The Sandy Hook Elementary massacre: Strange details... (UPDATE)

This post will be written far too rapidly, since the sun will rise soon and I have not yet slept. (One of those projects kept me up all night.) Yet I feel compelled to dash off a few notes about the recent school massacre. Although I don't want to give any credence to the wacky (and predictable) right-wing conspiracy theories involving mind control and the Great Gun Round-Up, the Newtown school tragedy does offer some legitimate oddities worth pondering.

1. We still don't have any explanation for the early "second shooter" sightings! As I said on Day One, even if those stories were in error, we still deserve an explanation for disturbing on-site reports like this one:

Police reportedly questioning someone. Witness says the man was led out of the woods by police in handcuffs.

2. We had more than the usual amount of misinformation in the early stages of this story. First the shooter's name was given as Ryan Lanza; the gunman turned out to be his younger brother Adam. We also heard that the mother was a teacher at the school; she wasn't.

These are serious journalistic mistakes. How did they occur?

3. Adam Lanza was a 20 year-old computer nerd. Yet so far, it looks as though this guy has left no internet traces. That's bizarre. Downright unheard-of.

4. We have conflicting reports about Adam's mother, Nancy Lanza. People who knew her have said that she was a wonderful person who gave to charity and socialized with the neighbors. Yet other accounts have held that she was a highly reclusive individual who was hard on her son.

It seems clear now that Nancy Lanza was indeed a gun enthusiast. More than that: She reportedly was a "Doomsday prepper" -- a survivalist. Most survivalists keep compounds in rural areas. Nancy set up shop in a mansion in an upscale Connecticut neighborhood.

Some have challenged the "prepper" account on the grounds that it stems from but one source -- an interview given by her former sister-in-law Marsha Lanza. However, the Washington Post and other sources indicate that Nancy allowed no-one inside her home. She acted as if she were hiding something. The landscaper was paid out of doors, never stepping foot inside the house.Very unusual behavior, that. When Nancy showed off part of her gun collection to the landscaper, she did not invite him in. Instead, she brought the weaponry outside.

(Come to think of it -- what kind of person feels compelled to brag about her guns to a landscaper?)

Her strange, secretive behavior suggests that Marsha is telling the truth.

5. A friend of Nancy's has told reporters that she was a "responsible gun owner." Oh really?

She kept guns in a home with a child she knew to be psychologically unstable. Instead of keeping firearms out of the clutches of her sick kid, she taught him how to operate semi-automatic weaponry.

I don't care what your stance is on gun control. Even the staunchest of Second Amendment fundamentalists must understand this point: Anyone who shelters a young man displaying psychotic behavior and violent tendencies shouldn't keep guns in the house.

Nancy clearly was not a responsible gun owner. I suspect that she was so enmeshed in the survivalist mindset that she lost sight of her clear duty -- a duty owed to her son, to her community, and to herself. She paid dearly for that error.

The prepper community will not be able to spin away Nancy Lanza's behavior. This is bad for them.

6. Peter Lanza's background probably has no relationship to the his son's outbreak of mad violence. Still, it is worth noting that, according to a number of published reports, the elder Lanza was the main tax guy for General Electric financial. One article reported that he earns a cool million a year. (When he divorced Nancy, he gave her that huge house plus a handsome annual payment.)

He is also the VP of G.E. Capital.

Was Lanza involved with, or cognizant of, the G.E. accounting fraud scandal that came to light in 2009 -- and which nearly everyone has forgotten about?

You may recall that G.E. shocked many Americans by finding ways to avoid taxes altogether.

General Electric, one of the largest corporations in America, filed a whopping 57,000-page federal tax return earlier this year but didn't pay taxes on $14 billion in profits. The return, which was filed electronically, would have been 19 feet high if printed out and stacked.

Peter Lanza had to be involved with that.

7. A number of sites report that Peter Lanza was set to testify in the Libor scandal. I don't know exactly what he was expected to say.

You know who else was  -- reportedly -- going to testify vis-a-vis Libor? Robert Holmes, the father of James "Joker" Holmes, the Colorado killer who shot up the theater showing The Dark Knight Rises. I emphasize the word "reportedly" because I haven't yet seen mainstream confirmation. (The allegation has received a lot of play on conspiracy sites.) However, it has been established that the elder Holmes worked for FICO.

Again: I would advise against cobbling together any oddball conspiracy theories tying points 6 and 7 in with the shootings. I'm not out to get Pater Lanza. Obviously, I feel feel sorry for any father who has to deal with what he must be going through right now.

But...cah-MON. You gotta admit: A possible Libor connection to both the Colorado and Connecticut events is just plain freaky.

