By berniem,

“In an ideal world no weapons would be permitted in the public arena unless sanctioned for specific purposes and returned to safe storage immediately upon resolution of the precipitating factors by duly authorized and responsible agencies subject to strict oversight.”

I’d agree wholeheartedly if you replaced the word “weapons” with “politicians” or “soldiers.”

“I thought he was a brave man, though I can’t imagine anyone would do the same now, in day when, at least in Arizona, it is perfectly conceivable that the callers might have concealed semi-automatic weapons under their jackets.”

Good grief, Mr. Reeves. Apparently you learned absolutely nothing from your father. The fact is, any one of those folks your father met with could have just as easily killed him with a butter knife. Why isn’t the lesson you took away from your father’s genuine bravery and compassion that maybe these people just needed someone to listen to them? Maybe they had been wronged! Maybe the deranged fellow in Arizona just needed the same thing.

It’s also quite possible that your father carried a handgun on a daily basis and to these meetings. It’s quite easy for judges (even back then) to get concealed-carry permits - something the average Joe, without the right connections, couldn’t get. The fact is, if he was a tactful man (as he sounds), you may have never known he carried a weapon for protection.

Your column is childish and is the product of childish thinking.

In the following video Walter Leland Cronkite, Jr. , the most credible journalist in the history of journalism, and others who are equally credible, explain class and cultural reality in the United States:

The American Ruling Class:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/112523/the-american-ruling-class

Also, the following video gives a history of the Bush family connection to Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich and is indicative of connectivity between the Right-Wing administration of Hitler’s Nazi Germany and the Right-Wing Movement that presently exists here in the United States:

Hitleresque Sophistry and Propaganda Connection:
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/263.html

The Axis Powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan were governed by fascist administrations. 

What is fascism?

Fascism is corporate governance with a religious face.

Fascist governance with a religious face was responsible for genocide and atrocities that killed at or about 30 million people during the World War II Era and the Bush family, President Bush I and President Bush II, as leaders of the American Conservative Right-Wing Republican EXTREMIST Movement are directly connected to Nazi Fascism as documented in the foregoing video.

SuperMike1661, January 15 at 6:30 pm,

If one doesn’t have a set liberal base in their mind, and keep listening to the conservative propaganda and sophistry of the Fox News Network and all the various Right-Wing conservative newspapers, conservative media networks and conservative programs on radio, television and in many of the churches, they will get pulled into the conservative “kill them, kill them all” snare, as did Jerry Falwell, Sarah Palin, Pat Robertson, Kenneth Copeland and many others..

The reason the Right is allowed to agitate to the extent they are where that they can enable so much murder is because the American Common Populace as a class and culture is not represented in Congress.  The American Common Populace, which includes all of the Middle Classes, had a parting of the ways in representation around 1980, when the Republican led Democratic Leadership Council, DLC, was formed and the academic upper crust of the American Common Populace split off and separated from the majority to quietly represent themselves as the American Middle Class forming a NEW CLASS and CULTURE, the American Middle Class, a Left-Wing academic elite class and culture in cooperation and competition with the American Aristocracy, the Republican monied elite capitalist class and culture, leaving the rest of the American Common Populace without representation as single individuals in a state of chaos.

Before the split, the Democratic National Committee was named the Democratic Farmer and Labor Party, but after the split, it no longer represents anything but academics.  Now it is only the Democratic National Committee, it isn’t really named the Democratic Party,  their membership card only reflects the Democratic National Committee.

So, they are representing themselves separately, and the only way for the 216 million strong majority common population to get representation is for them to become aware of the chaotic state of their majority class and culture, want representation and unite as the diversified class and culture we are, and demand representation in Congress for the unrepresented majority American Common Populace Class and Culture, so that along with the American Middle Class and the American Aristocracy, the American Common Populace as a class and culture will have their own representatives and senators, as neither the American Middle Class Democrats nor the American Aristocracy’s Republicans represent the American Common Populace as a class and culture even though they are in their parties. 

As long as the American Common Populace are not aware of their class and culture they won’t choose to organize for representation of their class and culture; President Obama can’t represent them if they won’t represent themselves, but if they will unite, form an agenda and demand representation for the 70% Majority Common Population as a class and culture, they will not be refused, as they ARE the majority population; then representation and change will happen. 

Neither the American Middle Class nor the American Aristocracy have any interest at all in bringing awareness to the majority American Common Populace as to their class and culture, as long as the American Common Populace choose to be unrepresented as subjects, it is OK with them, as both the Democrats and the Republicans can agree to do whatever they want and stick a pacifier in the majority American Common Populace’s mouth and tell them they are all the Middle Class.  As long as the majority American Common Populace accept this type of treatment without representing their own best interest themselves, lack of representation will continue, but if they become aware, stand up uncontentiously, organize, represent their own best interest themselves, and declare themselves as the American Common Populace Class and Culture that is unrepresented, the American Common Populace will by their unrelenting stand acquire equal representation.

SuperMike, On the Ring of Fire radio broadcast this week, I believe it was Mike Papantonio who talked about an incident in southern Arizona near the border in June 2009. Three individuals (Shawna Forde, Jason Bush, and Albert Gaxiola) were arrested and charged with the murder of two members of a Hispanic family by the name of Flores living there. The three had ties to anti-immigrant and Aryan white supremacist groups, including the Minutemen, a ‘citizens group’ that formed several years to patrol the border. What was learned about them is amazingly similar to what we’re hearing about Loughner, i.e. a mixture of right wing ideas and indecipherable craziness. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murders_of_Raul_and_Brisenia_Flores

Updates to Right Wing murders.  Post this list far and wide.  Corporation Media does not want you to know.

This latest list contains the murders of February 2010: A software engineer furious with the Internal Revenue Service launched a suicide attack on the agency by crashing his small plane into an office building containing nearly 200 IRS employees, setting off a raging fire, killing two. The suicide note stated, “Violence is not only the answer, it is the only answer…”

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE RIGHT WING MURDER CAMPAIGN LIST… WILL IT NEVER END?
Version 1.1 updated on 1/15/2011
Post this list far and wide.  Corporation Media does not want you to know. send updates to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

—July 2008: A gunman named Jim David Adkisson, agitated at how “liberals” are “destroying America,” walks into a Unitarian Church and opens fire, killing two churchgoers and wounding four others.

