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While he works on launching a U.S. senatorial run in Massachusetts, Fox’s “Medical A-Team” psychiatrist, Keith Ablow, has his platform on the “fair and balanced” network to promote his candidacy. So this morning, when he visited Fox & Friends to discuss the psychological scars that might affect Ethan, the Alabama kindergartner just rescued after being held hostage for nearly a week, Ablow gratuitously attacked those who think this is another example of the need for stricter gun regulations and suggested they are so dedicated to an anti-gun agenda that they’d rather people get shot by the mentally ill than institutionalize them.

I’ve written many times about what a crackpot Ablow is and his propensity for diagnosing people without benefit of an examination. In this case, he diagnosed Ethan as more or less doomed to mental illness - without knowing much more than his first name. Reacting to a report that the boy has been “laughing, joking, playing and eating” after being reunited with his mother, Ablow rendered his opinion: These are “also the things that five- or six-year-olds do when they’re desperately trying to maintain some semblance of normality… I can tell you that the effort to maintain that sense of normality in and of itself has set the stage for all kinds of trouble down the road. So, as sad as it is, Ethan isn’t OK. He’s at tremendous risk for depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, alcohol and drug abuse later in life. Fractured relationships. All manner of disabilities from psychological problems.”

Nobody challenged Ablow’s “evaluation.” Instead, Steve Doocy opened the door for Ablow to opine on policy by asking if maybe “somebody should have connected some dots” about the state of the abductor’s mental health.

Ablow replied:

Gee, ya think? And there’ll be people, by the way, who say this is an argument for more gun control. Those people are reprehensible. Because the bottom line is, this guy had a hearing for medicine coming up. You mean to say the court couldn’t have connected the dots between that and the fact that his neighbors said that he had threatened kids’ lives? And that he had beaten a dog to death with a pipe and said, ‘We are holding you in the psychiatric unit for evaluation against your will.’ Really?

Gretchen Carlson prodded for more by “asking” why they don’t do that.

With unintentional hilarity, Ablow said it’s because it takes “work” and “It takes not pontificating and trying to make political points by saying we’re gonna take everybody’s guns! …Obvious people who need help aren’t given that help when we could deliver it – because we have the expertise – but we’re not willing to allocate resources, partly out of stigma, and partly out of the fact that people would rather try to pander to certain voting blocs by saying it’s all about guns. Which it isn’t.

Doocy closed by validating the hypothesis: “It didn’t have to happen.”

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We've had an unusual spike in gun fatalities here in Peacenik Seattle this spring -- twenty-one since January, compared to only three such deaths at the same time a year ago. Everyone is trying to figure out why. And after yesterday, it's not just a rhetorical question.

Because this one was a real wake-up call:

A man described by his family as "angry toward everything" went on a deadly shooting rampage in Seattle on Wednesday, killing five people and critically wounding another before turning a gun on himself hours later as police closed in.

Ian L. Stawicki, 40, was identified by family and law-enforcement officials as the man who shot five people just before 11 a.m. at Cafe Racer Espresso in the University District — a hangout for a tight community of artists and musicians.

Four of the cafe shooting victims died. A fifth victim was fatally shot near Town Hall in downtown Seattle.

This happened not very far from where I live. At the park where my daughter's classmates were playing at their recess, the police came and told everyone to go back to their school and stay inside. Schools closer to the crime scenes were locked down entirely.

Everyone wants to know why this is happening. It isn't hard to figure out a couple of things that were clearly at play here: We're now a society awash in guns at unprecedented levels. And we're also awash in an increasingly untreated population of mentally ill people.

Over at Slog, Jonathan Golob explains:

In Washington State, it is exceedingly difficult to involuntarily commit mentally ill individuals—particularly for extended periods of time—unless someone is an imminent threat to themselves or others. Individuals with illness severe enough to be committed to a mental health facility in other communities are—by plan—allowed to try to integrate into the community.

In place of (costly and arguably inhumane) warehousing of the mentally ill, the plan for decades in Washington state has been to provide aggressive outpatient case management. Psychosis, bipolar disease, depression, anxiety and others are all treatable diseases. The notion—and it's not a bad idea at its core—is to use an army of social workers (state employees) to keep mentally ill people in the community engaged with treatment and the community safe.

Over the same decades, our investment in social services has dwindled. Right-wing propagandists like the Seattle Time's editorial board, Tim Eyman, and everyone you know who has uttered the phrase 'a more efficient state government' are directly responsible for our social service network being gutted, the many safety nets being left tattered and unmanned.

