Election, part 521

In case anyone is still wondering:

1. Coleman and Franken are separated by less than 500 votes. Must.have.recount. Coleman is bleating some complete nonsense that the result is "too important" for a recount. And I thought Franken was the comedian in that race!
2. As the tabulation approaches the final few votes, Merkley pulled ahead of Smith by about 6000 votes, but the difference is now approaching 0.5% (it's 0.42% right now). The reason why this is significant is that only a few thousand votes ago, Smith was ahead by nearly 2%. As the remaining districts kept coming in, Merkley gradually pulled ahead. If the few remaining votes to be counted break the same way as the last couple of thousands, the margin may well pass the mandatory recount limit. I suppose a recount is likely nonetheless. Besides, both candidates pulled in just over 47%, so there is good reason to wonder about Smith's survival. Meanwhile, the count is stuck at 99%. The Oregonian has called the race for Merkley. I am not sure that this is definitive--since Oregon is mail-only election, the count won't be finalized at least for another couple of days. On the other hand, the separation is nearly double that of the Alaska Senate race and that one still quite a few votes to count.
3. With Merkley likely pulling this off, the count of Republican moderates in the Senate is shrinking to 4. Should Coleman lose, it will be down to 3, with two of them in Maine. Big Tent?
4. Last night several outlets--but not NYT--declared both Georgia presidential count and Senate race as Republican victories. But, not so fast... Both races had Republicans over 56% with supposedly over 99% of precincts counted. Not so fast! TPM followed AP in reporting that early voting results from the Atlanta area were not included in the totals. Oops! The count went from 99% yesterday to 96% tonight. As further numbers came in, the Republican totals dropped precipitously toward 50%. The presidential race has now been called--the actual split is not important, only the plurality is needed to carry the state. Not so for the Senate--Chambliss is sitting (and has been all day) at 49.83%. Since it's below 50%, that points to a mandatory run-off (Georgia is a funny state). The question I have--and it was my guess last night, even before the story broke--is there a mandatory recount if someone is close to 50% in order to avoid a run-off, or does state law prefer a run-off to a recount? I doubt this is a trivial question.
5. Both Alaskan races appear to have tilted Republican, although the latest numbers I am looking at on the NYT tracker sit at 76% of precincts. Doesn't make much sense--others have it at 99%. I wonder why Alaska would be so slow--and I also wonder what Alaskans are thinking, voting for these two creeps. It does, however, explain Sarah Palin's "popularity" in the state. Apparently, corruption is a required event in this pageant. I wonder if it will be necessary to have Palin run for president in order to keep her from running for reelection in Alaska. Set phasers on stun.
6. Washington gubernatorial race was not close this time around. (Say good-bye to Rossi!) But one of the House races seems to be headed for a recount. Or maybe not.
7. Jean Schmidt won in Ohio. Sad. But, on the comedic note, we'll still have Mean Jean and Michelle Bachmann to kick around. With a relative paucity of Republican congressmen these days, do their chances for appearing on cable news shows increase?
8. The total presidential vote showed a higher percent turnout of registered voters (although some states also allow same-day registration) than the Nixon-Kennedy race. So much for the mandate argument from four years ago when Republicans kept claiming that Bush got the most votes of any presidential candidate in history. The talking heads are already whining that 52% is not a landslide and not a mandate. It's a slim margin. Yeah, and I am just as slim.
9. I've already heard two radio talk-show hosts claiming that "we're going to impeach [Obama]!" I kid you not! "Sore losers" does not begin to describe these idiots. Actually, Jay Severin's exact words appeared to be more scatological (not the "impeach" part).
10. Remember the debate kerfuffle on strategy vs. tactics?
    
