Ever wonder how a dumbass from bucolic Amishland sounds?

Just like the dumbasses in your neighborhood.

Sorry. SORRY!

That was uncharitable of me. Let me try again...

We can do that madam. We have that right. Did you ever hear of a Constitutional Convention?

I double-dog dare you and your totalitarian friends to call one. PLEASE CALL ONE. Then you will reap what you have sown.



From the paper that dares not speak its own name:

 Put gun control to a national referendum | Letters To The Editor ...


This gun control issue has gone beyond the ridiculous. The gun lobby seems to have a (rather personal) grip on our representatives in Congress that defies reason and common sense.

Here’s my idea: We hold a national referendum (put it to a countrywide vote) to decide the issue.

I haven’t talked to anyone who thinks assault rifles and other military-style weapons should be in the hands of ordinary, or not-so-ordinary, citizens. But apparently there are those who will release them only when their hands are cold and dead.

Just think about the weapons of choice in the 1770s when the Founding Fathers were writing the Constitution: flintlock rifles, pistols, blunderbusses. They unfortunately failed to be more specific in writing the Second Amendment, and this has fueled a centuries-old debate. But for sure, in their wildest dreams they couldn’t have envisioned these weapons we have designed for mass destruction to be necessary to defend life and limb.

For heaven’s sake, let’s move into the positions other developed countries have adopted and finally do something sensible about this once and for all.

Lillian Hill
Marietta, PA

TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

And now, in order to give equal time to the totalitarian gun-grabbers and the hysterical ninnies...

OH MY GOD!

SOMEBODY HAS TO DO SOMETHING NOW!

BAN GUNS!

BAN TALL THINGS!

BAN GATHERINGS OF THREE OR MORE PEOPLE!

BAN BAD PEOPLE!

SAVE US, O WISE AND POWERFUL LEVIATHAN!

SAVE US FROM THE OTHERS!

TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

ATTENTION ALL HYTERICAL NINNIES. HERE ARE THE FACTS ABOUT GUNS IN AMERICA.

Of course, these facts are not for you gun-grabbing fascists. You know our guns are for shooting you when you come to take every last bit of our freedom.

From Washington's other other newspaper:

I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise...


Leah Libresco is a statistician and former newswriter at FiveThirtyEight, a data journalism site. She is the author of “Arriving at Amen.”

People who care enough to learn the truth about these things have been reading similar research since the 1980s. The bottom line is this: Guns are tools. Like hammers. An evil son of a bitch with a hammer can murder too. Let's concentrate on helping our neighbors refrain from becoming evil sons of bitches.

(All emphasis below is mine. - F.G.)


Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me. I wished the National Rifle Association would stop blocking common-sense gun-control reforms such as banning assault weapons, restricting silencers, shrinking magazine sizes and all the other measures that could make guns less deadly.

Then, my colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.

I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn’t prove much about what America’s policy should be. Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun related-crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans. Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress. And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths.


When I looked at the other oft-praised policies, I found out that no gun owner walks into the store to buy an “assault weapon.” It’s an invented classification that includes any semi-automatic that has two or more features, such as a bayonet mount, a rocket-propelled grenade-launcher mount, a folding stock or a pistol grip. But guns are modular, and any hobbyist can easily add these features at home, just as if they were snapping together Legos.

As for silencers — they deserve that name only in movies, where they reduce gunfire to a soft puick puick. In real life, silencers limit hearing damage for shooters but don’t make gunfire dangerously quiet. An AR-15 with a silencer is about as loud as a jackhammer. Magazine limits were a little more promising, but a practiced shooter could still change magazines so fast as to make the limit meaningless.

As my co-workers and I kept looking at the data, it seemed less and less clear that one broad gun-control restriction could make a big difference. Two-thirds of gun deaths in the United States every year are suicides. Almost no proposed restriction would make it meaningfully harder for people with guns on hand to use them. I couldn't even answer my most desperate question: If I had a friend who had guns in his home and a history of suicide attempts, was there anything I could do that would help?

However, the next-largest set of gun deaths — 1 in 5 — were young men aged 15 to 34, killed in homicides. These men were most likely to die at the hands of other young men, often related to gang loyalties or other street violence. And the last notable group of similar deaths was the 1,700 women murdered per year, usually as the result of domestic violence. Far more people were killed in these ways than in mass-shooting incidents, but few of the popularly floated policies were tailored to serve them.

By the time we published our project, I didn’t believe in many of the interventions I’d heard politicians tout. I was still anti-gun, at least from the point of view of most gun owners, and I don’t want a gun in my home, as I think the risk outweighs the benefits. But I can’t endorse policies whose only selling point is that gun owners hate them. Policies that often seem as if they were drafted by people who have encountered guns only as a figure in a briefing book or an image on the news.

Instead, I found the most hope in more narrowly tailored interventions. Potential suicide victims, women menaced by their abusive partners and kids swept up in street vendettas are all in danger from guns, but they each require different protections.

Older men, who make up the largest share of gun suicides, need better access to people who could care for them and get them help. Women endangered by specific men need to be prioritized by police, who can enforce restraining orders prohibiting these men from buying and owning guns. Younger men at risk of violence need to be identified before they take a life or lose theirs and to be connected to mentors who can help them de-escalate conflicts.

