The Tragedy of the Arizona Shooting.

Palin: Journalists Incite Hatred After Arizona Shooting
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Sarah Palin posted a nearly eight-minute video on her Facebook page early Wednesday, accusing Journalists and pundits of inciting hatred and violence in the wake of a deadly Arizona shooting that gravely wounded U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. [Photo Gallery: Gabrielle Giffords Shooting in Arizona.] Last spring, Palin targeted Giffords' district as one of 20 that should be taken back. Palin has been criticized for marking each district with the cross hairs of a gun sigh...

Why the surprise? Whats the urgency?
Since the shootings in that Safeway Parking Lot in Tucson, Arizona, on Saturday, January 8, 2011, the Left and its major supporter, the Mainstream Media, have been having a field day with hateful non-statements against the Right: Everybody and his brother in those two camps has been taking every available opportunity to say something more or less like “Although there’s no evidence or solid reasoning to support it, it’s obvious that, even if he wasn’t actually hired and co...

Arizona shooting: Sarah Palin breaks silence, blames media, offers no apology
 Wednesday morning Sarah Palin broke her silence concerning the role her violent Rhetoric may have played in creating a climate of political violence leading up to the tragic shooting in Arizona. An angry and defensive Palin offered no Apology for her violent campaign Rhetoric and imagery, instead Palin blamed the media for Manufacturing a "blood Libel." Palin's message came in the form of a slick, well rehearsed, over produced video that was ultimately c...

The Tragedy of the Arizona Shooting
The Tragedy of the Arizona Shooting Monday, 01/10/2011 - 1:47 pm by Mike Konczal | Post a Comment There are many ways to look at it, but all say disturbing things about the country. This weekend’s tragic shooting at a Safeway district meeting in which United States Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was seriously hurt and a dozen more injured and a District Court judge John Roll, a nine-year-old girl born on September 11th, and a congressional aide were killed has left us all stunned. Her...

Fitting Memorial For Arizona Shooting Victims
President Obama, will speak at tonight’s public memorial service for the Victims of last weekend’s shootings in Arizona. The service and Speech will be carried live on Cable News networks, online, and elsewhere, beginning at 8PM EST. As he grieves with and consoles thousands in person at the University of Arizona’s McKale Center in Tuscon, the president will also be reaching out to the entire nation, helping with the healing process, and framing this terrible tragedy as the tea...

Change mental health laws, Gazette?
From the Charleston Gazette’s lead editorial today: Here’s a yes-or-no question: Should psychotic Jared Loughner have been allowed to carry a loaded, hidden, semiautomatic pistol with a clip holding 30-plus bullets? The deranged young Arizona man paid $500 for a Glock 9 mm and two clips on Nov. 30. He passed a federal Background Check because he had no felony record and his glaring Mental Illness — visible to most who encountered him — hadn’t been certified by a j...

House to condemn 'horrific attack' in Arizona
House Speaker John Boehner, struggling to hold back tears, opened a day of speeches on the resolution saying: "We are called here to mourn an unspeakable act of violence ... these are difficult hours for our country." Representative Gabrielle Giffords, a third-term Democrat from Tucson, suffered a gunshot wound to the head and remains hospitalized in critical condition. Thirteen others were wounded in addition to the six killed. The dead included one of Giffords' Washington aides, Gabriel Zimme...

House to condemn 'horrific attack' in Arizona
WASHINGTON | Wed Jan 12, 2011 11:56am EST WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A saddened House of Representatives on Wednesday observed the Arizona shooting that left one of its members gravely wounded as it discussed a resolution condemning the "horrific attack" and honoring the six people killed. House Speaker John Boehner, struggling to hold back tears, opened a day of speeches on the resolution saying: "We are called here to mourn an unspeakable act of violence ... these are difficult hours for our co...