—October 2008: Two neo-Nazis are arrested in Tennessee in a plot to murder dozens of African-Americans, culminating in the assassination of President Obama.

—December 2008: A pair of “Patriot” movement radicals—the father-son team of Bruce and Joshua Turnidge, who wanted “to attack the political infrastructure”—threaten a bank in Woodburn, Oregon, with a bomb in the hopes of extorting money that would end their financial difficulties, for which they blamed the government. Instead, the bomb goes off and kills two police officers. The men eventually are convicted and sentenced to death for the crime.

—December 2008: In Belfast, Maine, police discover the makings of a nuclear “dirty bomb” in the basement of a white supremacist shot dead by his wife. The man, who was independently wealthy, reportedly was agitated about the election of President Obama and was crafting a plan to set off the bomb.

—January 2009: A white supremacist named Keith Luke embarks on a killing rampage in Brockton, Mass., raping and wounding a black woman and killing her sister, then killing a homeless man before being captured by police as he is en route to a Jewish community center.

—February 2009: A Marine named Kody Brittingham is arrested and charged with plotting to assassinate President Obama. Brittingham also collected white-supremacist material.

—April 2009: A white supremacist named Richard Poplawski opens fire on three Pittsburgh police officers who come to his house on a domestic-violence call and kills all three, because he believed President Obama intended to take away the guns of white citizens like himself.
Poplawski is currently awaiting trial.

—April 2009: Another gunman in Okaloosa County, Florida, similarly fearful of Obama’s purported gun-grabbing plans, kills two deputies when they come to arrest him in a domestic-violence matter, then is killed himself in a shootout with police.

—May 2009: A “sovereign citizen” named Scott Roeder walks into a church in Wichita, Kansas, and assassinates abortion provider Dr. George Tiller.

—June 2009: A Holocaust denier and right-wing tax protester named James Von Brunn opens fire at the Holocaust Museum, killing a security guard.

—February 2010: A software engineer furious with the Internal Revenue Service launched a suicide attack on the agency by crashing his small plane into an office building containing nearly 200 IRS employees, setting off a raging fire, killing two.  The suicide note stated, “Violence is not only the answer, it is the only answer…”

Lafayette, January 14 at 10:16 am,

Lafayette said: “My point: We need a higher level than that of the present discourse, one that takes into account the contextual situation of America:

* That is transitioning ages, from the Industrial to the Information Age,

* It’s system of education that is graduating individuals with inadequate skills for a highly competitive world that is suddenly upon us, and

* It’s fetish for personal aggrandizement by means of capital accumulation, thus abandoning any sense of Income Fairness (an essential part of societal harmony), and,

* It lack of Social Justice that condemns its lower class to a life abject poverty and much of its its middle-class to paddling wildly to simply keep its head out of the water. (And an upper-class that lives on some other planet economically).” —Lafayette, January 14 at 10:16 am, Truthdig Forum ‘The Great American Craziness’

MarthaA’s Answer: The contextual situation in the United States is that there are 3 classes and cultures and only 2 classes and cultures represented; one class and culture, the majority class and culture goes unrepresented.

The reason for all of the above in your statement is the American Common Populace as a class and culture, which includes all of the Middle Classes, had a parting of the ways in representation around 1980, when the Republican led Democratic Leadership Council, DLC, was formed and the academic upper crust of the American Common Populace split off and separated from the majority to quietly represent themselves as the American Middle Class forming a NEW CLASS and CULTURE, the American Middle Class, a Left-Wing academic elite class and culture in cooperation and competition with the American Aristocracy, the Republicans monied elite capitalist class and culture, leaving the rest of the American Common Populace without representation as single individuals in a state of chaos. 

The only way for the 216 million strong majority common population to get representation is for them to become aware of the chaotic state of their majority class and culture, want representation and unite as the diversified class and culture we are, and demand representation in Congress for the unrepresented majority American Common Populace Class and Culture, so that along with the American Middle Class and the American Aristocracy, the American Common Populace as a class and culture will have their own representatives and senators, as neither the American Middle Class Democrats nor the American Aristocracy’s Republicans represent the American Common Populace as a class and culture. 

As long as the American Common Populace are not aware of their class and culture they won’t choose to organize for representation of their class and culture; President Obama can’t represent them if they won’t represent themselves, but if they will unite, form an agenda and demand representation for the 70% Majority Common Population as a class and culture, they will not be refused, as they are the majority population; then all the above grievances would be represented and change would happen. 

Neither the American Middle Class nor the American Aristocracy have any interest at all in bringing awareness to the majority American Common Populace as to their class and culture, as long as the American Common Populace choose to be unrepresented as subjects, it is OK with them, as both the Democrats and the Republicans can agree to do whatever they want and stick a pacifier in the majority American Common Populace’s mouth and tell them they are all the Middle Class.  As long as the majority American Common Populace accept this type of treatment, lack of representation will continue, but if they become aware, stand up uncontentiously, organize and declare themselves as the American Common Populace Class and Culture that is unrepresented, the American Common Populace will by their stand require equal representation.

This article was supposedly written by a learned man with an illustrious record in journalism but it’s utter nonsense. How does he logically proceed from the first sentence which references Palin and Angle, to the second sentence where a third of a huge nation is implicated?  In everything I’ve seen and read since the Tuscon tragedy, I don’t recall anyone blaming 100 million or a third of Americans. Is this writer so out of touch with reality that he can dismiss the notorious calls to violence by Palin, Angle and others as “simplistic hyperbole.”  Does he deny the words of Gabrielle Giffords herself who was recorded on video plainly stating that words have consequences? Has this man ever set foot in Arizona or done any research at all to know the climate that was created in the local elections last fall like a real journalist might do?  No.  Instead he goes with the meme that was created by the media, “one crazy person,” which makes any investigation of the matter pointless.  Don’t get me wrong.  It’s obvious there’s a gun problem in American.  No big reveleation there.  But what a lazy piece of writing and what lazy reasoning in it.

The Great American Craziness
By Richard Reeves —  “I do not believe that Sarah Palin had anything to do with the gunning down of innocents in Arizona.”....

Yeah,right,and Adolf Hitler’s “words” had absolutely nothing to do with the Holocaust,either.

WANDERING IN THE WILDERNESS

fel: Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” inspired our revolution.

Spot on.

WikiP, about Common Sense:

Common Sense is a pamphlet written by Thomas Paine. It was first published anonymously on January 10, 1776, during the American Revolution. Common Sense, signed “Written by an Englishman”, became an immediate success. In relation to the population of the Colonies at that time, it had the largest sale and circulation of any book in American history. Common Sense presented the American colonists with an argument for freedom from British rule at a time when the question of independence was still undecided.

Paine wrote and reasoned in a style that common people understood; forgoing the philosophy and Latin references used by Enlightenment era writers,

Paine structured Common Sense like a sermon and relied on Biblical references to make his case to the people. Historian Gordon S. Wood described Common Sense as, “the most incendiary and popular pamphlet of the entire revolutionary era”.

What interests me is the way in which he did it.

At the time, the overwhelming historical influence was that which was happening in Europe’s principle monarchies, France and England. Both were colonial rulers and derived much of their wealth from the New World.

Paine’s use of biblical passages is roughly equivalent to the same such usage today. There is nothing in the bible, however, that applies to present political policy of a modern government. (Except, perhaps, the phrase, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s”, meaning (perhaps) pay your taxes!)

Meaning what: He was speaking to the population using referential language that they understood. But, is that any different than the “pap for the masses” spewed by the current Message Mongers during electoral campaigns.

My point: We need a higher level than that of the present discourse, one that takes into account the contextual situation of America:
* That is transitioning ages, from the Industrial to the Information Age,
* It’s system of education that is graduating individuals with inadequate skills for a highly competitive world that is suddenly upon us, and
* It’s fetish for personal aggrandizement by means of capital accumulation, thus abandoning any sense of Income Fairness (an essential part of societal harmony), and,
* It lack of Social Justice that condemns its lower class to a life abject poverty and much of its its middle-class to paddling wildly to simply keep its head out of the water. (And an upper-class that lives on some other planet economically).

America is wandering in the wilderness of a world that has changed radically and in which we have lost our economic compass. This is not the same as the 18th century when its historical context was one of monarchical domination.

Unfortunately, with our bent for Income Unfairness and the warped distribution of income, we are tending towards a de facto plutocrat domination of the upper-class over the lower-classes. Why should we submit to the hegemony of an upper-class of individuals? We refused to do so in the 18th century, when dominated by a land-owning British aristocracy and its monarch.

We are repeating the past and (far too often) when that has happened, calamity has ensued. Why should we think America will be spared that outcome? We are that blessed by God?

What if he were indeed watching the situation and simply rolled his eyes in exasperation.

What if God, after all, didn’t give a damn ... ?

What should frighten us is that the Tuscon massacre is in perfect step with the right wing rhetoric. In other words, with all the Right’s talk about guns and the second ammendment, how some actually claim Obama is Hitler, and the friend of terrorists, the atrocity could just as easily have been committed by a right wing zealot - who takes the right ideology to literal heart.
After all, what does the Right stand for anymore - except to be violently AGAINST government and anything that compels them to care about community,

RE:
“You can’t blame a third of a huge nation, who love simplistic hyperbole, for the actions of one crazy person in Tucson.”

I beg to differ.
A third of a nation who loved simplistic hyperbole marched together in lockstep in Nuremberg in 1933.

I can blame them for being myopic, ignorant, and/or naive.
It is the divisiveness, the hyperbole, the inflammatory rhetoric, and the blatant racism, homophobia, and xenophobia that are major contributing factors to the collective craziness of this country.

President Obama has donned the cloak of Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in Our Time” for the Hitleresque craziness, but the Right-Wing EXTREME will never be pacified.

It is the cowardice of politicians. It is the unwillingness to furnish funds for mental health, and the low priority for helping our fellow citizens and high priority for war, and it is the climate of hatred and vitriol that is promoted by neo-conservatives to win control for corporate America.

Lafayette

You think the message machine is out of whack?

Which tiny segment of Americans is currently gathering huge increases in personal wealth while the vast middle has seen its Net Worth fall by 30 percent over the last two years?

Which Countries are seeing rapid bloating of Sovereign Wealth Funds and GDP while the United States settles into a permanent state of decay?

You think that the messaging within the US polity is only for the use of the US polity?

No.  Most messaging today is to achieve precisely what you suggest: Keep the Pot Boiling in the USA while collections are made.

We can use hate radio and the availability of high-powered weapons to crazy people to explain the massacre in Tucson.  What explains the massacres in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and all the other massacres ordered by our so sane, so wise, so respectable Great Leaders?  What words inspire them?

Butterfield - Perhaps not but if we equate the spoken
word with the written word, people can be and are
often incited into action by what they have read (and
heard).

French and Russian writers inspired their country’s
eventual revolutions.  Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”
inspired our revolution. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” went a
long way in bringing about the Civil War.

Perhaps your denial applies to the killer in Arizona,
but across the board denying that ‘words’ can effect
actions is naive, and cannot be substantiated by
history.

IN A CULTIVATED COUNTRY

RR: The result of that political fear will continue until soon enough we will have time for only 30 seconds of silence for each deadly outrage.

In a diabolic way, I wish that would happen. But it is immoral to want hurt and suffering to befall your fellow man (or woman).

Sometimes it seems that such outrageousness is necessary to grab and shake roughly the collective conscience into action. In a cultivated country of educated and moral people, however, that extreme should not be needed.

In a cultivated country ...

WEEDS

SM16: Our messaging is as good as it can get now.

Perhaps, then, you should be looking for some other job to challenge your talents?

The “messaging machine” is out of whack. It is spewing forth madness and manipulation, character assassination, defamation and innuendo. It contributes nothing,  but nothing, to the policy debate.

And because it contributes nothing to the debate, there is no discourse. There is no exchange on fundamental policy matters that must be decided by the nation. So, we keep throwing up to LaLaLand on the Potomac the same political class that got us into the mess in the first place.

The machine tries to manipulate/convince (you chose) the electorate that one candidate whitens whiter than the white of the competing candidate—employing he same vapid hyperbolic mechanism as used to sell laundry detergent.

And all that costs mucho moulah, from benefactors who almost certainly expect a quid-pro-quo.

