Max Blumenthal: My Day Testifying in the Courtroom of John Roll

Infidel Bloggers Alliance
Gabrielle Giffords was shot because she is Jewish? From Carl: Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Az) wasn't shot because she was pro or anti-immigration. She wasn't shot because she voted against Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House. She wasn't shot because Sarah Palin targeted her seat in last fall's Elections. And she wasn't shot because she voted for ObamaCare. Gabrielle Giffords was shot because of a much more baseless hatred. Gabrielle Giffords was shot because she is a Jew!

Clerk: Judge John Roll 'greatly dedicated to his family,' 'family of his staff"
Arizona shooting Six people were killed and 14 others wounded, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona. A photo of U.S. District Judge John Roll sits at a makeshift memorial....

Monday round-up
Previews of today’s arguments; weekend coverage of Friday’s certiorari grants; and the Chief Justice responds to Saturday’s shootings. The Court will hear oral argument this morning in two cases. First up is the interstate water dispute, Montana v. Wyoming. At issue in the case is Montana’s contention that Wyoming’s upstream use of increasingly efficient irrigation techniques in two tributaries of the Yellowstone River violates Montana’s rights under the Yello...

No Easy Answer
Since no one knows yet if right-wing Rhetoric played any twisted — and wholly unintended — role in triggering Jared Lee Johnson’s horrific massacre, the discussion of the influence of that Rhetoric is massively premature. But it is also unavoidable. I don’t think that questioning the possible role of political discourse in this tragedy merely represents callous opportunism on the part of the Left; it is a salutary human instinct after a tragedy of this dimension to search...

Why Was Giffords Targeted?
Jared Lee Loughner, the alleged would-be assassin of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Leaving aside whether broader currents in American political discourse influenced Jared Lee Loughner’s attempt on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’s life, what exactly were the direct, proximate motivations behind Loughton’s decision to shoot Giffords in the head and then open fire on the crowd at her “Congress on Your Corner” event Saturday in Tucson, Arizona, killing six and wounding nearly two d...

Tucson, Arizona: It Could Happen Here, and Anywhere
Tucson, Arizona, has always held a special place in my heart. It's the city where my son was born 28 years ago. A newspaper job and a sense of adventure drew me further west than I had ever been and this East Coast gal quickly fell in love – with the desert landscape and lifestyle. I loved that a place so different from the urban cities where I had lived and worked was still a part of the United States. It proved how diverse America could be. The territory that didn't become a state until ...

Federal murder charges filed in Giffords shooting case
A 22-year-old man was formally charged Sunday with two counts of Murder and three counts of Attempted Murder in a shooting rampage that killed six people and critically wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Jared Lee Loughner, of Tucson, Ariz., is in federal custody. He'll go before a federal magistrate on Monday and could face additional state and federal charges, including Domestic Terrorism. Loughner came to a meet-and-greet event Giffords was hosting at a local Supermarket on Saturday morning a...

Judge rules against background checks
In Arizona, U.S. District Court Judge John Roll has become the third Federal Judge to agree that part of the Brady Law violates the Tenth Amendment. He is the first to say that part of the Brady Law also violates the Fifth Amendment. Judge Roll's opinion does not knock out the waiting period for Handgun purchases, but it does strike at the very concept of the Federal Government requiring local Law Enforcement officers to conduct Background Checks. The suit was brought by Graham County Graham ...

Jared Loughner Fixated on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, Attended 'Congress On Your Corner" Event in 2007
I've been checking the Twitter feeds for some of the Media Matters goons. They're despicable. There's no sense of reality among progressive leftists, although some of those who've fanned the allegations of Sarah Palin's complicity have started to walk back the charges. So now that there's evidence that Jared Laughner was obsessed with Congresswoman Giffords as far back as 2007 --- a year before Sarah Palin became a major national political figure --- will Progressives recant and apologize? Don'...

DeWine, Husted sworn in to statewide offices
COLUMBUS — Republican Mike DeWine promised to hit the ground running when he takes office Monday as Attorney General and will try to put words into action by adding Ohio to the states challenging the Democratic-backed federal Health Care law. DeWine explained his plans in an interview after he and fellow Republican Jon Husted, surrounded by their families and friends, were sworn in Sunday in separate Statehouse ceremonies. Husted takes office today as Secretary of State. “When Washin...

Krugman: Climate of Hate
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 final stages of the 2008 campaign. Why mention his award? Because as an Economist he is used to examining the data and seeing the patterns. And on this the patterns are crystal clear. Read his column. It is as well written as usual, which makes i...

Jane Fonda Blames Giffords Shooting on Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and the Tea Party
Jane Fonda has blamed Saturday's tragic Shooting Spree in Tucson, Arizona, on former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, conservative Talk Show host Glenn Beck, and the Tea Party movement. Actually, Giffords is not a Progressive. Wikipedia lists her as part of the Blue Dog Coalition. It would be nice if Fonda knew how to spell Beck's first name, but since she's likely never seen his show or read anything he's written, it's not surprising. Nice job, Jane. You're quite a rocket sc...

Monday Big Blue Smuf Blogging: What They Said
Today's honoree: None other than the Shrill One himself, Paul Krugman, on the Right Wing Climate of Hate. The point is that there’s room in a Democracy for people who ridicule and denounce those who disagree with them; there isn’t any place for eliminationist Rhetoric, for suggestions that those on the other side of a debate must be removed from that debate by whatever means necessary. And it’s the saturation of our political discourse — and especially our airwaves —...

