Adding Insult to Tragedy

Redstate: Outspoken Sheriff Accused Of Dismissing Loughner Death Threats
Jared Loughner has been making death threats by phone to many people in Pima County including staff of Pima Community College, radio personalities and local Bloggers. When Pima County Sheriff's Office was informed, his deputies assured the Victims that he was being well managed by the Mental Health system. It was also suggested that further pressing of charges would be unnecessary and probably cause more problems than it solved as Jared Loughner has a family member that works for Pima County. Th...

Big News Events Make Blatherers of Us All
The New Yorker, reputedly one of America's smartest magazines, exemplifies (and not always in a bad way) some of the incoherence created amongst the chattering (and, alas, governing) classes with big news events that seems to DEMAND REACTION!! and yet are at the same time either too impossibly overdetermined or too obvious--like the decision by one deluded ass to open fire on a crowd--for there to be much fresh, interesting, or relevant to say, or do. First, George Packer takes one tack. Of cou...

Searching for answers to Tuscon tragedy
Image via CrunchBase IBD: From New York newspaper columnists to an Illinois senator, the liberal left is blaming the Tea Party and conservative stars for the shooting of an Arizona congresswoman. How about blaming the Communist and Nazi-loving shooter? It didn't take long for New York Times columnist Paul Krugman to blame the Tea Party and Sarah Palin for the shooting outside a Tucson Supermarket that seriously injured Congresswoman Gabriel Giffords and left six others, including a 9-year-old,...

Voices in His Head
A member of my family is paranoid schizophrenic. As I read about Jared Loughner, I think of this relative. There are many points of congruence - the decent but incomplete education, a fascination with intellectual discourse, a seemingly coherent exterior, a deep core of paranoia. A familiarity with Firearms. There was an incident, when no one he trusted could explain what was going on when strangers showed up on the doorstep and wanted him to leave his home. No one was injured, and no further ep...

AZ shootings: McConnell, Yarmuth talk rhetoric and security
Related: Suspect in attack on congresswoman to appear in court McConnell speaks to Students about Tucson shootings Obama: US grieving, shocked over Ariz. rampage Military: alleged Giffords gunman failed Drug Test McConnell calls for review of congressional security (WHAS11) - The Assassination attempt of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords that killed six and injured 14 others has sparked a national debate about whether inflammatory political Rhetoric was a factor in the attack. After Pim...

Pima County Sheriff Dupnik Jeopardizes Justice and Must Resign Now
Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik has blathered in radio, television, and newspaper interviews non-stop since Saturday’s massacre in his county.  He cannot possibly be doing his job to properly and thoroughly investigate the tragic loss of life on his watch in Pima County, Arizona. Monday , Dupnik even went so far as to blame Talk Show host Rush Limbaugh PERSONALLY for the Murders in Tucson.  See report here on Real Clear Politics.  On Sunday, Dupnik admitted in his interv...

Was the Arizona Shooting Sheriff Dupnik's Fault?
By RightKlik It's pretty clear at this point that Jared Loughner was the Lone Wolf shooter solely responsible for the carnage in Tuscon, Arizona on Saturday. But without a shred of evidence, liberals in this country want to blame the "usual suspects," including Sarah Palin, the tea partiers and conservative Talk Radio. Let's cast the net wider. On Saturday, we began asking pointed questions about Tuscon Sheriff Clarence Dupnik: A congresswoman got shot point-blank in the head in Pima County, A...

The left's political dirt ball
On Feb. 15, 1933, Giuseppe Zangara, delusional and a loner, fired his .32-caliber pistol at FDR in the Bayfront Park area of Miami. Five feet tall, Zangara could not aim over the crowd. So, he stood on a folding chair and was piled on after the first of five shots. He wounded four people, including Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago. In two weeks, Zangara, who pleaded guilty, had been sentenced to 80 years. When Cermak died on March 6, Zangara was retried for Murder and sentenced to the electric ...

Republicans Delay Repeal Vote On ObamaCare
The weekend shooting in Arizona at a Congressional event with constituents has led House Republicans to delay a Repeal vote against President Obama's Health Care bill. Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head and remains in critical condition and a Congressional aide was killed along with five other people in an attack which has ignited a debate about the tone of political Partisanship in the nation. The motive of the young gunman remains unclear although liberal and conservative com...

Snippets of Revelation.
Snippets of Revelation by digby Anderson Cooper interviewed Bill Maher tonight, playing Devil's Advocate to Maher's strong denunciation of Right Wing violence. It's worth watching on the rerun if you care to. This was a highlight: Cooper: I'm reading biographies of Lincoln and Jefferson and Lincoln had horrible things said about him when he was president, really vicious, vicious stuff. Maher: Sure, and look what happened to him. Cooper: well... Maher: yeah, and we saw how that ended. I guess ...

Megyn Kelly to Democrat Sheriff Clarence Dupnik: Why are you politicizing this tragedy?
Why is Democrat Sheriff Clarence Dupnik politicizing the Assassination attempt on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords? It’s almost as if he’s channeling Doug Henning, minus the skin tight body suits and 70s curls, creating a loud and noisy distraction over to the side so no one pays attention to what’s happening on the other side of the stage, where the really interesting story is happening. You know, like the reality that Sheriff Dupnik knew for at least the past year that Jared ...

Monday Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said
Giving credit where credit is due, today's honoree is Melissa, for putting the ultimate nail in the coffin of the "Both Sides Are The Same" doctrine. And as long as we continue to play this foolish game of "both sides are just as bad," and rely on trusty old ablism to dismiss Jared Lee Loughner as a crackpot—dutifully ignoring that people with Mental Illness are more likely to be Victims of violence than perpetrators; carefully pretending that the existence of people with Mental Illness wh...

