After the violence in Arizona, a truce | Ryan Streeter

In They Are Who We Thought They Were News..
I had put this in the replies in yesterday’s Afternoon Open Thread, but I thought about it, and decided to FP it. In an apparent effort to distance themselves from the Mass Shootings in Arizona over the weekend, the Tea Party Express sent out an email to supporters proclaiming that they “won’t be silenced” — and asking for contributions. Earlier today, TPE leader Sal Russo went on Fox News and lamented how “revolting and disgusting the left is for trying to as...

Will the Arizona tragedy end Palin's presidential hopes? (The Week)
New York – As the Assassination attempt on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords brings new scrutiny to Sarah Palin's gun-themed Rhetoric, pundits debate the political fallout The shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is being called a "turning point" and a "defining moment" for Sarah Palin, whose use of gun imagery (a 2010 campaign "map" targeting Giffords district with a crosshairs symbol and a call to "reload") has been linked, unfairly or not, to the Arizona tragedy. As soon as the media made the co...

Tomorrow's speech in Arizona is a big test for Barack Obama
We will find out a great deal about Barack Obama’s character tomorrow - or at least about the wisdom of his advisers. If his Speech at the Memorial service for the Victims of the Tucson shooting is spotlessly apolitical - if it manages to avoid any hint of support for the quite astonishing smear campaign which has explicitly attributed responsibility for this crime to his electoral opponents - then it may help to revive his original 

Personally, Tim Pawlenty Would Not Have Made a Map That Targets Congressmen With Crosshairs
Photo: Allison Shelley/Getty Images Do Sarah Palin's potential Republican rivals sense an opening to ever-so slightly and subtly undermine her with the Tucson shooting? In an interview Monday with reporters at The New York Times, former Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, considered another contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, defended Ms. Palin, if only to a point. “There’s no indication at present that those cross hairs, Fox News, any particular commentator ...

Times Mark Halperin: Fox News, Conservatives Using Tucson Shooting For Fodder
Almost immediately after the shootings in Tucson over the weekend the left was in full spin mode, blaming (despite not having any evidence) Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement for creating an “atmosphere of hate” that inspired the attack. As you might expect, Conservatives pushed back against this notion. Now Time’s Mark Halperin is claiming that the media “behaved” in the wake of the Tucson shootings and that it’s really Conservatives who made this politic...

America's worse sheriff
Image via Wikipedia IBD: It's bad enough that a fine congresswoman is shot down by a crazed assassin. But do those whose job it is to prevent such awful things have to insert their own base politics into the tragedy? As a key Law Enforcement figure in the Assassination attempt against Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, a Democrat, might be expected to show some caution in commenting on the violent swirl of bitter, unsubstantiated and outright false accusation...

Poll: Americans smarter than Democrat politicos, MSM
Glad to know that the 24-7 hyperventilating, sensationalizing , and demagoguing by MSM outlets and talking point-led Democrats aren’t persuading the American People in the aftermath of the attempted Assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ8), the Murder of 5 others, and injury of 11 others that happened in Tucson, AZ this past Saturday. Via CBS News ( hat tip ): Nearly six in 10 Americans say the country’s heated political Rhetoric is not to blame for the Tucson shooting rampag...

Left-wing Nutbag Kills Bush-Appointed Judge
Now there is a headline you won’t see in the lamestream media, blogs on the left or MSNBC. Instead, Chris Matthews is sure that a guy whose favorite book was the Communist Manifesto was inspired by… Sharron Angle.  More on that, later. Also basically unmentioned is the name of Federal Judge John Roll who was killed in the attack.  Judge Roll was appointed to the bench by George H.W. Bush.  I had to Google search today to remind myself of his name, to write this.  (The Los A

Who has been "inflaming tensions"
Another rampantly biased piece in the Tribune this morning by Kathleen Hennessey and others. No mention of the Pima County Sheriff's inflammatory and unprofessional outburst. No mention of the contemptible bias of the NY Times and CNN, not to mention MSNBC--and even FoxNews. The LA Times/Tribune "reporters" conveniently cut off the quote from Roger Ailes: Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes — while rejecting any suggestion that his Cable News net...