Nearly 50 Percent Of Mental Health Services Recipients In Giffords' County Were Dropped In 2010
Source: Huffington Post Nearly 50 Percent Of Mental Health Services Recipients In Giffords' County Were Dropped In 2010 WASHINGTON -- In the past year, Pima County, Ariz., where Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others were shot Saturday, has seen more than 45 percent of its mental health services recipients forced off the public rolls, a service advocate told The Huffington Post. The deep cuts in treatment were protested strongly at the time, with opponents warning that they would resul...

Giffords District Unable to Meet Mental Health Needs
The Huffington Post reports: WASHINGTON — In the past year, Pima County, Ariz., where Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others were shot Saturday, has seen more than 45 percent of its Mental Health services recipients forced off the public rolls, a service advocate told The Huffington Post. The deep cuts in treatment were protested strongly at the time, with opponents warning that they would result in a spike in Suicide attempts, public disturbances, hospitalizations and brushes ...

Will the Giffords Arizona Shootings Change Anything?
Isn’t it time to be blunt? When the news hit that Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords had been critically wounded and 6 people were dead, it was news that many Americans had expected. The wounded were Collateral Damage. It isn’t only supposedly wishy washy moderates and independent voters who have long been alarmed that America’s poisonous political polemics had replaced professional wrestling as a mass culture sport with (some of the controversies as authentic as the outcomes of pro wrestlin

Sarah Palin Speaks from Some Undisclosed Facebook Location
Sarah Palin: “America’s Enduring Strength” from Sarah Palin on Vimeo. Sarah Palin chose to forget today that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords brought up Palin’s “targeting” of her when lamenting the vitriolic political Rhetoric in this country before Jared Lee Loughner tried to assassinate her in Arizona. In a weirdly disembodied and out of touch statement from the abyss of her self-imposed political exile, Palin picks today, the day Pres. Obama will address the nation...

Sharron Angle Responds to the Arizona Tragedy, Says It's 'Irresponsible' To Assign Blame To Her, The Tea Party or Sarah Palin
"Finger-pointing towards political figures is an audience-rating game" Politico.com Former Nevada Republican Senate Candidate Sharron Angle is blasting those blaming her for inciting the Arizona shooting that injured Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed six others, saying the accused shooter went off the deep end long before the Tea Party movement started. In her first comments - coming three days after the shooting - Angle said in harshly worded statement that her critics were “dangerous ...

Descent into madness
Before After The New York Times: The account by Mr. Loughner’s friend, a rare extended interview with someone close to Mr. Loughner in recent years, added some details to the emerging portrait of the suspect and his family. “He was a nihilist and loves causing chaos, and that is probably why he did the shooting, along with the fact he was sick in the head,” said Zane Gutierrez, 21, who was living in a trailer outside Tucson and met Mr. Loughner sometimes to shoot at cans for target pract

Loughner's Rampage Underscores the High Costs of Mental Illness
Jared Lee Loughner, the disturbed young man charged in this weekend's massacre in Tuscon that left six dead, including 9-year-old girl, and 14 wounded, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), highlights the physical dangers that individuals with untreated Mental Illness pose to society. But the financial costs of Mental Illness are high too. The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that the total costs associated with serious mental illnesses -- debilitating disorders that a...

Loughner family expresses sorrow over heinous events
The Loughner family released a statement expressing their sorrow over the “heinous” events which happened Saturday in Tucson, Arizona. CNN reports: The family of Jared Lee Loughner issued a statement Tuesday regarding Saturday’s shooting rampage in Tucson, Arizona. “There are no words that can possibly express how we feel. We wish that there were so we could make you feel better. We don’t understand why this happened,” the family said in statement handed to ...

Blood Libel or No, The Political Climate Is Still Poisonous
Sarah Palin, once again, demonstrated her ability to rile both the left and right by uttering a few words from the last frontier. Now the ideological tribes will retreat to their clubhouses--Fox News, MSNBC, the political blogs--to stir themselves to outrage debating whether "blood Libel," a term historically reserved for a particularly vicious type of antisemitism, is an appropriate metaphor for the knee-jerk responses of a few liberal pundits after the Arizona shootings. Liberals attack the vi...