One final note. If Nancy really was a prepper, she was probably in communication with the kind of rednecks who would automatically presume Peter to be a tool of the Great Illuminati Conspiracy. I'd like to know more about that marriage. Did Nancy's firearms fetishism create the tensions that led to divorce?

UPDATE: Here's another source for the story that Peter Lanza and Robert Holmes were to testify as part of the Libor scandal. (Thanks, Lambert!)

Both men were to testify before the US Sentate in the ongoing LIBOR scandal. The London Interbank Offered Rate, known as Libor, is the average interest rate at which banks can borrow from each other. 16 international banks have been implicated in this ongoing scandal, accused of rigging contracts worth trillions of dollars. HSBC has already been fined $1.9 billion and three of their low level traders arrested.

Fascinating. But I cannot come up with any comprehensible scenario connecting the Libor testimony with the shootings. And my imagination is as good as anyone else's.

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Good, but not good enough

Al Franken is pushing a "stalking app" bill which will limit the amount of information your mobile unit can collect about you and pass onto others without your knowledge.

"Companies — some legitimate, some sleazy — are collecting your child's location and selling it to ad companies or who knows who else," Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, said in a statement.

In his remarks to the Judiciary Committee, the senator pointed to a recent Federal Trade Commission report that found app makers are collecting an "alarming" amount of data about children, without disclosure.

To combat the problem, the Location Privacy Protection Act of 2011 would require companies to get customers' permission before collecting or sharing data with non-government third parties, but also works to raise awareness about GPS stalking, and makes it a crime to intentionally operate a stalking application.

Senator Franken's bill is a step in the right direction, but we must go further. This act still accepts the proposition that the government has a right to know any citizen's location and web-surfing habits. I would prefer to keep such things hidden from Uncle Sam, thank you very much. That preference doesn't make me a criminal. I am, in fact, a (more or less) law-abiding private citizen -- emphasis on the private.

If you are about to tell me "If you're doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about" -- well, that's what people told themselves in the Third Reich.

(And fuck Godwin's law. In this instance, the analogy to Hitler's Germany is perfectly appropriate.)

If Uncle wants to know what we are up to, Uncle ought to get a damn warrant. Uncle's minions must be forced to create a paper trail showing good cause for them to know the details of our lives. Your parents and grandparents would have sneered at this generation's lazy acceptance of Big Brotherism.

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Politicizing tragedy

Why did Obama win an election that should have been a lock for the GOP? Because too many people have grown tired of conservative horseshit. Our wacky rightists simply do not provide a credible alternative, even when they face a very disappointing (if not infuriating) Democratic president and party.

The Connecticut school massacre provides a case in point. Immediately after the shootings occurred, the rightists warned: "Do not politicize this tragic event!" Yet in their own writings and tweets and public declarations, they have done nothing but politicize the tragedy.

The result is hypocrisy raised to the level of psychosis. Examples:

-- Even as the right tells the left to hold its collective tongue, conservatives feel free to pronounce that the children of Sandy Hook Elementary were killed by gun control laws.

-- Republican geniuses in Michigan decided that now is the time to push for legislation allowing guns in schools.

-- Mike Huckabee (as noted in the post below) and others have claimed that the massacre occurred because schools no longer lead children in public prayer. I'm not sure someone as psychotic as Adam Lanza would have cared one way or the other.

-- Alex Jones, whom Matt Drudge has been "mainstreaming" in recent years, used Sandy Hook for one of his characteristically insane rants. He claims that Obama plans to use this incident to "repeal" the Second Amendment. Not only that: Jones accuses MSNBC and Salon of being "state" media, supported by the government. (I'm old enough to recall when conspiracy theorists recognized at least some obligation to offer evidence.)

-- Here's Glenn Beck, by way of Salon:

Glenn Beck was a bit more contemplative. “It is not the gun. It is the soul,” he wrote. “Our society is broken. Our communities are suffering, and it is because of the ever expanding lack of self control & personal responsibility.” Apparently the shooter didn’t have enough personal responsibility.

That's right, folks: Glenn Beck -- the original lachymorose,  hyper-emotional Creature of the Id -- has seen fit to lecture the rest of us on the need for self-control.

-- The Breitbarters scored CNN's Piers Morgan for "exploiting" the tragedy, and uses that same word against Representative Jerrold Nadler. Yet the Breitbarters themselves have gone full P.T. Barnum in their coverage of the massacre. They blame the goth subculture. As I recall, the Breitbart crew was just as inane in their discussion of the previous massacre in Oregon, which they blamed on Occupy Wall Street.

(Actually, Adam Lanza was a computer geek. Maybe we should blame the tech-heads.)

Perhaps liberals should encourage our conservative brethren to persevere in this behavior. When the right-wingers heat up the hypocrisy and pile on the crazy, they help Dems get elected. Right-wingers spend so much time screaming paranoid nonsense at each other that they don't know how foolish they sound to normal people.