Right Wingers Defend Hate Speech While Tea Party Takes Advantage of Arizona Shooting To Raise Money
While Jared Loughner’s Extremist views differ from those of the Tea Party, many have raised concerns that the anti-government and hate-filled Rhetoric coming from the Tea Party movement, along with leaders such as Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, contribute to an atmosphere of hate which promotes violence among disturbed individuals such as Loughner. There is a fine line between extremists on both ends of the political spectrum, and I was not at all surprised to see that Loughner’s view...

Sophia Bush Talks About Cousin's Death in Tucson
NEW YORK (CBS) One of Sophia Bush's second cousins, 9-year-old Christina Green, was among those killed in the Tucson shooting rampage on Saturday. The "One Tree Hill" actress spoke about the tragedy during an appearance on "Chelsea Lately" Monday night. PICTURES: Rep. Gabrielle Giffords "It's been, I think, a lesson more than anything for me and for my family that life is incredibly short," she said about her cousin's death, according to ET Online. "I remember hearing when she was born and it's ...

Right Wing Media Vitriol Haunts Us In Arizona Shooting
We all had a finger on the trigger—I.F. Stone wrote those words about the Assassination of John F. Kennedy in the cruel fall of 1963. Now we come to the bleak winter of 2011, and how much has changed? Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords lay near dying in her own blood after a shooting rampage in Arizona left six dead, from a Federal Judge to a girl of nine, and 14 others injured. It all happened in the most American of places: a strip mall Parking Lot on a Saturday morning. That's what th...

Obama Will Attend Tucson Memorial Service
President Obama will attend the memorial service on Wednesday in Tucson for those killed in Saturday’s shootings. Expect a lecture. President Obama will travel to Arizona on Wednesday to attend a memorial service for those killed in Saturday’s shootings that targeted Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) for Assassination, according to a White House official. The news that Obama would visit Tucson, where six people were killed and more than a dozen others were wounded by a gunmen on Sat...

CBS Poll: Nearly Six In Ten Say Heated Rhetoric Unrelated To AZ Shooting
In a CBS poll released this morning, almost 60% of Americans said they don't think strong political Rhetoric is to blame for Saturday's shooting rampage in Tucson, Arizona that left six dead and wounded over a dozen others, including Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. In the poll, 57% of respondents said that intense political discourse had nothing to do with the attack, versus 32% who said that it was a contributing factor to the shooting. By political demographics, Republicans were less inc...

Pawlenty, Kennedy Knock Palin for Gun Imagery
Former Minnesota Gov. (and likely 2012 GOP presidential contender) Tim Pawlenty took a swipe at former Governor Sarah Palin on Tuesday for her use of crosshairs imagery on a map showing the Democrats that Palin wanted to see lose in the Midterm Elections. "I think Governor Palin is a remarkable leader; I think she brings a lot to the debate and the table, both nationally and within the Republican Party as well," Pawlenty said on ABC's "Good Morning America." But, he continued, "You know, it woul...

What good does this do Brian Terry and Gabrielle Giffords?
Brian Terry was the Border Patrol agent who was killed by Mexican bandits a few weeks ago on the Arizona-Mexico border. Gabrielle Giffords is the congresswoman who was seriously shot Saturday in Tucson by a gunman. Not much was made of Brian Terry’s Murder. There was a Funeral. Janet Napolitano came to the funeral and chided Terry’s family for complaining that their son was not kept safe enough and that was the end of it. When it surfaced that the reason Terry was killed was that Nap...

