Wednesday - April 18, 2007

Motivational Poster Of The Day

Posted by The Skipper     on 04/18/2007 at 03:16 PM   
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SCOTUS Upholds Abortion Law

The Supreme Court has just handed down a 5-4 decision upholding the 2003 Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, which says it is NOT OK to force labor in the second or third trimester and when the baby starts to come out stick a fork in its head, stir its brains up and suck them out for disposal along with the rest of the dead baby. Does this mean we can go back to behaving like civilized human beings again ... ?

Court Backs Ban on Abortion Procedure
WASHINGTON (AP) - Apr 18, 10:30 AM (ET)

The Supreme Court upheld the nationwide ban on a controversial abortion procedure Wednesday, handing abortion opponents the long-awaited victory they expected from a more conservative bench.

The 5-4 ruling said the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act that Congress passed and President Bush signed into law in 2003 does not violate a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion.

The opponents of the act “have not demonstrated that the Act would be unconstitutional in a large fraction of relevant cases,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion.

The decision pitted the court’s conservatives against its liberals, with President Bush’s two appointees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, siding with the majority. Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia also were in the majority. It was the first time the court banned a specific procedure in a case over how - not whether - to perform an abortion.

Abortion rights groups have said the procedure sometimes is the safest for a woman. They also said that such a ruling could threaten most abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy, although government lawyers and others who favor the ban said there are alternate, more widely used procedures that remain legal.

The outcome is likely to spur efforts at the state level to place more restrictions on abortions. More than 1 million abortions are performed in the United States each year, according to recent statistics. Nearly 90 percent of those occur in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, and are not affected by Wednesday’s ruling.

Six federal courts have said the law that was in focus Wednesday is an impermissible restriction on a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion. The law bans a method of ending a pregnancy, rather than limiting when an abortion can be performed. “Today’s decision is alarming,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in dissent. She said the ruling “refuses to take ... seriously” previous Supreme Court decisions on abortion.

Ginsburg said the latest decision “tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.” She was joined by Justices Stephen Breyer, David Souter and John Paul Stevens.

- More ...

Posted by The Skipper     on 04/18/2007 at 11:42 AM   
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Just Like a Car

Lawdog smacks another meme out of the park

I see that the gun grabbers have resurrected the old “We license cars, so why can’t we license guns?” meme.

I tell you what—every time you hear a gun grabber snivel about licensing guns like cars, call him a liar to his face.

I would absolutely love to license guns just like we do cars and drivers—for the same reason that every gun grabber who suggests it is lying through his or her snaggle teeth.

Think about it.

We give a drivers license to every seventeen-year-old high school student who can pass a lowest-common-denominator Drivers Ed course. A course that can be successfully passed by a lobotomized chimpanzee

Tell me, Mr or Ms. Gun Grabber, that you want to license guns just like cars. You’ll give a gun license to every 17 year-old who wants one—just like a drivers license.

You’re a liar.

That’s only the first of about 6 diatribes he goes through.

Posted by Drew458     on 04/18/2007 at 10:51 AM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists •  
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Phase II: Copycats & Hysteria

During Phase I of the VT shooting incident. The media descended on Blacksburg like a swarm of locusts, interviewing every warm body within reach to get reactions, diagnose the killer, describe the crime scene and ultimately ... assign blame.

That’s Strike One.

Now we are entering Phase II of the crime. The media have retreated back to their studios and called in all of the talking heads who will diagnose the killer, analyze the victims, discuss what could have been done to prevent it and ... assign blame.

That’s Strike Two.

The result of all of this media hysteria and endless 24/7 coverage is that a lot of warped individuals out there in the rest of this country see their chance to rise from obscurity and gain a fleeting moment of fame by either pulling off a copycat crime or at the very least, threatening one. Of course the media will have to fly off and cover those threats too and once more they will be looking to ... assign blame.

The easy target in all of this is your average, everyday firearm. It can’t defend itself but it is perceived by the liberal media as a direct threat to mankind. That is why the talking heads and newspaper editors are about to enter Phase III, wherein they hop up on their soapbox and call for the Second Amendment to be repealed or severely restricted - pressure on Congress to follow forthwith.

That’s Strike Three.

