From Denver:

Jan 11, 2011 / 05:54 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver expressed anguish over the recent Arizona shooting that left 6 dead and over a dozen wounded, noting particularly the life and deep Catholic faith of victim Judge John Roll.

U.S. Federal Judge John Roll was killed on Jan. 8 along with 5 others, including 9 year-old Christina Taylor Green.

The incident began on Saturday when 22-year-old Jared Loughner opened fire at a local supermarket where recently elected Democrat Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was giving a community address. Loughner, a socially isolated, anti-government youth with a history of mental instability, was reportedly intent on killing the congresswoman with whom he took personal issue. Rep. Giffords is alive but in critical condition after being shot in the head at point-blank range.

In his Jan. 12 column for the Denver Catholic Register, Archbishop Chaput remembers Judge Roll as a political figure who lived a life of “powerful, authentic Catholic witness.”

The archbishop recalls a trip to Phoenix in 2008 where he gave the homily for an annual Red Mass for the state’s lawyers and politicians. Sitting in the congregation that day, was Judge Roll’s wife, Maureen, “an active and very committed Catholic.”

Archbishop Chaput says that Maureen must have mentioned his homily to Judge Roll, since 10 months later “I got the first of several extraordinary letters from her husband.”

“It’s impossible to fully know a man from correspondence alone,” he writes. “But each of John Roll’s letters had the same four clear marks: generosity; intelligence, largeness of spirit and a sincere love for his Catholic faith.”

The archbishop says that two days after Judge Roll’s murder, he spoke to his law clerk, attorney Aaron Martin, who described the late political leader.

Judge Roll was devoted to St. Thomas More and kept a biography of the saint on a table near his desk. He was also known as a father figure among his subordinates and expressed a sincere interest in the lives and families of those he worked with.

“He liked mentoring young Christian attorneys because he believed their faith gave them a better moral foundation for the vocation of law,” Archbishop Chaput says. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Man, it is getting really deep around here — and no, I’m not talking about the snow, though there is no shortage of it here in Southwestern Ohio.

What’s really deep is the claim by current Government/General Motors Chairman and CEO Daniel Akerson that because of the company’s government-engineered, unsecured bondholder-shortchanging trip through bankruptcy, “we lost roughly a year in terms of development.”

The Associated Press’s Tom Krisher apparently doesn’t mind traipsing around in thigh-high boots while he’s covering the Detroit Auto Show, as he displayed no skepticism whatsoever at the utter ridiculousness of Akerson’s assertion, drily observing near the end of his report that “New products from GM were noticeably absent from the North American International Auto Show in Detroit this year.”

For the record:

• GM filed for bankruptcy on June 1, 2009. It emerged from bankruptcy with an opening cash balance in the tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer money on July 10, 2009. That’s 40 days, or less than one-ninth of a year.
• The company has been out of bankruptcy for exactly 18 months, and it’s admitting that it’s still a year behind in product development.
• There was not a hint that R&D would be compromised when the company emerged. In fact, the company clearly made representations to the contrary.

Pertinent to the final point just made, here are a few paragraphs from a July 10, 2009 bankruptcy emergence report by — imagine that — the Associated Press (Krisher was involved in earlier versions of this dispatch; bolds are mine):

At a news conference, CEO Fritz Henderson said the revamped automaker will be faster and more responsive to customers than the old one. It will generate cash and repay billions in government loans ahead of a 2015 deadline.

The new company will build more cars and trucks that consumers want and launch them faster than in the past, the CEO said. GM also announced a partnership with online retailer eBay to test auctioning vehicles online.

… Known for its sluggish decision-making process and bloated management ranks, GM will create a single, eight-member executive committee to speed up day-to-day decision-making, replacing two senior leadership forums.

… Top executives at the new company will focus on business results, new vehicles, brands and consumers.

… The new company will focus on customers, cars and culture.

What a load of rubbish that was — as was Krisher’s failure to note the obvious contradictions in Akerson’s excuse-making today.

