Crosscut is on fire today. I don’t know if our readers can handle it, so I won’t link to any of the stories, but here’s the rundown:
Knute Berger picks a coffee shop. (Tully’s)
David Brewster talks about skyscrapers. (A bland topic turned into a… blander topic.)
Ted Van Dyk talks about the caucus. (Light rail is not mentioned, but “blacks” are. As is Hubert Humphrey.)
It’s like they have the pulse of the city. Seriously, I haven’t been this tuned-in since Steve Scher dropped an f-bomb tirade on the rain barrel lady for talking through his bumper music. It’s like the Weekly, but before they got rid of everybody.
And what’s up with Crosscut having a blog? ‘splain that one to me. Department of Redundancy Department.
Holy kumquats! We haven’t had this much fun since Mike Seeley did his funny little hoax about the mayor’s secret smooth jazz club.
Bummer, no links. Now you’re going to force me to actually look for the URL.
Or not (suppresses yawn).
Ya got a link? Now that you linked to the fools at whackynation – I like going there to “discuss” things.
Link: http://www.whackynation.com/
In fact, bma (GO bma! – way to ask the simple questions that throw them into a lather) and others are the major commentators over there. I love the global warming deniers, the racists and the “bipartisanship perfussor”. Those guys really know how to confuse and obfuscate an issue. Luckily, their egos are large and fragile – so poking holes in their pathetic, small-minded, shallow arguments doesn’t take much leftover brain matter.
@3
Dude, nice work over there. The nutty professor has never been so funny.
@3: All I’m doing is asking questions. Unfortunately, Lou is ignoring me…
@5
I’m not sure Lou even knows what the internet is. I think he uses a printing press to write up his posts, then rolls them up and ties them to a carrier pigeon which flies to Mark Gardner’s house so that Mark can transcribe them onto the web.
knute picked tully’s? no way, dood.
The folks from Cross Cut have been all over Flickr begging for content. Why should we give them content when they are going to use it for profit and not share with the person who did the work?
Sounds like intellectual sharecropping to me.
@5: bma: Kudos for good questions
– The perphussor don’t like any prublems wid his intrepedations of da itshoes.
Seriously, he has a blog and then berates anyone who questions him?
And can’t defend his opinions other than to state that the questioners “don’t understand”, but he fails to elaborate or even answer the questions that are posed.
Are you sure the exact term mentioned wasn’t “The Blacks”
Anyone want to buy a coffee company? Tully’s is for sale. Don’t expect profits. Tully’s has never made any. It’s not a Starbucks.
Is it time to have a national conversation about guns? 5 dead, 17 wounded, at Northern Illinois University.
Correction, 5 dead, 16 wounded, and 1 suicide.
I don’t know how to prevent this sort of thing. I don’t know if it can be prevented. I don’t know if outlawing private ownership of guns would prevent it; I doubt it, there’s too many guns in circulation. I don’t know, I just don’t know … does anyone? Why do people do such things? I have no answers.
@13
Yes, it’s time to do exactly that. Leonard Pitts has a good article about that.
http://www.miamiherald.com/liv.....17089.html
In many mass shootings the shooter displayed some form of mental illness, so better access to health care might be part of the solution.
Having to pass a class before buying a gun might be a good idea.
Requiring more stringent background checks and training as the potential lethality of the firearm you are purchasing goes up might be a good idea. A single shot .22 rifle would require a simple background check and a short in store run down on safe shooting procedures. A hand gun would require a back ground check a more involved class and a look over to make sure you’re not crazy. Or something like that.
Roger,
Guns are a most difficult issue. I don’t believe the 2d Amendment means what the NRA says it means. I think it means the people have a right to rise up in arms against the government. I’m sure you’ve considered the Amendment’s historical basis. I don’t think it means everyone has some sort of constitutional right to pack whatever it is they can stick in their arsenal. At the same time, most of my friends (most, of course, liberals) own guns. Some of them have enough guns to supply a brigade. Most of them are hunters, and not simply fearmongers, waiting for some day in which their guns must be used against the terrorist at the door or the government. But, I believe you yourself have said that liberals must arm. I sometimes think that is good advice. In my scarier moods, I’m not sure that GWB will give up the presidency should Hillary or Obama take it from McCain. At that point, I sure as hell want to be armed. Then, we see these tragedies like we saw today at NIU. We don’t see such tragedies happen much in western Europe or Canada (occasionally, but rarely). The issue is remarkably difficult.
Some degree of mental illness seems to come into play. The Shooter at Virginia tech and Kip Kinkel in Oregon come to mind on the mental illness front. We need better access to health care! Sane people, generally, don’t mow people down.
We found out after the fact that the shooter in the Capitol Hill shootings had already been dumb with a gun back in his home town in Montana, but the gun was given back to him and his, “Right” to own a gun wasn’t taken away. If you do something criminal using a gun you should lose that right.
The kid that committed the Tacoma Mall shootings was an extremely troubled kid with a criminal history:
“Court records show Maldonado has an extensive juvenile criminal history dating back to 1998. He has been convicted of burglary, theft and possession of burglary tools and the records indicate he had been ordered by a judge not to possess any weapons.”
http://tinyurl.com/cchxs
Yet he was able to buy a used gun out of the Little Nickel want ads. Huh? I guess we just restrict the criminal element from owning shiny new guns.
We need to update our laws in regards to guns and we need to have better treatment available for the troubled people in our society.
I don’t think banning guns is the answer.
Michael,
A step in the right direction.
@17 i agree with you Michael, on both points.
Banning guns altogether would be pointless and futile, not to mention just asking for a fight. But I don’t have a problem with more extensive background checks, requiring the purchase and use of locks and safes, and mandatory education for first-time buyers (repeatable with each new class of firearm purchased: rifle, pistol, shotgun, etc.). And make it MANDATORY (with help in the form of federal funding and/or tax breaks to offset costs) that gunshops have access to the highest-speed internet access available to make those background checks that much faster. And having local government and/or law enforcement offer free wi-fi access at gun shows would close that little loophole. And really, if you want a gun that badly, I think you can wait out the extra time needed to prove that you’re not going to use it on the local mall the next day.
Whatever you might think about “banning guns altogether,” you can’t without amending the Constitution. The Second Amendment may not be clear on such trivialities as what constitutes an assault weapon, but the basic right to keep and bear arms is crystal.
And I favor strict limits and tight regulation.
@ 19:
HI MIKE!
sheesh! all them guns out there getting into the hands of kids. i best take my 4 yr old girl to the dairy freeze before she busts a cap in my head.
i reckon.
@21 Daddy: Not quite crytal clear:
Remember it starts with: “A well-regulated militia, being necessary for the….the right of the p[eople to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”
Of course the fourth amendment guarantees us “probable cause for a search” of our homes, bodies and effects and that is crytal clear too – yet the bush administration seems to need amnesty for telecoms that the US gov. persuaded to break that law (and the explicit FISA law in congress that they broke).