I read that Jared Loughner is insane. Duh. To try to kill somebody – to kill people who you don't even know – should be one of the definitions of insane. It seems to me that healthy, ,sane, people don't kill other people.   This jerk-off seems so insane that he is still smirking.

I have always been troubled by insanity as a defense because it presumes that somebody can kill and be sane. That -somehow – taking another person life; that thinking one has the right to take another person's life; seems, to me, insanity in its self. My belief is that his guy is insane and … so what. He didn't know what he was doing, or he couldn't control himself … so what. 

People are dead – most of them just randomly killed – more people have had their lives changed forever. Changed probably for the worse. It is so sad, it is just a goddamn shame.  

Three days ago, I had never heard of Salman Taseer but I had heard of Pakistan's blasphemy laws and how some Christian woman was going to be executed over them.For reasons that I have not spent a whole lot of time working on, stuff like that just sends me around the bend with rage.

The whole blasphemy thing just seems – to me – to be truly insane. 

Then this asshole kills a governor over it. And then smirks when he is arrested. He is a true believer. A real zealot; a nutcase. And then a group of imams says the killer is a Muslim hero and then – and this goes against all I thought I knew about Pakistan – a bunch of lawyers strew roses in front of him as he walked into court.  

All of a sudden, John Boehner seems reasonable. And he doesn't have nuclear weapons.

A year ago, I said Happy New Decade because it was the end of a decade if you started counting when 1999 turned into 2000. And we all did. But, even though it was the end of the oughts, somehow, this seems like the real end of the decade. 

I, for one, am glad the year is over, but not as glad as Dodai over at Jezebel. It started with a massive earthquake in Haiti,  sort of peaked with the gulf oil spill, and pseudo-ended with the republicans riding back into town yelling Hold on, we will save you from Obama.

To paraphrase somebody I am glad to see this year end in  the way a man, at the bottom of a pit, is glad to see a ladder¹.

So, Happy New Decade and Happy New Year.

¹. I have been trying to figure out how to use that quote since April.

or, as far as that goes, Kesha.

this chart from Data Pointed should be an eye opener.

Each pixel represents a death: the blue = US military, green = Iraqi military, orange = Iraq civilian, and the grey = what we call bad guys. The chart on the left is by total numbers and the chart on the right is by time. This chart does not include people who have left – presumably almost anybody who could – stripping Iraq of a lot of intellectuals and professionals

Iraq was not our finest hour.