Day: October 6, 2015

Early Saturday evening, an 11 year-old boy from Jefferson County, Tennessee, took his father’s unlocked shotgun and shot and killed, with premeditation, his 8 year-old neighbor, McKayla Dyer, from inside his house – because she wouldn’t show him her puppy. According to the local news station WKRN-TV (video below), the boy had a history of bullying the little girl. Her mother, Latasha Dyer said: “He was making fun of her, calling her names — just being mean to her…I had to go the principal about him, and he quit for a while, and then all of a sudden yesterday he shot her.” The boy, whose name is being withheld by authorities, has been charged with first degree murder, but a judge is to decide in the coming days whether or not to transfer the case to adult court.

We need to stop calling these incidents accidents.

The New York Times reports today that Hillary Clinton is organizing “leadership councils” in every state, comprised of dozens of top Democratic state officials and super-delegates to the nominating convention…

First it was the Charm Offensive with Saturday Night Live. Followed up by a Town Hall aired live on NBC and MSNBC. Where she was fiesty, on the attack and compassionate and sweet at the same time. And now she is out with a pretty great ad.

I know Delaware Online.com comment sections are cesspools of idiocy and ignorance, but this current top comment wins the day on this article about the threats of violence to local colleges and universities:

[this is] "Why firearm NO CARRY zones are becoming the MOST DANGEROUS public spaces."

Um, not really.

According to Politico, it was Joe Biden himself who first talked to Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, “painting a tragic portrait of a dying son, Beau’s face partially paralyzed, sitting his father down and trying to make him promise to run for president because ‘the White House should not revert to the Clintons and that the country would be better off with Biden values.'”

“It was no coincidence that the preliminary pieces around a prospective campaign started moving right after that column. People read Dowd and started reaching out, those around the vice president would say by way of defensive explanation. He was just answering the phone and listening. But in truth, Biden had effectively placed an ad in The New York Times, asking them to call.”

First, I am not sure if that is more or less crass than if someone else relayed the story or if the Vice President himself did it. Second, I do not believe that exact quote ever escaped the mouth of Beau Biden. I could see "Dad, you should run. You must run." But not "The White House should not revert to the Clintons and that the country would be better off with Biden values." I mean, really? When this story first came out back in August, I chucked that quote up to a hyperbolic fabrication or paraphrase on the part of Maureen Dowd, because she is known for that. But if Vice President Biden was the source of the story and quote, whoa boy. That means those words are Joe Biden's creation. And that tells us that he is running and he is going to go extremely negative on Hillary. And that will be a devastating end to his career. If this whole story is true in the first place.

When your campaign has to continually assert that you haven't dropped out, it is a bad sign. That's where Rand Paul is right now, as he tries to assure donors that he is still running for the GOP nomination... "but also, by the way... donate to my Senatorial campaign, because that is the real campaign." That's a paraphrase.