Senator John Kerry Stars at Weasel Zippers (Worried about Federal Monies)

Dear Prager Friends:  Prager fan, California Cole,sends me some good stuff to add to our conservative angst about the spread of Marxism here in our America.   Today I found another Weasel Zippers blog article he had sent to me for  review. 

The article at WZ had to do with one of the most successful “Weasels” ever to have invaded the halls of government in Washington D.C.’s history, ……that is one of the champion politicians of any political persuasion ever to  occupy a  totally empty suit but with command of a very loud voice……who else but JFK……

“[Do Republicans want a] government too small to give America’s auto industry and all its workers a second chance to fight for their survival? Taxes too low to invest in the research that creates jobs and industries and fills the Treasury with the revenue that educates our children, cures disease, and defends our country?” he said in remarks to the Center for American Progress.

“We have to get past slogans and soundbites, reason together and talk in real terms about how America can do its best,” he added

……..John F. Kerry  poses as a Senator from Massachusetts.    Click here for your complete Weasel results: 

http://weaselzippers.us/2011/01/11/john-kerry-warns-republicans-we-need-a-bloated-federal-government/

Let’ Not Forget the Marxist Ring at NPR, CPB Your and My Taxes Support!

Shuffling at NPR after Juan Williams firing:

“On Thursday NPR released the results of its internal review of the firing of Juan Williams. A New York law firm pronounced –surprise– that the taxpayer-funded radio network’s actions had been “legal.” The sole casualty was the network’s head of news, Ellen Weiss, tossed under the bus and off the payroll. NPR’s CEO Vivian Schiller lost her 2010 bonus as a sort of make-weight to a hilarious episode in faux corporate governance.

Read all of NPR’s own reporting on the shakeup at HQ, including this wonderful takeaway at the very end of the piece: ‘[Weiss] will be replaced temporarily by Margaret Low Smith, NPR’s vice president for programming. The two executives joined NPR on the same week in 1982.”

Read more from this article by Hugh Hewitt at Townhall.com, sent to me by Mark Waldeland ….click here:

http://townhall.com/columnists/HughHewitt/2011/01/07/defunding_npr_and_cpb

Not All at “Slate” Is Rational…..Where’s the Rightwing Media Claim Loughner was a Marxist?

Jacob Weisberg wrote the following article, “The Tea Party and the Tucson Tragedy”  at Leftwing, Slate:

“There’s something offensive, as well as pointless, about the politically charged inquiry into what might have been swirling inside the head of Jared Loughner. We hear that the accused shooter read The Communist Manifesto and liked flag-burning videos—good news for the right. Wait—he was a devotee of Ayn Rand and favored the gold standard, so he was a right-winger after all. Some assassinations embody an ideology, however twisted. Based on what we know so far, the Tucson killings look like more like politically tinged schizophrenia.

It is appropriate, however, to consider what was swirling outside Loughner’s head. To call his crime an attempted assassination is to acknowledge that it appears to have had a political and not merely a personal context. That context wasn’t Islamic radicalism, Puerto Rican independence, or anarcho-syndicalism. It was the anti-government, pro-gun, xenophobic populism that flourishes in the dry and angry climate of Arizona. Extremist shouters didn’t program Loughner, in some mechanistic way, to shoot Gabrielle Giffords. But the Tea Party movement did make it appreciably more likely that a disturbed person like Loughner would react, would be able to react, and would not be prevented from reacting, in the crazy way he did.

At the core of the far right’s culpability is its ongoing attack on the legitimacy of U.S. government—a venomous campaign not so different from the backdrop to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Then it was focused on “government bureaucrats” and the ATF. This time it has been more about Obama’s birth certificate and health care reform. In either case, it expresses the dangerous idea that the federal government lacks valid authority. It is this, rather than violent rhetoric per se, that is the most dangerous aspect of right-wing extremism.

Often the two issues are blurred together, because if government is illegitimate, rebellion is an appropriate response (hence the Colonial costumes). Conservative entertainers like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin like to titillate their audiences with hints of justified violence, including frequent reminders that they are armed and dangerous. Palin went so far as to put a target on someone who subsequently got shot. Whether or not the man who fired the gun was inspired by Palin isn’t the point. The point is that you shouldn’t paint targets on people, even in metaphor, or jest.

Guns are also at the heart of how the right’s ideology enabled Loughner. Tea Partiers often frame the right to bear arms as a necessary check on federal despotism. “You know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies,” said Sharron Angle of Nevada, who nearly defeated the majority leader of the U.S. Senate in neighboring Nevada. In practical terms, easy access to firearms empowers extremists and crazies to challenge government authority at whim. The National Rifle Association position that any attempt to regulate the ownership of firearms is a violation of the Constitution has prevailed both politically and through the courts. That means that there are few things simpler than for someone to walk into a sporting goods store, as Loughner apparently did, buy a dangerous weapon, and carry it concealed to political meetings. How should politicians protect themselves from nuts with guns? By arming themselves, of course. Absent permissive firearm laws, nowhere more lax than in Arizona, Loughner might still have been able to get a gun. But he couldn’t have done it quite so easily.