11. Obama has a bigger lead in the still-unfinished North Carolina than McCain does in still-unfinished Missouri. It looks like the final electoral count will not stay at 349.
12. Indiana went against the polling trend and turned out for Obama. Florida and Ohio also beat the poll projections in his favor. NC and MO lived up to "too close to call" expectations. Interestingly, most of the final tallies across all states appeared to match closely the poll numbers for the trailing candidate. The winner in most states got more than projected. So much for the Rovian observation that Republicans always beat the projected poll numbers.
13. In case you missed it--Obama beat the Gore and Kerry numbers for the Jewish vote. Exit polls suggest 78%. It might actually be higher. This is after many right-of-center observers predicted the opposite and the McCain campaign and its satellites broke the bank on sending out fear-smears even in the last few days of the campaign. So there are several possibilities. Here are a couple: Obama's debate performance was sufficient to overcome some fears (at least, among Jewish voters); McCain lost all credibility on foreign policy by the end of the campaign; the projected right-shift never happened to begin with. Obama failed, however, to impress the French Jews. On a related note, Russian treasury bailed out a "Jewish banker" to the tune of $2 billion and "Germany’s parliament agreed on a resolution that calls anti-Semitism a 'problem in German society that still demands serious attention.'"I am still waiting for a Bill O'Reilly apology for anything and for the latest odds on a snowball in hell.

Jeepers Freepers

Barack Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, died from cancer on the eve of elections. Most people pay their respects and offer condolences. Some bite their tongues. Not so for the FreeRepublic conspiracy theorists.

It's understandable that they have conniptions over Obama's birth certificate (some Hillary supporters are still fuming on the subject). And that's crazy enough. But would they stop short of accusing Obama of either murdering his grandmother to get the sympathy vote or keeping her on ice to maximize the impact of the announcement? Not so much--that's exactly what they would do!

For openers,

Obama’s grandmother dies of cancer in Hawaii

Nice timing. That’ll pick up a few sympathy votes for sure.

2 posted on Monday, November 03, 2008 4:57:13 PM by PeterFinn (Sarah Palin for President in 2012.)

OK, so it's just perverse schadenfreude. But it gets worse.

Cancer patients usually pass away from a planned terminal sedation.
This may be the first politically timed terminal sedation ever, though.

9 posted on Monday, November 03, 2008 4:59:53 PM by counterpunch (It’s the SOCIALISM, Stupid!)

Did he have power of attorney over her? Did he decide to stop any kind of life support?

22 posted on Monday, November 03, 2008 5:02:49 PM by nikos1121 (The first black president should be another Jackie Robinson)

Wow, just before the 6:00 news. How convenient

33 posted on Mon Nov 3 17:04:49 2008 by NYC Republican (PLENTY of time for analysis/I-told-you-so in 2 days. Now, Infuriate the MSM--- Support McCain/Palin)

There is no point copying the entire thread. You get the picture.

Some suspect that Obama offed his granny to get the sympathy vote--either as well-timed euthanasia or just in cold blood.

Others opine that she might have died much earlier--e.g., when Obama flew to Hawaii a week earlier, then returned to the East Coast without waiting another day for her birthday.

Yet others wondered why Obama flew back when it was announced that she fell and broke her hip and now she died from cancer.

The only group that was finally deterred was concerned about the fact--and was building its conspiracy theories on it--that the original wire report did not contain the time of death. This was finally put to rest by comment #215 or so, because later reports did mention more details. Still the entire discussion was taking place in a vacuum--they continued to discuss publication times of the local papers as if it was happening in DC.

What a bunch of cold-hearted bastards! No wonder they get worked up about "sharing the wealth" and judicial nominees who would empathize with "those less fortunate"!

It's all part of the same package.

Corrupting Influence

I've been corrupted! I joined the sloganeering crowd--you may or may not have noticed (and, judging by the traffic, you haven't), but I've added a slogan to the "blog description". It's at the top of the page, but, if you are too lazy to look up there--or are using an RSS feed--here's what is says.

It's not about the Democrats, stupid--it's about Democracy!

I wish more people would reflect this sentiment.

On stabs in the back and other assorted weaselitude

James Taranto puts out his nonsensical remarks daily. I've been mostly skipping them--too much real work--but I have a break in the drudgery today so, I thought, I'd give it a minute (I dutifully archive all the crap that ends up in my mailbox and I did have a reason to subscribe to Taranto's daily musings once upon a time). And I see that Taranto is still a lying weasel that he's always been.

Pretty Ugly
"Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards is calling on his supporters to turn this year's Memorial Day into a day of antiwar activism, saying that the best way to honor the troops is to demand an end to the Iraq war," the Washington Post reports. Edwards, who voted for the war, has set up a Web site for his effort, supportthetroopsendthewar.com.

