Tucson Shootings -- January 11

Paul Davenport of the AP: "Arizona legislators planned to consider emergency legislation Tuesday to head off picketing by a Topeka, Kan., church at the funeral service for a 9-year-old girl who was among six people killed during Saturday's shooting in Tucson. The proposed law would prohibit protests at or near funeral sites. It would take effect immediately if passed by the Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Jan Brewer," who says she will sign it. "The Westboro Baptist Church said Monday it plans to picket Thursday's funeral for Christina Taylor Green because 'God sent the shooter to deal with idolatrous America.'"

"Armed Giffords Hero Nearly Shot Wrong Man." William Saleton of Slate: "... what do gun advocates propose? More guns.... The new poster boy for this agenda is Joe Zamudio, a hero in the Tucson incident. Zamudio was in a nearby drug store when the shooting began, and he was armed. He ran to the scene and helped subdue the killer.... 'I came out of that store, I clicked the safety off, and I was ready,' [Zamudio] explained on Fox and Friends. 'I had my hand on my gun. I had it in my jacket pocket....' As he rounded the corner, he saw a man holding a gun. 'And that's who I at first thought was the shooter.... I told him to "Drop it, drop it!'" But the man with the gun wasn't the shooter. He had wrested the gun away from the shooter." Saleton elaborates details of the encounter to show "how close [Zamudio] came to killing an innocent man."

The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence posts an "Insurrectionism Timeline": "On June 26, 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court embraced the National Rifle Association's contention that the Second Amendment provides individuals with the right to take violent action against our government should it become 'tyrannical.' The ... timeline catalogues incidents of insurrectionist violence (or the promotion of such violence) that have occurred since that decision was issued."

Jennifer Medina on Suzi Hileman, one of the shooting victims who is recovering in University Medical Center from three bullet wounds. Hileman had taken 9-year-old Christina Green to meet Rep. Giffords.

Today doctors at University Medical Center discuss the status of Rep. Giffords & others:

Arizona Republic: "Doctors caring for U.S. Rep Gabrielle Giffords said this morning she is breathing on her own and is otherwise recovering from a devastating head wound she suffered when a gunman opened fire at point-blank range. In addition to Giffords, five patients remain in the hospital with three listed in serious condition and two in fair condition...." ...

... Tucson Sentinel: "Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is '100 percent' certain to survive, said Dr. Peter Rhee, a surgeon treating her for a gunshot wound to the head. 'As a physician I'm going to get into a lot of trouble for this, but her prognosis for survival is 100 percent, as far as it being short term,' Rhee told Britain's Channel 4 News.... 'Hopefully she'll live to be 95 years old,' said Rhee, the medical director for University Medical Center's trauma center." ...

Last night Dr. Peter Rhee spoke to PBS "News Hours"' Judy Woodruff:

David Fahrenthold, et al., of the Washington Post: "As Loughner appeared in court, acquaintances in Arizona revealed new details about his past few years -- in which an increasingly erratic Loughner distanced himself from family members and friends and made decisions that sabotaged his ambitions." ...

... CBS News: "The parents of the suspect in the shooting rampage that left six people dead in Tucson, Ariz., released a statement Tuesday saying that they don't understand why the shooting happened and that they can't express their feelings in words.... Both parents have been interviewed extensively by the FBI.... Earlier, the parents told federal investigators they knew their son was becoming increasingly troubled but were not aware how much he had drifted and were 'completely surprised' that he actually committed a violent act." ...

... CBS/AP: Jared Loughner "wrote 'Die, bitch' in a note found at his home.... Investigators believe the handwritten message was a reference to Giffords.... The note was found in a safe alongside other ones, including 'I planned ahead,' 'My assassination' and the name 'Giffords.' ... On Saturday morning, Jared Loughner's father saw him take a black bag out of a car trunk.... The father approached Loughner, and he mumbled something and took off running.... The father got in his truck and chased his son as he fled on foot." ...

