LYNDEN, Washington — Saturday night, as the Northwest Washington Fair was winding down its six-day run, gunshots disturbed the peace of my small town. One early observer said that over the din of the Fair the shots sounded like balloons popping. The scuffle was what local police are calling “gang related.” Hispanic youths in this Canadian border town started fighting near the front entrance of the fairgrounds. It was one of the hottest days of the year, which didn’t help matters. Fisticuffs were followed by a knife and then a gun. Police have released very little information thus far. We do know that the victims were between 18 and 23. A man was stabbed, then two men and a woman were shot. Fire chief Bill Boyd tweeted early on about the condition of the victims in the St. Joseph’s Hospital, in nearby Bellingham: “All stable at this point. 2 shot in trunk, 2 shot in extremities.” Boyd proved wrong about one gunshot, right about everything else. Two victims were treated and released, two were still in the hospital at this writing but likely to make it. As for their identities, multiple people said in the comment threads of the Bellingham Herald that the person shot “in the extremities” was an innocent bystander who took a bullet in the leg near the mini-donuts stand. Apparently the bullet — probably from a Glock, because .22s don’t usually have so much stopping power — went clean through the abdomen of another victim and decided it wasn’t finished yet. There’s a good chance that the person whose abdomen that bullet passed through was an “18 year old kid named Isaac.” The quote is from the Facebook page of Rev. Sean Taylor of Big Oak Ministries, who must have experienced the best of times and the worst of times that day. Taylor organized the world’s largest hayride, which will be recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records, and then ended the evening holding the hand of a scared, badly injured youth while they waited for the paramedics to arrive. Taylor asked his Facebook followers to “pray for Isaac today,” adding “today’s his birthday.” He thanked his “crew,” noting that “they sprung into action to help the kid and secure the area,” which, in turn, helped to hold back mass panic. Taylor posted a coda to the whole experience the next morning, stating simply: “We all need Jesus.” And vigorous law enforcement, Lyndeners might add. I got wind that something was wrong as I was walking home from the Fair a little after 10 Saturday and saw two Border Patrol SUVs, lights flashing, sirens sounding, booking it toward the carnival. When they got there, the situation was already well in hand. Local cops had tackled and disarmed the shooter, a 15-year-old boy whose name has not yet been released to the public. He will face one count of attempted murder and two counts of first degree assault, at the very least. Other assailants may be charged as the investigation progresses. Fair manager Jim Baron will probably catch heat for his gloss on events. He told the Herald Sunday that this was the first time a shooting had happened and then, well, he said this: “It’s a bummer that it got marred by that, but I don’t think it takes away from the fact that we had a great fair this year.” In one very narrow sense, Baron was right. Attendance was up this year, the year of the Fair’s sort-of 100th anniversary. The weather was actually warm and sunny for most of the week. Several barkers told me selling had been so good that they had very little inventory left to unload. And, while there is never a good time for a shooting, late Saturday night is the least economically damaging time to do it. In the more important sense, it could prove absolutely fatal. The chief draw of the Fair has been that it’s a safe, family friendly place to have some post-raspberry-harvest summer fun. Many locals scoff at the Fair but then show up anyway because it’s the one time when all of Lynden really comes together. And we invite the rest of the world as well. Until this weekend, that had worked out just fine. Now, that’s not so certain. The comment threads of the Herald were quickly clogged with calls for the mass deportation of Mexicans, and worse. That’s a non-starter, but the Fair could implement bag checks, pat downs or even install metal detectors — in addition to the inevitable and necessary beefing-up of security. It certainly has the right to do so, but then it will have to count this Fair diehard out. If the Fair can’t find some way to restore confidence without morphing into the TSA, then it will become a rather empty celebration.
Read the original:
Reflections on the Lynden Fair Shootings
The most accurate prognostication of the 2010 Catholic vote was made months ago when Rep. Bart Stupak (D, MI-01) decided not to run for reelection. Stupak, a “pro-life” Catholic, was the leader of a small hold-out group of House Democrats, also mostly Catholic, refusing to vote for a health care bill that included federal funding for abortion. Stupak’s sudden change of mind on May 21 , without any concurrent changes to the health care bill, led to the passage of the health care legislation when his fellow hold-outs caved with him. A veritable tsunami of pro-life outrage among Catholics ensued, in spite of attempts of White House shills like Sr. Carol Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association, to dispute the statements of the Catholic bishops about the presence of abortion funding in the health care legislation.
