So, today the big focus is on how you can make fake donations to the Obama site that still take money from your account.  As in:

So I went to the Obama website this afternoon and clicked on the "Donate" button.
 
I used my real MasterCard number (but was not asked for the 3 digit security code).

Used the following information and it was accepted...
 
First name: Fake
Last Name: Donor
Address: 1 Dollar To Prove A Point
City: Fraudulent
State: AL
Zip / Post: 33333
Email Address: allmyinfoismadeup@mediabias.com
Phone Number: 2125551212
Employer: Mainstream Media
Occupation: Being in the Tank
 
And incredibly, my $5 donation was ACCEPTED!!!
 
I then went to the McCain site and used the exact same information (and WAS asked for the 3 digit security code for my MasterCard).  There, my contribution was rejected with the following message: "Your transaction was not approved for the following reason(s): Invalid data", and then: "We have found errors in the information that you have submitted.  Please review the information below and try again."

Well, my reaction is that Obama is from Chicago...why are we surprised?  The man has built up his political career by relying on the efforts of crooked politicians and leaders.  He is at his best a dissembling shit, and at his worst a deceitful political thug.  I know such talk offends, but John McCain and his supporters have endured a worse sort of casual contempt from followers of Obama.  One side of the political debate seems to always be guardedly assessing the other's stupidity.  Guardedly, I say, for when they see the first sign of an intelligent critique of Obama the guardians of PC drop in to accuse the critic of abject racism or bigotry.

Then there is this:

Turning the Page from Campaign Finance Fraud . . .   [Andy McCarthy]

What is the deal with Obama's birth certificate and citizenship status?

Pamela Gellers at Atlas Shrugs raises some apparent shenanigans with the birth certificate the Obama campaign previously produced. Meanwhile, Philip J. Berg, a former Deputy AG of Pennsylvania and a professed Hillary supporter, filed a lawsuit claiming Obama is not constitutionally eligible to be president; instead of simply clearing up any questions — which you would think would take about five minutes — Obama's lawyers moved to dismiss the suit and failed to file a timely answer, meaning that, under the applicable rules (according to Berg), Obama is legally deemed to have admitted Berg's allegations that he is constitutionally ineligible to be president.

Admittedly, I've ignored this issue up until now on the theory that if there was anything here worth looking at, surely the Hillary and McCain campaigns would have raised it. But this all seems very strange. It's not just a matter of whether Obama was born in Hawaii — Berg claims he wasn't, but most others seem to agree he was (though the publicly available proof seems shaky at this point). There is also the question whether he was also a citizen of one or more other countries (Kenya? Indonesia?) and whether that means, as a matter of law, that he could not be a "natural born" citizen as required by the Constitution.

Has anyone around here looked into this? Is it a serious issue, and why does Obama seem to be so squirmy about it?

I'm not sure if this smells of desperation or if this issue really has legs.  I actually hope it does.  Our Constitution is pretty clear that you must be a natural born citizen to be President.  If Obama is in fact not eligible for the Presidency, expect a whole lot of talk about how the Constitution is a living document and it evolves over time...apparently enough to mean the opposite of what it says.  Well, now's definitely not the time to be polite.  The best opportunity to bring up this question happened to be 2 years ago.  But there's no time like the present.

"No person except a natural born Citizen(Obama's status now in doubt), or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution(these people are all dead), shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years(Sign of the times, huh?  Barely out of college these days), and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States(again, these are all dead)."

The Rage That’s Not On Your Front Page
The liberal media frets over conservative anger, but are blind to a torrent of liberal hate.

By Michelle Malkin

When a few unruly McCain-Palin supporters show their anger at campaign rallies, it’s national news. It’s an epidemic of “Weimar-like rage” and “violent escalation of rhetoric,” according to New York Times columnist Frank Rich. It’s the “re-emergence of the far right as a power in American politics,” according to Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne. It’s a mass movement of GOP crowds “gripped by insane rage,” according to newly minted Nobel Prize–winner Paul Krugman.

Too bad they don’t give out global awards for the Blindest Eyes in Punditocracy. We’ve just hit a trifecta.

Are a few activists on the right getting out of hand? Probably. Between massive ACORN voter fraud, Bill Ayers’ and Jeremiah Wright’s unrepentant hatred of America, and John McCain’s inability to nail Barack Obama on his longtime alliances with all of the above, conservatives have plenty to shout about these days.

But a couple of random catcallers do not a mob make. And there’s an overflowing abundance of electoral rage on the left that won’t make it onto your newspaper’s front page.

