UPDATE: Senator Mitch McConnell has asked the FBI to investigate the recording of a campaign strategy meeting in which the lawmaker and his staff made disparaging remarks about actress Ashley Judd. Ah yes, priorities.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s aides were reportedly building up an attack campaign against Judd that would go after her mental health and religion, according to tape leaked to Mother Jones on Tuesday. The actress had been mulling challenging McConnell in the 2014 election, a seat that Democrats consider vulnerable. “They want to fight? We’re ready,” McConnell says in the tape, despite having being silent in the media while Judd’s name was being floated. The meeting leader, who is unidentified, says Judd is “emotionally unbalanced.” The meeting attendees laughed at some recordings of Judd’s, including when she describes getting the most of her faith from a parable involving St. Francis, with one attendee mocking that as “my favorite line so far.”

Mother Jones:

But the McConnell gang explored going far beyond Judd's politics and policy preferences. This included her mental health. The meeting leader noted:

She's clearly, this sounds extreme, but she is emotionally unbalanced. I mean it's been documented. Jesse can go in chapter and verse from her autobiography about, you know, she's suffered some suicidal tendencies. She was hospitalized for 42 days when she had a mental breakdown in the '90s.

In her 2011 memoirs, All That Is Bitter & Sweet, Judd recounts her past bouts with depression, noting that she had considered suicide as a sixth-grader and that as an adult she had checked into a rehab center for depression. (The Jesse mentioned might have been Jesse Benton—the grandson of former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and the nephew of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)—who was hired last year by McConnell to run his reelection effort. Three years ago, Benton worked on Rand Paul's successful tea-party-driven Senate primary campaign against a GOP establishment candidate handpicked by McConnell. Benton did not respond to a request for comment.)

It's certainly frightful to listen to McConnell's gang reveal themselves to be such bottom-feeding mental midgets. Their plan to defeat Ashley Judd if she had decided to run against McConnell was to mock and attack her for suffering with depression? I believe that Judd might well have handily trounced McConnell once he and his aides revealed themselves to be the sort who get their shits and giggles from a person's suffering with what can be a horribly debilitating illness. With one of of every ten Americans reporting depression, it's certainly no laughing matter.

More at Mother Jones, including several more audio recordings.

Despite recent progress in some states, millions of mental-health records are missing from the national database that gun dealers use to run background checks on potential buyers, reports the WSJ.

This news comes amid reports that gun stores across the country can't keep up with the increased demand for weapons in the wake of the Newton shootings.

States were first required to submit these records to the database in the 1990's, but in 1997, the Supreme Court ruled that adding cases to the information bank was optional. Mayors Against Illegal Guns, an advocacy group headed by Michael Bloomberg, said that 19 states had fewer than 100 records filed.

The NYT reports:

Rainier Arms, a gun dealer in Auburn, Wash., receives great Yelp reviews for its responsiveness. But a call to the dealer on Friday led to a full voice mail box, and an e-mail to its sales team drew this automatic response: “Thank you for contacting Rainier Arms for your AR-15 needs. Due to an overwhelming response to the latest political climate, we are experiencing longer-than-normal response times.”

At Bud’s Gun Shop in Maryland, a message on the Web site said that customer service was “completely overwhelmed” and it discouraged customers from calling or e-mailing.

And on GunBroker.com, an Oracle .223 that normally retails for around $650 had been bid up to $1,175 with three days left in the auction.

And Walmart, the largest retailer of guns and ammunition in the United States, indicated that several semiautomatic guns were out of stock at locations across the country, and some stores had low inventory.

Worth noting:

"Cerberus Capital Management put the company that makes the Bushmaster, a gun used in the shootings, up for sale on Tuesday, saying, “The Sandy Hook tragedy was a watershed event that has raised the national debate on gun control to an unprecedented level.”

"Dick’s Sporting Goods temporarily ceased selling all guns in its location closest to Newtown, and has also put a hold on sales of so-called modern sporting rifles, which include semiautomatic guns, nationwide."

And Deseret Digital Media, which owns KSL.com, a Web site that has been criticized by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg for allowing unregulated gun sales, said it was suspending classified advertisements for guns.

Corporations with some sense of business ethics, who knew?

As part of a city-wide protest movement against Chicago City Hall's assault on mental health clinics, a major battle erupted in mid-April, 2012 over keeping open the Woodlawn Clinic on the South Side. Here are nighttime scenes of the occupation, subsequent press conference, and interviews detailing why this decision has spelled disaster for humanitarian health assistance to the City's most vulnerable population. These closing also presage broader social costs. Included are Toussaint Losier (Mental Health Movement); Sophia Kortchmar, activist; N'Dana Carter (Mental Health Movement); Rev. Jose Landaverde (Our Lady of Guadalupe Angelican Catholic Church); Ronald Jackson (mental health activist). Included also is a short tribute to Helen Morley, a mental health clinic consumer and activist who predicted to city officials that if they closed her clinic, she would die. Her clinic closed on April 30, 2012, and she died on June 6, 2012.

[Via Labor Beat]

In this video, a member of Occupy Denver films a Denver Health Department van stopping in front of the Occupy encampment and dropping off a group of people believed to be mental health patients, and many appearing to be homeless.

It does seem highly improper to release patients just exiting mental healthcare into a camp of activists rather than make arrangements for more stable, permanent housing without fear of police raids and arrests.

From Occupy Denver:

On Saturday, April 14th, a white van with Denver Health markings stopped on Broadway directly across from Occupy Denver's encampment. The van was then emptied of several people - many of whom appear to be homeless - who are thought to have been receiving mental health care, who can then be seen simply joining the crowd at Occupy Denver.

Is this how mental patients are to be handled? Why does Denver Health take the time and energy to bring these patients to Occupy Denver? At best, this is an awful, misguided, and irresponsible way to deal with patients who are exiting treatment. At worst, this is an attempt to ensure that Occupy Denver's encampment is kept populated with people who the City and the opposed public can then point to as creating "health and safety hazards".

People who have been at Occupy Denver for a while reported that this kind of scene is normal, and that this is apparently an ongoing practice of Denver Health. Amid the ongoing battle against the proposed Urban Camping Ban that the Denver City Council is pushing through despite a public outcry and a lack of public consultation, this is one more piece of evidence that Denver does not have the ability to deal with it's homeless population, and that no matter how the law changes, homeless persons will be hurt due to lack of services and alternatives.

We demand that the homeless issue be addressed properly, and that this practice of Denver Health be investigated.