(Permanent Musical Accompaniment to the Last Post of the Week from the Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian) We had another unfortunate exercise of Second Amendment freedoms on Thursday, this one in Bend, Oregon. A 16-year old with his mother's pump-action shotgun killed three schoolchildren and a teacher before he was gunned down by a citizen who’d followed him into the school. Silver Rail Elementary School.
From Oregon Public Broadcasting: This was the second mass shooting in Bend since 2022, when a guy walked into a Safeway with an AR-15 style rifle and killed himself and two others. I think Bend has done more than its part watering the tree of liberty. Now, we will have the usual dialogue.
Oregon has relatively tough gun-safety laws, so we will hear from the usual suspects about how those laws don’t work. The guy who killed the mass shooter will get all the run he wants from Fox News and the other, lesser fauna on the wing-nut media savanna. And all of it will obscure, again, the basic problem this country has.
Always thinking of his people. Zacharia’s weird tenure as the White House spokesperson is only the most obvious evidence that the administration is coming apart at the top. Somebody else had to have cleared Zacharia’s hiring, which means that someone has taken a big beating on that merciless Procrustean scoreboard in the president’s head.
Weekly WWOZ Pick to Click: “Inner Glimpse” (McCoy Tyner): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans. Weekly Visit to the Pathé Archives: Here, from 1968, is the Braemar Gathering in Scotland. The royal family stops by.
Lots of heavy-object tossing ensues, and the Brit narrator gets snotty about the American who came from Missouri to toss the caber. The Washington Post has been making a meal out of the relationship between the president and his temporary residence. On Friday, we learned how completely banjaxed that relationship really is.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
