I was just watching the live feed from the State House floor (because I’m just that cool) and I can’t even explain what I just saw. They’re debating the omnibus education bill right now (actually interesting otherwise) and everything was going just fine until Rep. Mark Olson (R-Big Lake) got up for a 3-5 minute speech. First of all, yes, that Mark Olson, but he’s managed to up the ante.
So, Mark Olson gets up to talk about a provision to allow voluntary mental health screening in public schools. Now, it seems pretty obvious that this might draw some references to Virginia Tech considering that Cho is said to have been mentally ill. So, I don’t really fault Olson for going down that path but, that being said, he had a very tight rope to walk. It starts getting nasty when Olson started politicizing the massacre and citing it as a reason for not passing the measure; yes, he’s trying to make the case that VA Tech shows that we shouldn’t allow voluntary mental health screening. How does Mark Olson string together these two supposedly conflicting realities? Well, of course Virginia Tech was caused by “psychiatric drugs,” or so Mark Olson says…
In fact, the whole speech was totally crazy. At one point in the speech Olson is literally yelling “Suicide! Suicide! Suicide! Death! Death! Death!” on the floor of the Minnesota State House. If this weren’t so outrageously offensive in light of the weight of the current events it would almost be funny, but it was outrageously offensive, and it wasn’t funny.
The MN Publius post also has an audio clip of Rep. Mark Olson ranting about death and suicide.
I will try to get video of this.
Ken Avidor writes about the "Personal Rapid Transit" scam.
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