First you rile up psychotics with inflammatory language about tyranny, betrayal, and taking back the country. Then you make easy for them to get guns. But if you really want trouble, you should also make it hard for them to get treatment for mental illness. I don’t know if Loughner had health insurance, but he falls into a pool of people who often go uninsured—not young enough to be covered by parents (until the health-care bill’s coverage of twentysomethings kicked in a few months ago), not old enough for Medicare, not poor enough for Medicaid. If such a person happens to have a history of mental illness, he will be effectively uninsurable. To get treatment, he actually has to commit a crime. If Republicans succeed in repealing the Obama health care bill, that’s how it will remain.

Again, none of this says that Tea Party caused the Tucson tragedy, only that its politics increased the odds of something like it happening. It was in criticizing writers on his own side for their naivete about communism that George Orwell wrote, “So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.” Today it is the right that amuses itself with violent chat and proclaims an injured innocence when its flammable words blow up.”

Leftist Writes Headline: The Shooting of Gabrielle Giffords….Is Encoded in Conservative DNA!

My argument regarding today’s  vile extremism from  the American Left, whether it emanates from Newweek, Time, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Guardian, Slate, the Nation, MSNBC, ABC or from nearly every American university and college is that these institutions have become the cathedrals of today’s Marxism, America’s new Establishment Religion.  

As with the jihadists of aggressive,  vile Islam,  only the result counts.   These are True Believers fanatically and/or  passively devoted to a religion which at its core is NOT DEMOCRACY or the democratic process, but autocracy and the autocratic process to create the dictatorship of making people become ‘equal’.

With nearly all aggressive religions, only THE GOAL matters.   The sacred goal will require devotion and sacrifice.

Dennis Prager offers a number of adages he believes explains the Left well…..

“Being on the Left means you never have to say you’re sorry.”

“Clarity of our best friend”.

“Truth does not matter to the Marxist Left.”

“The Left is fixated on shutting down the Right.

“There is no intellectual honesty on the Left.”

“The bigger the govenment, the smaller the citizen”…….The statement which in my view best decribes the basic battle   

Today, Dennis Prager referred to Michael Tomasky a Marxist writer at Guardian.co.uk. as an example of a writing “out of bounds.”  

  Here is the headline to Tomasky’s  article in yesterdays Guardian:   “In the United States, where hate rules at the ballot box, this tragedy hs been coming for a long time.”

Tomasky continues with the  subhead:  ” THE SHOOTIING OF GABRIELLE GIFFORDS MAY LEAD TO THE TEMPORARY HIBERNATION OF RIGHTWING RAGE, BUT IT IS ENCODED IN CONSERVATIVE DNA”.    (emphasis mine)

It is my belief through observation that this Tomasky ‘syndrome’, (a human disease whereby the victim  suffers a paranoia causing an irrational hate for anything non-Marxist)  has infected the majority of writers graduating from American and British universities since 1969.

Dennis after reading the above statement,  puzzled over his own DNA development, “I’m a Jew born in New York…..so much for my DNA.”

America’s Hate Machine in 2011 Comes from the Marxist Left Engines of our Universities

………….and so special   Thanks must go out to those Liberals who have the courage to speak out, as free Americans and  honest human beings,  against the hysterics of hate stirred by contemporary Marxist extremists now dominating the American news media. 

Thank you, Debra Saunders and the San Francisco Chronicle  for this article below, and thank you especially, Jack Shafer at Slate for your contribution to sanity despite the frenzy from the Left to poison any breezes, no matter how gentle and pure, which challenges Marxist authoritarianism.   Thank you   Steve Malzberg for your reminder of President Obama’s comment.

Nearly everything politically incendiary in America today  comes from Leftwing attacks on conservatives.   Please rewind your minds to the verbal atrocities from  Leftwing America, its universities and media since the election of George W. Bush, November 2000.   Please remember the ficticious scenarios  assaulting  that president and his vice president starting with “Bush lied.  People died”.   Remember the Leftwing movies called documentaries and Oliver Stone’s “JFK” implicating  totally non-existent conservative conspiracies endangering America’s democracy, all phantom…..all Leftwing lies.

When in reality the REAL, IN YOUR FACE THREAT TO AMERICAN DEMOCRACY is the massive growth of THE STATE AND THE RESULTING DIMINISHMENT OF THE CITIZEN by government fiat and maneuver called MARXISTM! 

Americans have every reason to be angry at this Obama administration and its propagandists…..those who smear instead of debate or make public their Leftwing views.

America’s freedom is in jeaopardy because of its Democrat Party’s  toying with this political atrocity.

Please read:              “As Country Mourns, Media Plays up Partisanship”       by Debra Saunders

“How do we react to the horrific murders of Christina Green, 9; John Roll, 63; Gabe Zimmerman, 30; Dorothy Morris, 76; Dorwin Stoddard, 76; and Phyllis Schneck, 79; and the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., and 13 others?

