Democratic Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is shot, possibly killed (reports vary). Interestingly, a New York Times article reporting on the shooting made no mention of her political affiliation — one of the most spectacular examples I’ve seen of a news article leaving out precisely the most interesting fact, I suppose, in the interest of appearing nonbiased.

One note about Giffords:

She is married to Navy Capt. Mark Kelly, a NASA astronaut who is scheduled to lead a space shuttle mission to the International Space Station.

Only absolute fools make political productions, but I’m going to predict this hastens the demise of Sarah Palin’s political future.

Interesting… Christian commentator Pat Robertson is criticizing the criminalization of cannabis. He says:

“I’m not exactly for the use of drugs, don’t get me wrong, but I just believe that criminalizing marijuana, criminalizing the possession of a few ounces of pot, that kinda thing it’s just, it’s costing us a fortune and it’s ruining young people. Young people go into prisons, they go in as youths and come out as hardened criminals. That’s not a good thing.”

My take is that legalization of marijuana is just a matter of time, but this probably nudges it up a bit.

I’ve often commented on my confusion as to why terrorists don’t abstain from massive 9/11 style attacks and instead focus on numerous small-scale attacks — like walking into a 7-11 and blowing everyone away with an AK-47. In the current Time magazine, Fareed Zakaria argues they are beginning to do just that.

Over the past year we have seen the rise of a new kind of warfare: microterrorism, which can be defined as small-scale terrorism, driven from the local level, whose practitioners choose not the largest or most spectacular operations but those that are likely to succeed.
…
“We do not need to strike big,” [Al Qaeda] say. “Attacking the enemy… is to bleed the enemy to death,” a tactic they dubbed “the strategy of a thousand cuts.”

This is, of course, what terrorists have been doing in Israel for decades, and many other parts of the world. Strap a bomb on someone, march them into a pizzeria, and whammo — 20 people are dead. A steady onslaught of such attacks could cause a radical restructuring of democratic society. And, as technology becomes more available, bombs and bio weapons become only easier to make.

One would have to be blind and deaf to not notice that there is a progressive revolt against President Obama over his agreement to extend the Bush era tax cuts to the richest Americans. Many people on Facebook seem to be expressing venomous anger and I’ve heard of some progressive leaders stating that unless Obama retreats on this issue, they will seek to nominate a more progressive candidate in 2012. (Michael Moore made comments to this effect on his last appearance on the Larry King show.)

My first take was that this was pretty damaging for Obama. I’ve always seen him as something of a centrist Democrat, but there’s no doubt he needs ample support from progressives and the liberal left to maintain his agenda and get elected.

However, one thing dawned on me today: the ire of progressive towards Obama goes a lot way to deflate accusations from the right (and similar concerns on the part of independents) that Obama is secretly beholden to his Marxist college professors and is initiating a stealth campaign to turn America into a socialist hellhole. If he is, as many of his conservative detractors allege, a Communist in disguise (a Muslim one at that), then why do so many on the far left, who would love to see a Communist America, hate him?

I’m not unconvinced that, when Obama’s advisers made the case that supporting tax cuts for the rich would anger the left, he saw this as a feature, not a bug.

Of course, it’s a delicate dance. If Obama angers the left too much, they may very well gather around an insurgent presidential candidate in 2012, splitting the vote, and handing victory to a Republican. This would be incredibly stupid thing for progressives to do, but they’ve done it before (see Nader, Ralph.)

I’ve defended Barack Obama from what I consider to be spurious charges that he has failed to deliver on certain campaign promises. However my recent discussion on the hunt for bin Laden brings to mind that Obama has failed to deliver on one significant campaign promise. Recall…

As recently as October 7, in a presidential debate, Mr Obama said: “We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al-Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority.”

This was no small matter. A chief criticism of Bush was that, for all his national security rhetoric and war mongering, he failed to capture the man behind the most egregious attack on America in 50 years. And many rank-and-file Democrats argued Obama would not continue this failure. Now, granted, Obama isn’t even halfway through his term, but one certainly doesn’t get the impression that capturing bin Laden is “our biggest national security priority.”