Send the media to the showers, coach. They can’t even get on base but they brag about their batting average at every Pulitzer committee meeting. When is someone going to do the research and look into our existing laws and figure out why they’re not working and why judges let killers like this go scot free? How can we better handle mental cripples like the VT killer when it seems all the signs were there that something was definitely amiss in his head?

We would be better served if the media would start asking those questions rather than blaming an inanimate object that is completely harmless without a human being operating it. For the time being though, we really need someone to explain “a 6-foot-tall man in a skirt, high heels, lipstick and a blond wig near a school drop-off area”. I’m sure the media will be all over that ....

Threats Rattle Schools in 10 States
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - Apr 18, 12:03 AM (ET)

Campus threats forced lock-downs and evacuations at universities, high schools and middle schools in at least 10 states on Tuesday, a day after a Virginia Tech student’s shooting rampage killed 33 people.

Threats in Louisiana, Montana and Washington state directly mentioned the massacre in Virginia, while others were reports of suspicious activity in Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, Tennessee, North Dakota, South Dakota and Michigan.

In Louisiana, parents picked up hundreds of students from Bogalusa’s high school and middle school amid reports that a man had been arrested Tuesday morning for threatening a mass killing in a note that alluded to the murders at Virginia Tech.

Schools Superintendent Jerry Payne said both schools were locked down and police arrested a 53-year-old man who allegedly made the threat in a note he gave to a student headed to the private Bowling Green School in Franklinton. Both towns are in southeastern Louisiana. “The note referred to what happened at Virginia Tech,” Payne said. “It said something like, ‘If you think that was bad, then you haven’t seen anything yet.”

A Great Falls, Mont., high school was locked down for a time Tuesday after a threatening note was found in a girls’ bathroom. A student found the threatening note at about 12:15 p.m. on a toilet paper dispenser. It stated, “the shooting would start at Great Falls High at 12:30 and it would be worse than Virginia Tech,” Assistant Superintendent Dick Kuntz said. He said it was a hoax.

Washington State University’s branch campus in Vancouver was evacuated because of graffiti discovered in a campus restroom threatened harm likened to the Virginia slayings around 8 p.m., around the time a conference on the Patriot Act and the war on terror was scheduled, authorities said. The event was to be rescheduled.

In Rapid City, S.D., schools were locked down after receiving reports of a man with a gun in a parking lot at Central High. No shots were fired and no injuries were reported, police said. The high school students were taken to the nearby Rushmore Plaza Civic Center, where parents were allowed to pick up their children.

In Austin, authorities evacuated buildings at St. Edward’s University after a threatening note was found, a school official said. Police secured the campus perimeter and were searching the buildings, St. Edward’s University spokeswoman Mischelle Amador said. She declined to say where the note was found and said its contents were “nonspecific.” Amador said the university’s reaction was not influenced by Monday’s attack at Virginia Tech.

“No matter what day or when this would have happened, we will always take the necessary precautions to protect our students, our faculty, our staff, the entire university community,” she said.

Seven North Dakota State University buildings in Fargo were evacuated after a duffel bag was found outside a bus shelter in the main part of the campus. NDSU spokesman Dave Wahlberg said the shootings in Virginia reinforced the need to “err on the side of safety.”

In Bloomfield Hills, Mich., police attributed a 30-minute lock-down at the exclusive Cranbrook Schools complex in response to jittery nerves following the Virginia slayings.

School officials called police after parents and students reported spotting a 6-foot-tall man in a skirt, high heels, lipstick and a blond wig near a school drop-off area outside Cranbrook’s Kingswood Upper School, Lt. Paul Myszenski said. Police were unable to find anyone meeting the man’s description.

At the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, officials ordered three campus administration buildings evacuated for almost two hours Tuesday morning in response to a telephone bomb threat. The city’s bomb squad searched the buildings but found nothing, campus spokesman Chuck Cantrell said.

- More ...

Posted by The Skipper     on 04/18/2007 at 09:51 AM   
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Murderers Row

What do serial killers and terrorists have in common? Good question. There is a lot of truth in the answer given by Robert Tracinski below. Essentially, there is no difference other than motive and scale. There are madmen all around us. The only thing I would add to the editorial below is: why then do we have a Congress that wants to turn our backs on the terrorists and walk away, hoping they will leave us alone ,and why do we have such a lax judicial system that effectively does the same when murderers are given light sentences and released in the hope they will leave us alone?