Jared Loughner appears to be clinically scitzophrenic, not a right-wing extremist. Leading conservatives argue this means that
A virtual who's who of Conservatives - from George Will and Marc Thiessen to virtually every well-known conservative media figure and blogger has now reacted with outrage to the idea that violent Rhetoric by Conservatives had anything to do with the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Many, in fact, reverse the accusation and claim that they are the Victims of a new "McCarthyism" or a "blood Libel" when critics suggest that violent Rhetoric by Conservatives in any way contributed to ...

The heroesof Arizona
It's an ancient warfare tactic, and one Terrorists of every stripe employ to wreak violence on the innocent: The element of surprise. Once the attacker ambushes presumably unarmed civilians, in a peaceful setting, the Victims are usually paralyzed through shock and cannot defend themselves. It takes remarkable presence of mind to survive – much less mount a unified offensive against the attacker and save other innocents. In the Arizona attack Saturday that killed six and injured 14, the...

Jared Loughner appears in court on murder charges
It remains unclear whether Loughner's alleged actions were politically motivated, stemmed from Mental Illness or both. But the nice, skinny kid some classmates remember from Tucson's Mountain View High School appears to have transformed into an oddball with psychological problems. Rants in Loughner's name on MySpace and YouTube suggest his alleged attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat, was a politically motivated rebellion, but former friends, co-workers and Mental Health specialists sug...

Suspect in Arizona shootings appears in court
By David Schwartz PHOENIX, Arizona | Mon Jan 10, 2011 8:42pm EST PHOENIX, Arizona (Reuters) - A troubled 22-year-old College Dropout made his first court appearance on Monday on five federal charges, including the attempted Assassination of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who remained in critical condition with a bullet wound to the head. His hands manacled together, Jared Lee Loughner said understood the charges against him that stem from a Shooting Spree in Tucson on Saturday that left s...

Chris Matthews Asks: What Is the Cause-Effect Relationship Between Derangement and "Right-Wing Crazy Talk"?
Despite the fact that we now know quite a bit about Jared Loughner's twisted background, the nincompoops over at MSNBC continue to feign ignorance, holding out hope it would seem for some shred of evidence showing that the Tea Party, Sarah Palin "target" maps, and conservative Talk Radio made Loughner go on a murderous rampage, or something. It is reprehensible beyond words. And yet, not surprising at all given what we know about the Left and their shamelessly dishonest cohorts in the media. So ...

WikiLeaks: Don't Call for Our Murder, Either
There have been many public calls to assassinate Wikileaks' founder Julian Assange. Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, Fox News Chief Roger Ailes, Democratic Rep. Steny Hoyer and Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander have all called for calmer, saner Rhetoric out of politicians and pundits in the wake of the assasination attempt on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the Murder of six individuals. The alleged shooter, Jared Loughner, has been described as a lone, mentally disturbed gunman. WikiLeaks fou...

Angry words about angry words -- is the Giffords debate helping?
The debate on overheated political Rhetoric is becoming overheated. The Post's George F. Will and other Conservatives denounce any implication that the right bears any kind of responsibility for the violence in Arizona. Liberals such as Paul Krugman, they argue, simply don't have any evidence connecting Jared Loughner's alleged decision to kill Giffords with anything any conservative politician or commentator has ever said. Therefore, politicizing the shootings is cynical. But now Krugman isn't ...

Right of Revolution
In the wake of the Tucson massacre, the left is attributing the violence at least partially to a “climate of hate” encouraged by anti-government Extremists on the right—the phrasing used by Paul Krugman in his latest column—a reaction made easier by Conservatives’ frequent use of violent and intimidating Rhetoric since 2008. Conservatives have responded by alleging the politicization of a random act of violence by a lunatic, and sought to place themselves in the ra...

Jared Loughner and the National Football League
Something has been bothering me about the left’s programmed response to Jared Loughner’s mass Murder, and it’s not what you think. Oh, I’m plenty bothered that Progressives have quite deliberately and with all malice aforethought called me a murderer to advance their totalitarian Speech codes, but that’s not what’s really been bugging me. See, the ridiculous notion that the metaphor — a linguistic device at least as old as ancient Sumer where Gilgamesh s...

Yes, There is a Political Climate of Hate
While millions of Americans are privately praying for Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the rest of the Victims of a crazed gunman and their grieving families, those on the left have been repeatedly calling for an end to the politics of hate. Not the hate filled heart of a lunatic. No, they want to shut up those with whom they disagree. So they classify anyone with a differing point a view a hate-monger. It’s appalling and I don’t even want to link to any of it because I’...

Was the Arizona Shooter an Anti-Semite?
Jared Loughner may not be linked to the Racist group American Renaissance, contrary to early reports, but he might have attacked Rep. Gabrielle Giffords for her proud Jewishness. We may never know, says Eric Alterman....

After attack, a leadership test for Obama, Boehner
(01-10) 19:30 PST WASHINGTON, CA (AP) -- On opposite sides of the political spectrum, President Barack Obama and new House Speaker John Boehner suddenly face the same challenge: rise above the anger, suspicion and hostility of their liberal and conservative bases to help a rattled nation deal with the deadly outburst of violence in Arizona. But what comes after the easy moment of silence? For now, both men are stepping past the question of what role, if any, the vitriol of the past election ca...

Giffords wrote to Harvard, seeking dialogue on civil discourse
US Representative Gabrielle Giffords wrote an e-mail Friday, a day before she was grievously wounded, congratulating the new director of Harvard’s Institute of Politics and saying she wanted to talk with him about ways to tone down the political debate. Kentucky’s Secretary of State — Trey Grayson, a Republican who was named to the Harvard post earlier that day — had become friends with the Arizona congresswoman. They met when both were Aspen Institute-Rodel Fellows in P...