Even the most data-driven practices, such as New Orleans’ plan to identify gang members for intervention based on previous arrests and weapons seizures, wind up more personal than most policies floated. The young men at risk can be identified by an algorithm, but they have to be disarmed one by one, personally — not en masse as though they were all interchangeable. A reduction in gun deaths is most likely to come from finding smaller chances for victories and expanding those solutions as much as possible. We save lives by focusing on a range of tactics to protect the different kinds of potential victims and reforming potential killers, not from sweeping bans focused on the guns themselves.

TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

It is evil and ignorant enough to be a Gloria Steinem quote...

...but it isn't. However, it is weirdly appropriate. Murder is murder, kiddies, whether you use a gun or a scalpel or a brick.

Actually, the ancient commie cow "borrowed" it from some asshole's Facefuck page a couple of years ago and now it is hers. You have probably seen it in the digital cesspool acting as the fascist alternative to thought:


"I want any young men who buy a gun to be treated like young women who seek an abortion. Think about it: a mandatory 48-hours waiting period, written permission from a parent or a judge, a note from a doctor proving that he understands what he is about to do, time spent watching a video on individual and mass murders, traveling hundreds of miles at his own expense to the nearest gun shop, and walking through protestors holding photos of loved ones killed by guns, protestor who call him a murderer. After all, it makes more sense to do this for young men seeking guns than for young women seeking an abortion. No young woman needing reproductive freedom has ever murdered a roomful of strangers."




It is baby-eating agitprop no matter what fascist wrote it. Let me explain it to you gun-grabbers and baby-eaters. When millions of real men buy guns, they don't use them to murder innocent people. Only assholes like that asshole in Vegas do that. (And goat rapists, too.) EVERY TIME a woman has an  abortion, an innocent baby is chopped to pieces and thrown in the trash. I know that is way too complicated for brains clogged with the effluvia of fascism to comprehend but I had to try.

One more thing, kiddies. In many states, it is possible for an underage girl to get an abortion without telling her parents, let alone getting their permission. In many of those states, it is illegal to get a tattoo until you are eighteen. If you think that's progress, you're a dumbass.

Please, people, think for yourselves. Try this little thought experiment:

Pretend you are in your mommy's tummy (no Freudianism allowed here) and the stork is about to drop you off. Imagine some paid ghoul who calls himself a doctor reaches in and chops you to pieces. You wouldn't like that, now would you?

Of course you wouldn't, because you were a baby once and babies aren't vegetables. Babies are people just like country music fans...and Gloria Steinem is too...all too human.

Gloria Steinem Did Not Say Quote About Abortion, Gun Control - The Cut

No, that viral quote you keep seeing is not from Gloria Steinem

This Gloria Steinem "Quote" About Abortion & Gun Control Didn't ...

That viral quote about gun control and abortion is not from Gloria ...

Gloria Steinem Is Not the Person Behind Viral Abortion Vs. Gun ...

The Gloria Steinem Quote Circulating on Social Media is Fake ...

TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

This parrot is a stool pigeon. (What? That would have KILLED in Fifties...in the Catskills.)

Too bad the guy couldn't train his bird to handle a firearm.

From InUSANews.com:

Michigan woman charged with murder in shooting witnessed by parrot

This story is from 2016, but it is a classic.

A woman has been charged with the murder of her husband in a 2015 murder-attempted suicide near Sand Lake.

Glenna Duram was arraigned in a White Cloud courtroom for first-degree murder in connection to the death of her husband Martin Durum. She is being held in Newaygo County Jail without bond.

Martin was shot five times and killed in his home on 128th Street in Ensley Township in May 2015. His second wife, Glenna, survived a bullet wound to the head.

The prosecutor told 24 Hour News 8 that he has not ruled using a parrot who allegedly witnessed the murder as evidence.

Family members of Martin say Bud, an African grey parrot, seems to replay the murder — mimicking what sounds like two voices, a male and a female, in argument.

“Don’t f—ing shoot,” the bird says on a video that the family says it took several weeks after the shooting.

VIDEO: Winged murder witness: ‘Don’t f—ing shoot’

TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

That old maid Dana Milbank offers us a glimpse into the minds of Orange Clump's Braintrust. (You try typing those last three words with a straight face. I dare you.)

From Washington's other newspaper:

Ivanka Trump has noticed a new 'level of viciousness.' Its sources are clear ...

Now we’ve done it. We’ve hurt Ivanka Trump’s feelings.

“There’s a level of viciousness that I was not expecting,” the presidential daughter and senior White House official told Fox News this week, adding that she was “blindsided” by the “ferocity.”

The poor dear.

Here are a few sources the blindsided footwear magnate might consult to understand why things are so vicious:

●Her brother Eric. The previous week, he called the head of the Democratic Party a “total whack job” and declared that “morality is just gone” from Democrats. “To me, they’re not even people,” he said.

●Her brother Donald Jr. On Wednesday, after the shooting at the Republican congressional baseball team practice, the president’s son retweeted with approval a claim tying the shooting to “NY elites glorifying the assassination of our President.”

●Newt Gingrich. On Thursday, the informal Trump adviser and surrogate tweeted a conspiracy claim that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III “is now clearly the [tip] of the deep-state spear aimed at destroying or at a minimum undermining and crippling the Trump presidency.”

●Her dad. The president on Thursday went on yet another Twitter tirade. He declared himself the victim of the “single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political history — led by some very bad and conflicted people!” And he renewed his attack on his vanquished opponent, saying, “Crooked H destroyed phones w/hammer.”