“The Killers Creed”
-by Robert Tracinski (The Intellectual Activist)

The irony of the Virginia Tech case is that it is distractinng our attention from the War on Terrorism, when it ought to be drawing our attention to that wider issue, because of the basic similarity of a spree shooter and a terrorist.

This may be why, of all the nations whose press has covered this case, the English-speaking Israeli press seems to have paid the least attention. A disgruntled individual decides that the world has been unjust to him, and he seeks to redeem his sense of failure and “humiliation” by engaging in a killing spree that ends in his own death—none of that is news to the Israelis. They have faced this sort of thing constantly, for years, from alienated Palestinian youth.

But the Palestinian spree killers are different—and that difference is what makes them far more dangerous. For years, whenever one of these mass shooting makes it into the news, Jack Wakeland has described the killer to me as a terrorist without a cause—a terrorist who uses random violence to protest the narrow fact that his girlfriend dumped him or that he has a dead-end job, the narrow fact of his own failure in life. (The Virginia Tech killer apparently left a “manifesto” with a “somewhat incoherent list of grievances.")

These spree killers have the mentality of a terrorist—but without a wider political cause to give their criminal schemes a sense of moral or religious legitimacy. But what about those who do have a justification—a whole religious, moral, and political theory—that make their lust to kill into more than just a personal fury?

What of those who have a theory that makes killing into a holy war—a jihad—which, in turn, allows them to recruit followers and start an organized movement with many sympathizers in the general population?

That is precisely what we face in the War on Terrorism: the mentality of the serial killer as a religious and political system that threatens us with mass death on a scale far greater than any disgruntled loner with a handgun could ever dream of. If you don’t believe me, check out the extraordinary report below, which I briefly referenced in yesterday’s TIA Daily, but which deserves more examination in light of yesterday’s events.

This report reinforces what September 11 has already taught us: that we are up against an ideology that justifies murder in the name of religion and threatens to generate and unleash upon us whole squadrons of serial killers. Worse, we face the possibility of the ultimate spree killer: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, armed not with a pair of pistols, but with nuclear-armed missiles.

“Report: Serial Killers Cleared by Iranian Supreme Court as Victims’ Activities Were Un-Islamic,” FoxNews.com, April 15

The Iranian Supreme Court has vacated the murder convictions of a group of serial killers because their victims were engaging in un-Islamic activities, the British Broadcasting Corp. reports.

The men were convicted for a series of grisly killings in the southeastern city of Kerman in 2002. The vigilantes were said to believe that Islam condoned the killing of anyone engaged in illicit activities if they issued two warnings to the victims, the BBC reports.

At least 18 people were killed on the murder spree, but the men were only tried for five of the deaths. Some of the victims were stoned, others were suffocated, and at least one man was buried alive, according to the vigilantes’ confessions. These men told the court that their understanding of the teachings of one Islamic cleric allowed them to kill immoral people if they had ignored two warnings to stop their bad behavior, according to the BBC.

For more from Mr. Tracinski subscribe to TIA Daily

Posted by The Skipper     on 04/18/2007 at 09:12 AM   
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   Tuesday - April 17, 2007

I Pray ….

_{Gary Varvel - The Indianapolis Star-News}

Posted by The Skipper     on 04/17/2007 at 08:39 PM   
Filed Under: • Personal •  
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Recon Patrol Status Report

What are our reconnaissance scouts coming up with at the BMEWS Recon Patrol blog? Let’s find out ....



“The Indestructo Tank” -by- Elliott

“Playing With Blog Bling” -by- mythusmage

“There Are Always Consequences” -by- mythusmage

“Guten Tag Mi Amigos” -by- WarWagon

“Missing In Action Report” -by- Sergei

“New School Prayer” -by- chip

“Gun-Free Zones” -by- tuffbeing right

“Teach Your Children Well” -by- mythusmage

Posted by The Skipper     on 04/17/2007 at 04:40 PM   
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Lost!

Lost again, Zoomies! This time I’m over CONUS and out west. This base is home to more B1-B Lancer strategic bombers than you can shake a stick at. It is also the “greenest” USAF base in the world as it gets up to 80% of the energy it uses from wind power. The city it is next to was made famous in a country music song by Bob Gibson and Les Brown in 1956. Where in heck am I?

