Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords shot in head

[bmags]

bizarre.

[caulfield12]

As thorough as C. Amanpour is, I would have thought someone would have had an idea beforehand of the combustible mix they would be putting together with Fuller and anyone representing the Tea Party or Palin on the same panel....I mean, it's sort of understandable if you've been shot and the Congresswoman you supported and volunteered for was almost murdered to look for blame and be a little bit less objective and clear-headed than those of us not involved in the events that day. And to sit on a panel after you've been shot and listen to people who have ZERO bend on ANY ASPECT of gun control laws, it has to be frustrating. I still don't know what has to take place in our country before it becomes "enough is enough" since every school shooting led to this same conversation and even movies like Bowling for Columbine and then faded from consciousness again. At the very LEAST, they should make it clear to gun dealers at shows that they don't have to sell a gun to EVERYONE who clears the background check. Clearly, many reasonable people had suspicions about the shooter (including the person who sold him the gun).

 

 

 

Eric Fuller, 63, who was struck by a bullet in the hail of gunfire in Tucson that killed six and wounded 13 on Saturday, claimed Thursday that conservative figureheads such as Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and Sharron Angle were to blame for the violence in Arizona.

 

"How many more demented people are out there? It looks like Palin, Beck, Sharron Angle and the rest got their first target," Fuller, a former campaigner for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), told Democracy Now.

 

"Their wish for Second Amendment activism has been fulfilled -- senseless hatred leading to murder, lunatic-fringe anarchism, subscribed to by John Boehner, mainstream rebels with vengeance for all, even nine-year-old girls," he added, reading from comments he said he had written down while being treated for his wounds.

 

huffingtonpost.com

Edited January 16, 2011 by caulfield12

[Balta1701]

Eric Fuller, 63, who was struck by a bullet in the hail of gunfire in Tucson that killed six and wounded 13 on Saturday, claimed Thursday that conservative figureheads such as Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and Sharron Angle were to blame for the violence in Arizona.

 

"How many more demented people are out there? It looks like Palin, Beck, Sharron Angle and the rest got their first target," Fuller, a former campaigner for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), told Democracy Now.

 

"Their wish for Second Amendment activism has been fulfilled -- senseless hatred leading to murder, lunatic-fringe anarchism, subscribed to by John Boehner, mainstream rebels with vengeance for all, even nine-year-old girls," he added, reading from comments he said he had written down while being treated for his wounds.

 

huffingtonpost.com

See: 2 posts above you.

[caulfield12]

Yes, Balta, I already read that post.

 

That's what I was responding to.

[Balta1701]

Yes, Balta, I already read that post.

 

That's what I was responding to.

Hmph, first time I read that, your comments weren't there, only the quoted text.

[Balta1701]

As thorough as C. Amanpour is, I would have thought someone would have had an idea beforehand of the combustible mix they would be putting together with Fuller and anyone representing the Tea Party or Palin on the same panel.

It doesn't sound from the article like the Tea Party activist was on the panel, only an attendee.

[caulfield12]

The week of that interview (with Chuck Todd) began with the House passing the health care bill on Sunday. Within hours, on Monday morning, vandals smashed the front door of Giffords’s office in Tucson. The Palin “target” map (and the accompanying Twitter dictum to “RELOAD”) went up on Tuesday, just one day after that vandalism — timing that was at best tone-deaf and at worst nastily provocative. Not just Giffords, but at least three other of the 20 members of Congress on the Palin map were also hit with vandalism or death threats.

 

In her MSNBC interview that Wednesday, Giffords said that Palin had put the “crosshairs of a gun sight over our district,” adding that “when people do that, they’ve got to realize there’s consequences to that action.” Chuck Todd then asked Giffords if “in fairness, campaign rhetoric and war rhetoric have been interchangeable for years.” She responded that colleagues who had been in the House “20, 30 years” had never seen vitriol this bad. But Todd moved on, and so did the Beltway. What’s the big deal about a little broken glass? Few wanted to see what Giffords saw — that the vandalism and death threats were the latest consequences of a tide of ugly insurrectionism that had been rising since the final weeks of the 2008 campaign and that had threatened to turn violent from the start.

