Not even bloodshed is cause for pause

The Morning Plum
* Obama steps up: The President is set to travel to Arizona tomorrow to attend the Funeral service of the Shooting Victims, and he is expected to give a Speech about tolerance, a theme he may reprise in the State of the Union address. But Obama's advisers are uncertain about the exact message he should send: It is not clear whether ideology motivated the alleged shooter, Jared Loughner, and Obama's advisers may conclude it unwise for the president to lecture the nation on mutual respect -- whi...

Hate Speech the Rights Magic Bullet (Guest Voice)
Hate Speech the Right’s Magic Bullet by Michael Winship 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 Un...

Vanishing Pointless
If there's one thing that the Tucson shooting has provoked, it's a lot of people going back and flushing a whole bunch of stuff down the memory holes. History must be unwritten, embarrassing items purged and denied, awkward truths must be ignored. Of course, this is the Internet, and nothing is ever truly forgotten -- and one's foes will often make copies and Screenshots before they expose your embarrassing postings before they expose them, so they can properly denounce you for your "admission...

Stop the Blame Game
I'm not a media critic and never will be, but this has not been a shining 48 hours for my profession. Following the shooting that left Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., gravely wounded and six bystanders murdered at a Tucson shopping center, the media have spent as much time trying to assign political blame for the cause of the shooting as they have trying to unearth facts. As it turns out, the murderer is a mentally unstable individual, with no coherent political ideology. For all the blame pl...

First Post-Shooting Poll - Most Americans Still Sane
CBS News has released a poll in the wake of the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the Murder of several others. The poll results show that the attempts by the left-blogosphere, Mainstream Media and some Democratic politicians to blame right-wing Political Speech and Sarah Palin for the shooting have not worked, so far, with most Americans: Nearly six in 10 Americans say the country's heated political Rhetoric is not to blame for the Tucson shooting rampage that left six dead and ...

Poisonous Politics
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 pled guilty, had been sentenced to 80 years. When Cermak died on March 6, Zangara was retried for Murder and sentenced to the electric chai...

The Giffords Blood Libel Will Fail
The big push to blame Conservatives for the murderous rampage of Jared Loughner won’t work. In fact, it will backfire. The Left is riding across quicksand on a horse that is dying beneath them. Here are some reasons why. The Right can fight back: The paramount reason this strategy will fail is that liberal media dominance is gone forever. The Politico offers a disgusting quote from a nameless Democrat operati...

Poll: Only 32% Of Americans Think Tucson Shooter Was Politically Motivated
Despite a 48 hour campaign by Demcorats and their surrogates in the media to pain the Tucson shooter Jarred Loughner as a tea-partying Sarah Palin devotee, most of the public isn’t buying it. Even a plurality of Democrats are saying that the shooting had nothing to do with politics: Nearly six in 10 Americans say the country’s heated political Rhetoric is not to blame for the Tucson shooting rampage that left six dead and critically wounded U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, according to ...

Nation gets first look at suspect, Tucson grieves
A woman prays at the memorial located in front of the University Medical Center, Monday, Jan. 10, 2011, in Tucson, Ariz. The memorial has been set up for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., who is in critical condition at the Hospital, and other Victims who were shot on Saturday, leaving six dead and more injured. When Jared Loughner walked into the courtroom, everything fell silent. Law clerks, courtroom artists and reporters alike turned from the wooden benches to look at the vacant-e...

Jon Stewart delivers special message on Tucson shootings (Video)
Last night Jon Stewart cut away from his normal comedic routine to deliver a more serious message on the shootings in Tucson, Arizona over the weekend.  Six people were killed and fourteen more were injured in the shooting.  United States Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who is currently recovering from a gunshot to the head, was the apparent target of the shooter.  As usual, Stewart brought a different perspective to a story which has come to be dominated by partisan “poli...

Ailes to Fox Anchors, 'Tone it Down'
Roger Ailes, the president of Fox News, on Monday embraced the idea of a more civil public discourse in the wake of the shootings in Arizona. In an interview with Russell Simmons, which was posted on the Web site of the founder of Def Jam records, Mr. Ailes said that his network would try to cool the heated Rhetoric. “I told all of our guys, shut up, tone it down, make your argument intellectually,” Mr. Ailes said. “You don’t have to do it with bombast. I hope the other ...

The Tucson Shooting's Most Important Questions
Since the shooting in Tucson on Saturday, lots of important questions have been raised - questions that go to far bigger issues than one horrific shooting. In the interest of summation, here are the best questions I've seen on Twitter, Facebook, in the blogosphere, on radio and elsewhere. - If after a calculated political Assassination attempt we cannot talk about the downsides of a right-wing media that effectively endorses political violence, when can we talk about this subject? Or should w...

The Note: 2012 Politics Gets Tangled In Arizona Shooting Aftermath
By MICHAEL FALCONE and AMY WALTER The place that Sarah Palin has occupied in the debate about civility in politics in the aftermath of Saturday’s shooting in Arizona that left six people dead has inevitably dragged other potential 2012 contenders into the discussion. One of the first to join the fray is former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, whose long-planned book tour kicks off this week. Pawlenty weighed in on the swirling Controversy about the appropriateness of Palin’s use of rifle cro...