Once upon a time, there were young, morally upright Americans who were prepared to make the hop to Canada rather than fight an ignominious colonial war in Vietnam.

Where have all those flowers gone? To be replaced by weeds?

PatP

What a thoughtful post! Thanks for that.

MY opinion is somewhat different, as I come from THE industry that creates and then sustains viral memes, advertising “messages” and Propaganda Campaigns that we call “publicity”.

Our messaging is as good as it can get now. We might spend a million dollars to PUSH a particular concept, e.g. that guns don’t kill, people do.  Then we put a dozen or so paid bloggers on sites like Truthdig to SUSTAIN the message.  We simulate amateur bloggers so that people like you believe that you are contributing to building an understanding of the World.  However, we often launch Break Up campaigns also. A Break Up is where our bloggers appear to present Counter Factuals for your edification but our real purpose is to Break Up any sustained political narrative that you and your friends might seek, as citizens, to build.

Our client’s money is our client’s Free Speech, and he will beat you every time. He buys more typing fingers in a minute than you presently field in a month.

Nice story and your Dad sounds like quite a man, the kind that is a rarity these days.

But…that story is not diminshed a whit by what psychologists tell us about how people’s world views and rationale are actually borrowed from what passes for public discourse now predominated by the anger of Palin, O’Reilly, Beck and their ilk. Every movement of the disaffected drags along in it’s wake the unhinged and those with an assortment of insecurities. This and theblanket sympathy from some in Congress for the anger that’s so often expressed in a threatful manner, however metaphorically, is the necessary conduit through which the unhinged get their ideas.

We protect impressionable children from graphic violence and sex in movies, and rightfully so. I know many adults with no more maturity than an average adolescent and so do most people. I believe we are putting way too much stock in adulthood.

Maybe you felt your opening sentence somehow lent emphasis to the points you made about your Dad. I had to go re-read it just to make sure you had not said “were responsible for” rather than “have anything to do with”.

There are nuances involved here and their exploration was probably not the intent of this piece but by boldly sweeping them aside from the get-go they now loom larger than if you’d elaborated.

No, Sarah Palin or others who use increasingly ubiquitous, innuendo-laden violent metaphor directed at specific indiiduals did not do it. Because this base practice is so prevalent the impact of any given contributor to the decline of political dialog certainly can’t be “responsible”. But its the confluence of the all of them that, in a time during which one can tune in an extrmely rabid, insular set of news sources, leads many to “know” a fearful, manic “reality” and bumps their anxiety level up more than just a couple of notches. Hell, I listen to Fox and if I don’t force my mind into gear I start to freak out until I come to my senses.

I have friends whose political thinking, if you can call it that, manifests itself in a gush of mania, an uncannily accurate reflection of the media venues they patronize. The ebb and flow and also their return to relative normalcy tracks very closely with their exposure to the poision to which they listen.

Neither you nor I have a perfect firewall that prevents us from being influenced by what to which our brains are repetitively subjected. Others who might be wired differently are more of less subject to this.

Yes, we would like everyone to be responsible to themselves and we do have choices regarding who we hold responsible but that doesn’t mean that people are not frightened to a point that they feel justified in taking action against those who are identified as the sources of what is frightening them.

I could give an unhinged person on last push before they did something extreme and we could say I had nothing to do with it even if I’d contributed at a time when it took one last straw to break the proverbial camel’s back.

Our laws recognize aiding and abetting as being equal to the crie under consideration which means one knew that it could happen and they helped. In Sarah Palin’s case her AIp associations are more than enough to raise an eyebrow.

In my youth I once knew a boy named Brad. He was a big lunk of a farm boy and very slow. You would never want to mess with him should be become angry. That would have been very risky. But some kids used to tease him in ways that he was not bright enough to see for what it was. One favorite of some of the meaner kids was to tell him something like “Oh man, you should hear what Joe said about you!” then watch the firework when Brad found Joe.

Is it not remotely possible that this does happens with bottom-of-the-barrel media and the tightly wound?

I’m not sure of your background, expertise, or qualifications but I sleep better at night knowing that psychological assessments will be left to the psychologists.

The juxtaposition of 4 things killed those people and wounded Rep. Giffords:
1. One nut
2. Lots of hate speech from Palin and others
3. The recent 45% cut in Arizona’s already inadequate mental health treatment budget.
4. The recent elimination of all obstacles to those newly off-med Arizona nuts legally buying guns.

ThomasG

Ok, I hear you, but who is to say what kind of Dog Whistles that Right Wing propagandists use to excite their murderers? 

What is most telling is that over the last two years, there is an upsurge in Right Wing MURDERS of our people.  THAT IS SIGNIFICANT, and I listed a bunch of these crimes earlier today…. below.

Whether Sarah or Rush said THIS or THAT is NOT significant because we should not care HOW they excite their robots nearly as much as we care that they are murdering us. Let the murders stop!  I don’t care HOW they stop them.

Because BY GOD if they do not stop, then the Right will get its wish and the entire Nation will arm itself… the blood bath will scourer the Earth.

The gun does not fire itself. It requires the use of a human hand, and that hand requires the direction of a human mind. If that mind is unbalanced and dangerous, people might die. It’s being said that this shooter “fell through the cracks” in terms of being mentally disturbed. What isn’t being said is that those cracks have widened by miles since Federal funding for the mentally ill is no longer a priority.

Sarah Palin rants about “blood libel,” as if she represents some lily-white, innocent peace group instead of the GOP. The Republican Party, through it’s fully-funded PAC affiliates, is the King of Lies, responsible for fully 98% of all the lies, half-truths, and scare-tactic propaganda produced in our political landscape. They are the masters of the “quick, look over there!” lies and misdirections that occur during political campaigns, intending to take the voters’ minds off the serious issues facing this country. Can you say “Swift Boat?” The only thing that eclipses this in terms of public stupidity lies in the stupendous number of you fools that believed them.

SuperMike1661, January 12 at 10:14 pm,

I agree with you, focusing on the provocative speech of the Right may not be fully illuminating, but focusing on the provocative speech of the Right does illuminate its Hitleresque character of accuse, condemn, denounce, and put liberals in the cross hairs.

Focusing on the provocative speech of the Right is not fully illuminating.  “Who is getting murdered?”, is the key question.

Please explain to me why Right Wing Gunmen continue to slaughter left wing people.