 

Giffords’s first brush with that reality had occurred some seven months before her office was vandalized — in the red-hot health care fever of August 2009. She had held another “Congress on Your Corner” meeting, at a Safeway in the town of Douglas. There the crowd’s rage and the dropping of a gun by one attendee prompted aides worried about her safety to summon the police. The Tucson Tea Party co-founder, Trent Humphries, told The Arizona Daily Star afterward that this was a lie, that “nobody was threatening Gabby.” After Loughner’s massacre, Humphries was still faulting her — this time for holding “an event in full view of the public with no security whatsoever.”

 

..........

 

But that sidesteps the issue. This isn’t about angry blog posts or verbal fisticuffs. Since Obama’s ascension, we’ve seen repeated incidents of political violence. Just a short list would include the 2009 killing of three Pittsburgh police officers by a neo-Nazi Obama-hater; last year’s murder-suicide kamikaze attack on an I.R.S. office in Austin, Tex.; and the California police shootout with an assailant plotting to attack an obscure liberal foundation obsessively vilified by Beck.

 

A few unexpected voices have expressed alarm. After an antigovernment gunman struck at Washington’s Holocaust museum in June 2009, Shepard Smith of Fox News noted the rising vitriol in his e-mail traffic and warned on air that more “amped up” Americans could be “getting the gun out.” The former Bush administration speechwriter David Frum took on the “reckless right” that August, citing the incident at the Giffords Safeway event. But when a Department of Homeland Security report warned of far-right extremism and attacks by “lone wolves” that same summer, Gingrich called it a smear and John Boehner demanded an apology.

 

Last week a conservative presidential candidate, Tim Pawlenty, timidly said it wouldn’t be his “style” to use Palin’s target map, but was savaged so viciously by his own camp that he immediately retreated. A senior Republican senator told Politico that he saw the Tucson bloodbath as a “cautionary tale” for his party, yet refused to be named.

 

What are they and their peers so afraid of? No doubt that someone might reload — the same fears that prompted Gabrielle Giffords to speak up, calmly but firmly, last March. Unless and until they can match her courage and speak out too, it’s hard to see what will change.

 

 

 

Frank Rich, nytimes.com

Edited January 16, 2011 by caulfield12

[mr_genius]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/15/opinion/...ef=charlesmblow

 

Immediately after the news broke, the air became thick with conjecture, speculation and innuendo. There was a giddy, almost punch-drunk excitement on the left. The prophecy had been fulfilled: “words have consequences.” And now, the right’s rhetorical chickens had finally come home to roost.

 

The dots were too close and the temptation to connect them too strong. The target was a Democratic congresswoman. There was the map of her district in the cross hairs. There were her own prescient worries about overheated rhetoric.

 

Within hours of the shooting, there was a full-fledged witch hunt to link the shooter to the right.

 

“I saw Goody Proctor with the devil! Oh, I mean Jared Lee Loughner! Yes him. With the devil!”

 

The only problem is that there was no evidence then, and even now, that overheated rhetoric from the right had anything to do with the shooting. (In fact, a couple of people who said they knew him have described him as either apolitical or “quite liberal.”) The picture emerging is of a sad and lonely soul slowly, and publicly, slipping into insanity....

 

Great. So the left overreacts and overreaches and it only accomplishes two things: fostering sympathy for its opponents and nurturing a false equivalence within the body politic. Well done, Democrats.

 

Now we’ve settled into the by-any-means-necessary argument: anything that gets us to focus on the rhetoric and tamp it down is a good thing. But a wrong in the service of righteousness is no less wrong, no less corrosive, no less a menace to the very righteousness it’s meant to support.

 

You can’t claim the higher ground in a pit of quicksand.

 

Concocting connections to advance an argument actually weakens it. The argument for tonal moderation has been done a tremendous disservice by those who sought to score political points in the absence of proof.

 

 

[BigSqwert]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/15/opinion/...ef=charlesmblow

 

The NY Times is a socialist/communist rag that cannot be trusted.

[mr_genius]

The NY Times is a socialist/communist rag that cannot be trusted.

 

haha

[Balta1701]

The legacy of Christina Green, the youngest victim of the Tucson shootings, will endure through helping another child, according to her father who said some of her organs were donated to a young girl in Boston.

 

‘‘That really lifted our spirits,’’ said John Dallas Green, in a phone interview from his Tucson home. ‘‘We’re proud parents once again of our daughter who has done another amazing thing in this lifetime.’’

Link

[caulfield12]

Did THE Dallas Green, the grandfather/former manager, ever put forth a public quote about this whole situation?

