"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.

Healthcare fact checking? For real?

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Facts?!? What the hell are facts doing on NPR and in a non-Krugman Times Blog? I'm a-skeert!

But there you are: ATC host Robert Siegel and NYT healthcare blogger Anne Underwood pretty thoroughly shoot down barefaced distortions pertaining to the costs of litigation, malpractice insurance, and defensive medicine told on Sunday Times op/ed page by former Senator Bill Bradley. It was a refreshing and unexpected piece of journalism to my shell-like ears, which are no longer accustomed to such spectacles as, uh, professional journalism being broadcast on NPR.

I'll have to dock Siegel and Underwood a few points for not directly calling Bradley a lying sack or reporting who is paying his wages and stipends these days. But gee whiz --- I'm actually slightly impressed!

Iranatics

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I agree with Atrios. And I'll add that I believe most of the domestic saturation coverage of the Iran election postmortem is driven primarily by some news exec's idea that this whole Iran thing could end up being a real "happening" --- maybe even a "color" revolution if the networks play their cards right. And that could at least mean a spike in ad revenues, up to and including the possibility of a new show with an awesome flying-graphics logo, triumphal theme music, and a 21st century Ted Koppel. Wouldn't that be a "coup"? [Nyuk nyuk nyuk BONK D'OH!]

More Fox Effect

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As seen first on TPM: the Executive Director of Minutemen American Defense (MAD*), Shawna Forde, and two others arrested on charges related to a double homicide in Arizona. Two members of a family with a Hispanic surname were reported to have been murdered in a 30 May home invasion 10 miles north of the border. Authorities suspect premeditated murder as part of a scheme by "thieves looking for drugs and money," according to the report. The Post-Intelligencer referred to the alleged home invasion ringleader as an "anti-immigration activist." That's some nice post-intelligence newswriting, I'd say. Here is an undated and unedited statement by Ms. Forde, copied and pasted directly from the MAD web page (go find it yourself, I'm not linking to it):

I would like to let everyone know that we are in full operation we have people coming from Florida and other parts of the country to assist in gathering exclusive footage of drug cartel drug smuggling and humane trafficking.

_________________
* No shit!

Words and pictures

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About the role of pictures in a presidential campaign, versus words.

McClatchy has a nice article on Big Oil interests possibly "laundering" oer $61,000 in McCain campaign contributions through the bank account of a middle-class New York family.

If the story is true, the reporting will not hurt John McCain in the slightest. The only way McCain will be hurt by this story is if Helen Thomas, when she returns to work, sucker punches him with a question about it on camera. You know: asking McCain if his flipflop on offshore oil drilling was related to the influx of Hess Corp. campaign contributions a few days earlier. Watch McCain stammer. Watch him turn red. Watch him call Helen a "cunt" when she returns to work. Now that would be a picture what is a picture.

But I may be wrong, because I'm just a simple country editor....

So-called "stunning comeback"

I can barely stand to hear political news coverage by the state-controlled media. For one thing it mainly speaks for corporations and propertied Americans. For another thing, it guards the gates against facts that don't fit the daily military-industrial narrative. And for a third thing, it's wrong about all the important things.

It was disappointing to see my hero Josh Marshall fall into the trap of echoing conventional platitudes about Clinton's "riveting win." Here is a link to TPM reporter Greg Sargent quoting AP on the "major upset" as if that characterization is a fact rather than someone's opinion.

Let's look at the freakin' historical NH poll data from Pollster.com. I'm terrible parsing lots of numbers, eyeball-wise; maybe Big Otis can help sort out these numbers for me. But it looks to me as if Obama, in most polls, was trailing Clinton by a wide margin --- often double digits --- back in November 2007. His numbers started creeping up in December 2007, but he was still a bit behind in most polls. He was even tied with or behind Clinton in a number of polls as late as 2 January 2008.

In actual voting totals, Obama finished only three points behind Clinton, which is well within the margin of error for a properly conducted poll. Now I'm just a simple country editor, but it looks to me as if the real stories are these:

* Obama slowly and steadily closed the gap between him and Clinton in December, and finished in a statistical tie with her for the primary win.

* Something --- the euphoric impact of a real news event on the people polled, the polling organizations, and the mass media, maybe --- skewed multiple polling results between the caucuses and the primary crazily in Obama's favor.

* The entire media establishment (plus non-establishment guys like Josh Marshall) became deranged --- first by all the amped-up Obama buzz out of Iowa, then by all the bizarre Clinton buzz (negative and positive) after Iowa through NH.

I think the Clinton fall from grace and stunning comeback happened mainly in the minds of celebrity journalists and the people who shovel them press handouts. Yes, we may see that Clinton had a late surge in voter support, and there is in fact anecdotal evidence (too lazy to link to it) that some late support was voter reaction against the negative coverage of her after Iowa. Fine: so be it. But the final NH voting totals were right in line with how the polling there had been trending all along! At least that's the way it looks to my dyslexic eyebones.

So the big news, in my view, is that the establishment media and polling organizations completely misreported what was really happening in the run-up to NH. And now they are all covering each other's backs by pretending that some sort of miracle occurred for Ms Clinton. Can't let the rubes see behind the curtain. To me, this "comeback kid" narrative is even less plausible than the fairy tales Mike Huckabee is ridiculed for spinning.

I'll forgive Josh, though: he's a young guy, and overworked.

Late update: I hate Blogger's numbered list and bulleted list styles. They screw up all typography that comes after them. Therefore, my bulleted lists will employ manual asterisks in order to otherwise preserve typographic beauty and legibility.

Deep Thought of the Evening

The news media do not have a liberal bias, but reality does.

Disclaimer: I do not claim the thought is utterly original, just deep.