In the winter of 1973 we moved to Cold Spring, a small town in central Minnesota where I had recently taken a job. Our kids soon became acquainted with the neighbor kids down the street. We had been there less than a week when Tara, our oldest daughter, says to her younger sister, “Come here once, Karen.”

“Once?” I thought. “Why not twice?”

I soon discovered that it was a local speech custom to attach useless and unnecessary words to the end of perfectly good sentences. Much like Canadians stick an “Eh” at the end of a statement or question. Minnesotans would tack on a “once”, “then” or “hey”.

This is, of course, not all that big a deal and cannot be compared to, say, the Iranians getting a nuclear bomb and wiping out Israel. Nor is it as annoying to certain speech crutches currently in vogue. Repeatedly sticking in “you know” between comments can be distracting and seems to be a common filler for athletes being interviewed by sports reporters. You would think that star baseball or football players who are frequently asked for on camera comments and who make the big bucks would have someone from the team’s media office taking the guy aside and saying, “Look Dwayne, you said ‘you know’ 37 times in that two minute interview yesterday. That makes you sound like a dumb shit and you are a graduate of Notre Dame and make $10 million dollars a year. Can we cut the ‘you knows’ down to perhaps 10 next time around?”

President Obama has a reputation for being a gifted orator, but that depends on whether he is reading his speeches off his teleprompter or not. When he is forced to speak off the cuff things do not go quite so well and he typically sticks in repeated “ah, ah, ahs” in the middle of sentences and phrases. It seems he’s groping for the thought or correct word. I guess that’s why they haul the damn teleprompters everywhere he is going to make even the most unimportant speech.

Some of the stuff that annoys me most is now part of the youth culture propagated by the all-pervasive media. The use of the word “go” as a substitute for “said” when recounting a conversation can be confusing to senior citizens like me. (“So he goes, blah, blah and I go blah, blah, blah and then he goes…..” etc.) In my memory, failing as it is, the verb “go” is not a suitable substitute for “said”.

But, by far the most maddening verbal crutch of recent times is the repeated and unnecessary insertion of “like” into conversation. “Like” is a perfectly useful word but has no place getting stuck excessively and inappropriately into otherwise perfectly fine sentences. Example conversation: “He was like really mad and I was like completely totally like shocked.” You get the drift.

I guess this is not so shocking. Teenagers all watch the same stuff on TV and the same movies and all their heroes talk this way. What really drives me nuts is to hear 40 something celebrities talking like (acceptable usage of the word) teens on Jay Leno or Jimmy Kimmel. My wife used to count the “likes” on those occasions and often could make it to 30 or 35 before I grabbed the remote and switched channels. Don’t these people ever watch one of their own interviews?

Note: This is not a piece about drilling for natural gas.

The extraordinary events of recent weeks have prompted me to break my personal promise to retire from writing about politics. While these latest developments are unlikely to affect me very much in a direct sense, they will certainly intrude on the lives of my children and grandchildren.

First, let’s talk about ObamaCare. You might notice if you pay attention that Obama and his minions happily referred to the program by that name until it started to turn to crap. Now it is Administration and liberal policy to refer to it as The Affordable Care Act or the ACA. ObamaCare has been banned from the lexicon of the left.

The Democrats in the dark of night pushed through this monster, a radical confiscation of the US healthcare system, by numerous questionable tactics and without one Republican vote. Now the Dems are blaming the GOP for not helping them implement the law! This is the height of absurdity. Remember Pelosi’s famous line? “We have to pass the law to find out what’s in it.” Surprise! It’s like a piñata full of poisonous snakes.

In a brilliant article by Andrew McCarthy in the National Review Online called “The Scheme Behind the Obamacare Fraud,” McCarthy explains why Obama and his supporters lied repeatedly about the plan. Unless you’ve been living in a cave and eating roots and berries you have certainly heard the President assuring folks that “If you like your plan you can keep your plan. Period.” Turns out that was a big lie as millions of people got notices that their plans were cancelled. Obama tried to blame the insurance companies but that would not hold water because it was obvious that HHS had changed the rules. Everybody’s plan had to include buying Sandra Fluke’s contraceptives, abortions, prenatal care and maternity benefits among others. It didn’t matter if you were a 90-year-old male widower who hadn’t had an erection since the Carter Administration; you still had to have maternity benefits in your insurance. With all this added stuff, including accepting everyone with pre-existing conditions at the same price, only a career politician or a liar would assert, “… everyone would save an average of $2500 on their insurance costs.” You’re going to get more and pay less? Yet Democrat apologists continue to assert that people will get better plans on the exchanges for less money.