For one thing, we can refuse to engage in political opportunism. There’s been too much of that.

Before any relevant facts about the alleged shooter were in, New York Times’ columnist Paul Krugman posted a blog in which he admitted that he had no proof that the right was involved, but blamed Sarah Palin anyway for targeting the Democratic congresswoman’s district in “crosshairs.” MSNBC host Keith Olbermann did likewise.

Slate’s Jack Shafer put that trick to rest when he wrote, “For as long as I’ve been alive, crosshairs and bull’s-eyes have been an accepted part of the graphical lexicon when it comes to political debates. Such ‘inflammatory’ words as targeting, attacking, destroying, blasting, crushing, burying, knee-capping, and others have similarly guided political thought and action. Not once have the use of these images or words tempted me or anybody else I know to kill.”

There’s been opportunism on the right as well. Before the blood was even dry, some conservatives leaped at the opportunity to wallow in their beloved role as victim. On CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” radio talk-show host Steve Malzberg said that after he got a CNN alert about the shooting, he turned to his son and remarked, “Wait — five minutes, they’re going to blame talk radio.”

Malzberg offered up tit-for-tat quotes from the left — including President Obama’s remark, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” Proving what? We know that Palin’s “crosshairs” is a phony excuse to dish out blame. So why show that Republicans can be equally as craven?

I’ve decided not to use the accused shooter’s name because that’s what he wants.

As of this writing, there is nothing tying this loser to the tea party movement or the GOP — and he wasn’t shy about airing his views. Yes, he listed “Mein Kampf” as one of his favorite books. He also listed “The Communist Manifesto.” From what we know now, he appears to have no partisan leanings, only a sick desire for infamy.

Longtime friend Bryce Tierney told Mother Jones that the accused shooter became obsessed with Giffords after he attended a 2007 “Congress on Your Corner” event and she failed to answer his bizarre question, “What is government if words have no meaning?”

Tierney, who described the alleged shooter as nonideological, thinks his friend’s motive was “mainly to just promote chaos. He wanted the media to freak out about this whole thing.”

So how do the media react? Lacking any solid evidence tying conservative speech to the suspect, CNN reporters and media scolds pronounced that Arizona’s political “climate” was a factor. “Climate” in this story is a code word for: no proof.

With a precious 9-year-old girl and five others dead, and an energetic congresswoman and other shooting victims recovering, this country has suffered a tremendous loss. On the left and the right, some partisans are determined to use this tragedy to defame their political enemies.

It seems that as a country, we have forgotten how to mourn.”

More Details about Jared Loughner

  It is my view that the more we know about this young man, the more we might know about what went wrong.   We should not be surprised that America’s young has been raised to accept alcohol and drugs as an essential part of social entertainment.   We see murder everywhere in visual entertainments.   We accept drugs which are killers and in trade cause countless tens of thousands of deaths.

At this early stage of this miserable drama it appears this young boy was once healthy. It is a miracle or a tribute to the American soul or both, that these horrors arising from insanitites caused thrillingly by  our  young or old seeking chemical hallusinates for fun,  habit, and then in decay, haven’t yet become epidemically violent. 

On the other hand maybe it is violently epidemic but we haven’t wanted to take count of the drugged dead.   And, yes, I am making a guess, a very good one, I think, that foul drugs had something to do with this tragedy, a helluva better thought and guess than from those political gangsters at the New York Times, Senator Durbin, and Sheriff Dupnik claiming Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Tea Party folks, and all of the other Republicans worried about the catastrophic national and state debt crisis and the impending collapse of the American dollar.

We are NOT a happy lot for what these Democrats have caused our America.   It is inherent in American conservatism to believe the process is more important that the end goal.   Unlike the Marxist oriented American Left, the conservative process is based on rational not racist persuasions for our cause, on peace and not violence.    We know restoring democratic and free enterprise America is a better cause than the Left’s dream of the forced equality of Marxism…..Obama’s apparent dream for “Change we’ve been waiting for.”

The more details here was written by Ed Morrissey at HotAir:

“Among the tragedies of mass murders is the bitter truth that the murderer will often for a time become more famous than the victims.  Perhaps that is especially true with true lunatics, as the public struggles to understand exactly what triggered the murder spree.  That will be the case for at least the next few days as more details emerge about Jared Lee Loughner and the very strange life he led in the years prior to killing at least six people and gravely wounding several others, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson.

Today, the Daily News reports that Loughner may have had an “alarming altar” consisting of a skull in a flowerpot, lending a “chilling occult dimension” to the attempted assassination:

A sinister shrine reveals a chilling occult dimension in the mind of the deranged gunman accused of shooting a member of Congress and 19 others.

Hidden within a camouflage tent behind Jared Lee Loughner’s home sits an alarming altar with a skull sitting atop a pot filled with shriveled oranges.

A row of ceremonial candles and a bag of potting soil lay nearby, photos reveal.

Experts on Sunday said the elements are featured in the ceremonies of a number of occult groups.

Earlier reports had pegged Loughner as an outspoken atheist, which makes this a little contradictory.  It reminds us to keep our minds open and to refrain from jumping to conclusions — even about the “alarming altar.”  The Daily News has a picture of the “altar,” which looks less than described, although the DN has a big, red “EXCLUSIVE” ribbon across the top left corner.  It might be an “altar,” or it could be the remains of an old party, or just some junk.

The AP reports with less breathlessness about Loughner’s 9/11 Trutherism:

For a time, Loughner drank heavily, to the point of poisoning himself, the friends said. Once, during school lunch break as a junior, he downed so much tequila that he came back to class, within five minutes passed out cold, had to be rushed to the hospital and “almost died,” one friend said.

Mistrust of government was Loughner’s defining conviction, the friends said. He believed the U.S. government was behind 9/11, and worried that governments were maneuvering to create a unified monetary system (“a New World Order currency” one friend said) so that social elites and bureaucrats could control the rest of the world.

On his YouTube page, he listed among his favorite books “Animal Farm” and “Brave New World” — two novels about how authorities control the masses. Other books in the wide-ranging list included “Mein Kampf,” ”The Communist Manifesto,” ”Peter Pan” and Aesop’s Fables.

More to the point, though, they lead with the fact that Loughner has a particular and personal grudge against Giffords from more than three years ago:

At an event roughly three years ago, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords took a question from Jared Loughner, the man accused of trying to assassinate her and killing six other people. According to two of his high school friends the question was essentially this: “What is government if words have no meaning?”

Loughner was angry about her response — she read the question and didn’t have much to say.

The portrait that the evidence thus far paints is of a nutcase with a grudge, whose lunacy utterly defies political categorization.  If people had waited a couple of days before jumping to conclusions, they could have saved themselves a lot of embarrassment.

Update: A couple of more links this morning on Loughner’s background courtesy of Allahpundit.  The first comes from the Wall Street Journal that reports that he was “fixated” with Giffords, mainly with the same data already known:

Accused gunman Jared Lee Loughner appeared to have been long obsessed with U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

A safe at Mr. Loughner’s home contained a form letter from Ms. Giffords’ office thanking him for attending a 2007 “Congress on your Corner” event in Tucson. The safe also held an envelope with handwritten notes, including the name of Ms. Giffords, as well as “I planned ahead,” “My assassination,” and what appeared to be Mr. Loughner’s signature, according to an FBI affidavit. …

Mr. Loughner had complained to a friend about how he was treated by the Arizona lawmaker during an event several years ago, which aggravated Mr. Loughner, according to the friend.

As for his politics, no one got much of a sense of them except for his “frustration” with the government:

“All he did was play video games and play music,” said Tommy Marriotti, a high school friend. Mr. Marriotti said much of Mr. Loughner’s free time was devoted to the school band. He wasn’t especially political, Mr. Marriotti said, though he expressed frustration with the Bush Administration.

Mother Jones provides some testimonial corroboration for the fixation:

Loughner would occasionally mention Giffords, according to Tierney: “It wasn’t a day-in, day-out thing, but maybe once in a while, if Giffords did something that was ridiculous or passed some stupid law or did something stupid, he related that to people. But the thing I remember most is just that question. I don’t remember him stalking her or anything.” Tierney notes that Loughner did not display any specific political or ideological bent: “It wasn’t like he was in a certain party or went to rallies…It’s not like he’d go on political rants.” But Loughner did, according to Tierney, believe that government is “fucking us over.” He never heard Loughner vent about about the perils of “currency,” as Loughner did on one YouTube video he created.

Meanwhile, don’t miss Michelle’s retrospective on the Left’s use of violent imagery over the last decade.

Update II: Because apparently a blogger or two can’t read for comprehension, let me state again that it appears that Loughner was neither a “righty” or a “lefty,” but an “outie” — as in outer space on the political spectrum.  He’s a lunatic.  The Truther issue appears on the fringe of both sides.”

Order of the American Left: “Nothing is Sacred to the Left except Its Immunity from Insult!”

This article was published at Townhall.com.

For  previous articles by Dennis Prager please go to Townhall.com.   The Dennis Prager show here in the Twin Cities  is at 1280 AM, 11:00  AM to 2:00 PM, Monday through Friday.   Programs can be picked up by podcast.   For more information, again, please go to Townhall.com.

“To the Left, Nothing is Sacred Except…..”

“A number of well-known spokesmen on the left have voiced reservations not only about the Republican decision to have members of Congress — both Republicans and Democrats — read the Constitution aloud at the opening of the latest session of Congress. They have also voiced reservations about the American veneration of the Constitution.

Three examples:

In a recent appearance on MSNBC, Washington Post staff writer Ezra Klein said: “The issue with the Constitution is that the text is confusing because it was written more than a hundred years ago and what people believe it says differs from person to person.”

Joy Behar asked her guests on CNN’s Headline News, “Do you think this Constitution-loving is getting out of hand?”

