Six Word Saturday 1/08

Things seem bad - and they are. 

(The longest Six Word Saturday EVER)

Things didn't actually get worse today. We just got a powerful indication of exactly how bad it is out there, and how much insanity is being promoted by the genuinely evil individuals and organizations who have co-opted American conservatism.   Evidently, Sarah Palin has taken down this graphic from her Sarahpac web site.   I was able to find it here, after seeing it on TV news today.  

The fourth name in the first column is Gabrielle Giffords, who was gunned down and seriously wounded today while attempting to address her constituents in broad daylight, in an incident that left, as of this writing, six other people dead, including Federal Judge John Roll and nine-year-old Christina Taylor Green, along with several others wounded.

You might think it hyperbolic of me to lay this event directly at the feet of Sarah Palin, and others in the far right who have used the symbols and rhetoric of armed violence to sway the opinions of the ignorant, stupid, and unstable.

You would be wrong.

That is from a campaign event promotion, which I found here via LGM.

Here are the words of Sharon Angle, who came close to defeating Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, in an interview with Right Wing radio host Lars Larson, as reported by Larson to Greg Sargent.

I'm not kidding. In an interview she gave to a right-wing talk show host, Angle approvingly quoted Thomas Jefferson saying it's good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years -- and said that if Congress keeps it up, people may find themselves resorting to "Second Amendment remedies."
What's more, the talk show host she spoke to tells me he doesn't have any doubt that she was floating the possibility of armed insurrection as a valid response if Congress continues along its current course.
Asked by the host, Lars Larson of Portland, Oregon, where she stands on Second Amendment issues, Angle replied:

You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact Thomas Jefferson said it's good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years.
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? I'll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.

Larson says Angle was floating the possibility of armed insurrection if Congress keeps it up under Reid et al.
"If it continues to do the things it's doing, I think she's leaving open that possibility," Larson said. "And I think the founders believed that the public should be able to do that when the government becomes out of control. It just matters what you define as going too far."
The most charitable interpretation here was that Angle was floating armed insurrection -- or "Second Amendment remedies" -- as a defensible response if electoral politics fails to change where things are headed under the current regime.

Click through for an audio clip of the quote.  Or here.

This is not an isolated incident.  Angle made a similar pronouncement to radio host Bill Manders.  This link also has an audio clip of Engel touting the possibility of  "2nd Amendment Remedies."

Do you know what had Engel prepared to support an armed revolution?  This, which Giffords voted for.

A brief rundown of the benefits of “Obamacare”:

• Children and adults with pre-existing conditions cannot be denied insurance
• Your insurance can’t drop you unless they can prove you committed fraud (before HCR, insurers would mysteriously cancel coverage for people who were diagnosed with illnesses like cancer)
• No lifetime limits or caps on health coverage
• Young adults will be allowed to stay on their parents’ insurance until they turn 26 (post-college grads under 26 represented one of the highest rates of uninsured people)
• Reviews on unreasonable insurance premium hikes
• Closed “donut hole” in Medicare, which will lift millions of elderly Americans out of poverty

The violent and  inflammatory rhetoric of Radio and TV host Glen Beck has already been implicated in a specific act of violence perpetrated by one of his listeners.

Here's "Armed and Dangerous" from Michelle Bachman.

If you want to get some background on today's shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, you can find it here.

This is what the blind hatred of the right has brought us to.  Evil, lying right wingers plant ideas of violence in the fevered brains of unstable individuals, and murder is what we reap.

More thoughts, from

Southern Beale

Asymptosis

Tom Tomorrow, via P6

Updates:

Tux

In comments at Naked Capitalism, C.C. from Tucson says this (quoted in full):

As a resident of Tucson with mutual friends of someone killed, this hits very close to home.
I hold complicit the justices of the Supreme Court who voted in favor of corporate power and special interests in overturning settled law by allowing unlimited monies from anonymous sources to promote their special interests via hysteria and misinformation.

Many citizens in Tucson remarked that the Arizona mid term elections had hit a new low of unintelligent discourse and degenerate tabloid absurdity funded with something like half a billion dollars flooding in from unknown domestic and international origins. Congresswoman Giffords was a frequent target.

And while I’m venting…our bankrupt state legislature spent their time on nonsense like enacting new gun laws where by anyone can carry a concealed weapon without any licensing or handling training into a bar or restaraunt or public area. I am sick of gun worshipping politicians who use inflammitory rhetoric like Sarah Palin to pander for sound bites like ‘don’t retreat, reload’ and with crosshair graphics over the photos of opposing politicians…..including Ms. Giffords!!

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