Dont you get it, you stupid, reactionary, racist, white, trashy, snowbilly, flagwaving, Constitution-fetish, Liberty-loving Reds
We don’t care that Loughner’s shooting rampage wasn’t inspired by anything other then his Mental Illness … YOU are still to blame. Whether Jared Loughner is a far-left nihilist or a right-wing Racist or — as he most likely is — some weird politically incoherent amalgamation of Extremist beliefs tinged with paranoia, he wasn’t driven to Murder by angry campaign slogans. Steve Kornacki’s right — Loughner was not a Gadsden Flag-wielding Tea Pa...

It's On: Pawlenty Jabs Palin Over 'Crosshairs'
Possible Republican presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty took a jab at Sarah Palin, saying he wouldn't have used gun crosshairs to target Rep Gabrielle Giffords and others. "I wouldn't have done it," the former Minnesota Governor told The New York Times on Monday when asked if he would have created a map like the one posted last year on Sarah PAC's website showing crosshairs on lawmakers who supported Health Care reform. You must login to comment. The Fox Nation is for those opposed to intolerance,...

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...

White Power, White Terrorism, White Mainstream
As you’ve probably heard by now, Jared Lee Loughner is accused of a horrific attempted Assassination of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ.) and the Murder of six other people, including a Federal Judge and a 9-year-old little girl.  Loughner also injured 14 other people.  Remarkably, Giffords survived - in no small measure due to the heroic actions of a gay, Latino intern who rushed to administer first aid - and doctors are cautiously optimistic that she will recover. ...

The Tea Party and the Tucson Tragedy
How anti-government, pro-gun, xenophobic Populism made the Giffords shooting more likely. By Jacob Weisberg Posted Monday, Jan. 10, 2011 There's something offensive, as well as pointless, about the politically charged inquiry into what might have been swirling inside the head of Jared Loughner. We hear that the accused shooter read The Communist Manifesto and liked flag-burning videos—good news for the right. Wait—he was a devotee of Ayn Rand and favored the gold standard, so he was a righ...

CBS Poll: By 57% to 32% Margin Americans Say Political Rhetoric Had Nothing to do With Giffords Shooting
MSM Propaganda FAIL. (The Hill)- Almost 60 percent of the public believes that heated political Rhetoric has nothing to do with an Arizona Shooting Spree that gravely wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D) and killed a Federal Judge. Many pundits and lawmakers have keyed in on political vitriol as a potential contributing factor to the shootings allegedly carried out by Jared Lee Loughner, a 22-year-old Tucson man who faces five federal Felony Charges. Loughner’s writings and videos suggest a...

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 ...

Video: Debating extremist rhetoric on Al-Jazeera
Yesterday I made my first appearance on Al-Jazeera’s English-language channel to discuss the Tucson massacre and the attempt to pin the blame on Sarah Palin and the “heated Rhetoric, particularly from those on the Right and the Far Right,” as the host put it. He presses repeatedly on this point, while I point out that there is absolutely no evidence that the shooter had any connection to the “Right,” or any other rational political movement. When he asks why we sh...

Treehugger: Can We Now Tone Down The Anti-AGW Rhetoric?
Of course, their premise is that we should have more civility in the green debate, otherwise, OMG, THE WORLD IS GOING TO BURN!!!!!!11!!!!!!! we won't be able to have a proper debate THE Arctic IS GOING TO BE ICE FREE IN 1,000 YEARS and decide what proper Legislation BUILD SOLAR PLANTS FOR GAIA!!!! to pass, and we seriously STOP SOLAR PLANTS FOR GAIA!!! need to make sure that our country has clean THE SEAS WILL RISE AND WE'LL ALL DIE energy for the future. Obviously, it is the fault of all partie...

Who Else?! NBC New's Matthews Links Bachmann to Shooting
Chris Matthews, on Monday's Hardball, used the attempt on Gabrielle Giffords' life, to not only portray America as some sort of gun crazed country, but also to blame the likes of Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann for political violence as he blurted: "Sarah Palin using gun play language. What is she talking about crosshairs and reloading...and Bachmann out there with her kind of talk. I mean it seems like the way people talk now has, has gotten more ballistic...Why are guns talked about so much, ...

NBCs Mitchell Digs Back to 2005 to Locate Becks Hate Speech, But Cant Find Any on MSNBC
There’s no evidence political vitriol of any kind drove Jared Loughner’s murderous rampage, ABC, CBS and NBC all acknowledged, but that didn’t deter them on Monday night from taking up the left-wing line holding Conservatives culpable as NBC, incredibly, managed to castigate Sarah Palin and go back more than five years to find an incendiary quote from Glenn Beck – but couldn’t find anything over the line from its own Keith Olbermann or Ed Schultz. “It was, by ...

Burying the Needle on Hypocrisy Meter: Lefty Tweeters Wish for Sarah Palins Death Because of her Violent Rhetoric
On Twitter they are reacting to the claims that Sarah Palin incited Murder against Giffords with inflamed Rhetoric by having an evolved, civil and intelligent discussion about the limits of free Speech. Ah, who am I kidding? My favorite was the one that admitted she had nothing to do with Giffords shooting, but said they wanted her to die anyway. Also, to be fair, some merely wish for her to get Cancer and die.  Do remember that these are generally the same people who want the government to...