Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammo

     I haven't been to Arizona since I was a boy several decades ago, and certainly don't remember the political climate at that time. I have been following a little about Jan Brewer, Governor of Arizona, recently, her lucrative connection to State run prisons, her false charge that Mexican drug lords were responsible for "hundreds of headless bodies" in the Arizona desert and her more recent refusal to fund transplant surgeries causing the death of two people in the last few weeks. Please remind me who was accused of having "Death Panels" now? Perhaps Jan could pull the measly few million dollars it would take to save the lives of those waiting for a kidney or heart transplant from the State prison system? It was even more gob smacking to learn on the Saturday of the shooting in Tucson that the upcoming Arizona Legislature's first order of business is to pass a law allowing guns in schools and Colleges, after Columbine and Virginia Tech? Really? What planet are these people coming from?
     When I turned on the TV Saturday morning and heard about a shooting I actually thought someone had shot Jan Brewer, maybe over the death of transplant patients or perhaps over Immigration policies, oh yeah, almost forgot about that one, the "show me your papers" law that smacked of racism and internment camps, the Federal government didn't let them pass it but it shows the kind of mentality we are dealing with here.
     I am still a recovering Breaking News Addict so I accidentally watched the News all Saturday. Since a political figure was shot I just automatically assumed the whole thing was politically motivated. I looked at the shooters UTube postings that day and really could not make head nor tail of his bizarre postings. There was mention of government mind control and currency systems being backed by gold, that's weird because I just saw uber right-wing Rand Paul supporting gold based currency on The Colbert Report a week earlier! There were postings of his favourite literature, among them The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf and Ayn Rand, but it seemed to me he was so caught up in semantics and this A=B so B=C logic that this guy is clearly verging on schizophrenia. So it probably doesn't matter what books he read because he's going to come up with an insane conclusion. I don't watch or subscribe to FOX News so I don't know how long it took them to come up their twisted view of the whole thing and lay blame, apparently their new narrative is the gunman was a left-wing lunatic who read The Communist Manifesto, see it proves it, that's all you need to know, Fair and Balanced if you only have a smidgen of the facts. We will probably never know or understand a motive, because these kinds of people have a mental disorder.
     Excuse those of us who remember the recent Health Care debate in the US last summer and took a lot of the violence and calls to violence as threatening such as the 1000 posters at a Tea Party rally that read "Bury Obama Care With Kennedy". Remember when outraged Tea Partiers publicly released the home phone numbers and address of Democrats who were supporting Health Care and called for protests on their front lawns, how about when somebody mistakenly targeted the home of a Congressman's brother? And of course the famous Palin website that pictured gun sights over Congressional districts, one of them over Congresswoman Gifford's district, as well as the "don't retreat, reload" comments? Palin also echoed this on her ridiculous reality TV show, Palin's Alaska, I saw it in a clip somewhere, I cannot stand to watch it for more than 35 seconds but she said it again when recreational shooting with one of her kids. I certainly remember the Republicans cheering on the Tea Party protesters on the day of the Health Care signing, when they were yelling "faggot" and "nigger" at certain Congressmen, it's not like John Boehner said tone it down then. Who can forget the Ground Zero Mosque uproar? I'm sorry but people in the Free World have the right to practice any religion they like, even in the US, it's the First Amendment of your Constitution. It sure seemed like a good time for George W. Bush to call for a tone-down of rhetoric, as he did in the days following  9/11, wow, I sometimes wonder if Americans have the memory capacity of a dog?