Last month on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a small, brave contingent of McCain supporters marched through the streets with campaign signs. They were met by a menacing horde of New Yorkers who displayed their disapproval with a barrage of jeers and vulgar gestures. (“The number of middle fingers in the ‘progressive crowd’ is directly proportional to the number of Ph.D. degrees in the 10-block radius,” one of the witnesses wryly observed.) A Youtube video of the confrontation now has half a million views. But don’t expect to find it on the nightly news. It doesn’t fit the Angry Right narrative.

Neither does the near-riotous reaction of Obama supporters to a McCain-Palin sign in Democrat-dominated Prince George’s County, Md. Buried in a back local section, the Washington Post reported this week that “pandemonium” broke loose when an unsuspecting businessman erected a “Country First. McCain/Palin.” message on the marquee at his Colony South Hotel & Conference Center.

“Operators of neighborhood e-mail group lists cried foul to their memberships. The NAACP logged calls. Community leaders demanded boycotts of the hotel, a common venue for Democratic events,” the little-noticed article reported. A black professor called the sign “a stink bomb in the middle of the living room” of Obama land. The poor hotel manager, Alan Vahabzadeh, surrendered. “I didn’t even realize it was going to be like this.”

Can’t blame him for missing the fiery hint from Portland, Ore. — where two deranged vandals were arrested after throwing a Molotov cocktail at a McCain yard sign in the middle of the night. Nope, that didn’t make it into the columns of Rich, Dionne or Krugman. Doesn’t fit the Angry Right narrative.

Speaking of “violent escalation of rhetoric” you never hear about:

Obama supporters in Philadelphia sported “Sarah Palin is a [disgusting vulgarism referring to female genitalia]” T-shirts and yelled, “Let’s stone her, old school” over the weekend.

An Internet artist has designated Palin an “M.I.L.P.” — "Mother I'd Like to Punch“ — and published a drawing of a

 man’s fist knocking a tooth out of the Alaska governor’s mouth and the glasses off her face.

“ABORT Palin” graffiti has sprouted on the sidewalks of Seattle, and "Abort Sarah Palin“ bumper stickers are spreading in Web stores.


Palin-bashing Madonna performs before an audience of thousands, screeching and threatening to "kick her a**."

Getty Images publishes a photo of a man pointing a fake gun at the head of a cardboard cutout of Palin on display at the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition building.

And no one blinks. Not a peep from the Obamedia.

But when Palin simply spotlights Obama’s longtime relationship with Weather Underground terrorist Bill “We Didn’t Do Enough” Ayers?

“Inciting violence,” frets NBC reporter Ron Allen. “Concerned . . . for Sen. Obama’s safety,” agonizes ABC reporter Terry Moran. “Beyond the pale,” cries Obama campaign manager David Plouffe. As if the no-holds-barred Obama campaign has ever had a rhetorical pale to stake.

All the world’s a Kabuki stage for the selectively outraged over rage.

TRENTON, N.J. - After a review driven by three brutal slayings, the state attorney general on Wednesday ordered New Jersey law enforcers to notify federal immigration officials whenever someone arrested for an indictable offense or drunken driving is found to be an illegal immigrant.

Attorney General Anne Milgram reviewed the state's policy in light of the execution-style killings Aug. 4 of three Newark college students and the wounding of a fourth victim. One of the six suspects was an illegal immigrant who had been granted bail on child rape and aggravated assault charges without immigration officials being alerted to his existence.

I can't really find the good news here. 

I do believe that increasingly draconian measures are going to be needed to finally quell this illegal immigration problem. 

Offhand, I'd say punishing fines to businesses that use their labor, coupled with tax incentives to ease operation of a business.  That goes for small mom and pop stuff and big ol' evil corporations too.  As a secondary measure, automatic deportation of any illegal immigrant and the placing any citizen children in the custody of the state until such time as parental citizenship is attained through legal means.  Additionally, I'd like to see armed borders. 

There, I've said it.

I'm just sick and tired of these people who shouldn't be here committing crimes of this magnitude.  It's bad enough that we have to deal with it from our own citizens.

The United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit today rejected Lewis Libby's request to remain free on bail while pursuing his appeals for the serious convictions of perjury and obstruction of justice. As a result, Mr. Libby will be required to turn himself over to the Bureau of Prisons to begin serving his prison sentence.

I have said throughout this process that it would not be appropriate to comment or intervene in this case until Mr. Libby's appeals have been exhausted. But with the denial of bail being upheld and incarceration imminent, I believe it is now important to react to that decision.

From the very beginning of the investigation into the leaking of Valerie Plame's name, I made it clear to the White House staff and anyone serving in my administration that I expected full cooperation with the Justice Department. Dozens of White House staff and administration officials dutifully cooperated.

