It turned out that Zamudio actually pushed the holder of the gun into a wall, and thus came much closer to doing violence on an innocent man who had just taken the gun from Jared Loughner than even this description suggests. The potential for yet another innocent death was pretty high here. And a Wild West show with alternating bouts of gunfire seems like an extremely dangerous environment for bystanders.

Frank Lautenberg said it very clearly on MSNBC: the difference between this country and practically every other industrialized nation, which has a tiny fraction of the gun violence as we have in the US, is that “we don’t have more madmen, we have more guns.” And increasing the amount of armed people out there won’t help this ratio, either.

Nope, right-wing rhetoric in response to the health care bill has nothing to do with violence and is not at all related to guns.

Right now, the public isn’t ready to believe an argument that Jared Loughner was motivated by right-wing rhetoric. Fortunately, nobody has said that, because it’s the wrong claim to make. Nobody has claimed that crosshairs on a map or talk of “Second Amendment remedies” is specifically to blame (some on the right have blamed heavy metal music and a skull in his backyard, and that’s just as silly). The main claim is that the toxic stew of noxious rhetoric, particularly in Loughner’s home district and home state of Arizona, creates an environment that amps up a lunatic fringe. Loughner couldn’t help but trip over that, and indeed his writings do have a cockeyed resonance to some of the really far-right groups like Posse Comitatus and the Patriot movement. That doesn’t make those practitioners of angry rhetoric culpable, but it sure doesn’t mean what they’re doing helped, either.

While the Chamber has commented on the White House’s tone, nobody has commented on the Chamber’s.

Keeping the flame of repeal burning probably helps the Chamber in two ways. One, by firmly positioning that as the right edge of the Overton window, it makes merely agreeing to a rolling back of some of the consumer protection regulations in the bill the “compromise” position.

A more obvious conclusion is that Rep. Pete King (R-NY) isn’t all that serious about gun control at all; he wants to propose something with no chance of becoming law to counteract the legislation, from Carolyn McCarthy (who’s from his neighboring district on Long Island), that would ban high-capacity magazine clips. I suspect this has more to do with local New York politics than anyone thinks. And of course, “independent” Mike Bloomberg is giving King a high-profile assist.

There’s something odd about the timeline of Bradley Manning’s alleged leaks to WikiLeaks: he appears to give WikiLeaks at least two things — the Rejkjavik 13 cable and the Collateral Murder video — before he verified Julian Assange’s identity.

The Presidential Oil Spill Commission has released their final report on the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Basically, they see the problems that manifested on the Deepwater Horizon well to be systemic, and ensuring the safety of rig workers and the US coastline depends on overhauling the industry completely.

The same wingnuts who are insisting today that there’s absolutely no connection at all between speech and actions have spent an awful lot of time over the past several decades saying exactly the opposite.

I don’t care if they find Sarah Palin’s crosshairs map in Jared Loughner’s bedroom. She didn’t cause him to do what he did. What she did do, undeniably and indisputably, was act irresponsibly in the midst of an extremely volatile situation. On the fifth straight day of violence and threats against members of Congress over the health care bill, when everyone from John Boehner on down was calling for the attacks to stop, Palin released her “crosshairs” map and tried to prove she was not a “weenie” by telling people to “reload, not retreat.”