The latest AP story gives the names of the victims, suggesting them to be African-American

Police identified the victims as Karsheika Graves, 21, and Taneshia Butler, 26.

“Why those two women were targeted … is still an unanswered question,” Kelly said.

Police did not release the shooter’s name because her relatives had not been contacted.[AP, via The Guardian]

At WMC=TV, sources say that the shooter was named Latina Williams, which, to be clear, is a name, not an ethnicity.[POLICE ID SHOOTER AND VICTIMS 3 Dead at Technical College] The photograph of the late Taneisha Butler looks fairly white–it’s a bad photograph. Why is it that I’m the one who has to figure these things out?

Bill Moyers is interviewing the Reverend Samuel Rodriguez tonight on “the role of faith” in the Presidential election. Of course, Hispanic evangelicals are minority within a minority, and within a minority that doesn’t vote much, either, but they sure have President Bush’s support. Watch it on PBS, or if you really can’t stand PBS, you may be able to learn more about the Reverend Samuel Rodriguez by reading Hispanic Evangelicals Flunking National Question? by Allan Wall.

You can comment at the PBS blog.

Since no names have been released, we can’t tell for sure what the races of the shooter or the victims are.

The Associated Press: Student Kills 2, Self at La. College
Student Kills 2, Self at La. College

By DOUG SIMPSON – Associated Press

3 hours ago

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — A 23-year-old woman killed two fellow students in a classroom at a vocational college Friday, then killed herself, police said. In South Carolina, a person was shot at Greenville Technical College, but was expected to survive.

The women apparently were shot in their seats in the second-floor classroom at Louisiana Technical College, Baton Rouge Sgt. Don Kelly said. About 20 people were in the room at the time, he said.

Officers ran into the building within four minutes of the first 911 call, which came at 8:36 a.m., Kelly said.

“There was mass pandemonium, people running,” he said. “One officer — the first into the classroom — told me he could still smell gunpowder.”

Police withheld the names of the shooter and the victims, ages 21 and 26, until their families could be notified.

The school — one of two LTC campuses in Baton Rouge and dozens around the state — offers classes in a dozen subjects including early childhood education, practical nursing, drafting and welding.

The Demographics of the college are below, if I can paste the table, so it’s not a sure bet.

I’ll keep looking. Nobody else is, that’s for sure.

Here’s a report on the massacre, and one man who fought back:

As the man fired at City Attorney John Hessel, Hessel tried to fight off the attacker by throwing chairs, McNichols said. The shooter then moved behind the desk where the council sits and fired more shots at council members.

“We crawled under the chairs and just laid there,” McNichols told ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “We heard Cookie shooting, and then we heard some shouting, and the police, the Kirkwood police had heard what was going on, and they ran in, and they shot him.”[The Associated Press: Gunman's Note: `The Truth Will Come Out', By CHRISTOPHER LEONARD, February 8, 2008]

While it says Hesssel “tried” to fight back, it should say that he “fought back,” even if he didn’t succeed in killing or disarming the gunman, who was shot by police. They’ve released the list of victims, and guess what? Hessel’s name isn’t on it.

The dead are: Police Sgt. Bill Biggs, Officer Tom Ballman, City Councilman Mike Lynch, Councilwoman Connie Karr and Public Works Director Ken Yost.

Injured in attack were mayor Mike Swaboda and journalist Todd Smith.[www.kansascity.com | 02/08/2008 | Details released on victims, shooting]

The victims whose photographs I’ve seen seem to be all white.

As I wrote last night, Gerald Thornton, the brother of the black gunman who shot up Kirkwood City Council is making noises excusing the murders on the grounds that his brother was a victim of racism.[Watch video here]

Surrounded by a crush of reporters, Gerald Thornton, two years Charles’ senior and one of nine siblings, verged on obstinate in his defense of his brother’s actions.When asked if he felt for his brother’s victims, Thornton said: “No one wants to see loss of life over issues that should’ve been solved. We have educated people over there and they should’ve been able to see the things they were doing should’ve came to an end sooner.