After the investigation was under way, the Justice Department appointed United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois Patrick Fitzgerald as a Special Counsel in charge of the case. Mr. Fitzgerald is a highly qualified, professional prosecutor who carried out his responsibilities as charged.

This case has generated significant commentary and debate. Critics of the investigation have argued that a special counsel should not have been appointed, nor should the investigation have been pursued after the Justice Department learned who leaked Ms. Plame's name to columnist Robert Novak. Furthermore, the critics point out that neither Mr. Libby nor anyone else has been charged with violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act or the Espionage Act, which were the original subjects of the investigation. Finally, critics say the punishment does not fit the crime: Mr. Libby was a first-time offender with years of exceptional public service and was handed a harsh sentence based in part on allegations never presented to the jury.

Others point out that a jury of citizens weighed all the evidence and listened to all the testimony and found Mr. Libby guilty of perjury and obstructing justice. They argue, correctly, that our entire system of justice relies on people telling the truth. And if a person does not tell the truth, particularly if he serves in government and holds the public trust, he must be held accountable. They say that had Mr. Libby only told the truth, he would have never been indicted in the first place.

Both critics and defenders of this investigation have made important points. I have made my own evaluation. In preparing for the decision I am announcing today, I have carefully weighed these arguments and the circumstances surrounding this case.

Mr. Libby was sentenced to thirty months of prison, two years of probation, and a $250,000 fine. In making the sentencing decision, the district court rejected the advice of the probation office, which recommended a lesser sentence and the consideration of factors that could have led to a sentence of home confinement or probation.

I respect the jury's verdict. But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive. Therefore, I am commuting the portion of Mr. Libby's sentence that required him to spend thirty months in prison.

My decision to commute his prison sentence leaves in place a harsh punishment for Mr. Libby. The reputation he gained through his years of public service and professional work in the legal community is forever damaged. His wife and young children have also suffered immensely. He will remain on probation. The significant fines imposed by the judge will remain in effect. The consequences of his felony conviction on his former life as a lawyer, public servant, and private citizen will be long-lasting.

The Constitution gives the President the power of clemency to be used when he deems it to be warranted. It is my judgment that a commutation of the prison term in Mr. Libby's case is an appropriate exercise of this power.

I think this is entirely fair.  Libby perjured himself and was given 30 months in prison in addition to fines and probation.  Apparently one can receive up to three years in prison for the offense.  But as I understand it, this case wasn't really about Scooter Libby and how he messed up on the stand.  Whoever was angry about the Plame Affair couldn't get anything else to stick.
The President has acted in accord with the Constitution of the United States and with a sense of fairness.  Libby isn't getting off the hook by any means, though some might still howl for his blood.  But I have to ask who would hire him in Washington, and I have to wonder who would want to broadcast the fact that they hired a perjured former official from the most polarizing Presidency in recent history.
Let's hope he has invested well, for the sake of his children.

It's all so tiresome, really.  Petty bickering about this issue will continue until January 2009.

American psycho

When Cho killed 32 people at Virginia Tech, the horrific slaughter revealed not only the poisons lurking in popular culture but the crisis of young males in a feminised society, says Sarah Baxter

Just before 5am on Monday, April 16, Cho Seung-hui got out of bed and walked to his computer. Perhaps he fiddled with his rambling 1,800-word self-portrait of a killer as the insults and grievances that he had been nursing for years coursed through his head.

High on his list were his classmates from Westfield high school, who jeered at him to “go back to China” without bothering to check his nationality. Two of them — who happened to attend Virginia Tech — were going to pay later that day. Then there were the college girls who reported him to the police for stalking and got him carted off to mental hospital after he sent them shy love messages full of yearning.

“By a name, I know not how to tell who I am,” he had written to one of them. He understood literature, he could have thought, while they didn’t have the brains to recognise that he was quoting Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Spurned by them, he had to make do with a fantasy girlfriend, a supermodel who called him “Spanky”.

On the way to the bathroom Cho bumped into his roommate Karan Grewal. As usual, Cho didn’t try to speak to him or even nod hello. He swallowed his antidepressants, put on his contact lenses and applied his spot cream. As he picked up his weapons, a Glock 9mm pistol and Walther P22 handgun, and twisted back his black baseball cap, he clearly did not want to be remembered as the kid with acne.

At 7.15am, campus police were alerted to a shooting at West Ambler Johnston residential hall, a two-minute walk from Cho’s own hall. Witnesses heard screams and the eerie “pop pop” of a semi-automatic weapon before finding the bodies of a young man and a young woman sprawled on the floor in the hallway between the men’s and women’s dorms.

The dead girl was Emily Hilscher, 19. Perhaps there was something about her that reminded Cho of another girl he had fancied — the one he had sneaked into the women’s dorm to see but, as a roommate recalled, “When he looked into her eyes, he saw promiscuity”.