This is why Washington is so vicious right now. (Actually, sweetie, the Clumpskyites haven't started shooting. Yet. Hodgkinson was a left-fascist like you. I'm just sayin'... - F.G.) Plenty bad before Trump’s campaign and presidency, it has gotten markedly worse. This is what happens when the president and his surrogates portray opponents as immoral, subhuman and criminal, when they hack away at the courts, the press and other pillars of a free society — and when they promote conspiracy theories suggesting American justice is tainted.

In attacking Mueller, Trump is attacking the man whom George W. Bush named to head the FBI and who was selected for his current role as special counsel by the deputy attorney general Trump himself appointed. And everybody should react with cheerful goodwill when these honorable public servants are defamed, said to be part of a “deep state” conspiracy?

It was sickening that a lunatic apparently converted his hatred of Trump this week into violence, shooting House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) and others on a baseball diamond. The would-be assassin’s act — the ultimate assault on the rule of law — is the antithesis of principled opposition to Trump.

Revolting in a different way is the speed with which a few on the right have tried to use the shooting to delegitimize the justifiable and widespread anger that Trump has generated. Rush Limbaugh called the gunman “a mainstream Democrat voter.” Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said of the shooting: “I do want to put some of this at the feet of Barack Obama.” Sean Hannity of Fox News, broadcasting from the scene of the shooting, alleged a “record level of vicious left-wing hate,” claiming this is the “biggest issue we have to face as a country.”

Some have gone in search of precedent to justify this attempt to smear Trump’s opposition by blaming it for a madman’s bullets. A writer for the conservative Washington Examiner falsely claimed this week that in 2011 I “blamed” Sarah Palin for the shooting that injured then-Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.) and killed others. In fact, I wrote then that “there’s no evidence that either Palin or [Glenn] Beck inspired the Tucson suspect” but that they both deserved to be “held to account for recklessly playing with violent images.” Now, as then, nobody but the shooter is to blame for a depraved act, but we all should be careful with violent language and imagery that could be misconstrued by the unhinged.

NEWS FLASH! Dana Milbank demands that all in Hollyweird be shot to save the republic!

That is obviously a fake news headline from Dimbart. (If anybody ever deserved to come back as a ghost and haunt the crap out of the perverts who have ruined his good name, it is Mr. Breitbart.) Dana is an ignorant cow who doesn't know we are supposed to live in a republic.

Kathy Griffin’s severed Trump head was grotesque. Though I doubt those who watch Shakespeare performed by the Public Theater in New York are violence-prone, (WTF? The Bard is all about the ultra-violence. Political assassinations are everywhere. Read a freakin' book, Dana! - F.G.) I wouldn’t have cast the assassinated Julius Caesar as Trump-like. As The Post’s David Weigel noted this week, many of the alleged calls to violence by the left have been misrepresented. But when they happen, they should be roundly denounced.

The deep and broad anger with Trump, however, has nothing to do with this. Part of it comes naturally from being out of power: Liberals were more vitriolic late in the Bush years, conservatives were nastier during Obama’s presidency, and the pendulum is swinging again.

But now there’s a new variable: The president himself is stoking fear and fury. Seven months after the election, he is still attacking Hillary Clinton as a criminal. He is frightening allies, attacking the courts, discrediting the intelligence community and the “fake news media” and suggesting there’s a major conspiracy against him in the justice system.

This recklessness causes enormous fear, which generates the “ferocity” Ivanka Trump perceives. President Trump could calm the anger — if he could calm himself.

Time for a new label, kiddies. None Dare Call It Sin!

TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

I was wrong, kiddies. This particular piece of Kumbaya crap lasted about 48 hours.*

Ross Douthat actually tries to be sane and reasonable, which means his time at The Whore is about done. Sadly, this sort of column would have come in handy forty or fifty years ago. Today, it is simply whistling past AmeriKKKa's graveyard.


From The Old Gray Whore:

Notes on a Political Shooting

The first thing to say about the attempted massacre of congressional Republicans on a baseball field in suburban Virginia is that the motivations of the shooter were unusual. By which I mean that, based on what we know, James Hodgkinson had surprisingly normal political beliefs. He hated Donald Trump, he liked Bernie Sanders, he wanted higher taxes on the wealthy. He was not a Communist or a paranoid knight on a shadowy crusade, but an ordinary Midwestern Democrat with far more rage but the same frustrations as many decent liberals.

Where modern assassinations are concerned, such normal partisan motivations are more unusual than you might think. John F. Kennedy was hated passionately by many Republicans in Dallas, but Lee Harvey Oswald’s beliefs were Marxist, not right-wing. Nationalist movements, not partisanship, inspired Sirhan Sirhan and the Puerto Ricans who almost killed Harry Truman. George Wallace was shot by a man trying to make “a statement of my manhood for the world to see.” One of Gerald Ford’s two would-be assassins was a member of the Manson cult, the other a sympathizer with the Symbionese Liberation Army. John Hinckley famously shot Ronald Reagan to impress Jodie Foster.

And most recently — if a little less famously, because the media spent a long time assuming that he was Tea Party-inspired — Jared Lee Loughner shot Gabby Giffords because he was a lunatic obsessed with (among other things) the government’s control of grammar, and she had failed to answer his town hall question: “What is government if words have no meaning?”