Andrew Sullivan has observed of Edwards, "He's pretty, he has flowing locks, he's young-looking." But as lovely as Edwards may be on the outside, it is ugly to try to turn a solemn day honoring those who died in the service of their country into a political stunt.

What'll he think of next, turning Christmas into a day of pro-abortion activism?

Note the strategic use of the hair comment, which had absolutely nothing to do with the story. It may be preaching to the choir, but he's still trying to reinforce the message. And, in case you missed it, it's about stabbing the troops in the back! (See here, here, here, here and here.) The reason I am particularly aware of the issue is because I have just spent nearly two hours researching it and sending some correspondence on it literally just before opening Taranto's screed. Of course, the other thing that Taranto does not tell you is that everything that the Bushies do is a political stunt. They've made the self-promoting abuse of the troops-as-backdrop into a ubiquitous routine. Any odds on Bush appearing before the troops just before or on Memorial Day?

Nice Going, Nancy
The Jerusalem Post reports on one Syrian who wasn't happy about Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to dictator Bashar Assad:

Mamoun Homsi is a courageous pro-democracy activist who had been one of the few independent members of Syria's puppet parliament. In March 2002 he was thrown out of the legislature and sentenced to five years in prison. As he was dragged off to jail, Homsi shouted, "This is a badge of honor to me and others like me. Long live the people!"

Released after four years in 2006, Homsi immediately left the country, saying there was no possibility of changing the regime by reform, and that any criticism would bring more imprisonment.

Homsi wrote Pelosi a letter urging her not to visit Syria as such a step would only strengthen the regime. Last week, the government seized all of his assets in the country, leaving his family destitute.

I wonder if Mr. Homsi made any comments on the visit by Rice. Did he write a letter to her as well?

That Explains It!
"A U.S. troop pullout from Iraq would leave the country as a potent launchpad for international terrorism and Washington would be forced to go back in within a couple of years, a leading al Qaeda expert said on Tuesday," Reuters reports:

Rohan Gunaratna told a security conference at Lloyd's of London insurance market that Iraq, like Afghanistan in the 1990s, would become a "terrorist Disneyland" where al Qaeda could build up its strength unchallenged.

And to think, that strange lady in L.A. thought Disney wanted to liberate Iraq.

Huh? And the point is...? Yeah, yeah--it's about the pottery barn rule again...

Speaking if which, I actually followed the link included in this piece. That lead to Taranto's clap-trap from April 30. In addition to the "strange lady" coverage, there was this:

Lynching Was Bad, but . . .
Speaking of the Los Angeles Times, on Friday the paper printed an exceptionally idiotic column by Rosa Brooks titled "9/11 Was Bad, but . . ." Brooks suggests that people who worry about terrorist attacks are "irrational wimps":

The 9/11 attacks were appalling and tragic, but they did not threaten the survival of the nation. . . .

Of course, 3,000 dead is 3,000 too many. But keep it in perspective. As a nation, we have survived far worse. We lost more than 100,000 Americans in World War I, more than 400,000 in World War II, 37,000 in Korea, 58,000 in Vietnam--all without allowing our national character to turn into quivering jelly.

Every year, we also lose millions of Americans to preventable accidents and disease. We're more likely to die on the road than as a result of Al Qaeda's machinations. Annually, we lose some 43,000 people to auto accidents. For the grieving families, that's 43,000 deaths too many. But, although we surely could reduce auto fatalities if we chose to make it our top national priority, the Bush administration has yet to announce a "War on Highway Deaths."

This is unoriginal as well as fatuous. It's not even original in the L.A. Times, which published essentially the same piece three months ago. But in the hope that our new friends at the Times won't make the same mistake a third time, let's repeat our analogy that shows why this is such a ridiculous argument.

According to this table, 4,742 people were lynched in America between 1882 and 1964. That's an average of but 57 people a year, and the number of annual lynchings peaked in 1892, at 230. By the standards Brooks applies to 9/11, lynching was not a big problem. It killed far fewer people than war, disease, accidents, etc.