Congressman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., complained that “They are reading it (the Constitution) like a sacred text.”

What troubles Klein, Behar and Nadler?

The answer is that for leftism — though not necessarily for every individual who considers himself a leftist — there are no sacred texts. The two major examples are the Constitution and the Bible.

One cannot understand the left without understanding this. The demotion of the sacred in general and of sacred texts specifically is at the center of leftist thinking.

The reason is that elevating any standard, any religion, any text to the level of the sacred means that that it is above any individual. Therefore, what any one individual or even society believes is of secondary importance to that which is deemed sacred. If, to cite the most obvious example, the Bible is sacred, then I have to revere it more than I revere my own feelings in assessing what is right and wrong.

But for the left, what is right and wrong is determined by every individual’s feelings, not by anything above the individual.

This is a major reason why the left, since Karl Marx, has been so opposed to Judeo-Christian religion. For Judaism and Christianity, God and the Bible are above the self. Indeed, Western civilization was built on the idea that the individual and society are morally accountable to God and to the moral demands of that book. That was the view, incidentally, of every one of the Founders including deists such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.

This is entirely unacceptable to the left. As Marx and Engels said, “Man is God, and God is man.” Therefore, society must rid itself of the sacred, i.e., God and the Bible. Then each of us (or the society, party or judiciary) takes the place of God and the Bible.

Morality is then no longer a God-given objective fact; it becomes a human-created subjective opinion. And one no longer needs to consult an external source to know right and wrong, only one’s heart. We are then no longer accountable to God for transgressions, only to ourselves.

That is why when there is God-talk on the left, it is usually about “the God that is within each of us,” not a God external to, let alone above, us, as Judaism and Christianity have always taught.

This explains the belief that is universally held on the left that the Constitution is an “evolving text,” meaning that it says what anyone (on the left) wants it to say.

Conservatives, on the other hand, do not share this view. They do not believe the Constitution has something to say about everything they believe in. While the left sees the right to abortion in the Constitution (because the left believes in the right to abortion), those who oppose abortion do not believe that the Constitution prohibits abortion. They believe that the Constitution is silent on the issue. Precisely because the right does believe the Constitution is to be treated as sacred, it does not claim that whatever it supports is in the Constitution or that whatever it opposes is unconstitutional.

There are humble individuals and arrogant individuals on the right and on the left. But there is no arrogance like leftist arrogance. If you hold a Leftist position, you know that you are smarter, wiser and more moral not only than conservatives, but more so than the Bible, more so than the Constitution, indeed often more so than everyone who lived before you.

Same-sex marriage is a perfect example. The fact that neither Moses nor the Hebrew prophets, nor Jesus nor the Buddha nor any great secular humanist thinker ever advocated defining marriage as between members of the same sex does not cause the left to rethink its advocacy of same-sex marriage; it only proves to them how morally superior they are to Moses, Jesus, the prophets and everyone else who lived before them.

That is why we must to treat the Constitution as sacred text. Because the bottom line is this: If it is not regarded as sacred, it is nothing more than what anyone believes about any social issue. Which is precisely what the left wants it to be — providing, of course, that the “anyone” is a liberal.

For the left, there are no sacred texts. There are only sacred (liberal) feelings.”

Rep. James Clyburn’s “Wisdom”: Reading the Constitution Stirred Tucson Event

James Clyburn  and Hillary Clinton shared their wisdom with thoughts about the terrible tragedy in Tucson.   Both videos were found at HotAir and at RealClearPolitics.  Article about Rep. Clyburn was printed at HotAir.

“In the race to see which politico makes the biggest ass out of himself over the shooting spree in Tucson, Arizona, we can report that so far the frontrunners appear to be Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina and former Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, both Democrats.  In a rambling interview on the radio with Ed Schultz, Clyburn complains about people attempting to “delegitimize the President” and suggested that the reading of the Constitution in Congress last week had something to do with the shooting.  Real Clear Politics has the audio:

“All [of] this stuff taking place in the Chambers the other day, when the Constitution was being read — all that stuff is uncalled for,” Rep. Clyburn (D-SC) told the Ed Schultz radio program.

Clyburn says there may be a “direct link” between Sharron Angle’s “Second Amendment remedies” comment and the reading of the Constitution with the attempted murder of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords over the weekend.

Of course, no one has ever heard the Constitution without committing a murder spree, so obviously Clyburn is on the right track here.  As far as “All that stuff about delegitimizing the President of the United States, that was uncalled for,” one may wonder whether Clyburn was as particular about that in 2001 as he is in 2011.  Wonder no longer:

The November election points to serious problems in our voting process in America.  We consider ourselves the premiere democracy in the world and expect other nations to emulate our example.  Our government sends officials overseas to “monitor” elections to insure their veracity.  And yet, the 2000 election in America will go down in history as one so rife with errors that the true outcome will remain forever in question.

