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Photograph: Pope Francis Visits The Sick And The Mentally Ill
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ViroCap Diagnostic Tool Tests For All Viruses And Can Even Differentiate Strains
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Another Country Has Banned Adults From Smoking In Cars With Children
Another country has banned adults from smoking in cars with children
Starting today (Oct. 1), it’s illegal in England and Wales to smoke in a car carrying someone under the age of 18.
Rolling down the window or opening the sunroof won’t cut it. The ban applies to all cars except convertibles with the top down (inadvisable most days in typical English weather).
Drivers who break the law face a £50 ($75) fine, but police acknowledge that enforcing the rule won’t be a top priority. Like the UK’s 2007 ban on smoking in indoor public places, the new smoking-in-cars law is mainly intended to influence attitudes over the long term. The percentage of smokers in the UK has fallen from 21% of the population in 2007 to around 18% last yea
Doctors welcomed the ban when Parliament passed it in February. British kids visit the doctor 300,000 times a year as a result of exposure to secondhand smoke, according to the BBC. Similar laws banning smoking in cars are in place in parts of the US, Canada, and Australia.
Civil liberty advocates called it a step too far.
“Do we let the police into people’s homes where children are watching six hours’ television? Do we have the state going into kitchens to say that is one Coke can too many?” Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister, said of the ban last year. “I think sometimes we have to say, hang on a minute, laws and legislation is not always the solution.”
Indeed, the best-intended bans sometimes result in unintended consequences.
A year after the UK’s 2007 public smoking ban came into effect, demand was down for dry cleaners and up for chefs, as pubs scrambled to find another offering to keep customers in their chairs. And after the US passed a 2012 law mandating healthier school lunches, school meal programs across the country lost money. Children tossed more of the low-sodium, low-fat food into the garbage, or opted to bring in their own meals from home.
"Neuroscientists Explain Why Marijuana Can Bring Serenity Or Psychosis"
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NASA Seeks Public Help To Solve Dwarf Planet Mystery
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"Was Pope Francis Actually Swindled into Meeting Kim Davis?" Esquire
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Was Pope Francis Actually
Swindled into Meeting Kim Davis?
I spent a little time Wednesday night examining my conscience, as we used to say around the ol' confessional, as regards the meeting between Papa Francesco and noted civic layabout Kim Davis. This contemplation was prompted by two things: first, an e-conversation I had with someone who had been part of the papal travelling party and second, the appearance of E. J. Dionne on Lawrence O'Donnell's show on MSNBC. According to the first person, there were a great number of people during the pope's tour who were simply hustled in and out for informal private audiences. According to Dionne, the meeting between Davis and the pope was brokered by Archbishop Carlo Vigano, the papal nuncio to the United States at whose residence the pope stayed during his time in Washington, which is when the meeting took place. Together, these facts set off my Spidey Sense about Vatican chicanery.
Before we continue, let us stipulate a few things. First of all, let us stipulate that there are more than a few members of the Church's permanent bureaucracy, both within the Clan Of The Red Beanie and without, who are not happy that this gentleman got elected Pope, and who are not happy with what he's done and said since he was. Second, let us stipulate that many members of this group are loyal to both former pope Josef Ratzinger and, through him, to the memory (and to what they perceive as the legacy) of John Paul II who, for good and ill, had a much different idea of how to wield a papacy than Papa Francesco does. Third, let us stipulate that this opposition to the current pope has been active and vocal,to say nothing of paranoid. Finally, let us stipulate that, for over 2000 years, the Vatican has been a hotbed of intrigue, betrayal, and sanctified ratfcking on a very high scale. (It also has been a hotbed of, well, hot beds, but that's neither here nor there at the moment.) So, if you're one of these people, and you're looking to ratfck the pope's visit to the United States, and to his agenda in general, you'd be looking to put him in a box. So, how would you do that?
MORE FROM ESQUIRE
Here's what I'd do. I'd arrange for the pope to meet Davis, but not as an American culture war celebrity, but as a devout Christian whose faith is under vague assault. (I would not mention the three marriages or the fact that she took an oath before god to do her job. I mean, why burden the poor old fella with details, right?) I'd shuffle her through the process and she gets some vague words of encouragement from the pope, who otherwise doesn't know her from any other hick who gets sent his way. I'd sit on the news for the entire rest of the pope's trip, even enlisting Davis's publicity-hungry legal team in that effort.
However, as the pope is preparing to go wheels-up in Philadelphia, I'd get the word to a reporter – say, Terry Moran of ABC. On the plane ride home, Moran would ask the pope a vague question about "religious liberty," without mentioning Davis's name, which seems a curious omission for a veteran journalist to make. The pope again would give a fairly anodyne answer about freedom of conscience with which nobody can disagree. Then, with the pope safely back in Rome, I'd leak the news to a conservative Catholic website and wait for the inevitable explosion. (Implicit in this strategy are two facts: a) that the pope doesn't know who Davis is or the facts of her situation, and b) that the Vatican press office will resort to its default position of clumsy semi-stonewalling when the story breaks.) When it comes, lo and behold, Kim Davis gets to give an exclusive interview to ABC, the same network that employs the reporter who asked the question on the airplane. But to pull this off, I'd need someone with serious clout within the Church bureaucracy. And this is where Vigano comes in.
The man is a real player within the institutional church. He first came to prominence as a whistleblowerduring one of the several investigations of the Vatican Bank, which may be what got him exiled to this godless Republic in the first place. Despite that fact, Vigano is well-known to be a Ratzinger loyalist and he always has been a cultural conservative, particularly on the issue of marriage equality. In April, in a move that was unprecedented, Vigano got involved with an anti-marriage equality march in Washington sponsored by the National Association For Marriage. (And, mirabile dictu, as we say around Castel Gandolfo at happy hour, one of the speakers at this rally was Mat Staver, who happens now to be Kim Davis's lawyer.) In short, Vigano, a Ratzinger loyalist, who has been conspicuous and publicly involved in the same cause as Kim Davis and her legal team, arranges a meeting with Davis that the legal team uses to its great public advantage. Once again paraphrasing New Orleans lawyer Lamar Parmentel fromThe Big Easy, the Vatican is a marvelous environment for coincidence.
(Also, I have been remiss in not mentioning that, because of the way John Paul II larded the cardinalate with conservatives, the pope was surrounded by conservative American clerics, including his host in Philadelphia, Charles Cardinal Chaput, who's really something of a dog's breakfast. While presiding in Denver, Chaput led the movement to deny communion to pro-choice American politicians. And, after this pope met with survivors of sexual abuse in Philadelphia, Chaput reached deeply into the Corporate Works Of Mercy to declare, "In some ways, we should get over this wanting to go back and blame, blame, blame. The church is happy to accept its responsibility, but I'm really quite tired of people making unjust accusations against people who are not to be blamed—and that happens sometimes." What a guy! As a pastor, Chaput would make a terrific collection agent.)
Ratzinger's fingerprints are all over this story. Vigano is a Benedict loyalist. Robert Moynihan, whose newsletter, Inside The Vatican, got the story first, is an actual lifelong Ratzinger protégé. And the Vatican press office acted just the way I'd want it to act, if I were the guy setting this up. First, it issues a silly non-denial denial, and then it merely confirms that the meeting occurred. At which point, the office clams up, leaving the story festering out there in the news cycle, and leaving the pope out there in the American culture war to twist in the wind. And, if this scenario is in any way accurate, it had its desired effect. The impact of what the pope actually said and did in America has been fairly well ratfcked.
Of course, this speculation depends vitally on the proposition that Papa Francesco didn't know who Kim Davis was, or anything about her current public display of faith-based goldbricking. I don't find that so very hard to believe; for all the attention it's gotten over here, it's not an international story of any consequence. (Whether he should have known about it, or have been briefed about it beforehand, is another matter entirely, as Dan Savage pointed out on Chris Hayes's program Wednesday night.) And, it can be argued, I guess, that I'm engaging in apologetics here. But the whole thing is just a little too hinky, and I know too well how these birds operate. They've had millennia to get really good at it.
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NYPD Says It Will Track Use Of Force, Actually Start Disciplining Cops
Compendium Of Pax Posts: What's Wrong With Race Relations - Hatred, Cops And The Law
NYPD Says It Will Track Use Of Force, Actually Start Disciplining Cops
“With transparency comes public understanding and with public understanding comes public support."
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Anybody but Hillary? The case for Biden-Warren 2016
Anybody but Hillary?
The case for Biden-Warren 2016
The case for Biden-Warren 2016
Damon Linker
Six months ago, I wrote a column titled "Anybody but Hillary? The case for Warren-Webb in 2016."
Well that certainly didn't go anywhere.
Elizabeth Warren has stayed true to her word and far away from the race, while Jim Webb's campaign has gone absolutely nowhere. (Behold him languishing at under 1 percent in the polls.)
But that doesn't mean my instinct to seek out "anybody but Clinton" was wrong. On the contrary, between Hillary's inept handling of thebottomless email imbroglio, Bill's predictably defensive and passive-aggressive response to her critics, and the boatload of potential scandalslurking around in the sleaziest corners of Clintonland, I've come to view the Democratic frontrunner as a ticking time bomb for her party and the country.
That leaves Bernie Sanders as the most viable "anybody" currently in the race. But that doesn't ease my mind.