Thornton also raised the issue of race, suggesting that African Americans have a more difficult time exerting their rights and that his brother’s race was a factor in his difficulties with the city and in the courts.[www.kansascity.com | 02/08/2008 | Shooter’s brother: “He mapped out his strategy for war and executed it.”By JASON NOBLE and LAURA, The Kansas City Star, February 8, 2008]

Of course, when an African-American bursts into a room with gun, and shoots six or seven white people, the issue of race is already there. It should, in fact, be raised by the press, whose job is to get the facts.They could ask if the late Charles “Cookie” Thornton hated white people, or if Gerald Thornton, pictured at left, does.

Former Mexican foreign minister Jorge G. Castañeda Gutman has been a long-time interest of mine. (Here’s my 2001 VDARE.com article about this slippery fellow: “Mexico’s Talleyrand“).

In 2006, Fredo Arias-King pointed out to me that Castaneda’s Soviet mother was an employee of Stalin’s government when his father, Mexico’s UN ambassador, met her in New York City in the early 1950s, where she was a translator for Stalin’s delegation. Castaneda’s chief advisor while he was Foreign Minister (2001-2003) was his older half-brother, Ambassador-at-Large Andres Rozental Gutman, who is his mother’s son by a previous marriage. Rozental personally advised Mexico’s immigration negotiators with the Bush administration.

On Monday, the Mexico City newspaper El Universal has accused Castaneda of spying for Castro’s intelligence service on his father, who was Mexico’s foreign minister in the late 1970s and early 1980s: “Castañeda espió a México y a su padre.”

Even though Castaneda is a frequent commentator in the American press, the American media, according to a Google News search, ignored the story — after all, it’s only a story about America’s next-door neighbor — except for the LA Times on Wednesday, which headlined Castaneda’s denial of a story that nobody in America had been told about.

Joe Guzzardi will be a guest on the George Putnam Show today, Friday, at 4:06 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, 1:06 Pacific Time.

Listen live here.

So, a Somalian woman walks in to the cockpit of a plane with a knife and stabs the pilots.. And CNN calls her a “New Zealand woman.” Australian blogger Tim Blair has more details.

There’s been a mass shooting by Charles Lee “Cookie” Thornton in Kirkwood, Missouri. None of the news stories want to say that he’s black, or that his victims were white, but I tracked down a television interview with his brother, who is black, and is “okay” with the shooting.

“The only way that I can put into context that you might understand is that my brother went to war tonight with the people, the government that was putting torment and strife into his life. He has spoke on it as best he could in the courts, and they denied all rights to the access of protection and he took it upon himself to go to war and end the issue,” Gerald Thornton said.

“I can’t change it. The thing that I can say is that he went to war with the people that were causing strife in his life and he ended it,” said Thornton.[Gunman’s relative: “My brother went to war” | Top Stories | KMOV.com | St. Louis, MO]

Laurie Waters is interviewing people and talking about how the “people here feel so disenfranchised” and they understand why he committed mass murder. She doesn’t talk about black people, and she doesn’t make reference to the color of the gunman, or the color of his victims, (I am assuming that Mayor Swoboda is white, everyone in Poland is). but the brother of the deceased is black, which is one of those things you can see with your eyes.

The same reporter also apparently interviewed people in the community after the random killing of white police officer Sergeant Bill McEntee. Apparently locals “understood” that was wrong, too, but also linked it with some kind of oppression.

Greg Cochran points out a profound change in American culture: from celebrating and promoting heroes of accomplishment to doing the same for heroes of suffering. Consider two war heroes-turned politicians. Dwight Eisenhower got the 1952 GOP nomination because of his accomplishments even though he didn’t suffer much for them — he was never in combat in his life. But organizing D-Day and managing the Anglo-American coalition suggested he had what it takes to perform well the day-to-day work of the Presidency during a particularly scary part of the Cold War. In contrast, John McCain is likely to get the 2008 GOP nomination in large measure because of his tremendous suffering during the Vietnam War, although he never accomplished all that much in the military.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are granted Honorary Heroes of Suffering status because of their being non-white males. Mitt Romney, who, among other things, saved the 2002 Winter Olympics (which by the way, were much better run than the embarrassing 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta), proved so unpopular that he dropped out today.

Perhaps the turning point was John F. Kennedy, whose main wartime feat of command was the almost unique one of getting his PT boat sliced in half by a Japanese warship.

Similarly, the high school students’ top ten most famous Americans (who weren’t President) is heavy with people presumed to have suffered, although the suffering of some, such as #2 Rosa Parks, was primarily symbolic.