It’s worth asking, especially if other products have been or are still being shortchanged, which presumptively appears to be the case, if the surely lavish level of resources the company has thrown at the Chevy Volt — never mind the awards pouring forth from the green-crazy driving press — has been worth it. Financially, I doubt it. To keep President Obama’s car czars off their backs, it was probably necessary.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Ten epic fails, as delivered by the proprietor at Declaration Entertainment.com:

Okay, here are the Cliff’s notes for those who make the mistake of avoiding Whittle’s outstanding delivery:

Oh c’mon, this is too easy.

Here’s a paragraph from former Congressman Paul Kanjorski’s op-ed in the New York Times, published online yesterday, in the print edition today (“Why Politicians Need to Stay Out in the Open”):

We all lose an element of freedom when security considerations distance public officials from the people. Therefore, it is incumbent on all Americans to create an atmosphere of civility and respect in which political discourse can flow freely, without fear of violent confrontation.

Here’s Kanjorski, when he was still a Congressman, discussing Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Scott last year (HT Mark Hemingway at the Washington Examiner):

“That Scott down there that’s running for governor of Florida,” Mr. Kanjorski said. “Instead of running for governor of Florida, they ought to have him and shoot him. Put him against the wall and shoot him. He stole billions of dollars from the United States government and he’s running for governor of Florida. He’s a millionaire and a billionaire. He’s no hero. He’s a damn crook. It’s just we don’t prosecute big crooks.”

The same column at the Scranton Times-Tribune recalls other gems from Kanjorski, who called the health insurance industry “blood suckers,” and “said at a town hall meeting that Democrats ‘sort of stretched the facts’ to sound as if they would end the Iraq war.”

Kanjorski also said the following while defending last year’s “financial reform” law:

We’re giving relief to people that I deal with in my office every day now unfortunately. But because of the longevity of this recession, these are people — and they’re not minorities and they’re not defective and they’re not all the things you’d like to insinuate that these programs are about — these are average, good American people.

You don’t have to be a genius to see the racism inherent in that statement, but in case anyone needs help: If the people Kanjorski “deal(s) with in my office everyday” are “average, good American people” because “they’re not minorities and they’re not defective,” then those who are minorities and “defective” in some way are not “average, good American people.”

This is the guy to whom the New York Times goes for an op-ed on civility.

The Old Gray Lady, which has been obsessed with partisan “vitirol” (right-wing only, of course) since Saturday’s Tucson murders, is turning itself into a sick, sad joke. No further commentary required.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

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BizzyBlog Update: Other NYT examples are cited at NewsBusters here, here, and here.

Ford plans to hire 7,000 more workers in the next two years, including 750 engineers. The jobs are slated for Michigan, Louisville, and Chicago.

I suggest that Ohio Governor John Kasich make two phone calls:

• Call Number 1 — Given the suicidal plan in Illinois to raise its income tax by 75% (from 3% to 5.25%) and to raise its corporate income tax, get on the phone on behalf of expansion in the Buckeye State. (Update: Apparently, it’s now “only” a 67% increase to 5%.)
• Call Number 2 — This one needs to be a joint call to GOP leaders in the Ohio House and Senate to work on repealing the job-killing Commercial Activities Tax. As long as it’s there, companies like Ford will probably continue to avoid expanding in Ohio, as Honda did in 2006.

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Last Friday, Best Buy reported that December’s same-store sales dropped 4% from a year ago. That’s on top of a 5% revenue miss (vs. expectations) in the quarter that ended in November.

The Reuters story says that Best Buy is losing business to Target. Target? I think Best Buy’s difficulties represent a symptom of a deeper problem, namely that retail traffic for hard goods, especially electronics, is in the doldrums.

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Hiring is supposed to pick up this year, but “the 2% payroll gains, though healthy, will be about half the additions that followed similarly severe recessions in the 1970s and 1980s.”

That’s because the architects of the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy chose “stimulus” — a zero-impact “triumph of Keynesian wishful-thinking over practical experience” — over tax cuts, which produced the Seven Fat Years.

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Speaking of the Seven Fat Years, policymakers today seem all too willing to accept mediocrity. Here’s an example, from Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President and CEO Dennis P. Lockhart:

Lockhart: Economy could surprise in ‘11

Then the economy hit an air pocket in the middle of 2010 as these forces played out and were not sufficiently replaced by sustained private demand. Importantly, though, the economy did not go into a nosedive as the year progressed. The third quarter of last year steadied to a modest rate of growth around 2.5 percent, which is in the range of the widely perceived long-term potential of the economy.

Says who? 2.5% growth was barely acceptable when the economy hadn’t suffered a deep recession (annual GDP growth averaged 2.6% from 2002-2007). It’s absolutely unacceptable coming out of one. If we had the right policy recipes, we should be seeing 5%-plus quarterly growth readings.

During Reagan’s Seven Fat Years, annualized quarterly growth averaged 4.3%. There’s no reason that can’t be replicated; failure to do so explains why the job market is in a 5-year recovery mode, when it should have recovered by now.

Accepting mediocrity has inflicted terrible consequences on millions of workers and their families. It didn’t have to be this way. The Party of Faux Compassion and its statist fixations made it this way. “Party of Compassion” my a**.

From Denver:

Jan 11, 2011 / 05:40 am

Fr. John Harvey, known for founding Courage, the international support group for Catholics who experience same-sex attraction, passed away recently at the age of 92.

Dr. Richard Fitzgibbons, a Catholic psychiatrist who worked with Fr. Harvey for 30 years, remembered the priest as a “brilliant moral theologian” whose life was a “gift to the Church.”

Father Harvey died on Dec. 27, the feast of St. John the Evangelist, at Union Hospital in Elkton, Maryland. Born in Philadelphia, he was priest for 66 years and an Oblate of St. Francis de Sales for 73.

In New York City in 1980, Fr. Harvey helped found Courage, the Church-approved ministry devoted to helping Catholics who experience same-sex attractions live in accordance with Catholic moral teaching.

The apostolate is aimed at strengthening chastity, religious devotion, healthy friendships, and a spirit of fellowship and support among Catholics who experience same-sex attractions. Courage incorporates a modified version of the “Twelve Steps,” traditionally used in the treatment of substance-abuse, in its work helping Catholics who struggle with homosexuality to lead chaste lives.

With the endorsement of the Vatican, Courage now has more than 110 chapters and contact people world-wide.

“Fr. Harvey responded to the needs of those with same sex attraction in the Church through the development of Courage,” Dr. Fitzgibbons said.

He called Fr. Harvey’s prominent book, “The Truth about Homosexuality,” a “great gift to the Catholics” that should be “required reading” for clergy, educators and laity.

Dr. Fitzgibbon’s praised Fr. Harvey as a “brilliant” moral theologian, but explained that more importantly, the priest defended the Church’s teaching on sexual morality “with great wisdom, love and gentleness.” …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Clarice Feldman at the PJ Tatler:

Pima County Sheriff Dupnik has been making a fool of himself charging on no evidence that heated rhetoric was behind the madman’s shooting rampage in Tucson.

But Cholla, a blogger with an impressive background in the Navy and journalism, reports that sources inside the Department who have seen original police reports have told him that Dupnik’s own office dropped the ball on Loughner.

Cholla’s important claim and bottom line:

Jared Loughner has been making death threats by phone to many people in Pima County including staff of Pima Community College, radio personalities and local bloggers. When Pima County Sheriff’s Office was informed, his deputies assured the victims that he was being well managed by the mental health system. It was also suggested that further pressing of charges would be unnecessary and probably cause more problems than it solved as Jared Loughner has a family member that works for Pima County.

… The Pima County Sheriff’s Department was aware of his violent nature and they failed to act appropriately. This tragedy leads right back to Sherriff Dupnik and all the spin in the world is not going to change that fact.

Given that Loughner bought a gun in November, it’s worth asking if any of his death threats pre-dated that purchase. If so, and if the sheriff’s office had treated those threats seriously, Loughner might never have obtained the weapon he used — or any other gun.

Feldman speculates that “Perhaps one of those crack TV reporters who let Dupnik wax on about his theories of the shooters’ motivation might ask about this report.” I hope I’m wrong, but I’ll bet that instead the sound of crickets chirping in establishment media news rooms will be deafening.

At City Journal (HT Instapundit):

Where incendiary political rhetoric truly resides in America

… the Left’s sudden talk about incendiary political rhetoric in the wake of the Arizona shooting isn’t really about political rhetoric at all. It’s about the real-world failure of leftist policies everywhere—the bankrupting of nations and states by greedy unions and unfundable social programs, the destruction of inner cities by identity politics, and the appeasement of Muslim extremists in the face of worldwide jihad, not to mention the frequently fatal effects of delirious environmentalism. Europe is in debt and on fire. American citizens are in political revolt. Even the most left-wing president ever is making desperate overtures to his right.

But all that might be tolerable to leftists if they weren’t starting to lose control of the one weapon in which they have the most faith: the narrative. The narrative is what leftists believe in instead of the truth. If they can blame George W. Bush for the economic crisis, if they can make Sarah Palin out to be an idiot, if they can call the Tea Party racist until you think it must be true, they might yet retain power in spite of the international disgrace of their ideas. And though they still mostly dominate the narrative on the three broadcast networks, most cable stations, most newspapers, and much of Hollywood, nonetheless Fox News, talk radio, the Internet, and the Wall Street Journal have begun to respond in ways they can’t ignore.

That’s the hateful rhetoric they’re talking about: conservatives interrupting the stream of leftist invective in order to dismantle their arguments with the facts. As for leftists’ reaction to the Arizona shooting, call it Narrative Hysteria: a frantic attempt to capitalize on calamity by casting their opponents, not merely as racist or sexist or Islamophobic this time, but as somehow responsible for an act of madness and evil. Shame on them.

They clearly have no shame.

Michelle Malkin’s must-read, must-bookmark: “The progressive ‘climate of hate:’ An illustrated primer, 2000-2010.”

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At NewsBusters: “Arizona Sheriff Admits There’s No Evidence ‘Vitriolic Rhetoric’ Incited Giffords Shooter” –

Since making his claim Saturday that the Tucson shootings were caused by “vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business,” Pima County Arizona Sheriff Clarence Dupnik has become a media darling being regularly quoted by press outlets from coast to coast.

On Sunday, during strong questioning from Fox News’s Megyn Kelly, Dupnik admitted that his department has not uncovered one shred of evidence to support his now well-publicized assertion.

Later in the referenced interview with Fox’s Kelly, Dupnik, a Democrat, said that, “We see one Party trying to block the attempts of another Party to make this a better country.” What a joke. He’s supposed to be conducting a murder investigation, not campaigning for his next reelection or next move to a higher office by fanning partisan flames.

As NBer Noel Sheppard noted: “In the end, Dupnik is just another Democrat that is hostile to Republicans and is expressing his opinion as such. Yet media outlet after media outlet have quoted the comments he made Saturday as if they were coming from a legal perspective and not a political one.”

Update: Here’s the video.

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SBVOR: “Palin’s ‘gunsights’ are merely ‘position indicators’” –

(The left’s) purported “evidence” against Palin is an allegation that she used “gunsights” in a graphic to “target” Democratic members of Congress — including Gabrielle Giffords — in the 2010 ELECTIONS.

(But) Palin did not use “gunsights” on her graphic. As any geek worth his or her salt knows, Palin used the Unicode character (#2316, seen at left) described as a mere “Position Indicator”.

… If Palin wanted to employ gun imagery, she would have selected Unicode character 25CE (seen at right), sorta like the Dems did in 2004.

I have little doubt that we’ll spend the next two years or more hearing and seeing the establishment press lie about this.

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Glenn Reynolds in the Wall Street Journal:

The Arizona Tragedy and the Politics of Blood Libel
Those who purport to care about the tenor of political discourse don’t help civil debate when they seize on any pretext to call their political opponents accomplices to murder.

… When Democrats use language like this—or even harsher language like Mr. Obama’s famous remark, in Philadelphia during the 2008 campaign, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun”—it’s just evidence of high spirits, apparently. But if Republicans do it, it somehow creates a climate of hate.

There’s a climate of hate out there, all right, but it doesn’t derive from the innocuous use of political clichés. And former Gov. Palin and the tea party movement are more the targets than the source.

… To be clear, if you’re using this event to criticize the “rhetoric” of Mrs. Palin or others with whom you disagree, then you’re either: (a) asserting a connection between the “rhetoric” and the shooting, which based on evidence to date would be what we call a vicious lie; or (b) you’re not, in which case you’re just seizing on a tragedy to try to score unrelated political points, which is contemptible. Which is it?

Read the whole thing.

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From the “At Long Last, Have You No Decency?” Department:

The full item is at BigGovernment.com.

From Biloxi, Mississippi:

Jan 9, 2011 / 01:11 pm

For one east Biloxi parish, the New Year signifies a new beginning.

Bishop Roger Morin will re-consecrate the “Fisherman’s Church,” as St. Michael Church is commonly known, on Jan. 27 at 6:30 p.m.

The cylindrical church with the scalloped shell roof suffered extensive wind and water damage as a result of Hurricane Katrina.

St. Michael pastor, Father Greg Barras, said the church building, much like the people who worship in it, is a powerful symbol of resiliency.

“The most important thing in my mind is simply the resilience of the community as is symbolized in this architecture, which is resilient to major hurricanes” said Father Barras, who was assigned to St. Michael in Jan. 2006.

“The community still exists and supports the parish. It still comes to worship. We’ve drawn a very diverse community since the storm. We’re growing more now than they were before the storm.”

Before Katrina, St. Michael had 180 registered families. Today, the parish has 300 families.

Father Barras sees the increase in membership as another powerful symbol of that resiliency.

“It is the resilience of the people,” he said. “This icon of a church draws from the casinos. We’re drawing from D’Iberville, Ocean Springs, Gulfport and Latimer. It’s a welcoming, warm community with good liturgy and good music.”

But, undoubtedly, the main draw is the building itself.

“When people walk in this space, a common comment is ‘I just feel so lifted up.’ There’s a circular energy. It does that,” Father Barras said. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

“Never let the facts get in the way of a good story” must be the motto at Reuters, or at least of the wire service’s Richard Cowan, three other contributors, and Editor Jackie Frank.

Cowan’s late Sunday afternoon dispatch (HT to an e-mailer) is caricature-driven collection of cliches, half-truth, outright myths, and totally predictable oversights. There’s the racial slurs before the heath care vote fabrication. There’s an attempt to declare Sarah Palin unfit for the presidency.

And of course, there’s the deliberately avoided recall of rhetoric from President Obama (here and here, for warm-ups) that could certainly be interpreted by unstable people as a call to violence, as well as total omission of the left’s anger just days ago over Gabrielle Giffords’s refusal to back Nancy Pelosi as Minority Leader and the leftist inclinations of  deeply troubled accused murderer Jared Lee Loughner.

But that stuff’s not important when there are disliked right-wingers to pile onto while the piling-on opportunity is there:

Protesters parade an altered photo of President Barack Obama sporting an Adolf Hitler-like mustache. [1] A candidate for the Senate muses about gun “remedies” if election results don’t go the right way. [2] Members of Congress are spat on and taunted with racial epithets before casting votes for a healthcare reform bill. [3]

Welcome to politics American-style.

For the past few years, some public officeholders and pundits have warned that the political rhetoric has gotten a little too overheated in a country known for its loose gun laws and history of presidential assassinations.

Now, in the aftermath of Saturday’s Arizona shooting rampage that left a congresswoman in critical condition from a gunshot to the head, six people dead and 13 others wounded, some are saying it’s time to reset the tone of America’s political discourse.

… An angry America is no doubt the result of economic woes underscored by an unemployment rate that has been stuck at nearly 10 percent for a prolonged period.

The Tea Party movement — a loose union of conservatives who have mostly supported Republican candidates or have run as Republicans — has capitalized on the uncertain times, winning dozens of seats in the House of Representatives and Senate.

Some Tea Party “town hall meetings” have included angry confrontations with incumbent members of Congress. [4]

… On a Facebook site in early 2010, (Sarah) Palin posted a map of the United States with cross hairs over 20 congressional districts held by Democrats she hoped would be thrown out of office. It included the seat held by Giffords. “It’s time to take a stand,” the posting said.

“That’s going to be hard for her to overcome,” (chairman of the political science department at Youngstown State University Paul) Sracic said, adding, “With this, she comes across as irresponsible. It has damaged her chances as a nominee” for president. [5]

Notes:

[1] — I guess Cowan doesn’t realize that probably the best-known Obama-Hitler mustache poster carrier was Rachel Brown, a Lyndon LaRouche supporter who confronted Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank at a town hall meeting and challenged him in the Democratic (that’s right, Democratic) primary last year. Cowan also seems to have “forgotten” how a different Democratic Congresswoman’s supporters “participated in a Palin-as-Hitler rally” in September 2010. How convenient.

[2] — Cowan is referring to a Sharron Angle statement last year. Here’s what I wrote in the fall, after AP reporter Calvin Woodward erroneously described what Angle said as a “call to arms”:

The “Second Amendment solutions” audio with Lars Larson is here. The quote involved is: “I hope that’s not where we’re going, but, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around?”

When I hear “Second Amendment solutions,” I think of so many people who have told me that they have felt the need to arm themselves and learn how to use a gun in case civil order breaks down. God forbid if that should ever happen, but if it does, it will largely be because Congress spends the next few years, as Angle said, “going the way it is” and destroying the country’s economic and legal foundations.

[3] — The “racial slurs were uttered before the health care bill” lie has been so thoroughly discredited that it’s somewhat amazing that Mr. Cowan would attempt to resurrect it. But since he has, here’s the video documenting that there is no record of any such thing ever occurring when it was alleged to have occurred.

[4] — So “angry confrontations at town hall meetings” are the same as incitements to murder? What is amazing is how, to the leftist press, raised voices on the right are incitements to violence, while raised voices on the left are either not worthy of comment or even occasionally noble expressions of passion.

[5] — Of all the “experts” Mr. Cowan could have gone to for commentary on Sarah Palin’s civility and presidential prospects, the Reuters reporter picked a Youngstown State University PoliSci Chair who seems more than a little enamored of the late Surpreme Court Justice Hugo Black. That’s right, Hugo Black, the FDR appointee with the initials “KKK” embedded firmly in his background. In a book review, Sracic is more than willing to forgive Black for this involvement, essentially considering it a necessary resume enhancement in the old South, without any thought as to how many cross-burnings and perhaps more violent activities Black’s involvement might have entailed. Black also wrote the Supreme Court opinion upholding the World War II internment of Japanese Americans. Yet it’s Sarah Palin who is apparently beyond the pale. You can’t make this stuff up.

Cowan and his collaborators’ unsupported, poorly-sourced crabbing would be laughed out of a well-run ninth-grade social studies class. Too bad that the standards at Reuters aren’t even that high.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

At his Pajamas Media blog:

The political anger comes from people who can’t win an honest debate, and whose view of the world is demonstrably false. If they want to throw their intellectual weight around, the easy way is to attack their opponents in a very personal and nasty way (the hard way is to rethink their view of the world).

Eagerly lining up to prove Ledeen’s hypothesis in the immediate circumstances of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting and related murders: CNN, Paul Krugman, CBS, Jane Fonda, and the Associated Press.

In the recent past, I also recall someone likening his opponents to kidnappers who are on the verge of harming their hostages (HT BlogProf):

At one point, he appeared to liken Republican lawmakers insisting on tax cuts for the wealthy to terrorists.

“I think it’s tempting not to negotiate with hostage takers, unless the hostage gets harmed. In this case the hostage is the American people and I was not willing to see them get harmed,” he said.

Who could that be? Well, he works in an Oval Office.

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UPDATE: Alleged at HillBuzz (HT Temple of Mut) —

Arizona state representative Lopez was a high profile driving force behind the immediate effort on the Left to blame the Tea Party for the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords and the murder of 6 bystanders yesterday (with scores more injured). Without having a single piece of information, Lopez took to the airwaves condemning the Tea Party and conservatives for the murder spree.

Jared Lee Loughner, the would-be assassin, is a confirmed Leftist Democrat upset with Congresswoman Giffords for being a conservative Democrat who was not Leftist enough for his tastes.

The evidence is at Blackfive. At about 4:10 in the vid at the link, Ms. Lopez starts the guilt-by-association trip with the Tea Party supporters of Giffords’s opponent in the 2010 election.

UPDATE 2: Sad to say, media guilt-by-association is a nearly five-decade tradition (at least). In November 1963, until they learned that Communist Lee Harvey Oswald was the shooter of John F. Kennedy, network TV made a point of showing a few protestors holding “Yankee Go Home” signs along JFK’s Dallas motorcade route.

Even after Oswald’s arrest, some still obsess over the strong dislike for Kennedy that some in Dallas had — as if it matters, which it doesn’t. It doesn’t take a lot of searching to find someone in a supposedly responsible position who still hasn’t gotten over the fact that it wasn’t the far right that assassinated Kennedy. Note that the linked column doesn’t even mention Oswald.

UPDATE 3: Byron York at the Washington Examiner —

On November 5, 2009, Maj. Nidal Hasan opened fire at a troop readiness center in Ft. Hood, Texas, killing 13 people. Within hours of the killings, the world knew that Hasan reportedly shouted “Allahu Akbar!” before he began shooting, visited websites associated with Islamist violence, wrote Internet postings justifying Muslim suicide bombings, considered U.S. forces his enemy, opposed American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as wars on Islam, and told a neighbor shortly before the shootings that he was going “to do good work for God.” There was ample evidence, in other words, that the Ft. Hood attack was an act of Islamist violence.

Nevertheless, public officials, journalists, and commentators were quick to caution that the public should not “jump to conclusions” about Hasan’s motive. CNN, in particular, became a forum for repeated warnings that the subject should be discussed with particular care.

“The important thing is for everyone not to jump to conclusions,” said retired Gen. Wesley Clark on CNN the night of the shootings.

… Fast forward a little more than a year, to January 8, 2011. In Tucson, Arizona, a 22 year-old man named Jared Lee Loughner opened fire at a political event, gravely wounding Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, killing a federal judge and five others, and wounding 18. In the hours after the attack, little was known about Loughner beyond some bizarre and largely incomprehensible YouTube postings that, if anything, suggested he was mentally ill. Yet the network that had shown such caution in discussing the Ft. Hood shootings openly discussed the possibility that Loughner was inspired to violence by…Sarah Palin. Although there is no evidence that Loughner was in any way influenced by Palin, CNN was filled with speculation about the former Alaska governor.

UPDATE 4: At NewsBusters — “ABC Interviews Friend of Giffords Shooter, Ignores Her Claim He’s Liberal.” The friend’s tweets saying just that are at the link.

UPDATE 5: A New York Times snippet —

Another former high school classmate said that Mr. Loughner may have met Representative Giffords, who was shot in the head outside the Safeway supermarket, several years ago.

“As I knew him he was left wing, quite liberal. & oddly obsessed with the 2012 prophecy,” the former classmate, Caitie Parker, wrote in a series of Twitter feeds Saturday. “I haven’t seen him since ’07 though. He became very reclusive.”

“He was a political radical & met Giffords once before in ’07, asked her a question & he told me she was ‘stupid & unintelligent,’ ” she wrote.

Instapundit’s Insta-snark: ““Quite liberal,” and didn’t like Giffords in 2007, before anyone had heard of Sarah Palin or the Tea Party. But it’s their fault.”

UPDATE 6: Michelle Malkin writes on “the 6 innocents.”