I think we might have been a little too hard on Sarah Palin lately. I would like to suggest that she take a vacation to someplace warm. Hey how about Australia?

Come on, we all have to admit that Sister Sarah has had just about the WORST couple of weeks that any of us could imagine.

As a matter of fact, according to the Globe, the Wasilla Ice Queen has recently had a MAJOR meltdown.

You know I always take what the tabloids say with a grain of salt, but this one definitely has the ring of truth to it.  I have very little doubt that the Grizzled Mama has dealt a great deal of stress these last few weeks, and from what certain sources have told me in the past about how she handles bad news this sounds quite believable.

Add to that the increased stress which certainly must result from learning that the world now knows that Todd likes his rubdowns to include happy endings, and you have a perfect storm of bad news which could easily result in a complete nervous breakdown.

What better time to head off for a relaxing vacation in sunny Australia? After all how could anything possibly go wrong while relaxing on the white sand beaches and hanging out with the friendly laid back blokes from the land down under?

Under Australian law, inciting violence is a serious crime: an offense which could even trigger the prosecution of members of the US political class and mainstream media who called for the assassination of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, according to his attorney.

"Our main concern is really the possible extradition to the US," he said. "We've been troubled by the sort of rhetoric that has come out of various commentators and principally Republican politicians — Sarah Palin and the like — saying Mr. Assange should be executed, assassinated."

Stary added: "Certainly if Sarah Palin or any of those other politicians come to Australia, for whatever purpose, then we can initiate a private prosecution, and that's what we intend to do."

Oh.

So I guess Palin might consider crossing "visiting Australia" off of her bucket list. You know, for the time being at least.

Well what can I say?  Once you have attracted the incredible amount of bad karma that Sarah Palin has, there really is no good place to hide.

This is the video I wanted to post last night.

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One of the things I will miss the most about seeing Keith on Countdown weekday nights is hearing the compassion in his voice for those who are hurt, or discriminated against, or treated inhumanely.

He did a wonderful job of covering Gabby Giffords horrendous attack and her courageous recovery.  I hope that someday soon she comes to know how compassionately he discussed her situation, and how he spoke out against continuing to reinforce the kind of hateful environment which might inspire a similar attack in the future.

Gabby Giffords stands!

From the AP:

In the latest milestone in Gabrielle Giffords' recovery from a bullet wound to the brain, the congresswoman stood up and looked out a window even as preparations got under way for a move to Houston, where she'll undergo extensive mental and physical rehabilitation.

Her swift transition from an intensive care unit to a rehab center is based on the latest research, which shows the sooner rehab starts, the better patients recover.

Giffords' family hopes to move the Arizona congresswoman on Friday to TIRR Memorial Hermann hospital in Houston, where her husband lives and works as an astronaut.

"I am extremely hopeful at the signs of recovery that my wife has made since the shooting," Mark Kelly said in a statement released by Giffords' congressional office. The staff at University Medical Center in Tucson "has stabilized her to the point of being ready to move to the rehabilitation phase."

This is great news, and from what I hear Rep. Giffords recovery is almost unprecedented.

I wonder how much longer it will be before Gabby is able to speak and perhaps answer questions?

BTW you just know that, even with everything else going badly in her life, that Sarah Palin is truly concerned about just what Giffords might say.

Let's face it if, while lying in her hospital bed with her head swathed in bandages, Giffords were to condemn Palin's use of the crosshair map and even hint that such things might have lead to an atmosphere where people could be shot, Palin is beyond finished.

She must also be kind of worried about what THIS guy might say as well.

The suspect in the attack, Jared Loughner, 22, of Tucson, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Phoenix Wednesday, accused of attempting to assassinate Giffords and trying to kill two of her aides.

It does not include two murder charges listed in an earlier criminal complaint for the deaths of Giffords' aide Gabe Zimmerman, 30, and U.S. District Judge John Roll, 63. Those are potential death penalty charges and prosecutors said they require a more painstaking process. Additional charges are likely.

Well I for one hope for a very speedy recovery for Rep. Giffords and that someday she can walk back out onto the House floor to the raucous cheers of her fellow Representatives.

That is one tough lady.

No One Listened to Gabrielle Giffords. Update!

From Frank Rich for the New York Times:

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.”

Others on the right spent last week loudly protesting the politicization of tragedy. What was most revealing was how often they tried to rewrite the history of previous incidents having nothing to do with Loughner. A Palin aide claimed that her target map was only invoking a “surveyor’s symbol,” not gun sights. A Tucson Tea Party leader announced that the attack on Giffords’s office (never solved by the police) was probably caused by skateboarding kids. Mike Pence, a potential G.O.P. “values” candidate for president, told the C-Span audience that those bearing firearms at Congressional town hall meetings and Obama events (including one in Arizona that August of 2009) were no different from anti-Bush demonstrators “waving placards.”

This article is well worth your time.  Frank Rich dismisses the idea that "both sides do it," and gets to the meat of the problem. Which is that the vitriol and viciousness of those on the far right has not only intimidated many on the left, it has also managed to frighten those more moderate voices on the right from challenging the hateful rhetoric and encouraging a more cordial dialogue between both sides.

This is the world that Sarah Palin has gone out of her way to help create, and that is why she deserves to have her words attached to ANY act of violence which might have taken its inspiration from the heated political environment that we find ourselves in today.

Update: Sarah Jones of Politicususa has written a very compelling piece on this subject as well.  In my opinion it is a must read.  Here is a sample to whet you appetite:

Imagine if it were Islamic anti-government radicals who had been spreading the sort of lies and propaganda the GOP has when this brutal massacre occurred. How would the nation react to their attempts to distance themselves from their own words and graphics? How would the media and the American people respond to the rage of the Right if they were dressed as fundamentalist Muslims?

