Stephanopoulos, NYT, CNN, WaPo decline to correct erroneous Giffords reporting (Daily Caller)

Say What? 1/14/2011 Edition [Reader Post]
Michael Daly of the New York Daily News: “Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ blood is on Sarah Palin’s hands after putting cross hair over district.  Here is what Sarah Palin said on the Facebook page where she depicted Gabrielle Giffords in the cross hairs of a rifle scope: ‘Don’t retreat! Instead - RELOAD!’  Well, the guy who shot Giffords yesterday managed to keep firing until he killed six, including a child, and wounded 13.  Palin would no doub...

Barrel-Fishing With Adam And Andrew
We are once again marveling at the utter brain-lock displayed when Andrew Sullivan and Adam Serwer team up to share their enlightement.  From Serwer, who naturally is bashing Sarah Palin, comes his deeply considered ruling on the appropriate use of "blood Libel" as a metaphor: Over at Greg 's place, I explain why Sarah Palin 's use of blood libel in the context of people accusing her of being responsible for the incident in Tucson is wrong, even if the accusations are u...

Palin to break media silence to Sean Hannity
(CNN) - After a tough week for Sarah Palin during which she was sharply criticized for her reaction to the Arizona shootings, the former Alaska Governor will sit down with FOX New’s Sean Hannity on Monday - her first television interview since the uproar. That Palin is breaking her media silence on FOX is of course not surprising - she is a paid contributor to the network and Hannity is likely to provide a sympathetic audience for the former vice Presidential Candidate af...

Tucson Tea Party Co-Founder Blames Giffords For Getting Shot; Says Tea Party Is Also Shooting Victim
Trent Humphries, co-founder of the Tucson Tea Party, says if Gabrielle had security concerns she should have protected herself and not appeared without better security at an open event. (via Raw Story) The Arizona congresswoman shouldn’t have attended an event “in full view of the public” if she had security concerns, according to Tucson Tea Party co-founder Trent Humphries. Humphries told The Guardian, “We’re Victims, too,” worried that the fall-out from the ...

Say What?
In discussing a House resolution on Thursday to condemn the shooting in Arizona, Minority Leader Nancy "We have to pass the bill to find out what's in it" Pelosi referred to the shooting as a "tragic accident." First the Left blamed the violent, evil, act of a lunatic on the "vitriolic Rhetoric" of the Right ... now we have the queen of the Left calling it a "tragic accident." Clearly, wrong on both accounts, and clearly clueless. Charles Krauthammer: 'The origins of Jared Loughner's delusions ...

Reject, Dont Participate in Big Lie About Arizona Shooting
“Never mind, they’ll swallow it,” said Stalin, the 20th Century’s first successful progenitor of the Big Lie. The suppression of the facts is by no means the most dangerous aspect of any Big Lie. After all, facts don’t go away even amid efforts to suppress them. All sorts of inconsistencies, impossibilities and clues remain behind, and sometimes in plain sight, for anyone who cares to look. The real threat the Big Lie poses to society comes when it is not stopped in...

Prominent columnist says 'violent talk' protects gun rights
Well, that's not exactly how E.J. Dionne, Jr. words it; the actual title of his op-ed piece in the Washington Post is "Violent talk blocks sane Gun Laws." More important: We have not focused at all on how the militarized Rhetoric on the right is tightly connected to our national failure to enact the gun regulations that might have saved lives in Arizona. I wonder if E.J. thinks the "militarized rhetoric" on the left has done anything to prevent passage of more restrictive gun laws, that would su...

Sen. Mark Udall Says Divided Seating At State Of The Union Unbecoming Of A Serious Institution
Colorado Democratic Sen. Mark Udall has a hope-y change-y idea for toning down the discord in Washington: he wants to seat Republicans and Democrats together at this year’s State of the Union Speech. In keeping with tradition, Democrats and Republicans sit on opposite sides during the SOTU, making for wonderful television moments where one side stands and cheers as the other side sits on their hands and remain stone-faced. Udall seems intent on messing that up: “Instead of sitting in...