The reign of radical right wing financial policy in Washington State has left (the richest of) us with some of the lowest tax burdens of any community in the United States. The cost is a day like today.

But we haven't only government-gutting conservatives to thank for this problem. Because we can also thank the far-right paranoid gun nuts who run large national "gun rights" organizations for having gutted any kind of reasonable restraints on the public's access to guns.

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Indiana prosecutors charged her with murder and feticide, and despite her attorneys' best efforts, she lost her appeal to have the charges dropped. The specific statute she is charged under was intended to punish violent attackers who do harm to a fetus in the process of committing a crime but Indiana's prosecutors have decided the statute also applies to depressed pregnant women, evidently.

Like Rennie Gibbs in Mississippi, Bei Bei Shuai is being held captive to a "back door" personhood law. By placing the life of the fetus over the life of the mother, Indiana is imposing their own version of Sharia law on Bei Bei Shuai.

Via RH Reality Check:

Pregnant women are not immune from the mental illness or severe depression that leads some people to attempt to end their lives. Indiana, like virtually every other state in the country, addresses suicide and attempted suicide as a public health issue, not a crime. Prosecutors simply may not decide that a suicide attempt is a public health issue for everyone except pregnant women. Moreover, there is wide consensus that subjecting pregnant women to special criminal penalties does not work. Rather, it undermines legitimate interests in maternal, fetal, and child health by stigmatizing pregnant women and by making them vulnerable to punishment if they seek help of any kind.

If this prosecution is allowed to go forward, the law will not just apply to one desperate pregnant woman who attempted suicide by swallowing rat poison – it will create legal precedent that makes every woman criminally liable for the outcome of her pregnancy. This precedent would mean that women who undergo significant risks to their lives and health by bringing forth life, sometimes undergoing major surgery to do so, may then be arrested as criminals if they are unable to guarantee the birth of a live and healthy baby. In addition, if Ms. Shuai’s prosecution is upheld, it leaves no doubt that women who intentionally end their pregnancies will go to jail as murderers if Roe is ever overturned.

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[Ed. note: We break into our countdown of top videos for a few notable videos of the past 24 hours]

Here we have Republican Newt Gingrich tearing up as he recalls times with his mother, who struggled with mental illness and died of cancer in 2003 - or - here we have Republican Newt Gingrich desperately trying to save his floundering campaign by crying a couple of days before voting starts. Your call.

"You'll get me all teary-eyed, Callista will tell you, I get teary-eyed every time we sing Christmas carols. My mother sang in the choir and loved singing in the choir," Gingrich said, referring to his wife, as he fought back tears.

"But I identify my mother with being happy, loving life, having a sense of joy in her friends, but what she introduced me to, is late in her life she ended up in a long-term-care facility. She had bipolar disease, and depression, and she gradually acquired some physical ailments, and that introduced me to the issue of long-term care, which I did with Bob Kerrey for three years, and that introduced me to the issue of Alzheimers, which I did with Bob Kerrey for three more years, and my whole emphasis on brain science comes indirectly from dealing with the real problems of real people in my family," the former House Speaker continued, at moments stopping to cry.

The audience sympathetically cheered for Gingrich as he spoke about his mother.

"I do policy much easier than I do personal," Gingrich joked.

Republican pollster Frank Luntz asked how his mother would react if she was at the event Friday, Gingrich said she would have been working the crowd.

"She'd be talking to all these people, and she'd be telling them how nice I was," Gingrich said to laughter.

[Video via TPM]

Amygdala: Changing attitudes toward mental illness.

Lance Mannion: Stupak and the bishops, the bishops and me.

Sadly, No: Nothing will make them happy.

TBogg: Atlas begs.

Pam's House Blend: Tradishinul marridge is what brings us together today.

Thump and Whip: Glenn Beck doesn't identify as white, or speak for "white America" – except when he does.

James Wolcott: It takes more than a market rally to pull the wool over Bolton's mustache.

Guest post by Batocchio. Mike is back tomorrow. Send tips to Finnsagain AT aol DOT com.

It's fairly astonishing, really, how little coverage the horrendous shooting rampage in Florida earlier this week has gotten in the American press: Someone walks up to a townhouse meeting room full of Chilean college students and opens fire on them -- after having warned neighbors earlier not to have any immigrants in her home, and asking one of them if they wanted to join him in his "revolution."

Two kids (including Racine Balbontin, 22, left) dead, five hospitalized. This is just a mundane story? Well, it's a major, front-page news story in Chile, at least, and in much of the rest of Latin America.

