Aurora CO Theater Massacre

[8bitagent]

I personally am a very free form thinker that ascribes to no other rule than overall kindness and openness with a view to skepticism with a larger view to synchs with a still larger view to leftist idealism (I do tend to swear a lot though). There really isn't any kind of perfect fit for me or really any of us on this planet.

Hey, quit hacking into my brain and stealing my exact thoughts

To steal an old quote, the more I know...the more I don't know. My latest conspiracy theory is I don't know what's going on:)

[82_28]

One of my most favorite bands growing up and all I can say is, I still agree. . .



Educated Idiot

I recognize the pieces but
I don't know where they fit.

To analyze the universe to bits.
I know exactly just enough
I know all there is to know
I'm all messed up, nowhere to go.
About nothing at all.

Ask me my address I can't recall.
It's my fault.

I don't know.
I'm an educated idiot.
I'm smart enough to know
[ Lyrics from: http://www.lyricsfreak.com/a/all/educat ... 79964.html ]
I know how an engine works
I know where Old Zealand is
I don't know how to drive.
But I barely know my left feet from my right.

I'm not sure if I fit.
I recognize the species but
To analyze the universe to bits.
I quit.
We know exactly just enough
Smart enough to know

An educated idiot
I'm an educated idiot
Sure is good to know
I'm not alone.

[compared2what?]

What I'm saying is very simple- you can extrapolate as far as you like or not at all. But my basic argument is that conspiracy theories and you know, actual conspiracies, curiously emerge from the very same quarters- that of the far right. The shootings all have a common denominator that no one wants to talk about- I simply pointed it out.

Barber holds Gabrielle Giffords' seat for Democrats in Arizona

Democrat Ron Barber, Gabrielle Giffords' former district director, won the special election Tuesday to succeed his former boss in Arizona's 8th District, holding the open House seat for his party and earning a leg up in the race for a full term.

Barber led Republican Jesse Kelly, a Marine veteran and Giffords' 2010 challenger, 52 to 45 percent in the Tucson-area district.

The district leans Republican but remains highly competitive territory-- prompting some national interest from outside groups as well as party strategists in Washington. Republicans attempted to capitalize on the president and Obamacare's low approval numbers, tying Barber to each, while Barber cast Kelly as an opponent of Social Security.

"Ron Barber's strong campaign made this a referendum on the Republican plans to drastically cut Medicare and privatize Social Security, while giving massive tax breaks to millionaires, Big Oil and corporations that ship jobs overseas," Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Steve Israel said in a statement. "The Republican plan lost."

Israel said Democrats plan to capitalize on similar themes this election year.

Barber is expected to soon be sworn in by Congress to represent the open seat, which Giffords vacated in January amid her continued recovery from a January 2011 shooting attack at a town hall event. Barber also sustained injuries in that attack.

But this isn't the last time Barber and Kelly will be competing.

While Barber is now set to serve out the remainder of Giffords' current term, voters will still need to choose a representative for the coming session of Congress beginning in January 2013. Due to redistricting, most of the current 8th has been incorporated into the newly drawn and renumbered 2nd District, for which Barber, Kelly and additional candidates are running to represent. The primary for that race is Aug. 28.

Barber's win Tuesday offers him an advantage heading into the fight for a full term.

(LINK)

[Pele'sDaughter]

Just a strange and tragic coincidence.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-574 ... s-in-iowa/

(CBS News) DENVER - The family of a nurse who cared for victims in July's mass shooting at an Aurora, Colo., movie theater is mourning her loss, CBS Denver station KCNC-TV reports.


Jennifer Gallagher, 46, died while on a vacation in the northwestern part of Iowa. Her husband said she drowned while swimming with friends in Lake Okoboji.


Gallagher cared for some of the most critically injured patients after the mass shooting in the neurosurgical intensive care unit at University of Colorado Hospital. She was on duty in the ICU the day after the shooting.


"She did bring home a lot of the tragedy and talked about it," said Greg Pinson, her husband.


Pinson said his wife was particularly touched by one patient's story. Caleb Medley was shot in the eye by the gunman and has been in critical condition ever since. His wife -- who was also in the theater during the July 20 shooting -- was due to give birth a few days later. She decided to have the baby at University of Colorado Hospital to be close to Medley. The baby, Hugo, was born July 24.


"She was very affected by that, the fact that his life was so dramatically altered and a newborn baby arriving almost at the exact same time," Pinson said.

Gallagher was also there when President Obama came to the hospital to comfort families and thank the staff July 22.


"I think that was very special to her to be there when he was there, to get to meet him, you know, she was very proud of that," Pinson said.


