Listen ...

Much as we all hate the verbal diarrhea spewed by the dripping sphincters of the GOP/Conservative/Teabag crowd, this is still America. I'm sorry, I value the 1st Amendment as much or more than the conservatives worship the 2nd.

Washington (CNN) - Rep. Robert Brady, D-Pennsylvania, said he will introduce legislation making it a federal crime for a person to use language or symbols that could be perceived as threatening or inciting violence against a Member of Congress or federal official.

...

Like I said before: Just exactly who will be the arbiter of what's "threatening" or not? Just exactly what are we prepared to do about it?

This is "slippery slope" territory. Any attempts to curtail free speech just don't sit right with me.

Quote of the Day

Cookie Jill:

...

sarah. you're not amongst the victims here.

...

Palin breaks silence, steps on own dick

This is pretty fresh. Salon's War Room:

This is why Palin '12 just won't work

Thank you, Lord.

It has been widely assumed that Sarah Palin's response to Gabrielle Giffords' shooting would be a pivotal moment for her viability as a 2012 presidential candidate. Now Palin has finally broken her silence*, with a seven-minute videotaped message released this morning -- one that, more than anything, will probably give Republicans yet another reason to look elsewhere for a '12 candidate.

*Click this one for lots of instant reactions to her statement. It probably should been my main link.

As is the case just about every time Palin sounds off on a major topic, the result has been instant and bitter polarization. Palin pretty much guaranteed this would be the case by employing the emotionally- and historically charged term "blood libel" and by claiming that journalists and pundits who focused on her inflamed rhetoric in the hours and days after the shooting are guilty of inciting "the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn."

Wow! Blaming the media by using an anti-semitic slur in the wake of the attempted assassination of a Jewish congresswoman! That woman is even dumber and less sensitive than we thought. Amazing.

This deal is spreading faster than the munchies at Fixer's parties!

Gotta go. Lotsa readin' up on this one to do.

Update:

Josh Marshall

Today has been set aside to honor the victims of the Tucson massacre. And Sarah Palin has apparently decided she's one of them.

Note to Sarah: Victim my big hairy white hind end. You did this to yourself. What went around came around, not as quickly as I would have liked but better late than never. Hear that dripping noise? That's my ass bleedin' for ya.

Update II:

National Jewish Democratic Council via YubaNet

Instead of dialing down the rhetoric at this difficult moment, Sarah Palin chose to accuse others trying to sort out the meaning of this tragedy of somehow engaging in a "blood libel" against her and others. This is of course a particularly heinous term for American Jews, given that the repeated fiction of blood libels are directly responsible for the murder of so many Jews across centuries -- and given that blood libels are so directly intertwined with deeply ingrained anti-Semitism around the globe, even today.

Perhaps Sarah Palin honestly does not know what a blood libel is, or does not know of their horrific history; that is perhaps the most charitable explanation we can arrive at in explaining her rhetoric today.

She knows now. Heh.

Update III:

I'm starting to hear conjecture that her use of 'blood libel' is a 'dog whistle' word for her fringie anti-semite supporters. I wouldn't put it past her, but personally I think she's was just being her usual ignorant self. I've been wrong before, however.

Where the American Dream went to die

I like Arizona for all the same reasons Will Bunch does plus a few of my own. This may be the best and saddest commentary on that state I've seen.

Is it any wonder that they call Arizona the Grand Canyon State? When news bulletins first flashed on Saturday that a congresswoman had been shot at a public event, it didn't take too much imagination to correctly surmise that it was Arizona, and that the victim was Gabrielle Giffords. Nor were you shocked, as some clearly were, when Pima County sheriff Clarence Dupnik declared his home state to have become "a mecca for prejudice and bigotry." The grim, blood-soaked crossover from death threats and broken windows to actual murder and mayhem seemed inevitable. But why here, in such a naturally blessed, sun-soaked corner of God's earth.

Why Arizona?

In 2011, the state is coming to represent a violent revolution of rising, and failed expectations. For much of the last generation, Arizona was held out as a promised land -- for retirees looking to write the closing chapters of life under heavenly skies, for immigrants who would meet the bottomless demand for hard work, for families looking to raise their kids into this thriving and up-and-coming economy, buoyed by boundless real estate and low taxes. It seemed too good to be true, and it was. By the time I got there in March 2010, it was clear that Arizona was the place that the American Dream went to die.

