wtf?
any word on the captor? who is he/she, and what's the motive??

are they armed?

Glenn, you're right. The other wack-job narrative that's coming is how Hillary will fail to react properly, no matter what she did.

I told them not to hire Bernie Kerik for security... sorry, trying to lighten the mood.

This is really, really frightening and awful.

Glenn and martingauthier are correct - and add to that another round of terrorists-at-home scare tactics and intimidation efforts

I guess you guys weren't overparsing the language when the Gravel campaign released that statement saying that they would not "seek to" blow up the Clinton office.

Hopefully the police can defuse this situation without a loss of life.

And of course, Bush was in charge during 9/11.

I hope you are right, Shawn. With a woman and an African-American as the front-runners for the White House, I hope this isn't the start of some trend. The two campaigns have so many volunteers and it would be tragic if they were all at risk, which would include myself.

This sucks!

Exactly!! Bush is in charge. Thug!

2008 Presidential Election Weekly Poll

http://www.votenic.com

The Only Poll That Matters.

Results Posted Every Tuesday Evening.

COINTELPRO?

I wish I was in front of a TV. I'll lay 3 to 2 that it takes the right-wing media 30 minutes to turn this from a tragedy into a tasteless condemnation of how devisive Hillary is ....

Is it me or did FOXNews try and find the happiest, most gleeful photo of Clinton they could find to put in split screen with the headline of this tragedy?

I'm just saying....they never stop efforting.

r€nato wrote on November 30, 2007 2:04 PM:
you reap what you sow, GOP.

If Rethuglicans are getting their heads filled by 24/7 Fox News Hillary-vilifying, it's inevitable some wingnut will decide to take things in his own hands...

Yeah, it's still early to tell WHAT this guy's motive is, it may not even be political (i.e. bad breakup with his girlfriend a la "Taxi Driver"), BUT I've been saying for years that IF Hillary gets elected (or even gets too close) some right-wing "patriot" will think it's important to "protect the country from a Hillary presidencey at all costs." My friends think I'm way off, but I say the writing's on the wall.

WMUR is reporting two hostages have now been released. It now seems all hostages are released.

Now it seems the situation is an armed standoff, rather than a hostage situation.

http://www.submersibledirigible.com/img/hostage.png

What DTM said. To which I'll only add that I fervently wish and hope that this resolves peacefully, both for the sake of the staffers and for the sake of democracy. We are all Hillary staffers today.

Everyone needs to just stop guessing about motivations at this point, no matter how tempting it is to speculate about which people whose political views we don't like are behind it.

This guy could be anything from an antiabortion extremist to a guy whose talking toaster told him he needed to duck tape a dozen candle sticks to his chest and force Hillary to talk to him about the massive conspiracy he uncovered by decoding the secret messages on those tags on the bottom of upholstered furniture.

Just calm down and wait and see, okay? Unless you'd like to see every comment you make being cited all over Malkin's end of the blogsphere as examples of how hateful all of us terrorist loving communists are.

Attention conspiracy-mongers, et al.:

ABC has the story:

"Local police are believed to be negotiating with a man described as a well-known local resident with a history of mental illness who told his son to "watch the news today." He is said to be in his 40s with salt-and-pepper hair."

In other words, unless Tom Tancredo has stopped using Grecian formula, it's just a local schizophrenic, and not part of any sinister political plot.

"Seems to me that local schizophrenics have figured into many sinister political plots, FWIW." -- anon

That may well be, at least if you expand "schizophrenic" to include the broader category of "screwed up ", (cf. Lincoln, John Paul II, Benigno Aquino, JFK, RFK) but such nefarious plots were not generally monumentally pointless, as this was.

Just to be clear -- I'm talking about plots against the above people, not by them.

Okay, here's my take on this whole Hillary Clinton Campaign Office Siege thing.

I heard about it at the last minute during the day at the office, via Talking Point's Election Central online political blog. When I got home at 5 pm EST, I put the news on. CNN first, of course, because it's less neo-con than Fox News. CNN was saying that the suspect was upset about mental healthcare and he was a local man from New Hampshire. Fox News only stated that they thought the suspect was a local.

By 5:30 a hostage (female) was released, peacefully and calmly. CNN was now giving out the name of the suspect, one Leeland Eisenberg, of Somersville NH. When I flipped one channel up to Fox News, they were showing the hostage being released and stating they thought the suspect was one Troy Stanley, a local who was known to have a record.

By 5:45 another hostage (female) was about to be released, and Fox News was beginning to doubt the name of their suspect. They felt that perhaps it was a man named Leeland Eisenberg instead. According to Fox News, Leeland had a record too.

By 6:00 Wolf Blitzer was turning the situation into his War Room show and enjoying every minute of it. Shortly thereafter, the last hostage (male) was released and then we had a commercial break.

After the commercial break, the headline at the bottom of CNN's screen (shouldn't that be a bottomline?) stated that the police were standing outside the door of Clinton's campaign headquarters and had the building surrounded, and then the headline disappeared while Wolf talked for a few minutes, and the next thing I see is Leeland Eisenberg walking out of the campaign office and into the custody of the SWAT team waiting outside.

CNN airs the footage of Leeland giving himself up, getting handcuffed, and escorted to a police car, all the while raving about how "peaceful" and "textbook" and "perfect" this arrest turned out to be, even going so far as to say they wouldn't be surprised if it should be cited by the FBI and other agencies for training purposes.

Almost immediately after Leeland Eisenberg is driven from the scene in handcuffs, CNN releases the stunning news that they have indeed been in touch with "Lee" almost all afternoon after one of the hostages called them shortly after 1:30 pm saying she was being held hostage.

Shortly thereafter, Hillary gets on camera down in Washington, DC, and gives a 10-minute speech about the bravery of her campaign staff. Shortly afterwards, both Fox News and CNN mention her drop in the New Hampshire and Iowa polls. For the rest of the evening, CNN and Fox News analyze Leeland Eisenberg's state of mind as if they live in his brain and understand everything he is going through.

What a great job of news reporting, eh?

Fox News, of course, never gave CNN the credit for their half-assed knowledge of the story, and I can only hope that they plan to apologize to Troy Stanley and his family.

CNN repeatedly aired a picture of Lee Eisenberg, courtesy of "Fosters Daily Democrat", so I got online and googled Fosters Daily Democrat and found Lee is already on the home news page. When I did a search of Leeland Eisenberg on the local New Hampshire news website, I found several links to news items about Lee, all of them from 2007. Only once is he listed as being a drunk driver, by the way. I found no mention of the domestic abuse that CNN is touting about him, and I found one article and one letter to the editor about his argument with local police acsertaining to his anger over the local police's new habit of opening unlocked cars at night and leaving a flier in each car stating that local residents should lock their car doors at night.

Yet CNN and Fox News have been calling Lee Eisenberg a mentally ill man with a long history of abuse and a police record all night long.

I looked up poor Troy Stanley and found he has a stronger record than does Lee Eisenberg. That doesn't mean Troy deserved to be mentioned on Fox News for over an hour, now does it?

Meantime, Hillary soaks up the spotlight on the evening of what should've been her visit to DC for the Democratic National Convention dinner and flies off to New Hampshire to soak up the spotlight even more, all weekend.

Here is the link to the local news about Leeland Eisenberg, the "siege", and Troy Stanley. Just search their names in the search bar at the top of the Fosters homepage:

http://www.fosters.com/

One more thing I want to add: The person responsible for typing the daily police record at Fosters Daily Democrat has one hell of a sense of humor, LOL!