Was Ryan Clark, 22, her boyfriend? Cho didn’t know but he shot him anyway. Deprived of sex himself, he regarded those who were getting it with malevolence. “All your debaucheries weren’t enough . . . to fulfil your hedonistic needs,” he had ranted on his pre- prepared “martyrdom” video.

He went back to his room and recorded one last QuickTime video clip. It was 7.24am, according to his computer log. “This is it. This is where it ends. End of the road. What a life it was. Some life,” he said agitatedly.

But Cho wasn’t finished yet. He still had more scores to settle and fame to seek. He downloaded 28 video clips onto a DVD, which showed him posing with his weapons like the star of a Quentin Tarantino film or Lara Croft, and set out for the post office, past the police cars that had arrived outside the dorm. By the time he arrived it was 8.45am.

It was tax-filing day in America, but as a student he didn’t pay any. The queue in the post office surprised him, though he waited his turn patiently as he rehearsed his next acts of violence in his mind. He posted his multimedia manifesto to NBC News, went back to his room, grabbed his weapons and set out for more killing.

This time he would target professors as well as students. He walked across the campus to the teaching block at Norris Hall, where he chained the front doors so nobody could escape. He may have remembered some lines from Mr Brownstone, a play he had written: “He gave me a D, when I only forgot to turn in two homeworks.”

As he gunned down Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, a French lecturer, science professor Kevin Granata and Holocaust survivor Liviu Librescu, he may have thought again of the professor in his play who “ass-raped us all — isn’t that what teachers do?

“I wanna watch him bleed, the way he watched us bleed”. Now he was fulfilling his own prophecy.

As for the students, they could forget his sympathy. He fired at them again and again, scattering their flesh across the floor. Most of his victims, girls and boys, were shot three times. Sometimes he would return to check whom he had killed and who was merely playing dead. His face was blank, but his emotions were seething.

As he said in his video, “You had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats, Your gold necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs . . . You thought it was one pathetic boy’s life you were extinguishing.”

The baby-faced Cho was 23, an adult by most people’s reckoning. In any other era it is doubtful he would have thought of himself as a boy or described his fellow students at Virginia Tech as “brats”. Trapped in the perpetual adolescence of the student, he has become a new monstrous poster child for boys who would rather kill themselves and others than grow up.

Camille Paglia, professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and author of Sexual Personae, believes Cho is emblematic of the crisis of masculinity in America. “Women have difficulty understanding the mix of male sexual aggression with egotism and the ecstasy of self-immolation,” she says. Or to quote Martin Amis on that other killer, Fred West: he became “addicted to the moment where impotence becomes prepotence”.

Cho swallowed his medicine, but it failed to stop him carrying out the biggest mass murder by a lone gunman in American history. By the time he turned his gun on himself, 32 students and teachers were dead — more than twice the number killed by the Columbine high school students in 1999.

Colin Goddard, 21, whose father is British, was one of the last students to be shot before Cho killed himself. He remembers the horror he felt as Cho entered his lecture room at Virginia Tech and began firing calmly and methodically at the class. “He had on boots, dark pants and a white shirt. He just started walking down the rows of desks, shooting people multiple times. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t demand anything. He was just shooting.”

The scene at Virginia Tech was hellish. Some students managed to save themselves by jumping from the windows, but those left behind died without knowing what Cho’s grievance was or why they were being punished for his rage.

Yet in death and murder, the silent Cho found his voice, railing at the perceived ills of society and slights to his deranged ego. From the blunt message he posted on a college web forum warning, “I’m going to kill people at Va Tech”, to the mountainous last testament of writings, photographs and video clips sent to NBC, rarely has a killer been as loquacious or left so much evidence of his twisted mind.

“That’s got to be more than he’s spoken, ever,” one surprised graduate student said. “I thought, ‘Well, he does talk’.”

Cho’s parents were hospitalised by shock when they heard of the killings, but some relatives have begun to speak out. Cho’s sister Sun Kyong-Cho said: “This is someone I grew up with and loved. Now I feel like I didn’t know this person.” But in Seoul some family members described Cho as alienated even as a child. After watching the videos of him posing with his weapons, his furious 82-year-old grandfather said, “Son of a bitch. It served him right he died with his victims.”

Kim Hyang-Im, Cho’s mother, was the second of five children, who was obliged to look after the younger members of her family. At 29 she was still unmarried. Fearful that she would become an old maid, her parents fixed her up on a blind date with Cho Sun Tae, 10 years her senior. “Her husband was very serious and quiet and careful with money. He was not very friendly to his mother-in-law and father-in-law,” Cho’s 85-year-old aunt recalled.