The real factors behind this Arizona Nightmare -- venal banks, too much borrowing, too much outsourcing of jobs that, unlike home construction, would have been permanent and stable -- were too abstract, especially for the toxic soup of talk radio. It is tragic how a state that once prided itself on Barry Goldwater-style can-do self-reliant libertarianism devolved into blaming The Other the minute that things went south here. Virulent anti-immigrant nativism -- occasionally sprinkled with things like neo-Nazism -- grew into the desert, as did fear of Muslims, to the point where an architecturally unusual new Christian church in Phoenix had to declare in a giant banner that it was not Islamic. Political heroes were now those like Arpaio who didn't just pursue reactionary policies but actually heaped humiliation and degradation on The Other, in sweltering outdoor prison camps. Ditto with members of Congress suddenly out of step with the new zeitgeist -- moderate Democrats like Harry Mitchell and Gabrielle Giffords were not just to be disagreed with but to be physically threatened with vandalism or worse. Meanwhile, guns became a statewide obsession, as lawmakers competed to see just how lax an environment they could create, where it was legal to bring concealed firearms just about anywhere.

In just the three days since semi-automatic gunfire shattered their world and ours, there has already been so much debate about whether Loughner and the shooting are products of our toxic environment or just the handiwork of "a lone nut," and whether that means the Pima sheriff was out of line with his pointed and powerful assault on prejudice and bigotry. But is it really necessary to tie Loughner into the broader body politic to prove what we as Americans should already know instinctively: That when eliminationists are targeting members of Congress with rocks and stray bullets and tar and feathers and a minister is praying for the death of the American president and when a state decides as an entity to profile and harass human beings because they have brown skin or because their religion is different, that things have already gone way, way off the tracks. We should have seen this long before 10 a.m. Mountain time, on the fateful morning of Jan. 8, 2011.

It's time for Arizona to turn off the radio and its cable TV sets, come out of its air-conditioned homes, and begin to see each other as human beings again -- to see leaders of an opposing political viewpoints as debate-club adversaries and not enemies on an apocalyptic battlefield. It is time for Arizona to re-dream the American Dream and maybe re-invent it in the process, to see that immigrants and retirees and everyone else in the polyglot that is the American Southwest just want bigger slices of a tamale pie that all can share, and not to fight each other over the crumbs. And when they come out of their homes to do this, Arizonans should also see what it's like to leave the handguns at home for a change.

All of us would give anything to go back in time, to undo Saturday's carnage, and to bring those six magnificent souls back to life. We can't do that, but maybe Arizona can dust itself off, gaze into the splendor of its big sky and see what an outsider sees, and remember what it was that brought them all to this scenic corner of America in the first place.

The promise of paradise.

Paradise is internal, not external. It's where you make it for yourself, at least on this earthly plane. Expectations that paradise will be thrust upon you by geographic or financial, and most certainly by political, circumstances will lead only to disenchantment and lashing out at "them" who denied you your dream.

If it's Wednesday...

...it must be Morford. One guess what he's on about.

You know the answer. It's a bit like asking if violent video games really do desensitize children's minds, or if smoking too much pot every day will eventually make you a useless, slow-blinking dolt. It might not be the sole cause, but it's certainly a factor. How big a factor depends, in part, on the level of one's instability to begin with.

[...] But the fact is, Loughner's festering insanity also found easy, fertile ground indeed to flourish into violence. Almost right up until the moment Loughner pulled the trigger, the ever-paranoid, Tea Party-enraged portions of this country essentially cheered him on, sent him a brochure, welcomed him as one of their own.

Look, this is America: While you are halfheartedly allowed to be as optimistic, spiritually awake, book-learned, calm and reasonable as you wish, you are aggressively encouraged to be as suspicious, xenophobic, poorly informed, well-armed, God-fearing and insular as you possibly can. Let's be absolutely clear: When it comes to toxic rhetoric and the general spew of hate and fear, the GOP and its frothing media army outgun liberals by a factor of, oh, about a thousand to one.

On one level, Loughner is but another fractured mirror, held up to reveal our darkest cultural themes, obsessions, illnesses. We ask, "How can we minimize those factors that allow monsters like him to exist in the first place?" Most answers fail spectacularly.

Will the hate radio provocateurs do any soul-searching? They will not. Will we get stricter gun laws? Barely. Will treatment programs for mental illness improve? Hardly. Will the media, pop culture, our politicians, our society ever get past the vile veneration of the firearm, which results in 30,000 gun-related deaths a year, by far the worst rate in the civilized world? What are you, a communist?

No, and I'm not ready to try to try to sensibly discuss Guns In America either.

Nobody is, and it's a big part of the problem. It's very complicated and the NRA will not permit it.

The final questions emerge. Are you an agent of the calm and the open-hearted, or a pseudo-victim of the fear and the reactionary? Have you already made your choice?

Yes. I'm getting calmer and more hard-hearted against the fringe right all the time. When they both turn to ice, and it's close, Katy bar the door.

The Right-Wing Conspiracist Subculture

Talk To Action compares Loughner to an anti-abortionist killer and delves deeper.