Late Night: Pouting Baby Doesnt Understand Why Little Davey P Wants a Star for Failing
Pouting Baby doesn't understand why Little Davey P. wants a star for failing. (photo courtesy of Jim White) Pouting Baby is talking to us again.  -  JW Two Soldiers wrote  a column today in the Wall Street Journal saying that they thought Little Davey P should get a star.  You can’t read that column, though, unless you pay money to Old Man Murdoch, and I don’t like what he does with his money.  But you don’t have to pay to read what CNN had to say abou

Sarah Palin to Appear on Hannity Monday
Sarah Palin will appear on Sean Hannity's program on Fox News Monday, the New York Times reported Thursday night. This interview will be Palin's first extended interview since the shooting rampage in Tucson that killed six people and wounded 12, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Giffords was holding an event outside a Grocery Store to meet with her constituents. Palin has been taking heat from both sides of the political spectrum since the shooting. In the days following the shooting before ...

Mark Levin Threatens to Sue Matthews, Olbermann, Schultz and Anyone Tying Him to Tucscon Shootings
For going on six days, dishonest media members have blamed prominent Conservatives for inciting last Saturday's tragedy in Tucson. Mark Levin: Now I’m going to tell you something. Maybe I shouldn’t, but I will. I’m waiting for an allegation that is very specific against me because I’m going to sue. I don’t care if they’re Bloggers, I don’t care if they’re television hosts, I don’t care if they’re radio hosts. I’m going to drag...

Former Judge to Dupnik: Shut up before you do any more damage
Rep. Louis Gohmert (R.-Texas), a former prosecutor and judge and a current member of the House Judiciary Committee, is offering some advice to Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik: “Shut up before you do any more damage to the prosecution’s case.”  On Monday, Jan. 10, Dupnik told ABC News, "The kind of Rhetoric that flows from people like Rush Limbaugh, in my judgment he is irresponsible, uses partial information, sometimes wrong information, attacks people, angers them aga...

New York Times wrongly suggests Tucson shooter is a pro-life
Ann Coulter, of all people, makes a heck of a catch in her latest column. So here's what ABC News reported about Loughner's time in community college: One Pima Community College Student, who had a poetry class with Loughner later in his college career, said he would often act "wildly inappropriate." "One day [Loughner] started making comments about Terrorism and laughing about killing the baby," classmate Don Coorough told ABC News, referring to a discussion about Abortions. "The rest of us were...

Keith Olbermann is not a madman, he just ate some bad oysters: We watch, because were paid to
Oh, boy. This was quite a week for Keith Olbermann. There’s nothing like a senseless act of violence to bring out the worst in pundits of all stripes, and Olbermann not only isn’t an exception, he’s the rule. By Saturday evening, just a few hours after the shooting at a Tucson strip mall, we had hardly any information about alleged gunman Jared Loughner or his motivations. That didn’t stop Olbermann from somberly opining about why the act required widespread self-censorin...

Off The Grid
There are many ways to transcribe political philosophies into graphical form. I am rather fond of the dual-axis model, as illustrated and explained here. On the other hand, there's a large delegation of the left thinks that second axis is kind of redundant; there's a simple left-right continuum, with "left" being synonymous with 'liberal" and "good," and "right" meaning "conservative" and "evil." And then there's a third model. This is the one demonstrated by the Tucson shooter and his politic...

Elephant Dung #9: Christie challenges Palin to go unscripted
Tracking the GOP Civil War By Michael J.W. Stickings (For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.) Given that so many Republicans are trying to distance themselves from the half-term Alaska ex-governor, it makes sense that many of our Elephant Dungs will be about Palin. Of course, given her significant popularity with the GOP base, including the Tea Party, these Republicans need to be very careful, and so their criticism tends to be indirect. Often, th...