So Hodgkinson’s seeming normalcy, his angry but relatively mainstream Democratic views, might be a warning sign for the future of our politics. The turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s generated segregationist terrorism on the right and a revolutionary underground on the left, but it did not produce much partisan terrorism, violence inspired simply by fear and hatred of the opposition party.

Now, though, we hate each other simply for being Democrats and Republicans more than ever — and violence inspired simply by the polarization of the major parties would be a unique and novel threat.

The second thing to say is that a murderous attack on Republicans by an angry liberal should be an important reminder for our media-cultural establishment that societies can be pulled apart from the left as easily as from the right. Of course, network anchors and magazine editors and editorial boards know this on an intellectual level. But because our centrist elites are actually center-left there is a constant, involuntary tug toward emphasizing what’s wrong on the right-wing side of the spectrum and excusing what’s wrong on the other.

There’s a great deal wrong on the right in the age of Donald Trump, and the scrutiny directed rightward is not at all misplaced. But as Trump proves more hapless than dangerous — or only dangerous because he’s hapless — the derangement that he inspires or amplifies among his critics also matters. And if America slides toward a rendezvous with 1968, the tendency of the establishment to only see one side’s dangers — to treat Marine Le Pen as uniquely terrifying but Jeremy Corbyn as merely dotty, to “remember” that Loughner was a Palin fan or that right-wing hate killed J.F.K. — will make things more dangerous overall.

Part of what went wrong in America in the later ’60s was that the liberal establishment carried water for, protected or excused its far-left children’s rage. Part of what could go wrong today is evident in the way that violence in the left-wing core, the university campus, gets met with excuse-making, appeasement and halfhearted punishment from liberal authorities. The House whip bleeding on a baseball field is a reminder that brighter lines against lesser acts of violence serve the entire culture well.

But the third thing to say is that the worst of what could go wrong hasn’t yet. James Hodgkinson was not part of a network of terrorists, a literal Democratic underground. No prominent politician justified his act; instead both parties prayed together before a cheering D.C. crowd. The Trump era is crazy, but not as crazy as I feared: The Antifa types and Proud Boys are more performative than revolutionary, college campuses are hothouses but not actually in flames, the internet is deranging us but perhaps also encouraging us to express derangement with tweets rather than bullets.

So we have the space to keep our bearings — which includes remembering that hot political rhetoric is a normal part of high-stakes debate, that lies are wicked but insults are very small-d democratic, that comparing self-aggrandizing presidents to Caesars is as American as apple pie, and that martial metaphors are not incitement. Only incitement is incitement.

Police what you say for lies, for slander, for stupidity, for simple vileness. Don’t be Sean Hannity; don’t be Kathy Griffin. Abjure the sword, the gun, the bomb.

But don’t parse your every word for what a maniac might make of it. This is a free country, and still, thank God, a mostly peaceful one. Say what you believe.

*See Third World problems...we've got them.

TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

Third World Britain: Only slightly ahead of us.

Phase II: People take things into their own hands because government does not represent them and their interests, only its own.


London mosque attack: man arrested on suspicion of terrorism | The Guardian ...


A father of four from Cardiff is believed to be responsible for a terrorist attack which left one person dead and 11 others injured when a van he was driving ploughed into a group of worshippers near a mosque in north London.

Darren Osborne, 47, is alleged to have shouted “I want to kill all Muslims – I did my bit” after the hire van hit a crowd which had gathered to help a elderly man who had collapsed near a mosque.

The Met said a 47-year-old man had been arrested on suspicion of the commission, preparation or instigation of terrorism including murder and attempted murder in the immediate aftermath of the incident which occurred near two mosques in Finsbury Park after late prayers in the small hours of Monday morning.

On Monday neighbours in Pentwyn, where Osborne had lived for several years, described him as “aggressive” and “strange”. They said that over the weekend he told a 10-year old Muslim neighbour he was an “inbred” and had been thrown out of a local pub for getting drunk, “cursing Muslims and saying he would do some damage”.

Witnesses to the attack said it had occurred after a small crowd had gathered round a man who had collapsed outside the Muslim Welfare House near the Finsbury Park mosque when the van ploughed into them at around 12.20am.

One man, who did not want to give his name, said he and his friends had stopped to help the “elderly man” who was lying on the ground.

“In seconds this terrible thing happened,”’ he said. “Within a minute, a van with speed, turned to where we were and ran over the man who was laying on the floor and the people around him, around eight people or 10 people got injured, some of them seriously. Thank God I’m safe, but my friends got injured.”

Onlookers said the driver then got out of the van and shouted “I want to kill Muslims” before he was wrestled to the ground.

Abdikadar Warfa said he was one of those who caught hold of the van driver, who tried to kick and punch people as he tried to escape. He said: “He tried to run away, he tried to escape. Some people were hitting him. He was fighting to run away.”

Theresa May, said that the “hatred and evil” seen in the attack would never succeed and visited the scene at lunchtime on Monday. The prime minister said the attack on Muslims was “every bit as insidious and destructive to our values and our way of life” as the recent string of attacks apparently motivated by Islamist extremism, adding: “We will stop at nothing to defeat it.”

Mohammed Mahmoud, an imam at the Muslim Welfare House, arrived moments later and was praised for stopping anybody attacking the suspect. “By God’s grace we managed to surround him and protect him from any harm,” Mahmoud said at a press conference on Monday afternoon.

