Tea partiers balk at blame

Democrats that are politicizing Arizona tragedy have ulterior motives
The tragic shootings in Arizona on Saturday that left a nine-year-old girl dead and Congresswoman Gabrielle “Gabby” Giffords severely wounded should have been a time to put politics aside and honor the Victims. Instead, many people on the left are capitalizing on this opportunity to blame Conservatives and the lack of Gun Control as contributing the tragedy. Let’s take Democratic Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik for example. Instead of giving a fact-based Press Conference Sa...

The first instinct of weak minds is to blame the Tea Party, Palin
Image via Wikipedia Marc Thiessen: After the attempted car bombing in Times Square last year, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg publicly speculated that the attack had been carried out by "somebody with a political agenda that doesn't like the health-care bill or something." At the Nation, columnist Robert Dreyfuss wrote that "a member of some squirrely branch of the Tea Party, anti-government Far Right" was probably behind the bombing. Countless others in the left-wing blogosphere joined the "...

Drum: Why the Rights Rhetoric is Worse
Kevin Drum at Mother Jones writes: From George Packer, who notes (correctly) that he called out the left for its ugly Rhetoric in the runup to the Iraq War, on where today’s ugly Rhetoric mostly comes from: In fact, there is no balance—none whatsoever. Only one side has made the Rhetoric of armed revolt against an oppressive tyranny the guiding spirit of its Grassroots movement and its midterm campaign. Only one side routinely invokes the Second Amendment as a form of swagger and intim...

10 Things You Didn't Know About Gabrielle Giffords
1. Gabrielle Giffords was born in Tucson, Ariz. On June 8, 1970 to Gloria, an art conservator, and Spencer Giffords who served on the School Board district and ran the family's auto and tire business, El Campo Tire, Inc. 2. After graduating with a degree in Latin American history and sociology from Scripps College in Claremont, Calif. in 1993, Giffords studied in Mexico on a Fulbright Scholarship. 3. Giffords graduated from Cornell University in 1996 with a master's degree in regional planning...

Commentary: Take the political rhetoric down a notch
Those searching for easy answers after a 22-year-old shot 20 people, killing six, during U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' meeting with constituents in Tucson, Ariz., on Saturday won't find any. Yes, guns are easily accessible in this country. Yes, in the past two years we have seen Political Speech ratcheted up with gun-toting participants at some Tea Party events, and some Democrats in Congress faced angry voters at town hall meetings during debate on Healthcare Reform. And, yes, the Internet a...

ACTION ITEM: Find video clips of Democrats using references to weapons, targets, fights, ass-kicking, destroying, etc. to create
We’re working with a video editor we know to produce a video exposing the media’s politicization of tragedy for Democrat gain. Please use this thread to collect video clips you find on YouTube or other sources that we can use in this new mashup video. This will make it easy to have all the clips assembled in one place, so that we do not have to hunt for them.  Put the link to the video in this thread.  If you know of a good clip but don’t have a link, describe it in a...

ACTION ITEM: Create debate team style flashcards to help people better counter the Lefts talking points when surrogate speaking
How can you help people better debate the Left? Here’s something else you can do to help counter the media and Left’s (redundancy alert!) talking points against the Tea Party and Conservatives:  if you ever took debate in school, are a teacher, or are just great at organizing information, you can help collect all the instances of the Left’s hypocrisy you are seeing emerge right now into debate team style flashcards that people can use to better counter any Leftists they en...

Sen. McCain cutting trip short to attend Memorial service in Tucson
According to ABC News’, Matthew Jaffe, Sen. John McCain is cutting short a Congressional trip to Latin America to return to his home state of Arizona for Wednesday’s memorial service for the Victims of last weekend’s Tucson shooting. McCain and his wife Cindy will both attend the memorial service, according to the senator’s spokeswoman Brooke Buchanan. McCain left last Friday with Sen. John Barrasso on a week-long trip to Colombia, Brazil, Chile, Panama and Mexico, but no...