Don't get me wrong: Currently clocking in at roughly 28 percent nationally (in comparison to Hillary Clinton's 41) and leading handily in New Hampshire, Sanders is doing remarkably well. And in a campaign cycle that's seen the lefty Jeremy Corbyn wrest control of the British Labour Party from the centrist Blairites, it just might be possible for a left-leaning candidate to capture the Democratic nomination — and, who knows, even win the presidency (at least if he's pitted against one of the two guys currently leading the GOP race).But even then I'm afraid I can't quite wrap my head around the possibility of a Sanders victory in November 2016. Why do I find it implausible? Oh, I don't know. Maybe it's because if Hollywood were looking to cast the role of a 70-something socialist union organizer on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the early decades of the 20th century, Sanders would land the part in a heartbeat. I just don't buy that a plurality of middle-American general-election voters will cast a ballot for a guy like that. (The fact that he's also proposing a few trillion dollars' worth of new federal spending without adequately explaining where the money's going to come from doesn't thrill me either.)
As recently as a month ago, this combination of options had me feeling a little demoralized. But that was before I (along with lots of other people) began to take a second look at Joe Biden.
I'll admit, until recently I scoffed at the idea of him jumping into the race. Biden's been kicking around an awfully long time. (He first ran for president and lost in the primaries in 1988, when I was a freshman in college.) He has a history of verbal gaffes that could make a Biden presidential campaign a nightmare to run. He has his own skeletons in his closet (a plagiarism scandal in law school). He's not identified with any specific issue, agenda, or constituency. And he's no spring chicken (72 years old to Clinton's 67).
That makes him sound like a pretty weak candidate. But on a second look, I like what I'm seeing (and some of what I'm remembering).
Along with many millions of people, I was mighty impressed by Biden's mid-September interview with Stephen Colbert. Talking with frankness about his faith and how he's coped with more than his share of loss in his life — in addition to the death in May of his 46-year-old son Beau from brain cancer, his first wife and one-year-old daughter were killed in a car accident in 1972 — Biden sounded refreshingly unpolitical. He came off as charming, warm, and comfortable speaking without a script — someone who (unlike some) doesn't need to practice his authenticity.
Then there are Biden's recent statements staking out a more conflicted position on abortion than one expects to hear from such a prominent Democrat. This places him far closer to the consensus position on the issue than most leading members of his party and may indicate that he would cultivate more of a working-class, middle-American sensibility than we've seen from a Democratic presidential candidate since...well, since Jim Webb announced he was running. Yet unlike Webb, Biden seems, so far, to be pulling it off. Good for him. And good for the Democratic Party if he can run and succeed as that rarest of things — a moderate on the most divisive issue in the culture war.
On foreign policy, Biden might be even more interesting. Not many people remember it now, but back during George W. Bush's second term, Biden proposed that Iraq be broken up into three semi-autonomous regions — one Sunni, one Shiite, and one Kurdish. It was a bold proposal that was quickly forgotten once W's troop "surge" finally managed to tamp down the insurgency that was tearing the country apart at the time.
But of course the violence returned, and now we're back again to something approaching chaos, with the desert west of Baghdad serving as a home base for ISIS, the country's Sunni and Shiite populations nearly at each other's throats, and the Kurds (as always) just trying to live their lives without getting sucked into the whirlwind of violence around them. If that's not a complete vindication of Biden's proposal, which would surely have provoked its own forms of instability, it's at least refreshing evidence that he was willing to think outside the narrow, unimaginative, ideological boxes that too often determine foreign policy thinking inside the Beltway. American politics could use more of such thinking.
Finally, there's domestic policy — an area where Biden has never really stood out or distinguished himself. And that's where Warren comes in.
Biden should only jump into the race if he can persuade Warren to change her mind and take the leap with him, forming a complete ticket before the first votes are cast this winter, with the senator from Massachusetts serving as a running mate and senior domestic policy adviser in waiting. Take Biden's everyman charisma, foreign policy chops, and extensive experience as a senator and vice president, and combine it with Warren's firey, whip-smart, left-liberal populism on domestic policy and you'd have a hell of a ticket. It would be one straight out of Hillary Clinton's nightmares — and one perfectly poised to poach support from Sanders with the message, "I get why Bernie appeals to you, but we will do it better — and we can win this thing."
Put Sanders' support together with what Biden currently enjoys and you'd have a candidate with nearly 48 percent of the Democratic vote nationally to Clinton's 41 percent.
That's the contest that American politics needs — and Democratic voters deserve.
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13 Killed At Oregon's Umpqua Community College. Conservatives Call For More Guns
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ANYWHERE, USA
Australian Gun Control After Port Arthur Massacre Left 35 Dead
Alan: If being awash in guns were a prelude to safety, why is the United States the most dangerous developed nation rather than the least?
![]()
Suicide And Homicide Rates Attributable To Firearms
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2879650/Study-shows-annual-gun-deaths-United-States-catching-killed-car-crashes.html
"Gun Cartoons and Gun Violence Bibliography"
Handguns At Home And The Scourge Of Suicide Among Young People
ANYWHERE, USA
Australian Gun Control After Port Arthur Massacre Left 35 Dead
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/12/australian-gun-control-after-port.html
Alan: If being awash in guns were a prelude to safety, why is the United States the most dangerous developed nation rather than the least?
![]()
Suicide And Homicide Rates Attributable To Firearms
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2879650/Study-shows-annual-gun-deaths-United-States-catching-killed-car-crashes.html
Alan: If being awash in guns were a prelude to safety, why is the United States the most dangerous developed nation rather than the least?
Suicide And Homicide Rates Attributable To Firearms
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2879650/Study-shows-annual-gun-deaths-United-States-catching-killed-car-crashes.html
Handguns At Home And The Scourge Of Suicide Among Young People
Mom Killed By 2 Year Old Child Described As "Responsible." NOT!
80% Of All Firearm Deaths In 23 Industrialized Countries Occurred In The U.S.
http://paxonbothhouses.
“Toy Guns Outlawed At Republican Presidential Convention. Real Guns Allowed”http://paxonbothhouses.
Mom Killed By 2 Year Old Child Described As "Responsible." NOT!
Mom Killed By 2 Year Old Child Described As "Responsible." NOT!
At least 13 people were dead and more than 20 others were injured after a gunman opened fire Thursday morning on the campus of Umpqua Community College in southwest Oregon, authorities told NBC News.
The gunman was killed in a firefight with Douglas County sheriff's deputies, Sheriff John Hanlin said. State Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum told NBC News that 13 people were dead after the events near Roseburg, where the shootings were called in at 10:38 a.m. (1:38 p.m. ET).
No officers were injured, said Hanlin, who said: "It's been a terrible day."
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown described the gunman as a 20-year-old man and said she was immediately traveling to Roseburg, in the southwest corner of the state about 60 miles south of Eugene.
"Our top priority now is the medical treatment of the victims and the security of the campus," said Brown, who expressed "profound dismay and unimaginable heartbreak."
The FBI, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the U.S. Marshals Service all joined numerous state and local agencies at the scene.
Mercy Medical Center in Roseburg said it was treating nine patients and was expecting four more. Sacred Heart General Hospital in Eugene, a major trauma center, told NBC News it was expecting three patients by helicopter.
Students told NBC News that the shootings occurred in a classroom building called Snyder Hall.
"I was walking into class, and I heard what sounded like a car backfiring," Courtney Rennie, 23, second-year human services student, told NBC News.
"You don't even think that's somebody shooting a gun," Rennie said, but "I kept envisioning someone is going to come around the corner and and shoot the windows out."
Kenny Ungerman, a Navy veteran in his first year in the school's medic program, said he had just come out of a writing class at Snyder Hall and was talking to the National Guard recruiter when "we heard a gunshot."
"It sounded like a handgun. It wasn't loud enough to be an assault rifle," Ungerman said. "Then I saw a guy with a handgun right outside — he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He was going toward the building, and he just disappeared into the building."
Ungerman said he heard people running and screaming, "He has a gun!" and "He's shooting!"
"I only saw him for a split second," Ungerman said.
Police search students outside Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore., Thursday, Oct. 1, 2015, following a deadly shooting at the southwestern Oregon community college. Mike Sullivan / Roseburg News-Review via AP
Umpqua is a two-year school with about 3,300 full-time students and 16,000 part-time students. It started offering classes in 1961.
In a joint statement, the American Association of Community Colleges and the Association of Community College Trustees said called the shootings a "tragedy" and said they were committed to on-campus safety and security.
But "while campus safety is of the utmost priority, due to their open nature, college and university campuses are susceptible to these types of events," the organizations said.
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Access to Higher Education Equals Access to Opportunity. America Intends Unequal Opportunity
Access to Higher Education
Equals Access to Opportunity
Linda Katehi, Chancellor, UC Davis
College rankings are something parents, students and educators all watch. They offer a snapshot of what each university has to offer and UC Davis has long enjoyed high rankings across the board.
UC Davis has been recognized for being 1st in the world for agriculture and forestry each of the past three years by QS World University, 1st among the world's veterinary schools also by QS World University and just this past week was ranked 44th in the world among all universities by Times Higher Education of London. But there was one recent ranking that filled me with even more pride because it says so much about who we are and what we value at UC Davis. The New York Times, in an article headlined "California's Upward Mobility Machine," ranked us number two in the nation when it comes to educating students of diverse economic backgrounds.
We provide a world-class education at UC Davis. As Chancellor, I know our faculty and staff work incredibly hard to offer outstanding programs and opportunities for our students. But the overriding issue for me as leader of a public higher education institution is being able to ensure access and affordability as we also maintain institutional excellence. A quality college education can be transformative. I could not be more proud of UC Davis and our sister campuses in the UC system for our devotion to access for students of varying socio-economic backgrounds.
The Times survey put six UC campuses among the top seven for doing the most to educate low and moderate-income students. Rankings were based on three factors:
- Number of students receiving Pell Grants;
- Graduation rates those students;
- Net cost of attending, after financial aid.