“We stopped all forms of attack and abuse towards him that were coming from every angle.”
Mahmoud said he and others managed to flag down a passing police van. “We told them the situation and said there’s a mob attempting to hurt him. If you don’t take him God forbid he might be seriously hurt.”

The elderly man who had collapsed had come round moments before the van ploughed into the crowd. He died at the scene and has not been named. Mahmoud said: “People came to tend to him. They brought him a chair. He regained consciousness and then, as he regained consciousness, the van drove perpendicular to Seven Sisters Road.”

The attack took place in the constituency of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn who spent much of the day at the mosque. He said the targeting of the Muslim community at the height of Ramadan had shocked the community. “A lot of the time people are saying Islamophobia isn’t real, but this time it’s actually killed someone and injured others,” he said, adding: “There are kids who grew up (watching this) on TV and never expected it to happen in their own backyard.”

The Muslim Council of Britain said the attack was the most violent incident in a wave of Islamophobic attacks to hit muslim communities over the past few months and called for “transformative action ... to tackle not only this incident but the hugely worrying growth in Islamophobia”.

DO NOT TRUST ANYONE WHO THINKS "PHOBIA" MEANS HATE!

Writing in the Guardian, the home secretary, Amber Rudd, said the scale of policing operations to protect and reassure Muslim communities across the country has been enhanced as a result of the attack and would continue “for as long as necessary”.

She said British Muslims had been quick to show solidarity and support victims of other attacks in recent weeks, and it was “now time to extend the same hand of friendship to them. Other faiths have already been quick to express their shock and lend their support.”

The home secretary said that she had been have been saddened to see suggestions that this “cowardly crime” was not being dealt with in the same way as the Westminster Bridge, Manchester or London Bridge attacks.

“Let there be no doubt this attack is every bit as horrifying as theothers we have seen. Our grief is no less raw.” And she pledged to be tough on terror “wherever it strikes” and stressed she would not shy away from tackling the “stark figure” that more than half of victims of religious hate attacks were Muslims.

The suspect is believed to have links to the extreme right wing, according to investigators. They said they extent is not clear at this stage, but the finding cemented the view this should be classed as a hate crime.

The man’s mental health is also being explored by the counter terrorism investigation which is trying too establish if the attack was preplanned and premeditated or opportunistic.

Police are also concerned about the possible fallout from the attack - either copycat incidents or retaliation for an attack on Muslim targets.

London mayor Sadiq Khan spent much of the day at the scene of the attack. Writing in the Guardian, he said London had been through “an incredibly difficult few weeks”.

“I know Londoners will remain strong and united. While we have been filled with great sorrow and anger at the unnecessary loss of innocent lives, we have also shown time and again our great resolve not to allow those who seek to divide us to succeed.”

                

Third World problems...we've got them.

It is going to get worse and it may never get better, kiddies.

Just watch for the reaction to come...


GOP Rep. Steve Scalise shot at congressional baseball practice - CNBC...


1) Left-fascist  Colonel Sanders fan shoots Repansycans.

2) ?

Will some Clumpskyite AWUG mirror-image of Hodgkinson shoot some Democrasses and will right-fascists claim victory if one is killed?

Will there be a Clampdown ?

How many Repansycans will become gun-grabbers now that they realize that left-fascists can buy guns too?

Is this the catalyst that spurs the formation of an All-Fascist United Front to protect the perverse common interests of ALL our moral and intellectual superiors?

Don't laugh, kiddies. It most certainly can happen here.

It might have already happened...


A gunman opened fire at a congressional baseball practice in Alexandria, Virginia, on Wednesday, wounding five people, including the third-ranking House Republican.

Majority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise was shot in the hip. He underwent surgery at Medstar Washington Hospital Center and is in critical condition. Earlier, a statement from his office characterized his condition as stable.

Two U.S. Capitol Police officers — who House Speaker Paul Ryan identified as Crystal Griner and David Bailey — were wounded. Capitol Police Chief Matthew Verderosa said in a statement that Griner is in "good condition in the hospital after getting shot in the ankle" and that Bailey was "treated and released" following a "minor" injury.

"Had they not been there, it would have been a massacre," eyewitness Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who took cover behind a tree amid the shooting, said of the Capitol Police. The officers were present because Scalise is a member of the congressional leadership.

Ryan named the others injured: Tyson Foods lobbyist Matt Mika and Zack Barth, a staffer for Rep. Roger Williams, R-Texas. Mika was transported to a hospital and remains in critical condition following surgery, according to a Tyson Foods spokesman.

Barth's condition was not immediately known.

President Donald Trump said Wednesday afternoon that the assailant had died of gunshot wounds.

The FBI said law enforcement officials identified him as 66-year-old James Hodgkinson of Illinois.

Several GOP congressmen and at least two Republican senators attended the practice, Paul told MSNBC. They were preparing for an annual bipartisan charity baseball game set to take place on Thursday at Nationals Park. That game will go on as scheduled.

South Carolina Republican Rep. Jeff Duncan told CNBC that he was approached by a man Wednesday morning who asked him whether the people practicing on the field were Democrats or Republicans. Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., who was with Duncan at the time, later told CNBC that the pair saw pictures of Hodgkinson and believe it was the same person who stopped them with the question.

It is too early to tell if the shooting was a targeted attack, said Tim Slater, a special agent in charge of the FBI's Washington field office.

The shooting started shortly after 7 a.m., ET, and witnesses described Hodgkinson's weapon as a rifle. Paul said he heard a first, "isolated" shot followed by a "rapid succession" of five to 10 shots.