... Ben Smith links to a conspiracy theory Website which Loughner apparently frequented in November 2010. One of Smith's readers pointed to a conversation between Loughner & another user; the other person tells Loughner that he (Loughner) is "frankly schizophrenic" & urges him to "Seek help before you hurt yourself or others...." 

... Nick Baumann of Mother Jones: a friend of Loughner's, Bryce "Tierney tells Mother Jones ... that Loughner held a years-long grudge against Giffords and had repeatedly derided her as a 'fake.' Loughner's animus toward Giffords intensified after he attended one of her campaign events and she did not, in his view, sufficiently answer a question he had posed, Tierney says."

... Brigid Schulte of the Washington Post: "Under Arizona law, any one of Jared Lee Loughner's classmates or teachers at Pima Community College so concerned about his increasingly bizarre behavior could have contacted local officials and asked that he be evaluated for mental illness and potentially committed for psychiatric treatment. That, according to local mental health and law enforcement officials, never happened." ...

... If Schulte's reporting is correct, our crack Education Secretary doesn't know WTF he's talking about: Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post writes, "Education Secretary Arne Duncan said today that the community college that forced out the suspect in the Arizona shooting rampage because he was disruptive did what it could in handling the young man."

Adam Nagourney, et al., of the New York Times: "Today, the Eighth District stands apart as one of the most emotionally and politically polarized in the nation.... The shootings came after a disconcerting run of episodes in this district..., raising temperatures here in a way that some that some of Ms. Giffords’s friends argue fed an atmosphere that might encourage violence."

Michael Levenson of the Boston Globe: "On the 50th anniversary of one of President Kennedy’s most famous speeches, his great-nephew, Joseph P. Kennedy III, stood in the same spot in the Massachusetts House today and delivered his own address, decrying the vituperative political rhetoric that he said is tearing at the nation's fabric."

Michael Shear of the New York Times: "Former President Bill Clinton on Tuesday waded into the debate about America’s political rhetoric..., saying the tone of the national conversation must change. Speaking from Haiti on the one-year anniversary of the earthquake there, Mr. Clinton suggested that passionate political speech should not be directly blamed for the kind of violence that occurred in Tucson. But he said the angry back-and-forth of modern debate is not healthy." Here's the BBC print story & video. ...

... Jim Rutenberg & Kate Zernike of the New York Times: "... even some Republicans sympathetic to [Sarah] Palin suggested that she needed to find a more substantive and nuanced means of addressing the criticism [related to her targeting Rep. Giffords] to avert any risk to her political standing and to maintain control of her political narrative."

Peter Wallsten of the Washington Post: "Across the ideological spectrum, officials and activists agreed after Saturday's Tucson killings that it was time to soften the harsh edges of America's raucous national dialogue. But by Monday, a bitter debate had erupted over how to do it -- and on whose terms." CW: Newt Gingrich seems crazier than usual -- he brings up "liberals" and "radical Islam".

Jake Tapper & Diane Sawyer of ABC News on vitriolic rhetoric. Sheriff Dupnik lets Rush Limbaugh have it:

Alex Pareene of Salon: "The attempted assassination of a member of Congress seems depressingly like the inevitable conclusion of two years of hysterical revolutionary language suffusing every single domestic political debate." Pareene cites many examples of how the right has "normalized political violence." ...

... Adam Serwer in the Washington Post: "We need to be clear that we're not talking about the mere use of violent imagery -- but political rhetoric that implicitly or explicitly justifies actual violence." ...

Jon Stewart, who has been excoriating the MSM for years about hyperbolic pundits, on the same:

It would be really nice if the ramblings of crazy people didn't in any way resemble how we actually talk to each other on TV. Let's at least make troubled individuals easier to spot. -- Jon Stewart

Tim Smith of RobotCeleb explains the screenshot below: "Glenn Beck is trending like crazy after a photo of him holding a gun was randomly generated by his website. The kicker here is that Beck had just published an article stating 'We must stand together against all violence'”:

Joe Davidson of the Washington Post: "Rhetoric against federal workers has escalated from the day Ronald Reagan famously said ;government is the problem' to last week's comment by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) that 'the enemy is the bureaucracy.'" Davidson recounts recent acts of violence against federal employees.