With Election Day fast approaching, it’s time to remind Republicans of the unused ammunition they have only three more weeks to expend. In the spirit of the Marine Corps aviators — one of whose mottos is, “never return to base with unexpended ordnance” — here are a few cases of bombs that are still hanging on the Republicans’ wings waiting to be dropped. Given his record, it should be easy for Meg Whitman to defeat the gent who the late Mike Royko labeled “Governor Moonbeam.” But the last time Jerry Brown served as California’s governor was thirty years ago, and memories — even bad ones — fade over time. So it’d be a good time for Ms. Whitman to remind Californians of Brown’s other nickname — Governor Medfly — and how he earned it. In 1980 California was beset simultaneously with Brown sitting in the governor’s chair and an infestation of the Mediterranean fruit fly (the two creatures being easily confused). On November 24, 1980, the U.S. Department of Agriculture declared the state’s effort at medfly eradication inadequate. Gov. Medfly fumbled and fussed, working anxiously to avoid using environmentally unfriendly pesticides against the environmentally destructive fly. Eight months later — on July 10, 1981, after threats of boycotts of California agricultural products came from Japan and Mexico — Brown finally ordered aerial spraying. State ag officials used malathion, a very powerful chemical. But because the infestation had spread so widely by the time Brown acted, the spray had to be applied across a huge area, close to many populated places. The malathion promptly melted the paint off of hundreds of cars. Californians may want to vote “green”, but not if they have green-painted cars. And while we’re in fruit and nut land, Carly Fiorina might want to remind voters that her Senate opponent, soon after her election, disclaimed any loyalty to the other of the state’s two major employers: the defense industry. And Sen. Barbara (“don’t call me ma’am”) Boxer has remained faithful to that liberal orthodoxy. She’s done all she can to turn California’s aerospace industry into a high-tech ghost town. Suddenly last August, Boxer realized there were defense industry union votes to mine so she went to the C-17 production plant and promised to do everything in her power to keep the massive transport rolling off the production line. And, of course, Babs didn’t lift a finger, C-17 production is being terminated, and California will lose yet another 5,000 jobs. Babsy Boxer has not only harmed our national security. She’s cost California a minimum of 40,000 defense industry jobs. Moving east from California, we need to stop briefly in Nevada to remind Sharron Angle of the principal question regarding Harry Reid: where is Harry’s brain? He answered that question for us on August 3, 2007. Remember when the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was being rewritten by grownups? Amidst the New York Times ‘ conniptions about “warrantless wiretapping” and the ACLU’s rants about “constitutional rights” of terrorists, FISA was about to expire and the Bush administration was pushing hard to get the law updated and reauthorized. And on that hot and sunny Washington day, Harry Reid was asked at a press conference whether he thought the Bush administration was stampeding Congress to pass the FISA bill. Harry then reached into his suitcoat pocket and pulled out a New York Times editorial from that very morning. Fortuitously, it was entitled, “Stampeding Congress, Again.” And Harry proclaimed, “Here’s what I think about that.” Ms. Angle should remind Nevada voters that Harry’s brain is not in his body. It’s in the New York Times ‘ editorial office. If you want to know what Harry thinks, don’t ask him: read the Times . Not many Nevadans do. It would be ungenerous of us to list the redundant proofs that the so-called “Blue Dog” Democrats, poseurs all, are nothing more than Pelosi’s pink lapdogs. So let’s proceed. Of these 52 ladies and gents who insist that they are fiscal conservatives and strong on national defense, about one-third of them voted for BOTH the “cap and tax” global warming bill AND for Nancy Pelosi’s version of Obamacare. For the record, they were: Joe Baca (CA-43) Sanford Bishop (GA-02) Leonard Boswell (IA-03) Dennis Cardoza (CA-18) Jim Cooper (TN-05) Henry Cuellar (TX-28) Gabrielle Giffords (AZ-08) Jane Harman (CA-36) Baron Hill (IN-09) Mike Michaud (ME-02) Dennis Moore (KS-03) Patrick Murphy (PA-08) Loretta Sanchez (CA-47) Adam Schiff (CA-29) David Scott (GA-13) Zack Space (OH-18) Mike Thompson (CA-01) Anyone running against any of these folk should be reminding people of these votes. (As Casey Stengel would have said, “you could look it up.” Pelosicare was HR-3962. The “cap and tax” bill was HR-2454.) The ever-informative Club for Growth reports that Pelosi herself cast 62 votes on fiscal issues in the 111th Congress and the Blue Dogs voted with her 80% of the time. (Which brings to mind another useful New York baseball saying: “T’row da bums out.”) Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio is blessed by the fact that his main opponent, Charlie Crist, has a record that is the rough equivalent of Gov. Medfly’s, minus the malathion. Rubio should need no help at all after Crist’s toss of the first pitch at an MLB playoff game. Crist — apparently dressed in someone’s pajama pants and his father’s baseball jersey — looked entirely ridiculous and threw so wildly that the catcher needed to chase the ball. Why not use the video of Clumsy Charlie juxtaposed with one of Rubio throwing hard to a major league catcher? “Marco Rubio throws heat, and hits the target”? Pollsters have all but written off Jay Townsend’s campaign to topple uberliberal Chuck Schumer in one of the two New York Senate races. But Townsend may yet surprise them. He’s already remembered two key facts: that Schumer is in a three-way tie (with the aforementioned Babsy Boxer and Barry O’Bama) for the title of most liberal person on the planet. And Schumer’s weirdness is something too few New Yorkers remember. Chuck has two imaginary friends — he named them Joe and Eileen Bailey — who he talks to frequently and who he says accompany him everywhere he goes. They advise him on middle-class issues. Townsend could put out a YouTube video with Chuck and a few cartoon pals talking about how proud he is to lead the national liberal agenda. It would go viral and Chuckie could be the surprise upset of the year. Illinois Senate candidate Alexi Giannoulias said on “Meet the Press” yesterday that he (formerly the bank’s senior loan officer) didn’t know the extent of his family-owned bank’s loans to convicted mobsters and assorted felons. And, he said, only 9% of the bank’s loans weren’t bad. Hey, no prob: the mob is a good credit risk to Giannoulias’s “family” bank. Republican Mark Kirk might think about one of those newly-popular YouTube videos featuring Jack Webb’s Sergeant Friday character. Kirk’s staff could cobble together Giannoulias’s statements on MTP with Sgt. Friday questioning him aggressively. No need to waterboard Alexi. The hot lights will be enough. Dumm-ta-dumm-dumm. By the time the polls close on Election Day, Republicans should feel confident that they’ve missed no opportunity. Bombs away, folks.
See the article here:
Medfly and Other Dems
Let me summarize this Dallas Morning News article about Lisa Blue: if your husband (Fred Baron) is a millionaire and multimillion-dollar Democratic Party fundraiser – John Edwards’ bagman , in fact – and also dying of bone marrow cancer, then you can not only get away with smuggling into the country experimental cancer medicine of dubious efficacy; you can get the Speaker of the House herself to lean on the FDA to let your husband get the medication in question – despite the fact that it didn’t actually work. And then you get to brag about it, while piously talking about how awful it is that regular families don’t have your ability to violate federal regulations on access to experimental and untested medicines*. Which is irrelevant, of course: because it’s not going to get any easier for people to get that access in a system where private health insurance is eliminated. In fact, as the Avastin controversy demonstrates, access to experimental or possibly-marginal medicines will decrease under an universal health care regime. Not that it matters to people like Lisa Blue, Fred Baron, and Nancy Pelosi – after all, they live in the other one of the Two Americas that Edwards liked to so pontificate about. The one where you can publicly call in a marker like this to the Speaker of the House and not be shunned afterward. It takes a lot to erode my instinctive sympathy for both anybody dying of bone marrow cancer, and their families. Being lectured on the need for universal health care coverage by a person who successfully evaded an intolerable medical regulatory regime that her own husband helped spawn will do it every time, though. Moe Lane *Regulations, by the way, that are in place partially because of unscrupulous tort lawyers like… Fred Baron. You see, drug companies are terrified of lawsuits, because they’ve been taught to be by a generation of lawyers. And those lawyers get away with it because many of them are heavy contributors to the Democratic party, like… Fred Baron. Crossposted to RedState .
Link:
Got cancer – and millions of dollars? Nancy Pelosi can help!
Filed under: Matt Lewis and the News Anat Baron, director of the film, ‘Beer Wars’ joins us on today’s podcast.
