icon says it all...

Social conservatives choose Amsterdam for global meeting - Taiwan News Online:

Up to 4,000 social conservatives are expected to descend upon liberal Amsterdam, Netherlands, on August 10-12 for the biennial World Congress of Families, a meeting that brings together scholars, academics, policy makers, elected officials, and activists for four days of speeches, lectures, and networking.

The Netherlands beat out four other countries in its bid to host what is the largest gathering of social conservatives in the world.

You'd think social conservatives really don't realize that their very right to free speech (as well as free assembly) is a liberal value that they just happen to take advantage of, even as they strike to take it away from the rest of us.

Grokked from Greg Laden.

why 14th street was closed for so long

Elderly gunman kills guard at Holocaust Museum - Yahoo! News:

One law enforcement official said James Von Brunn, 89, a white supremacist, was under investigation in the shooting, and a second official said the elderly man's car was found near the museum and tested for explosives.

This bit is the kicker. Some on other sites were asking why 14th Street was closed for so long, given that, "everything happened *inside* the museum, right?".

Simple answer: gunmen don't always *just* use guns. The terrorist attack at the Pakitstan hotel a couple days ago was done by *first* bombing the area in order to clear the first security hurdle, then following that up with the gun attack in order to take out the innocents.

(and in Columbine, the authorities found a number of undetonated explosives among the boy's stuff and throughout the school, at least according to some stories I've read - that may have been invalidated later as just rumor mill.)

This *could* have been intended the same: go inside and investigate the situation, come back out, set off bombs, then follow that up with the shooting.

Turns out it wasn't, but law enforcement HAS to consider that possibility, that there's more going on than just lone-gunman-single-gun, and that requires getting everybody else the hell away from the scene.