_{(Click image for larger 1065x915 in popup window)
(Photo from Google Earth Desktop)}

Posted by The Skipper     on 04/17/2007 at 04:38 PM   
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Motivational Poster Of The Day

Posted by The Skipper     on 04/17/2007 at 04:20 PM   
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European Hysteria Over Firearms Begins

Surprise! Europeans think Americans are wild and wooly, bloodthirsty, gun-totin’, suicidal madmen, ruled by the NRA and driven by a wild west mentality to run around the streets and into schools as nothing more than wild gunslingers. (LINK: Der Speigel) Euro-Peon newspapers have spent the entire day today psychoanalyzing the American mentality and pointing out all of our obvious defects - as opposed to their “civilized” gun laws over there.

Need I remind our Euro-Peon friends that if the Jews in Germany in 1934 had owned guns, the Holocaust probably would never have happened and those crazy, gun-totin’ Americans would not have had to trot over the ocean to stop the bloodshed. Besides, with Euro-Peons disarming the public in recent years, crime rates have soared. People who live in glass continents ... etc. ...

THE INDEPENDENT (UK)

“The passionate feelings of the gun lobby may be traced to the Second Amendment of the US Constitution, enshrining ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms’. Although the provision stems from the times when ‘well regulated militias’ were deemed necessary to protect against a British attempt to regain the lost colonies, it is the default position of any argument against greater gun control here.”

“As such, it has trumped every other consideration, not least the fact that on any given day about 80 people are killed by firearms, the vast majority by murder or suicide. Gun violence may cost $2.3 billion each year in medical expenses, but it is a price, gun supporters believe, that is worth paying to protect a fundamental freedom ...”

TIMES OF LONDON (UK)

“The trauma of the death of the students at Virginia Tech that will spread across the university and the whole country will be magnified by the feelings of so many people who feel that they should have been able to prevent it.”

“Doubtless there will be a call to review the availability of firearms. The National Rifle Association’s (NRA) response is predictable too. They will point out that events such as this are not carried out by a rifle-wielding member of a weekend militia. There is no doubt that access to rapid-action shotguns makes these events even more destructive but as we have seen with suicide bombers, who are closer to spree killers than is often realized, if a person really wants to take their own life and kill others in doing so it is exceptionally difficult to prevent it.”

LE MONDE (FRANCE)

“The shooting at Virginia Tech ... is a dramatic episode of school violence that fits into a long series of such episodes, a series topped by the drama at Columbine, the school attacked by two adolescents in 1999 ...”

“If Columbine left such a strong impression, that was because it was one of the first dramas of school violence that received broad coverage in the media. Americans were informed of what was happening in real time, via TV and the radio. The students called their families or CNN even as the killers were still roaming the corridors of the schools. ...”

LE FIGARO (FRANCE)

“It was all too easy easy for the elected representatives of the United States, from the White House to the Congress, to express their sadness yesterday; America’s problem with fire-arms represents a political issue for which they share responsibility. Here is a country that represents the vanguard of development and democracy while it is legal to carry a gun in 45 of 50 states, as long as the gun is not loaded. ... At the end of 2004, the Republican-controlled Congress allowed a law to expire that prohibited the sale of semi-automatic and military weapons. Thereafter, legal changes were made to protect the producers and vendors of fire-arms from being held responsible for the actions of gun owners.”

“Contrary to what one would imagine, this backward stance is not something left over from the Wild West. It goes back to the creation of the United States and the War of Independence against the English. ... While most states have issued laws designed to control the sale of arms, the NRA ensures they remain inefficient or are not applied. Strongly linked to the conservative fringe of the Republican Party, the NRA spent $400,000 a day to prevent the election of the Democratic candidate John Kerry during the 2004 presidential elections ...”

IL MESSAGGERO (ITALY)

“The bloodbath on the university campus is the work of a suicide killer—an American suicide killer who, differently from Muslim killers, did not act out of religious motives but was driven instead by the unrest affecting broad layers of US society. America is a nation that has for some years been in danger of becoming more and more unloved in the world, especially in the poorest countries. During the period following World War II, America was seen as the guardian of democracy and was equated with the defense of liberty; today, America is a superpower that begins wars and lives with the constant necessity of having to defend itself against the enemy—whether this enemy be called Islam or whether it bears the face of the neighbor who has done you wrong.”