They would do their own cause a lot of good if they cut out the double talk about "politicizing" the tragedy. Of course people are going to discuss gun control legislation after a mass shooting. That conversation is inevitable. The people who initiate that conversation are not evil conspirators; they are normal human beings. So when that debate begins, opponents of gun control should not become angry or suspicious or accusatory. They should simply present their case in a calm, reasonable manner.

That's how you win people over.

If Republicans have lost the ability to speak in that fashion, they consign themselves to the fringe.

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Mike Huckabee, super genius

Mike Huckabee understands why the Sandy Hook school shooting occurred:

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee attributed the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in part to restrictions on school prayer and religious materials in the classroom.

"We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools," Huckabee said on Fox News, discussing the murder spree that took the lives of 20 children and 6 adults in Newtown, CT that morning. "Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?"

Law enforcement has released few details on the alleged gunman, but Huckabee suggested that the separation of church and state may have spurred his rampage.

"[W]e've made it a place where we don't want to talk about eternity, life, what responsibility means, accountability -- that we're not just going to have be accountable to the police if they catch us, but one day we stand before, you know, a holy God in judgment," Huckabee said. "If we don't believe that, then we don't fear that."

By this logic, schools in the U.K., France, Belgium, Germany and lots of other places ought to be daily bloodbaths. Atheists are far more plentiful in other western countries, and education is a strictly secular business. Some have even suggested that we ought to label Europe a "post Christian" civilization.

So where's the carnage in European schools, Mike? You have offered us a simple equation: Godless schools = Gore galore. Care to explain why we don't see daily murders in the schoolyards of Paris and London?

(If you ever get the face-to-face opportunity to ask that question of some fundamentalist offering a Huckabee-esque exercise in logic, expect said fundamentalist to switch the subject with a speed reminiscent of Superman on meth.)

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The tragedy

Obviously, we're all thinking about the horrifying events in Connecticut right now. I suppose there will be more to say later, especially when the right-wingers start spinning their predictable paranoid yarns about mind control and the Great Gun Round-Up. Right now, though, let's put one oddity on the record...

CBS News reports that a potential second shooter is in custody and that SWAT is now investigating the home of the suspect. CBS News’ John Miller reports that authorities went into the suspect’s home after seeing what appeared to be a body inside.

A witness tells WFSB-TV that a second man was taken out of the woods in handcuffs wearing a black jacket and camouflage pants and telling parents on the scene, “I did not do it.”

I'm sure that there will be soon be a reasonable explanation for this incident. But let's not allow the report of a second gunman slide away without explanation.

Update: Woah! Looks like the bizarre conspiracy theories are already blazing. The links are here and here...

From the latter:

This shooting was a government engineered conspiracy so Obama has an excuse to take away our guns and turn America into a police state, like Alex Jones has been warning us about. Anyone who disagrees is a government sheep.

I'm just a Tea Party Patriot who can see through the government agenda to take away our guns via staged shootings.

Boring. The first link, however, offers us a promising headline...

How The CIA Trained Shooter In Connecticut! Shooting Tied To European Court Ruling Against The CIA!

Unfortunately, the story below that headline is just rehashed yada-yada about MKULTRA. The "European court ruling" bit is no more than a particularly loopy exercise in post hoc ergo propter hoc anti-logic. Yawn.

I do wish that our right-wing weirdos would put more thought into their efforts. If the paranoids can't show more creativity, then we might as well not even have national tragedies.

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Against Kerry; for Huntsman. (With sadness.)

He wants the job, he can do the job, he deserves the job. But he shouldn't be given the job. And I say that as a lifelong admirer of John Kerry, now everyone's favorite choice for Secretary of State.

Why shouldn't he have the gig? Because the Republican war on Rice had the Machiavellian goal of moving John Kerry out of the Senate, opening up a chair for Scott Brown. The number crunchers are already doping out Brown's chances:

Brown's loss in his 2012 race to Senator-elect Liz Warren was, at least partially, because of the demographics in presidential elections. Black voters turned out in higher numbers for Obama than they would have otherwise; 18- to 29-year-old turnout also is usually depressed in non-presidential years.

I wanted to find out what Brown's loss in 2012 might have looked like under the 2010 special election turnout. The problem is that there were no exit polls taken for the special election. There was a survey conducted by telephone afterward, but exit polls tend to find more minorities and younger people than telephone surveys. The 2012 exit poll also found an electorate that was actually 7pt more white in 2012 than in 2008, which a whole host of evidence indicates was almost certainly not the case.