It’s true that Obama walked back from this promise almost instantly. After he won the election, but before he assumed office, he said (as can be seen from the page linked above)…

“My preference obviously would be to capture or kill him,” he said. “But if we have so tightened the noose that he’s in a cave somewhere and can’t even communicate with his operatives then we will meet our goal of protecting America.”

… which is very similar to comments Bush made on the subject. But that’s the point. Those who criticized Bush for his comments are obligated to apply those same criticisms to Obama.

I should be up front that while I’ve loosely followed the story of the recent Wikileaks, um, leaks, I’m not very comfortable with my sense of the specifics of the laws that may have been broken, or the potential damage that may arise. That said, Andrew Sullivan’s recent defense of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange seems weak to me. He first notes a compelling argument from Joe Klein that the leaks may result in the death of people working with the US in trouble spots like Afghanistan. Sullivan then states…

This is indeed a terrible possibility, but would arresting Assange really put an end to Wikileaks or something like it? The point, surely, is that Assange is to Wikileaks as bin Laden is to al Qaeda or Mark Zuckerberg is to Facebook.

Certainly there is a “whack a mole” element to prosecuting/assassinating some of these people, but is Sullivan really arguing that we shouldn’t go after Osama bin Laden just because his organization will doubtless continue without him?

And can any reasonable person really argue against assassinating Mark Zuckerberg?

Heh – the snark is thick and syrupy in this op-ed column by Joe Scarborough condemning Sarah Palin for criticizing the first George Bush as a blue blood.

Maybe poor George Herbert Walker Bush was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Indeed, he was so pampered growing up that on his 18th birthday, the young high school graduate enlisted in the armed forces. This spoiled teenager somehow managed to be the youngest pilot in the Navy when he received his wings, flying 58 combat missions over the Pacific during World War II. On Sept. 2, 1944, “Blue Blood” Bush almost lost his life after being shot down by Japanese anti-aircraft fire.

With his engine shattered and his plane on fire, Bush still refused to turn back, completing his mission by scoring several damaging hits on enemy targets. His plane crashed in the Pacific, where he waited for four hours in enemy waters until he was finally rescued. For his bravery and service to this country, Bush was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, three air medals and the Presidential Unit Citation for bravery while in combat.

What a spoiled brat.

I suppose Palin’s harsh dismissal of this great man is more understandable after one reads her biography and realizes that, like Bush, she accomplished a great deal in her early 20s. Who wouldn’t agree that finishing third in the Miss Alaska beauty contest is every bit as treacherous as risking your life in military combat? Maybe the beauty contestant who would one day be a reality star and former governor didn’t win the Distinguished Flying Cross, but the half-termer was selected as Miss Congeniality by her fellow contestants.

Again, I find myself frustrated by progressive “disappointment” in Obama, at least as listed in this Newsweek article about how the Netroots have left him.

Maybe the problem is that Obama failed to deliver some things online activists were hoping for. When we wrote our article two years ago, we mentioned a Web site called Change.org, where people could vote on what they wanted Obama to do; the top-rated idea at the time was “Close Guantánamo prison camp.” That hasn’t happened. Obama also hasn’t repealed “don’t ask, don’t tell,” or legalized marijuana, or supported gay marriage, or used the Internet to create a more transparent government—issues the Netroots cared about. And he’s escalated the war in Afghanistan.

On those first two points (Guantánamo and “don’t ask, don’t tell”), online activists have a legitimate grievance, though it seems very possible these changes could still happen. But Obama certainly never promised to legalize marijuana, and always purported to support “traditional” marriage (I suspect his personal views are different, but that was his public face.) I’m not sure what “using the Internet to create a more transparent government” even means. And, again, he campaigned very clearly on the argument that he was going to escalate the war in Afghanistan.

So I’m unclear how either Newsweek or online activists could claim Obama “failed to deliver” on these issues. Aside from the exceptions mentioned above, he delivered exactly what he said he would.