Pinson and Gallagher got married seven years ago and have a 5-year-old son. Pinson said she loved being a nurse.


"She had a great capacity for empathy and a great capacity to make the patients and family members feel better," he said.


Pinson said it is his wife's smile he wants people to remember most.


"You know, everywhere she went she left people smiling and laughing, be it at work or home, or wherever she was," he said.


Gallagher was involved in Denver's Irish community and played on a ladies football team called the Denver Gaels. On the team website she is remembered as someone who always put others above herself.

[yathrib]

This is the quote of the year, if not the decade:

But my basic argument is that conspiracy theories and you know, actual conspiracies, curiously emerge from the very same quarters- that of the far right.

Welcome, Chris. I can't take everything you say at face value, but I appreciate your efforts to expose the not-so-hidden assumptions of the conspiratainment culture and its useful idiots. I hope you stay, but try not to be so thin skinned.

[8bitagent]

Barracude, CLK....here you go. Top headline story on MSNBC:

Army faces an influx of white nationalists seeking military training for "racial holy war"

US Army battling racists within its ranks
Leaders instructed to look out for tattoos of lightning bolts, skulls, swastikas, other extremist symbols

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — They call it "rahowa" — short for racial holy war — and they are preparing for it by joining the ranks of the world's fiercest fighting machine, the U.S. military.

White supremacists, neo-Nazis and skinhead groups encourage followers to enlist in the Army and Marine Corps to acquire the skills to overthrow what some call the ZOG — the Zionist Occupation Government. Get in, get trained and get out to brace for the coming race war.

If this scenario seems like fantasy or bluster, civil rights organizations take it as deadly serious, especially given recent events. Former U.S. Army soldier Wade Page opened fire with a 9 mm handgun at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin on August 5, murdering six people and critically wounding three before killing himself during a shootout with police.

The U.S. Defense Department as well has stepped up efforts to purge violent racists from its ranks, earning praise from organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has tracked and exposed hate groups since the 1970s.

Page, who was 40, was well known in the white supremacist music scene. In the early 2000s he told academic researcher Pete Simi that he became a neo-Nazi after joining the military in 1992. Fred Lucas, who served with him, said Page openly espoused his racist views until 1998, when he was demoted from sergeant to specialist, discharged and barred from re-enlistment.

While at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, Page told Simi, he made the acquaintance of James Burmeister, a skinhead paratrooper who in 1995 killed a black Fayetteville couple in a racially motivated shooting. Burmeister was sentenced to life in prison and died in 2007.

No one knows how many white supremacists have served since then. A 2008 report commissioned by the Justice Department found half of all right-wing extremists in the United States had military experience.

"We don't really think this is a huge problem, at Bragg, and across the Army," said Colonel Kevin Arata, a spokesman for Fort Bragg.

"In my 26 years in the Army, I've never seen it," the former company commander said.

Experts have identified the presence of street gang members as a more widespread problem. Even so, the Pentagon has launched three major pushes in recent decades to crack down on racist extremists. The first directive was issued in 1986, when Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger ordered military personnel to reject supremacist organizations.

That failed to stop former Marine T.J. Leyden, with two-inch SS bolts tattooed above his collar, from serving from 1988 to 1991 while openly supporting neo-Nazi causes. A member of the Hammerskin Nation, a skinhead group, he said he hung a swastika from his locker, taking it down only when his commander politely asked him to ahead of inspections by the commanding general.



"I went into the Marine Corps for one specific reason: I would learn how shoot," Leyden told Reuters. "I also learned how to use C-4 (explosives), blow things up. I took all my military skills and said I could use these to train other people," said Leyden, 46, who has since renounced the white power movement and is a consultant for the anti-Nazi Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Rattled by Oklahoma blast
In 1995, eight months before the Fort Bragg murders, two former Army soldiers bombed the Oklahoma City federal building, killing 168 people. With a growing awareness of the spreading militia movement, the Pentagon in 1996 banned military personnel from participating in supremacist causes and authorized commanders to cashier personnel for rallying, recruiting or training racists.

"What's scary about Page is that he served in the 1990s when putatively this was being treated quite seriously by the military. There's plenty of other Pages who served during the war on terror, and we don't know what they're going to be doing over the next decade or so," said Matt Kennard, author of the forthcoming book "Irregular Army: How the U.S. Military Recruited Neo-Nazis, Gang Members and Criminals to Fight the War on Terror."

Kennard argues the U.S. military was so desperate for troops while fighting simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that it allowed extremists, felons and gang members into the armed forces.

