As most of you know by now, Jason Statts and Dave Williams are two local musicians who were seriously wounded by gunfire this past weekend in Ardsley Park. It was not a robbery attempt, as nothing was taken. It was just an act of pure evil.

Two males approached them, asked if they “needed” drugs,” and when told no, accepted a few beers from Statts and Williams. They took the beers, walked off, then returned a few minutes later. One fired a single bullet, which went through Statts’s neck, shattered one of his vertebrae, and lodged in Williams’s neck, destroying his trachea.

Like I said, no robbery was intended, nothing was stolen. They were shot for the pleasure of seeing them shot.

If you don’t think you’re living in a world of good vs. evil, you haven’t been paying attention.

Anyway, as of this writing, Statts has been moved to a rehab facility in Atlanta, and Williams is in a step-down ICU unit at Memorial.

A fund has been started to help pay for medical expenses (Dave was uninsured at the time). Find it here.

As I’ve written before, it’s pathetic and inexcusable that upright citizens must resort to such panhandling to scrape up money for medical bills in this, supposedly the greatest country on earth. I know we have great medical care in this country, and that great medical care costs more, but if we’re spending two billion dollars a week in Iraq — for nothing — surely we could have begun a decent medical subsidy by now.

Every other big business in America is subsidized by taxpayers — oil, farms, defense contractors, the NFL. I don’t know why medical care for a couple of decent guys who were in the wrong place at the wrong time should be exempt.

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Very interesting take on the upcoming primary challenge to our incumbent Congressman John Barrow by State Sen. Regina Thomas here at Glenn Greenwald’s excellent blog.

Apparently Mr. Fresh Start himself, Barack Obama, is openly supporting John Barrow — basically a Democrat in name only — over Regina Thomas, an African American who clearly shares what are assumed to be Obama’s generally progressive, populist policies.

Huh?!

This is a very interesting development, and as Greenwald indicates, it says a lot about the true character of Mr. No More Politics As Usual and where his true politics lie (double entendre intended). John Barrow votes with George W. Bush nearly all the time. Obama taking Barrow’s side in this fight would seem to belie any claim Obama has to the progressive mantle.

Also interesting is that it’s a fight Obama most certainly did not have to wade into. So why did he? Not sure, but I’d guess money is at the center of it. Both Obama and Barrow seem to share an abiding love for the green stuff and a talent for raking it in. It can’t be a quid pro quo for Barrow coming out in favor of Obama over Hillary Clinton; Barrow was hardly a profile in courage in that regard, endorsing Obama only after he got a trillion percent of the vote in Barrow’s district.

A Sister Souljah moment it ain’t, in any case. Regina Thomas is anything but a firebrand and is hardly someone Obama would want to distance himself from in order to be more palatable to white people. Most everybody I know, black and white, likes Regina a heck of a lot better than they do Barrow anyway.

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Oh, lordie, where to begin with this joker.

Like one of those “groundbreaking” comedians from the late ’70s, Barack Obama’s former pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright is now basing entire speeches on the whole “black guys do it like this, while white guys do it like that” schtick, complete with an impersonation of us uptight white people and how uptight we speak. The bit wasn’t funny 30 years ago, and it’s only pathetic now. I mean it’s lamer than jokes about airline food.

(I leave it up to you to see if you can find the hypocrisy in a speech with the premise that “Different doesn’t mean deficient” while making fun of other types of people the entire time. And I’ll leave it up to you to make what you will of Wright’s bizarre and offensive claim that black people use a different part of their brain to learn than white people. And I’ll also leave it up to you to ascertain exactly how long a white person would remain in their job if they made a similar claim in front of a TV camera.)

I usually hesitate to complain about blanket attacks on white people, because let’s face it: Most of the time when white people complain about how they’re being spoken of, the subtext is nasty, i.e, they seem to be wishing that they could also get away with saying nasty things about other groups of people.

Such is not the case with me. I don’t pine away for the ability to treat other groups the way I’ve been treated. It’s a sign of weakness at best, and virulence at worst. I don’t want any part of it, and I emphatically do not claim the right to respond in kind.

No, the only things that truly offend me as an American about Rev. Wright’s embarrassing media tour are his totally bogus claims that A), he represents the black church and B), that an attack on him is an attack on the black church. If anyone is racist in this whole affair, it’s Rev. Wright himself for trotting out a totally inflammatory image of the black church as being at all related to the kind of freak show he puts on at his own “church,” which from what I’ve learned of it is hardly worthy of the title.

I have been in black churches, and have never witnessed anything remotely like Rev. Wright’s over-the-top, self-obsessed, hyper-political screeds. Maybe things are different in Chicago, I don’t know. If so, shame on them.

The only reason the media is not calling Wright out on this obvious slander is because so few people in the media know the first thing about black churches. (That, and they’re also totally in the tank for Obama, but that’s a side issue.)

Quite simply, Rev. Wright is a fraud, a charlatan. No more and no less. I hope his 15 minutes on the American stage is over.

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I’m trying to stay away from public thoughts about the Democratic primary, because nothing good can come of me taking an open stand on it. But a quick perusal of the headlines this morning after the Pennsylvania primary — classic, stupid example here — prompts me to sally forth in some small way.