[Balta1701]

We now know a little bit more about the matrix of ideas that helped inspire Jared Loughner’s murderous rampage on Saturday. According to a friend of his interviewed on Good Morning America on Wednesday, the conspiracy documentary Zeitgeist “poured gasoline on his fire” and had “a profound impact on Jared Loughner's mindset and how he views the world that he lives in.” He was also, according to his friend’s father, influenced by the documentary Loose Change, a classic of the 9/11 Truth movement. This does not mean that either of these movies is responsible for making Loughner do what he did, but it does show how his madness was shaped by a broader climate of paranoia, and offers a clue as to why he targeted Gabrielle Giffords.

Link

[caulfield12]

I think that's a LARGE reason we're seeing the fingers pointed...because of the anti-government rhetoric in movies like the aforementioned one, or Collapse.

 

Of course, there are "conspiracy theorists" on the liberal/radical side (think of JFK the movie, for example)...but I can't count how many times the last two years I've heard that the Federal Government in Washington has no right to impose or levy taxes, about the IMF/World Bank/Trilateral Commission, Davos, World Economic Forum, WTO, George Soros, shadowy world bankers, etc.

 

But the weirdest part of this guy's "world view" was the one of the grammar/mind/thought control...based on the preaching of some guy in Hawaii who I'd never even heard of, I guess the anti-Noam Chomsky as it were.

[knightni]

Did THE Dallas Green, the grandfather/former manager, ever put forth a public quote about this whole situation?

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2...en_devasta.html

[southsider2k5]

Link

 

You'd give your first born to find a real Republican to link this story to. Until then, close enough will do.

[StrangeSox]

You'd give your first born to find a real Republican to link this story to. Until then, close enough will do.

 

9/11 troofer isn't a left-right thing. And this Zeitgeist film, what with it denying a historical Jesus, doesn't sound very Republican, either.

[Balta1701]

You'd give your first born to find a real Republican to link this story to. Until then, close enough will do.

Considering I posted that because I thought "oh, the guy seems like he had the whole 9/11 truther string going too" and even deliberately avoided quoting the BS parts of the article where the author tries to do the Republican connection...and you immediately rose up in defense of your party, I guess the only conclusion is that you think any attacks on 9/11 truthers are attacks on all Republicans.

 

Seriously, I didn't put anything partisan in that post. I thought it was an interesting new nugget.

[mr_genius]

9/11 troofer isn't a left-right thing. And this Zeitgeist film, what with it denying a historical Jesus, doesn't sound very Republican, either.

 

 

I believe he was commenting on the dimwitted analysis within the linked article. Obviously 'Loose Change' and that other movie are not anywhere close to a conservative narrative.

[StrangeSox]

I believe he was commenting on the dimwitted analysis within the linked article. Obviously 'Loose Change' and that other movie are not anywhere close to a conservative narrative.

 

I didn't read the article

 

The excerpt Balta posted didn't match with ss2k5's response.

[Balta1701]

A federal grand jury indicted Jared Loughner today for murder. The government is saying that it will seek the death penalty.

[Cknolls]

A federal grand jury indicted Jared Loughner today for murder. The government is saying that it will seek the death penalty.

 

Maybe they can use that fine upstanding Philadelphia abortion doctor to stick his scissors into his neck and cut his spinal cord. Seems to be a fitting way to end this creeps life. And then they can do the same to the doctor. But lets defend this guy. Very humane way to kill an innocent child. s*** like this makes me want to puke.

 

 

 

 

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=...dhOq5Hs9ycCdKag

 

 

 

 

[BigSqwert]

Way to stay on point.

[NorthSideSox72]

Maybe they can use that fine upstanding Philadelphia abortion doctor to stick his scissors into his neck and cut his spinal cord. Seems to be a fitting way to end this creeps life. And then they can do the same to the doctor. But lets defend this guy. Very humane way to kill an innocent child. s*** like this makes me want to puke.

 

 

 

 

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=...dhOq5Hs9ycCdKag

Well that's sick, but also completely unrelated, and nice baiting in there too. No one has even brought up the topic, let alone defended the guy.

 

[southsider2k5]

Well that's sick, but also completely unrelated, and nice baiting in there too. No one has even brought up the topic, let alone defended the guy.

 

The death penalty hasn't been brought up? It has in this thread. And that isn't anymore off topic than any of the random blame game in here.