“If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” Says Obama again and again. Another lie and they knew it. Doctors are retiring in droves and are being dropped from group plans. More and more are refusing to see Medicaid and Medicare patients. Specialized hospitals and clinics like the Mayo Clinic and Seattle Children’s Hospital (where a couple of my grandkids go) are being cut out of group plans because under ObamaCare, group policies can no longer afford it. Which raises another question in my mind. Why are the insurance companies nailing together their own gallows and tying the noose for their own hanging? It’s pretty obvious that Obama intends to put them out of the health insurance business. They seem to be quietly walking to the scaffolds. Executives of these companies should be screaming their bloody heads off.

The most recent and seemingly unrelated story last week was Harry Reid’s decision to invoke the “Nuclear Option” and change over 220 years of Senate tradition by changing the rules such that instead of requiring 60 votes to approve a judicial or administrative appointment, only a simple majority would suffice. This allows the Democrat majority in the Senate to pack the DC Court of Appeals (and others) with liberal justices. Why is this important? The DC court is the only check on the rules issued by unelected bureaucrats in the EPA, HHS and other intrusive branches of government. It’s a power grab pure and simple. The Senate Democrats are pretty fearful that the voters are awakening from their slumber and realizing that they have been lied to by their Democrat rep and will likely take revenge in 2014.

Getting rid of the 60-vote requirement also allows the Obamaniks to appoint leftists to the IPAB, the Independent Payment Advisory Board. This outfit, beyond judicial review, will effectively have control over prices, reimbursement to doctors and, essentially, rationing. These guys are what Sarah Palin so accurately called “Death Panels”.

Speaking of Palin… perhaps you missed that Martin Bashir of ultra-liberal MSNBC decided that Ms Palin was not entitled to use the word “slavery” when referring to the national debt being accumulated in the name of our grandchildren. He was so angry about it that he said she should suffer the same fate as the punishment meted out by one of the world’s worst slave owners: That someone should urinate and defecate in her mouth. What did MSNBC have to say about this? How about NBC, the parent of MSNBC? Well, nothing. Not a single word. Paula Dean lost her career because she admitted in a courtroom that she may have used the word “nigger” at some point in the misty past but Bashir did not even get a reprimand.

Nor did NBC have anything to say about the collapse of the ObamaCare website or the millions having their heath care plans cancelled. No interest in the disaster of the $900 million flop of Healthcare.gov or the no bid contract to build it given to Michelle’s Princeton pal’s company. Total silence. If the major networks don’t mention it, it didn’t happen. The media has protected Obama since 2007 and the Obamas have reason to believe that policy will continue.

Speaking of lies and the media…Obama’s re-election hinged on several frauds as well. First, Benghazi. To perpetuate the myth that Obama’s policies had terrorism on the run they had to blame the Benghazi disaster on “a protest of an anti-Islamic video” when it was obviously a lie. Second: It is now clear that Obama used the IRS to harass and silence the Tea Party organizations around the US. Finally, Obama used the Census Department to fudge the numbers to put the unemployment figures below 8%. That, too, was a lie. But for those lies and the untimely arrival of Hurricane Sandy, there would be an honest man in the White House today and the economy would be booming. ObamaCare would not exist.

Getting back to the failing ObamaCare program… McCarthy asserts, and I agree, that it was designed to fail from the start. The “scheme” as he points out, is to get the US to a “single payer” system like Canada, the UK and other European socialist counties. Obama admitted as much in a speech in 2003 and again in a speech in 2007. More people are already being forced into Medicaid and Medicare. The cost and unsuitability of the policies being pushed on the young “invincibles” will not attract enough of them to make the economics of the program viable and perhaps a 150 million more people will lose their employer provided health care at the end of 2014 when the “grandfathering” runs out. With millions uninsured by the private market the liberals will be there with the solution: Government health care. ObamaCare is a carefully scripted program to get the US to a single payer system. To the leftists if lies, fraud and deceit are necessary to get there, so be it. The ends justify the means. If high cost, long delays for essential services, rationing and bureaucrats deciding who lives and dies are your thing, you’re gonna love it.

By the way, the Democrats in the faint hope to cover their asses in the 2014 elections have pushed the release of the costs for health policies for 2014 past the November elections. How cynical is that?

Preface & disclaimer from the author:  I couldn’t help but weigh in on this issue, maybe as much to organize my thinking as anything. However, if you are expecting any brilliant explanations out of this piece, I suggest you save your time and read the sports pages. No body really knows why some people drop off the deep end and suddenly start killing indiscriminately. When it’s little kids, we have even less chance of understanding. After the grieving we need to have a rational discussion about it. Perhaps this is a place to start. Send me your comments.

