Insanity Nation

Breaking...Loughner conducted bizarre, Satanic rituals
Breaking news this morning provides further insight into the mind of Jared Lee Loughner, the alleged shooter in the Tuscon massacre. Reports indicate that Loughner was engaged in Satanic rituals, according to the New York Daily News. A sinister shrine reveals a chilling occult dimension in the mind of the deranged gunman accused of shooting a member of Congress and 19 others. Hidden within a camouflage tent behind Jared Lee Loughner's home sits an alarming altar with a skull sitti...

Jared Lee Loughner, mental illness, and fringe politics
As appalled as I've been over the past couple of years by ads like this, veiled allusions to insurrection, and the otherizing of the president, I've found arguments drawing connections between a "climate of hate" and Loughner unpersausive. Simply put, the case that far-right Rhetoric contributed or caused this Killing Spree strikes me as squishy, and, at the moment, unprovable. In The Times and Post this morning, there are some of the calling-cards of the conspiratorial right. But more relevant,...

The Politics of Assassination
On Saturday morning, the Nation took a collective gasp as it was reported that an attempted Assassination had taken place in Tuscan, Arizona.  The target, Democrat Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot by a lone gunman.  The Congresswoman survived, miraculously, because the bullet which entered her brain passed through completely and did not enter the other lobe.  As the gunman, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, tried to reload his weapon a woman rose and hit the gun and clip fr...

Politicos Ben Smith gives credence to baseless SPLC comments on Tea Party connection in Arizona shooting
Matthew Boyle is a contributing reporter at The Daily Caller. In a column published late Sunday night, Politico’s Ben Smith quoted a Political Activist at the Southern Poverty Law Center as a source to link the weekend shooting in Arizona to mainstream Conservatism. SPLC’s Mark Potok told Smith that the connection is through Far Right-wing Activist David Wynn Miller. Miller is a former Milwaukee welder who has declared himself the “King of Hawaii.” He’s associated w...

Get your story straight, MEPS.
I'll have more to say about the tragedy in Tuscon that killed a 10 year-old girl, a Federal Judge, several others, and critically wounded U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ-8) over the weekend. But in the mean time I think DoD needs to figure out which story they are going with. This: In one of a handful of anti-religious, anti-government videos on Loughner's YouTube page, he says "every United States Military recruit at MEPS (Military Entrance Processing Station) in Phoenix is rece...

Why Fox is news and CNN is not
Democratic Sheriff Clarence Dupnik went on CNN on Saturday and blamed everyone but Jared Lee Loughner for Jared Lee Loughner’s shooting of 21 people, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. CNN did not challenge Dupnik when he said: “I think the vitriolic Rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business and what (we) see on TV and how our youngsters are being raised, that this has not become the nice United States of ...

Arizona Massacre Prompts Political 'Cheap Shots'
When Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords collapsed outside the Safeway in Tucson Saturday morning, felled by a hail of bullets that killed six and wounded another 13 innocent people that had come to see her, some were quick to claim that the carnage was the product not merely of the tortured mind and trigger-happy fingers of the alleged shooter, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner. Rather, many on the American Left said the horror could be traced to the malign influence of American Conservatives; members...

Tucson Gunman Jared Loughner Who Shot Gabrielle Giffords Described by Classmate as Left-Wing Pothead
Hmm, the Tea Party gunman as inaccuratly described by the liberal MSM is described as a LEFT-WING POT HEAD by former classmates. That seems to be a much different profile than the NY Times, liberal media and left-wing political agenda propagandists want America to believe. This punk, was a loner, a deranged individual, with no real political affiliation who appears by all accounts to have been fixated on this Assassination attempt long ago. This kid was a delusional loner who was hell bent o...