Yet if someone were lynched tomorrow, would we shrug it off because the number of deaths is only 1/43,000th of the annual car-crash toll? Of course not. It takes a stunning degree of moral obtuseness to treat a murder in the furtherance of a hateful ideology--be it white supremacy or Islamic fundamentalism--as the equivalent of an accidental death.

A similar bit of foolishness comes from Ian Buruma, who won an award at the book festival. In yesterday's Times, he opines:

Just as Jews, during some traditional Passover feasts, ask God to bring down his wrath on the Gentiles who "don't know him," and many Christians believe that hell awaits those who don't subscribe to their faith, Muslims are led to believe that killing the enemies of Islam can be justified.

"Just as"? Surely there is a difference between believing or hoping that God will punish unbelievers and taking it upon oneself to do it. It doesn't speak well of the editors of the L.A. Times that they not only publish such nonsense but do so habitually.

I wonder what rock Taranto was hiding under when Derbyshire and the rest of the idiots were referring to the victims of the VaTech massacre as, for all practical purposes, "irrational wimps".

Finally,

Good Point!
"Wouldn't it be weird if French President-elect Nicolas Sarkozy turns out to be more pro-American than all the Democrats running for U.S. president?"--Jim Seay of Henrico, Va., quoted in the Richmond Times Dispatch's "Your Two Cents" feature

Don't hold your breath, Jimbos!

Law does not apply

If you want to know why almost no one takes Hamas seriously as civic representatives of the Palestinian territories, all you need is the latest headline in the Jerusalem Post: Hamas calls for new attacks on Israel.

Hamas on Sunday called for new attacks on Israel after nine Palestinians were killed in a surge of fighting over the weekend.

Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum urged Palestinians to be prepared for a new round of confrontation.

"The blood of our people is not cheap," he said in a statement faxed to The Associated Press. "Therefore we are calling on ... (Hamas's armed wing) and the Palestinian resistance groups to be united in the trench of resistance and to use all possible means of resistance and to respond to the massacres."

The Corsicans and their blood feuds got nothing on these idiots. Let's not forget that the Palestinians killed this week were all involved in the very activities for expansion of which Mr. Barhoun is now calling for.

The two Aksa terrorists, including a top bombmaker, were killed in the Casbah of Nablus after IDF troops surrounded a building where they were hiding and ordered people out, the group said. Most occupants came out, but the two operatives remained holed up inside. An exchange of fire broke out, and the two men were killed.
...

On Saturday night, IAF helicopters killed a member of a Kassam rocket cell in a car in the northern Gaza Strip, wounding one of his confederates. It was the second such missile strike since Israel accepted a Gaza cease-fire in November.

Earlier Saturday, Gazans fired four Kassam rockets into Sderot; one scored a direct hit on a home, sending several people into shock.
Three terrorist organizations - Islamic Jihad, and Fatah's Aksa Martyrs Brigades - claimed responsibility for the rocket attacks in a joint statement.

They said they were carried out to avenge the deaths of three terrorists killed by border police in Jenin earlier in the day.

The Daily Star (Beirut) has a different headline, but substantially the same facts:

Two teenagers among dead as Israelis raid Gaza, West Bank

Karim Zahran, 17, was shot dead while throwing stones at Israeli troops near the city of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian security sources and medics said.

The Israeli Army said troops fired at a man in a crowd who was about to throw a Molotov cocktail at soldiers.

In the northern West Bank town of Nablus, the army shot dead two gunmen from Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a militant group affiliated with President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement, Palestinian security sources and the army said. The Palestinian sources identified the dead men as Fadel Nur, 23, and Amin Lubadi, 25, and said they were killed during heavy exchanges of fire with the Israeli troops.
...

Al-Aqsa Brigades vowed to retaliate for the killings.

"We do not cooperate with the Israelis and we use only the language of arms, as it's the only one they understand," Al-Aqsa official Nasser Al-Kharaz told AFP. He also called on Abbas "to cease all contacts and meetings with the Israelis as these do not bring anything and give the world the illusion that Israel speaks of peace."

The Daily Star gives an even better idea of how crass Barhum's comments were.

"We call on Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades [the armed wing of Hamas] and all other Palestinian resistance factions to unite and use all means to respond to the massacres of the occupation," Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhum said.