     There will always be crazy people but God forbid there should be any form of gun control in the US to prevent the multiple tragedies that have occurred over the decades. Have a look at the opening of the Rachael Maddow show from Monday, you can see it online, she pointed out that on the day Jared Loughner was born there was also a mass shooting and then goes through a long list of the mass shootings that have happened over the last two decades. It's total insanity! Does the public really need access to machine gun capabilities? Would you give public access to armoured vehicles? Ground to air missiles? Anthrax? Nuclear Bombs? Of course not. People are not hunting deer with the kind of guns used in most mass shootings and we should all feel more comfortable in the world if criminals or the criminally insane did not have this kind of weapon. I wonder how Americans would feel if a Mexican Drug cartel shot dozens of innocent people at a Safeway in Tucson? I wonder if there would be a step-back from the pro gun lobbyists? You know since they are evil foreigners and not citizens protesting the government.
     Of course I am surveying the media in the past few days and as expected everyone is getting way off track with this story, focusing on making sense of the insensible. How about some solutions? What if victims of gun crime were able to sue the gun seller? Would you give your car keys to an obviously very drunk individual? No, and those who sell guns should be held accountable too. This brings me to my second point about banning the unstable from owning guns by checking their Facebook and UTube accounts. It always seems to happen that we find out after the fact how depressed, or delusional, or angry people were before a shooting spree, yet no one bothered to look up their online profiles? Maybe parents, teachers and friends could be the first line of defense here although I would like to see gun shops do an online profile check before handing over merchandise.
     Who knows if this Jared Loughner was motivated by left or right ideology, and really does it matter what went thru his mind? We do know, however, that the NRA has a huge influence in the US and recently tried to influence gun laws in Canada, unsuccessfully. Clinton managed to push some gun control back in the 90's, remember the very successful Cash for Guns program? and remember how Bush cancelled it and let any gun control laws expire in 2004? Certainly Arizona's gun laws play a major role here too, egged on by the smokey-whiskey throated Republican Jan Brewer herself. Apparently people can walk around with concealed guns in Arizona, just like the Wild West of movies, do you know what the second place runner up for walking around with guns society is? Yemen. Yes, the super dangerous third world terrorist laden hell hole. You've come a long way baby (Arizona)!
     I know most Americans don't give a shit about the rest of the world,or even know of it's existence, although love going around saying they are the "Leaders of the Free World". Well, the rest of us in the free world look on in horror most of the time. We enacted gun control after one mass shooting in Canada in 1989 and as a side note have been political assassination free since 1970, before then 1868! Sure any society has its insane mass murderers but the US is really reaching new heights in the past few years, it gets harder each time to have any respect for American society.
    

I Was A Breaking News Addict

     When I was growing up people got news from the local Newspaper, Network News and maybe 60 Minutes, or 5th Estate if you lived in Canada. I will always remember the tiny black and white plastic television that sat near our kitchen table, it was fun watching the Brady Bunch while pretending to do homework but everybody had to be quiet when the News was on! So I was never completely unaware of the world growing up but people didn't care as much about news stories then it seemed. The main points of whatever issue of the day were probably well understood by most people through this medium but I don't remember the editorializing like we have today, everybody's entitled to an opinion now.
     The morning of September 11th 2001 was just another Tuesday for me, the weather was dull and cool the day before and would be for another few days. My big plan for the day was to watch Dr. Phil on Oprah, who was going to be appearing every Tuesday to tell wacky women to get real, my other plans were to walk the dog, weather pending, and maybe do dishes. I didn't even watch news in the morning in those days, other than  for weather because I live in Canada and local traffic. When I turned on the TV I was all uh-oh, Live News, smoking building that I recognize as the UN or World Trade Centre in New York. Wasn't thinking of the time difference, hadn't even had one coffee yet but I was worried people were in there burning to death. My husband was just going out the door and almost to the garage when I yelled out the back door "someone blew up a building in New York!"
     I used to mainly watch Canadian Networks for news in those days but during 9/11 all our information was pretty much coming from American feeds anyway so why not just flip to CNN since they are probably there in New York right now?. And that's how it started. I watched CNN until probably 2am that day. I flipped over to the Golden Girls because I thought it would be light and take my mind off this stuff but it was the episode where Rose was dreaming about her dead husband and thinking it was real until Blanche had a heart to heart with her and helped her accept reality. That didn't help! I also had so many questions about the mysterious terrorists and if there were survivors and if Bush was going to start bombing somebody, did I need to start driving to the in-laws farm? That's when I became addicted to breaking news, it didn't help the Anthrax thing was just after that and who knew what Bush was planning after these attacks?