Accuse, condemn, denounce, and kill was the process used by Adolph Hitler, and accuse, condemn, denounce, and put in the cross hairs is the process that has been, is, and continues to be used by Conservative Right-Wing Republican EXTREMISTS such as Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and Fox News Network’s like ilk; the only difference that I can see between Adolph Hitler as a Conservative Right-Wing EXTREMIST and Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and all the Fox Network’s like ilk is just a matter of degree in the killing that has at present occurred.  If this behavior continues in its Hitleresque aspects as I have indicated, it is most likely that the same result will eventually occur.

The argument over whether or not inflammatory speech is “responsible for” the Tucson tragedy is futile as nothing can ever be proven, and allegations of connection are in themselves inflammatory and could actually increase fear of freedom of speech.
  We need to be reminded that every freedom has limits, and that if we are to remain free, we each have to faithfully respect those limits and act accordingly. 
  So what is the basis for those limits?  Discretion, common sense, the realization that one thing leads to another because causes create effects which become causes etc. etc. ad infinitum. “The law of unintended consequences.”
  Further, that each one of us is personally responsible for maintaining freedom by using restraint, by doing unto others as we would have others do unto us, by allowing other points of view besides our own, and by arriving at agreements through mutual discussion. This means that not only what we say is important, but how we say it.
  It ain’t easy but it’s vitally necessary. A civil society is not an angry society, and it is obvious that anger does not promote civility.
  “Moderation is all.”  The Greeks had that one right, too.

RayLan, January 12 at 6:50 pm:

‘“I agree that the best gun control comes from not controlling guns”

I’ll pretend you didn’t write that. The insane don’t need rhetoric. Controlling crimes committed with guns by controlling guns is important for all sorts or reasons beside access to the criminally insane….’

Sure, but speaking of the criminally insane, how are you going to get the guns away from the government?  This is a serious question.  The cops swagger around with Glock 9s, shotguns, AK-47 clones, and so forth, so everyone else wants them—and can get them, often from the very same cops.  And then there’s the military, and all the privileged people—politicians, bureaucrats, business managers, rich people—who also feel the need to keep guns around.  We live in a heavily armed society.  How do you plan to deal with the situation?  Hint: taking guns away from only the poor and powerless isn’t going to solve the problem.

RayLan

Even cleaning up the hate language that the right spews daily would still not solve the socio-economic reasons that people buy guns…  To steal and rob because they have nothing and others have a lot.

I wouldn’t care if guns were outlawed completely, after all this country has more violence than Britain, etc. who has strict gun laws.

It is worth a try.

In an ideal world no weapons would be permitted in the public arena unless sanctioned for specific purposes and returned to safe storage immediately upon resolution of the precipitating factors by duly authorized and responsible agencies subject to strict oversight. Unfortunately this nation, having been born in violence, expanded thru genocide and unlawful wars, and nurtured by greed and materialistic lust has never matured into what it likes to think of itself as the guiding beacon of liberty and justice. We have progressively allowed ourselves to be ruled by fear and revenge as evidenced by our ever expanding prison/industrial complex which is probably now one of our major industries since we no longer make much other than WMD which we employ and provide generously worldwide. Of course we can’t be supportive of obscene military budgets and an Assyrian war mentality unless the public is allowed to access the tools of the trade and participate directly via enlistment or vicariously thru video games and other media in the stock and trade of the USA. However, to cite a hackneyed phrase, America’s love affair with violence as a means to an end on the world stage has resulted in “unintended consequences” and will continue to do so pending an actual occurence of “The Day The Earth Stood Still”!

Politicians (of both parties) don’t ‘challenge’ the
NRA because when they do, like advocating gun control
legislation, their approval numbers plummet.  It’s
the electorate out here which is against gun control. 
The politicians are, finally, elected to do their
bidding.

I experienced second-hand what the result of an
easily available gun can be.  A woman I know was in a
heated argument with her husband (over an affair she
thought he was having.)  In her passion, she opened a
nearby drawer, pulled out a gun and shot him dead. 
She has spent the rest of her life tormented by what
she did.

good one Lafayette.  Keep our eye on them guns.  They are the key to your children’s future.

An anecdotal recital of the historical roots of American firearm violence, if Washington, DC is any example - here

Posters here can type angry bursts about Murder, Guns, Immigration, Abortion, Liberals, and so on.

The story that is being whispered among the fleeing elite is completely different:

There is no question that the gigantic increase in debt load on the United States from 2007 to 2010 was approx. 35% or 5 Trillion USD.  Also the US MANUFACTURING economy is now completely shattered by PRC slave-worker pressure so that the US can not recover its lost position, i.e. the Balance of Payments will continue to flow to PRC. Therefore the US has no way to generate repayment of its ever-increasing debt, and this debt is now forecast to increase 1 to 2 Trillion every year for the foreseeable future.

At some point, approximately 2020, there will be no available cash to match the ever-increasing military expenditures of the PRC, and the US military, for the first time in US history, will have to decide whether it supports the politicians or it supports the security of the United States. This is the Point of Revolution that appears to be unavoidable.  The rape of the United States that began circa 1995 was so fast that even the most sophisticated Bankers missed the timing. They completely misread the power of the PRC to humble US manufacturing workers with tightly controlled Chinese labor.

Now even if Americans replace the totally compromised political elite (both parties), it is unclear if there is enough time to reorganize its deeply damaged economic and political components.

Many Goldman Sachs bonus fortunes are being spent immediately for Security Bungalows in the Monaco and Switzerland and other Security States.  In the mean time, the fleeing elite hope that Tuscon-like political murders will keep the masses occupied.

“I agree that the best gun control comes from not controlling guns”
I’ll pretend you didn’t write that. The insane don’t need rhetoric. Controlling crimes committed with guns by controlling guns is important for all sorts or reasons beside access to the criminally insane. Prevention is worth a pound of cure, but once the disease has taken over the medical cure is still needed. That’s like saying the best form of fire control is not to start them , so we really don’t need firemen.

The Second Amendment recites, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” In essence, this says that citizens have the right to serve in a citizens’ army, or militia,

One day, when I lived in Switzerland I saw the meaning of the above.

It was a Saturday morning, and at a stop-sign, when who trundled up on a bicycle in his khaki uniform with a machine gun strapped on his shoulder but a Swiss soldier.