Another Hamas spokesman, Ghazi Hamad, called on "the international community to pressure the Israeli government so it stops its crimes against the Palestinian people."

Massacres of the occupation?? Crimes against the Palestinian people? Why not just ask, as a condition for peace, for 10 Israelis to be sent voluntarily to Gaza daily to be blown up? The attitude also explains why the PA police is impotent to stop any crimes either within the territories or against Israelis. They want criminality with impunity. I am not going to try to split hairs over whether throwing rocks, as opposed to throwing a Molotov cocktail, constitutes sufficient threat to the IDF to provoke it to shoot. It's a minor point compared to the rest of this situation.

There is even a bit of irony here. Note that even Arab and other developing world publications have finally adopted more appropriate language and identify Palestinian gunmen and bombmakers who have a tendency of dropping dead from Israeli raids as "Palestinian militants". (Never mind that even Western European papers still tend to adopt the "facts" from Palestinian sources, often ignoring the Israeli version of each story.) In the past, there was no implication in print reports that these men were involved in any sort of adverse activity when IDF soldiers just happened to have killed them.

So this change in coverage is an improvement, right? Perhaps. On the other hand, "militant" has become almost a badge of honor and the response from Palestinian groups remains the same--militant or not, with or without the gun, they reserve the right to retaliate for any Palestinians killed.

An odd parallel--Dahlia Lithwick seems to have come to similar conclusions about Alberto Gonzales's testimony. She is wondering if Gonzo's testimony was not just an elaborate bird-flipping by the White House. Keeping Gonzo in place is not denial--it's a provocation to a virtually impotent Democratic Congress: No matter how criminal we get, you can't touch us (or we'll cry "politics").

Bomb Bomb Iran

There is a lot of buzz on McCain's off-the-cuff "Bomb Iran" joke. The YouTube video is floating up the charts.

When I first spotted the header at Steve Clemons's The Washington Note blog early Thursday, I did not bother to read the actual post (the picture appeared sufficient)--I simply assumed that Steve or one of his guests was reusing a Carter-era parody song to mock a McCain policy statement. My reaction to the post turned out to be somewhat recursive. Scott Paul wrote,

When I first read it as an unrelated comment to my last post, I brushed it off as a joke.

It's no joke.

Speaking at a VFW meeting in South Carolina, McCain asked when the U.S. would "send an air mail message to Tehran. " McCain replied: "You know that old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran? Bomb bomb bomb, anyway..."

Ann Althouse adds,

Is he trying to be Reaganesque?

alluding to Reagan's "The bombing will begin in five minutes" joke.

McCain is undeterred.

"Please, I was talking to some of my old veterans friends," he told reporters. "My response is, Lighten up and get a life."

When reporters asked if the joke was insensitive, McCain said: "Insensitive to what? The Iranians?"

McCain does not have my vote, but he has my support here. Note how Paul missed the euphemism in the vet's "airmail message" prompt . It's the same kind of mail as the one Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) warns Jeffrey (Kyle MacLaclan) about in Blue Velvet when he threatens to send him a "love letter". McCain simply replies in kind--especially to the generation that grew up listening to the Beach Boys.

But the joke is far from new. There were several versions popping up during the Iran hostage crisis (Vince Vance and the Valiants was the best known version), and they persisted through the early 1980s. Some, like Vince's, had a definite Right Wing tinge, but not all.

However, there was no YouTube in the 1980s. In fact, there was barely an embryo of an internet. So, not surprisingly, few people remember the lines like "Went to a mosque, gonna throw some rocks. Tell the Ayatollah..."Gonna put you in a box!" " (from Vince's version), "A-rockin'-n'-a-rollin', Nuke'm 'till the'r glow'n'" or "Bomb Ira-a-an, just like Viet-Na-a-am!" (from other versions) that lurked around the college counter-culture music circuit. Beatnik coffee houses are not the internet and 45s are not CDs.

But no one seems to have bothered to check more recent archives either. Here's one version (Adam Kontras) that appeared almost exactly a year ago.
[Update NOTE: The clip will pop up in a new tab or window. It starts with a brief ad.]