Jared Loughner: Was It the Family's Fault?
​Details on Jared Lee Loughner and what occurred (and what may have occurred) prior to his shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and more than a dozen others, killing six, in a Tucson Safeway Supermarket last Saturday continue to unfold. The questions everyone wants answers to, of course: Could we have stopped him? Should we have known? And...why didn't someone know? Particularly, say, his parents? Inevitably, in situations like these, people seek someone or thing to blame...

Bill Proposed To Keep Protesters From Demonstrating At Funerals Of Arizona Shooting Victims
On the heels of the Arizona shooting that left six people - including a 9-year-old girl and a U.S. District Court judge - dead comes plans for a new bill that could effectively keep Protesters from demonstrating during or near Funerals and other such memorial services for the deceased. According to AZDailySun.com, legislators from both the right and the left have gathered enough votes to deem it illegal to “picket within 300 feet of any home, cemetery, Funeral Home or house of ...

Angle defends herself against ties to Arizona shooting
WASHINGTON -- Sharron Angle defended herself today against charges that comments she made in her campaign for the U.S. Senate from Nevada last year helped create an atmosphere that contributed to the Mass Shooting in Arizona last Saturday. "I condemn all acts of violence," Angle said in a statement issued overnight. "The despicable act in Tucson is a horrifying and senseless tragedy, and should be condemned as a single act of violence, by a single unstable individual." "Expanding the context of ...

Morning Must Reads: "Libel"
--Sarah Palin breaks her silence on the Arizona shootings, issuing a long, unapolagetic response from her Social Media perch that accuses the media of trying to "manufacture a blood Libel" against her. --"Blood Libel" historically refers to the powerful anti-semitic falsehood that Jews use the blood of Christian Children in rituals. Ben Smith tries to get a bead on how it entered the American political vernacular. --Obama's Speech today in Tucson will be more eulogy for the Victims than tre...

Should we start involuntarily committing people?
The Tucson shooting has some people saying that needs to change --sometimes the first crime is a Shooting Spree that kills six and wounds 14. An article in the Atlantic magazine says the question of "the way we as a society manage the violently mentally ill" is much more pressing than the endless chatter about political Rhetoric . At the New Republic magazine , writer William Galston agrees: "The story repeats itself, over and over," he writes. "A single narrative connects the Unabomber , George...

Loughner Stopped by Police Hours before Shooting
With all the evidence against the suspected Tucson shooter Jared Loughner, a Guilty verdict could still prove very difficult. Jan Crawford reports on the latest details of the case. Though Jared Lee Loughner's parents were "completely surprised" by the news of the Tucson shooting, former friends and classmates of Loughner's were not. Ben Tracy reports on the troubled past of Jared Lee Loughner. Doctors at Tucson's University Medical Center are increasingly optimistic about Ariz. Democratic Rep. ...

Report: Jared Loughner Wanted To Create Media Chaos, He Wanted Exactly Whats Happening
A friend of Arizona shooting suspect Jared Loughner tells Mother Jones Loughner had a long-standing beef with Rep. Gabrielle Giffords , believing she was a “fake,” and that one of his motivations may have been to create “chaos.” In the friend’s words, “he wanted the media to freak out about this whole thing. He wanted exactly what’s happening.” In an exclusive interview with MoJo’s Nick Baumann , the friend, Bryce Tierney , describes what h...

President Obama has a chance to be Clintonian tonight if he doesnt waste it
I recently wrote about the shameless attempts by some on the left to politicize the tragedy in Arizona.   New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and Pima County Sherriff Clarence Dupnik were among the voices rushing to blame Right Wing talk, Cable News and a “climate of hate” for the Arizona shooting that claimed six lives, including a 9 year old girl and Republican Federal Judge, and injured Democrat Representative Gabrielle Giffords.  That they were doing so within ho...