"What is government if words have no meaning?" the question Jared Loughner asked Gabrielle Giffords at a "Congress in Your Corn
Mother Jones reports what he said to his friend Bryce Tierney: "Can you believe it, they wouldn't answer my question." Tierney says, "Ever since that, he thought she was fake, he had something against her." (By the way, 2007 is a year before Sarah Palin emerged on the national scene.) Loughner would occasionally mention Giffords, according to Tierney: "It wasn't a day-in, day-out thing, but maybe once in a while, if Giffords did something that was ridiculous or passed some stupid law or did som...

Giffords environmental advocacy
By now you know the basic story: Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head on Saturday while appearing at a "Congress on Your Corner" event in Tucson. The shooting killed six, among them a federal judge and a nine-year-old girl. Giffords herself seems to be responding to stimuli despite being gravely injured. The suspect, Jared Lee Loughner, is in custody, and while we don't know anything definitive about his motives, many Democrats are pointing out that Giffords -- a Blue Dog in a re...

Flashback: Bachmann Called for "Armed and Dangerous" Citzenry on Climate Bill
In the wake of the tragic shootings in Tucson on Saturday, there has been a lot of talk about the influence of heated—and at times, violent—political Rhetoric, which has seemingly escalated in recent years. Sarah Palin has gotten plenty of attention for her midterms target map (replete with bulls-eyes) of Congressional Districts, Arizona's Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, who was critically injured in the shooting. But it's worth noting some of the other examples of extreme rhetoric&m...;

Who is really to blame for the shootings in Tucson, AZ?
The Rhetoric seems to be never ending.  The blame game has begun, and there is no end in sight regarding comments as to what happened, who should have done what and why.  But the real answers as to how to prevent another tragedy like the one in Tucson, AZ have not yet been discussed. Anyone who has spent enough time listening to TV news, or has read on-line accounts of the incident, has heard or read about all of the finger pointing commentary by everyone from the m...

Medias wild accusation against Palin missed wacky cult connection to ODonnell
The Lying Liberal Media desperate to implicate the Tea Party, Sarah Palin and Talk Show Conservatives missed one wild and unhinged theory they thrive on.  Jared Lee Loughner's (notice the middle name, press loves three named assassins) has an occultist alter in his back yard. The Daily News exclusive writes, “A sinister shrine reveals a chilling occult dimension in the mind of the deranged gunman accused of shooting a member of Congress and 19 others. Hidden within a camouflage tent b...

Republican Rhetoric, Right-Wing Terror
"My tears are flowing and I am stunned and angered that Gabby Giffords was savagely gunned down while performing her congressional duties." So said Minnesota Republican Representative Michele Bachmann in response to Saturday's mass killing in Tucson. But less than a year ago, Bachmann called for resistance to Cap and Trade Legislation, "I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue," adding, "Thomas Jefferson told us, having a revolution every now and then is a good thing." Sadly,...

WWHD?
I should have written a post about this earlier because I really don’t like the meme “politicizing a tragedy” and you won’t hear me using it. The reason you won’t hear me using it is because words like “politicizing” are cooked up by operatives at the speed of light and are used to short circuit the thought process. They provide a sort of cheap grace as a substitute for thinking the problem out. Same for words like corporatist and triangulate. But that...

What Riverdaughter said
There seem to be two major camps regarding this tragedy: Sarah Palin is a monster and the Tea Partiers must be blamed. Or, Sarah Palin is the scapegoat and her picture had nothing to do with this tragic incident. I prefer the third way. .... In the past 18 years, starting with the advent of Rush Limbaugh, we saw a ratcheting up of Right Wing Extremism. ... And it is into this environment that Sarah Palin steps as the champion of a new set of people. A group that even the Right Wing Republicans ...

Michael Winship: Hate Speech the Right's Magic Bullet
The Russian playwright Anton Chekhov had a rule: if you show a gun in the first act, by the time the curtain falls, it has to go off. For weeks and months, that gun, the weapon of angry Rhetoric and intemperate rabblerousing, has been cocked and loaded in plain view on the American stage; Saturday morning outside a Shopping Mall in Tucson, Arizona, it went off again and again and again. The target, Gabrielle Giffords, a member of the United States Congress, lays critically wounded, one of thir...

