Earlier this week it happened again. We don't know all the details, but what we do know is this. A young man named T.J. Lane walked into high school—here in my home state of Ohio—approached a table full of kids and started shooting.

By the time the smoke cleared, three kids were dead. Three tragedies of unfulfilled dreams, unrealized potential, and abrogated Constitutional rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," their "general welfare" not protected by the state. More accurately, sacrificed on the altar of the arms industry's puffery and profit-driven deceit.

Like with any tragedy such as this, there were many handmaidens. Certainly, chief among them was the violence this young man bore witness to regularly, in a household reportedly filled with it. His parents, both charged with domestic abuse and other violent behavior in the past, seemingly helped nurture a disturbed and dangerous kid.

But it's also been reported that the killer's grandfather—from whom Lane accessed the gun used—had so many weapons lying around that he couldn't figure out a gun was missing until afterwards. Read that sentence again.

Teaching a child that violence solves everything and giving him access to an arsenal. That should make his family criminally liable—although, current Ohio law will not allow that to happen.

Perhaps, if Ohio state lawmakers hadn't been so busy letting fetuses testify or extending concealed-carry permits to drinking establishments (shots and shooting! Two pastimes that go hand-in-hand like crack cocaine and boating!), they could've found some time to work on that one.

Because, make no mistake, it's a love affair with guns by an obsessive and loud minority and the resulting lax regulation, which are key reasons these things just don't happen on a regular basis in any other Western country. While TJ Lane had easy pickings among a bevy of unaccounted-for weapons, the state of Virginia—under its culturally-Ragtime-Era governor—was removing a law that limited buyers to one handgun purchase per month.

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John Kerry swiftboater Jerome Corsi is at it again. After writing a book back in 2004 which sought to sink John Kerry's Presidential hopes by calling into question his heroic Vietnam service, Corsi has now set hs sights on Barack Obama. With all the secret-Muslim/unpatriotic/radical-black-liberation-theologist smears already circulating, you might think his job would be easier this time around.Well, if every news outlet is as "fair and balanced" as CNN was last night in covering the book, Corsi and his ilk might be in a bit of trouble. Watch while MediaMatters' Paul Waldman, author of the book Free Ride: John McCain and the Media, dismantles every single one of Corsi's lies in rather humiliating fashion. In this clip,Corsi gets slammed for claiming "700 footnotes" while refusing to acknowledge that one of his sources is a widely discredited anti-semitic right-wing blogger.

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WALDMAN: He talks about how many footnotes he has and how many sources he has. Well, if you actually look at them, there are dozens and dozens of citations to right-wing Web sites and blogs. One of the people that he cites as a quote/unquote source is a man named Andy Martin, who is an anti- Semitic right-wing blogger who once called a judge a dirty Jew and filed so many frivolous lawsuits that he's now no longer allowed to file lawsuits.

So my question to Mr. Corsi is, since you cite Andy Martin multiple times as a source, are there any other anti-Semitic right- wing bloggers that you also use as sources or is he the only one?

CORSI: All right. This is what Media Matters does. They frame questions that you...

WALDMAN: This is what we do. We look at what you wrote.

CORSI: [...] If you'd like to talk, I can just sit here. The book has close to 700 footnotes in it. The footnotes are of primary sources. There must be 100 books cited in that. I did interviews. The interviews are cited. There's newspapers included...

KING: Well, respond to the question about Mr. Martin.

CORSI: Well, I quote -- I can remember one quip I quote from him -- and it's just a quip, which is -- where he basically is saying if Obama will lie about his background and his family, he'll lie about anything. And this was in reference to the way Obama presents his father in the autobiography, which I write about extension extensively."

MediaMatters has the entire segment here as well as a thorough debunking of Corsi's book here.

The Dems have an email campaign going called: Get the Truth Out About Jerome Corsi. Please sign up and help us to expose this fraud.

UPDATE: The Obama campaign has released an exhaustive 41 page rebuttal to "fringe bigot" Corsi titled "Unfit for Publication." Read it and learn it here.

Full transcript below the fold.

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Rove: Liberals Want Troops To Die

Atrios has found old Rove at his worst and the . " But, this is the new strategy on Iraq: blame the critics. We're all Dixie Chicks now." I wonder what Karl says to those when he's questioned about that new breeding ground for terrorists he created?

The Left Coaster says: Karl Rove - King of the Shills

Paul Waldman says: "As for Senator Schumer - another smart, tough Democrat - he also seems to be missing something. Chuck, you don't respond to slander like that by talking about how we shouldn't be divided. This is how you respond:

"Karl Rove's comments are even more despicable than what we've come to expect from Republicans. There is no depth to which they will not sink, no tragedy they will not exploit for political gain. The next time Mr. Rove wants to come to New York to lecture us about what September 11 means, he'd better hope this New Yorker isn't in the room."

A sort-of mea culpa from the Washington Post

by Paul Waldman, Editor-in-Chief
8.13.04

News flash: The Washington Post was not as skeptical as it should have been of the Bush administration's claims in the run-up to the Iraq war. So says a front-page article by the Post's media reporter Howard Kurtz.

It's a year and half later. They're getting around to admitting this now?