- Graduation rates those students;
- Net cost of attending, after financial aid.
On our campus in Davis, 43 percent of our students receive Pell grants. More than half have all their tuition and fees covered by grants and aid they don't have to pay back or that turn into long-term debt. We have been able to maintain this level of assistance even through the last recession, when state support for higher education was decreasing and we were admitting greater numbers of students.
We've been proactive in ensuring access to a quality education for all students. Although tuition went up as state funding declined, it is still relatively low, especially when compared to some of our peer institutions. At the same time, outreach, recruitment and enrollment of low-income students increased. Expanding partnerships with community colleges is allowing increased transfers for many low-income students.
As the Times article points out, research has demonstrated that a teenager from a first-generation and/or low-income family not only thrives in college but also experiences many of benefits after graduation such as "higher income, better health and greater life satisfaction."
I can personally attest to the value of having access to a first-rate college education. I grew up on an island off the coast of Greece in a poor community. My parents worked multiple jobs to make ends meet. They were never able to attend college themselves, but my mother was determined to make sure I had more opportunities for a full life. She knew education was the way to get there. With my parents' constant support and encouragement, I was able to attend the National Technical University of Athens, Greece and then a masters and doctoral program in electrical engineering at UCLA.
The college experience gave me the chance for a life I could not have imagined when I was growing up. I want the same opportunities for our students, no matter where they come from and regardless of financial status. The students I see on campus are future innovators, scientists, writers, educational leaders, business owners, policy makers and more. They remind us everyday of how crucial it is to invest in public higher education in this country.
We want to continue to be that Upward Mobility Machine the Times called us, but it takes a commitment from everyone to make that happen. We have so many earnest, hard-working kids in California and the rest of the nation who, with the tools and solid foundation a world-class higher education provides, will go on to accomplish great things we cannot even imagine. It's our responsibility--and opportunity--to do all we can to give them a helping hand. To me, this is what higher education is all about.
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There Is No Catastrophe So Ghastly That American Will Reform Its Gun Laws
Australian Gun Control After Port Arthur Massacre Left 35 Dead
There is no catastrophe so ghastly that America will reform its gun laws.
Tim Kreider, The Week
I started writing this essay last week, about the next mass shooting. It hadn't happened yet, but we all knew it was going to. We didn't know then whether it would be in a school or a workplace, a mall or a theater or a military base, in Maryland or Idaho, Chicago or some small town we'd never heard of before, suddenly elevated to infamy. We didn't know the killer's name or how many people would die. But we did know some things for certain.
We knew there would be grief: genuine on the part of relatives and friends, professionally simulated by media personalities, journalists, politicians, spokespeople, and pundits. There would be anguished calls to understand how this could have happened. The question "Why?" would be posed. There would be outraged calls for gun control by liberals, and pro forma calls for better monitoring of the mentally ill by gun lobbyists. The Culture of Violence would be decried. The word tragedy would be used, and the word senseless, and, within minutes, politicize, and, after a few days, the phrase come together as a community, and the word healing. Ultimately, nothing at all would be done and we'd forget all about it again, until the next one.
I didn't write fast enough. The next mass shooting has already happened. Over the holiday weekend, some guy went on a petulant killing spree in California, killing a half dozen people, three by stabbing and three with guns, because girls didn't like him. A senseless tragedy that will all too soon be politicized. I personally deplore the culture of violence that leads to such acts. We cannot help, at such a time, but wonder Why. But I, like you, have faith that Santa Barbara will soon come together as a community and begin the process of healing.
Look, we've collectively decided, as a country, that the occasional massacre is okay with us. It's the price we're willing to pay for our precious Second Amendment freedoms. We're content to forfeit the lives of a few dozen schoolkids a year as long as we get to keep our guns. The people have spoken, in a cheering civics-class example of democracy in action.
It's hard to imagine what ghastly catastrophe could possibly change America's minds about guns if the little bloody bookbags of Newtown did not. After that atrocity, it seemed as if we would finally enact some obvious, long-overdue half-measures. But perfectly reasonable, moderate legislation expanding background checks and banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines was summarily killed in the Senate for no reason other than that a sufficient number of United States senators are owned by the NRA. It made our official position as a nation nakedly explicit: We don't care about any number of murdered children, no matter how many, or how young. We want our guns.
I realize we are not all equally complicit in this indifference; there's a spectrum of culpability. I don't even bother to hold the NRA or the politicians they own accountable for the deaths they allow, any more than I blame deer ticks or herpes for doing their jobs. Gun lobbyists are just engines of greed, businesslike and efficient as HIV. Politicians will do whatever will get them re-elected. And gun owners are simply frightened; anyone who buys a handgun is, self-evidently, afraid of something. Plenty of them are decent, fun, likable, kindhearted people, but fear can make normal people behave vilely. And as an electoral bloc they've made the calculation that placating their own imaginary terrors is more important than the lives of what will probably, after all, be some stranger's kids. And luckily kids don't get to vote.
The coalition of Greed and Fear seems invincible. No appeals to reason or decency can affect either of those factions; it's like arguing with addicts or bacilli. They will never modify their position because their position isn't rational — it's driven by deep feelings of impotence and fear they can't even admit to, and funded by cemeteries full of money. If gun laws are ever going to change in this country, it'll have to be because people like me, people who care except not quite enough, quit their bitter impotent griping and actually do something about it. We care in the way that carnivores care about the screaming in slaughterhouses or that pro-war voters care about families accidentally blown apart in Iraq. Which is to say, sorta — just not enough to change our minds or habits or do anything hard or inconvenient.
An annoying thing about living in a republic is that you can't feel completely blameless for the ruinous state of your nation. But the happy loophole is that responsibility for decision-making is so broadly diffused across millions of your fellow citizens that you can always tell yourself that you did what you could but the Other Guys steamrolled you so it's all their fault. My own contribution toward ending gun violence so far has been to feel sick with rage and loathing toward the NRA. Occasionally I'll draw a mean cartoon about it. It's easy and fun to mock gun fanatics, because they're so selfish and scared and weak and mean. It's also pointless, an exercise in frustration and helplessness. Seeing the NRA repeatedly defeat any gun legislation, brutally effective as the Soviets crushing an uprising, has incrementally demoralized me and given me an excuse to give up. As William Greider wrote: "powerlessness also corrupts."
So how about let's actually do something for once? Write your senators or congressman, your state representatives, your governor. Become a single-issue voter. I'm sorry to say it, but the most effective thing you can do is probably to send a check to a gun-control lobby group, since it should be clear by now that the only voice that matters in American governance is that of money. We need to buy up and bully some senators of our own. Why not do it right now? Because it's too late for the victims in California, but we don't know when the next mass shooting might happen; I haven't seen the news yet today, so for all I know it already happened this morning. If not, it'll happen next week, or two or six months from now. But we do know it's going to happen. Some parents out there reading this and shaking their heads in vague sorrow are already doomed to unimaginable grief.
If we're not going to do anything again, I'd just like to make one request: given that we've all agreed, if only by our passive acquiescence, not to keep this from happening, can we please quit pretending to care? Let's just skip the histrionics this time: no pro forma shock, condolence photo ops, somber speeches, flags at half-mast, meaningless noises from liberals about legislation, meaningless counter-noises from the NRA about armed guards in elementary schools. Why bother going through the motions of soul-searching when we know very well there's nothing to search? If we can't be brave we might at least be honest: when we see the familiar helicopter shots of ambulances outside a school, the clusters of classmates hugging, the sobbing parents being led away, the makeshift shrines of candles and plush toys, instead of looking stricken or covering our mouths or saying "Oh my God" or "How horrible," let's just all look each other in the eye and say: "Shit happens."
Alan: If being awash in guns were a prelude to safety, why is the United States the most dangerous developed nation rather than the least?
![]()
Alan: If being awash in guns were a prelude to safety, why is the United States the most dangerous developed nation rather than the least?
![]()
Suicide And Homicide Rates Attributable To Firearms
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2879650/Study-shows-annual-gun-deaths-United-States-catching-killed-car-crashes.html
"Gun Cartoons and Gun Violence Bibliography"http://paxonbothhouses.
Handguns At Home And The Scourge Of Suicide Among Young Peoplehttp://paxonbothhouses.
Mom Killed By 2 Year Old Child Described As "Responsible." NOT!
http://paxonbothhouses.
80% Of All Firearm Deaths In 23 Industrialized Countries Occurred In The U.S.
Suicide And Homicide Rates Attributable To Firearms
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2879650/Study-shows-annual-gun-deaths-United-States-catching-killed-car-crashes.html
"Gun Cartoons and Gun Violence Bibliography"
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2879650/Study-shows-annual-gun-deaths-United-States-catching-killed-car-crashes.html
"Gun Cartoons and Gun Violence Bibliography"
http://paxonbothhouses.
Handguns At Home And The Scourge Of Suicide Among Young People
Handguns At Home And The Scourge Of Suicide Among Young People
http://paxonbothhouses.
Mom Killed By 2 Year Old Child Described As "Responsible." NOT!
http://paxonbothhouses.
80% Of All Firearm Deaths In 23 Industrialized Countries Occurred In The U.S.
Mom Killed By 2 Year Old Child Described As "Responsible." NOT!
http://paxonbothhouses.
80% Of All Firearm Deaths In 23 Industrialized Countries Occurred In The U.S.
http://paxonbothhouses.
“Toy Guns Outlawed At Republican Presidential Convention. Real Guns Allowed”http://paxonbothhouses.
Mom Killed By 2 Year Old Child Described As "Responsible." NOT!
Mom Killed By 2 Year Old Child Described As "Responsible." NOT!
