When we launched Michael Tracey’s series on the Ramsey case we frankly didn’t know what to expect. We hoped for intelligent engagement around the essay’s central thesis – a runaway media and what it tells us about the sad state of our democracy. We feared that the place would be overrun by nutters. In the end, though, neither our hopes nor fears have been realized.

Instead there’s been a lot of silence. We know some people are reading – we have access to the stats, after all – but there’s been minimal response.

I think I know why. The other day Lex, one of our most prolific commenters, posted this: Full story »

Yesterday, an idiot father and and even more brain-dead “instructor” allowed an eight-year-old boy to fire a fully automatic Uzi submachine gun at an event billed as, “all legal and and fun! — No permits or licenses required!!!” Naturally, the gun kicked up, as it is designed to do, flipping toward the child who managed to shoot himself in the head with it.  Since kids’ heads aren’t all that heavily armored, we now have a little boy who will never see his ninth birthday.

So, little Christopher Bizilj is dead, dead, dead.  His father, Dr. Charles Bizilj, director of emergency medicine (if you can believe it) at a hospital in Stafford Springs, Connecticut, got to watch his son bleed out from a head wound on the floor.  And the people who put this little event together have to look at themselves in their mirrors and ask themselves the simple question, “What the FUCK made me think it was a good idea to put a submachine gun in a child’s hands?” Full story »

Part I: An Ugly Overview
A few days ago I stood on the rim of what was once Kayford Mountain in southern West Virginia. Razed, stripped and gutted, the mountain is now a 7,500-acre blast zone devoid of vegetation, a massive gray scar that looks like the surface of the moon.

Journalists survey a mountaintop removal mine operation at Kayford Mountain, WV. Photo: Dennis Dimick

Some 470 mountaintops in central Appalachia look like Kayford. Once blanketed in hardwood forest, their ancient slopes laced with clear streams and inhabited by more species than any place outside the tropics, nearly a million acres of these mountains have become casualties of America’s addiction to cheap energy. Full story »

Link of the Week (as opposed to the Weakest Link):

Shaun Mullen at the Moderate Voice:

It is no accident that there are so many older African-Americans waiting in the long lines at early voting stations. These folks have long memories and they fear that they won’t be able to vote on Election Day because of the usual reasons given for suppressed minority turnouts — faulty machines, improper registration cards, not enough poll workers. Full story »