We can still get a decent idea of what would have occurred in special and midterm elections based on a number of factors, including voter age, ideology (more consistent from survey to survey than party identification), and race. Warren's margin of victory of 7pt in 2012 probably would have dropped by to only a 4pt win with special election or midterm turnout. This is not enough to erase her margin of victory, yet it's a significant reduction. Without Obama on the top of the ticket, you could make the argument that Brown might have made it much closer.

There's something evil about such calculations, yet the argument has a certain persuasive power. Brown has a chance to become a senator again -- not a good chance, but also not a bad chance. And you can bet that the Republicans will pour a ton of cash into a Brown race.

Brown himself has hinted at a new run:

“As I’ve said many times before, victory and defeat is temporary,” he told colleagues. “Depending on what happens, and where we go, all of us, we may obviously meet again.

He opposes any changes to the filibuster process. Ominous.

Here's another argument against Kerry: He has the backing of David Ignatius, whom Glenn Greenwald once called "the CIA's spokesman at The Washington Post." (Correction: The current CIA spokesman at The Washington Post.)

My preferred choice: Jon Huntsman.

Granted, such a move would be more than a little odd. If Obama picks Hagel for Defense, then replacing Clinton with Huntsman would, in essence, hand two major posts to Republicans. Doing so would piss off a lot of Dems -- including quite a few readers of this humble blog -- but would forevermore blunt all criticism of Obama as overly partisan. (Hell, a number of Cannonfire readers will tell you that Obama has been a moderate Republican all along.)

In the words of this recent piece on Huntsman's presidential race:

"There was no edge to his message, no contrast with other candidates, and he was way too subtle," said Fergus Cullen, a former chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party, who endorsed Huntsman shortly before the state’s primary. "I appreciated his civility a lot, but I concluded that fundamentally, he’s a diplomat and not a politician."

Okay. So give the guy a job which plays to those skills.

The fact that he speaks Mandarin would certainly be a huge plus. Here's Huntsman speaking on foreign policy (mostly on China) last October, pointing up one possible reason not to choose him:

I was supposed to be there a month ago giving a speech, but they canceled my visa. Why? Because I talk too much about human rights and American values, and they know that. And at a time of leadership realignment, the biggest deal in 10 years for them, they didn't want the former U.S. ambassador saying stuff that might create a narrative that they would have to fight. I understand that. But when the transition is done, the crazy American ambassador will be let back in, and I can say whatever I want. As they used to tell me when I was over there was "Women zhongguo ye you zhengzhi"---"We have politics too in China."

I don't think that minor squabble should prove too much of a problem.

There are still a few non-insane Republicans lurking about, and they deserve encouragement. The wackos look even wackier when compared to a man like Jon Huntsman.

His views on the financial crisis, as expressed in 2011, had much to recommend them -- arguably, he adopted a more capital-D Democratic stance than did Barack Obama. The next Secretary of State will have to deal with the European debt problem.

I've spent years carping at Obama for being too nice to the opposing team, so it isn't easy for me to say this. But the President should make Jon Huntsman his next Secretary of State.

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Rice withdraws

I was saddened to learn that Susan Rice has withdrawn her name from consideration as Secretary of State. The proximate cause was, of course, the inane controversy over Benghazi:

Rice, who was considered a top contender for the position, has been embroiled recently in ongoing controversy surrounding her account of the September 11 Libya attacks, which she discussed in a series of talk show appearances on September 16. 

Infuriating. There is no genuine scandal here; the whole pseudo-controversy was ginned up by the Republicans as an election-year gimmick.

I mean, come on -- just what it, exactly, that the Republicans have been trying to say? Do they really think that Obama lied about the attack because he was somehow trying to cover up for his Mooooslim buddies in Al Qaeda? That kind of paranoid nonsense might seem credible to sub-Trumpian birthers and cognate aficionados of quasi-psychotic absurdia, but the idea is laughable to all rational people.

Everything Rice said about Benghazi derived from reports she received from the intelligence community. If those reports got the story wrong, you can't blame her. It's not as though she personally went snooping around Libya looking for the truth, then lied about what she found.

If the CIA offered varying descriptions of what happened on September 11 -- and they did -- we must presume that their analysts received conflicting reports from their human and electronic sources. That kind of dispute happens all the freakin' time in the world of intelligence analysis.

Whenever a violent outbreak occurs, historians often argue about who did what when -- and those arguments have been known to span centuries. We still don't know whether the Russians or the French set the great Moscow fire of 1812. We still don't know precisely how Wat Tyler's rebellion originated. People still argue about the sequence of events surrounding the Boston Massacre.

Turning the Libyan attack into a weapon against the Democrats was always nothing more than a cheap, low GOP ploy. The Republicans thought that spinning absurdities about Benghazi could bring down Obama. When that line of attack failed, they settled on a secondary target. Rice.

Their obvious goal is to push John Kerry into that post, thereby freeing up his seat for Brown.

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