October 2009

This headline:

Gun-toting soccer mom is shot dead

A very sad story indeed, but so ironic none the less:

Meleanie Hain, the pistol-carrying Lebanon mom who received national attention for taking a loaded gun to her daughter’s soccer game, was shot to death Wednesday night with her husband in an apparent murder-suicide, police said.

Hain, 31, and her husband, Scott, 33, were pronounced dead by Lebanon County Coroner Dr. Jeffrey Yocum shortly after 8:30 p.m. at their home at Second Avenue and East Grant Street, police said.

The couple’s three children were home at the time and were not injured, and are staying with relatives and friends, police said.

Thankfully the children were not victims of a crime that is becoming all to common. Given the legal fights Hain was in, I wonder if her battle for gun rights wasn’t a contributing factor to her untimely demise.

I swear you can’t make up the stories that come out about the Wasilla-billies.

Al Franken had his first amendment pass the Senate since being sworn in, and it is a good one:

On Tuesday night, the Minnesota Democrat got his first piece of legislation passed by the United States Senate via roll call vote. The amendment stopped federal funding for those defense contractors who used mandatory arbitration clauses to deny victims of assault the right to bring their case to court. It passed by a 68-30 margin with nine Republicans joining each voting Democrat. And in the immediate aftermath, Franken was granted the chance to revel, ever so slightly, in his victory.

"The story came to my attention of Jamie Leigh Jones who, when she was 19, went to Iraq to work for [defense contractor] KBR and she was put in the barracks with 400 men and was sexually harassed," Franken told the Huffington Post in a brief interview shortly after the vote. "She complained. But they didn't do anything about it. She was drugged and gang raped and they locked her up in a shipping container. She tried to sue KBR and they said you have a mandatory arbitration clause in your contract. She tried to fight back and said this is ridiculous. She took it to court and they have been fighting her for three years."

"This bill would make it so that anybody in business with the Department of the Defense can't do this," he concluded emphatically. "They can't have mandatory arbitration on issues like assault and battery."

The amazing part is that a majority of Republicans voted against this. KBR makes far more from the government in one year than ACORN has over the past 15 years, and yet Republicans are fine with them trying to cover up a brutal attack on a U.S. citizen. They are every bit as sick as the perpetrators of this crime.

Thankfully Democrats aren’t going to take the NRCC’s latest misogynistic attack on Speaker Pelosi lying down. Here is what Debbie Wasserman Schultz had to say about the NRCC ad saying General McChrystal needed to put Pelosi “in her place”.

"It's evidence they long for the days when a woman's place was in the kitchen. Now a woman is third in line for the presidency... But it's not surprising, coming from a party that's 80 percent male and 100 percent white,"

That reminds me of when Howard Dean, then chairman of the DNC, said the Republican Party was mostly old white men. The RNC complained, yet their actions since then have done nothing but etch that sentiment in stone.

There is an angle to this though I think the Democrats should take up. It’s been over three years now since we started seeing a barrage of retired generals come out and oppose the Iraq War. When that happened countless Republicans took to the airwaves and decried these generals words as being detrimental to the morale of our troops, and pushing for them to take their issues up privately through the chain of command, despite them being retired.

So why isn’t the view the same on McChrystal? He is more bound to the chain of command than someone of the same rank who is now retired.