The Tree of Liberty

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 ...

The false rush to cry 'balance' (Politico)
When Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot and six other people — including a Federal Judge who was coming out of Mass — were killed at a shopping center in Tucson, Ariz., I was staying at a resort a few miles away. Among the guests, there were three immediate reactions: outrage, sadness and, if you’re headed to the airport, make sure to turn right at Tangerine instead of staying on Oracle to Ina, because traffic’s going to be a mess down there. Life goes on incredibly quickl...

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...

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...

The false rush to cry 'balance'
By: Michael Kinsley Politico.com January 11, 2011 When Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot and six other people — including a Federal Judge who was coming out of Mass — were killed at a shopping center in Tucson, Ariz., I was staying at a resort a few miles away. Among the guests, there were three immediate reactions: outrage, sadness and, if you’re headed to the airport, make sure to turn right at Tangerine instead of staying on Oracle to Ina, because traffic’s going to be a mess dow

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...

The Quest for an Obamacare Martyr
Posted by Nichole Hungerford on Jan 11th, 2011 and filed under Daily Mailer, FrontPage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. In 1995, a politically desperate President Clinton brazenly capitalized on the bombing in Oklahoma City, blaming his political opponents and their extreme right-wing Rhetoric for the horrific incident. This was six months after Clinton suffered a stunning rebuke in th...

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...

False Equivalencies: Right vs. Left
Crazy vs. Not As Crazy Y’all know where I stand on the Tucson shooting.  Those who have used inflammatory Rhetoric bear responsibility. The thing is, they know they bear responsibility.  That’s why they are running full-bore in damage control mode, instead of doing what leaders and human beings do, which is to examine their actions, to think about whether they could have done something differently, and to contemplate what they can do in the future so that they do not cont...

Bill Maher: Jared Loughners Chalkboard Likely Looks Like Glenn Becks Chalkboard
Anderson Cooper took a very different tack last night in trying to make sense of the Arizona shooting tragedy from the weekend. While many on Cable News were turning down the partisan Rhetoric, AC360 producers booked comedian Bill Maher, who was unafraid to compare the imagined mindset of alleged assailant Jared Loughner with Fox News host Glenn Beck, while at the same time calling for responsibility in the media. Huh? Cooper opened by asking about the soul searching and finger pointing that cam...

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...

What Did Paul Broun (R-GA) Contribute To The Mayhem In Arizona? A Guest Post From Russell Edwards
We first came across a young attorney, Russell Edwards, last August when he was campaigning for a House seat held by radical right fanatic and John Bircher Paul Broun (R-GA). Russell wrote a thoughtful guest post for us at the time and he's written another one today. I have to admit, Blue America is trying to persuade him to run against Broun again in 2012. In November Broun took 137,263 of the votes to Russell's 66,574, a respectable first-time effort with no help whatsoever from the DCCC. In...

Political violence in America: Lets stop pretending we're shocked
By R.K. Barry I don't know. Is there anything that hasn't been said about Saturday's shooting in Arizona that left six dead and fourteen wounded, including Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords? Some news coverage and partisan commentary has tried hard to place blame and draw connections or deflect blame and deny connections as the case may be. It would have been better for Progressives if the assailant were actually on a Tea Party group membership list or if he expressed his admiration...

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 ...

MSNBC Hosts: Left Wing Rhetoric Is Different Than Right-Wing Rhetoric
Meanwhile, Ed Schultz claims that he’s been thinking a lot about his own words, but rejects “the claim that the left is just as bad as the right.” See, it’s ok when a leftist like Schultz calls Republicans bastards and boldly proclaims on television that he’d commit election Fraud to help the Democrats win. That’s just passion. But if someone on the right were to say something like that, they’d be an accessory to Murder or something. All of this, and we ...

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...

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...

Meet Jared Loughner
This is the rather bizarre mugshot of Jared Loughner that was released yesterday afternoon. He has been assigned lawyer Judy Clarke, who defended the Unabomber. One of the more interesting facts to emerge is that Loughner was expelled from his community college after complaints from classmates that he seemed on the edge of violence. In the meantime, the Sheriff is being attacked for criticizing right-wing commentators for their over-the-top Rhetoric, including conservative icon, Rush Limbaugh. ...

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...

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...

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...

Right of Revolution
In the wake of the Tucson massacre, the left is attributing the violence at least partially to a “climate of hate” encouraged by anti-government Extremists on the right—the phrasing used by Paul Krugman in his latest column—a reaction made easier by Conservatives’ frequent use of violent and intimidating Rhetoric since 2008. Conservatives have responded by alleging the politicization of a random act of violence by a lunatic, and sought to place themselves in the ra...

Dem leader: Alleged shooter sought 'Second Amendment remedy'
Rep. James Clyburn said it is impossible not to connect fiery campaign Rhetoric to the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.).  The number three-ranking House Democrat invoked the Rhetoric of a Tea Party Senate Candidate in describing the actions of the man accused of shooting Giffords (D-Ariz.).  "He saw a Second Amendment remedy and that's what occurred here and there is no way not to make that connection," Clyburn said during an interview with the Charleston Post and Courier. 

Midday open thread
An update on the condition of Rep. Giffords and other Victims of Saturday's shooting: Ms. Giffords continues to respond to simple commands and shows no evidence of additional brain swelling, hopeful signs, doctors said Monday. "At this phase in the game, no change is good," said Michael Lemole, the head of Neurosurgery at the University of Arizona Medical Center in Tucson. "And we have no change." [...] Doctors at the University Medical Center in Tucson said seven other Victims were also doi...