Paul Krugman channels Howard Dean [Darleen Click]
… just with a lot more words One side of American politics considers the modern Welfare State — a private-enterprise economy, but one in which society’s winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net — morally superior to the Capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It’s only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate. The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support oth

Palin Sitting Down With Hannity For First Interview Since Arizona Shooting
Sarah Palin will sit down Monday with fellow Fox pundit and notorious softball lobber Sean Hannity, according to the New York Times, for her first interview since wading into the debate over the Tucson shooting. Palin's decision to do her first post-Tucson interview on Fox News isn't too surprising given that she's a paid Fox contributor who's often expressed disdain for the so-called 'lamestream media.' But Hannity's show in particular should provide her with a very friendly setting to speak ...

Daily Caller Prepares to Party With the Pols
The Daily Caller is ready to get acquainted with the new members of Congress, and come Jan. 20 at Top of the Hill on Capitol Hill they will do just that. The party is geared towards new members and their aides, but open to returning pols and their staffs. As always, Daily Caller staff never needs a big excuse to party. They’ll also be there. “We wanted to do an event most of all to welcome the large group of new members and staff to Washington but also to welcome back all the returni...

DAILY CALLER: Congressmen want increased security for themselves but are they in more danger th
Daily Caller: Congressmen want increased security for themselves — but are they in more danger than teachers and doctors? No, but they’re more important, don’t y’know. Threats and attacks are serious concerns, but are they serious enough to justify special treatment at already-well-secured airports because some lawma...

Good Morning FishbowlDC
“Repeating to fix big-thumb typo: “Without a good network, an entrepreneur cannot succeed,” says @robertniles on @ojr https://bit.ly/dE6rP9″ — TBD Community Engagement Director Steve Buttry , in keeping with his publication’s dippy correction policy, laments his gynormous thumb in a Thursday tweet.  (We’re hoping against hope that Editor Erik Wemple approves of our example because God knows he decides all of Washington’s journo corrections thes...

Sarah Palins Mistake
Democrats were in major meltdown when John McCain tapped Sarah Palin as his Running Mate just days before the Republican National Convention in 2008, in large part, because Sarah Palin was the change agent Barack Obama claimed to be.  As Governor of Alaska, she actually took on entrenched interests, worked across party lines and shook up her state’s political establishment. No wonder Democrats (and their allies in the MSM) chose to ignore her actual record of accomplishment and dwell on...

Back to reality: Tea Party election-day violence
Back in late November, I wrote a diary, "Congressmember Bob Filner: Confronting Racist Tea Party violence on election night ". Filner, I noted, had been a Freedom Rider in Mississippi in 1961, who spent two months in the state pennitentiary rather than posting bond, in order to further draw attention to the cause. The diary included a rough video of the crowd scene in which Filner was clearly threatened--a security detail intervened, but not before at least one punch was thrown--which finally ...

The madness of cross hairs, shots in the foot and the civility of blame
Does Sarah Palin have blood on her hands? Does she? Answer the question! Or the Tea Party for that matter? Care to blame someone not already mentioned? If, God forbid, Sarah Palin is ever put in the cross hairs of some perverted assassin’s weapon will the Left accept her blood on their own hands? Will you accept the responsibility of your own complicity in that act by virtue of the incontinent words with which you have chosen to condemn her? You were all so quick to assign the blame for th...

Lawrence ODonnell Reconsiders Ugly Tea Party Protest Following San Diego Election
In the days that followed the Arizona shooting tragedy of last week, an ugly game of finger-pointing and tragedy exploitation broke out along predictable partisan lines. Some on the left blamed the violence on overheated and toxic Rhetoric from the right, and some on the right used that overreach to do their own exploitation. It was in this frame of reference that Lawrence O’Donnell reconsidered a very ugly Protest by self-described Tea Partiers that followed the election of Bob Filner ove...