He was going off to the gun range for an obligatory practice session, where he would be given the ammunition to practice. He is authorized to keep the gun at his home, but unauthorized to use the gun except under command.

Is Switzerland without firearm homicides? No. But neither is it anywhere near the US rate. See here.

There are different ways to read the above passage from our Constitution. Mine would be that we can bear arms as a militia, but not necessarily as an individual unrelated to the defense of the nation. Besides, what is a militia?

Militia =  a military force that is raised from the civil population to supplement a regular army in an emergency.

That, to my mind, is the role fulfilled by the National Guard.

So, please, enough blather about how the right to bear arms is protected by the constitution. It may indeed be, but so also are its adherent conditions.

I agree that the best gun control comes from not controlling guns, but controlling the “fire in a theater” type rhetoric spewing from Right-Wing Conservatives against liberals, as the sophistry tool of “military type propaganda” must not be allowed to be used against a nation’s public under the guise of free speech.

kerryrose
“The best gun control comes from responsible language and behavior from the political and media leaders. “
The best gun control comes from gun control.

All the counts against Jared Loughner surely will be dropped, since he was definitely mixed up in the head from all the Right-Wing sophistry and propaganda, if not an MK Ultra Type secret military psychiatric experiment, either way this young man is in need of mental help, not prison, because his mind is out of balance, and a person whose mind is out of balance can’t be held responsible for their actions.

It is unconscionable that the government of the United States has been and continues to allow the sophistry tool of “military type propaganda” to be used against the American Populace by the Conservative Right-Wing and sanctioned by Moderate and Conservative Democrats, as if it is free speech.  It is a miracle more people have not lost their minds.

Jesse Jackson has a few words about “the heinous act has generated a good debate about the connection between the rhetoric of violence and violence itself.” http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/4572-hate-speech-in-arizona 

Wallace suffered the consequences of his actions and it was fitting, as also the conservative Right-Wing sophists and propagandists spewing all the vitriol against liberals and any kind of socialism for the populace, need to suffer the consequences of their actions as well.  Remember, remember, worse than Wallace,  Hitler and Mussolini suffered the consequences of their sophism and propaganda against their own country’s, as well.

This killer in Arizona is a kook. He is too psychologically confused to hold a coherent ideology. He is probably too mentally disordered to be legally capable of standing trial. We are wasting our time talking about the tone of the public dialogue. 

The real point here is that this is the only country in the world in which people are permitted, legally, to buy hardware that has no purpose other than to kill people, and in which even such legal restrictions on the arms trade which do exist are so weak and ineffective that whatever arms cannot be obtained legally can be obtained illegally with ease. The policy on guns in the USA is, in a word, insane.

In any other country in the world, apart from failed states such as Somalia, it would be possible to change this through the established political channels, if such an insane situation were ever permitted to arise in the first place.

Not here. Why? Because corporations make a lot of money out of the arms trade. Corporations also control the American government, corporations manipulate American public opinion and corporations censor and limit the scope of public dialogue. Corporations buy elections. Corporations ensure the survival of undemocratic institutions such as the US senate, and the even more undemocratic rules of such institutions such as the filibuster. Corporate media edits out or marginalizes public figures who openly call into question the policy of the Second Amendment.

The Second Amendment recites, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” In essence, this says that citizens have the right to serve in a citizens’ army, or militia, as opposed to the alternative, which is having a standing army of hired mercenaries at the command of the government. Today, we have both - the state national guard regiments are the descendants of local militias, and we also have a standing army of young people for whom the military represents their only possible career path out of poverty. Looking at its purposes, the Second Amendment supports the equal rights of gays to serve in the military more concretely than it supports Dick Cheney’s right to go quail hunting.

The Second Amendment doesn’t say anything about the “right” of individual citizens, outside the context of any civil defense organization, to keep and bear arms purely for their own individual motives - motives which demonstrably may include the desires of some individuals to assassinate public officials, to rob banks, to kill competing drug dealers, or maybe just to go berserk and massacre college students, high school students, holiday shoppers or whoever happens to be around, for no coherent reason at all.

But it would be taboo for any public figure to say what I have just said in any national media forum.

How many people were shot, bombed, kidnapped, tortured in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen and God knows where else by the U.S. government on the day Giffords was shot?  Nobody knows.  Nobody cares.

Gun control has to start at the top.

RayLan
What I meant is that ‘crazy’ will find a way, and that to ignore, like the blogger ignores, the ‘crazy’ rhetoric of the fringe right is a mistake.

The best gun control comes from responsible language and behavior from the political and media leaders.

“I do not believe that Sarah Palin and her blather about ‘reloading’ or Sharron Angle, she of ‘Second Amendment solutions,’ have anything to do with the gunning down of innocents in Arizona.”

Are you suggesting that words do not have consequences?  And that this is even truer with unstable people?

Please.  Loughner clearly had a political agenda: he wanted to kill GIFFORDS - not just “any” politician (much less a taxi driver or store owner).  So even if he was not SPECIFICALLY triggered (appropriate word, that…) by Palin’s sniper-sight imagery or specific phrases used by Palin, Angle et al, he was bombarded 24/7/365 by incendiary, demonizing, often gun-culture-supporting language by right-wing politicians, pundits and talking heads.  These words (and images) both VALIDATED his beliefs and ENABLED him.  To suggest otherwise is at best disingenuous, and at worst willfully naive.

That said, there is no question that the other, perhaps even more critical issue here, is that he lived in one of the states in which it is easiest to obtain a gun, and the state with the laxest gun ownership and carrying laws.

Thus, Loughner found his “perfect storm” in which his own admittedly cockamamie ideas and beliefs found validation in the incendiary rhetoric of the right, and were enabled by his ability to obtain and carry a gun.

Peace.  (maybe…)

If there were stricter gun laws the crazies would simply be running people over with trucks, buses, tractor trailers.

This is another good arguement for nationalized healthcare.  If children in our schools were given preventive medical screening, the crazies could be identified at an earlier age.

Lafayette

Forget about spin control and markets. Simply follow the money.  The owners allow markets to flourish when it suits them, e.g. Goldman now operates in a permanent shadow of guaranteed profit by buying and selling the same product with tax payer guarantees.

