Andanh.com

Open thread.

My 25-words-or-less review of Olympics coverage: Not enough track and, particularly, field. Too much tedious beach volleyball. Too many commercials. Thank goodness for TiVo.

John Brummett has a few words to say about the dialogue on this blog after last week's shooting of Bill Gwatney.

I'm wondering if humanity is in precipitous decline or if we've always hung by such a precarious thread.

Also today: A Doug Thompson tribute column to the late Democratic Party chair.

And also today: Andrew DeMillo analysis on how much Bill Gwatney had done for the Democratic Party. No doubt about that.

PS, A MEDIA MUSING: You know from this blog, TV reporting and, for those who see it, fine AP reporting a great deal about Gwatney killer Timothy Johnson's passion for guns and gun sports and his reported animus toward Democrats. Alone, they prove nothing about the motive for the crime. But they add interesting dimensions to the emerging portrait of the man. Have you noticed that the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, while front-paging three days later the man's encounter in the Baptist Convention building, has been far less aggressive about detailing the suspect's life? The newspaper has chosen not to follow reports about his gun hobby, his classmate's remark on his political leanings and a neighbor's remark about noticing a shooting target in Johnson's yard the day before the slaying. I begin to wonder if these omissions were considered decisions, rather than oversights. Was this, again, Editor G. Smith jr. (CSA hon.) at work? Were Johnson's gun passion and politics (including his 2008 Republican presidential vote) decreed by him to be unmentionable, akin to mentioning seatbelt use in the context of fatal auto accidents? We'll wait and watch for more.

NY Times today profiles a bank regulator who oversaw the takeover of the failing ANB bank in Bentonville. The article touches on the source of the bank's problems and mentions that the FDIC now has some $145 million in properties backed by bad loans for sale on its website.

Mr. Holloway and five colleagues huddled in the bank’s loan office in St. George, Utah. Two-thirds of ANB’s loans had been made in Utah.

“I was the asset manager, and the biggest assets were in Utah,” he said. “They also had offices in Jackson Hole, Wyo., and Idaho Falls, Idaho. So we consolidated them.”

ANB, like other smaller banks, had been eager to grow and had determined that its local northern Arkansas housing market, heavily laced with retirees looking for new leisure homes, was saturated. It moved further west and into construction loans. Those can be among the most treacherous because it takes years to determine if the development is successful, if people will buy the properties and if the bank will be repaid.

It wasn't enough that bingo operators pursued their business illegally for years. They get legalized and now they want the tiny state tax on gambling removed. They say it is so that more money will reach charity. Count me suspicious. I don't believe the vast air-conditioned halls that pay big money to advertise regular gambling nights haven't figured out a way to put some money into the pockets of operators. I also believe the caterwauling about a tiny tax isreally about the pinch they -- not charities -- feel.

Whatever. Their argument that removing the tax -- and with it the state regulation it pays for -- fails completely when they say local authorities can be trusted to regulate the gambling. We know from decades of experience what local regulation brings -- insiders are ignored, outsiders are prosecuted, the gambling goes far beyond church lady bingo. It's an invitation to corruption and disrespect for the law.

Someone has posted a Youtube.com video taken in the confusing minutes just after the shooting of Arkansas Democratic Party Chairman Bill Gwatney. In the video -- which also includes the first on-scene comments to the press by Little Rock Police Department spokesman Lt. Terry Hastings and a very early interview with an Arkansas Baptist Convention employee recounting how gunman Timothy Dale Johnson entered their building and pointed a pistol at a staffer --  police are heard to shout "Go! Go! Go!" before squealing away in their squad cars, presumably in pursuit of Johnson, who was then at large in Little Rock. Johnson eventually led cops on a 35-mile chase before being forced off the road and shot in Sheridan. He later died of his wounds.