It’s like clockwork by now, as predictable as the sun rising in the east: Hillary Clinton dominates Barack Obama — I mean crushes him, mops up the proverbial floor with him — in another large, electoral-vote rich state, yet the mainstream media the next morning is dominated by even more feverish calls for her to drop out, and even more smug “analyses” of why she can’t win the nomination.

It’s become something of a phenomenon, a lesson in irrational mass hysteria akin to the great tulip mania in Holland in the 1600s. I literally have lost count of how many times the media has assured us, usually the morning after another huge Hillary win, that there’s no way, no physical possibility, that she can be the nominee.

Never in my life have I seen another person, candidate, or sports team counted out so prematurely, so many times. At some point you just have to ask what gives.

I have swung from explanation to explanation. Being in the profession myself, I know how badly the media — which is massively, hugely white — wants to avoid even the hint of an accusation of racism. Maybe that dynamic comes into play with the mainstream media’s almost desperately fawning adulation of Obama, but it cannot possibly account for all of it.

I then thought classism might be the cause, since Obama’s obvious appeal to well-educated, liberal “creative class” Starbucks drinkers makes him an equally obvious fit for most journalists, who fall squarely into that niche. But that can’t be all of it, either.

I know the media have hated the Clintons with a passion for a long time — classism again, I’m pretty positive, since the Clintons have always portrayed a blue-collar image — but not even that can explain the immense irrationality, the sheer solipsism of demanding that a candidate who is only slightly trailing to drop out, often right after said candidate wins a big primary.

In the end, I can only settle on simple misogyny. The media is not only massively, hugely white, it’s also massively, hugely male. Yeah, the pretty anchorwoman is a ubiquitous stereotype, but you can almost rest assured that her producer, her boss, her boss’s boss, and the owner of the company are all men.

I have said for years that misogyny and sexism are more pervasive problems in America than racism — if not in intensity, than surely in scale. There’s historical support for my position; remember that African-American men got the right to vote half a century before any American women ever did.

Surely there is much racism in this country, and none of it should be tolerated. But it’s just as true that in my lifetime I have seen much more progress on racial issues than in the equal treatment of women. I’m hardly the first to say this, but I believe it’s true: Sexism is the last acceptable “ism” in America.

Perhaps I’m biased on this, since I’m not African-American and I’m the father of two daughters. But we can only really speak from personal experience, eh?

In any case, if anyone else has any better explanations, I’m all ears. But clearly something really weird is going on, and the only people clueless about it are the ones dispensing the weirdness.

How weird is it? Let’s put it this way: I now have to go to Fox News to get objective coverage of the Democratic primary. That’s weird.

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This whole sad episode about the firing of Bob Colvin from Memorial — a good guy facing a pretty much impossible task — got me thinking about something that happened a couple of weeks ago.

In one of the Savannah Music Festival’s few boneheaded moves, state Rep. Ron Stephens (R-Savannah) was allowed to say a few words on the Lucas stage before the (great) concert by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Stephens, microphone in hand, proceeded to crow about how the Georgia legislature was finally going to do something about the need to fully fund adequate trauma care in south Georgia, and indeed all across the state.

What this had to do with Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky I still don’t know, but I shrugged it off at the time. Stephens is on the right side of the trauma issue, after all, and has been working hard to get real legislative work done about it while idiots in his party like Sonny Perdue have been more concerned with bringing in more Chinese businesses to Georgia and more Chinese products to Georgia’s already-overstuffed ports.

However, in the wake of the trauma bill’s total failure at the very end of the session, Stephens’s appearance at the Savannah Music Festival now looks like a particularly loathsome brand of grandstanding. No, it’s not his fault the bill didn’t pass, didn’t even have a chance to pass. But he is tarnished by his own party’s actions on this issue. It’s not fair, but then again politics isn’t.

Here’s the thing: I don’t give a flip that Stephens was on the right side of the issue, because he is simply a cog in this failed Republican leadership of Georgia. Failed, as in Bush-level failure. I mean this is possibly the most irresponsible state government in the country right now, which is really saying something.

The Democrats who ran the state for decades before them were hopelessly corrupt, to be sure. But at least the Democrats gave back some of the money they stole from us, in the form of some services.

The Republicans just steal.

Stephens, while an intelligent, well-meaning guy who would have been a solid conservative Democrat in the old days, is just another part of the whole lunkheaded posse. He and his entire crew — Perdue, Cagle, the insane Glenn Richardson, and Savannah’s own talk-tough-but-deliver-nothing Eric Johnson all need to go back to their day jobs in corporate America and let someone with an ounce of decency and integrity and most of all, real ability, take over.

Not that I have great faith in Democrats to engineer any big electoral victories, but I tell you this: Georgia is sinking and sinking fast, and it started spiraling downhill much faster when Perdue and his feckless Republicans took over. Bottom line, they all need to go and go soon.

You and your loved ones are likely going to need trauma care at some point, and I hope you all remember who killed it when they had a slam dunk opportunity to help it.

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