As long as you accept the Market Fairytales that they taught you in school, we are lost.  Look at the real centers of power, e.g. K Street where foreign and local money coordinates to enhance their control of what little government is left to us. 

Look at the City of Chicago where Goldman arranged for the Saudis to purchase the city’s parking meter franchise for the NEXT 75 YEARS.

As you embrace the fairytales, they manipulate a Once In History globalization process that will result in your children’s permanent servitude to their “free market” religion.  The Owners are perfectly happy to take their NEW tax cuts and invest them in the PRC… while your son’s prospects dwindle to nothing.

Do you embrace the fiction of free speech now when some 29 year old salesman at Goldman can purchase with his 60 million USD bonus, 1 MILLION TIMES the little speech that your little finders give you on the internet?

click below for the K Street story:

http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=c

Reeves makes at least one contribution to the debate with his description of the differences between confronting an enemy or an opponent with your hands or a knife or some similar up-close and personal weapon or jerking out a firearm.

Is a gun wielding attacker or assassin therefore a cheater, a sneak or even a coward? Not that it really matters from the perspective of the target.. felled from a distance before any threat is perceived and before any effective defense or response can be mounted.

But wait! isn’t this exactly the way the United States is conducting it’s aggressive foreign policy? Some suit in Langley gives the nod to a quick-fingered video-game junkie in another safe and well-provided building who-knows-where and in a few moments a flame blooms over a vehicle or a hut somewhere halfway across the planet.. a ‘target’ plus a lot of his family and friends.. has been eliminated.

About killing others from the safety of surprise or a safe distance being cowardice or bravery? .. in the Air Force there is no doubt it is proper behavior.. They’re awarding hundreds of Air Service medals to the chair-jockeys manning the joysticks and doing these ‘missions’ .. virtually none to pilots in the cockpits of fighters and bombers overseas..

So while it will never be proven that any hate-speech or fear-mongering politician or prognosticator had anything to do with these tragic shootings.. what If? What if those connections could be shown to be tangible.. what would it matter? Taking on, killing and maiming your perceived opponents through the use of others, including those directed via the intangible airwaves is the American way.

And what are people who let others inflame their passions and direct their opinions with fact-less assaults on decency and compassion.. except DRONES?

Adios!

kerryrose

No gun control is needed.

WHAT WE NEED is a leadership that is not bought and paid for by the tiny elite on K Street and the Street’s international funders. By constantly agitating excitable elements throughout the American political spectrum TO DISTRACTION, this elite grows ever richer. Note how a quick 2 Trillion was stolen in 2008 and 9, but the masses are fully distracted by Health Care or whatever political topic that works at that particular time… Political Murder this week.

There is very little time left.

CONGRESSIONAL CONNIVANCE

SM16: WHO makes the money, WHO are their international partners and WHY should any of them care about the United States when they all own 10 room Security Bungalows in Monaco?

This all smells of Conspiracy & Co. Ever try to spin a national conspiracy? Do so. You’ve a few things to learn about spin-control.

I will admit, however, that vested-interests are birds of a feather that flock together. Meaning this, they are all “wild ducks” who fly in formation (which makes flying further easier for technical reasons). But if they have common objectives, they have no common fidelity. This is no conspiracy, but they function more like the Mafia. Meaning, at the first menace, it’s everyone for themselves.

Our “wild duck” plutocrats see the need to maintain their business privileges by manipulating politicians. Allow me to offer an example of this: When the US came to its senses and decided to break-up the MaBell monopoly on telephony (short but not long-distance) it created the Baby-Bells. Worse, it gave the Baby-bells ownership of the network.

This did not increase competition, it simply sectioned the monopoly into smaller regional parts. Which is why America has higher DSL-interconnect costs than, say, Europe.

In Europe, the incumbent operators were also allowed to keep the networks but were obliged to resell the network bandwidth-interconnect at a price decided by regulators and not the incumbents. So, there is considerably more competition in DSL-access in Europe, for which tariffs are lower.

MY POINT

In the postwar 1950s, America embarked upon a consolidation of markets in the theory that Bigger Is Better. That is, by consolidation, companies would obtain learning-curve benefits in terms of productivity and thus lower production costs.

Where the strategy failed was to transfer those costs to consumers. The retail costs remained the same or increased and the service- or product-cost savings went into profits.

We have continually consolidated markets in the same manner, thus producing oligopolies. Health Care is a prime example of an oligopoly. The result is higher consumer costs.

Health Care is another prime example. When left to “private enterprise” it costs more for the same service.

Meaning this: Some markets are highly competitive. Some markets, due to their nature, are not. These latter should become Public Service markets that are highly-regulated to assure that the services are retailed in a fair and impartial manner.

These are the “privileges” of which I speak that should be against the law and thus prosecutable. No country should adopt economic policies that favors oligopolistic market practices.

But, in fact, we do. The PC-software you are using to access this blog is produced by an oligopolistic market dominated principally by just one company.

POST SCRIPTUM

You want to call them “our owners”. I call them “oligopolists”. The name doesn’t matter. What they do to warp the market mechanism with a sole pecuniary objective, otoh, does matter.

Worse yet, that they are allowed to attain their objectives with Congressional Connivance is a corruption of our system of governance.

kerryrose
“What kind of gun control do you envision will stop a crazy?” 
I’m not sure what point you are making. Reeves isn’t claiming that gun control stops insanity. It isn’t a sufficient condition but it is at least a necessary condition among many others. Because gun control doesn’t cure insanity - means it should be ignored so that crazy people can have easy access to fire power? I really don’t get the logic here. I guess it’s like saying, why should I care about my health, since I’m going to die anyways.

Well, of course you don’t believe the right wing rhetoric had anything to do with it.  There are people who believe crazy needs a direction to be pointed.  This guy had a run-in with Giffords two years ago, but only this year has’second amendment solutions’ or ‘don’t retreat, RELOAD’ stirred him to action.

What kind of gun control do you envision will stop a crazy?  There are some who believe gun control should start with the garbage that leaks from mouths of political and media leaders.

But you say no?

