Criminal charges in boy's gun death?

A prosecutor said Tuesday he is investigating whether criminal charges should be filed after an 8-year-old boy accidentally killed himself while firing an Uzi submachine gun at a gun fair in western Massachusetts.

Christopher Bizilj of Ashford, Connecticut, shot himself in the head when he lost control of the 9mm micro submachine gun as it recoiled while he was firing at a pumpkin.

Police have said the shooting at the Machine Gun Shoot and Firearms Expo at the Westfield Sportsman's Club on Sunday was an accident.

Hampden County District Attorney William Bennett said he is investigating whether the gun fair violated the state's firearms law by allowing the boy to fire the machine gun, and also whether it was "a reckless or wanton act to allow an 8-year-old to use a fully loaded automatic weapon."

"At this point in the investigation I have found no lawful authority which allows an 8-year-old to possess or fire a machine gun," Bennett said in a statement.

Daniel Vice, senior attorney with the Washington-based Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said his interpretation is that Massachusetts law specifically prohibits "furnishing a machine gun to any person under 18."

"It is unconscionable that the gun fair allowed and encouraged young children to fire machine guns," he said in a statement.

*****

The child was attending the gun show with his father and older brother.

And where was the child's father when all this occurred you ask ...

On Monday, Bizilj told The Boston Globe he was about 10 feet behind his son and reaching for his camera when the weapon fired.
He said his family avoided larger weapons, but he let his son try the Uzi because it's a small weapon with little recoil.

Reaching for his CAMERA!
The asshole should have been reaching for his brain - something he obviously does not have - letting an 8 year-old fire an automatic weapon!

This tragic loss of a young life is horrific but the real tragedy is the lack of sense displayed by the boy's father and the 'circling of the wagons' of the gun show people saying they aren't to blame.
By damn, they aren't!

And I Quote

"According to expense reports, Sarah Palin charged the state of Alaska over $21,000 for her children to travel with her on official business.
In fairness to Governor Palin, when she leaves them home alone, they get pregnant."

~ Seth Meyers, SNL

"It turns out the highest-paid person in the McCain campaign is Palin's makeup artist.
I'm not kidding.
The highest-paid person, she flies to every city where Palin appears.
And McCain? He just gets the local gal who does the funeral home."
~ Bill Maher

"Sarah Palin says the election is in God's hands now.
Isn't that what you say to a prisoner who's about to be executed?"
~ Jimmy Kimmel

Behind Blue Eyes

The Who at their best ... LIVE!

Ancient mummy hair suggests drug use

Researchers have found evidence of psychoactive drug use in the hair of ancient mummies found in Chile's Azapa Valley. The scientists detected harmine, an ingredient used in the psychedelic brew ayahuasca, in hairs from an adult and baby who lived between 800 and 1200 years ago.

From National Geographic:

"These individuals probably ingested harmine in therapeutic or medicinal practices, some maybe related to pregnancy and childbirth," said study co-author Juan Pablo Ogalde, a chemical archaeologist at the University of Tarapacá in Arica, Chile.

"However, it is possible also that consumption of harmine was involved in religious rituals, said Ogalde, whose research appeared online October 14 in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

X-rays showed that the adult male—who was buried with items of social prestige such as panpipes, a four-pointed hat, and a snuffing tray—had damage near the nose, perhaps from sniffing.

As for the baby, Ogalde speculated that the mother had consumed the drug and passed it on to her offspring during pregnancy or breast-feeding.

"The fact this mind-altering substance was found even with a one-year-old shows how much a part of their life it was," said archaeologist Alexei Vranich of the University of California, Los Angeles, who did not participate in the study.

Drugs Found In Hair of Ancient Andean Mummies

As of his moment ...

551 Brave men and women will not be returning from Afghanistan
ALIVE!

Jewish, Nazi objects found in dump near Berlin

Yaron Svoray scrapes caked layers of dirt from a shard of glass, revealing a sunflower at the heart of a Star of David.

He carefully turns it, speculating it may have been a bowl used for Passover ceremonies in pre-World War II German Jewish homes.

The fragment is one of a handful of artifacts Svoray has pulled from mounds of debris in this former dump about an hour north of Berlin that locals say was used by the Nazis to deposit rejected loot from the 1938 pogrom known as Kristallnacht, or "The Night of Broken Glass."

"Most of the people in Israel I know who went through the Holocaust, if I take this to Israel, to Yad Vashem, you'll get every visitor who is a Jew will say: 'Oh this is what was in our house 50 or 60 years ago,'" Svoray said recently at the site.

"For me as a Jew, if this turns out, and I'm not saying it is, but if this turns out to be a Jewish bowl from before the war, it's a treasure."

