From USA Today:

10 years later, the real story behind Columbine

They weren’t goths or loners.

The two teenagers who killed 13 people and themselves at suburban Denver’s Columbine High School 10 years ago next week weren’t in the “Trenchcoat Mafia,” disaffected videogamers who wore cowboy dusters. The killings ignited a national debate over bullying, but the record now shows Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold hadn’t been bullied — in fact, they had bragged in diaries about picking on freshmen and “fags.”

Their rampage put schools on alert for “enemies lists” made by troubled students, but the enemies on their list had graduated from Columbine a year earlier. Contrary to early reports, Harris and Klebold weren’t on antidepressant medication and didn’t target jocks, blacks or Christians, police now say, citing the killers’ journals and witness accounts. That story about a student being shot in the head after she said she believed in God? Never happened, the FBI says now.

A decade after Harris and Klebold made Columbine a synonym for rage, new information — including several books that analyze the tragedy through diaries, e-mails, appointment books, videotape, police affidavits and interviews with witnesses, friends and survivors — indicate that much of what the public has been told about the shootings is wrong.

Read the whole article, it’s worth it.

I’m always fascinated — and sometimes infuriated — at the falsehoods we choose to believe. Things like “tax cuts increase revenue” or “vaccines cause autism.” A lot of the problem is that we self-select news sources to match our pre-existing notions and ideologies, but that’s not the whole reason. The media is at fault, too.

See the above as evidence. In the aftermath of Columbine, the media passed along these untrue stories, then didn’t bother correcting the record until, what, 10 years later? The mother of the girl who supposedly died because she believed in God wrote a book about it, even though it didn’t happen. It’s not her fault, really. She was just going by what she had been told. People still believe it today; maybe she does, too.

It happens all the time, even on major stories that end up changing world history. In the runup to the invasion of Iraq, anonymous sources in the administration leaked falsehoods about Saddam’s WMDs to the NY Times. The Times published them without skepticism. Then Dick Cheney would go on Sunday morning chat shows and point to the NY Times as proof that Saddam had WMDs. Liberal, conservative, whatever, I just wish we had a news media that didn’t suck.

I still seriously can’t believe they’re going through with it, but apparently right-wingers really are gathering in teabagging parties across the coast today, invoking the spirit of the Boston Tea Party to protest taxation with representation:

Teabagging jokes aside, the core of this idea is still a bunch of lower- and middle-class people protesting a small hike in rich people’s taxes… to the same level as under Clinton, which was well below Reagan levels. Matt Taibbi has a nice rant about this aspect of the parties.

Ahh, but what about the second major protest item: the ever-expanding national debt? That actually IS something I can get behind! After all, it was one of the many reasons I hated Bush. Speaking of which, where were the fucking tea parties when the national debt was doing this?

09/30/2000 $5,674,178,209,886.86
09/30/2001 $5,807,463,412,200.06
09/30/2002 $6,228,235,965,597.16
09/30/2003 $6,783,231,062,743.62
09/30/2004 $7,379,052,696,330.32
09/30/2005 $7,932,709,661,723.50
09/30/2006 $8,506,973,899,215.23
09/30/2007 $9,007,653,372,262.48
09/30/2008 $10,024,724,896,912.49

That’s $1 trillion in Bush’s last year alone.

This has nothing to do with standing against tyranny (as Jon Stewart said, “You’re confusing tyranny with losing [elections]“) and more to do with the usual paranoid fantasies of gun-banning socialist fascist gay Muslim terrorists. And if it involves railing against higher taxes for Neil Cavuto and Glenn Beck on the side, then of course they’re in favor of it.

I’m curious about turnout versus media coverage. Half a million people marched against invading Iraq in New York alone in 2002 (out of millions worldwide), with no effect and barely a blip in media coverage. Another half-million Hispanics marched for immigration in LA in 2006, with better results. The early counts for today’s numbers are “hundreds,” yet I’m sure the usual sources will consider that a victorious turnout.

But whatever. If it keeps these guys from blowing up government buildings or shooting cops, I’m all for it. Meanwhile, I’ll be enjoying National T Party Day, aka Operation: Foolpity. Or maybe I’ll just give up and call it National Oh, Quit Whining and Pay Your Damn Taxes Day.

Wait, what?! How did I not know about this until now?

This weekend, in addition to a new Doctor Who special on BBC, we’re also getting three new episodes of Red Dwarf, set nine years after season 8.

The trailer: