Crongresswoman Shot: AZ

[redrum]

Just a short note to my little buddy Steve (in Buenos Aires) above. Buenos Dias mi amigo. Just wanted to update you on some new stuff - a FYI kinda thing. The Arizona shooter's voter registration form has surfaced. Guess what party he's with..... Did he sign up as a Democrat or Independent? Nope - (buzz) Wrong Answer..... I'll cut to the chase - tick tock tick tock.... wait for it, HERE WE GO !!! REPUBLICAN da da !!! - why doesn't that surprise me? Enjoy those hot summer days in BsAs little buddy, over and out for now. Dudester (keeping Steve informed with reality and facts)

dude, you can't seriously be blaming the shooting on the fact that he was a registered republican. that makes zero sense.

as another poster mentioned, the scumbags in washington are attempting to politicize this tragedy for their own gain and it's sickening. the bodies were still warm before the finger pointing began.

basically, this event will be used to exert tighter controls and more security on just about anything. it will create the false perception that we are now fighting against american born, home grown terrorists and thus need to strengthen the control grid.

this starts at home, plain and simple. from the looks of it, he did not have the most stable of upbringings.

 

[redrum]

Sad fact of the matter is politicians are politizing this tradgic event for their own self serving interests. When Hillary Clinton says this event was motivated by political reasons, I have to ask: how does she know?? Did she authorize the brain washing of this individual?? Did she have a little pow-wow after the shooting??? What also is bothersome is how politicians are starting to tell us to "tone down the rhetoric"... what rhetoric?? Ohhh they mean criticism of a piss poor job and the meltdown of our country?? They are so lucky to just be facing "rhetoric". Over two hundred years ago, we use to tar and feather that kind of walking garbage. Who are they to try and control our opinions of what governement should and shouldn't be responsible for? Never mind the illusion of a bi-partisian governement, no such thing exists. The only thing our fine establishment is doing is "divide and conquer". Anyone realize how upset they are at the other "party"?? ... democrats... republicans... tools!! What those people faced was a demented individual and nothing else... Should we limit our freedoms because of one person?? Should we stop trying to change (I mean really change, not the kind you get in a package) our governements actions to eventually take our Constitutional rights? We are in a foreign country, but that doesn't mean we stop being Americans... not democrats, nor republicans, but Americans. Only one kind. Much love.

amen brother. no, we should NOT give up our freedoms and our rights because of some nut job. that's the same mistake we're making with homeland security, TSA, the patriot act and the FAKE war on terror.

as i've posted many, many, many times on this board.

THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A DEMOCRAT AND A REPUBLICAN at the higher levels. THEY BOTH WORK FOR THE SAME TEAM. both parties take turns advancing the agenda of the banksters and the global elite.

why do you think goldman sachs funded both mccain and obama? They always fund both sides. It makes no difference who wins.

both parties take turns going from the private sector to the public sector and vice versa. while in public office they pass legislation that advances the agenda of their corporate masters. upon leaving the public sector, they return to work for their corporate scumbag bosses. and on and on it goes.

is it any wonder that obama recently appointed william daley as his chief of staff. who is this guy? only the former chief lobbyist for jp morgan chase. he's currently serving on the Operating and Executive Committees of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_M._Daley

and how about gene sperling? All he did was play a major role in lifting the legislation that contributed to the housing market crash. And for that he is awarded with the position of Director of the National Economic Council. We call this failing upwards.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Sperling

“As director of the NEC. Sperling was a principal negotiator with then-Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers of the Financial Modernization Act of 1999, also known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Gramm-Leach-Bliley repealed large portions of the depression-era Glass-Stegall Act allowing banks, securities firms and insurance companies to merge.[3] President Barack Obama believes that the repeal of Glass-Steagall helped cause the 2007 subprime mortgage financial crisis.[4]

Also in 1999, together with United States Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky, Sperling successfully negotiated and concluded the China-World Trade Organization agreement in Beijing, paving the way for China to enter the WTO in 2001.[5]

Sperling was the chief economic advisor for Hillary Clinton during her presidential campaign.[6][7]

According to Bloomberg News, Sperling earned $887,727 from Goldman Sachs in 2008 and $158,000 for speeches mostly to financial companies.”


In short, both of these guys are as insider as it gets. Nothing has changed. Nothing….except that that the corruption continues to become more blatant, more outrageous and more IN YOUR FACE as they simply don’t care anymore if you know what they’re doing. They do it anyway.

 

[bigbadwolf]

as another poster mentioned, the scumbags in washington are attempting to politicize this tragedy for their own gain and it's sickening.

On the contrary, the impression I get is that politicians and media on both sides of the fake Democrat-Republican divide are trying to sweep troubling questions about this under the rug. Personally I think the gunman was a lone nutcase -- but there are still questions about the cultural milieu he lived in that can legitimately be raised. And the politicians and media are anxious that such questions not be raised because frankly there's a lot wrong with the country today.

Linh Dinh had some perceptive remarks to make:

Responding to the Tucson shooting, Sheriff Clarence Dupnik cited “vitriolic rhetoric” in the media as a poisoning influence. “This has not become the nice United States that most of us grew up in.” How nice it ever was for how many is debatable, but it’s undeniable that our culture has turned more savage. We haven’t always enjoyed caged fighting, people eating maggots on TV or popular music that openly advocates murder.

Looking tough has become de rigueur and even pre-teens now strut around like gangstas. America also leads the world in the adoption of military fatigues as casual wear, where T-shirt slogans such as “Kill ‘Em All” and “Made in America, Tested in Japan,” over a mushroom cloud, are deemed witty. Our soccer moms steer military trucks. Rush Limbaugh used to open his show with a sustained salvo of automatic weapons.

Joel Olson provides some insight on Arizona:

With the passage of the notorious anti-immigrant bill SB 1070 last spring, the outlawing of ethnic studies as of January 1, the gutting of the school and university systems, the collapsed housing market, the high unemployment rates, and now the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, you might be wondering what it's like to live in Arizona right about now.

It ain't easy.

But it helps to put Giffords's shooting in historical perspective, which is defined by two things in Arizona: corruption and class struggle. And ironically, this perspective gives me hope about the radically democratic future of my home state.

Arizona's economy was founded on the "Five C's:" copper, cotton, cattle, citrus, and climate (tourism). These C's were controlled by big mining and agricultural interests and real estate developers. Corruption was commonplace as they manipulated the political system for their benefit. A group of these capitalists, called the Phoenix 40, controlled state politics until the 1970s, when the political establishment opened up some. But even after their rule, the state capitol has always been a place to lie, bribe, and scam your way to what you want. If the names Don Bowles, Evan Mecham, AZ scam, Fife Symington, or the Keating 5 (which included Senator John McCain) mean anything to you, then you know that corruption is as plentiful as the parking here. And I haven't even mentioned Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio or State Senator Russell Pearce, the tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum of racist nativism.*

SB 1070 and Giffords's shooting, in other words, are but the latest of a storied history of corrupt cowboy capitalism.

Patrick Martin has a couple of interesting pieces at wsws.org on the great man's speech in Tucson. An excerpt from the first:

... On the contrary, his entire speech was an argument against such an analysis, as he declared the causes of the massacre to be unknowable. It was a statement of intellectual bankruptcy, carried out, as usual in modern American politics, amid nonstop invocations of religion.

Obama’s invocation of religion had a wholly secular purpose: to provide sanction for his rejection of any political assessment of the events of January 8 in Tucson.

The conclusion of his remarks was an attempt to cover up the deepening social tensions in America and present a saccharine picture of US political life that is entirely divorced from reality.


His final appeal to create a better America was entirely empty of any content. There was no reference to the actual problems confronting the American people—two wars, permanent and growing mass unemployment, extremes of great wealth and mass poverty, decay of social infrastructure, attacks on democratic rights.


... Contrary to his invocation of America as one big family, it is a society with an unbridgeable class divide between the financial aristocracy and the working people.


The political response to the Tucson massacre has unfolded in a completely predictable manner. The Republicans and the ultra-right media are in attack mode and don’t back down, proceeding, instead, with ever greater arrogance and hysteria.


The Democrats are cowardly and evasive, forswearing or quickly abandoning any suggestion that the right wing should be held responsible for the direction of Jared Lee Loughner’s attack.


But on a more fundamental level, both parties and the entire ruling elite come together to cover up the social context of this crime. The title given to the memorial service, “Together We Thrive: Tucson and America,” could serve as a monument to the complacency being spread by the entire political establishment. If there is one thing that is not happening in Tucson—or in America—it is “thriving.”

Under conditions of a capitalist social order that deals with the unemployed—and the mentally ill—in cold and inhuman fashion, and a ruling class that glorifies violence and practices it more widely and brutally than any other on the planet, events such as those which took place January 8 in Tucson are inevitable.

And an excerpt from the second:

The right-wing media celebrated the Obama speech because he whitewashed the role of the political right in providing the ideological impulse for the mentally disturbed gunman, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner. The liberals celebrated the Obama speech because they fear nothing more than provoking the right wing and sense that any serious examination of the shooting rampage would lay bare the putrefaction of American capitalism itself.

 

[esllou]

I couldn't believe how well Obama's speech was received. Half an hour of saying nothing of any real substance and talking about the man-in-the-clouds. The US is in deep deep trouble if that's the best the head of state has to offer at this time. OK, perhaps it wasn't the time nor the place, but if a european politician spent even a tenth of the time in a speech talking about fairy tales, he/she would be rightly crucified.








(pun intended)

 

[bigbadwolf]

I couldn't believe how well Obama's speech was received. Half an hour of saying nothing of any real substance and talking about the man-in-the-clouds. The US is in deep deep trouble if that's the best the head of state has to offer at this time. OK, perhaps it wasn't the time nor the place, but if a european politician spent even a tenth of the time in a speech talking about fairy tales, he/she would be rightly crucified.

I long ago came to the conclusion that this vacuous nincompoop is paid a president's salary to look grave, sombre, and thoughtful while mouthing empty cliches and platitudes.

The USA is a military empire externally and a paranoid national security state internally. And then everyone is amazed that incidents like this occur? What's amazing is they don't occur more frequently. And all the president and his senior officials can do is read from the bible and talk vacuously and hypocritically of "empathy" and "understanding." What a crock. The country is coming apart at the seams and both politicians and media are in a deliberate state of denial, incessantly peddling propaganda and disinformation to the contrary.

 

[redrum]

On the contrary, the impression I get is that politicians and media on both sides of the fake Democrat-Republican divide are trying to sweep troubling questions about this under the rug. Personally I think the gunman was a lone nutcase -- but there are still questions about the cultural milieu he lived in that can legitimately be raised. And the politicians and media are anxious that such questions not be raised because frankly there's a lot wrong with the country today.

no that's not the impression i see at all bigbad. that's because taking advantage of a crisis is politics 101 for these people. you can get much more accomplished during times of crisis than you ever could during times of peace.

we need only heed the sage words of rohm emanuel when he advises to "never let a crisis go to waste".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mzcbXi1Tkk&feature=related

governing by crisis is what naomi klein speaks about in her book The Shock Doctrine. and if a crisis doesn't come along, they'll simply manufacture one, either directly or indirectly.

this is why the left is taking this shooting and attempting to blame it on the right. but again, this is nothing new. both parties do it. we need only look at how nixon attempted to blame the left for the shooting of george wallace back in 1972:

http://www.infowars.com/the-opportu...d-the-left-for-72-shooting-of-george-wallace/

Video: The ‘Opportunity of Crisis’: Nixon blamed the left for ’72 shooting of George Wallace

Media blame following the Tuscon shooting tragedy parallels one of Richard Nixon’s worst ‘dirty tricks,’ when he attempted to “pin” George Wallace’s attempted assassin as a Leftist McGovern/Kennedy supporter in the media, and in manufactured evidence, before Bremer’s background or affiliation was known

 

[redrum]

and that leads into governing by crisis from a domestic level to an international level - where elements within our own federal govt. create phony terrorism that is used as a justification for a military campaign.

the CIA creates the crisis in order to attack another country. sound familar? iraq anyone? gulf of tonkin event? the blowing up of our embassies abroad? afghanistan? pakistan? iran?


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods

"Operation Northwoods, or Northwoods, was a series of false-flag operation proposals that originated within the United States government in 1962.

