Americans are more afraid of terrorism than at any other time since 9/11’s immediate aftermath, according to a new poll. Meanwhile, Democrats find themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to take seriously the man who declared tonight anyone who found guilty of killing a cop should be executed.
Some very visible bad things have happened. Dozens of people have been shot. Some people are very afraid. They don’t need to be.
During a speech to his conservative supporters in Barrington, New Hampshire this weekend, Senator Ted Cruz bashed the "Obama-Clinton foreign policy of leading from behind," saying the "world is on fire," to the horror of a three-year-old sitting in the front row.
The animal kingdom is, to the delight of web users riding the dot-com wave, full of photographic evidence of disparate species getting along. "#relationshipgoals," one might tag a photo of lion hugging a man; "me and bae," you might say about a dog cuddling a cat. A weasel and a woodpecker? Save this one...FOR YOUR ENEMIES!
It was December 2001. Senior year at Spring High School—the nucleus of a small town called Spring, Texas, two dozen miles north of Houston. Sixteen years old and like other restless suburbanites, I was over-committed to extracurricular activities, spent an unreasonable amount of time with my friends, and my only real concern was how far I could stretch the $1/gallon gas on my middle-grade car.
Susan Sherman quit her job at St. Margaret Mary Catholic School in Louisville, Ken. this week after the school—fearing Ebola—demanded she take "precautionary leave" and place herself into 21-day quarantine following her mission trip to Kenya. There apparently was "strong parent concerns" that Sherman might have been exposed to Ebola, even though Kenya is on the opposite end of the continent from where the virus has been spreading.
Halloween is a special time when drunken adults dressed as horrifying clowns start crashing their cars and freaking people out down at the McDonald's. Over the next 10 days, hundreds of scary clowns will be arrested nationwide for all kinds of terrible behavior. When a person decides to be an evil clown for Halloween, they are basically planning on being arrested.
Monstrous "crazy ants" from Argentina and Brazil have invaded Texas and the American Southeast, driving out the already awful fire ant and making life even more miserable for those living in the South.
The most common refrain you hear in the wake of tragedies like Monday's Boston Marathon bombing is also the one that sounds most like a redneck bumper sticker: "Don't be scared." In an interview with the Washington Post yesterday, author and security expert Bruce Schneier said the appropriate response to terrorist violence is to face it fearlessly: "If you are scared, they win. If you refuse to be scared, they lose, no matter how much carnage they commit."
Isaac Aguigui, the Army private and alleged ringleader of a plot to assassinate Barack Obama and "take over" Ft. Stewart in Georgia, apparently served as a page at the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minnesota. That's his mug shot after he was arrested for the alleged murder of Pvt. Michael Roark on the left. At right is a 2008 Reuters photo with the caption: "Republican National Convention page Isaac Aguigui watches from the edge of the floor at the start of the first session of the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota September 1, 2008."
Today is the 33rd anniversary of the disappearance of Etan Patz, the six-year-old New Yorker whose abduction in 1979 helped usher in a new age of terror and suspicion for American parents. Though Etan was declared legally dead in 2001, his case has never been solved. Yesterday, after three decades of false leads and a menagerie of suspects, the NYPD announced that a New Jersey man named Pedro Hernandez had confessed to strangling Patz and dumping his body somewhere in Manhattan. It's unclear at this point whether Hernandez's confession will hold water, if he acted alone, or if he is just a confused publicity seeker. Here's a look back at the case.
America has entered a bold new era of internal mistrust: a new Pew survey officially shows that class conflict has surpassed both racial conflict and immigrant-native conflict as "the greatest source of tension in American society." Well—are you just going to stand there and let them get away with that?
The cheap, rickety county fair clown car that is the US stock market took another nice little dive today: down 389 points, or 3.2%. Just your standard "Europe has no money left" fears. A decade ago this would have been considered a fairly horrific one-day collapse, but lately these swings of several hundred points per day have become as commonplace as the various Wall Street jokes which we are too sophisticated to make.
The heartiest of congratulations goes out to Ortrud Kastaun of Essen, Germany, whose collection of 2,053 different clown-related items has qualified her for inclusion in the 2012 Guinness Book of World Records. Even more remarkably, when the lights go down in Ortrud's workshop, her army of inanimate harlequins and jesters comes magically alive, marching steadily towards you, single-mindedly of purpose, stopping at nothing until the last shreds of flesh have been stripped from your bones, all the while Headmistress Ortrud laughing, laughing, laughing in delight as your darkest coulrophobic nightmares come to horrifying life.
Sweden is weathering a rare "tropical hurricane," forcing Swedes to use the term "tropical hurricane," with quotation marks, because this whirling dervish is strange to them, exotic, bewildering, foreign. Sweden's hurricane is named "Katia." She is Class 1, and tore through British Isles earlier, killing one. [The Local, The Local]
What's the main problem with the American economy? You, okay? You, and people like you. As an average drone, your job is very simple: you go to work, you make money, and then you spend all of that money on consumer products. Repeat until dead. But you can't even get that right.
Remember the guy who took the world's most expensive pee, 21-year-old drunk Oregonian Josh Seater? Well, how about instead of laughing at his misfortune you thank him for keeping America safe from goddamn terrorists hell bent on poisoning our water supply. This young man's pee has reignited the debate about the safety of our water supply.