Roiling Arizona
A disturbing report by Max Blumenthal. Money quote: When President Obama took office, Arizona's anti-immigrant right fused with extreme elements of the religious right under the Tea Party banner. In August 2009, a young man called Chris Broughton openly carried an AR-15 Assault Rifle and a Handgun to an Obama rally in Phoenix. The night before, Broughton had attended a sermon called "Why I hate Barack Obama" given by the Rev Steven Anderson, a local Tea Party Activist. Anderson d...

Tea Partiers out in force
A long line made up mostly of Tea Party supporters and conservative Activists, some of them chanting and carrying signs, snaked through State Capitol halls and stairways this morning waiting to get into the House Gallery. By 10 a.m., the line of several hundred people stretched from near the statehouse’s west entrance to the third-floor entrance to the gallery. It was set to open at 10:30 a.m. Some wore red-white-and-blue t-shirts supporting state Rep. Ken Paxton, R-McKinney, for speaker. ...

Is Sheriff Dupnik Distracting Public From Looking at His Contacts With Killer?
“I’d like to make one additional point on Sheriff Dupnik. I think we’re missing the point when we’re talking about his political agenda. This man and this suspect has had previous contact with the sheriff’s office. It looks to me, we don’t have many details on this, but it looks as though he slipped between the cracks. I think what we really need to look into is what happened when he had previous contact with the sheriff’s office with their negligence he...

Quote of the Day: No, Both Sides Aren't Equally Guilty
In fact, there is no balance—none whatsoever. Only one side has made the Rhetoric of armed revolt against an oppressive tyranny the guiding spirit of its Grassroots movement and its midterm campaign. Only one side routinely invokes the Second Amendment as a form of swagger and intimidation, not-so-coyly conflating rights with threats. Only one side’s Activists bring guns to democratic political gatherings. Only one side has a popular national TV host who uses his platform to indoctri...

Turning It Down a Notch
Tue Jan. 11, 2011 8:28 AM PST For the next few days I guess we're going to be talking about political Rhetoric and how toxic it's become. And it has! But the problem is still with specifics. Here's First Read, for example: What was particularly striking to us is how Activists, especially on the right, were playing the Victim when there are so many actual victims — the deceased, the wounded, the grieving — in Arizona. And here’s our point from yesterday: Although it appears tha...

Rep. Garcia wears passport to protest immigration bill
As Conservatives push forward with a plan to bring an Arizona-style Immigration law to Florida, Miami Rep. Luis Garcia has donned a form of Protest in the State Capitol: His passport. Garcia said the proposal, which would require police in some circumstance to check a suspect's Immigration status, is tentamount to ethnic or Racial Profiling that eventually will make Hispanics, Haitians and other immigrants feel unwelcome and subject to search. So he's walking around with his papers on ...

Unknown militant group emerges; targets birthers, GOP
(Paulding County, Georgia) - Paulding County Republicans and birthers need to be on guard due to an unknown group calling itself, Militant Association of Democrats who sent letters, placed phone calls as well as death threats that included the words GOP and birthers through a sniper scope to the American Patriot Foundation. Two anonymous letters sent to APF from Richmond, Va. place "GOP" and "Birthers" in the crosshairs of a rifle scope alongside the exhortation "Load 'em Up!" These letter...

Arizona shooting of Rep. Giffords brings gun control laws under scrutiny
Seven years ago, former President George W. Bush responded to Gun Rights special groups, and in 2004, allowed the 1994 assault weapons laws to expire. Critics of the gun law roll back suggest that it allowed Jared Loughner, 22, to kill six people at a political rally in Arizona on January 8, 2011. Sixteen others were wounded, including Arizona Democrat, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head. Out of tragedy often comes progress. But will Tea Party Republicans surrender their ...