 

Hillary  Clinton has strong words of wisdom to share about the Tucson event with the American Public also:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/01/10/hillary_clinton_crazy_voices_on_tv_contributed_to_giffords_shooting.html

Idiots, Competing for Idiot Championships, Look to Fix Blame for Tucson Massacre

“It’s now a major secondary story in the Giffords shooting: who or what’s to blame for the carnage? It began almost as soon as the story broke, when fingers were pointed quite prominently even before anything was known about the shooter except that he was a young man, and that he had been taken into custody.

The anti-gun contingent sprang to action almost immediately, as did the anti-Palin faction and a particular loud-mouthed Democratic sheriff, in marked contrast to the pleas from the MSM and the left for verbal restraint in speculating about the motives of the Fort Hood killer.

Almost all the blaming in the Giffords shooting comes from the left against the right. And this despite the fact that Giffords, a Blue Dog Democrat, could just as likely have been a political target of either side, since she stands roughly in the middle.

It would be easier to judge the finger-pointers as impartial if they were equally incensed against rhetoric and images from the left as from the right. A display of evenhandedness would at least serve to establish some sort of arguable sincerity. For example, when campaigner Obama advised supporters to bring a gun to the fight if the opposition brought a knife, wouldn’t he have been to blame, too, for upping the ante?

Or do mere words lack the power to ignite acts such as Saturday’s shooting? (If one is to believe a friend of Loughner’s, the killer himself thought that “words mean nothing.”) And if mere words have no such power, what does?

I don’t pretend to have the answer to what motivates violence of this sort, except to say that it is highly unlikely to have a single cause. But common sense tells us that many if not most of such shooters are propelled by primarily private demons. Yes, they are not isolated from societal influences in general, and words of political rhetoric are part of that. But such words are hardly the only part, or even a major part.

Was this a politically motivated assassination, anyway? Giffords was indeed a political target, but she was hardly a major political figure. Politicians in general have a special visibility, something they share with celebrities (think John Lennon and Andy Warhol), and which can make them targets for the homicidal crazies among us, and not always for primarily political reasons.

Political assassins tend to be of two types: the first is the coldly calculating killer (or co-conspirators) motivated by a strategic move for power and/or a political vendetta, and the second is the lone crazy person. Some, such as Lee Harvey Oswald and Sarah Jane Moore (remember her?) inhabit territory somewhere between the two (they also happen to inhabit territory on the left, a fact most leftist commentators tend to conveniently forget).

The first group do have primarily political motivations, but they are highly unlikely to have been motivated or even affected at all by casually inflammatory rhetoric. Their provocations are of a deeper sort.

How often have this first sort of killer or killers been behind political assassinations in the United States? Well, it depends who you ask; Kennedy conspiracists are adamant that such plotters were behind Oswald, and if theories about the mob’s involvement in the 1933 Mayor Cermak slaying are true, that would be another example of a group effect. Lincoln’s assassination featured a number of Confederate sympathizers who worked together and planned to take over the government, as well.

But more often in this country, assassins are just plain crazy. Maybe not legally insane — few qualify for that designation — but crazy in the vernacular sense of unhinged and obviously out of touch with reality. As disturbed individuals, their thinking is idiosyncratic and unpredictable, and their propensity for violence is sometimes telegraphed and noted ahead of time, although often formless and quite general. More importantly, what finally tips them over the edge into action can in many cases never be known, and appears almost arbitrary from the outside.

Who could have ever guessed, for example, the trajectory of John Hinckley, Reagan’s wannabee assassin whose bizarre obsession with Jodie Foster in the movie Taxi Driver led to the near-fatal shooting of the president? Loughner’s writings and YouTube videos so far indicate that his real motivations are likely to have been at least as idiosyncratic, bizarre, and incomprehensible as Hinckley’s, and probably more so. In fact, Loughner’s mind may be so disordered that he could end up making Hinckley look like a model of rationality in comparison.

Those who linked Loughner’s act to inflammatory Tea Party rhetoric didn’t want to wait to find out what they were dealing with. After all, political hay was to be made. If they had been a little more judicious, they would have discovered that this particular killer had been telegraphing his disordered and chaotic thinking for quite some time, thoroughly frightening quite a few people and institutions in the process, although all seemed powerless to stop the train wreck in the making.

But political points aside, what is the possible role of heated political rhetoric, be it on the left or the right, in motivating violent acts such as Loughner’s? It’s entirely unknown, but there’s no particular reason to believe such speech is especially influential. The first category of shooters — the cold-blooded and rational political assassins, out for political gain—are highly unlikely to be swayed by it. The second — the crazies, for want of a better term — can be motivated by nearly anything, and conventional political rhetoric tends to play only a small part in their confused and rambling diatribes.

Mere words are hardly enough to incite an act so extreme and so vicious, whatever the strength of one’s political convictions, and however great the anger at the opposition. Most people understand figures of speech, whether the mention of guns be Sarah Palin’s “reload” statements or the president’s campaign call for bringing guns to knife fights, and most homicidal lunatics are motivated by something far deeper, and far more perverse.”

