Is there a foreign-policy angle to the Tucson shooting? Not really.

Palin slams 'blood libel', takes no blame for violence (AFP)
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Sarah Palin on Wednesday slammed as "blood Libel" charges that overheated political Rhetoric contributed to a weekend shooting rampage in Arizona that left a US lawmaker fighting for her life. "Especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, Journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn," she said in an online video message. The conservative former Re...

(Sharron) Angle: Media 'inappropriately attributing blame' for Tucson shooting
Source: The Hill Former Nevada Senate Candidate Sharron Angle denied her campaign Rhetoric helped motivate the Tucson gunman and accused the media of "finger-pointing towards political figures" to boost Ratings. Angle's suggestion during the midterm campaign that voters could pursue "Second Amendment remedies" to settle political differences with Congress has been widely criticized in the wake of the attack that left six people dead and Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) in critical condition. "I...

Pakistan Muslim blasphemers jailed
Who is to blame for Taseer's death? A court in Pakistan has sentenced a Muslim prayer leader and his son to life in jail for Blasphemy. The pair were found Guilty of tearing down and trampling a poster of a gathering to mark the birthday of the Prophet in Punjab province. A Christian leader said it was the first time a jail term had been handed down under the blasphemy law, which carries a mandatory death sentence. A Christian woman is on death row for allegedly insulting Islam. The convict...

Biden to Pakistan: Fight Extremism or Be 'Consumed' By It
ABC News’ Nick Schifrin and Karen Travers report: Vice President Joe Biden made an unannounced trip to Pakistan today to try and push government and Military leaders to crack down on Militants and shore up a shaky economy. Biden delivered that message in private and in public, one week after a prominent politician was assassinated and crowds across the country celebrated his killer. “Societies that tolerate such actions wind up being consumed by those actions,” Biden said to th...

Bomb at Pakistan police station kills 11
ISLAMABAD (AP) — A Hospital official says 11 people have been killed in a Suicide Attack on a Police Station and an adjoining Mosque in northwest Pakistan. The Victims of the attack Wednesday in Bannu district included security officers and civilians. Hospital official Abdullah Khan said more than 30 people had been wounded. Islamist Militants have carried out scores of attacks on Pakistani police and army targets over the last three years as part of a campaign to topple the country’...

Overheated Rhetoric on Overheated Rhetoric
If the pundit class were merely seeking to use the Tucson shootings as an opportunity to open a debate on civility in American life, that would simply be a case of misguided opportunism. There is a time and a place for such a debate. A better time would be when the dead are buried and the wounded have recovered, and when cooler heads can prevail in such a debate. Overheated Rhetoric is misplaced in a debate about overheated rhetoric. I have not heard anyone on these pages suggest that our public...

Determined to Stifle Arizona Violence Debate, Palin Claims She's the Victim... of a "Blood Libel"
Echoing the new battle cry of the right, Sarah Palin has come out of hiding to accuse those who suggest over-the-top Rhetoric and a volatile political climate might offer some explanation of Saturday's gun rampage in Arizona of Manufacturing a “blood Libel” against her. Desperate to defend herself after being called out for placing the crosshairs of a rifle over the home district of a congresswoman who was then the Victim of an Assassination attempt, the former Governor of Alaska scr...

Systematic Assassinations Not Part of Our Politics
The steam seems to be going out of the move to "deftly pin this"--the shooting of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 13 others--"on the Tea Partiers," as one unidentified senior Democratic operative put it to Politico. It has become obvious that the murderer was crazy, the follower of no political movement, motivated only by the bizarre ideas ricocheting through his head. If any blame attaches to others, it is to authorities who had notice of his madness and did not do enough to confine him o...

Ed Koch: China's Rising Military Power and What We Should Do About It
On January 6, The New York Times reported that China has rolled out the J-20 tactical fighter, its first stealth (radar evading) plane, which appears to be a copy of the U.S. F-22. According to The Times, the "Hong Kong editor in chief of the Canadian journal Kanwa Defense Weekly, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday, "They want to show the U.S., show Mr. Gates, their muscle." While experts concede that China "remains a generation or more behind the U.S. in Military technology," and even...

Why isn't VP BIDEN taking questions?
Below is a Press Pool report (traveling in Afghanistan and Pakistan with VP Biden.). Why isn't the VP (for 2nd time) taking questions from the press in these two very important locations? The VP says "running late" but..... Vice President Biden and Pakistani Prime Minister Gilani each made a statement after their meeting in the PM's residence in Islamabad. Again, Biden took no questions from the press. As he did after his meeting Tuesday with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Kabul, the vice pres...

Vice President Biden pushes Pakistan to target militants on Afghanistan border
Vice President Joe Biden, in Pakistan Wednesday, stressed that Pakistan and the United States have a common enemy, and warned of the dangers to the country of tolerating violent Extremists....

Re: Defending the Tea Party
Katrina’s piece on the homepage looks at how Tea Party–backed lawmakers have responded to the whirlwind Rhetoric surrounding the Tucson tragedy. I caught up with Mark Meckler, co-founder and national coordinator for Tea Party Patriots, late last night. He confessed to having been bogged down in a “media frenzy” over of the past few days, and said he wasn’t exactly pleased with what he’d been hearing. “What we saw is an example of the depravity of people ...