No wonder that the site that distributes the Kontras clip came up with a humorous take:

John McCain Rips Off AtomFilms!!

It is unusual that the same song not only served for multiple parodies at different time periods, but that it spawned versions from both ends of the political spectrum (although the ones from the Left were distinctly more ironic). The fact that McCain tapped into the same channel shows that he still has a sense of humor and can still connect the dots. His critics, on the other hand, are getting stale. Meanwhile, the Corner is poll-watching...

Gun control

[UPDATE: some changes and additions made to the text; links updated]

Steve Soto beat me to the punch, but the buzz is just beginning to rise. There have been many exchanges over gun control since the Virginia Tech shooting--with some comments being plainly delusional--but, best I can tell, no one proposed a rational approach to policy change following the tragedy. Rep. Jane Harman took the opportunity--in my view, inappropriately--to plug her bill to renew the assault weapons ban. She failed to explain how her proposal would have prevented or mitigated the most recent disaster.

Conservative blogs put on a dog and pony show to convince the masses that it would have been better if Virginia Tech did not have a gun ban because than any half-cocked student or professor with a concealed weapon could have taken out the creep. (And this is only some of the nonsense that's flying out there. There is also a distinct blame-the-victim tinge to their comments.) None of them consider the other likely consequences (especially in light of John Derbyshire's admission of utter inability to shoot straight). With multiple gunmen, the likely outcome indeed would be a possibility--nothing more--that someone would have shot the perpetrator. There is also a distinct possibility that the resulting barrage of bullets would result in significant collateral damage, compounding the tragedy. And, to make matters worse, there is also the possibility that, in a rush to resolve the situation, NYPD style, the police would end up shooting the "hero". And if they did not do it, a bunch of "heroes" likely would shoot each other. Color me unconvinced.

My initial instinct was that the gun dealer would be blamed. I was likely mistaken. The state should escape liability. But the university itself--and, yes, I know it's a state institution--may well be on the hook, especially with the latest revelations. Cho's background may also take the wind out of gun advocates' sails.

Here's the news, in a nutshell:

The Centreville man responsible for Monday's shooting rampage at Virginia Tech was questioned by police twice in 2005 after female students complained he was harassing them and was hospitalized after he was reported to be suicidal, the campus police chief said this morning.
...
In the first case -- in November 2005 -- officers referred Cho to the university discipline system. The next month, at the request of the second female student, officers met with Cho to ask him not to contact her again.

Hours later, a friend of Cho's called campus police to say he seemed suicidal, Flinchum said. Police then contacted Cho again and persuaded him to undergo an outside psychiatric evaluation. Officials said they did not send Cho to the campus counseling center because staff there do not have the authority to involuntarily hospitalize patients.

Cho was admitted to Carilion St. Albans Psychiatric Hospital in nearby Radford, Va., on Dec. 13, 2005. Officials said they believe Cho entered the hospital voluntarily. They would not say how much time he spent there, citing privacy rules. [emphasis added]

To sum up, the kid was 1) a serial stalker, 2) became despondent and suicidal when confronted, and 3)was institutionalized for mental problems as a result.

An average Second Amendment dead-ender will say, "So what? You can't make laws to take all crazy people into account. If someone wants to get a gun, he can get illegally. Are you going to penalize all normal people because of some crazy guy?"

There is a simple concept known as hedging. We don't lock our doors to prevent burglaries--we do it to make them more difficult. We don't invent draconian travel restrictions to guarantee that terrorists will not find their way in. No--we do it to make it more difficult for them. Abortion opponents demand waiting periods, notifications and multiple consultations. Do they think that they are stopping abortions? No--they are making them more difficult, acting as a deterrent in at least some cases. [Note: I don't support these tactics, but for unrelated reasons.]

Why not institute a background check that puts up red flags not only on ex-felons, but and those who satisfy conditions (1), (2) or (3).

Mental health advocates might object that I am proposing taking rights away from people simply because of their health problems. Although this may nominally be true, the health problems are not the cause of the action I propose--it is the specific nature of the problem that makes gun possession an unjustifiable risk.