Cho’s father scraped together enough money to buy a second-hand bookstore in South Korea, where they lived in a cheap, rented apartment. When relatives invited them to America, they were thrilled at the chance to “provide a better education”, the grandfather said.

The family was already worried about Cho, then eight years old. Soon after arriving in America he was diagnosed with autism. “He was very quiet and only followed his mother and father around but never showed any feelings or emotions,” his great-aunt said. His parents were too poor and busy trying to scrape a new life together to get specialist help for Cho.

They opened a dry-cleaning business, like many Korean immigrants, and moved to a two-storey cream town house in Centerville, Virginia, just outside Washington. In fulfilment of her parents’ dream, Cho’s sister went to Princeton University and now works as a contractor for the US State Department on the reconstruction of Iraq.

Cho chose to study English in at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, a sprawling residential college in the distant Blue Ridge Mountains. It is hard to fathom his rage at the “trust fund” brats with golden necklaces, vodka and cognac and “everything you wanted”, when among his victims were many immigrants like himself, who were proud of making their way in America.

But this carefully manicured campus — home to 26,000 students who called themselves Hokies — was no place for a social misfit. Even Cho used to wear the uniform of the mini-city: an orange or maroon T-shirt or sweatshirt with a baseball cap. Paglia, who has taught in American universities for 35 years, describes America’s residential campuses as vast “islands of green and slack conformity where a strange benevolent and tyrannical paternalism has taken over. It’s like a resort atmosphere”.

Paglia believes the school Cho attended would have been no better equipped to deal with frustrated young males. “There is nothing happening educationally in these boring prisons that are fondly called suburban high schools. They are saturated with a false humanitarianism, which is especially damaging for boys.

“Young men have enormous energy. There was a time when they could run away, hop on a freighter, go to a factory and earn money, do something with their hands. Now there is this snobbery of the upper-middle-class professional. Everyone has to be a lawyer or paper pusher.”

Cho is a classic example of “someone who felt he was a loser in the cruel social rat race”, Paglia says. The pervasive hook-up culture at college, where girls are prepared to sleep with boys they barely know or fancy, can be a source of seething resentment and alienation for those who are left out.

“Young women now seem to want to behave like men and have sex without commitment. The signals they are giving are very confusing, and rage and humiliation build up in boys who are spurned again and again.”

The sex, Paglia argues, “is everywhere but it is not erotic”, as can be seen by the sad spectacle of Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears flashing their lack of underwear during a night on the town. “It’s not even titillating. It’s banal and debasing.”

The former Virginia Tech student who posted two of Cho’s hate-filled plays on the internet recalls that Cho fitted the “exact stereotype of what one would typically think of as a ‘school shooter’ — a loner, obsessed with violence and with serious personal problems”. But the plays show he was preoccupied not just with girls but with paedophilia and sodomy.

In Richard McBeef, a drama about child abuse, a stepson rants, “I will not be molested by an aging, balding, overweight pedophile [sic]stepdad named Dick”, before threatening to shove the television remote control “up his ass”. It concludes: “I hate him. Must kill Dick. Must kill Dick. Dick must die. Kill Dick.”

Dr James Gilligan, a former prison psychiatrist who teaches at New York University, believes that misogyny and homophobia are a central component of the make-up of violent criminals, who often fear they have homosexual tendencies.

“An underlying factor that is virtually always present is a feeling that one has to prove one’s manhood and the way to do that, to gain respect, is to commit a violent act,” he says. “It is tremendously tempting to use violence as a means of trying to shore up one’s sense of masculine self-esteem.”

It is not simply an American phenomenon. In Cho’s video manifesto, there are unmistakable echoes of the home-made martyrdom videos of the young male jihadists circulating on the internet.

Cho began working out in the gym weeks before the killings, and the video pictures sent to NBC reveal a bolder, more muscled character than the images of the shy young student released when his name was first identified.

Dressed to kill in black and tan, Cho borrowed the vocabulary as well as the iconography of Islamic fundamentalist suicide bombers by hailing Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold — the two teen killers at Columbine — as “martyrs” of the same vengeful cult of death.

On his arm Cho had etched in red ink the nom de guerre Ismail Ax, a possible reference to the son whom Ibrahim (or Abraham) prepared to sacrifice in the Koran, sparking a torrent of speculation on the internet about his religious motives.

Others suggested that the student of literature was merely thinking about an American novel called Ishmael about a young boy growing up outside Washington, just as he did. But Cho was also explicitly drawn to Christian symbolism and its own veneration of martyrdom.