Helene Cooper of the New York Times: "President Obama is, so far, keeping his distance from the debate over whether vitriolic political discourse contributed to the attack in Arizona... ." ...

... Two Times a Hero. Speaking to Shep Smith of Fox "News," Tucson shootings hero Patricia Maisch calls out right-wing and Republican party rhetoric, which she says she hopes will change in the wake of the shootings:

Eric Lipton, et al., of the New York Times: "House lawmakers are considering adopting an enhanced security system that would ease the way for members of Congress to get more comprehensive protection at public appearances in their home districts. Under the bipartisan proposal, the Capitol Police ... would formalize its relationship with local police and sheriffs’ departments ... and jointly develop more standardized plans to deal with varying threat levels for ... public events.... Lawmakers could then ask the local police to execute the plans for certain events, a step now taken only on an ad hoc basis."

Bob Herbert writes about our really stupid gun laws & our out-of-control murder rate. ...

... Molly Ball & Shira Toeplitz of Politico: Members of Congress "who have brought up gun control in light of the Tucson shooting have largely been the issue’s regular standard-bearers on Capitol Hill. Even gun-control advocates aren’t very optimistic about their chances.... The signal piece of gun legislation to come out of the Arizona shooting looks to be a bill that Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.) plans to bring up as soon as this week. It would ban the manufacture and sale of high-capacity magazines such as the one Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’s would-be assassin, Jared Lee Loughner, attached to his Glock 19, allowing him to fire off 33 bullets without reloading, rather than the 10 or so in a typical clip. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) ... plans to introduce McCarthy’s legislation in the Senate.... But McCarthy and Lautenberg are up against a political consensus that has only hardened in recent years...."

Mass Media Meet a Mass Murderer
(And Are Totally Flummoxed, According to Our Mr. Brooks)

David Brooks opines on Jared Loughner's mental state & faults the media, including the New York Times, for blaming the tea party and Sarah Palin for the Tucson shooting rampage. The Times moderators have scrambled the comments again, so here's mine, which for once has some nuance:

Mr. Brooks, you have set yourself up as an expert in psychology or psychiatry. Not only are you able to diagnose Jared Loughner from afar, you imply you know a lot more than the rest of the media about psychology: you write, "We have a news media that is psychologically ill informed." Except for you, I guess. Okay, I'm going to buy your set-up argument.

I have no idea what Mr. Loughner's political views might be. A classmate cited by the Times saying Loughner was "a liberal." Others have linked him with tea party-type politics. For a while there was an attempt to associate him with a radical anti-Semitic group. To confound all the political-motivation theories, the Washington Post reports that Loughner was a registered independent who didn't vote in 2010.

We do know this. Loughner thought Gabrielle Giffords was "stupid" and "a fake" because she didn't properly answer a question of his in 2007. And among the evidence found by law enforcement officers was an envelope from her office on which he wrote the words "My assassination."

But we know something more important, something larger than a young man in Tucson. George Packer of the New Yorker put his finger on it: "... for the past two years, many conservative leaders, activists, and media figures have made a habit of trying to delegitimize their political opponents. Not just arguing against their opponents, but doing everything possible to turn them into enemies of the country."

There's a second element which I would add, one well-illustrated by Dick Armey when he went on the teevee Sunday supposedly to calm the waters. But he didn't do that. He stirred things up. Armey said during an ABC New roundtable that tea partiers must "continue to do their duty and defend our liberties." Defend our liberties? That is a loaded phrase that the is standard tea party code. "THEY" are going to take your "liberties" away. "THEY" are going to enslave you. "WE" must "defend" ourselves against this peril.