Rep. Jack Bergman, R-Mich., told CNBC that the first shot came "from somewhere behind the third base dugout and then the second shot came shortly thereafter." They then "knew it was something real, so people started scrambling."

"We are very fortunate. It could have been a whole lot worse," he said.

Capitol Police and Alexandria police officers who responded to the scene exchanged fire with the shooter, according to Verderosa. Witnesses described dozens of shots ringing out before the firing stopped.

Brooks told CNN that he saw Scalise drag himself from second base into the outfield after he was shot, leaving a trail of blood 10 to 15 yards long. Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., told reporters Scalise lay by himself for "at least 10 minutes," as people could not get to him amid the shooting.

"I wanted to get to him but there were still shots going overhead from both sides," he said.

People helped an injured aide in the first base dugout, Flake later told MSNBC. They also made sure Texas Rep. Joe Barton's 10-year-old son, who attended the practice, got to safety.

Barton teared up later Wednesday when he said he felt that his son "had 25 dads. Everybody out there was looking out for him."

When they could make it to Scalise, Rep. Brad Wenstrup of Ohio, a former combat surgeon, applied pressure to the wound, Flake said. Wenstrup told CBS News that he "felt like [he] was back in Iraq."
Trump said the two Capitol Police officers "took down the gunman despite sustaining gunshot wounds."

Scalise remained coherent throughout, according to Flake. The senator said he called Scalise's wife so she did not hear about the shooting on the news first.

Officials delayed or canceled many House hearings scheduled for Wednesday. The Senate chamber also canceled votes for the day, according to multiple reports.

After the shooting, Trump called for unity.

Of course it did.

"We may have our differences, but we do well in times like these to remember that everyone who serves in our nation's capital is here because, above all, they love our country. We can all agree that we are blessed to be Americans ... and that we are strongest when we are unified and when we work together for the common good," the president said.

He called Scalise a "patriot" and a "fighter."

It has no ides who Scalise is.

In a statement to the House later Wednesday, Ryan praised the Capitol Police officers and also called for unity.

Of course he did.

"An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us," Ryan said, drawing a standing ovation.

Rep. Ruben Kihuen, D-Nev., shared a photo of Democrats at their baseball practice praying for the Republicans.

Praying to what, exactly?
TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

Let's hope the munitions don't have to be kept on a differnt ship.

What about gun locks? The Good Ship Lollipop should have gun locks.

And a real loud rape whistle.

And pepper spray.



From The Old Gray Whore:

Warship Named for Giffords Is Close to Being Ready for Sea


 In January 2012, Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona, decided to resign her seat, a sad coda to the assassination attempt she had miraculously survived, but which left her badly disabled.

On that day, Ms. Giffords got a call from Ray Mabus, the secretary of the Navy at the time, who told her the Navy planned to name a warship in her honor. It would be the first Navy warship to be named after a living woman since the cutter Harriet Lane — named after the niece of President James Buchanan — was commissioned in 1857

Next weekend, the 418-foot Gabrielle Giffords will be commissioned in Galveston, Tex., and prepared for regular duty. A bevy of Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., are expected to attend.

Previously, the ship was officially named at the Pentagon, its keel was laid in Mobile, Ala., and it was christened in June 2015 by Jill Biden, the wife of Mr. Biden. It is the third naval ship named after a living woman, and the 16th for a woman in American history.

“That our Navy chose to give my name to this ship is an incredibly humbling honor — one I would never have imagined, one I will never forget, and one for which I always remain grateful,” Ms. Giffords said. “When we celebrate the commissioning this weekend, I will be thinking of the thousands of hardworking Americans who built this ship and the brave men and women who will serve aboard her.”

"HER"? Apparently, Gabby Giffords is a sexist woman-hating nazi stuck in the 1950's.


The littoral combat ship, armed with missiles, machine guns and fast-firing weapons, is the sort that has come under congressional scrutiny for its expense. Also, some gun rights groups have grumbled that it was named for Ms. Giffords, who became a gun safety advocate along with her husband, the retired astronaut and Navy captain Mark E. Kelly, after the assassination attempt in Tucson.

The commissioning of a Navy ship named after a gun safety advocate — and with Mrs. Clinton at Ms. Giffords’s side — could inflame President Trump, who calls himself a strong supporter of gun rights and has continued his feud with Mrs. Clinton, his onetime rival for the White House.

On Jan. 8, 2011, a week into her third term as a United States representative, Ms. Giffords was shot in the head at close range in a grocery store parking lot during a meeting with constituents. The gunman killed six people and, aside from Ms. Giffords, injured 12 others.

During her congressional career, Ms. Giffords, whose district in southern Arizona featured two major military installations, served on the House Armed Services Committee and had a spouse on active duty. In announcing that the ship would be named after her, Mr. Mabus said it was appropriate that it “be named for someone who has become synonymous with courage, who has inspired the nation with remarkable resiliency and shown the possibilities of the human spirit.”

Inside a box that will be sealed below the mast is the patch of the American flag worn on Mr. Kelly’s launch suit during the final flight of the space shuttle Endeavour, a Purple Heart medal left anonymously at the Arizona hospital where Ms. Giffords was treated after being shot, her congressional identification and an 1804 coin featuring the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Pray for us, Blessed Mother.

TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

If you Alt-Reich pansies wanna kill some goat-rapists, stop picking on little girls and join the Marines.

From Oregonlive.com:


Portland suspect in 2 slayings on train is known for hate speech ...


Jeremy Joseph Christian, the man accused of aggravated murder in the brutal knife slayings of two good Samaritans on the MAX, has described himself as a sociopath and threatened to kill or stab people in Facebook postings online.

"I AM TROUBLE," he said in an April comment.

He has shared anti-Muslim memes, espoused Nazi beliefs and called Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh a "true patriot."

Christian, 35, was booked into the Multnomah County Detention Center on suspicion of aggravated murder and attempted murder early Saturday morning, records show. He was also arrested on suspicion of misdemeanor charges, according to records. He's being held without bail.

He has a criminal history, including felony robbery, kidnapping and weapon convictions, records show. When he was 20 years old, he was shot in the face by Portland police after he robbed a convenience store.

In October 2011, Christian was convicted of being a felon in possession of a firearm in federal court and sentenced to time served, plus three years of supervised release. He violated the terms of his release several times – in August 2012 for testing positive in an urine test for use of "spice,'' or synthetic marijuana, and failing to attend treatment a month earlier. He agreed to go to a residential re-entry center, but then violated supervision again by not staying at the re-entry center and was sentenced to another nine months in custody in 2013.

TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

Third World shitheads hate girls! [See, I'm not biased against mohammedans, although quite a few of them do hate girls.]

This ain't circumcision, kiddies.

From Disclose.tv:

FBI Arrested Doctor For Female Genital Mutilation Of Girls Across US Midwest ...


A doctor in Michigan is charged with cutting the genitals of many young girls, working out of her office in Livonia Michigan. As young girls scream in pain, their families tell them the procedures, now illegal under a new federal law, are performed “to get the germs out.” Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) refers to the removal of parts of the victim’s vulva, with extreme cases involving “Infibulation,” where the victim’s external genitalia are completely sewn closed. While FGM is a frequent occurrence in Islamic parts of the world, it has a particularly high occurrence in Africa.

On Thursday, the FBI arrested Dr. Jumana Nagarwala and charged her with multiple counts of female genital mutilation (FGM) against young girls aged six to eight years old. The mutilations were performed in her office, located in Livonia, Michigan.

One victim states that she screamed from the pain of being cut and afterward was barely able to walk. She was told by per parents not to tell anyone what occurred

.The arrest of Dr. Nagarwala is the first prosecution of FGM in the United States, resulting from a new law targeting FGM, according to a Department of Justice press release. In the 11-page complaint which accompanied Dr. Nagarwala’s arrest, mention of “members of a particular religious and cultural community” are made.

Dr. Nagarwala works in the emergency room of Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital. Detroit is home to the largest population of Somali immigrants in America, a group among whom FGM is prevalent. The complaint against Dr. Nagarwala charges her with the genital mutilation of the daughters of two separate families, which allegedly occurred at her office in Livonia, Michigan. Many other girls in the community allege that Dr. Nagarwala mutilated their genitals, in occurrences going as far back as 2005-2007, before the new federal law.

The Department of Justice has issued several statements concerning the prosecution of this type of crime stating their commitment to stopping FGM in the United States.


From Twincities.com:

MI doctor charged with genital mutilation of MN girls, age 7

"First, do no harm" apparently is Western Crusader imperialism in some communities.

A Detroit emergency room doctor is accused of performing genital mutilation on two 7-year-old Minneapolis-area girls.

Dr. Jumana Nagarwala

Dr. Jumana Nagarwala is charged with performing the procedure out of a clinic in Livonia, Mich., in February, according to charges filed in U.S. District Court on Thursday.

Somebody should sew this ghoul up in a pig carcass...

What? I'm the bad guy?

It’s believed to be the first case to be brought under the federal law criminalizing female genital mutilation of girls. The investigation suggests there are “multiple” other child victims of Nagarwala.
“According to the complaint, despite her oath to care for her patients, Dr. Nagarwala is alleged to have performed horrifying acts of brutality on the most vulnerable victims,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Blanco of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.

Nagarwala heard the allegations during a brief hearing in U.S. District Court and was returned to jail to await another hearing Monday. Federal prosecutors want to keep her locked up without bond.

Nagarwala denied to the FBI ever having performed female genital mutilation. Defense attorney Shannon Smith declined to comment outside court.

The girls’ mothers were with them during the procedure, according to the FBI, which conducted the investigation.

Female genital mutilation is considered criminal sexual activity. It involves circumcising, excising or infibulating all or part of the labia majora, labia minora or clitoris. One purpose of the procedure, the complaint notes, is to curb girls’ or women’s sexuality by making sex painful.

TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.

Fly spit or blood splatter, that is the question.

Even gross science is cool, kiddies.


Loyola professor developing spray to identify fly spit at crime scenes - Baltimore Sun

The victim lay across the doorway of a filthy Mount Airy home, a 12-gauge shotgun blast through his chest. The suspect had called in a confession, and the evidence was clear. But that day in April 1999, police puzzled over dark stains on a wall far from the man's body.

"It didn't make sense," said forensic investigator Mitchell Dinterman. "These were all the way across the room.

He noticed an open window. The stains, he realized, came from flies.

Crime scene investigators have long relied on their own judgment to distinguish blood spatter from the look-alike stains left by flies that land on the body and then on a spot nearby. Now a biology professor at Loyola University Maryland is developing a spray that removes the guesswork.