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President Obama Laments Mass Shootings Becoming 'Routine' After Oregon School Massacre
"There Is No Catastrophe So Ghastly That America Will Reform Its Gun Laws"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/10/there-is-no-catastrophe-so-ghastly-that.html
Alan: One of the last webpage postings by presumed Umpqua Community College killer, Chris Harper Mercer, was a link to the BBC documentary, "Surviving Sandy Hook."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8CrkwHptDI
Alan: One of the last webpage postings by presumed Umpqua Community College killer, Chris Harper Mercer, was a link to the BBC documentary, "Surviving Sandy Hook."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8CrkwHptDI
Obama Gives Smoldering Statement on Oregon Shooting: “Our Thoughts and Prayers Are Not Enough.”
"Gun Cartoons and Gun Violence Bibliography"
Handguns At Home And The Scourge Of Suicide Among Young People
Handguns At Home And The Scourge Of Suicide Among Young People
Mom Killed By 2 Year Old Child Described As "Responsible." NOT!
80% Of All Firearm Deaths In 23 Industrialized Countries Occurred In The U.S.
http://paxonbothhouses.
“Toy Guns Outlawed At Republican Presidential Convention. Real Guns Allowed”http://paxonbothhouses.
Mom Killed By 2 Year Old Child Described As "Responsible." NOT!
Mom Killed By 2 Year Old Child Described As "Responsible." NOT!
50 Police Officers Shot & Killed In 2014. Huge, Steady Decline Since 1970s
http://paxonbothhouses.
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Rape: Still Open Season On Victims
“They Told Me It Never Happened”
What’s at stake when police arrest women who they believe falsely reported rape? For Lara McLeod, it was her reputation, her mental health, and maybe even her baby nephew’s life.
Lara McLeod never wanted to report her rape. In those first few hours, the 19-year-old was barely able to put what had happened to her into words. Joaquin Rams, Lara’s older sister’s fiancé, had forced Lara to have sex with him, she said — just two weeks after Lara’s sister, Hera, had given birth to Joaquin’s baby.
Joaquin warned Lara not to tell anyone, she said, because it would ruin her family’s life. Lara feared that was true, but she broke down and told her parents the next day. They rushed out the door in a panic to pick up Hera and the baby. All Lara wanted to do after that was go back to sleep.
Instead, later that evening, she got a call from a police officer in Prince William County, Virginia, the suburb of Washington, D.C., where Joaquin and Hera lived. He wanted to know whether what Lara had told her parents was true. When Lara said it was, the officer told her that she needed to come to the station immediately for a formal interview.
After a cursory investigation of the claim they compelled her to file, the police abruptly concluded Lara was lying about being raped and arrested her. Hera was charged with obstructing justice for aiding Lara’s alleged deceit, and had to spend her savings on legal fees to get them dismissed. Lara’s charges were eventually expunged, but not before her reputation was destroyed. She says she still has severe panic attacks whenever she sees a police officer.
But the worst was yet to come.
In the ensuing battle for custody over Prince, Hera and Joaquin’s infant son, it emerged that not only had Joaquin lied about his name, employment history, and age — he was a decade older than he had claimed — but he had also once been a suspect in his ex-girlfriend’s shooting death and a person of interest in his mother’s death, too, although he was never successfully charged in either case. He had been accused of child abuse by his other son, although never convicted, and ran an amateur porn site.
But thanks to the charges against Hera and Lara, Joaquin was able to portray himself as a comparatively fit parent — and the victim of a smear job. The judge granted Joaquin unsupervised visits. Three months later, EMTs found Prince unconscious on the floor of Joaquin’s house. The 15-month-old died the next day. Months later, Joaquin was charged with murder.
Joaquin, who has been in jail without bail ever since, adamantly denies any wrongdoing in the deaths of his son, ex-girlfriend, and mother, and denies he raped Lara. His upcoming trial, in which the prosecutors are seeking the death penalty, has attracted plenty of media attention. But the mishandling of Lara’s rape allegations — the night that started it all — has never been reported until now, and authorities still refuse to explain why they were so quick to press charges against the sisters.
Internal documents and recordings of private meetings obtained by BuzzFeed News, none of which have previously been made public, show how grievously the police botched their investigation from start to finish, allowing their beliefs about sexual assault to influence the way they pursued the case.
In a private meeting with the McLeods, the chief of police admitted the department bungled aspects of the investigation, calling parts “improper,” “sloppy,” and “shortcutted,” saying he was “disappointed” that the detectives “didn’t pursue every possible means to either support the allegations or the conclusions that they were reaching or disprove them.” But he stressed that women do lie about rape, so it was important for officers not to be too credulous — and that it was only his “personal opinion” that police shouldn’t have pressed charges.
“It is not uncommon for people to make false, malicious, salacious allegations of sexual assault,” he said. “That does happen.”
Lara is stuck putting the pieces of her life back together. Now 23, she still has no clue why the police told her to report a crime, then arrested her for doing so. She only knows one thing for sure, she says: No one should ever report a rape to the police.
“The night I was raped, I said I wanted to be left alone,” Lara told BuzzFeed News in August. “People say rape is serious and you should report it, but look what happened to me: I reported my rape, and they told me it never happened.”
Before Hera met Joaquin in February 2010, the McLeods were a tight-knit, fortunate family. Both sisters attended private boarding schools and elite colleges. Lara, who is 11 years younger than Hera, studied opera and journalism in college before moving to the West Coast, where she works at a tech company. After Hera graduated, she worked for Teach for America and competed on the reality TV show The Amazing Race with her father before moving to Washington, D.C., where she’s worked the kind of high-powered consulting jobs that earn six figures and require a security clearance. Hera didn’t have much time for romance, so she tried online dating, where she met Joaquin.
The judge who presided over Hera and Joaquin’s custody battle was struck by the differences between the two. “What attracted the two of you together on the internet, god knows,” he said. Hera’s family was equally baffled. Joaquin was a goateed musician who didn’t have a steady job or any discernible talent. But he won Hera over by talking about how much he loved his 10-year-old son, whom he had raised as a single dad ever since what he claimed was the child’s mother’s tragic accident. He spoke confidently about his aspiring music career and often said he was on the phone with R&B stars or meeting with business partners. He had a recording studio in his four-bedroom house, drove a Mercedes-Benz SUV, and bought expensive electronics.
Hera is the first to admit she didn’t try too hard to poke through the holes in his story. She was 29, and Joaquin, who told her he was 26, was her first serious boyfriend after years of travel and adventure. He “spoke with such conviction,” she said, “that it seemed impossible that the things he told me weren’t true.”
The fantasy began to unravel a few months after they started dating, when Hera became pregnant. Hera knew it was risky to have a baby with a man she barely knew, but she had a steady salary and had always wanted kids. That rationale, combined with her Catholic upbringing, convinced her to go for it, she said.
Lara McLeod and Prince. Courtesy of Lara McLeod
Suddenly, Joaquin had no money and expected Hera to pay for everything, she said. He stopped eating and showering and made comments about how he should kill himself so Hera could collect life insurance. In December 2010, Joaquin was charged with domestic abuse on a juvenile after his son told a school counselor that Joaquin had punched and kicked him, according to a visitation evaluation report. Joaquin told Hera that his son was overreacting to a spanking. Hera, determined to keep her newly formed family together, convinced herself that Joaquin, who was never convicted of the charges, was telling the truth and experiencing depression. She started attending counseling sessions with him.
“I felt trapped,” she said, “but I wanted my son to have a father.”
Lara and Hera had always been close, but the two grew apart when Hera started dating Joaquin and Lara went off to college. That’s why Lara agreed to go to a Lil Wayne concert with Joaquin on July 16, 2011, two weeks after the baby was born. Lara didn’t like Lil Wayne any more than she liked Joaquin. But he was family now.
It was the summer after Lara’s freshman year, and she was living at home at her parents’ house in Gaithersburg, Maryland, about 40 miles away from Joaquin’s place in Manassas, Virginia. The night of the concert, Hera and the baby spent the night at the McLeods’ in case Joaquin and Lara stayed out late — he had told Lara he would take her backstage and to an afterparty. On the way to the show, Joaquin asked Lara if she was willing to do whatever it took to succeed in the music industry. She wasn’t sure what he meant, she told the police.
Later on, Lara said, instead of taking her backstage, Joaquin brought her back home to explain: She could either have sex with him, right then and there, or he would take her to a party where she would be gang-raped by a group of men.
Lara later told the police that she tearfully argued with Joaquin into the early morning. When she protested that her sister had just given birth to Joaquin’s baby, he claimed he and Hera had agreed that Joaquin could sleep with Lara that night, the police report states. Lara even tried saying she had her period — that always discouraged pushy guys at college — but Joaquin was relentless. Earlier in the night, he had shown Lara the gun he had on him, she told police. Later, he put her phone in the trunk, and she didn’t know anyone in the area to ask for help, she said. As the night went on, Lara began to realize there was no escape. Joaquin led her into the basement.
The rape itself was an “out-of-body experience,” Lara said. Either her sister had put her in a position to be raped by Joaquin, Lara thought, or she had just destroyed Hera’s new family. Afterwards, Joaquin dropped her off at a subway station, gave her a hug, and told her not to fight him so hard next time, she says.
When Lara told her parents what had happened the next day, Hera knew immediately that her sister was telling the truth.
“I wanted so badly to believe that he was who he said he was,” Hera said. “But then it was like someone finally threw a big bucket of water on me and I woke up screaming. I realized I didn’t know this person at all. I just saw a monster.”
