SDB Evening News Reads 010512: Insane? Is it just a state of mind?

Good Evening!

The have caught a suspect in Florida in connection with the abortion clinic that burned down in an arson fire last week. Florida – Man Held After Fire at Abortion Clinic

The authorities arrested a man on Thursday on federal charges of setting a fire on Sunday that gutted a Pensacola abortion clinic that has faced violence in the past. Bobby Joe Rogers, 41, of was being held at the Escambia County Jail, the authorities said. Investigators said tips from the community led to the arrest. In an affidavit, prosecutors said he told investigators that he made a fire bomb and threw it at the clinic early Sunday. Mr. Rogers said he was pushed to action after he saw a young woman enter the clinic for an abortion while he was standing outside the clinic with a group of protesters recently, it said. The same clinic was bombed on Christmas Day in 1984, and in 1994 a doctor and a volunteer were shot to death as they arrived.

Makes me think of the last episode of the new Beavis and Butt-Head series… Whorehouse / Going Down

Oh, just seeing these “whores…fornicators” walking into a clinic “pushed” this guy to commit a federal crime. Is this the makings of an insanity plea?

Speaking of the insane, you may remember that Breivik, the Norwegian man who committed that mass murder last year, was found to be insane by a court hearing. Well, now it seems that decision/finding has been overturned. Doctors overturn Breivik insane ruling

Psychiatrists who are monitoring Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik say that he is not psychotic, contradicting an earlier diagnosis by experts.

A court filing by the public prosecutor said four experts at Ila Prison in Oslo had not observed any signs that Breivik was insane.

It was also revealed that he was not receiving any medication and the prison had not seen any need to move him to another facility. An earlier evaluation by two court-appointed psychiatrists described him as living in a “delusional universe” – a paranoid schizophrenic who had lost touch with reality.

Lawyers representing victims of last Juky’s massacre, when Breivik left 77 people dead, demanded the Oslo District Court order a second evaluation. But prosecutor Svein Holden yesterday said he has no plans to do so, fearing Breivik could manipulate new experts.

Wow…imagine this guy manipulating the doctors into finding him insane….or is he manipulating the experts into thinking he is sane. Sometimes when I read these articles, I find myself having to read them over again.

Sticking with the question of sanity, Santorum has Raked In $2 Million In Two Days

Enjoying a wave of momentum from his near-win in the Iowa caucuses, Rick Santorum’s campaign is raising money faster than ever before. Donors have added $2 million to his campaign’s war chest in the last 48 hours alone.

And a Santorum aide tells ABC News that in the space of 10 hours — between midnight Thursday and 10 a.m. — the campaign took in $250,000 of that $2 million total. The quarter-million figure total represents online contributions only.

Other than the obvious wingnuts, who would send this guy any money? 2 million…that figure is staggering. There are some mighty rich PLUBs out there, and you know that none of them would be willing to raise that much money to help teenage mothers…

Which reminds me, yesterday I wrote about the young teenager that was “mistakenly” deported to Columbia. I posted an update in the comments but I just wanted to bring it to the front page: Teenager Mistakenly Deported To Colombia

She is pregnant…and still being held by Columbia, but what is worse…the news and media are blaming the child.

Now she is pregnant, being held in a detention facility in Bogotá. God knows what has happened to that child after she was deported and now, but whatever it is, it shouldn’t ever have happened. ICE likes to brag about their numbers and say they’re deporting criminals and repeat offenders, but it seems that they’re a bit sloppy about how they’re doing it. They fingerprinted this child, for heavens’ sake! How hard would it have been to compare her fingerprints to those of the person whose name she used before sending her out of the country? I wonder if they ever thought the absence of a Columbian accent would have been a clue? Evidently not.

Even if the Houston police screwed up, and I believe they did, the responsibility and ultimate screwup sits firmly with this administration’s immigration authorities. An apology and restitution is the least they should do.

Step up, DHS. Get this girl home. Now.

Update: CNN just ran this report at 9 AM this morning. Note how the entire story is being twisted now to blame the victim. It’s HER fault she’s in Colombia. Somehow she plotted to use someone’s name who was never in the ICE system? According to CNN, she jacked the whole system to get from Texas to Colombia. They can’t imagine why, of course, but it’s clearly this 14-year old (now 15) African-American teenager’s fault that she is being held in the system in Colombia after being deported from this country.

Lavandera makes her sound like some kind of drug dealer:

So basically, what we know so far is this 14-year old girl — 15 now — was able to fool local authorities, also the ICE agents and ICE officials and the immigration process and on top of that the Colombian government to get the necessary paperwork to get deported back into Colombia without any of her own identification.

[…]

…and then at the point of being deported, at the very last minute, why not raise her hand and say “whoa whoa whoa I’m not who I’ve been saying I am.” They don’t understand that.

[…]

The big story here is that this girl has fooled many people on many different levels and it’s absolutely bizarre.

Here’s what I think is bizarre. That a CNN reporter who admits to not having all the facts ready or at his fingertips thinks it’s just fine to go on national television and trash a 14-year old girl who might — MIGHT — have had a student identification card as her sole ID. If she ran away, she could easily have been victimized by human traffickers who told her to use that name if she were arrested. Who knows? None of us know right now. What we DO know is that a 14-year old girl who is a United States citizen was deported. That’s what we know, and Lavandera’s effort to paint her as some kind of con artist was unwarranted and simply victimizes her all over again.

It was a reprehensible report and one that seems to have had ICE agents’ fingerprints on it in an effort to cover their own behinds. Really, we can do better than this.

According to the local TV station that broke the news:

Thursday afternoon, the family had a conference call with members of the National NAACP, congressional Black Caucus leaders and her attorney. They are all demanding the U.S. Embassy gets a chance to visit Jakadrien where she is being held, and to allow her to call her family, which the Colombian government has refused to do.

“I’m looking forward to that,” Turner said. “I just want to hear my baby’s voice.”

The biggest question now is how all this happened – something civil rights leaders are also asking.

Earlier today The Boston Globe endorsed Jon Huntsman for GOP nominee. For vision and national unity, Huntsman for GOP nominee – Editorials – The Boston Globe

Most of the editorial is bashing Romney…looks like Boston Boomer isn’t the only one who really doesn’t want a Romney presidency.

And for your last link of the night, Cosmic Log – What mystifies Dr. Hawking? Women

As famed physicist Stephen Hawking turns 70, the subject that most occupies his thoughts is not how the universe arose from nothing, or how he’s been able to live with neurodegenerative disease for so long. Here’s what he thinks about most: “Women. They are a complete mystery.”

That’s the bottom line from New Scientist’s interview with Hawking, timed to coincide with this weekend’s birthday celebration at Cambridge. The theorist is almost completely paralyzed due to his decades-long struggle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, and had to provide his answers by laboriously twitching his cheek to operate a computerized speech-translation system.

Hawking also listed what he saw as his “biggest blunder in science” (his now-repudiated insistence that information was destroyed in black holes), the most exciting development in physics during his career (the discovery of the big bang’s imprint in cosmic microwave radiation) and the potential discovery that would do the most to revolutionize our understanding of the cosmos (discovery of supersymmetric particles at the Large Hadron Collider).

But it’s his brief comment on women that attracted the most attention: How could it be that a scientist who has plumbed the deepest mysteries of the cosmos finds himself mystified by women?

Hmmm…I guess the man is brilliant enough to discover the origins of the cosmos…

The saga of the super-smart professor who is flummoxed by interpersonal relations, particularly with the opposite sex, is at least as old as Sigmund Freud (who famously wondered, “What does a woman want?”), Jerry Lewis’ fictional “Nutty Professor” and the stereotype we have of Albert Einstein. It’s as up to date as the TV astrophysicist on “The Big Bang Theory” who can’t say a word to women unless he’s under the influence.

Somehow, folks get a satisfying sense of karma from the idea that geniuses are socially stupid. But the stereotype doesn’t really hold true, particularly in Hawking’s case.

Like the real-life Einstein, Hawking has had an active romantic life, marked by two marriages. (Einstein’s second marriage ended with the death of his wife and cousin Elsa; Hawking’s ended in an ugly divorce.) Hawking’s disease does not affect his sexual ability or his potency, and the fact that he’s fathered three children is evidence of that.

“The disease only affects voluntary muscle,” Hawking’s been quoted as saying.

The article goes on to say that Hawking is an incurable flirt, and has a thing for Marilyn Monroe, who he says is the one person he would want to meet if he could go back in time.

Even as he approaches the age of 70, Hawking seems to have kept his playful, pleasant, mischievous character. That may help explain his latest comment about the mystique surrounding women, as well as his own mystique.

Here’s a classic example: Actress Jane Fonda was clearly won over last year when Hawking came backstage after her performance in a play about a woman musicologist in the early stages of neurodegenerative disease. “I took his hand and carefully uncurled the fingers one by one, wanting to see how they felt and looked … soft, pale, safe,” she recalled in a blog posting.

When Fonda asked Hawking what he thought of her performance, Hawking typed out a short response: “You were my heartthrob” — which got a big laugh. Fonda came away starstruck. “This man who cannot move or speak, can, nonetheless, comprehend the incomprehensible,” she wrote.

Hmm … Maybe women aren’t such a complete mystery to Hawking after all.

That is all for tonight…catch ya later in the comments.