David Rivers has worked on and off for five years to isolate an enzyme distinctive to the fly gut. He won a $154,521 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice in December to complete development of his spray over the next two years.

His research stretches the limits of traditional forensic science — "Even the crime shows don't talk about it," he said — and it's a field best avoided by the squeamish: forensic entomology, the study of bugs in deaths.

"It's unsettling to think flies are getting to a body," he said. "When we're thinking about someone's loved one, we don't want to think about that."

Rivers teaches the only college course on forensic entomology in Maryland, he said. At his research lab, flesh flies and hide beetles dine on cow livers in screened cages. A cow skull and rat skeleton are picked clean. He urges visitors to remove their sweaters or wool coats.

"Certain fabrics retain the smell of death," Rivers explained.

As a boy, Rivers kept fireflies in a mayonnaise jar in his mother's refrigerator. He wanted to be a scientist when he grew up, and planned to study genetics. But he found himself instead as a research biologist, milking venom from tarantulas.

Today he studies the flies that feed on corpses.

Blowflies are common in Maryland, identifiable by their metallic green or blue bellies, and able to sniff out death from a mile away. A corpse dumped in summer attracts the flies within five minutes, Rivers said. He sets up mock crime scenes around campus with caged animal remains. And the flies start buzzing around him when he's 10 feet out the door with the cages.

These flies grow two and three times bigger than house flies but can crawl inside a car with its doors and windows closed.

Rivers encountered the flies in the early 1990s while consulting on a case as a graduate student at Ohio State University. An elderly woman had died alone in her old Victorian home and the flies got in. The house was cleaned and sold to a young couple who discovered thousands of flies hidden in the air ducts. The sale was rescinded under Ohio's lemon laws, Rivers said.

"They're very aggressive," he said. "You tend to forget they're everywhere."

Also, they're slobs. Flies slurp and dribble and wear their food. They spit up after eating or before they begin. Their digestion can occur outside the body.

This makes for a gruesome mess, considering blowflies' taste for bodily fluids. Mealtime may proceed like this: Flies lap up blood, mix it with digestive juices and spit it out. They wander off to wait out the digestion and return to sponge up their meal — bon appetit.

Swarms can really muck up a crime scene.

"They leave these little marks and it resembles a lot — quite a lot — like impact spatter," said Chief Steven O'Dell, director of the Baltimore City police crime lab. "It could lead you to a wrong conclusion, to decide a witness statement is incorrect, or maybe an impact happened over here, or maybe there's some other body that's missing …

"It confuses you," he said. "It can slow the investigation down."

Investigators routinely measure the tiny tails of blood spatter to calculate the angle and location of a violent blow. This is called "directionality."

Flies leave nearly identical tails when buzzing around and spitting up, which can further confound investigators.

"It creates these little streaks that look like bloodstains that hit an object with some directionality," O'Dell said.

Still, scenes disturbed by flies remain an uncommon occurrence, mostly found in suburban and rural communities where bodies may linger undiscovered. In Baltimore, shootings typically happen on streets, and such evidence rarely factors into investigations.

"We actually see it quite a bit down here," said Holly Latham, a forensic scientist with the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, who has presented case studies on blood spatter during annual meetings of forensic investigators with the International Association for Identification.

Latham was unaware of Rivers' project.

"It does sound intriguing," she said.

A study published in November 2003 in the journal Forensic Science International offered investigators tips for distinguishing fly spots from blood spatter.

Tails of fly spots will point in random directions, the study advised. Another clue: spots found in rooms without a body. And flies will concentrate on lights, mirrors and windows.

The study presented a case from June 1997, in which two men were found shot dead in a Nebraska apartment. Spray around the apartment suggested a struggle, perhaps a robbery. But investigators ruled out the stains as fly spots, changing their theory to an execution.

"If you can develop something that's more reliable, well, you don't make these kinds of mistakes," said the study's co-author, Larry Barksdale, a former police officer and forensic science professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The first known case decided by forensic entomology happened centuries ago in ancient China, according to Neal Haskell, a prominent forensic entomologist. After a Chinese peasant was murdered by someone wielding a hand sickle, the wise local magistrate ordered villagers to lay down their sickles.

Blowflies alighted on the murderer's blade.

Haskell has testified in 32 states and recalls cases where a victim's battered hands came from cockroaches feeding on dead skin; in another, matted grass didn't signal a dragged body, but maggots crawling off en masse.

He also has challenged evidence in court, testifying that blood spatter was actually fly spots. A reliable spray would prove invaluable to investigators, Haskell said.

"If this technique works," he said, "that will help immensely."

Sometimes technicians can detect fly spots by shining blue or purple light on stains and observing the specks through an orange filter. It's an inexact method, but fly spots often glow. At Loyola, Rivers has tested this method in his lab, finding true blood stains also glow. Routine field tests for human blood fail to distinguish fly spots as well.

"Every test that law enforcement has available should test positive for human blood," Rivers said, "but the reality is it winds up being derived from flies."

A student's casual question years ago — shouldn't there be some way to tell? — launched his research to invent the spray. He has isolated the flies' digestive enzyme and developed a binding antibody. Tests of 10 common fly species revealed the enzyme, but there remain dozens more to test over the next two years in his lab. And that's just fine with the professor.

"The odor," he said, "doesn't bother me anymore."

TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.