[Bruce Dazzling]

I've read 3 or 4 stories about the drowned nurse, including this pathetic excuse for journalism, and nobody is reporting anything about the "friend" she went out with for her moonlite swim.

Nurse who aided shooting victims in Aurora, Colo., theater attack drowns

Nurse Jennifer Gallagher, who helped treat victims of the Aurora theater shooting in Colorado, has drowned while on a family vacation in Iowa.

Gallagher, 46, of Denver, went swimming in West Lake Okoboji the night of Aug. 6 and her body was found the next day, according to the Sheriff's Office in Dickinson County, Iowa.

Gallagher, an Ireland native, worked at the University of Colorado Hospital for 13 years and cared especially for a shooting victim treated in the hospital's neurological intensive care unit, which she helped open. She was among staffers who met with President Barack Obama during his visit two days after the July 20 shooting rampage that killed 12 and wounded 58 at the Century Aurora 16 theater.

The hospital's nursing chief officer, Carolyn Sanders, said Gallagher was a "beloved nurse" who was well known for her ability to connect with people and develop caring relationships with her patients.

Her husband of seven years, Greg Pinson, told the Evening Herald newspaper of Dublin that his wife “loved saving lives” and was a “wonderful mother” to their son Jack, 5.

“We’re struggling to cope without her,” Pinson told the Herald.

He said he and Jack had gone to sleep when Gallagher and her friend took a boat out on the lake to go swimming.

"She wasn't a very strong swimmer and I suppose she just wasn't able to stay afloat. The hardest thing is I may never know what really happened to Jenny," Pinson said.

The County Meath native moved to United States in the 1990s to go to nursing school, the Herald said.

This article includes reporting by The Associated Press.

Well sweet holy fuck! Perhaps maybe someone should find that friend and ask her/him a question or three.

I mean FFS. I think Phyllis Diller's death received more forensic/journalistic scrutiny...

[justdrew]

yeah, it's really bizarre that they give no info about the night in question. Presumably her mysterious "friend" sounded the alarm and they were looking on the dark lake most of the night for her? You'd think they'd say so.

[barracuda]

Sorry, but the excitement and mystery surrounding the death of Jennifer Gallagher evades me. What is the importance of this story? How many doctors and nurses worked on patients at the three hospital emergency rooms serving the wounded from Aurora? How many police and emergency responders? Morgue personnel? Several hundreds?

I think this story has "pretty white lady" written all over it.

[barracuda]

Barracude, CLK....here you go. Top headline story on MSNBC:

Army faces an influx of white nationalists seeking military training for "racial holy war"

The article makes it sound like this is a new thing. It ain't. The white nationalists have been ex-military since the get-go (see: the history of the KKK), and they've been whispering about their stupid RaHoWa for around forty years and calling it some other dumb-ass name for a hundred years before that.

[justdrew]

well, yeah, it's totally probably just a random event, but I agree the reporting is piss-poor at best. Some of the stories suggest she went swimming alone. Others say "with a friend". She wasn't reported missing til the next morning.

Some friend.

[82_28]

She was probably wasted. Not to be glib, but she probably was. Some friends of mine were camping last week and had a drunken water mishap with some of their friends. It happens. No doubt this time of year Lake Okoboji is a shit show. Her friends had probably passed out.

But, who knows?

[justdrew]

She was probably wasted. Not to be glib, but she probably was. Some friends of mine were camping last week and had a drunken water mishap with some of their friends. It happens. No doubt this time of year Lake Okoboji is a shit show. Her friends had probably passed out.

But, who knows?

yeah, I was thinking along those lines too, and that may explain the "quiet" around those details too

[8bitagent]

Fuck, if I saw all that trauma I'd be wasted to. Hell Im wasted most nights when Im out dancing or partying.

What I'm wondering is why no security footage has been announced, was there truly someone who let James Holmes in, what more do we know of his online searches and reasoning, and
what was his full plan? Like, why did he announce the booby traps?

[compared2what?]

Barracude, CLK....here you go. Top headline story on MSNBC:

Army faces an influx of white nationalists seeking military training for "racial holy war"

The article makes it sound like this is a new thing. It ain't. The white nationalists have been ex-military since the get-go (see: the history of the KKK), and they've been whispering about their stupid RaHoWa for around forty years and calling it some other dumb-ass name for a hundred years before that.

The Bush-Cheney uptick in felony waivers for recruitment purposes can't exactly have helped reduce the connection, though. (Prison gangs, I mean.)

But there's no particular reason to think they're all from (and/or in) southern/western states, anyway. So moot point.