Hera McLeod (left) and Lara McLeod photographed in Seattle on September 8th, 2015. Jovelle Tamayo for BuzzFeed News
After Hera’s parents picked her and the baby up, she called the police — not to report the incident, but to ask for an escort, so she could go back to the house and get the baby’s things. When the officer entered, Joaquin, who later said in court that he was “confused” as to why the officers were there, started yelling that he had never touched Lara. Suddenly, the officer later said in court, the routine escort request “became an investigation for an alleged rape.”
Another police officer, Detective Bradford Cavender, called Lara to confirm the allegations were true, then told her she needed to come down to the station for an interview. Lara didn’t want to go — it was late, and she was groggy and shell-shocked — but she still wasn’t worried. It didn’t occur to her that even “if you were innocent, someone might not believe you,” she said.
The police report notes Lara’s reluctance to report her rape multiple times. Cavender, who interviewed Lara when she got to the station, wrote in the report that Lara said “she never wanted to call the police.” When he asked what Lara wanted from the investigation, she said she just wanted Joaquin to “leave my family alone.’”
Virginia law defines rape as sexual intercourse that is accomplished against one’s will, not just by force but by “threat or intimidation.” Even so, Lara didn’t say she was “raped” in her account, according to the partially censored police report obtained by BuzzFeed News, but instead made statements such as “He was having unconsensual sex with me and it was painful.” It was the police that first used the word — and then used it against Lara later.
Cavender appeared skeptical of Lara’s claims from the start. He repeatedly questioned her as to why she didn’t try to escape, even though Lara told him she was afraid of Joaquin’s gun, and that he warned her she would “fuck my family life up” if she didn’t comply. Cavender asked Lara why she didn’t keep her arms down when he tried to take her shirt off, even though she told him over and over again that she didn’t struggle because she was “terrified.” Lara used the word “catatonic” to describe her mental state by the time she yielded to Joaquin after hours of arguing. “Despite being in a catatonic state she remembered that he led her by the arm into the house through the garage entrance,” Cavender noted.
Police sent her to get a rape kit and then met with Joaquin and his lawyer.
Joaquin initially told police he “did not touch” Lara, he later admitted in court. Now, he’d changed his story. They had sex, but it was consensual, he said. (Later, in court, he would also say it wasn’t the first time.) And he had proof, he told the police and later said in court: a video he had secretly recorded using a camcorder Hera had left their house with a few hours before.
The police were seemingly unconcerned that Joaquin had videotaped a 19-year-old having sex without her knowledge, which is a crime in Virginia. Instead, they summoned Hera back to the station and demanded to see her camera. After a few minutes of confusion she took it out of her purse and handed it over.
The police scrolled through the camcorder’s contents but didn’t see the video. Joaquin told them he might be able to retrieve it, so they allowed him to take the camcorder — evidence in an alleged sexual assault — to his attorney’s office, where, with the help of an “IT guy,” the video appeared. Police would later admit in court that they had no idea what Joaquin did — whether he used a computer program, or backup software, or inserted a different memory card — just that he “knew how to use the camera a lot better than any of us would be able to.”
Cavender described the tape in his police report. Both Joaquin and Lara were onscreen, he wrote. He heard Joaquin say, “Look, think about how things are gonna be, once we can get over this,” and, later, “Don’t be shy, we’re gonna get this over with.” But Cavender was more interested in Lara’s movements. She had already told the police that she didn’t try to leave the basement during the sex itself, but she had said she cried, told Joaquin he was hurting her, and said “no” repeatedly, according to the report. Cavender wrote that he could not hear Lara crying out as she had said, and that the video contradicted her chronological account. He concluded that she was an “active participant in the sexual intercourse” because she did “not appear to be struggling” in the video Joaquin had provided, and “at no point during the sexual intercourse did Lara ever tell him to ‘stop.’”
Many neurobiological studies show that rape and trauma victims have fragmented memories of assaults. Our brains often react to life-threatening situations by shutting down, which is why victims can’t always provide a linear account, experts say. Cavender didn’t appear to consider that a factor. But if he was concerned about the seeming discrepancies between Lara’s account and the video, there were any number of paths he could have pursued.
Cavender could have sought out the security footage from the 7-Eleven where Lara told him that Joaquin had taken her while they were arguing about whether she’d sleep with him. Cavender could have reviewed Lara’s medical records or run Joaquin’s name to see if he had ever come to the attention of local authorities before. The police record does not indicate that the detective did any of those things, however. Because by the time Cavender finished reviewing the videotape, Joaquin was no longer the one under suspicion. Lara was.
He asked Lara to come back to the station two days later. Unaware that she was under investigation, she showed up without a lawyer.
Cavender and another detective, Kimberly Norton, interrogated Lara. Was there a possibility Lara had ever had sex with Joaquin before, or that she slept with him that night in hopes of meeting people in the music industry? If someone had been watching, would there have been any doubt in their mind that she was raped? Lara said no, Cavender wrote.
They asked Lara if there were inconsistencies in her testimony; she said if there were, she didn’t mean them. It was hard for her to remember exactly what had happened, she said, since she had been so distraught. But she couldn’t understand why the police were fixated on the sex instead of the three hours before, especially since she had admitted that her case wasn’t a “stranger rape” case.
Cavender noted that Lara said, “At the point where he had sex with me, yeah at that point I was a willing participant because I wanted to get it over with.” But Lara wouldn’t “admit” that she had wanted to sleep with Joaquin, which made the detectives upset. They told her that Joaquin didn’t deserve this, she says.
“I gave Lara one last opportunity to tell me the truth and to admit if it was consensual sex and she again denied that it was consensual,” Cavender wrote in his report. He finally told her he had a tape of the two of them having sex and asked if Lara wanted to watch it.
Lara started panicking. No, she didn’t want to watch a secret video of her recent sexual assault. That’s when the police told her it was time to teach her a lesson, she said.
“Despite being contradicted on almost every part of her story from the first interview, Lara refused to admit that she lied about reporting the rape,” Cavender wrote. “She continued to assert that she was a [sic] unwilling participant.”
Lara and Hera still haven’t seen the video. Joaquin’s prosecutors have the camcorder now, and have said they may use other footage on it as evidence in the upcoming trial. Hera believes Joaquin doctored the recording — as it later came out in court, he had the know-how. Even if he didn’t edit it, “the tape represents one moment in time in which he had control over her,” she said. “He knew when to turn it on and turn it off.” (Joaquin’s lawyer, Daniel Morrissette, told BuzzFeed News that the recording “shows that Ms. McLeod’s participation was consensual,” although he would not say if he had actually seen the video himself.)
The police charged Lara with making a false report to law enforcement. Assistant District Attorney Claiborne Richardson signed off on the charges and told the police to also charge Hera with obstruction of justice for deleting the video, according to the police report. Two women with perfectly clean criminal records — who had never wanted to report the rape in the first place — ended up charged with crimes.
Lara says she wasn’t even read her rights before she was handcuffed and marched out of the station. She thought her mom would be waiting at the end of the road. Instead, they frisked her, told her to take out her piercings and let down her hair, and carted her off to jail.
“I don’t know what I did!” Lara recalled saying over and over. “They said, ‘Don’t play dumb, you know what you did.’” She spent the next few hours sobbing behind bars. As soon as they let her out, she started apologizing.
“The police told me I had to apologize,” Lara said. “So I kept saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’”
Making a false report to a police officer is a misdemeanor offense in 42 states and a felony in eight. These laws exist because filing a false report can have serious consequences for the accused. An innocent person might be arrested, booked, and subjected to a forensic examination and public scrutiny. Sometimes police spend extensive time and resources investigating a false claim — in those cases, they might seek restitution.
But given that the majority of sexual assaults are not reported to the police, there’s reason to tread carefully when it comes to those reports, experts say. Because sexual assault is such a deeply personal violation, victims are less likely to report the crime. They’re also less likely to go to the police because they are so often unbelieved: The possibility of being ridiculed, doubted, shamed, or even thrown in jail dissuades many from coming forward.
Sexual assault allegations may be deemed false just because a victim is uncooperative, police have doubts about her credibility — often because she’s a sex worker, poor, or a minority — if drugs and alcohol are involved, if the victim has mental health issues, or simply if there’s not enough evidence. In other words, just because a police officer determines a report is false doesn’t mean it is, which is why there are no consistent studies on the rate of false rape allegations, although the most widely accepted research puts it in the range of 8–10%.
Still, the prospect of false rape claims seems to loom large in police perception, which may be one of the reasons only 7% of sexual assault reports lead to arrest and just 3% lead to prosecution, according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network.
“One of the biggest problems in rape investigations is that police think women lie,” said Lisa Avalos, a University of Arkansas law professor who researches the prosecution of false rape claims. “When police think that, they typically fail to thoroughly investigate their rape complaints, thus doing a disservice to those victims as well as to the community as a whole, because a predator remains at large.”
The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) says rape claims must be fully investigated before false reporting charges are considered, and it directs police to be open-minded and sympathetic when interviewing victims and not to judge a victim’s credibility by her reaction to the rape. Some states have developed their own best practices, such as the Oregon Attorney General’s Sexual Assault Task Force, which instructs officers not to arrest women for making false reports if the reporter was compelled to make the report, or if the report did not result in harm to the accused or in the use of significant agency resources.
But both federal and local investigations across the country have found that police often fail to follow these guidelines, instead letting deep-seated stereotypes about sexual assault — that women often lie — influence their decisions. A 2012 federal investigation into how Missoula, Montana, handled sexual assault complaints found that the police, prosecutors, and local university all responded inadequately and failed to take sexual violence seriously. In 2013, Human Rights Watch published a report on police mishandling of sexual assault cases in Washington, D.C. Although the district said it had policies in place to prevent mishandling of sexual assault cases, the report found the department often failed to investigate complaints and discouraged victims from reporting their assaults, in some cases even threatening to charge them with false reporting.
