The Republic of T.

Via Jack and Jill Politics comes this alert to help find a missing child: 11-year-old Octavius Howell.

Miami-Dade police issued a plea to the public on Saturday to help find a missing 11-year-old child.

Octavius Howell, who is just shy of 5 feet tall and 80 pounds, was last seen Friday at the Madison Middle School at NW 10th Avenue and NW 90th Street.

He was wearing a red polo shirt and khaki pants.

People with information are asked to contact Miami Detective Javier Soto at the Miami-Dade Police Special Victims Bureau’s Missing Persons Unit, 305-418-7201 or 305-476-5423.

The bureau issued a photo of the boy to accompany its alert.

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(Or, An Ounce of Treatment, Pt.2)

I don’ think this is what anyone meant by “Calgon, take me away.” (Ed. Note: I know the bath salts in question are in no way associated with Calgone bath beads or other products. It just seemed like a good line.)

When Neil Brown got high on bath salts, he took his skinning knife and slit his face and stomach repeatedly. Brown survived, but authorities say others haven’t been so lucky after snorting, injecting or smoking powders with such innocuous-sounding names as Ivory Snow, Red Dove and Vanilla Sky.

Law enforcement agents and poison control centers say the bath salts, with their complex chemical names, are an emerging menace in several U.S. states where authorities talk of banning their sale. Some say their effects can be as powerful as those of methamphetamine.

From the Deep South to California, emergency calls are being reported over exposure to the stimulants the powders often contain: mephedrone and methylenedioxypyrovalerone, also known as MDPV.

Sold under such names as Ivory Wave, Bliss, White Lightning and Hurricane Charlie, the chemicals can cause hallucinations, paranoia, a rapid heart rate and suicidal thoughts, authorities say. In addition to bath salts, the chemicals can be found in plant foods that are sold legally at convenience stores and on the Internet. However, they aren’t necessarily being used for the purposes on the label.

Still, I’m not sure that banning bath salts is the answer.

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Michael Tomasky points to this…

The chief investigator for the sheriff’s department here has for the first time publicly described the brief and gory video clip from a store security camera that shows a gunman not only shooting Representative Gabrielle Giffords just above the eyebrow at a range of three feet, but then using his 9-millimeter pistol to gun down others near her at a similarly close range.

…The crucial video showing the shooting of Ms. Giffords, Judge Roll and Mr. Barber lasts only about five seconds before the gunman steps out of the frame.

At the start of the clip, it shows the “suspect coming from just outside of the frame of the video toward the parking lot,” Mr. Kastigar said. “He goes around a table set up for part of that gathering and walks up to Gabby and shoots her directly in the forehead.” It was not clear from this video, he said, if Ms. Giffords realized what was happening.

The gunman “then turns to his left and indiscriminately shoots at people sitting in chairs along the wall,” he said. The video does not show those people being shot, he said. But quickly the gunman is back in the video, which shows him turning to his right and shooting Mr. Barber, who had been with Judge Roll “standing side by side with the table to their backs.”

…And asks, “Should we see the video?”

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In the aftermath of the tragic Tucson, AZ, shooting that left six dead, and Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D, AZ-8) hospitalized, much has been said and written about the degree to which incendiary rhetoric motivated the shooter. However, caustic rhetoric isn’t the real danger.

Like Molotov cocktails, fiery rhetoric is intended to spark fires. But a spark that falls on bare ground quickly burns out. To start a fire, a spark needs fuel. It needs kindling — material that burns quickly and easily — to start and spread a fire. The conditions created by the economic crisis have surrounded us with kindling, awaiting a spark to ignite a conflagration.

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"Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards."

- Eric Holder, United States Attorney General

Ed. Note: The second half of this post was written before the reading of the constitution on the House floor, at the opening of this session of Congress, and has since been updated.

Like a lot of people, when the new GOP majority in the House announced that they would begin this session by reading the constitution on the floor of the house, I was both amused and bemused. On one hand, I thought sarcastically, it might be educational. Some of them seem to know less about what’s in it, than about all the things of which they’re fond of saying "That’s not in the Constitution," while waving around the copy of the constitution they keep in their front pockets. (I’d wave around the copy I have on my iPhone, but I don’ thing it would have the same dramatic effect.)

I was bemused, because I wondered how conservatives would handle some uncomfortable parts of our history reflected in the Constitution. When I found out, I was more angry than amused, and more bitter than bemused. Congressional conservatives proved themselves to be callow and cowardly regarding the Constitution — unwilling to understand it in anything except a literalist framework, and unable to face up to the contradictions between our history and idealized image of ourselves, when the Constitution lays them out in black and white.

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When I began hearing a few months ago about the rash gay youth driven to suicide by bullying, I immediately wanted to write about it. But when I sat down and started taking in the stories, I found I couldn’t. So many of the details were so close to my own experience growing up that I initially found it too painful to write about. In fact, I was a bit surprised that those memories were still as painful as they were, decades after the fact.

I also considered including the stories in the LGBT Hate Crimes Project, because strongly believed that they should be called hate crimes. I was aware, however, that the question was still a subject of debate. Should these cases, involving suicide, be considered hate crimes?

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The LGBT Hate Crimes Project is back. After a period of inactivity, plus some hosting problems, the site is back up. It disappeared after my initial hosting account expired. After a brief, and unfortunate, switch to what turned out to be a disreputable host, I’ve returned my original host. In the meantime, I’ve had to restore the site from my files. So there are corrections that were made before that have to be made to some entries again. And there are updates that were added before that have to be added to some entries again. Those tasks will be ongoing. In the meantime, there are new entries coming this week.

With the passage of the Hate Crimes Prevention Act last year — which expanded existing hate crime law to include crimes motivated by the victim’s gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, or disability — I wondered if I needed to continue with the LGBT Hate Crimes Project. I it as a Wikipedia project in July 2007, when I noticed — while doing research for a round-up post on hate crimes — that number of anti-LGBT hate crimes I knew of were not included on Wikipedia.

I soon found out why so many were not entered on Wikipedia.

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A last month, I was toying with the idea of taking part in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

To build without tearing down. I like that idea. That is, I still like that idea.

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Or is it, “People kill people with guns”? Either way, there’s been a bit too much of it going on too close to home for my comfort. Now, people are being shot over speed bumps.

No, seriously. A guy was shot over a speed bump.

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OK. I don’t know what to make of this, but the hubby just called and told me, and the news confirmed that a gunman has barricaded himself at the Discovery Building in Silver Spring.

A barricade situation involving a gunman who may have taken at least one person hostage has been reported at the Discovery Communications Building in Silver Spring, Md.

Police have shut down several roads, including Georgia Avenue, around the building at One Discovery Place.

All employees at One Discovery Place have been alerted to the incident and are seeking shelter or have been evacuated from the building.

Hazmat teams, bomb squads and SWAT teams have been called to the building.

The Discovery building? Why the Discovery building? My guess is either a disgruntled former employee or a domestic issue or stalker situation between the gunman and the hostage.

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I’ve written once or twice about my interest in crime stories and earlier research into serial killers for a writing project. I’ve seen the first season of Dexter, but have yet to catch up with the rest on Netflix. And, I’ll admit that I was intrigued and found Dexter more than a little sexy. (Michael C. Hall’s good looks and portrayal of the character go a long way towards towards turning a murderous psychopath into a sympathetic character. It doesn’t hurt that Dexter’s deadly impulses are directed at other killers.)

That said, I actually agree with this guy. A Dexter "action figure" is just a bit much for my tastes.

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To be more specific, what’s Rand Paul smoking these days?

His musings that America was a better, freer place when African Americans had no civil rights protection, and no one was looking out for the safety of American workers (at least no one who didn’t have one eye on the bottom line), were both amusing and disturbing. But his latest riff on unemployment — that helping the unemployed would increase drug use — is a shocker, even from him.

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I wasn’t able to follow this story much yesterday, and probably won’t today. (This post was hastily written yesterday, before I went back to my power-less home.) Apparently, the "Flint Serial Killer" has been caught.

A suspect in the killings of five people and the stabbings of 15 others in three states was arrested at the airport here as he tried to board a plane to Israel, the authorities said Thursday morning.

The suspect was identified as Elias Abuelazam, 33, and investigators said they believed he was responsible for a spree of attacks in Michigan, Ohio and Virginia that began in May. Mr. Abuelazam was arrested on Wednesday night and was being held on unrelated charges, the police in Leesburg, Va., said in a statement.

“While this is a key step in the investigation, there are still many issues that need to be addressed before we identify this individual as the person responsible for this horrific crime spree,” the police said.

Nearly all of the victims were black men, and the crimes may have been racial motivated, authorities said.

Arrested in Georgia? On his way to Israel?

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I’m assuming the blonde woman in the Prius, with a kid in the back seat, who stopped to ask me for directions Monday morning was safe. But, until they catch this guy I’m not telling anyone else where to go.

A Michigan prosecutor said Tuesday that stabbing attacks in his state that killed five people are linked to similar attacks in Virginia and Ohio.

So far, authorities have reported a total of 20 such attacks in the three states. Genesee County, Michigan, prosecutor David Leyton said on CNN’s "American Morning" that the victims’ description of the attacker and his car are similar.

"We think we have the same perpetrator," he said.

Leyton said police believe the man is responsible for three recent attacks in Leesburg, Virginia, the stabbing deaths of five people and injuries to 11 others in the Flint, Michigan, area and a stabbing Saturday that injured one man in Toledo, Ohio.

Fourteen of the 16 victims in Michigan were African-American, he said, but Flint is also a majority African-American community. In majority white Leesburg, Virginia, two victims were black and one was Hispanic.

Great. On top of the usual day to day stuff, I gotta look out for a serial killer who may be in the metro-D.C. area, and whose favorite victims are apparently people who look like me.

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Granted, we’ve all had days on the job where we’ve long to say, “Screw you guys. I’m going home.” But this guy took it to a whole new level.

A JetBlue flight attendant got into an argument with a passenger on a jetliner arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Monday, cursed the passenger, grabbed a beer from the galley and then deployed an emergency exit slide and fled the plane, authorities said.

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My initial reaction to Ross Douthat’s (whose name I habitually mispronounce as “Ross Doubt-that”) recent New York Times column was to roll my eyes.

Fifty years ago, American family structures were remarkably uniform. The rich married at roughly the same rate as the poor and middle class. Divorce rates were low for the college educated and high school graduates alike. Out-of-wedlock births, while more common among African-Americans, were rare in almost every region and community.

That was a long time ago. The intact two-parent family has been in eclipse for decades now: last week, the Pew Research Center reported that in 2008, 41 percent of American births occurred outside of marriage, the highest figure yet recorded. And from divorce rates to teen births, nearly every indicator of family life now varies dramatically by education, race, geography and income.

It wasn’t until I reread the beginning paragraphs that I realized why.

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The only things more astounding than conservatives’ record of failure, are their denials of "personal responsibility" for the ensuing disasters, and their attempts to blame somebody — anybody — else. Their response to the growing ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is taken straight from Bart Simpson. "I didn’t do it, no one saw me do it, there’s no way you can prove anything!"

Despite their latest attempt at dodging accountability, the Deep Horizon disaster is just the latest collision of corporate failure and conservative failure — and its roots go back to the previous administration and its conservative ideology.

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(TRIGGER WARNING: The descriptions and some of the media in this post depict extremely violent acts of child abuse. If this is an issue for you, consider yourself warned.)

I had not expected to update this series so soon after the last installment. But, via Alvin McEwen, comes the latest conservative blather on gay parents. This time, from former Arkansas governor and GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee.

He continues to oppose any government recognition of same-sex relationships. Even civil unions are “not necessary,” Huckabee said. “I think there’s been a real level of being disingenuous on the part of the gay and lesbian community with their goal of civil unions,” he alleged, referring to LGBT activists who first claimed that their goal in several states was to enact civil unions, but subsequently launched efforts to implement full marriage rights.

Huckabee went on to draw parallels between homosexuality and other lifestyles that are considered by some to be morally aberrant. “You don’t go ahead and accommodate every behavioral pattern that is against the ideal,” he said of same-sex marriage. “That would be like saying, well, there are a lot of people who like to use drugs, so let’s go ahead and accommodate those who want who use drugs. There are some people who believe in incest, so we should accommodate them. There are people who believe in polygamy, so we should accommodate them.”

No surprise here. Nor is it all that surprising that — given the connection cemented in the conservative mind that the sole purpose of marriage is procreation or the symbolic possibility thereof. This last part makes it OK for, say, infertile or elderly heterosexual couples — who physiologically unable to procreate, or well past their reproductive primes — to marry, and to marry for a “reason” that can still be used disqualify same-sex couples (who cannot reproduce with one another).

Predictably he attacks same sex parents

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It’s been a while since I’ve added to this series. There are probably a number of reasons, among them that I’ve found myself blogging more about other issues and less about LGBT issues. There are any nmber of reasons, including that my writing at work tends to bleed over to this blog because I have less time to write these days to my interest in what’s happening on the national political scene. But I’ve been keeping up with the latest chapter of the abuse scandal swirling in the Catholic church in the past weeks. And found myself thinking more and more about this series.

Besides the Catholic church scandal, there’s the news of the Boy Scouts covering up abuse. I find it, if nothing else, noteworthy that two organizations that have gone to some lengrhs to defend their anit-gay policies and that have inveighed against families like mine have the same problems with child sex abuse, and the same penchant for covering it up — or, rather, keeping it in the closet.

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I came across this in my work-related news-reading. According to a Bakersfield woman, five police officers — and maybe one bounty hunter — entered her home without consent or a warrant. At least she had the presence of mind to grab a video camera.

“Open the door now!” shouted the official just outside her window.

[Star] Hills grabbed a video camera and recorded Kern County Sheriff’s deputies and at least one unidentified bounty hunter entering her home without her consent.

“Is Mr. Baker in your house?” asked an unidentified sheriff’s deputy.

Deputies and the bounty hunter were looking for Joseph Baker, who was charged with a misdemeanor count of assault on a peace officer. Baker was not at the home, but that did not stop them from continuing their search of Hills’ home.

During the search, Hills repeatedly kept asking to see a warrant and for the names of the deputies and bounty hunter in her home.

“I have a bench warrant,” responded the bounty hunter.

“Where is it?” Hills asked in return.

“Actually, I don’t need a bench warrant … I’m a bail enforcement agent,” responded the bounty hunter.

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