Here is where pop psychology and politics collide. Mainstream politicians tell the gullible & impressionable that the government is illegitimate and that this illegitimate government is going to take away their natural and Constitutional freedoms. (That's why the Republicans read an expurgated version of the Constitution on the House floor -- to establish THEIR legitimacy as defenders of the Constitution against -- the OTHERS.) You really don't need to be an unbalanced individual to be worried about that frightening scenario.

So whatever combination of psychological aberrations motivated Jared Loughner to murder and maim 20 innocent people, he did so, I would guess, at least partly because he lives -- as to the rest of us -- in a culture where a crackpot theory about THEM has achieved mainstream legitimacy. So he targeted one of THEM, one who had "failed" to understand him and therefore provided "proof" that the government was illegitimate.

As long as there are people like you, Mr. Brooks, who aid and abet, and therefore legitimize, the crackpot theory of an illegitimate government that seeks to deprive Americans of their natural rights, the nation's psychological landscape is not going to improve.

The Commentariat -- 1/1/11

Stephen Colbert weighs in on so-called Reps. Mike Fitzpatrick & Pete Sessions taking their oaths of office on the teevee:

Sudeep Reddy of the Wall Street Journal: "To an extent rarely seen in recessions since the Great Depression, wages for a swath of the labor force this time have taken a sharp and swift fall."

Ben Bernanke Is the Best Fucking Banker in the World. Felix Salmon of Reuters: "The Fed ... managed to earn net income of $80.9 billion in 2010. Which means that its return on assets was incredibly high at 3.3%, while its return on equity was an astonishing 143%. I think it’s fair to say that no bank in the history of the world has ever had income of anywhere near $80 billion in one year: that’s over $700 per US household. Somehow, the Fed is making roughly $60 per household per month, and remitting that money straight to the Treasury.... $80 billion is enormous — more than four times the Fed’s profit in 2004, for instance. And it’s a useful reminder of ... how monetary policy can make a serious dent in the funding-need side of fiscal policy."

Ezra Klein: Paul Ryan, who will be charged with writing the federal budget, pretends to be a deficit hawk, has repeatedly voted for advocated for budget-busting measures.

John Schwartz of the New York Times: "With judges looking ever more critically at home foreclosures, they are reaching beyond the bankers to heap some of their most scorching criticism on the lawyers. In numerous opinions, judges have accused lawyers of processing shoddy or even fabricated paperwork in foreclosure actions when representing the banks."

A Work of Fiction by Joe Biden. Politico: in Afghanistan, Vice President "Biden was cordial with [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai, saying he 'did a great job in Lisbon” at a summit to talk about the future of Afghanistan. 'I think it's gotten us on the same page,' he said, according to the pool."

Sex News

Adam Liptak of the New York Times: William S. MacDonald, a man who was convicted of a felony violation of a sodomy law -- a Virginia law which is similar to the law the Supreme Court struck down in Lawrence v. Texas -- is still forced to register as a sex offender. MacDonald has asked the Supremes to hear his case.

Tamar Lewin of the New York Times: "The abortion rate in the United States, which has declined steadily since a 1981 peak of more than 29 abortions per 1,000 women, stalled between 2005 and 2008, at slightly less than 20 abortions per 1,000 women, according to a new report from the Guttmacher Institute.... Rachel Jones, the lead author, said the economy might have played a role":

Unintended pregnancy is increasingly concentrated among poor and low-income women, and for the 2008 survey, we were collecting data in the midst of a recession>. So there are more poor women in the survey, women who in better economic times might have decided to carry to term, but since they or their partner lost their job, decided they couldn’t.

Uh-Oh. NBC News: "Ted Williams, the formerly homeless man who became a viral sensation for his 'golden voice,' was detained with a daughter Monday night after police responded to a disturbance at a Los Angeles hotel, according to the Hollywood Reporter and Access Hollywood."