Obama’s speech tonight contained some beautiful lines, the tone set by a quotation from my favorite Psalm, one of the most poetic and comforting passages in the Bible: There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells. God is within her, she will not [...]
A joint dispatch from Katy Steinmetz and myself: TUCSON–They started lining up in the early morning, and by mid-afternoon, more than 20,000 Tucsonans had queued up under cloudless skies to get into the University of Arizona’s McKale Center to pay tribute to the fallen. The unruly line snaked for blocks through the downtown Tucson campus, [...]
Tonight’s event in Arizona was a somewhat strange, not always comfortable, melange of moods and messages. But it concluded as an emotional and intellectual triumph–one that showed Barack Obama at his very best.
Barack Obama spoke to the city of Tucson, and to the United States of America, not so much as our President tonight, but as a member of our family. He spoke as a son–I couldn’t help but think of his personal regret over not being by his mother’s side when she passed as he said, [...]
Hillary Clinton’s comments today, describing Jared Lee Loughner as an extremist, were unfortunate and are probably much regretted by now. I attribute them to jet lag and total immersion in the difficult, high pressure, multi-country trip she’s undertaken, which probably caused her to lose track of the emerging portrait of the shooter as a dangerously [...]
What will the legislative fallout be from the tragedy in Tucson? Probably nothing at all. Frankly, there’s little they can do. Thus far members have come up with a variety of ideas: –Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN) renewed his call to install a Plexiglas shield between the gallery and the House floor – because members should [...]
Politico reports: Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert says his office is drafting a measure to allow members of Congress to carry guns in the District of Columbia, including in the Capitol and on the House floor. Gohmert says he and his colleagues need to be able to protect themselves, in light of the mass shooting [...]
President Obama is wheels up on his way to Tucson, and locals have long since started queuing in hopes of getting into the University of Arizona’s 14,000-capacity McKale Center for tonight’s memorial, “Together We Thrive: Tucson and America.” In addition to Obama, the university’s president, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano (Brewer’s [...]
Hey, everybody–I’m back from maternity leave. Anything happen while I was gone? Sigh. I’ve been spending more time reading Pigeon books than political pages lately, so I may be a little rusty. But it took me a few minutes of watching Sarah Palin’s video message this morning to realize that it wasn’t an OnionTV production [...]
Sarah Palin, once again, demonstrated her ability to rile both the left and right by uttering a few words from the last frontier. Now the ideological tribes will retreat to their clubhouses–Fox News, MSNBC, the political blogs–to stir themselves to outrage debating whether “blood libel,” a term historically reserved for a particularly vicious type of [...]
