Yep. The crack reporters at the Associated (de)Press(ed – hat tip to Mark Levin) are rested, ready and a-rarin’ to go, with coverage on the Jared Lee Loughner phenomenon. Well, that is if you count “incompetent sheriff’s apologist” as Excellence in Journalism. When even the New York Times feels obligated to point out that the police and sheriff’s office knew about Loughner long before the attack, and had several run-ins with him, you’ve got to enjoy the contortions the AP’s going through, to spin the story to exonerate the sheriff, and implicate the Right.
The AP sounds amazed that “It turns out there is not a [government watch] list in the United States for people like Loughner.”
Um…nope. And to save the reporters from any hard work, perhaps it’s a good time to mention that Minority Report was just a movie, We still labor under the U.S. Constitution as the supreme law of the land, and water is still wet.
One of the things I love about Liberals is they seem to think that there’s an answer for everything. Get into a conversation with one about anything – guns, violence, poverty, the environment, you name it, and the conversation will go something like this:
Hey, Bob…how ’bout that ____________(insert subject matter here). Kind of a difficult nut to crack, eh? I wonder if there’s a way to solve that problem.
(replying in a condescending, paternalistic tone) Of course there is, Stan. That’s what the government is for. THEY can fix it…if only you conservatives would let them.
FINIS
Um…not so much. If that were true, we wouldn’t have crime (police), poverty (entitlements), pollution (the EPA), et cetera. In fact, unless we want a government that incarcerates first, and asks questions later (see: U.S.S.R.), we’d best be careful what we wish for.
Of course, when you get past the fact that you can’t arrest someone for a crime they have not yet committed, you have to observe that you CAN bloody well arrest them for making threats, or have them committed to a mental health facility for evaluation, when they appear to be a few clowns short of a circus. Note that nobody that was close to Loughner thought the guy was stable. And the police had visited his home on several occasions. For what, we don’t know, because they’ve been uncharacteristically tight-lipped on the subject. Of course, that hasn’t stopped Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik from opining that the current political discourse (i.e.: the Tea Party) is to blame.
So when you rest your head on your pillow tonight, sleep well, for the Associated Press is on the case, twisting stories around with tortuous logic, so they will conform to their Worldview. Regardless of the facts.
In fact, unless we want a government that incarcerates first, and asks questions later (see: U.S.S.R.)
It is difficult to compare the Gulags to the current situation, but according to Straight Dope:
“According to the International Centre for Prison Studies at King’s College London, the U.S. currently has the largest documented prison population in the world, both in absolute and proportional terms. We’ve got roughly 2.03 million people behind bars, or 701 per 100,000 population. China has the second-largest number of prisoners (1.51 million, for a rate of 117 per 100,000), and Russia has the second-highest rate (606 per 100,000, for a total of 865,000).”
We already imprison way more people than any other country in the world. Perhaps more relevant to this situation, there was an article in Slate in Feb 09 that claimed that we just recently returned to the combined level of institutionalization (prison and mental hospital population.) that we had prior to the emptying of the mental institutions.
http://www.slate.com/id/2211585/pagenum/all/#p2
Myth No. 4: In the past three decades, we’ve newly diverged from the rest of the world on punishment. Given that our incarceration rate before the mid-1970s is one-seventh the rate of today, it is easy to think that we’re suddenly acting like outliers…. More strikingly, if we look back historically at the lockup rate for mental hospitals as well as prisons, we have only just now returned to the combined rates for both kinds of incarceration in the 1950s. In other words, we’re not locking up a greater percentage of the population so much as locking people up in prisons rather than mental hospitals. Viewed through this lens, what seems remarkable is not the current era of mass incarceration but the 1960s and ’70s, during which we emptied the hospitals without filling the prisons.
Apparently you missed the lesson in high school civics class. Government is the answer to all of society’s problems. All we need are a few more laws, a few more well-intentioned social programs and we’ll be living in the utopian state the left knew was always possible. We just have to have the courage to make the investment that will make it all possible.
Oh, and as for the US incarceration rate, a funny thing happened on the way to the gulag nation we now endure. As those incarceration rates when up, crime came down. It’s almost as if there were a correlation there.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1963761,00.html
When even Time F-ing Magazine has to to acknowledge it, you know it’s gone too far to ignore any more.
Did crime come down or did the reporting of crime come down?
I suppose if we locked everyone up then we’d have zero crime.
Okay, let’s assume that Loughner was the Invisible Man. So what? The Sheriff didn’t need to know the predator. He just had to know the prey.
Sheriff Schmucknik’s office claimed that he didn’t protect the Congressman or have a presence at the meeting because “[t]he Pima County Sheriff’s Department was not requested to provide security to, nor informed of, the Giffords’ event or any other event.” Huh? The “Congress on Your Corner” meeting was one of twenty that Rep. Giffords had held. Like all the others, this one was well-advertised. It simply defies belief or logic that thousands of people knew about Rep. Giffords event, but not of them was in the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. How is that possible?
The Sheriff either knew or should have known about the meeting. If he knew and did nothing, then he and his department were unaware of the danger, ignored the danger or just didn’t care. In a post-9/11 world, that’s just grossly negligent. But if the Sheriff didn’t know about the event, then he is incredibly incompetent. I can’t imagine another option.
Excellent point, Ralph. What’s even more weird is that Arizona is largely a Conservative-leaning state. Both Giffords and the Sheriff are Democrats. You’d think he’d have been out there, supporting one of his own (although from what I’ve heard Giffords is pro-NRA, pro-border security, and more of a Blue Dog Dem than Deputy Dawg is). He’s got a lot to answer for. Wouldn’t want to be in his shoes at re-election time.
No type of security could have stopped him from shooting her. The Secret Service can’t even give a 100 percent guarantee as to the presidents safety, as it has been well proven thru out history. Anyone can be killed at any time! Even if there were a state trooper standing right beside this poor woman, that nutjob would have shot him first or second it doesn’t matter, she would still have been shot. Bad things happen, and those with evil intentions will do as they please, whenever they please and no one can ever change that.
Joe, you are right. Even presidents have been assassinated. BUT, and this is a big but, I’m pretty sure that if there was some armed security presence from the sheriff’s office, Loughner would have been taken down before he could shoot everyone he did.
That guy in the picture.
He was great in those James Bond films.
You have him confused with Sheriff Buford T. Justice from “Smokey and the Bandit.”
I’m pretty sure that’s him 😉
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