There are no comprehensive studies on how often women are mistakenly charged with false reporting of sexual assault, but high-profile cases from Wisconsin to Washington state have frightening similarities: Victims were pressured to recant reports and prosecuted for lying, then vindicated years later, when their rapists were caught by other authorities after raping more women.
Women wrongly charged with false reporting have won big: Pennsylvanian Sara Reedylanded a $1.5 million settlement from the police in 2012 after enduring a similar ordeal. But it costs money and energy to fight back against police and prosecutors. Rape victims often just don’t have it in them.
“My rape was awful,” Lara said. “But the way the police handled it was even worse.”
Lara spent the rest of the summer of 2011 in bed, reading and hiding from the world. She quit her job working at a summer camp. She flinched every time a family member touched her. A lawyer advised her not to fight the charges in court and helped her work out an agreement where she had her charges expunged in exchange for community service.
Lara never admitted guilt or even entered a plea, legal documents show. But that didn’t stop both strangers and prosecutors from claiming she did.
Just two weeks after her arrest, a burner email account sent emails to Lara’s ex-boyfriend and sorority sisters claiming that she had been charged with filing a false rape report and that the police had determined no rape occurred. The email included a link to an article on a website that posts false rape claims that mentioned her parents’ home address. Other websites reposted the charges alongside Lara’s mugshot. Lara said she lost friends her sophomore year of college over the allegations and had trouble finding a job the following summer.
Even worse, the authorities were spreading false information. Assistant DA Richardson, who had signed off on the charges against both sisters, wrote in a January 2012 email to the mother of Joaquin’s ex-girlfriend, obtained by BuzzFeed News, that Lara had pleaded guilty and had “already received a partial sentence,” both of which were untrue. He said that Hera had “gained access to a crime scene under false pretenses and removed evidence” that “determined that the allegations of rape brought by Ms. McLeod’s sister were untrue,” and wrote that the sisters’ efforts “to manipulate this office and to ignore their actions will not occur.” (Richardson did not respond to requests for comment.)
In reality, the charges against Hera were dismissed in May 2012 in about an hour and a half, with the judge calling Joaquin’s testimony “incredible.” But it cost Hera $50,000 in legal fees, she said.
Hera’s lawyer argued during the short trial that Joaquin was deliberately trying to use the situation to his advantage in their ongoing custody dispute. “If he can show, when he goes back to this review hearing, that Ms. McLeod was convicted of a crime and show that she is a bad person, it will enhance his argument that he should have more custody,” he said.
Although Hera’s case was dismissed, that’s exactly what happened.
By then, Prince was almost a year old. During the custody proceedings, theWashingtonian reported, a police officer testified that Joaquin was a suspect in the 2003 shooting death of an ex-girlfriend named Shawn Mason. A different ex-girlfriend testified that Joaquin had asked her if she knew anyone who could carry the murder out. A social worker said Joaquin had been charged with domestic abuse of his older son. Hera discovered the music career was a lie: Joaquin’s only current means of support appeared to be his older son’s Social Security benefits and his mother’s life insurance, which he collected after her death, ruled a suicide, in 2008. She also learned that Joaquin was mistakenly under the impression that he was the beneficiary of Shawn’s life insurance policy, according to a report by a social worker who interviewed him as part of a 2004 custody proceeding for his older son. Additionally, she found out that Joaquin ran a pornography website on the side.
Judge Michael J. Algeo was concerned about the porn and other aspects of Joaquin’s lifestyle, but dismissed the ex-girlfriend’s testimony — she had also said Joaquin was abusive — because Joaquin had taken photos of her before and she “likes to get undressed and go on websites.” Joaquin admitted that it was unwise to have had sex with Lara, but portrayed himself as the guileless victim of a conspiracy by the two sisters — one who lied about the rape and the other who tried to hide the exculpatory video. “I mean, the fact that I could have served eight to 10, 15 years of my life for something that [Hera] had done, that really concerns me, because the fact is that she had evidence in her possession and she chose to delete it,” Joaquin said in court that March.
Judge Alego gave Hera sole custody, but eventually granted Joaquin the right to unsupervised visits despite Hera’s insistence that he was a danger to their young child. On the fourth unsupervised visit, she got a call that Prince had been taken to the hospital in a coma.
EMTs had found him cold and wet, with a bruise on his forehead and dried blood in his nose, according to the Washingtonian. Hospital officials had even notified Child Protective Services, noting “obvious unexplainable injuries,” the Washington Postreported. An autopsy found “fluid in the sinuses, airways, lungs and intestines” and “small bruises and abrasions on the face and upper chest and back.”
He died the next day, at 15 months old.
Police and prosecutors charged Joaquin with murder the following January, alleging he drowned Prince to collect more than $500,000 from three life insurance policies they say he obtained before his death. (Joaquin has said that he was just trying to help his son, who had been suffering from febrile seizures.) He was later indicted by a grand jury on a charge of capital murder. They have encountered some setbacks: Last fall, Virginia’s chief medical examiner reversed the initial ruling of drowning to “no known cause of death,” and a judge denied the request to connect it to the deaths of his mother and ex-girlfriend, ruling that “a propensity” to commit crimes is not admissible to prove guilt in one specific case. Prosecutors are still seeking the death penalty, and the trial date is set for January 2016.
Lara was never allowed to see her medical records from the night she went to the hospital for her rape kit, although she remembers a nurse telling her her injuries were consistent with sexual assault. When Lara requested them recently, the hospital told her she would have to ask the police. When she requested them from the police, she was told her records were exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, since they were associated with a criminal case, even though it was now closed.
Two members of the Manassas city police force, which investigated Joaquin’s ex-girlfriend’s and mother’s deaths, would not comment on the upcoming case. One retired detective said he believed Joaquin was “guilty of three murders.”
Manassas Sgt. Christine Perry said she had “met and spoken with many people” who Joaquin hurt “either physically, mentally, emotionally, or financially.”
“How he continued to come out on top and be able to play the victim himself still astonishes me,” she said.
Lara McLeod (left) and Hera McLeod photographed in Seattle on September 8th, 2015. Jovelle Tamayo for BuzzFeed News
The McLeods demanded that the Prince William County Police Department conduct an investigation into how it handled Lara’s rape allegation. In fall 2013, Police Chief Steve Hudson invited the family in to discuss the results. Lara didn’t want to attend the meeting, but she wrote a letter to the police detailing what their actions had cost her.
She spent her college years having flashbacks, isolating herself, and crying in her room, she wrote. She had lost friends from the nasty articles. She lost her faith in the justice system. And her baby nephew was gone forever.
“I’m not really sure how your police force can fix anything two years later,” she wrote. “I’m not looking for monetary compensation, and an apology just isn’t enough…you not only ruined my life, but you ruined my family’s life. It took me two years to finally get some of myself back, and I assure you that I will never be the self-confident, bright eyed girl I once was.”
The family had specific requests: Train officers on how to properly respond to sexual assault. Discipline the detectives that charged the sisters. Make a public statement, so someone who googles Lara — a potential employer, say — would not see the outlandish charges.
“A few of your concerns, I think, have been corroborated,” Chief Hudson told Hera in the meeting, a recording of which was obtained by BuzzFeed News. He admitted that the decision to allow Joaquin to recover the video was “improper” and “violates our policies on handling evidence.” Hudson said the police report was “sloppy” and he thought some aspects of the investigation had been “shortcutted.”
“I think fatigue played a part in this,” he said, “and not a good part.”
Hudson admitted that the detectives had “reached a conclusion and didn’t pursue it further” and that, “in hindsight,” he would “prefer that the charges not have been made.”
“One of the shortcomings in this case is the fact that they didn’t do further investigation on the specific charge against you,” he said to Hera. “To leap to the conclusion that you needed to be charged at the time you did I thought was cut short.”
But he said there was nothing “technically improper” with the charges brought against Hera and Lara, as it was the detectives’ “judgment call.” And, he said, even if the police hadn’t charged them, Joaquin still wouldn’t have been arrested for rape. When Hera asked whether it was common for the department to charge women with falsely reporting rape, Chief Hudson said that he didn’t know if he would “call it an aberration.” The department deals with about 9 or 10 charges of false reporting a year out of 80–100 reports, he said.
As for the idea that his officers needed further instruction on handling sexual assault cases, he said their training was already “cutting edge.” He said they would address some issues internally but could not elaborate on what or how.
“Is there nothing your department can do to say ‘we made some mistakes and we’re fixing them?’” Hera asked.
“I would certainly think that it would be possible for me to say, in this investigation we uncovered some concerns about the methods used in the investigation that we are addressing administratively and internally,” Chief Hudson said, but he would have to ask their attorneys. “That’s probably about as far as I’d be able to go.” He couldn’t say Hera and Lara should never have been charged at all, because that was just his “personal opinion,” he said.
Later, Hera says, the department told her they could not make any public statement at all.
When Human Rights Watch faulted the D.C. police for how they handled sexual assault cases, the report included recommendations for police departments nationwide. Departments should hold officers accountable if they do not document or investigate cases, create an effective complaint procedure for victims or observers of improper treatment, respond seriously and transparently to those complaints, and submit to outside oversight.
The Prince William County police told the McLeods they couldn’t say whether they would make those or any similar changes. But, it appears, they haven’t even tried one simple fix: keeping data on how often they arrest women for falsely reporting rape.