EL PAIS (SPAIN)

“The president of Virginia Tech called it a tragedy of monumental proportions. But similar comments could already be heard following previous tragedies of this kind. The shooting spree at the Columbine high school in Colorado, for instance, revived the debate on the necessity of better controlling access to weapons. This led to some laws being toughened and security at schools being improved. But the measures are decided by the individual states and are constantly side-stepped by means of an exaggerated interpretation of the US constitution.”

BILD (GERMANY)

“Now we will probably begin discussing the overly lax gun laws in the United States. There, buying a machine gun is often easier than getting a driver’s license. And a new ban on violent games and killer videos will also be put back on the agenda. But in the end, nothing is likely to happen. And the next killer already lives somewhere among us. But we have little reason to point an accusing finger at the Americans. Despite strict gun legislation, we (in Germany) have experienced the school shootings in Erfurt and Emsdetten. We have to consider the problems in our society. And we have to take care of our fellow humans.”

Posted by The Skipper     on 04/17/2007 at 01:41 PM   
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The Killer And The Hero

Courageous Final Act Of Professor
Fatally shot as he protects students
_{(NY DAILY NEWS) - Tuesday, April 17th 2007, 9:53 AM}

Liviu Librescu was killed as he blocked his classroom door to keep the gunman out as students escaped out the window. Ryan Clark was shot as he went to investigate a disturbance in the dorm where he was the resident student adviser, witnesses said.

Virginia Tech University Prof. Liviu Librescu, described as a family man who once did research for NASA, sacrificed his life to save his students in the shooting rampage yesterday. “When he heard the gunfire, he blocked the entrance and got shot through the door,” his daughter-in-law Ayala Schmulevich said.

“He realized he had to save the students,” she said. “That was the kind of man he was.”

The hero educator was beginning a class on solid mechanics when all hell broke loose on the second floor of Norris Hall. First came the terrifying gunshots from a classroom next door. “It wasn’t like an automatic weapon, but it was a steady ‘pow,’ ‘pow,’ ‘pow,’ ‘pow,’” student Richard Mallalieu, 23, told The Washington Post. “We didn’t know what to do at first.”

The students in the class dropped to the floor and started overturning desks to hide behind as about a dozen shots rang out, he said. Then the gunfire started coming closer. Librescu, 77, fearlessly braced himself against the door, holding it shut against the gunman in the hall, while students darted to the windows of the second-floor classroom to escape the slaughter, survivors said.

Mallalieu and most of his classmates hung out of the windows and dropped about 10 feet to bushes and grass below - but Librescu stayed behind to hold off the crazed gunman. Alec Calhoun, 20, said the last thing he saw before he jumped from the window was Librescu, blocking the door against the madman in the hallway.

He died trying to protect the students.

UPDATE: Librescu was a Romanian by birth and had survived the Nazi Holocaust before his family migrated to America after WWII.

Librescu, an Israeli engineering and math lecturer who survived the Nazi killings and later escaped from Communist Romania, was one of several foreign victims of Monday’s shootings, which coincided with Israel’s Holocaust remembrance day.

When Romania joined forces with Nazi Germany in World War II, the young Librescu was interned in a labor camp, and then sent along with his family and thousands of other Jews to a central ghetto in the city of Focsani, his son said. Hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jews were killed by the collaborationist regime during the war. 

“Holocaust Survivor Saved Students Lives” (AP)

Posted by The Skipper     on 04/17/2007 at 11:34 AM   
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Jilted South Korean Student

_{Jeff Koterba - Omaha World Herald}

The anit-gun groups are already starting to pound the drum. Personally, I have a lot of questions. (1) The last time I checked the BATFE form you are required to fill out and which must be submitted for verification explicitly asks if you are a US citizen - so how did the shooter get the guns and all that ammo? (2) Why wasn’t the campus locked down after the first shooting incident occurred?

I’m waiting for more details to come out before I say too much. Right now the media is in a feeding frenzy. It will be interesting to watch as the finger-pointing begins. For my money, the problem begins with the way entry visas are issued. This is not the first time someone with a student visa killed people. Remember 9/11?

32 Killed By Love Row Student

A jilted boyfriend killed 32 people on a US college campus yesterday. In the country’s worst ever school massacre, the maniac — who also shot himself dead — burst in brandishing two 9mm automatic handguns and an “ungodly” amount of ammunition.