Northwest Florida Daily News reports:

Cooperative Radio reporter Stephanie Hunt spoke to the Daily News via phone from Santiago, Chile, Friday morning. She said Chilean Government Minister Francisco Vidal called the crime "macabre" and "brutal."

Hunt said Chile's Deputy Consul General is working to get family members to the United States so they can be with the injured students and bring back the bodies of those who didn't survive. Families traveled from all over Chile Thursday to Santiago to meet with officials in an attempt to expedite the process of getting passports and visas.

Although the case is sensitive because it involves foreign nationals and 14 victims total, The Walton County Sheriff's Office released some new information.

"It was a tremendously horrific scene," said Sheriff Mike Adkinson. "Even the survivors are victims."

Adkinson said the shooting happened about 1:45 a.m. when Dannie Baker, 60, approached Unit 12 in the Summer Lakes townhome complex and opened fire through a window. When he was done, Adkinson said, he went back to his home at Unit 25.

We're gradually learning more about the shooter, Dannie Baker -- but a heap of questions remain unanswered. It appears that he used to campaign for Republicans, but they dropped him when he sent some e-mails in 2007 that apparently frightened them.

According to one news story:

Not much is known about Baker or his lifestyle yet, according to the Sheriff's Office.

He was a volunteer at the Walton County Republican Headquarters during the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign in 2004.

"He volunteered the same time I did," said Pat Magee, a member of the Walton County Republican Executive Committee. "I was shocked. The person I knew would have never done anything bad to anyone."

Magee said Baker answered phones and did general office work during the campaign. Although she didn't remember much about his personal life, she said he had mentioned he was from Alabama and had attended Auburn University.

Jim Anders, another member of the Republican Executive Committee, said Baker was very active during the 2004 election but added that he was very eccentric. He said Baker traveled to Atlanta once a year to assist in some sort of music ministry there.

Baker did not volunteer during last year's election, but local Republicans said they began to receive disturbing e-mails from him about national political issues, said Anders.

"Dannie had some emotional problems, it seemed," said Anders, who added that that many e-mails were "radical" and "inappropriate."

The e-mails were so disturbing they were reported to the Sheriff's Office, the Republican volunteers said.

The Sheriff's Office said the e-mails did not target any individuals, but would not reveal any more details about them.

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SF Chronicle:

Thousands of Iraqi and Afghanistan veterans are returning home only to become casualties of war - at their own hands. Suffering from psychiatric injuries, 1,000 veterans under Veterans Administration care are attempting suicide each month. Almost 40 percent of the young men and women returning from combat almost have proven mental health injuries that include Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, major depression and traumatic brain injury.

But when they seek help, disabled veterans face a claims system so mismanaged and inefficient that they often must wait more than five years for any assistance. The Department of Veterans Affairs is choking on a backlog of some 600,000 unresolved benefits claims. Even after their eligibility has been established, thousands of veterans cannot obtain adequate mental health treatment. While they wait for the care they are owed, veterans are dying. About 126 veterans per week commit suicide. Vast numbers of veterans are living with mental illness, sometimes so severe that they are unable to work. Nationally, about 154,000 veterans are homeless on any given night and twice that many are homeless at some time during the year. Read on...

I've said before that I'm the granddaughter of a career military officer. There is no excuse for the treatment of vets and it horrifies me that we're adding tens of thousands of more vets every year from Iraq and Afghanistan. They say that the measure of a society is how they treat the neediest among them. What does this say about us?

Prairie Weather: The Army was pressured by the White House to hire a Halliburton subsidiary to take over patient care at Walter Reed.

Truthdig: Excellent interview with Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski (ret.), a veteran of the Pentagon with firsthand experience of the administration’s cherry-picking of intelligence

TalkLeft: NY firefighters blast Rudy Giuliani

MediaBloodhound: The unindicted co-conspirator in the Libby case was your hopelessly dysfunctional press corps. The hackery continues...

Intrepid Liberal Journal: The criminalization of mental illness
Scrutiny Hooligans: The Democrat’s debate on FOX is dead, but Screwy Hoolie has preserved the special FOX debate rules and some ads they were going to run.

I think I'm starting to suffer from a new form of mental illness curently under consideration to be entered in the DSM-IV: Severe Wingnut Psychosis: The sudden and uncontrollable impulse, and or urge to bash in my television set with a large, metal object due to the exposure of CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News.

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In a segment on Scarborough Country (where else) Donohue is angry and wants an apology. While defending the Catholic Church's stance on condoms in Africa...you watch!