The proposals called for Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or other operatives to commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities and elsewhere. These acts of terrorism were to be blamed on Cuba in order to create public support for a war against that nation, which had recently become communist under Fidel Castro. One part of Operation Northwoods was to "develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington."

Operation Northwoods proposals included hijackings and bombings followed by the introduction of phony evidence that would implicate the Cuban government."

*************************************

evil and tyranny do not simply disappear. like anything else, they also evolve and become worse or more developed. it begs the question then, if such heinous acts could be conceived and suggested almost 50 years ago - what other monstrous deeds is our government capable of performing?

how about the mass murder of over 1 million Iraqi people in an illegal war? funny how that gets no press. yet a few people die in arizona and it's a national uproar.

 

[esllou]

I love all the conservative chickenshits on this site, jumping at the chance to play apologist for the violent right while brow-beating progressive leftists for advocating gun control. Not even the murder of a nine year-old girl is enough to get you to rethink the wisdom of your extremist political rhetoric.

You think you had nothing to do with this? You had everything to do with this. Sure, the shooter was crazy, but your violent rhetoric makes him feel a little less crazy, and a little more bold. No doubt he's thinking while riding in that taxi to Safeway, "Well, those Tea Partiers show up to rallies with weapons, so why can't I? It must be completely normal to arm yourself as a way of expressing strong belief." So when you're trying to get to sleep tonight think of your role as a kind of involuntary manslaughter: no direct malice aforethought - you haven't pulled any triggers yet - but plenty of willful negligence creating deadly situations.

The only reason you fucking loser apologists for gun violence are now trying to dodge responsibility for the obvious is because the radicalization of your base has produced positive electoral results for your party. That's right: you're selling out America so that you can regain national power. Violent rhetoric attracts frustrated voters in a tough economy, and you like that, even if it kills innocent kids. It also produces a violent society, which sadly is where we are today.

I hope that wasn't directed at me...I was very clear that my real objection to the speech was, as is pretty much standard fare in US politicians' speeches in the last 20 years, the obsession with droning on about religion.

 

[Choripán]

I hope that wasn't directed at me...I was very clear that my real objection to the speech was, as is pretty much standard fare in US politicians' speeches in the last 20 years, the obsession with droning on about religion.

Nope. not directed at you and forgive me if the post came across that way. I totally agree about the state of American political oratory.

 

[jaredwb]

I love all the conservative chickenshits on this site, jumping at the chance to play apologist for the violent right while brow-beating progressive leftists for advocating gun control. Not even the murder of a nine year-old girl is enough to get you to rethink the wisdom of your extremist political rhetoric.

You think you had nothing to do with this? You had everything to do with this. Sure, the shooter was crazy, but your violent rhetoric makes him feel a little less crazy, and a little more bold. No doubt he's thinking while riding in that taxi to Safeway, "Well, those Tea Partiers show up to rallies with weapons, so why can't I? It must be completely normal to arm yourself as a way of expressing strong belief." So when you're trying to get to sleep tonight think of your role as a kind of involuntary manslaughter: no direct malice aforethought - you haven't pulled any triggers yet - but plenty of willful negligence creating deadly situations.

The only reason you fucking loser apologists for gun violence are now trying to dodge responsibility for the obvious is because the radicalization of your base has produced positive electoral results for your party. That's right: you're selling out America so that you can regain national power. Violent rhetoric attracts frustrated voters in a tough economy, and you like that, even if it kills innocent kids. It also produces a violent society, which sadly is where we are today.

Wow, Choripan, once again you have shown yourself to be an intellectually challenged, small, angry liberal that is watching your welfare state dreams drift away because us "chickenshits" are taking back our Country.

And your bed buddies, Krugman, MSNBC, NYT, aren't advocating for gun "control", they are advocating for banning guns. You know, "If the people don't have guns the Govt can do as it wants" mentality.

Newsflash...ain't (you like that redneck talk) gonna happen...never ever...ever...so give up.

Attaching this crazy man's actions to anything other this his own mental issues is ridiculous and everyone knows it (except you apparently).

And the ONLY people using this tragedy as political theater is the Lib's.

Grow the fuck up and stop being a poor loser.