Article above was found at Pajamas Media and written by neo-neocom.

The Education of The Tucson Shooter? We Need to Know

AZ Shooter’s High School Used Curriculum Founded by  Bill Ayers

 Back in 1995 this program was funded by none other than the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and — Barack Obama!    

(WND) — Jared Lee Loughner, the suspected gunman in Saturday’s Arizona shooting, attended a high school that is part of a network in which teachers are trained and provided resources by a liberal group founded by Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers and funded by President Obama, WND has learned.

The group, Small Schools Workshop, has been led by a former top communist activist who is an associate of Ayers. Obama provided the group with funds in the 1990s when he worked at an education reform group alongside Ayers.

Loughner attended Mountain View High School, which is part of Arizona’s Morana Unified School District. Since 2003, Mountain View has been part of what is known as the Smaller Learning Community, a network of schools that have been restructured to create a more personalized learning environment where students often have the same teachers and fellow students from grade to grade.

Mountain View was part of the Smaller Learning Communities throughout Loughner’s entire attendance there, from 9th grade until he withdrew without graduating before his senior year.

The high school received grants to research the concepts of Smaller Learning Communities and work to implement them.

Ayers himself is considered one of the fathers of the Smaller Learning Communities, often providing lectures to schools on the subject. For example, a 2001 lecture at Lewis & Clark College featured Ayers at a workshop entitled, “A Simple Justice: Building Smaller Learning Communities to Know Our Youth.”

Smaller Learning Communities had its conceptual genesis in 1991, when Ayers founded a group, Small Schools Workshop, which provides training and resources to teach schools on how to implement the Smaller Learning Communities.

Small Schools Workshop is a recommended agent for how to implement smaller schools curriculum, including at Loughner’s alma mater, Mountain View.

Ayers’ Small Schools Workshop has the stated goal of providing support for teachers who want to create smaller learning environments. Ayers reportedly recruited a radical activist, Mike Klonsky, to head the Workshop. Klonsky still serves as director.

The Small School Workshop originally was associated with the University of Illinois in Chicago, where Klonsky previously taught in the education department alongside Ayers, who retired from the university last year. The group was headquartered for a time inside the university’s department of education building.

In 1995, with Obama as its chairman, the newly formed Chicago Annenberg Challenge, or CAC, a school reform organization, gave the Workshop a grant of $175,000. The CAC provided another $482,662 to the Workshop over the next few years.”

(We thank California Cole and Weasel Zippers for the above article.)

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“Shooting Subject’s Nihilism Rose with Isolation”….  by Justin Pritchard at Associated Press:

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — At an event roughly three years ago, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords took a question from Jared Loughner, the man accused of trying to assassinate her and killing six other people. According to two of his high school friends the question was essentially this: “What is government if words have no meaning?”

Loughner was angry about her response — she read the question and didn’t have much to say.

“He was like … ‘What do you think of these people who are working for the government and they can’t describe what they do?'” one friend told The Associated Press on Sunday. “He did not like government officials, how they spoke. Like they were just trying to cover up some conspiracy.”

Both friends spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they wanted to avoid the publicity surrounding the case. To them, the question was classic Jared: confrontational, nonsensical and obsessed with how words create reality.

The friends’ comments paint a picture bolstered by other former classmates and Loughner’s own Internet postings: that of a social outcast with nihilistic, almost indecipherable beliefs steeped in mistrust and paranoia.

“If you call me a terrorist then the argument to call me a terrorist is Ad hominem,” the 22-year-old wrote Dec. 15 in a wide-ranging screed that was posted in video form and ended with nearly the same question his friends said he posed to Giffords: “What’s government if words don’t have meaning?”

On Sunday, Loughner was charged in the shootings a day earlier at a political event outside a Tucson supermarket. Aside from the six killed, 14 people were injured. Doctors were optimistic about Giffords’ chances for survival.

Loughner had at least one other contact with Giffords. Investigators said they carried out a search warrant at Loughner’s home and seized a letter addressed to him from Giffords’ congressional stationery in which she thanked him for attending a “Congress on your Corner” event at a mall in Tucson in 2007. Saturday’s shooting occurred at a similar event.

Other evidence seized from his home included an envelope from a safe with messages such as “I planned ahead,” ”My assassination” and the name “Giffords” next to what appears to be Loughner’s signature. Police say he purchased the Glock pistol used in the attack in November.

Loughner lives with his parents about a five-minute drive from the shootings, in a middle-class neighborhood lined with desert landscaping and palm trees. Sheriff’s deputies blocked off much of the street Sunday.

Neighbors said Loughner kept to himself and was often seen walking his dog, almost always wearing a hooded sweat shirt and listening to his iPod.

His high school friends said they fell out of touch with Loughner and last spoke to him around March, when one of them was going to set up some bottles in the desert for target practice and Loughner suggested he might come along. It was unusual — Loughner hadn’t expressed an interest in guns before — and his increasingly confrontational behavior was pushing them apart. He would send bizarre text messages, but also break off contact for weeks on end.