House Resolution to Reaffirm Democratic Principles
With all of Capitol Hill’s legislative business postponed in response to the shooting rampage in Arizona, the House will reconvene on Wednesday to approve a resolution honoring the dead and the wounded, praising the Bravery of those who responded to the attack and reaffirming “the bedrock principal of American Democracy and representative government” - the right to peaceable assembly enshrined in the First Amendment. The resolution is being offered by the House Speaker, John A. Boeh

McCain to return from overseas trip to attend memorial service
Arizona Sen. John McCain (R) will return from a congressional delegation trip to attend a memorial service for the Victims of a Shooting Spree in his home state that resulted in the wounding of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D).  Brooke Buchanan, a spokeswoman for McCain, told The Hill he is cutting his trip short to go to the memorial in Tucson, Ariz., where the shooting took place. McCain is traveling in South America with his Senate GOP colleague Tom Barrasso (Wyo.) The two were scheduled to vi...

US lawmakers urged not to arm themselves
US lawmakers should reconsider plans to carry Firearms in response to the weekend Assassination attempt against one of their colleagues, an official tasked with congressional security says. "I don't think it's a good idea," the US Senate's sergeant-at-arms, Terrance Gainer, told ABC television on Tuesday. "I've been a policeman for 42 years, and I don't find introducing more guns to the situation helpful." At least two members of the US House of Representatives have said since a shooting rampage...

How low can Wikileaks go? Julian Assanges sick attempt to exploit the Arizona shootings
In a Press Release late last night, Wikileaks made a sick attempt to link in the public mind the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords to widespread outrage in America over its recent leaking of hundreds of thousands of US government documents. Even for Julian Assange this is surely a low point IN Media manipulation, and here he is clearly mimicking the Far Left’s ludicrous attempts to blame the Right for the Arizona shootings. Here’s what the release, entitled “WikiLeak

Violence and politics merge
Aid and comfort: Some Republicans responded with indignation—why should the alleged act of an apparently deranged young man with a record of barely coherent, and only vaguely ideological rantings get charged to their account? Others acknowledged what they called an unavoidable reality—flamboyant or incendiary anti-government Rhetoric of the sort used by many conservative politicians, commentators and Tea Party Activists for the time being will carry a stigma. A senior Republican senator, s...

Peaceful gather to support the family of Christina Taylor Green
Several of us (Smart Girl Politics) attended an organizational meeting tonight downtown regarding members of our community gathering in support of the family of Christina Taylor Green during her Funeral on Thursday. As indicated in previous emails, Westboro Baptist is threatening to Protest Christina’s Funeral as well as the funerals of the other Victims of Saturday’s tragic shooting. Location of the funeral: St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Catholic Church, 8650 North Shannon (on Shannon nor...

Rancher Chisum bows out of race for Texas House speaker
Austin — Republican Rep. Warren Chisum says he’s dropping out of the running for Texas House Speaker and will support Incumbent Joe Straus. The House is set to select its speaker Tuesday, the opening day of the 82nd legislative session. It had been a three-way race, with Chisum and North Texas Republican Rep. Ken Paxton challenging Straus for the spot. But Straus’ re-election seemed all but certain after the GOP Caucus selected him as its choice on Monday. Some conservative...

Arizona leaders play blame-game, but get it wrong
While investigators continue to investigate the tragic shooting that took place in Tucson last Saturday, leaders in Arizona have eagerly jumped on the main stream media’s overblown, detrimental, blame- game wagon. Only hours after the shooting took place, Pima County Sheriff, Clarence Dupnik argued that the “vitriol” of the Country's harshly polarized political climate was partly to blame, arguing that “unbalanced individuals are uniquely "susceptible" to vitriol.” ...

It was inevitable: gun rights in the crosshairs, again
In the 72 hours after the attempted Assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the Murder of several others in Tucson, our moral betters on the liberal left were shouting in (coordinated?) that it had to be due to the angry, overheated Rhetoric from the Right, and most particularly from Sarah Palin . Even the Sheriff of Pima County couldn’t resist getting in on the act. Though the Left is still pushing the “dangerous rhetoric” idea, even to the point of introducing a...