The callous murderous agenda of the NRA signals the moral bankruptcy of the Right. They are perfectly happy to enable an anarchic violent Wild Wild West nation, with people sniping and shooting at each other regardless of their mental stability. Their ethic is equivalent to the oligarchic war machine that has embroiled us in so many stupid immoral wars, I mean the state of permanent war.
Why is it that every political era has used metaphor of war for every problem? - the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, the War on Terrorism.. Apparently that’s the vision that excites America and eventually will destroy it.

patriot10101 is a likely NEXT Right Wing Gunman who will slaughter Americans after he has been properly agitated. He WANTS to drawn down on the “liars, deceivers, and lawless”.  He is STANDING in robot line WAITING for Rush or Glenn to ACTIVATE him.

As long as we on the left allow our own leaders and the entire Right to slaughter us, so do we deserve to be SLAUGHTERED.

Virtually the entire political elite of the United States needs to be retired before their position becomes TOTALLY UNASSAILABLE. *so says SuperMine1661*

Lafayette

Unfortunately you are wrong about how MUCH it costs to buy the American political system.  You need to understand that, for example, the annual bonus pool of Goldman Sachs is always north of 5 Billion USD. In other words this SINGLE company doles out, in a single year, enough money to pay for the ENTIRE federal election apparatus.  And these bonuses are DISPOSABLE INCOME.

NO my friend, our owners are only toying with us now. When they need to reach deep into that silk lined pocket, they will continue their rape of the United States AT ANY COST THAT FACILITATES THEIR CONTINUING OWNERSHIP, and we will sit helplessly as their robots continue their Wet Operations.

Try and look deeper behind the existing system.  WHO makes the money, WHO are their international partners and WHY should any of them care about the United States when they all own 10 room Security Bungalows in Monaco?

WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY

RR: What bothers me is the cowardice of national leaders and other politicians who allow people to carry around those weapons on the streets, in restaurants and bars. That’s the great American craziness.

Then neither do you understand adequately the political system by which the Gun Lobby (aided and abetted by the NRA) can, on a dime, get gun-lovers to hand over bundles of money for manipulating politicians during election time.

It costs one helluva lotta moolah to get elected in the US of A. Try it some time, see how far you get on just our journalistic merits ...

If we want to take back the governance of America then we must intervene in the one factor that most warps the process. Money, that is, political contributions.

The Supreme Court made one of the most erroneous decisions in its history when it decided (by a logic only the gods may comprehend) that companies, which have no quality of citizenship, also had protection under the law in terms of Freedom of Speech. And thus, practically no limits to the amounts of money that can be given to political campaigns.

Freedom of Speech, the notion by which many a sin is committed—particularly if one does not understand the counterbalancing factor of Responsibility of Speech. Which, in fact, is at the heart of the Political Rhetorics discussion presently raging over the Interenet.

Freedom of Speech is NOT unlimited. Any person in the media must take responsibility for what they say and how they say it. More so, all the slandering and defamation that simply heightens the public-rage is allowed as “Free Speech” because America has insufficient Public Slander / Defamation laws.

Some bloggers have got it right when they lament the low level of intelligence that allows such manipulation during election campaigns. It is one thing to be overcome by the Emotion of Hope and quite another to insinuate by chain letter that Barack Obama is a Black Muslim and, by inference, an anti-Christian.

And this is only one example of how the public rage has descended into the depths of depravity. And why does it happen?

Because the people not only tolerate it, but courts allow it and we also indulge in it ourselves.

We have met the enemy and he is us.

Richard Reeves had better wake up before they come for him too. Right Wing Propagandists do indeed incite Right Wing Gunman.

This from poster JEP from another site:

•  July 2008: A gunman named Jim David Adkisson, agitated at how “liberals” are “destroying America,” walks into a Unitarian Church and opens fire, killing two churchgoers and wounding four others.

—October 2008: Two neo-Nazis are arrested in Tennessee in a plot to murder dozens of African-Americans, culminating in the assassination of President Obama.

—December 2008: A pair of “Patriot” movement radicals—the father-son team of Bruce and Joshua Turnidge, who wanted “to attack the political infrastructure”—threaten a bank in Woodburn, Oregon, with a bomb in the hopes of extorting money that would end their financial difficulties, for which they blamed the government. Instead, the bomb goes off and kills two police officers. The men eventually are convicted and sentenced to death for the crime.

—December 2008: In Belfast, Maine, police discover the makings of a nuclear “dirty bomb” in the basement of a white supremacist shot dead by his wife. The man, who was independently wealthy, reportedly was agitated about the election of President Obama and was crafting a plan to set off the bomb.

—January 2009: A white supremacist named Keith Luke embarks on a killing rampage in Brockton, Mass., raping and wounding a black woman and killing her sister, then killing a homeless man before being captured by police as he is en route to a Jewish community center.

—February 2009: A Marine named Kody Brittingham is arrested and charged with plotting to assassinate President Obama. Brittingham also collected white-supremacist material.

—April 2009: A white supremacist named Richard Poplawski opens fire on three Pittsburgh police officers who come to his house on a domestic-violence call and kills all three, because he believed President Obama intended to take away the guns of white citizens like himself. Poplawski is currently awaiting trial.

—April 2009: Another gunman in Okaloosa County, Florida, similarly fearful of Obama’s purported gun-grabbing plans, kills two deputies when they come to arrest him in a domestic-violence matter, then is killed himself in a shootout with police.

—May 2009: A “sovereign citizen” named Scott Roeder walks into a church in Wichita, Kansas, and assassinates abortion provider Dr. George Tiller.

—June 2009: A Holocaust denier and right-wing tax protester named James Von Brunn opens fire at the Holocaust Museum, killing a security guard.

(thanks to JDmysticDJ)

Don’t agree with the NRA?  They will be happy to put a bullet in you!

“You can’t blame a third of a huge nation, who love simplistic hyperbole, for the
actions of one crazy person in Tucson.” — who are you, Maggie Thatcher? of
course you can. We don’t know that this man was crazy. We don’t know a lot of
things. But one thing we do know is that this third of a huge nation who loves
simplistic hyperbole are extremely insistent on their hyperbole, and have a
platform with 99% saturation in the mass media that disseminates PRECISELY that
simplistic hyperbole to this third (which is actually far more than a third) who then
absorb it and repeat it *and now enact it*. You most certainly can blame these
people who harbor it.

I cannot argue with your conclusion Richard…...!

For the love of peace and a human future , what is this murderous PB ad doing on a Truthdig site?