Barack Obama always thinks he's the smartest person in the room. Hence his foreign policy blunders
Ivy League arrogance: Barack Obama For the whole eight years of George W Bush’s presidency he was relentlessly criticised by America’s Mainstream Media for clumsy communications skills. It’s true that Bush’s constant malapropisms - “strategery” being the most famous - detracted from the content of the message. Yet that content was usually sound. On the other hand, while Obama’s platitudinous style avoids Bush’s clumsiness of expression, he displa

Law passed to ban picketing at Tucson funerals
PHOENIX — Arizona legislators quickly approved emergency Legislation Tuesday to head off picketing by a Topeka, Kan., church near the Funeral service for a 9-year-old girl who was killed in the Tucson shootings. Unanimous votes by the House and Senate sent the bill to Gov. Jan Brewer, who signed it Tuesday night. It took effect immediately. Without specifically mentioning the Tucson shooting, the law prohibits Protests at or near Funeral sites. Armed hero nearly shot wrong man in A...

Bill Maher: 'I'm So Tired of the Second Amendment'
Comic and HBO "Real Time" host Bill Maher has always been good at stirring the pot, and his comments about Gun Rights on "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" Tuesday night are certain to stir up something! When Jay Leno asked Bill Maher for his take on the Tucson Shooting Spree that killed six and wounded more than a dozen people last weekend, Maher responded to the Tucson event rather indirectly, but was quite direct as to how he feels about gun issues in general. You must login to comment. The Fox...

No More Mister Nice Blog
THE RIGHT-WING'S NEW BARD OF THE BACKLASH: Glenn Reynolds? I've always thought of Instapundit as tendentious but incredibly superficial -- looking back a decade, it seems to have been a Twitter feed before there was Twitter, and, in the '10s, Glenn Reynolds seemed like yesterday's man. Now, though, he's suddenly hot. The New York Times reports on Sarah Palin's new fireside chat about the Tucson shootings and tells us: Sarah Palin, who had been silent for days, on Wednesday issued a forceful den...

Palin: Were above the mindless finger-pointing (Daily Caller)
Read more stories from The Daily Caller Face of evil: Mug Shots of famous assassins [SLIDESHOW] Poll of Conservatives shows support for broad cuts to spending, including Military Spending Washington's top five most ridiculous reactions to the Arizona shooting Jared Loughner and the ins and outs of the insanity defense Mark Sanford exits the stage Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin released a video Wednesday of her first long-form statement on Saturday’s Tucson, Ariz. shooting that left six ...

Should Tucson Prompt a Discussion About Climate Change?
Some angry e-mails this morning about civility, specifically about my earlier posts asserting that, so far, the Tucson massacre story has more to do with Mental Illness and Gun Control than it has to do with violent Rhetoric in political discourse. Here's one such e-mail: Get your head out of the sand Goldberg. These kinds of shootings wouldn't happen in a country that wasn't ruled by Fox. Wait until your targeted for Death Threats, then you'll see. Put aside that bit about death threats -- I ke...

Judson Phillips On Tucson Massacre: The Left Benefits From This
Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips organized the national Tea Party Convention in 2010 where Keynote Speaker Sarah Palin cried, “America is ready for another revolution!” Phillips now argues that the Tucson massacre is part of the “war” between the left and the Tea Party. Managing the online forum at Tea Party Nation, he has encouraged his members to argue that accused killer Jared Loughner is a “liberal lunatic” in order to fight against “the ma...

Sharron Angle Defends Her Political Rhetoric
Yahoo! Buzz Sharron Angle , the unsuccessful GOP Senate Candidate from Nevada, denied that her fiery campaign Rhetoric played a roll in Saturday’s attack on Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords . In a statement, Ms. Angle said that blaming her, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin or the Tea Party movement “puts all who gather to redress grievances in danger.” Ms. Palin earlier released a video statement defending her Rhetoric and calling it a “blood Libel’’ to link political...

Hezbollah plans to resign from Lebanese government
The Islamic Militant group Hezbollah and its allies plan to resign from the Lebanese Cabinet and topple the government on Wednesday over tensions stemming from the international investigation of the 2005 Assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, officials said. The ministers were planning to resign in the afternoon unless Western-backed Prime Minister Saad Hariri — the son of the slain leader — agrees to their demand to convene an urgent Cabinet meeting over the tribunal c...

New CFR Book: How American Innovation Can Overcome the Asian Challenge
As the United States struggles to emerge from Recession, India and China's continued robust growth is the subject of much interest and concern. In his new book, Advantage: How American Innovation Can Overcome the Asian Challenge , Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Senior Fellow Adam Segal analyzes Asia's technological rise, questions assumptions about the United States inevitable decline, and explains how America can preserve and improve its position in the Global Economy by optimizing its str...

Punjab court sentences blasphemers
Mohammad Shafi, 45, and Mohammad Aslam, 20, were accused of tearing down and trampling a poster of a gathering to mark the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed. They were arrested last April for the offense that happened outside a Grocery Store. The judge in the court at Dera Ghazi Khan in the eastern part of the Punjab also fined them each the equivalent of $2,700. The sentences come after Punjab Provincial Governor Salman Taseer, 64, was assassinated allegedly by one of his Bodyguards who claimed ...

Silence is not an option in the struggle for Islam’s soul
The Prophet Mohammed’s many encounters with Christians have been well-documented, beginning, as a 12-year-old, with a warm meeting with a Syrian monk during a trade expedition. During heightened persecution of the nascent Muslim community in Mecca, Mohammed advised some of his followers to migrate to Abyssinia (Ethiopia), then ruled by the Christian king Negus. Mohammed had full confidence in the righteous nature of Negus, who provided refuge to the persecuted Muslims, allowing them to pra...

Obama 2.0: Who will fill the top jobs in foreign policy?
The Obama Administration's Foreign Policy team can claim a few signature accomplishments in its first two years in office:  progress on resetting relations with Russia, aiding Iraq's transition to self-rule, strengthening sanctions on Iran, and increasing attention on Southeast Asia. Progress on Middle East peace, the War in Afghanistan, and dealing with North Korea and China haven't gone as smoothly. Now, faced with a divided Congress and looking ahead to another Presidential Campaign only m...