September 11, 2026

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Shot:

 

Chaser: Gabrielle Giffords shooting fuels debate over rhetoric.

Has the nation’s harsh political rhetoric become more than just talk — to the point of being dangerous?

The attempted assassination of Arizona Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords as she spoke with voters outside a grocery store in Tucson fueled a debate Sunday over whether the sharp partisanship and anti-government language that now mark American politics have created a climate that makes violence against public officials more likely.

As a moderate Democrat who barely won re-election in a state torn by disputes over immigration policy, economic angst and growing mistrust in the government, Giffords was familiar with today’s increasingly nasty political rhetoric. Her opponent last fall accused her of betraying her district. Meanwhile, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s website posted a map with cross hairs on 20 Democrat-held congressional districts Palin was targeting for takeover by Republicans in the November elections. Giffords’ was one of them.

“You can’t say they’re just words; they have consequences,” said South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, a member of the Democratic leadership. He said he worries about the effect of words on “people who may not be clicking on all cylinders.”

He cautioned, “We need to take a look at what we’re drifting into here.”

—USA Today, January 9th, 2011.

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

HE SHOULD HAVE GOTTEN A MEDAL AND A BOUNTY: Wheelchair-Bound Man Shot Would-Be Robber, Now He’s Being Evicted For ‘Criminal Activity.’ “Police and prosecutors described Torrey Holliday as the victim of an armed robbery in the Aug. 26 incident, Fox2Now.com, a St. Louis TV station, reported, while Randall T. Taylor was charged with first-degree robbery, armed criminal action and two counts of unlawful possession of a firearm. Despite the charges against Taylor, Holliday received a letter from the St. Louis Housing Authority on Aug. 28 informing him he was being evicted for ‘criminal activity,’ according to Fox2Now.”

Posted at 4:54 pm by Stephen Green

YOUR WEEKEND ASSIGNMENT: Somehow I missed it but the three-part series on the Bill Walton Show entitled “Inside the Wire” is absolutely required YouTube watching for every person who worries about the future of America. Wade Miller, the retired Marine combat veteran who is now Executive Director of the Center for Renewing America, has for years studied the Islamic invasion and related actions originating from China.

But Miller sees those challenges as symptoms of the deeper problem facing all of us, which is the growing inability, even unwillingness, of Western Civilization to defend itself or why it is infinitely worth defending. This is deep and disturbing analysis, but it’s crucially important. Go here for the first of the three parts: “The Crisis Nobody Will Name.”

 

Posted at 4:43 pm by Mark Tapscott

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: The Power of Positive Thinking vs. SWAT. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, we’ll learn that positive thinking isn’t all that powerful, how to outdo the ‘I thought this was America’ meme, and what it takes these days to be a true 49ers fan.”

Posted at 4:23 pm by Stephen Green

IT’S TIME FOR VICTORIA TAFT’S West Coast, Messed Coast™: Nothing Says ‘We Hate America’ Quite as Much as UCLA’s 9/11 Event.

Today, your humble correspondent is shocked that the only guy not invited to the 9/11 observance at what used to be one of the West Coast, Messed Coast’s great universities is Khalid Sheik Mohammed himself.

Up for discussion today:

It’s a terror-friendly, America-hating event for the ages.

Democrats who run a California city hire a 20-year-old to manage the city’s money. This should go well.

And unbelievably, another California city decides to DOGE itself.

Let’s get going!

Let’s.

Posted at 3:21 pm by Stephen Green

SECONDED:

The NYT did the Norm Macdonald joke because of course they did.

Posted at 3:05 pm by Stephen Green

I THOUGHT POLITICIANS WERE MUCH BETTER ACTORS: AOC and Zohran Mamdani Spotted Yucking It Up As Names of Those Murdered Read at Ground Zero (Watch).

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

HA-HA, NO:

Posted at 2:34 pm by Stephen Green

THE DARK TRUTH ABOUT 9/11 CONSPIRACY THEORIES:

The tiny number of Twin Towers survivors had not even been pulled from the rubble before the first conspiracy theories were advanced. On the day of the attacks, the notorious Alex Jones claimed he was ‘98 per cent’ certain the Bush administration was to blame. In fact, six weeks before 9/11, he devoted several hours of his Infowars show to a history of ‘false flag’ attacks before warning explicitly that President Bush was planning to commit an act of terror.

So far, so Alex Jones. Yet it would be a mistake to think that trutherism was merely the preserve of cranks and crackpots in dark corners of the internet. Perhaps the first mainstream figure to dip his toe into trutherism – or at least trutherism-lite – was literary giant Gore Vidal. In a 7,000-word essay, published in the Observer in 2002, Vidal accused the ‘Bush junta’ of setting out to deceive a ‘simple-minded’ public as a pretext for ‘our long-contemplated invasion and conquest of Afghanistan’. Bin Laden, Vidal claimed, was ‘chosen on aesthetic grounds to be the frightening logo’ for the war effort.

The truther movement kicked off in earnest in 2004 with the release of a statement from the group, 9/11 Truth. It called for an investigation into 9/11 and alleged that the Bush administration knowingly allowed the attacks to happen. It was signed by nearly 200 prominent figures, including activist lawyer Ralph Nader and Van Jones. Jones would go on to advise the Obama administration.

Regarding Jones, as Mark Steyn said to Hugh Hewitt in 2009:

We’re supposed to be the crazy guys. We’re supposed to be the ones who don’t distance ourselves from the loons. You know, we’re the…Glenn Beck is supposed to be bananas. The birther movement are supposed to be the nuts. And yet, and yet, it is somehow the reality-based community, or whatever these guys call themselves, that has managed to put a 9/11 truther two doors away from President Obama in the Oval Office. And if he really thinks that the federal government pulled off 9/11, then he’s inside the system. Why doesn’t he uncover the truth of it? He’s the green jobs czar. Presumably, in the previous administration, George W. Bush was the steel melting czar. So why doesn’t he just take a look in the filing cabinets, and expose the truth on it?

As with all world-changing events, we want the cause of them to be as dramatic and frightening as the end results. Gavrilo Princip assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand set in motion the horrors of WWI, which effectively begat the 20th century. After JFK was assassinated, it was far easier to believe Oliver Stone’s shadowy cabal did the job, which effectively implicated everyone from the mafia to the joint chiefs, to LBJ. Jackie Kennedy was quoted bitterly complaining that her late husband, unlike Lincoln, “didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It had to be some silly little communist. It even robs his death of any meaning.”

And of course, putting the blame for 9/11 on the Bush administration and/or Israel helps to deflect from a very politically sensitive topic: Ted Cruz Drops Brutal Reality Check on Radical Islamism, Triggers All the Right People in the Process.

In contrast, the New York Times “unexpectedly” boldly goes where Norm Macdonald has gone before:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT WOULD TAKE A HEART OF STONE NOT TO LAUGH:

Posted at 2:03 pm by Stephen Green

MICHIGAN THINKS GRADES ARE THE PROBLEM. Replacing first semester grades with “pass/no credit” is not going to work any better than going test-optional did, and it’s not going to “curb the mental health crisis” among students.

Posted at 1:49 pm by Robert Shibley