Students said the shooter first killed his ex and her new lover at Virginia Tech University, Blacksburg. The slaughter began at 7.15am when the gunman opened fire in a dormitory. The gunman was an Asian male who was a student at the university and a dormitory resident, said the university’s president Charles Steger. However Steger did not give the gunman’s name.

Last night he was said to be a 24-year-old Chinese man who arrived in the US a year ago on a student visa. One of the dormitory victims was named locally as student Ryan Clark, who died with an unnamed woman. Fifteen more students were still being treated in hospital last night.

The names of 14 victims gunned down in yesterday’s massacre were named by the university today. They include the following:

Maxine Turner
Henry Lee
Matt La Porte
Jamie Bishop
Prof G.V. Loganathan
Juan Ortiz
Jarrett Lane
Ryan Clark
Leslie Sherman
Caitlin Hammaren
Prof Liviu Librescu
Prof Kevin Granata
Reema Samaha
Emily Hilscher

- Gunman Kills 32 at Virginia Tech (WASHINGTON POST)

UPDATE: The shooter, whose name was not released last night, wore bluejeans, a blue jacket and a vest holding ammunition, witnesses said. He carried a 9mm semiautomatic and a .22-caliber handgun, both with the serial numbers obliterated, federal law enforcement officials said.

Which begs the question - why were the serial numbers obliterated? So the firearms can’t be traced? Traced to who? Where did the guns come from? They were obviously not bought legally.

UPDATE II: The WAPO also is starting the anti-gun crusade.

Shock, Sympathy And Denunciation Of U.S. Gun Laws
British Newspaper Asks, ‘What Price the Right to Bear Arms?’
_{LONDON (WASHINGTON POST) - Tuesday, April 17, 2007}

The Virginia Tech shootings received extensive news coverage around the world Monday, leading many to question how such violence could keep happening in the United States.

In Britain, there was shock at the scale of the killings, but many people said they were not surprised, seeing the United States as a nation obsessed with guns, where firearms are easy to obtain.

“I think the reason it happens in America is there’s access to weapons—you can go into a supermarket and get powerful automatic weapons,” Keith Ashcroft, a psychologist, told the Press Association. Ashcroft said he believed such access, along with a culture that makes gun ownership seem normal, increases the likelihood of such attacks in the United States.

- More ...

UPDATE III: It turns out the killer was South Korean ...

Va. Tech: Gunman student from S. Korea
_{BLACKSBURG, Va. (YAHOO NEWS) - April 17, 2007 10:04 EDT}

A Virginia Tech senior from South Korea killed at least 30 people locked inside a classroom building in the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history, the university and police said Tuesday. Ballistics tests also found that one of the guns used in that attack was also used in a shooting two hours earlier at a dorm that left two people dead, Virginia State Police said.

Police identified the classroom shooter as Cho Seung-Hui, 23, a senior from South Korea who was in the English department at Virginia Tech and lived in a different dorm on campus. Cho committed suicide after the attacks, and there was no indication Tuesday of any possible motive. “He was a loner, and we’re having difficulty finding information about him,” school spokesman Larry Hincker said.

Two law enforcement officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the information had not been announced, said Cho’s fingerprints were found on the guns used in the shootings. The serial numbers on the two weapons had been filed off, the officials said. One law enforcement official said Cho was carrying a backpack that contained receipts for a March purchase of a Glock 9 mm pistol.

Col. Steve Flaherty, superintendent of the Virginia State Police, said it was reasonable to assume that Cho was the shooter in both attacks but that link was yet definitive. “There’s no evidence of any accomplice at either event, but we’re exploring the possibility,” he said.

- More ...

UPDATE IV:(Mr. C) A Local Cartoonist Just Published This:

Posted by The Skipper     on 04/17/2007 at 09:20 AM   
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   Monday - April 16, 2007

SURPRISE!

Posted by The Skipper     on 04/16/2007 at 06:00 PM   
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Not Lost!

Posted by The Skipper     on 04/16/2007 at 05:31 PM   
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Not that very many people ever read this far down, but this blog was the creation of Allan Kelly and his friend Vilmar. Vilmar moved on to his own blog some time ago, and Allan ran this place alone until his sudden and unexpected death partway through 2006. We all miss him. A lot. Even though he is gone this site will always still be more than a little bit his. We who are left to carry on the BMEWS tradition owe him a great debt of gratitude, and we hope to be able to pay that back by following his last advice to us all:

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