Jared Lee Loughner, the alleged shooter of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and others in Arizona shares an obsession with government currency and money manipulation plots with anti-abortion killer John C. Salvi 3d. Loughner wrote about a conspiracy of currency manipulation in text posted on YouTube. Salvi was found guilty in the Brookline, Massachusetts clinic shootings in late 1994 that left two women dead and several persons injured.

Although he was found competent to stand trial, there was substantial evidence that Salvi was mentally unbalanced and obsessed with conspiracy theories. [...]

It is still difficult for many people to see the political side of the Salvi case. There is still a widespread lack of knowledge about the beliefs of the right wing conspiracist subculture-and there is still an attitude of denial that groups promoting conspiratorial worldviews have growing influence in our political system.

[...] It is clear, though, that aggressive right-wing rhetoric targeting Democrats as treasonous encourages some unstable people to act out in aggression or violence. This was the warning of my report Toxic to Democracy: Conspiracy Theories, Demonization, and Scapegoating, published in June 2009.

As I wrote in Toxic to Democracy:

Right-wing pundits demonize scapegoated groups and individuals in our society, implying that it is urgent to stop them from wrecking the nation. Some angry people in the audience already believe conspiracy theories in which the same scapegoats are portrayed as subversive, destructive, or evil. Add in aggressive apocalyptic ideas that suggest time is running out and quick action mandatory and you have a perfect storm of mobilized resentment threatening to rain bigotry and violence across the United States.".

The right-wing demagogues are not legally culpable for the violence and assassinations, but they must share some moral culpability.

That last sentence is the crux of the biscuit. Go read the rest. This is scary shit.

A question ...

As mostly all of you know, I've had dogs all my life. Our last dog, Princess Shayna, had a lot of health problems from the time she was little and what we spent on medical care for her over 12 years was a fortune.

So now that we have the Dingo Sisters, I'm doing something I'm completely unfamiliar with; shopping for pet health insurance. Naturally, no insurance company would issue me a policy on Shayna (pet insurance didn't become "mainstream" until she was about 5 and by then she had too many "pre-existing conditions").

So my question(s) is(are): Anybody have any experience with pet insurance? Anything I have to keep in mind when comparing insurers?

The way it should work ...

Via Susie, a great editorial by Dylan Ratigan (he generally annoys me, more his manner than his substance) about how our economic system has been bastardized by those who can afford to buy our elected representatives:

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As Americans, I believe we reject communism because it historically has allowed a tiny group of people to consolidate complete control over national resources (including people), in the process stifling competition, freedom and choice. It leaves its citizens stagnating under the perpetual broken systems with no natural motivation to innovate, improve services or reduce costs.

...

And to be fair, as we've seen, it ain't just the Republicans who've allowed this "socialism for the wealthy" to get so out of hand. We've come to understand quite well that our guy in the White House has no qualms about giving in to the wealthy and the corporations.

...

And yet today we find ourselves as a country in two distinctly different categories: those who are forced to compete tooth and nail each day to provide value to society in return for income for ourselves and our families and those who would instead use our lawmaking apparatus to help themselves to our tax money and/or to protect themselves from true competition.

...

They are the same people who wave the "free market" flag around when we demand a little regulation so we're not poisoned by our food, air, or water. The same people who created "too big to fail" and reached deeply into our pockets to subsidize their losses. The same people who nickel and dime us when we try to fly somewhere, yet are the first in line for government handouts when their business model is worth shit.

...

Unfortunately, they use our wealth and laws not only to benefit their outdated, failed companies, but also spend a small pittance of their ill-gotten gains lobbying and favor-trading with politicians so the government will continue to protect them from competition and their well-deserved failure.

...

I urge you to read the rest of the stuff between the quotes.

Thought ...

The modern Republican Party is the professional wrestling of politics.

Good luck in the primary ...

Our resident idiot here on Long Island (Rep. Peter King R - idiculous) came up with a somewhat common sense (for a Republican) piece of gun control legislation (limited as it is). I wonder when they'll take his GOP membership card away and run someone (a teabagger) against him in the primary.

Rep. Peter King, a Republican from New York, is planning to introduce legislation that would make it illegal to bring a gun within 1,000 feet of a government official, according to a person familiar with the congressman's intentions.

...

Hell, what good is being a teabagger when you can't carry a piece to a Dem campaign rally?

Great thanks to Mr. Amato for the link.

Shit ...

Another foot of snow overnight and it's supposed to continue until noon. It's 4 a.m. and I've already had to shovel out the back entry to get the Dingo Sisters out for their morning constitutional. I might as well move up to Gordon's neck of the woods* at this point. Heh ...

*If this keeps up all winter, by next winter I'm gonna have one of them Honda snow throwers that Gordon got this year. I've shoveled more this winter so far than I have in the last 10.

AZ to do something right! Will wonders never cease?