Rep. Gabrielle Gifford's cousin has a message for Sarah Palin.

Dear Sarah Palin:

I am writing today about how you are responding to and how you will respond to the assassination attempt on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the murders of six other people.

By way of introduction and background, I am a cousin of Congresswoman Giffords. I am also an ally of Dr. George Tiller, the Kansas doctor who provided abortion services and who was assassinated on May 31, 2009.

When the Congresswoman’s offices were vandalized after her vote on healthcare reform, I wrote to her. As I recall, I congratulated her on her strong spirit in the face of that attack and other threats. I told her that I was proud of her courage on behalf of health care reform and sorry that she had to show the same courage as those who provide health care to pregnant women who need abortions and other reproductive health care services. Both have been the subjects of hateful, vitriolic language. Both have been put in rifle crosshairs.

In the aftermath of the murder of Dr. Tiller and the attempted murder of Congresswoman Giffords, many have spoken out about the role that hateful language played or might have played in encouraging these acts of violence. Immediately after Congresswoman Giffords was shot, many people voiced concern about such things as your "Take Back the 20" map targeting congressional districts of those representatives, including Congresswoman Giffords, who voted for health care reform by placing their districts in the crosshairs of a gun sight. Commentators have also noted your advice to people disappointed in the outcome of the 2008 elections to “lock and load” and “don’t retreat, reload.”

As I am sure you are now aware, Congresswoman Giffords herself had expressed concern about your map in particular. She said: “We need to realize that the rhetoric, and the firing people up and ... for example, we're on Sarah Palin's targeted list, but the thing is, the way she has it depicted, we're in the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they've got to realize that there are consequences to that action...”

Your response so far, has been to defend the images and language you use. In an e-mail to Mr. Glenn Beck you said, “Our children will not have peace if politicos just capitalize on this to succeed in portraying anyone as inciting terror and violence.”

Ms. Palin, the moment calls for more than this. I am a strong supporter of the First Amendment and of your right to defend your words and to challenge those who seek to connect them to the assassination attempt and murders in Tucson, Arizona. I also know that there is often a very long distance between words and actions.

But even if your map and your language had nothing to do with these murders or any others that might occur in the future, a compassionate response would acknowledge that possibility and indicate a willingness, in her honor, in honor of the people who died, to consider this concern.

Whether or not you are willing to take this concern seriously, it is, nevertheless a critical moment to clarify your beliefs and principles. Now is the time to answer these questions and lead.
Do you believe it is appropriate to bring about political change in America through the use of or threat of violence?

When you suggest targeting candidates, use gun-sight crosshairs to do so, and speak repeatedly about guns, locking and reloading do you mean that violence is or could be properly used to encourage or ensure certain outcomes of elections or legislative votes?

If you do not mean literally that elected officials should be targeted with rifles and threatened by political activists armed with loaded weapons, what do you mean? What should politically frustrated Americans do when their views are not prevailing?

Throughout the course of history people have demonstrated that the most effective change comes through non-violent action. Many of us believe that the most courageous leaders and activists are those who are willing to be attacked for their beliefs not those who threaten to attack.

Ms. Palin, if you are among those who believe that political change can come about non-violently, without hate, violence, or the threat of violence, now would be an excellent time to say so.

(Source)

Yesterday it was pretty easy to spot the cable news outlet with the guilty conscience.

What was that old Sesame Street song?  "One of these things is NOT like the other, one of these things doesn't belong...."

(If you click on the image you can get a better look.)

Is this the face of evil? Update!

This is the mugshot of Jared Lee Loughner. (Update: Like many of you I also watched Rachel Maddow tonight and she explained that this is NOT Loughner's mugshot.  She also went on to debunk a number of other misunderstandings and conspiracy theories about this case.  I will write a post and embed the video first thing in the morning.)

I am not really somebody who believes in evil, but it is hard not to look at this visage, knowing what he did, and see anything else.

Of course without access to the kind of weaponry that Loughner had in his possession, even somebody as deeply disturbed as he appears to have been, could never have inflicted such devastation on so many innocent lives.

I can only hope that this sends a message to the lawmakers in this country about the need to carefully regulate who does, and who does not have access to such powerful instruments of death. 

Though perhaps that is too much to hope for.

Update: It looks like the Teabaggers have lost little time in turning this tragedy into an opportunity to raise funds.  That is almost as cold blooded as what Loughner did.

Update 2: Mother Jones has an interview with Loughner's close friend.

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 the perils of "currency," as Loughner did on one YouTube video he created.

And then there were the heroes.

Patricia Maisch, 61, with her husband John.

From the LA Times:

Patricia Maisch watched a gunman shoot a woman who was using her own body to shield her teenage daughter.

"I thought: 'I'm next. I'm next to her. He's going to shoot me. I'm next,'" she said in an interview Sunday.

The attacker, whom authorities identified as Jared Lee Loughner, fired a series of shots and began moving down the line of people who had been waiting for Giffords. He paused to reload after shooting the woman directly in front of Maisch.

"She was shot at least two times, once in the back and once in the arm," Maisch said.

Two men tackled the gunman, and they fell close to Maisch. She saw the shooter reach into his pants pocket for another ammunition clip, and she grabbed his hand. Then she knelt on his ankles to help subdue him.

Please click the link at the top and red the entire story.  This woman was amazing.

Then there was Rep. Gabby Gifford's newly hired intern who demonstrated amazing bravery and clarity of thought in the most extreme of circumstances.



I am not a religious person but it is hard not to call these two, and the others who ran to help despite putting themselves in harms way, anything but "angels."