"Barring info...speculation benefits no one"

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That is NPR's rejoinder about the Giffords shooter and his motives. They're concerned about "speculation."

Little "speculation" is necessary when facts are available.

Rep. Giffords's Republican opponent Jesse Kelly had campaign rally shoot-in to "help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office."

The federal judge shot dead in today's incident, John Roll, had previously received right-wing death threats by telephone that required intervention by the U.S. Marshals Service.

One account, a second-hand attribution to the Democratic National Committee Western States Director, posted by Atrios, has the perpetrator calling out the name of each victim he shoots.

Anybody following national news for the past several years knows that Arizona has a highly expressive right-wing gun culture that has normalized the concept of bringing firearms to political events. (Sorry, don't have time to find a link right now.)

So, NPR, why don't you take "political junkie Ken Rudin" off the pontification beat this evening and assign him try some real reporting on the alleged shooter's internet ramblings? Based on an initial look at samples posted to TPM, the shooter would seem to have been motivated to a large extent by psychosis. But in the few of his utterances I've glanced at so far there appears to be a stack of kindling cut fresh from the right-wing noise bush. As one would expect, those political assassination attempts that are not the work of paid hit men are typically the finale of a grand vision obsessing an individual who has lost his mind. We don't have to go too far out on the "speculation" limb to write a reasonable first draft of what went wrong in Arizona today.