“Do you know what it feels to be torched alive? Do you know what it feels like to be humiliated and be impaled upon a cross and left to bleed to death for your amusement?” he railed on video. “You have never felt a single ounce of pain in your whole lives. You have vandalised my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience.”

Political scientist Francis Fukuyama believes the common denominator between the terrorist suicide bomber and the suicidal mass murderer is their sexual frustration and gender. “It really is young men between 15 and 30 who are responsible the vast majority of crimes, although it is politically incorrect to say this too loudly,” he says.

Suicide bombers and the Virginia Tech killer, Fukuyama suggests, “fall into the same demographic of young males, a lot of whom are unemployed, without a clear place in the social hierarchy. These guys have the most to gain and the least to lose by martyrdom”. And often, he adds, they are upset about girls “whose attention they can’t get”.

Fukuyama believes that Cho’s case is “fairly unique” but “the maleness is important”. In his essay Identity and Migration, published by Prospect last February, he writes that radical Islamism should be understood in the context of identity politics.

“We have seen this problem before in the extremist politics of the 20th century, among the young people who became anarchists, Bolsheviks, fascists or members of the Baader-Meinhof gang.” It is not specifically tied to radical Islam, he insists.

Yet Cho’s ethnicity may have prevented the university authorities from intervening in his life, Paglia suggests. Voicing a theme that conservative talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh have taken up with gusto, she wonders whether political correctness about his background and culture may have led them to make excuses for him.

“He was Korean and so people were hesitant to declare he was abnormal in American terms,” she says. It is no accident, she believes, that the two female lecturers who were most suspicious of his behaviour were themselves not white.

One professor, Nikki Giovanni, known as the “princess of black poetry”, was the first to raise the alarm about Cho’s writing. It did not feature hardcore violence; but it was weird. “It wasn’t like, ‘I’m going to rip your heart out’,” she said. “It’s that, ‘Your bra is torn and I’m looking at your flesh’.” When female students said they were scared of him, she wanted him out of her class.

Giovanni reported her concerns to Lucinda Roy, a British professor of literature who was then head of the department. She was so disturbed by Cho that she contacted the university police and went on to give him individual lessons — after devising a code word which, if ever used, would be a signal to her assistant to call security.

“You seem so lonely,” she told him. “Do you have any friends?”

“I am lonely,” Cho replied. “I don’t have any friends.”

The lone gunman is a familiar figure in American mythology. “In American culture you always have the rough-edged loner, the anti- establishment figure which goes all the way back to the silent films and westerns and continues through Humphrey Bogart, James Dean and Marlon Brando,” says Paglia.

In Cho’s case, there were echoes of Taxi Driver, the story of a stalker. The promiscuity that Cho saw in women was “a huge warning sign”, Paglia believes. “You want them, you want the status of being seen with them, you’re driven towards them and at the same time they are contaminated, they are dirty. That’s exactly the mentality of the stalker and assassin played by Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. There is an apocalyptic impulse to destroy everything and to purify the world.”

In a twist to the debate on masculinity, some commentators have complained that the terrified Virginia Tech students were no Rambos when it came to defending themselves. John Derbyshire, a right-wing British writer based in America, wondered, “Why didn’t anyone rush the guy? Yes, I know it is easy to say these things, but didn’t the heroes of Flight 93 teach us anything?” — a reference to the passengers fighting back in the 9/11 hijacked plane.

The columnist Mark Steyn took up the theme with an essay on the “culture of passivity” that is overtaking America. In his view, students are becoming so infantilised that they have lost their capacity to take responsibility.

“In a horrible world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself and others,” he believes. “It is a poor reflection on us that in those critical first seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor understood instinctively the obligation to act.”

Librescu, 75, forced his body against the door to prevent Cho storming his classroom, gaining time for some of his students to escape. He was shot dead. But there were younger heroes, too, such as Derek O’Dell, who was shot in the arm but managed to wedge his foot in the door and prevent Cho from re-entering the classroom.

Another student, realising that a friend was playing dead, was said to have deliberately drawn Cho’s attention to himself as the gunman searched the room for survivors — and sacrificed his own life.

“When someone opens the door of a classroom and begins firing with a semi-automatic weapon, there is no fighting back possible,” says Paglia. “All of this happened too fast for the young men or young women to rush the shooter and bring him down.”

Paglia is a defender of the constitutional right to bear arms in America. She is troubled, however, by the ease with which Cho bought his weapons. “The problem is not hunting guns but these semi-automatic weapons. He could not have cut down that many people so quickly or with such brutal efficiency without them. They have no use except for commandos, swat teams and paramilitary organisations.

“This is part of the plague that has come with the drug culture in the inner cities,” she says. “Cho’s use of semi-automatic weapons can ultimately be traced back to gangsta rap. It is a fabrication of urban life which is sold to teenagers trapped in the utterly sterile shopping-mall culture of the American suburbs.”

