Today's Kansas City Star has two important stories.
The first, which is not the real subject of the headline, is about free health clinic at a downtown convention center.
Here is a paragraph about this clinic in the country with the "best health care" in the world.
[There were] 1,300 patient appointments for the safety-net clinic, which was organized by the Kansas City CARE Clinic and the National Association of Free and Charitable Clinics.
. . .
“Most of the patients we’re seeing are employed; they have jobs,” said [Bobby Kapur, a physician from the Baylor College of Medicine who served as the medical director for the first clinic six years ago].
The story was buried in Section A, but the headline in the paper was about domestic terrorism:
Special report: Ignoring the terror within.
Here is the first paragraph:
Twenty years after the Oklahoma City bombing, federal authorities have lost sight of domestic extremists and failed to prevent acts of terrorism. The lack of focus, funding and information-sharing across disparate agencies has led to fatal consequences for unsuspecting victims around the country. Meanwhile, the violence is metastasizing and the threat is growing.
More after the break.
The article outlines how the centers set up to watch domestic terrorism are largely ineffective because of bad management and inability to coordinate with other law enforcement groups.
Here is a chilling quotation:
“We are five years into the largest resurgence of right-wing extremism that we’ve had since the 1990s,” said Mark Pitcavage, director of investigative research for the Anti-Defamation League, which trains more than 10,000 law enforcement officers a year about domestic terrorism, extremism and hate crimes.
From 2009 through July 2014, Pitcavage said, authorities were involved in 46 shootouts with domestic extremists.
One of the reasons why this effort has not been equal to the challenge is the DHS report in 2009 that identified the growing threat from domestic terror after the election of Obama.
Johnson [the former DHS senior analyst] said the backlash ultimately silenced the discussion about the dangers posed by domestic extremists. Although a plan was in place to hire 10 more analysts, he said, the agency instead went from six analysts tracking right-wing, non-Islamic terrorism to only one. Now, he said, it has three.
In contrast, he said, DHS has dozens of analysts monitoring the threat of Islamic terrorism.
Here is a youtube that accompanies the story. It is about a father, who was a police, who lost his policeman son to domestic terrorism
The story had a full page picture of the 50 plus victims of domestic terrorism since 9/11. It is not online, so here is my picture of the top half.
It is issues like this which makes me have to read the daily newspaper.