In July, Prince William Detective Samuel Walker said it’s standard protocol to arrest people for falsely reporting rape because the department tries “to deter false allegations,” but “only if they can determine that the person is at fault.” However, he said, the department does not track how often it arrests people for falsely reporting sexual assault to a police officer, making it impossible to know how big — or how small — the problem actually is. Walker also said the department would be unable to provide BuzzFeed News with data detailing the number of women who report sexual assault per year to the Prince William police, or with a clear breakdown of how many of those reports are deemed “unfounded” and why.
Cavender, Norton, and Hudson did not respond to BuzzFeed News’ requests for comment. Prince William Police spokesperson Sergeant Kim Chinn said BuzzFeed News’ assertions were “erroneous” and that the case had been “investigated internally and criminally, and then reviewed again in response to your inquiry.” She said she could not comment further due to legal constraints.
Paul B. Ebert, commonwealth’s attorney for Prince William County, said his office could not “confirm or deny” any allegations related to Lara as there were no records involving her.
Assistant DA Richardson has since come under fire for allegedly instructing police to take photos of a minor’s erect penis for evidence in a “sexting” case.
Hera hasn’t spoken to Joaquin since the day her parents told her he raped her sister. But every year on Prince’s birthday, she sends a letter to the authorities who she holds just as responsible for his death. This year, she included a photo of Prince with his two front teeth in, smiling and sitting on a red truck — with his birth and death dates printed above.
“On July 1st, 2015, I would have turned four,” the card said. “May you always remember how the decisions you make impact the lives of innocent people. I will never forget you. I pray you will never forget about me.”
This year, Kimberly Norton, one of the two officers who charged the McLeod sisters, put the card in a new envelope and mailed it back to Hera unopened. She rewrote her return address in block letters. Not Detective Norton, as Hera had written, but “SGT K. NORTON.” She had been promoted. So had Detective Cavender.
Lara McLeod and Prince. Courtesy of Lara McLeod
Katie Baker is a national reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.
Contact Katie J.M. Baker at katie.baker@buzzfeed.com.
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Obama Compares American Deaths From Terror And Deaths By Domestic Firearm: The Chart
Obama Gives Smoldering Statement on Oregon Shooting: “Our Thoughts and Prayers Are Not Enough.”
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/10/president-obama-laments-mass-shootings.html
Deaths from gun violence vs. deaths from terrorism, in one chart
Okay.
Here's what that looks like (at least, for 2001-2011, the period for which we could find the most reliable data quickly courtesy of the State Department, the Justice Department, and the Council on Foreign Relations' Micah Zenko):
Over ten thousand Americans are killed every year by gun violence. By contrast, so few Americans have been killed by terrorist attacks since 9/11 that, when you chart the two together, the terrorism death count approximates zero for every year except 2001. This comparison, if anything, understates the gap: Far more Americans die every year from (easily preventable) gun suicides than gun homicides.
The point Obama is making is clear: We spend huge amounts of money every year fighting terrorism, yet are unwilling, at the national level, to take even minor steps (like requiring background checks on all gun sales nationally) to stop gun violence.
"We spent over a trillion dollars, and passed countless laws, and devote entire agencies to preventing terrorist attacks on our soil, and rightfully so" Obama said. "And yet we have a Congress that explicitly blocks us from even collecting data on how we could potentially reduce gun deaths. How can that be?"
Watch: 7 mass shootings, 7 distraught Obama speeches.
Video: http://www.vox.com/2015/10/1/9437187/obama-guns-terrorism-deaths
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Ted Cruz Is Not A Conservative: He's A Self-Promoting Narcissist , Fraud And Nihilist
Stop calling Ted Cruz a conservative: This self-promoting narcissist is a fraud and a nihilist
SEP 29, 2015
The people of Texas owe America an apology. They elected Ted Cruz to the United States Senate, and now the country is forced to endure his presence throughout the interminable election season. Cruz has worked diligently (and successfully) to become the least liked human being in Congress. Judging by last night, he’s hated most by his Republican colleagues, who, once again, blocked his inane efforts to shut down the government unless it defunded Planned Parenthood.
Both Republicans and Democrats passed a temporary spending measure that will keep the government afloat (a move supported by a majority of Americans) through mid-December. After the bill was passed by a vote of 77-19, Cruz theatrically sought a roll-call vote but he was promptly denied by his fellow Republicans, many of whom shouted “No!” at the Senator’s request.
Cruz, however, knows a conspiracy when he sees one, and he took to the Senate floor to dispense his bullshit with characteristic flare. “I mentioned to you [his colleagues],” Cruz said, “that the votes were always cooked here.” “How is it,” he rhetorically asked, “that Speaker Boehner and Leader McConnell can promise that there will never ever be a shutdown? Because, I believe, Speaker Boehner has decided to cut a deal with Leader Nancy Pelosi.” In case the prospect of two legislators reaching a sane and popular compromise isn’t scary enough, Cruz clarified what’s really going on here: It turns out that Boehner knew he would lose his speakership if he didn’t cave to the insurgent wing of his party, so he went and made a devilish “deal to surrender and join with the Democrats.” Sounds legit, right?
The worst thing about Cruz isn’t his obnoxiousness or his undemocratic conservatism or his dreary affectations; it’s his self-promoting nihilism. What he’s doing, and how he’s doing it, feels unprecedented. Threatening to shut down the government or undermine the country’s credit rating in defense of campaign talking point is an act of legislative terror. Cruz represents the very worst of factionalist fervor. He has no regard for the constitution or the general will or the nation’s economy. He sees an opportunity to promote his brand and it doesn’t matter what the costs are, to his party or his country.Cruz fancies himself a political martyr, the one Republican willing to fight for truth and transparency and conservative principles. He condemns his GOP colleagues as RINO cowards and pseudo-conservatives. But there’s nothing genuinely conservative about Cruz’s brinksmanship. He has no respect for Senatorial tradition or process or majority opinion. Again, he’s a nihilist and, perhaps worse, a fraud.
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The Republican Presidential Field - More Freak Show Than Statesmanship
Let’s be honest, they’re idiots: The embarrassing truth about the unqualified, underprepared GOP field
Build a wall! Let Russia fight ISIS! GOP ideas are so simple-minded that they almost can't be serious. They're not
OCT 1, 2015With Russia’s surprise decision to launch airstrikes against Syrian rebels, the Afghan government’s failure to defend Kunduz, and the flood of Syrian refugees in Syria, we’ve entered a surprising moment in American politics where the right answer, contrary to all conventional political wisdom, might be “It’s complicated, stupid.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said, “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”
In the coming months, every presidential candidate worth their salt might consider creating a winning political message by taking Holmes up on his advice and leaning into complexity. They could promise that they’ll work hard to design intricate policies that mirror the world’s actual challenges. And they could (convincingly) argue that Americans should trust them precisely because of that approach.
Of course, what I’ve just written totally violates campaign orthodoxy. Back in 1996, I participated in a campaign training academy at a hotel in New Brunswick. For a week, we studied political campaigns with the best political consultants in the country. To this day, I remember one adviser scrawling “KISS” in large letters on a blackboard, which stood for “Keep It Simple, Stupid.”
I’ve since worked on many campaigns (including my own), and I can tell you that in politics KISS has the gravitational pull of the Death Star. Resisting is the right thing to do, but it feels impossible and can be fatal.
While KISS particularly dominates today’s Republican field, it hasn’t seemed to bear much fruit for anyone but Donald Trump (more on him in a moment). Last December, Rick Perry (now, out of the race) said of Hillary Clinton, “And this secretary of state, and this president of the United States, both did a miserable job. I would put it in the feckless foreign policy category.” Both Chris Christie and Rand Paul (they of the moribund campaigns) have also criticized Obama as “feckless.”
Here’s the dictionary definition of that word: “having or resulting from a weak character or nature.” The Republican candidates are conflating willful simplicity with good moral character. That sounds appealing in theory, but its hollowness immediately appears when you tap on their Iraq policies, where, as former senior Obama defense official Derek Chollet recently wrote in the Washington Post, there’s virtually no difference between their ideas and what Obama and Clinton have actually done.
“[I]t is seductive to trumpet solutions as ‘tougher’ or ‘stronger,’” Chollet wrote, “but Republicans are finding it is difficult to define a way forward, especially when they must first grapple with the ghosts of their past.”
The reason their policies are bankrupt and that they’re falling back on character attacks is that they don’t know what to do in a world that’s vastly more confusing than ever before.
There has been no more egregious example than Donald Trump, who this week on “60 Minutes” framed our foreign policy choices in Syria and Iraq as so simple they might as well be a game of Risk.
Of ISIS in Syria, he said, “Why aren’t we letting ISIS go and fight Assad and then we pick up the remnants?” Of Syria, he said, “Russia wants to get rid of ISIS. We want to get rid of ISIS. Maybe let Russia do it. Let ‘em get rid of ISIS. What the hell do we care?” And of ISIS in Iraq, he said, “Look with ISIS in Iraq, you gotta knock ’em out. You gotta knock ’em out. You gotta fight ’em. You gotta fight ‘em.”
This was beyond slogans and bumper stickers. It is a foreign policy of bombast alone.
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Alabama Just Made It Even Harder for Black People to Vote
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/04/jon-steward-and-asif-mandvi-candid.html
Compendium Of Voter Fraud And Voter Suppression Posts
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/04/compendium-voter-fraud-and-voter.html
Republican Opposition To Majority Rule
Republican Opposition To Majority Rule
Alabama Just Made It Even Harder for Black People to Vote
| Oct. 1, 2015
In Alabama, you need a driver's license or other form of photo ID to vote. But getting that ID just got a lot harder, especially in the state's majority-black counties.