“We just started getting sketched out about him,” the friend said. It was the first time he’d felt that way.

Around the same time, Loughner’s behavior also began to worry officials at Pima Community College, where Loughner began attending classes in 2005, the school said in a release.

Between February and September, Loughner “had five contacts with PCC police for classroom and library disruptions,” the statement said. He was suspended in September 2010 after college police discovered a YouTube video in which Loughner claimed the college was illegal according to the U.S. Constitution. He withdrew voluntarily the following month, and was told he could return only if, among other things, a mental health professional agreed he did not present a danger, the school said.

It was at the college that Loughner had posed his question to Giffords about government and words, one friend said. A college spokesman said Giffords often has used school property for open events; a Giffords spokesman said he was not sure at which event the exchange would have taken place.

Loughner’s alienation from his friends was gradual.

The Loughner they met when he was a freshman at Mountain View High School may have been socially awkward, but he was generally happy and fun to be around. The crew smoked marijuana every day, and when they weren’t going to concerts or watching movies they talked about the meaning of life and dabbled in conspiracy theories.

For a time, Loughner drank heavily, to the point of poisoning himself, the friends said. Once, during school lunch break as a junior, he downed so much tequila that he came back to class, within five minutes passed out cold, had to be rushed to the hospital and “almost died,” one friend said.

Mistrust of government was Loughner’s defining conviction, the friends said. He believed the U.S. government was behind 9/11, and worried that governments were maneuvering to create a unified monetary system (“a New World Order currency” one friend said) so that social elites and bureaucrats could control the rest of the world.

On his YouTube page, he listed among his favorite books “Animal Farm” and “Brave New World” — two novels about how authorities control the masses. Other books in the wide-ranging list included “Mein Kampf,” ”The Communist Manifesto,” ”Peter Pan” and Aesop’s Fables.

Over time, Loughner became increasingly introspective — what one of the friends described as a “nihilistic rut.”

An ardent atheist, he began to characterize people as sheep whose free will was being sapped by the government and the monotony of modern life.

“He didn’t want people to wake up and do the same thing every day. He wanted more chaos, he wanted less regularity,” one friend said.

The friends said Loughner told anyone who would listen that the world we see does not exist, that words have no meaning — and that the only way to derive meaning was during sleep. Loughner began obsessing about a practice called lucid dreaming, in which people try to actively control their sleeping world.

Several people who knew Loughner at community college said he did not engage in political discussions — in fact, he didn’t talk much at all, and when he did classmates cringed.

“He made a lot of the people really uncomfortable, especially the girls in the class,” said Steven Cates, who attended an advanced poetry writing class with Loughner at Pima Community College last spring. Though he struck up a passing friendship with Loughner, he said a group of other students went to the teacher to complain about Loughner at one point.

Another poetry student, Don Coorough, said Loughner read a poem about bland tasks such as showering, going to the gym and riding the bus in wild “poetry slam” style — “grabbing his crotch and jumping around the room.”

When other students, always seated, read their poems, Coorough said Loughner “would laugh at things that you wouldn’t laugh at.” After one woman read a poem about abortion, “he was turning all shades of red and laughing,” and said, “Wow, she’s just like a terrorist, she killed a baby,” Coorough said.

“He appeared to be to me an emotional cripple or an emotional child,” Coorough said. “He lacked compassion, he lacked understanding and he lacked an ability to connect.”

Cates said Loughner “didn’t have the social intelligence, but he definitely had the academic intelligence.”

“He was very into the knowledge aspect of school. He was really into his philosophy classes and he was really into logic and English. And he would get frustrated by the dumbed-down words people used in class,” Cates said.

Loughner expressed his interest in grammar and logic on the Internet as he made bizarre claims — such as that the Mars rover and the space shuttle missions were faked.

He frequently used “if-then” constructions in making nonsensical arguments. For instance: “If the living space is able to maintain the crews life at a temperature of -454F then the human body is alive in the NASA Space Shuttle. The human body isn’t alive in the NASA Space Shuttle. Thus, the living space isn’t able to maintain the crews life at a temperature of -454F.”

Loughner also said in one video that government is “implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar.” He described America’s laws as “treasonous” and said that “every human who’s mentally capable is always able to be treasurer of their new currency.”

Loughner described himself as a U.S. military recruit in the video, but the Army released a statement saying he tried to enlist but was rejected. The statement said under federal privacy law, no reason could be specified.

In October 2007, Loughner was cited in Pima County for possession of drug paraphernalia, which was dismissed after he completed a diversion program, according to online records.

A year later he was charged with an unknown “local charge” in Marana near Tucson. That charge was also dismissed following the completion of a diversion program in March 2009, the Arizona Daily Star reported.

After reviewing this blog assemblage, I am adding the following interview of Zach Oster, very likely Jared Loughner’s  last close friend…..which I believe will help understanding this story.

http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/jared-loughners-friend-says-suspect-did-not-watch-tv-disliked-the-news_b48040