“Throughout most of human history men have been armed, but with swords not guns,” Paglia observes. As the weapons grow more deadly, even a solitary “boy” can commit the worst massacre in American history. This is the 19th such scenario in the past decade. Unfortunately it is unlikely to be the last.

This article has quoted from so many people with whom I agree that it is difficult to know where to begin.

Paglia, with her insightful commentary on the feminization of American culture...

Steyn, raising the issue of what it means when only someone who lived through a horrific time period has the fortitude to act...

Fukuyama, with his verbalization of something I have felt myself, that sense of being "too male" for the culture...

This whole thing just makes me sick.  Cho was right when he said that there were so many ways for us to prevent what happened.  The only problem is that none of it is obvious.  It's all subtlety and unspoken truths.  It's a deeper problem with our culture, deeper than gun control or any platitude about race or religion. 

Gun control is a band-aid on top of gangrene. 

There is a certain amount of helpless confusion that I think many men experience as they reach adulthood.  In simple terms (as I understand this only in a simple fashion), there is this constructive urge to strike out and do things, but there is societal pressure to simply graduate from college and get a job.  As in the article:

“Young men have enormous energy. There was a time when they could run away, hop on a freighter, go to a factory and earn money, do something with their hands. Now there is this snobbery of the upper-middle-class professional. Everyone has to be a lawyer or paper pusher.”

Have I felt that!  It's everywhere.  I remember it seemed like I was hopelessly trapped as I graduated.  I found an outlet for this feeling in Americorps, but even still it's not quite hopping on a ship and sailing around the world.
Cho Seung-Hui (or Seung-Hui Cho, as he called himself) was not a monster.  He was not a victim, either, labelling him as such would be playing right into the hands of this castration of society.  He didn't know how to deal with being a social misfit, for reasons of mental illness. 
And when he decided to take others with him as he committed suicide, nobody except an old man tried to stand up to him.  I could make it an allegory of the West and radical Islam, but that would dehumanize the victims.

But let's be frank:  Gun control is not the answer, nor is therapy.  There are no easy answers to this problem, none at all.

I ducked out of the news for about a day and came back to find out that British sailors had been captured by the Iranians.  Captured!  By Iranians!  Apparently, these Persians believe that the Brits were violating territorial waters.  This happened in 2004, and satellite imagery proved their claims to be out and out lies.  What do these people have to gain from prodding the West?  It would seem that they are trying to provoke an outright confrontation over five Revolutionary Guards found in Iraq.  Return the Guards, get your Brits back.

The news at present is that these British men (and a woman) may be tried for espionage in Iran.  The punishment for spying in that country is death. 

Nuh-uh.  Sorry.  Geneva Convention, as dox^2 brought to my attention.  Course, maybe they'll be real hard cases and decide that the Geneva Convention doesn't apply to them, instead of looking for loopholes like we did with our enemy combatants.  Fine piece of lawyering, that.

What, I say again, what do these people have to gain from getting involved?  Territorial claims to the Shatt-al-Arab?  Partitioning of Iraq when the West inevitably* withdraws in shame and defeat?
The Ayatollah has allowed for the use of illegal means to get their nuclear program up and running.  Even if they do not wish to acquire nuclear weapons, this is troubling.  Yes, nuclear energy is a good thing and I think we should utilize it on a global scale...but I would posit that it's different to produce radioactive material in their region than in the much less turbulent American one.  Oversight of their program is not too much to ask, but they don't want any international involvement which damages their credibility. 
Qatar has reported that a fisherman claims the Britons were in Iraqi waters. I trust him over Mah-moody Ahmakillthejews.

*by inevitably, I mean never until we have achieved our goals.  And by partitioning, I mean we assassinate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and partition his body into quarters -- that's how we do it in the West.  Drawn and quartered, courtesy of us barbaric House of War types.  We'll use a horse and tree method, or perhaps two horses.  A horse will be involved, however.

My fiancee heard on Rush Limbaugh today that there is a new service out there for women.  It goes by the name Exhale, and it is billed as a counseling talkline for women who have had abortions. 
I'm at a loss.  On the one hand, I cannot seem to trace the development of this movement.  For decades the push has been to relegate the status of the fetus to no more than a glob of tissue.  Why should a woman be any more upset over an abortion than she would be for getting a cancerous mole removed?  It seems that this organization is out of step with most abortion advocates in that it admits the level of trauma a woman can experience from the procedure.  That is, mental and physical trauma.  Feminists for Life have been on the ball with that for a while, but they somehow came to different conclusions than the women over at exhale.
Here comes the other hand:  What does this say about the people who get abortions or advocate them?  These folks are admitting that women need counseling and often have extreme guilt or sadness following an abortion, yet they don't see that it is abortion itself that is the problem.  No, they say that

...abortion, and having feelings afterward, is normal in the reproductive lives of women and girls.