Due to budget cuts, Alabama is closing 31 satellite DMVs across the state. The biggest impact will be in rural, largely black counties that voted for President Obama in 2008 and 2012. Alabama Media Group columnist John Archibald put it this way:
Take a look at the 10 Alabama counties with the highest percentage of non-white registered voters. That's Macon, Greene, Sumter, Lowndes, Bullock, Perry, Wilcox, Dallas, Hale, and Montgomery, according to the Alabama Secretary of State's office. Alabama, thanks to its budgetary insanity and inanity, just opted to close driver license bureaus in eight of them. All but Dallas and Montgomery will be closed.Closed. In a state in which driver licenses or special photo IDs are a requirement for voting…Every single county in which blacks make up more than 75 percent of registered voters will see their driver license office closed. Every one.
Archibald predicted the move would invite a Justice Department investigation, as did his fellow columnist, Kyle Whitmire:
But put these two things together—Voter ID and 29 counties without a place where you can get one—and Voter ID becomes what the Democrats always said it was.A civil rights lawsuit isn't a probability. It's a certainty.
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It's Been 50 Years Since the Biggest US-Backed Genocide You've Never Heard Of
Former Indonesian dictator Suharto, second from left in sunglasses, on October 6, 1965. It's Been 50 Years Since the Biggest US-Backed Genocide You've Never Heard Of
As many as 1 million people were killed by Indonesia's Cold War regime—and we still don't know the full story of our government's involvement.
| Oct. 1, 2015
Fifty years ago today, one of the biggest mass murders of the 20th century began in Indonesia. On the heels of a Cold War-era military takeover, between 500,000 and 1 million people were slaughtered by the army and civilian death squads—with support from the US government. Starting in October 1965 and continuing through much of the next year, these Indonesian victims were accused of being communists, whether or not they supported the country's communist party: Many were targeted simply because they were seen as opponents of the new US-supported, military-backed Indonesian regime.
In Germany, Rwanda, and Cambodia, mass killings have been followed by truth-and-reconciliation commissions or trials. In Indonesia, despite a transition from military rule toward democracy that began in 1998, there haven't even been memorials for the victims. The killers were never brought to justice, and many of them remain in power today. Meanwhile, the US government's own role in the bloodshed remains unclear, as key documents related to the atrocity are classified. Even so, researchers and journalists have dug up some damning evidence of American involvement. Here's a rundown of what happened and what we do know.
President John Kennedy and Sukarno share a car at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington in 1961. AP
During the the Cold War, why was the United States concerned about Indonesia? After Indonesia won its war of independence against the Netherlands in 1949, a hero of the struggle named Sukarno became president. The United States was not a fan of his politics: Though he was not a communist himself, he was an anti-West populist-socialist who took steps after the war to nationalize plantations and other lucrative assets. He also protected the rapidly growing communist party, known as the PKI, which by 1965 was the biggest such organization outside of a communist country. The United States conducted covert operations during the late 1950s intended to weaken Sukarno's government and strengthen the staunchly anti-communist Indonesian military. "They considered the army to have the muscle to balance Sukarno," says Indonesian journalist Andreas Harsono, a researcher for Human Rights Watch.
What sparked the mass murders? In the early hours of October 1, 1965, a group of army conspirators killed six generals in Jakarta, the country's capital. Maj. Gen. Suharto, who would soon become Indonesia's dictator for more than three decades, took control of the armed forces, claiming that the killings were part of an attempted communist coup. Then he and the military launched a campaign to purge Indonesians believed to be connected with the communist party or left-leaning organizations. They also targeted hundreds of thousands of Indonesians unconnected to the party who they saw as potential opponents of their new regime, including union members, small farmers, intellectuals, activists, and ethnic Chinese. The carnage was so intense that people stopped eating fish—fearing that the fish were consuming the human corpses flooding the rivers.
Members of the youth wing of Indonesia's communist party are taken to a Jakarta prison on October 30, 1965. AP
So, how was the United States involved?Speculation abounds over the US role in the 1965 military takeover, though there's no concrete proof in the public record that America had a direct hand in it. However, investigations by journalists, as well as government documents, have made it clear that the United States provided money, weapons, and equipment to the Indonesian military while it was undertaking the killings. What's more, according to excerpts of contemporary cables released by the US State Department, officials at the US embassy created lists of thousands of names of communists and provided them to the military. It has been reported that the CIA worked on the lists, too, but the agency has denied involvement, Harsono says.
How was the genocide covered by the US press? "It was presented in the American media as good news," says Joshua Oppenheimer, a filmmaker who has spent the past 12 years investigating the mass murders and producing two award-winning documentaries about them. He cites a 1966 story in Time magazine that said the killings were the "best news for years in Asia." In a report at the time for NBC News, a correspondent spoke with an Indonesian man in Bali who claimed that the island, famous for its tourism, had "become more beautiful without communists," and that "some of them wanted to be killed." The correspondent noted that Indonesia boasted "fabulous potential wealth in natural resources" before showing footage of so-called communist prisoners at a labor camp on the island of Sumatra, some of whom, he said, would be starved to death or released from the camp to be killed by local citizens.
What's the situation in Indonesia today? Military rule ended in 1998 when Suharto was forced out, but even today many of the perpetrators of the killings remain in power, immune from prosecution. (Under Indonesian law, soldiers cannot be taken to trial in civilian courts.) Schools continue to teach that it was necessary and good to wipe out "the communists," and the government has yet to issue a national apology or establish a truth-and-reconciliation commission. "It was the darkness period," says Harsono. "I have hope that sooner or later the Indonesian government will apologize and overcome the handicap to learn the truth of that darkness." Over the last 50 years, the nation has remained a key US ally in the region. Home to some 250 million people, Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim country and an important backer of the United States in the so-called war on terror. Oppenheimer believes a US acknowledgment of its role in the killings might embolden Indonesia's current president, Joko "Jokowi" Widodo, to address what happened.
Is anyone pushing for more accountability? Human Rights Watch and other activists have for years called on the US government to declassify all relevant documents, and today Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) reintroduced a resolution in Congress calling for their release. Oppenheimer's documentaries have brought new public attention in both countries to the period. In his first film, The Act of Killing(2012), which was nominated for an Academy Award, he identified several of the killers and convinced them to reenact the murders they committed. "They offered boastful accounts of the killings, often with smiles on their faces and in front of their grandchildren," Oppenheimer explained in a recent New York Times op-ed. "I felt I had wandered into Germany 40 years after the Holocaust, only to find the Nazis still in power." In his second documentary, The Look of Silence (2014), a death squad leader looks straight into the camera and says, "We should be rewarded with a trip to America—if not by airplane, a cruise will do. We deserve it! We did this because America taught us to hate communists."
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Oregon Sheriff Handling Umpqua Massacre Fought White House on Gun Control After Newtown
Anywhere, USA
We Americans have failed to create a civilization.
In large part we are a nation of barbarians.
President Obama Laments Mass Shootings Becoming 'Routine' After Oregon School Massacre
"There Is No Catastrophe So Ghastly That America Will Reform Its Gun Laws"
"There Is No Catastrophe So Ghastly That America Will Reform Its Gun Laws"
Australian Gun Control After Port Arthur Massacre: 35 Dead
"Gun Cartoons and Gun Violence Bibliography"
Handguns At Home And The Scourge Of Suicide Among Young People
Australian Gun Control After Port Arthur Massacre: 35 Dead
Handguns At Home And The Scourge Of Suicide Among Young People
Mom Killed By 2 Year Old Child Described As "Responsible." NOT!
80% Of All Firearm Deaths In 23 Industrialized Countries Occurred In The U.S.
http://paxonbothhouses.
“Toy Guns Outlawed At Republican Presidential Convention. Real Guns Allowed”
Mom Killed By 2 Year Old Child Described As "Responsible." NOT!
Mom Killed By 2 Year Old Child Described As "Responsible." NOT!
50 Police Officers Shot & Killed In 2014. Huge, Steady Decline Since 1970s
http://paxonbothhouses.
Alan: One of the last webpage postings by presumed Umpqua Community College killer, Chris Harper Mercer, was a link to the BBC documentary, "Surviving Sandy Hook."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8CrkwHptDI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8CrkwHptDI
Oregon Sheriff Handling Massacre Fought the White House on Gun Control After Newtown
| Thu Oct. 1, 2015
As the sheriff in Douglas County, Oregon, John Hanlin was front and center following Thursday's shooting at Umpqua Community College, which left 10 dead and 7 others wounded.
Two years ago, Hanlin was one of hundreds of sheriffs around the country to vow to stand against new gun control legislation. In a January 15, 2013, letter to Vice President Joe Biden, he wrote, "Gun control is NOT the answer to preventing heinous crimes like school shootings."
Read more below:
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Grappling With Mass Murder: 9/11, Sandy Hook, Umpqua Community College
Biblical Literalism And The Cultivation Of Hatred
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/02/biblical-literalism-and-cultivation-of.htmlDear Josie,
Thanks for your visit.
Following up on our conversation...
Here is a link to Francis' first address in the United States - and another detailing the eye-popping tenets of "Traditionalist Catholicism," not to be confused with traditional Catholicism.
"Pope Francis Recommends Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton"
"What You Need To Know About The Man Who Claims To Be Pope"
And here is the link to the PBS Frontline program that so impressed me:
"Faith And Doubt At Ground Zero"
"Faith And Doubt At Ground Zero" calls to mind a superb BBC documentary concerning the Sandy Hook slaughter a a link to which was one of the last webpage-posts by Umpqua Community College mass murderer Chris Harper Mercer
"Surviving Sandy Hook," Superb BBC Documentary About Grappling With The Aftermath
I look forward to the account of your upcoming visit with the Callagy's.
Pax tecum
Alan
Mercy Is Not Fair
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September 11 Families For Peaceful Tomorrows
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