People enter mental health facilities for a number of reasons. Not all of these pose risk, but certainly, if the cause is depression, suicidal tendencies (a variation on depression, I suppose), drug or alcohol abuse or more pervasive disorders (e.g., schizophrenia), possession of guns poses a risk. Certainly an involuntary hospitalization points to an extensive problem and lack of self-control that would be anathema to gun possession. I am sure there are professional publications that outline all the risk factors for random violence, and they should confirm my theory. I am not suggesting that every behavioral flag should turn into a background check flag, but there is no question that some represent a major change in risk and should be considered in a background check.

Specific forms of obsessive behavior--such as stalking or domestic abuse--are also major risk factors that should be taken into account. Not all stalkings result in abuse, and, of those, fewer still involve weapons, but the risk is unacceptable, compared to the risk from an average person without these problems. Domestic abuse reports and stalking reports--should go into a closed law-enforcement database that is only used for gun permits and sales. I am not suggesting that it should be used for other purposes.

Add these to the restrictions on felons--especially those who were involved in violent crimes or drug-related crimes--and we have a fairly comprehensive background check. On top of this, of course, there is the usual restriction on non-citizens--not even the most zealous Second Amendment advocate would argue against this particular restriction (in fact, they are likely to demand it).

There are some fine points that need ironing. For example, in Wisconsin, the first drunk-driving conviction is not a felony. For my money, someone who drives drunk shows the kind of lack of self-restraint that should result in the deprivation of a gun license, irrespectively of whether the specific offense is a felony. If one drives drunk, what would prevent him from handling a gun drunk?

Worse yet, many states don't even require a license or a permit, so implementing any restrictions would be difficult. But not impossible...

Even Second Amendment zealots admit that civilian gun ownership is meant to support a militia--not the White Supremacist or survivalist kind, obviously, although, some of the true nuts do not make that distinction. And, since the purpose is, ostensibly, "a well-regulated militia", there is no reason why militia-related training--er, gun handling training--should not be required. Want to buy a gun? No problem--just show proof of recent training for the type of weapon you want to buy or sign up for a class. And mandate periodic "continuous education" type training as a condition for perpetual extension of a permit. This should also weed out people who get red-flagged after getting a permit or whose mental condition slowly deteriorates.

Tommy, can you hear me?

Those from Wisconsin and Illinois have always known that Tommy Thompson is not the brightest light bulb on the tree. That has not stopped him from mulling over his presidential aspirations. Some locals have claimed that he might have had a good chance a decade ago--with Bob Dole and George Bush as eventual nominees, Thompson could have made it interesting, they say.

This is doubtful. Thompson never had the financial backing of Bush, and Dole was running on inevitability--the same kind of campaign that John McCain expected to run in this cycle-- because he "earned" the nomination. As we can see from McCain's predicament, even "inevitable" candidates can take a precipitous drop. However, Thompson was hardly the candidate to knock Dole off the perch.

Thompson is an affable enough guy, but that does not make him presidential material. His faux pas before a group of Reform Jews did not win him any supporters. He made matters worse with a backhanded apology--he was trying to be complimentary. Why didn't Imus think of that!

Well, a day later he tried a different tack:

"I was tired, I made a mistake and I apologized," Thompson told a group of Politico reporters and editors in an interview.

"Have you ever made a mistake?," a testy Thompson demanded of this reporter.

That sounds a lot more plausible (except for the "apologized" part). But why get snippy?

The problem with getting snippy is that you end up saying things that make little sense.

Thompson also noted that he had received an award from the Anti-Defamation League and traveled to Israel last year to accept a "Friend of Zion" award from former Prime Ministers Benjamin Netanyahu and Shimon Peres.

Is it just me or does this sound like, "Some of my best friends are Jewish people!" (OK, so he actually says, "I am a friend of the Jewish people," but it's the same message.) If someone accuses you of an ethnically insensitive comment, accept it and move on. Don't dig deeper by trying to explain it, or get defensive and snap at reporters. It makes people think that you really meant it.

Thompson is no Mel Gibson or Pat Buchanan, but he really needs a few lessons in public speaking and diplomacy. A briefing session with Kerry and Biden mulling over jokes that should not have been made might help too. Doesn't matter--Tommy is going home empty-handed in any case. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy!