Round up the usual suspects

The Aurora, CO theater shooting unfolded

when a man strode to the front in a multiplex near Denver and opened fire. At least 12 people were killed and 58 wounded, with witnesses describing a scene of claustrophobia, panic and blood. Minutes later, the police arrested James Holmes, 24, in the theater’s parking lot.

There will of course be the usual news cycle, but only until our attention wanes and we have another financial industry or celebrity scandal. Gun massacres are simply a recurring and accepted part of the American landscape, a fact captured by cartoonists
Tom Tomorrow (This Modern World):

I wrote this cartoon after the Gabby Giffords shooting in January of 2011. It remains tragically relevant.
Sigh

and Ruben Bolling (Tom the Dancing Bug):

And of course, here we go again. I did this comic shortly after the Columbine [1999] shootings.
Teen inkblot goes on rampage across U.S.

And after the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007.

On The Monkey Cage blog, political scientist Patrick Egan argues The Declining Culture of Guns and Violence in the United States

The massacre unleashed by James Holmes in Aurora, Colo. shortly after midnight on Friday is a tragedy of national proportions. Like other mass shootings before it—Columbine in 1999 and Virginia Tech in 2007 come to mind—it leaves us desperate for explanations in its wake. There are those who blame our nation’s relative paucity of gun control laws and others decrying the power of the gun lobby. Cultural explanations abound, too. On the right, one Congressman has pinned the blame on long-term national cultural decline. On the left, fingers are pointed at America’s “gun-crazy” culture.

But as pundits and politicians react, they would do well to keep in mind two fundamental trends about violence and guns in America that are going unmentioned in the reporting on Aurora.
First, we are a less violent nation now than we’ve been in over forty years. In 2010, violent crime rates hit a low not seen since 1972; murder rates sunk to levels last experienced during the Kennedy Administration. Our perceptions of our own safety have shifted, as well. In the early 1980s, almost half of Americans told the General Social Survey (GSS) they were “afraid to walk alone at night” in their own neighborhoods; now only one-third feel this way.
...
Thus long-term trends suggest that we are in fact currently experiencing a waning culture of guns and violence in the United States. This is undoubtedly helping to dampen the public’s support for both gun control and the death penalty. There are growing partisan gaps on attitudes regarding the two policies, but enthusiasm for both has declined recently in lockstep with the drop in crime and violence. The total effects of these trends on opinion and policy remain to be seen, but one thing is clear: they defy easy ideological explanation.

Finally, here is incontrovertible proof of the Founders intent regarding 100-round assault-rifle magazines, based on this previously undiscovered transcript of a June 12, 1787, debate on the Second Amendment at the Constitutional Convention.

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Risk vs. Uncertainty in Politics

Nate Silver writes this interesting take on "risk" vs. "uncertainty" in politics.

Well, I don’t know what [Cain] should do. This gets at something of the distinction that the economist Frank H. Knight once made between risk and uncertainty. To boil Mr. Knight’s complicated thesis down into a sentence: risk, essentially, is measurable whereas uncertainty is not measurable.

In Mr. Cain’s case, I think we are dealing with an instance where there is considerable uncertainty. Not only do I not know how I would go about estimating the likelihood that Mr. Cain will win the Republican nomination — I’m not sure that there is a good way to do so at all.

But I do know what an analyst should not do: he should not use terms like “never” and “no chance” when applied to Mr. Cain’s chances of winning the nomination, as many analysts have.

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We are a banana republic...

... with nukes.
After the House failed to pass the bailout package, on Monday afternoon Paul Krugman posted a blog entry titled OK, we are a banana republic in which he quotes himself from an earlier post:

So what we now have is non-functional government in the face of a major crisis, because Congress includes a quorum of crazies and nobody trusts the White House an inch.

As a friend said last night, we’ve become a banana republic with nukes.

And just because it's interesting, roll back the clock three years to his column of 8 August 2005, That Hissing Sound

Of course, some people still deny that there's a housing bubble. Let me explain how we know that they're wrong.

One piece of evidence is the sense of frenzy about real estate, which irresistibly brings to mind the stock frenzy of 1999. Even some of the players are the same. The authors of the 1999 best seller "Dow 36,000" are now among the most vocal proponents of the view that there is no housing bubble.

And speaking of "Dow 36,000" (and returning back to the future):

And last year, when the McCain campaign announced that the candidate had assembled “an impressive collection of economists, professors, and prominent conservative policy leaders” to advise him on economic policy, who was prominently featured? Kevin Hassett, the co-author of “Dow 36,000.” Enough said.

Qualifications

What's all the ruckus over John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate? As this article in the Anchorage Daily News quotes Alaskan State House Speaker John Harris, a Republican from Valdez: "She's old enough," Harris said. "She's a U.S. citizen."
And before running for governor, Palin was mayor of Wasilla, AK (pop. 8,471 per 2005 census estimate). We did, after all, once elect a ticket with Dan Quayle as vice president.

Addendum [09.03.2008]: Yes, the "bikini picture" is Photoshopped.