HuffPo

Arizona's state legislature has announced a legislative effort to combat the infamous Westboro Baptist Church's plans to picket the funerals of the shooting victims in Tucson over the weekend.

May I suggest they simply not offer the WBC haters police protection?

Tweet of the Day

From 'Sarah Never Does Anything Wrong' at Juan Cole's Informed Comment:

Hey, Sarah Palin, how's that hatey, killy, reloadey, crosshairsy thing working out for ya?

Spin it like ya stole it!

I made the following comment over at Ornery Bastard in the wake of some furiously back-pedalling wingnuts trying to shift the blame:

Yes, the guy was a whackjob. A FAR RIGHT whackjob. Too bad he wasn't a Librul whackjob or a Muslim whackjob or somethin', huh?

My point, though I didn't make it very well, was that the wingnuts like to blame Libruls and/or Muslims for everything and would have been all over this like stink on shit had Loughner been either of those instead of what he is which is a stark raving right wing lunatic.

Well, they're doing it anyway:

Ever fond of blaming Muslims for anything, Gingrich immediately responded by shifting focus from the Arizona shootings to his Islamophobia campaign. Throwing in a few plugs for his anti-Muslim film “America At Risk,” Gingrich slammed liberals “who scream if you tell the truth about American Islamists” but “smear conservatives” for other, non-Muslim acts of violence:

Blaming “the left” is typical Gingrich behavior in the wake of national tragedies. After the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, Gingrich accused “the liberal academic elite, the liberal political elite” of “being afraid to talk about the mess you have made, and being afraid to take responsibility for things you have done.” When ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked if he saw the 2007 Virginia Tech tragedy the same way, Gingrich said “yes” because liberals have created “situation ethics” zone free of religion. He even blamed liberals for Susan Smith’s drowning of her two children in 1994, saying the only way to avoid future incidents was “to vote Republican.”

Nice try but no cigar, Neutie. The shoe's on the other foot this time like it has been in a zillion other recent right wing terrorist attacks.

The right is trying like crazy to dissociate the act of a crazy person from their 'kill the liberal commies' hate speech. They're good at this, but they're not going to get away with it this time.

Ah, shit, they probably will.

Headline of the Day

Woman Denied Transplant Funding May Leave AZ After Being Told Life-Saving Procedure Is Not ‘Cost-Effective’

Makes me wonder if there's some kind of test in AZ to see who's 'cost effective' when it comes to saving their lives and who's not. Democrats and Liberals need not apply.

Dear Gordon ...

Don't worry, bro, it ain't that easy to pardon the Bugman.

Regards,

Fixer

Thanks to Joe for the link.

If it's true ...

I'll put even money on the position that Fox won't cover the trial at all and the other networks will gloss over the details:

I just heard from a couple of sources that attorney Judy Clarke, who represented the Unabomber in a defense that helped educate the public into the vitriolic right wing mindset, is going to greatly highlight the responsibility of the rabid right, particularly Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and the Tea Party, of the violent atmosphere that led to her client's unfortunate crime ...

How come ...

We're running a "socialist program"* in Afghanistan when we can't afford to help poor Americans?

At the entrance to a military base in southern Afghanistan, US Army Staff Sergeant Andrew Cunningham hands out money to locals employed to help rebuild their villages devastated by war.

...

Men from the 101st Airborne are now taking steps to help the population rebuild villages and irrigation canals through a cash-for-work scheme, part of the counterinsurgency plan to keep locals from backing the Taliban rebels.

...

This is why there never should have been "American boots on the ground" in Afghanistan. The minute we declared we wanted to "win hearts and minds" (remember that?) obliged us to rebuild what we broke (somehow, we now own everything the Soviets broke too, go figure) and stop the drug lords (except for the Pals of Karzai). Being the only common understanding with them is "we have the cash and you want it", we'll be subsidizing Afghan society until my nieces and nephews have grandchildren.

...

Later on the military base, about 100 workers are left annoyed when Cunningham runs out of money to pay them.

They will have to wait for their pay until next week -- more frustration for a population which has faced years of it.

And next week they'll be Sarge's pal again. Tomorrow, they'll put a bullet in Sarge's head if a Taliban gives them $50. Once (if) we leave, the Taliban will kill Karzai (if he doesn't leave for Zurich with his bankbook before when we go) and go back to business as usual. That's how shit works over there.

*I'm being facetious.

"But ...

Everybody does it."

Yer ass. Read it and weep.

The Wrath Of Fools

Truthout

To: Palin-lovers, Fox "News," the "mainstream" media, and the Far Right, et al.

From: William Rivers Pitt

Date: Monday 10 January 2011

Re: The blood on your hands

Dear “Patriots,”

Most Disrespectfully Yours,
William Rivers Pitt

Between those two quotes lies the best rant yet on the Tucson right-wing attack. He pulls no punches and his anger is apparent. Go.