The Year in Review

New Year's Day: very nice.

First full week of January: wretched tooth pain.

Second week of January: offending tooth drilled into oblivion; temporary crown installed; excruciating tooth and jaw pain.

Third week of January: emergency root canal; total bill for dental adventures $2100.

Rest of 2010, never mind rest of January: you are on fucking notice.

US Domestic Terrorism Month Continues

We're still in mid-reel from George Tiller's assassination and subsequent closing of his clinic, and just now comes the unfolding story from DC that a geriatric white supremacist shuffled into the Holocaust Museum and unloaded a shotgun on a security guard. Other guards plugged the elderly terrorist, and both he and the wounded guard are in critical condition at the GW medical center. The fact that news crews reported EMTs frantically performing CPR on the guard as his guerney was rolled into the trauma unit is less than optimistic. A bomb-sniffing dog has also apparently shown an untoward amount of interest in a car parked outside the museum, but no word yet on what that means.

Are the two shootings related? Probably not, beyond the creeping suspicion that extremists of more than one rightish stripe might be feeling more emboldened these days, as one white guy after another bravely stands up to call the president a monkey and a Muslim, and his first Supreme Court appointee a racist, after a campaign in which the white male candidate spat out his revulsion over abortion for the sake of the woman's "health" in bitter, angry scare quotes. And of course it doesn't do jack to explain the asshole who murdered the Army recruiter last week in the name of Islam. But that doesn't make our little teeny-tiny watered-down tastes of Baghdad in the past couple weeks any more palatable and less unsettling.