Tucson lead-slinging

Unless your cell phone's been dead for the last few days you're probably already had enough of the wall-to-wall coverage of the latest shoot-em-up in Dallas, er, Tucson, Arizona...

"...suddenly we're concerned that it is rude and politicizing a tragedy to point out that the right wing has produced a toxic atmosphere that pollutes our politics with hatred and the rhetoric of violence? Screw that. Now is the time to politicize the hell out of this situation"—PZ Myers

As it happens, one lone media personality has actually apologized for going overboard with his rhetoric. He'll probably be the last.

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin's facebook page has a rapid-response team of negative comment scrubbers working overtime. But there's one off-color remark strangely overlooked. How refreshing.

For those who just came off an opium jag, here's a creepy mug shot of the shooter along with some other interesting details. Here's his YouTube channel. When I first looked at it the clips only had a few hundred views. His myspace and facebook pages are long gone.

Self-certified ophthalmologist Dr. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) has diagnosed the Tucson shooter as paranoid schizophrenic. I had no idea he styled himself a psychiatrist as well. I wonder if he ever gave a neurological diagnosis of Terry Schiavo?

A nine year old girl (born 9/11/2001) was killed. Guess who's coming to her funeral?

Naturally, some idiot in Congress has called for an unconstitutonal law criminalizing political hate speech.

Historical note: some Puerto Ricans shot up the House of Representatives back in 1954.

Most insane part of writing this entry: doing a search of "right wing violence" on Google Images and finding the "surgeon's photo" of the Loch Ness monster on page six. But I also found this (probably copyrighted so I won't post it here) cartoon that sums it up nicely.

"The death of one is a tragedy, the death of millions just a statistic"—Marilyn Manson