That’s Political Entertainment!
EMOTE CONTROL Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, Sarah Palin, and Glenn Beck. In Morning Glory, last year’s most underrated movie comedy, go-getter breakfast-show producer Becky Fuller (Rachel McAdams, divine), in a burst of exasperation, explains the facts of life to journalistic warhorse Mike Pomeroy (Harrison Ford, face furrowed with mental indigestion): “The world has been debating news versus entertainment for years, and guess what? You lost!” Which hasn’t stopped the l...

Hate, violence, extremism: Krugman on the Arizona shooting
By Michael J.W. Stickings Just to drive the point home, allow me to quote Paul Krugman, who yesterday made the case that many of us have been making the past few days: When you heard the terrible news from Arizona, were you completely surprised? Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen? Put me in the latter category. I've had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach ever since the fina...

Can't We All Just Get Along?
I would like to know what rock David Gergen has been living under for the last two years if he thinks this tragedy in Arizona is possibly just the beginning of a period of violence. Someone needs to tell him to go read our contributor Jon Perr's post if he actually hasn't been paying attention to how many people have already been killed over the last couple of years. We don't need to know "what part of that culture" of violence led to the actions by the shooter in Arizona to know that it's long ...

The Vitriol Will Likely Return
With any disturbing event, like the tragic and horrifying shooting in Tucson last Saturday, there is a natural tendency to extrapolate the impact of it for months or even years to come. The unspeakable event cost people from such varying walks of life as a 9-year-old girl and a Federal Judge their lives and has left Rep.Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., fighting for her life. Something like this creates a memory that is certain to be burned into the consciousness of current and former elected offici...

Political Rhetoric and Political Violence: Are Conservatives to Blame for the Arizona Shooting?
In the wake of Saturday’s deadly shooting in Arizona, the Assassination attempt on Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, with fingers being pointed (justifiably, I think) at the likes of Sarah Palin (and the Tea Party, as well as much of the Republican Party), much of the talk today is about Political Speech: Do Palin and others deserve any of the blame for what happened yesterday? More broadly, what is appropriate and what isn’t? At Slate, Jack Shafer defends “inflammatory rhet...

Arizona Shootings: When Speculation Is Acceptable
Not a Veteran. NOT a Veteran. *NOT* a Veteran. How many times must we go through this? I had no clue what he was talking about since, like the rest of male Americana save Demophilius, I was watching football. So, I went to my designated homepage, Drudgereport, to see what was up. Sure enough, right there in one of the links at top was the words I feared: “Military Veteran.” Ah $#!^, I thought. The link took me to a Washington Post article that indeed stated that Law Enforcement offic...

The blame conservatives first 'progressives'
Image by Getty Images via @daylife George Will: ... A characteristic of many contemporary minds is susceptibility to the superstition that all behavior can be traced to some diagnosable frame of mind that is a product of promptings from the social environment. From which flows a political doctrine: Given clever social engineering, society and people can be perfected. This supposedly is the path to progress. It actually is the crux of progressivism. And it is why there is a reflex to blame cons...

The tragic shooting of Congresswoman Giffords affects all of us
The gunman is Jared Loughner. He is sick and deranged.  Unfortunately, liberal pundits attempted to tie Loughner as a conservative and blamed Talk Radio for this shooting.  He had been stalking Congresswoman Giffords for years. Their observations were unfounded and completely false.  Loughner was a Lone Wolf; a term liberals often use to categorize criminals.  People who knew Loughner said he was unstable and prone to violence.  He is an atheist.  He listened to hea...

Tucson Sheriff sticks foot in mouth over Rush Limbaugh comment!
Having an opinion is one thing, but making your opinion public can have Unintended Consequences.  And yes, even for Pima Count, AZ Sheriff, Clarence Dupnik, that rule applies.  Yesterday, he may have inadvertently stuck his foot in his mouth with his Rhetoric about Rush Limbaugh.  Take for instance, the comments made by Dupnik.  Yesterday in an interview, he told Diane Sawyer of ABCNews  that; Really?!  Do you really think he listens to Limbaugh's program, or is he ...