The impression I got from the visit (and I realize it's just an impression) is that he did his very best to keep a low profile. He tried to make it about the victims and the medical staff. The photos inside (again from what I understand) were all provided by private individuals, not from media outlets or his PR people.

I applaud him for this. And I'm sure to the extent he was able he kept the madness to a minimum. If there was chaos, we only have the media and certain vulture types (looking at you TMZ) to blame.

I guess the point I was trying to make was this: While I applaud his intent and understand that he did try to keep a low profile he still is an incredibly famous person entering a place of work where said work has a certain necessity to it. The very reason that his visit is note worthy guarantees that he will be a distraction to the people that would otherwise be occupied caring for their patients. While nurses aren't always going all out all the time they really don't have a lot of time for standing around. Many of them don't even get genuine lunch breaks.

The fact that he met off site with the emergency workers was the way to go. Just entering the hospital was a disruption of care, I guarantee it.

The president coming to visit anybody for anything is a major pain in the ass, I can tell you. When he came to Colorado Springs a few weeks ago for the fire on the west side of town, it screwed up my whole day. He shut down most of the interstate through town, which is one of only 3 major north-south roads in a city of 600,000 people, for a couple hours. He didn't steal resources from the fire crews, it was all Secret Service and State Patrol, but it still screwed up the city travel for the afternoon just as we were getting functional again.

Every time he comes to town, anybody who delivers anything, or depends on deliveries, knows to expect major delays. I wish he'd stop visiting, it doesn't actually help anything anyways.

That's not going to change. The office of the President has a ceremonial/figurehead function that won't go away just because it's unhelpful.

I know. But I dream of this as I dream of winning the lottery, unlikely to ever happen, but it'd be cool if it did.

It's the kind of job in which there's always distractions. The best you can do is warn people, and as far as I can tell, that happened and the visit was approved by the hospital.

I wanted to share this from Hans Zimmer--he posted it on FB. I think it's probably worth the donation.

Whelp, I suppose this was inevitable.

.

When I say I feel bad for the victims, I really mean I feel bad for some of the victims. Apparently some of them that survived deserved to die.

All right, I'm gonna think through this logically as I'm capable of:

Suing the company that made the movie should be laughed out of court. There's more violent movies published every day (Troma Pictures springs to mind) and audiences for them do not get shot by crazy people.
Suing the theater that did not have alarms on their emergency exits doesn't seem to hold up. Negligence assumes that the acts of this crazy person were predictable, but with no prior records of such an act that's rather unlikely. This is tantamount to blaming engineers who designed the WTC for not making the building able to withstand a direct collision from a 757.
Suing the doctors who prescribed this crazy person something to help his mental state for not making sure he took it is patently ridiculous. Assuming your average doctor spends 15 minutes with each patient and 5 minutes after writing notes in their chart, they see 3 people an hour during an 8 hour shift, and if each patient comes in once per month (with the doctor taking two days a week off) that's 20x8x5=800 patients, the majority of which are getting prescribed something. The doctor can only provide the medication, he can't track down each patient and force them to swallow it as directed too.