BRYAN PRESTON: Clicking through images of Jared Lee Loughners backyard skull shrine, linked fro
BRYAN PRESTON: “Clicking through images of Jared Lee Loughner’s backyard skull shrine, linked from Drudge. I’m not seeing a Gadsden flag.” ...

True Face of Progressivism Exposed in a Tragedys Aftermath.
There is no proof yet that Christianne Amanpour is a child molester. Let that sink in for a second. Outrageous, right? Especially when simply said out of the blue like that. Yet that is how the media is treating the insanity of the left-wing progressive charge that Conservatives, Sarah Palin and the Tea Party are somehow responsible for the actions of a man who had been obsessed with his target since 2007, more than two years before the Tea Party was in existence. Amanpour, on her low-rated â€..

Sheriff: Loughner Not Cooperating
NBC News reports: A 22-year-old man charged with trying to assassinate a U.S. congresswoman in a Shooting Spree that left six people dead has remained silent and has not been cooperating with the investigation, according to a sheriff. Jared Loughner, described as a social outcast with wild beliefs steeped in paranoia and deep distrust of government, was due to make his first court appearance Monday at 4 p.m. ET. At 11 a.m. ET, President Obama led the nation in a moment of silence to remember t...

David Sirota: Silence Is Complicity & Defensiveness Is Endorsement
I've just finished up 3 hours of the most difficult radio I've ever had to do. The topic, of course, was the horrific shooting in Tucson, which has deeply affected me, as it has many others. As someone who had to flee the Capitol on 9/11, was warned of Anthrax contamination in my congressional office, and has faced various threats of violence, I was shaken by the scenes in Arizona more so than by any other news imagery in a long time. The reason the Radio Show was so difficult this morning was...

Giffords wrote of need to 'tone our rhetoric and partisanship down' on eve of shooting
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) wrote of the need to "tone our Rhetoric and Partisanship down" the day before having been shot. Giffords e-mailed outgoing Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson (R), who will become director of Harvard University's Institute of Politics, on Friday to offer congratulations on the new position, and urge him to use his new job to "promote centrism and moderation," according to a copy of the e-mail published by cn|2 Politics on Monday, and flagged by The Huffi...

The Left Hypocritically Exploits Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords' Shooting
Just hours after Saturday's tragic shooting incident in Tucson, Arizona, numerous news sources on the left from CNN to the Huffington Post were casting blame upon Sarah Palin, Tea Parties, and Second Amendment supporters. Hoping the shooter had right-leaning views, the Left immediately started portraying Jared Lee Loughner as a Right Wing nut. Even as information trickled in revealing Loughner had some left-leaning political views, the left ignored it and ran with their own spin, labeling hi...

Raul Labrador responds to Giffords shooting on 'Meet The Press'
Raul Labrador, the newly-elected GOP Congressman from Idaho's 1st Congressional District, appeared on CBS's Meet the Press program Sunday to discuss the shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. "She was doing what all of us should be doing, which was talking to our constituents, and trying to get educated on the issues," Labrador said. Within minutes of the tragedy, liberal media pundits were blaming Sarah Palin, the Tea Party and Glenn Beck for the shootings.  "We have to be c...

Media Matters Calls On Murdoch To Rein In Beck, Palin
In a letter delivered to News Corp.CEO Rupert Murdoch Monday afternoon, and obtained by TPM, Media Matters founder David Brock says the time has come for Fox News to take responsibility for its programming. Specifically, Brock is calling on Murdoch to make Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck tone down their Rhetoric on threat of termination -- or to be complicit in acts of political violence. "Beck and Palin are two of Fox's most recognizable figures," Brock writes. "Before this heartbreaking tragedy i...