Adam Lanza’s decision to devote last Friday to slaughtering 27 people including 20 school children aged 6 and 7 and then killing himself has set off a media frenzy and collective grieving unlike anything we have ever experienced. I guess it is the horror of imagining anyone so callused and cold being able to look innocent and helpless children in the face and then shoot them. Trained and hardened combat veterans cannot do that to a wounded or unarmed enemy.

For pure body count Anders Breivik of Norway wins the prize. He killed 69 and injured 170 in his bombing and then shooting attack at a summer camp on an island off the coast of Norway. And, Seung Hui Cho killed 32 and injured 17 in the Virginia Tech massacre. But for pure horror, Sandy Hook beats all.

Most recently James Eagen Holmes killed 12 in his theater attack in Aurora, CO but perhaps the most infamous incident prior to Sandy Hook was the 1999 Columbine High School shooting carried out by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold where 12 students and one teacher were killed.

Robert Leider, a U. of PA School of Law fellow had a thoughtful article in Monday’s WSJ (“Breaking the Gun Control Stalemate”). Inevitably, when one of these tragedies occur, the left cries out for more gun control laws and the gun rights people argue that if someone at the school had had a gun they likely would have stopped the asshole before he ran out of ammo. Note: Mr. Holmes may well be insane but he was smart enough to choose a theater in Aurora that did not allow people to carry a gun inside. Colorado has a “concealed carry” law and in most theaters you can pack your sidearm.)

David Kopel wrote a piece for the WSJ today (12/17) and points out that all of these shootings occur in “gun free zones” and says, “… these shooters are weaklings and cowards who crumble as soon as an armed person shows up.” Indeed. In the recent Clackamas Mall shooting in Oregon, after killing two people the shooter shot himself as soon as he saw a legally armed citizen aiming his gun at him. While some jurisdictions are allowing teachers to carry guns (Harold Independent School District in Texas just voted to allow teachers to pack heat and Utah already does) the emotionally driven push will be toward further restrictions on guns. This, of course, will accomplish nothing.

Biker Lance Armstrong wrote, “It’s Not About the Bike.” It’s also true it’s not about the gun. Recently 36-year-old Min Yung jun in the Chinese village of Cheng Pin stabbed an 85 year old woman with a kitchen knife then stabbed 22 children between the ages of 6 and 11 outside an elementary school. He cut some of the children’s ears and fingers off. This is the most recent of a string of knife attacks on school children in China and 20 have been killed and 50 injured so far. China does not permit private ownership of firearms. [Editor’s note:  China now requires you to register any large kitchen knife purchases with your name, ID card number, address and you must state the purposes of knife use.]

The one thing that all these mass killings have in common is mental illness. The VA Tech shooter had a history of mental problems but privacy laws prevented VA Tech being informed about it. And, because he was never actually committed to an institution, he was able to legally purchase firearms. As Adam Lanza’s life gets dissected we will learn more about this young man’s mental problems. Unfortunately, we will never be able to ask his mother about it and also question her about the wisdom of keeping a collection of guns where he could get his hands on them.

Dr. Steven Segal of the U of California-Berkeley has written extensively on the subject of civil commitment law in the US. The legal system can take credit for making it pretty tough to keep mentally ill people in hospitals where they can get help. He points out in the Kopel piece that the number of beds in state mental hospitals has declined to 1850 levels. Given the amount of money spent on health care, this is difficult to comprehend. He also contends that there is a strong correlation between homicide rates in various states and the strength of their involuntary commitment laws. Clearly, if we want to get a grip on mass shootings the mental health system is a good place to start.

Many people have speculated about the role of bullying, the Goth culture and video games. There seems to be no question that the wall-to-wall media coverage of this stuff seems to be a trigger for some unstable individuals to try to emulate the fame of an Adam Lanza or Dylan Klebold. Already there have been a couple of copycat attempts following the Newtown tragedy. The media needs to take a serious look at how they handle this kind of story.

I’m not too convinced that bullying or the Goth culture has much to do with it. These young men all seem to be social outsiders and as such are likely bullied, and Goth seems to be a place for weirdos anyway. As for video games….. The last game I played was “Frogger” and something with a rolling ball so I am hardly an authority. However, I have seen the ads and many seem to involve a lot of realistic shooting of multiple targets. I suppose most kids can play these games with no ill effects but perhaps one in ten million youngsters with psychological problems will be desensitized and motivated to try shooting real people.

Like I said in my disclaimer preceding this piece, I don’t make any pretense to having a solution. I am quite certain, however, that passing more restrictive gun laws on law-abiding citizens will accomplish nothing. I personally would endorse tightening up restrictions on gun ownership for persons with a history of drug or mental problems. And would not I oppose closing the loopholes on gun shows. But, as a practical matter in a country with an estimated 200 million guns already floating around out there….. Yeah, exactly. This, of course, will not prevent the politicians from bloviating on the matter endlessly.