WHAT?   Now I understand that miscarriages (spontaneous abortions) are often natural or out of the control of the mother.  But to say that poisoning the child with a saline solution (or dismembering it and then vacuuming it from the mother's womb[or delivering it partway and then ripping out its brain]) is normal is something a bit more than ill-thought.  That's downright stupid.
No, what this service says to me is that these people fully understand the guilt and remorse women feel after these procedures and attempt to minimize it by the same old lies.
I just can't wrap my mind around this, except to say that the best lies always have some truth to them.  "Feeling guilty?  Well don't bottle it up!  Talk about it, and remember, you didn't do anything wrong so eventually you'll get over it."  That's not healing.  That's amputation of the soul.

Here is a card with a picture of mountains that your child will never see.  A cloud that your child will never imagine to be shaped like a whale.  A tree your child will never climb.   Air your child will never breathe.
Let's be sure that you've dealt with this grief by next month, okay honey?  After all, life goes on.  Whoops, I mean for us it does.

Crime turning New Orleans into Big Uneasy
Mon Feb 19, 2007 6:04 PM ET

By Jeff Franks

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - New Orleans, the "Big Easy" city famous for its good times and relaxed attitude, has become the Big Uneasy in recent weeks as its murder count has soared and anger grown at local leaders unable to stop the violence.

Annual Mardi Gras celebrations unfolded without incident this weekend, but fear of the rampant blood-spilling and its threat to the city's recovery from Hurricane Katrina are constant topics of conversation.

The homicide total for a still-young 2007 climbed to 27 on Saturday with the dead of a man shot at a nightclub on Friday.

He was one of nine people shot in separate incidents in a seven-hour span on Thursday and Friday, and the third of them to die.

Local leaders, worried crime may scare away tourists who are the life-blood of the economy, stressed that the shootings did not take place at Mardi Gras events and assured visitors violent crime is largely restricted to "hot spots," or impoverished neighborhoods where visitors seldom go.

"The truth is that crime traditionally has gone down during Mardi Gras," Mardi Gras historian Arthur Hardy said.

New Orleans has had one of the United States' highest per-capita murder rates for years, but the current violence has added to insecurities in a city worried about its future.

Only about 200,000 of the pre-Katrina population of 480,000 is back and much of the city is still damaged and abandoned. Recent news stories have said a growing number of those who returned are leaving because they are fed up with the slow recovery and the crime.

"If they don't get crime under control, if they can't convince people it's safe to be here, it doesn't matter how much money they get from the federal government, nobody's going to stay," Tulane University criminal justice instructor Ronnie Jones said.

MARCH ON CITY HALL

Before Katrina struck on August 29, 2005, there was little public pressure to do something about the number of murders, which peaked in 1994 with 425 killings.

But Katrina hit hard the poor neighborhoods where the murders usually occurred, and brought the criminals closer to wealthier, often mostly white, areas, Jones said.

Several thousand people marched on city hall last month to demand that Mayor Ray Nagin and other officials take action.

The basic complaint was that too many criminals are arrested and then returned to the streets due to poor police work and lax prosecutors and judges.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune found that 3,000 arrested suspects were released in 2006 because prosecutors failed to indict them within the required 60 days. In January 2007, 580 were released for the same reason, the newspaper said.

That compared to 187 in the eight months of 2005 before Katrina brought the criminal justice system almost to a halt, the paper said.

Police blame inept prosecutors for the revolving door; prosecutors say their hands are bound by poor police work. Both say a big problem is that Katrina destroyed New Orleans' police lab, forcing them to borrow facilities to process evidence.

Even before Katrina, a local study found that in 2003-2004 only 12 percent of those arrested for murder went to prison.

The situation is so bad that federal agencies including the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration are helping the local police. The U.S. Attorney's office has stepped into cases previously left to local courts and prosecuting them in the less lenient federal courts.

The larger problem is that New Orleans has too many social problems - drugs, poverty, broken families, poor education - all present before Katrina.

A recent murder encapsulated the difficulties. After a 17-year-old was beaten up, his mother gave him a gun and told him to get revenge, and he killed the boy he fought with.

When police went to his home to investigate, they found the mother with cocaine and a family photo on display of the son with a gun in one hand and a fistful of cash in the other.

"For us to correct this, we have to look at the root of the problem. The root of the problem is our education system," Police Superintendent Warren Riley said in an interview.

It's called martial law.  Declare it.