     In those 9/11 days I was the only person I knew who watched The Daily Show and I thoroughly enjoyed his questioning and mockery of the relatively new phenomenon of Cable News, I see that period as when Cable News and Jon Stewart were becoming what we know them as now. Maybe I kept watching CNN to see if they were going to ask some hard questions when the Iraq War started. Well they didn't, but at least the state of comedy was reaching new highs. Watching from Canada many of us could see a bias toward the Bush administration on CNN and a disregard for actual journalism. FOX News was not allowed in Canada in those days but I could see what they were doing by watching The Daily Show and it all looked dangerous, like dangerous to standard democratic pratices such as journalism, everything was becoming opinion and personalities.
     Of course FOX News led the wave of personality opinions, and still does, they say they are #1 in ratings but that is in the over 50 demographic, number one with old folks, doesn't seem like a sustainable plan to me. Even if they are popular or not maybe it's perceived that way by other Cable News outfits. This is probably why we see CNN trying to have personalities like Lou Dobbs or Rick Sanchez only to find out maybe they have too much personality to handle! It seems CNN is always trying to pander to some sort of popularity contest, now they're all about tweeting and having Jack Cafferty read out people's online comments. I thought I liked the Cafferty File segments, at least I did when he was slandering the Bush Administration and openly supporting Obama, now it's all about supporting the Tea Party, and maybe the reason is not with Jack himself but CNN trying to increase ratings. So they are not actual news but a ratings seeking business. Sure, news has always been a business but a business with standards, it used to be that way, it's important for the democracy everyone says they love so much, to report facts so we can make decisions about who we'd like to represent us.
     Yesterday I saw Michael Moore on Keith Olberman's Countdown, sorry CNN I went looking for information elsewhere, turns out a guy called Wendell Potter who used to work for the Health Insurance industry is openly apologizing for an organized smear campaign against Moore and his movie Sicko. We also learn that big Insurance companies helped create a fake front group called Health Care America Now that CNN interviewed as a real entity. Yet not a word of this story on CNN today, News You Can Trust? I think it would cut into all the time they devote to gushing over the Tea Party. Now we know CNN was giving air time to a fake organization just to create drama I think they should make a retraction. They are all about drama though, I got really turned off by their blatant support of the Tea Party marches and later candidates for office, the smiling reports on Obama's falling approval numbers. It seemed like they were trying to write a script or at least force a prediction they could be right about. I remember all their predictions about incumbent rage, everyone is going to vote against incumbents, which didn't come true, at least in the numbers they were talking about. I was expecting Wolf Blitzer to start a countdown to the "Death of Hope", maybe they would have a countdown clock in the corner of the screen to the exact moment everybody lost their audacity of hope?
     So I don't watch as much news anymore, or at least I'm trying, I sometimes still need to know how stories are being covered in the wide world of infotainment. I agree with Jon Stewart when he says if FOX is going to be right and MSNBC is going to be left then maybe CNN should try actual journalism. Somebody should, because Cable News is more about Royal Weddings than potential war between the Koreas, this is why so many of us would rather get information from The Daily Show, The Colbert Report or Bill Maher. It seems like these comedy guys do more research and explore more sides of a story than what we call news these days. When you study Art History and look at the French Revolution period one gets very bored of the fluffy pastel Baroque style of painting with fat ladies and cupid characters flying all over. What is considered among the most important works of that period is actually the satirical cartoons, it says a lot, people will tire of style, it is substance that they seek.
OK, gotta go now, CNN is interviewing Alaska's Tea Party backed Joe Miller, I think they're trying to cause more drama by supporting his fantasy that he won the election over Lisa Murkowski.