Some of us want climate change
I’ve had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach ever since the final stages of the 2008 campaign. I remembered the upsurge in political hatred after Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 — an upsurge that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing. And you could see, just by watching the crowds at McCain-Palin rallies, that it was ready to happen again. There are defensive sounds coming from the right that you can't blame "society" and the social climate for the shooting in Arizo

Democrat hate machine politicizes Arizona tragedy
Cover of Rush Limbaugh James Rosen, Fox News: 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 mal...

Thoughts on Loughner | Michael Tomasky
Here's the question of the day. Does there have to be absolute hard proof that Jared Loughner was a committed right-winger before we can say that violent Rhetoric likely played some kind of role here? I read some of the comments to my piece yesterday, and commenters were furious at me for making such a connection. I'm hardly the only person to do it, but anyway. I didn't recognize any of the handles, which made me think that I'd been linked to and denounced on some conservative site, and so thes...

The Tree of Liberty
Alex Pareene has a good piece over at Salon. Pareene writes: The Tea Parties are based around the Rhetoric of the American Revolution, which was a violent insurrection. It makes a sad sort of sense that a bunch of comfortable white reactionaries would dress up their childish tantrums with such grandiose language, because “desperately protecting your privilege in the face of what appears to be the demise of the empire” sounds much less inspiring than “defeating tyranny.”...

John Roll, Chief Judge of District Court in Arizona, and the Ninth Circuit's Release
Photo issued by the 9th Circuit of deceased jurist John Roll Normally, I do not post Press Releases in their entirety on this blog, but I think an exception is warranted in the case of this statement from the United States' Ninth Circuit Court regarding Arizona's Chief District Judge John Roll, who was killed in the massacre that also severely wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Earlier this year, I interviewed Judge Roll for my October cover story on the U.S. Government's Operation Str...

'Get Down! Get Down!' As Gunfire Erupts in Arizona
Monday, January 10, 2011 By Pauline Arrillaga, Associated Press Tucson, Ariz. (AP) - She arrived right on time - smiling, as Gabrielle "Gabby" Giffords so often did, as she made her way through the small crowd that had assembled for her first "Congress on Your Corner" gathering of the new year. The meetings had become one of her hallmarks as a congresswoman, a way to get face-to-face with the people she served and hear them out, from those who cheered her close re-election to those who oppo...

Why Blame Photos of Political Figures Holding Guns?
Are we really to believe that if a politician poses in a photo, aiming a gun at a target, that they are ipso facto contributing to an atmosphere of hatred and violence? In that case, are advocates of this argument willing to blame the Victim? Because Gabrielle Giffords did the same. Of course, Gabrielle Giffords did nothing to contribute to the actions of her attacker. Nor did Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck or the Tea Parties or anyone else other than the gunman. I suspect some of what we’re ...

Right-Wing Bloggers Freak Out Over Batman's 'Muslim Sidekick'
Meet your newest nemesis, Batman: the right-wing American blogosphere. First, a little back story. In the December issues of the Batman comics, the superhero has set up Batman Incorporated to recruit an ally in cities across the globe, the AFP reports. Enter Nightrunner -- the alter ego of Bilal Asselah -- the 22-year-old Muslim son of immigrants who seeks to make things right in his riotous neighborhood of Paris. He's trained in parkour acrobatics, and his Muslim upbringing encourages him to ...

No More Mister Nice Blog
A HORRIBLE MOMENT, AND THE BLOGOSPHERE IS MAKING IT WORSE I've been away from computers since yesterday morning and I learned about the Arizona massacre from the Sunday print New York Times. At that point I really didn't want to get online, because I knew what was coming, and I was exactly right: the shooter is mostly crazy and, though clearly influenced by angry right-wing Rhetoric, in a political gray area. Our side is essentially Not even bloodshed is cause for pause
By Nicholas Wilbur Hope died this weekend, at least one of the faces of hope - that of Christina Green, whose life was taken by a gunman at a political event in Tucson Saturday morning. The 9-year-old Christina, who studied ballet and had just been elected to Student council, according to news reports, was one of the Children featured in a book titled, Faces of Hope: Babies Born on 9/11. The gunman, Jared Lee Loughner, took the lives of at least six people and injured 14 others in an attempt...

Assassination in Arizona
I haven’t posted earlier for two reasons - first, there’s still a lot of information and insight coming out of the investigation in Arizona. Second, the pace of rapid fire punditry was somewhat overwhelming. At a certain point, while people are in surgery and the ICU, I don’t really care to be arguing with Conservatives on Twitter about the level of their leaders’ culpability for their persistently violent Rhetoric in opposition to the Obama Administration and Democrati...

EPA "pollution diet" starves agriculture: farm group
By Charles Abbott Atlanta | Sun Jan 9, 2011 6:18pm EST Atlanta (Reuters) - The head of the largest U.S. farm group called on Congress to stop ruinous EPA "over-regulation" of agriculture and announced on Sunday a Lawsuit against EPA rules to reduce Chesapeake Bay Pollution. Bob Stallman, president of the 6 million-member American Farm Bureau Federation, announced the Lawsuit during a Speech that opened the group's annual meeting. He said the Environmental Protection Agency's "over-regulation ...