There's no excusing what happened at Fort Hood. None. The United States Army has filed charges against the survivor who opened fire in the Soldier Readiness Center, killing 12 fellow soldiers and a civilian, and wounding 30 more persons.

Major Hasan, 39, an Army psychiatrist, is accused of opening fire with two handguns in a Soldier Medical Readiness Center, where troops receive medical attention before being deployed or after returning from overseas.

Of the 13 people who were killed last Thursday, 4 were officers, 8 were enlisted soldiers and one was a civilian. Major Hasan was eventually subdued by civilian police.

The 13 charges against Major Hasan are “initial charges,” said the Army spokesman, Chris Grey, “and additional charges may be preferred in the future, subject to the ongoing criminal investigation.”
“It is important to remember that the preferral of charges is the first step in the court-martial process,” Mr. Grey said, “and that a charge is merely an accusation. The accused is presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty.”

Col. John P. Galligan, a retired Army officer who is representing Major Hasan, has questioned whether the suspect will be able to get a fair trial at Fort Hood.

For now, Mr. Grey added, “Major Hasan is currently under pretrial restriction while receiving medical care.”

Major Hasan is reported to be in stable condition in an Army Hospital in San Antonio, where he is recovering from four gunshot wounds.

Now comes the Times with a follow-on to the initial stories suggesting that the hero civilian first credited with stopping this madman was merely another shooting victim. I don't know whether that is true or not; ballistics and evidence will tell the story. Either way, I think her partner, whose shooting was credited on the day of the incident with finally bringing down Hasan, deserves positive feedback and respect.

Via Baseline Scenario, where James Kwok comments that Brad DeLong is never afraid to admit error, this from DeLong:

“Back in the 1930s there was a Polish Marxist economist, Michel Kalecki, who argued that recessions were functional for the ruling class and for capitalism because they created excess supply of labor, forced workers to work harder to keep their jobs, and so produced a rise in the rate of relative surplus-value.

Cappy McGarr in the Times, today:

Back in the 1990s, I was the founding chairman of Texas’ state-run purchasing alliance — an exchange, essentially — which ultimately failed. There are lessons to be learned from that experience, as well as the similar failures of other states to create useful exchanges.

Bob Herbert in the Times:

The survey for the Economic Policy Institute was conducted in September by Hart Research Associates. Respondents said that they had more faith in President Obama’s ability to handle the economy than Congressional Republicans. The tally was 43 percent to 32 percent. But when asked who had been helped most by government stimulus efforts, substantial majorities said “large banks” and “Wall Street investment companies.”

When asked how “average working people” or “you and your family” had benefited, very small percentages, in a range of 10 percent to 13 percent, said they had fared well.

People think the Dems suck because, well, the Dems suck.

NYT:

Senior staff members of the United Nations nuclear agency have concluded in a confidential analysis that Iran has acquired “sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable” atom bomb.

The report by experts in the International Atomic Energy Agency stresses in its introduction that its conclusions are tentative and subject to further confirmation of the evidence, which it says came from intelligence agencies and its own investigations.

But the report’s conclusions, described by senior European officials, go well beyond the public positions taken by several governments, including the United States.

The Times:

[I]n Midtown Manhattan on Tuesday morning a different sort of health-care protest took place, led by left-leaning groups who accused insurers of greed ...

Why, the idea!

... and called for nationwide, single-payer health insurance.

The police said that 17 people were arrested after refusing to leave the lobby of an office building on Park Avenue where the insurance company Aetna has offices. They were charged with criminal trespass. In addition, the police said, three of those arrested were charged with obstructing governmental administration.

... despite what anyone says, and I'm totally confident that Obama's vetting process will continue to produce public servants of the most awsum and unimpeachablest integritude, despite blips like chief speechwriter Jon Favreau, Commerce Secretary-designate Bill Richardson, and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, but doesn't this pose the appearance of conflict?

[Daschle's] finances [include] more than $300,000 in income from health-related companies that he might regulate as secretary....

And, even though a substantial proportion of that $300,000 must come from the insurance parasites that single payer would remove from the health care system, it's impossible for me to imagine that this would influence Daschle's views of what's "politically feasible [rhymes with weasel] and what isn't.

I am not a journalist. I don't like exhaustive research, though I do respect such research. I have been skimming politics like a water bug my whole life: though I spent three years on the high school newspaper, I don't think I wrote a single straight news story. My whole itty bitty life has been about impressions and tones and intuition and snark and flights-of-fancy and bald-faced fantasy: don't get me wrong, I listen and read others and weigh the evidence that is laid out and then go on my way, writing lyrics or snark or nothing about these same topics. Hurricane Katrina has threatened my relationship with the written word, has clawed at it and mugged it and pulled me to the harder work of writing and making some kind of sense out of large disasters, but now I am slipping backwards inside myself, for I know there isn't anything more I can add in terms of "the facts of the case." What's weird is that I am a sort of mirror of the administration, fashioning reality as I go, adding textures and colors as I feel like, moving pieces around in often arbitrary patterns. The difference is I do it for fun while the Bush administration does it for profit.