What Sarah Palin should have said about Tucson shooting

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

Sorry Libs Only 32% of Public Agrees That Political Rhetoric Was Cause of Tucson Slaughter
Sorry libs. Only 32% of the public believes that political Rhetoric caused the “quite liberal” Tucson crackpot to go on a shooting binge at a Safeway. Even a majority of honest Democrats believe the shootings were not caused by heated political rhetoric. 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. … Republicans who responded...

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 ...

Video: How MSNBCs Chris Matthews Handled Tucson Shooting vs. Ft. Hood Shooting
Nidal Hassan, who yelled Allah Akbar as he murdered 13 servicemen at Fort Hood - ironically in a no gun zone - was taped murdering 13 people, plus a 14th Victim - an unborn child. A deranged "left-wing pothead" ;lunatic shoots a Congresswoman and a few others over the weekend. Chris Matthews handled both... quite a bit differently: After the Ft. Hood shooting, Chris Matthews went out of his way to find reasons other than Radical Islam for the shooting. And he had a representative of CAIR on his...

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 ...

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 ...

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 Vitriol Will Likely Return
With any disturbing event, like the tragic and horrifying shooting in Tucson last Saturday, there is a natural tendency to extrapolate the impact of it for months or even years to come. The unspeakable event cost people from such varying walks of life as a 9-year-old girl and a Federal Judge their lives and has left Rep.Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., fighting for her life. Something like this creates a memory that is certain to be burned into the consciousness of current and former elected offici...

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...

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...

More Guns, More Shooting
As best I can tell, stringent restrictions on Firearms ownership are neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve drastic reductions in the incidence of Violent Crime in the United States. So given that many people feel very strongly about Gun Ownership, I’m inclined to say that law-abiding citizens should be able to buy guns with ease. But the occurrence of spree killings in one of the states with the most liberal Gun Laws in the union ought, at least, to undercut the theory that such la...

What Sarah Palin Should Have Said
Coming from David Frum, this advice carries a lot more force than if it were coming from, oh say, Firedoglake or Crooks and Liars, e.g. (emphasis is mine): The shooting in Arizona shocked the nation into grief - and presented Sarah Palin with an immediate political problem: her now-notorious gunsight map.Palin scrubbed the map from her Palin PAC website, and then issued the following statement on her Facebook page: My sincere condolences are offered to the family of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords an...

Facts about Haiti a year after devastating quake
Some facts about Haiti in the year since the devastating Jan. 12, 2010 Earthquake: — The Haitian Economy contracted by 7 percent following the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that the government said killed an estimated 230,000-300,000 people and destroyed more than 100,000 buildings. — More than 1 million displaced people, including 380,000 Children, are still in some 1,200 tent-and-shack encampments. — The U.N. estimates that 650,000 people will still be living in camps at the end o...

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...

Gabrielle Giffords Gives Thumbs-Up
Get alerts when there is a new article that might interest you. Doctors treating Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords said Monday the congresswoman was responding to verbal commands by raising two fingers of her left hand and even managed to give a thumbs-up. Giffords, 40, is in critical condition in the intensive care unit of Tucson's University Medical Center after she was shot through the head Saturday during a meet-and-greet with voters outside a Supermarket. Two patients were discharged Sunday n...

Accused gunman warned of brainwashing
Honouring the Arizona Victims ... Barack and Michelle Obama after observing a minute's silence with staff on the South Lawn of the White House on Monday. Photo: AFP Tucson: Online political ramblings of the man charged with the killings in Tucson bear a strong resemblance to the ideas of an extreme right-wing Conspiracy theorist who believes the US government uses grammar to control people's minds. The director of the centre's intelligence unit, Mark Potok, said Mr Loughner's YouTube rant that '...

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...

Democrats Use Tucson Shooting As Justification For A New Fairness Doctrine
The Fairness Doctrine, of course, being an FCC policy that once upon a time limited the sort of content broadcasters could have on their airwaves by requiring ideological balance. What listeners/viewers actually wanted in terms of content was irrelevant. If you had three hours of a conservative like, say, Rush Limbaugh on air you’d have to have three hours of a liberal. Now, in the wake of the Tucson shooting, liberals are using their baseless conjectures about the motivations of the shoot...

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...

What if 31 Shots Had Been Only 10?
Tue Jan. 11, 2011 3:00 AM PST Glock's "superior firepower" clip The Tucson shooter's killing frenzy finally came to an end on Saturday after he allegedly emptied his semiautomatic Glock Handgun of its 31 bullets. According to witness reports, as he was changing the clip, a wounded woman tried to grab the gun from him. His next shot jammed before two men wrestled him to the ground. Before 2004, when the Federal Assault Weapons Ban expired, the shooter never would have been able to get ...

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...