Svoray was hunting for a downed Nazi plane in the area's vast stretches of woods when a former forester tipped him off to the dump, used from 1935 to 1945, outside the village of Klandorf in the largely rural eastern state of Brandenburg.

After two hours of digging with his bare hands and a rusty spade found among the refuse, Svoray had unearthed what appeared to be a beer bottle stamped with a Star of David and a plate-sized alloyed metal swastika. Several weeks later he returned and found the jagged shard of the bowl.

"I don't claim to say this is from Kristallnacht, I claim there is enough evidence here to provoke a further investigation," said Svoray, 54, an Israeli journalist who made his name infiltrating German neo-Nazi groups in the 1990s. He would like to see the dump excavated.

Thomas Kersting, an archaeologist employed by the state of Brandenburg to care for buried memorials and archaeological sites, said Svoray's finds - which he has yet to examine - may give the area historical value.

"A place like this where we have objects with a Star of David directly next to a Nazi swastika, that is of course meaningful ... that gives it a certain quality of a memorial," Kersting said.

But Kersting played down the likelihood of an archaeological dig, citing a lack of funds and arguing that such a disruption would be in direct opposition to his bureau's aim to maintain the sanctity of such sites.

Arno Gielsdorf, who owns the strip of land where the dump sits, said his father told stories the arrival of "garbage" trains after Kristallnacht.

Since the collapse of communism in 1989, he said, bands of scavengers have picked over the area, selling their finds at weekly flea markets in Berlin.

But he is convinced the dump holds valuable artifacts.

"The things from Kristallnacht were buried in the deepest places," Gielsdorf said. "They are still there."

The redistribution of wealth

Apparently "the redistribution of wealth" is only bad when "poor" people get a piece of the pie.

The gap between the nation's ceos and average workers is now ten times greater than it was a generation ago. And while bush's tax cuts shaved only a few hundred dollars off the tax bills of most americans, they saved the richest one percent more than $44,000 on average. In fact, once all of Bush's tax cuts take effect, it is estimated that those with incomes of more than $200,000 a year -- the richest five percent of the population -- will pocket almost half of the money. those who make less than $75,000 a year -- eighty percent of America -- will receive barely a quarter of the cuts. in the bush era, economic inequality is on the rise. ...so where did all the economic growth go?

It went to a relative handful of people at the top. the earnings of the typical full-time worker, adjusted for inflation, have actually fallen since Bush took office. Pay for CEOs, meanwhile, has soared -- from 185 times that of average workers in 2003 to 279 times in 2005. And after-tax corporate profits have also skyrocketed, more than doubling since Bush took office. those profits will eventually be reflected in dividends and capital gains, which accrue mainly to the very well-off: more than three-quarters of all stocks are owned by the richest ten percent of the population. -

professor Paul Krugman in Rollingstone

The wingnuts are foaming at the mouth because they fear "redistribution of wealth" and calling Obama a socialist.

Question: What do they have to say about the shrub's "redistribution of wealth" that actually undermines America and it's future?

Election Fraud

The Virginia Pilot reports today that a phony Virginia board of elections flier is being distributed in Hamption Roads, Virginia telling Democrats that they are now scheduled to vote on November 5.

The flier falsely claims that “an emergency session of the general assembly” adopted a new voting schedule to “ease the load” at polling places on election day.

From Think Progress

You want to talk 'voter fraud'!?!
How about ELECTION FRAUD!

Those manufacturing and/or distributing these fliers are committing election fraud on the highest order.

The repugicans are trying to steal another election and there is growing sentiment that if they do dare to declare McPain the winner on November 4, 2008, that, the little dust-up between the Confederate States of America and the rest of the states a ways back was a slight misunderstanding compared to what would be the mood of the country.

They quit rather than lie

Some three dozen workers at a telemarketing call center in Indiana walked off the job rather than read an incendiary McPain campaign script attacking Barack Obama, according to two workers at the center and one of their parents.

Nina williams, a stay-at-home mom in Lake county, Indiana, tells us that her daughter recently called her from her job at the center, upset that she had been asked to read a script attacking Obama for being "dangerously weak on crime," "coddling criminals," and for voting against "protecting children from danger."

Talking Points Memo Election Central

*****

It's really bad when telemarketers won't lie for you!

ACORN: The Facts

Despite the howls of the wing-nuts there is NO evidence of ACORN wrongdoing.

All the "evidence" repugicans are using to trash ACORN are the fraudulent registrations that ACORN itself flagged, and legitimate registrations that repugicans has incorrectly identified as false.
When the repugicans provided a list of the worst cases of "registration fraud" from ACORN, every single one was found to be legitimate upon investigation.

Below are some of the FACTS about ACORN.

Drinking the ACORN Kool-Aid: How Cries of Voter Fraud Cover Up GOP Elections Theft

by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast

First the facts about ACORN. Months ago, we obtained, as part of our investigation for Rolling Stone magazine, the Republican's list the GOP alleged were the very worst cases of vote and registration fraud by ACORN and similar groups. We went through the names the GOP asserted were "obviously, undeniably and clearly fraudulent" voter registrations.

First, there was Melissa Tais, a dubious ACORN registrant. Her two voter registration forms show, admittedly, suspiciously different signatures. Republicans suggested Melissa was part of a massive fraud to allow Democrats to vote twice. They were wrong. Ms. Tais, a Cerrillos, New Mexico, waitress, told us she had signed one form on a table and one form holding the paper in her hand. Hence, a second, wobbly signature.

Then there was Patricia White, who Republicans claimed was a fictitious voter. When we filmed her at home in Albuquerque, she seemed real enough. And so on, through the entire GOP list -- not one fraud. And these were their best cases out of the five million "illegal voters" who Republican leaders claim have infiltrated America's voting rolls.

The overblown histrionics about ACORN do not surprise those of us who have been watching the RNC's election manipulation antics. For eight years White House operatives have been trying to gin up press stories about voter fraud. David Iglesias of New Mexico was one of seven U.S. Attorneys fired by the White House for their refusal to bring voter fraud prosecutions. "We took over 100 complaints," from the GOP, he told us, "We investigated for almost 2 years, I didn't find one prosecutable voter fraud case in the entire state of New Mexico." Iglesias, a McCain supporter, has, for the first time, leveled a new and serious charge: Despite finding none of the 200 voters guilty, he says the White House nevertheless ordered him to illegally prosecute baseless cases against innocent citizens, just to gin up voter fraud publicity. His refusal, he says, cost him his job. "They were looking for politicized -- for improperly politicized US attorneys to file bogus voter fraud cases."

Certainly ACORN collected some bad signatures. But despite McCain's claims, now morphed into media theology, none of ACORN's actions will have any impact on any election. ACORN hired 13,000 canvassers to register new voters. A small number of these workers defrauded ACORN by handing in phony registration forms using names they had invented (e.g. Mickey Mouse), or copied from phone books. In one case ACORN canvassers used cigarettes to bribe a homeless man, now a Fox News regular, to register 17 times. None of these activities constituted voter fraud. It is no crime to register 17 times; only the final registration counts. His multiple registrations would not allow the tobacco lover to vote 17 times. Nor is there any evidence the phone book registrants will cast multiple ballots.

Finally, the removal by GOP officials of hundreds of thousands of legitimate voters from voting rolls over the past year provides ACORN with a sound rationale for obtaining new registrations, even from voters who believe they are already registered. ACORN took pains to screen its registrations and cull out those it considered dubious.

However, federal laws make it a felony for voter registration groups like ACORN to discard registrations even when it believes them fraudulent. So ACORN flagged the forms it considered doubtful and handed them in to the registry. Ironically, it was those flagged forms -- the fruits of ACORN's diligence -- that have been flogged by Republicans as their best evidence of widespread election fraud.

Voter fraud is a phantom according to Lorraine Minnite, an expert on voting crime at Columbia University. Only 24 cases of federal voter fraud have been uncovered between 2002 and 2005 despite massive government efforts devoted to uncovering evidence of a voter fraud crime wave.

A call to arms!

Bush wants Mukasey to suppress votes in Ohio.

This year, there are over 600,000 newly registered Ohio voters, but President Bush has asked Attorney General Mukasey to investigate as many as 200,000 of them. Why? Because Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner won't let voters be disenfranchised simply because of a typo in a state database.
Secretary Brunner has refused to challenge voters based on faulty database matching because it would erroneously deprive tens or even hundreds of thousands of Ohioans of their right to vote.
Now, President Bush is trying to end-run the Supreme Court by getting the Department of Justice to intervene. On Friday, October 24th, Bush reportedly asked Attorney General Mukasey to investigate whether as many as 200,000 voters need to reconfirm their registrations before November 4th.
This is hugely problematic, and we need to fight back.
President Bush is doing his best to politicize the Department of Justice and suppress the rights of Ohio's voters, but Attorney General Mukasey doesn't have to bend to this insidious tactic. With the election only days away, the time to act is short.
Please click here to tell Mukasey to say no to President Bush's request. Ohio's voters are counting on us.
Thank you for working to protect every citizen's right to vote.
Kate Stayman-London, Campaign Manager
CREDO Action from Working Assets