Gabrielle Giffords, a 40-year old Arizona Democrat “was among as many as 12 people wounded in a shooting at a Tucson, Ariz., grocery store where she was holding a campaign event,” ABC News reports:

ABC affiliate KGUN-TV in Tucson reported that as many as 12 people had been shot, including Giffords.

Sources said Giffords had been shot in the head.

She was taken to University Medical Center where a hospital spokesman confirmed she was alive. But the extent and seriousness of her injuries are unknown.

A law enforcement source told KGUN that the shooter was in custody.

Reuters has since tweeted that the congresswoman later passed away. Other reports are saying that six other people have died in the incident, and several injured.

The Anchoress notes that it hasn’t taken long for this story to become politicized, and has background details on Giffords:

It is appalling to note that some on the social media circuits are already letting the conspiracy theories fly according to their agendas – some on the left are already tweeting about Sarah Palin and gun imagery and some are not beneath bringing the full-crazy and wondering if this was done purposely to blame Palin. [QED--Ed] Not the time, folks. It’s kind of disgusting when you hear someone is shot and the first thing you do is try to figure out how to fit the terrible news to your political worldview. Blame the gunman.

I do wish the CNN anchor would learn how to pronounce her name. Can he not figure out Gabrielle? Giffords is the only member of congress married to an active member of the military, astronaut Mark Kelly; they have two children.

Here’s Giffords’ Wikipedia page and Kelly’s; more on the shooting as it comes in.

Update (11:36 PST): I’ve amended the headline; Reuters is now saying that Giffords is still in surgery, and alive.

Update (12:21 PM PST): Glenn Reynolds adds:

And judging from the comments to this post, people are already trying to score political points. Well, they kind of telegraphed this strategy, didn’t they? Remember Bloomberg making a fool of himself by blaming the Times Square bombing on the Tea Party? How about waiting until we actually know something, this time? That’s likely to be soon enough.

President Obama’s office has released the following statement:

This morning, in an unspeakable tragedy, a number of Americans were shot in Tuscon, Arizona, at a constituent meeting with Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.  And while we are continuing to receive information, we know that some have passed away, and that Representative Giffords is gravely wounded.

We do not yet have all the answers.  What we do know is that such a senseless and terrible act of violence has no place in a free society.  I ask all Americans to join me and Michelle in keeping Representative Giffords, the victims of this tragedy, and their families in our prayers.

Speaker Boehner’s office adds this statement:

I am horrified by the senseless attack on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and members of her staff. An attack on one who serves is an attack on all who serve. Acts and threats of violence against public officials have no place in our society. Our prayers are with Congresswoman Giffords, her staff, all who were injured, and their families. This is a sad day for our country.

From Sarah Palin:

My sincere condolences are offered to the family of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the other victims of today’s tragic shooting in Arizona.

On behalf of Todd and my family, we all pray for the victims and their families, and for peace and justice.

Update (12:49 PST): Found via Cassy Fiano, who has regular updates on the shooting, “Federal Judge John M. Roll killed in Arizona attack, NBC News reports.”

Meanwhile, Paul Krugman of the New York Times goes all in; the Daily Kos fires up the airbrush.

Update (1:04 PM PST): Suspect identified, Business Insider reports:

AP and NBC are reporting that the shooter is named Jared Laughner and is an Arizona native.

Some have reported, including Fox News, that Laughner was an Afghanistan war veteran.

His age is either 21 or 22.

The Washington Post confirms Laughner’s name, but has little on his background as of now.

MSNBC reports, “Surgeon says he’s ‘optimistic’ for congresswoman’s survival after shooting.”

Update (1:25 PM PST): Blogger Bookworm Room on apparent YouTube page of the suspect:

Judging by his YouTube channel, choice (a), above (i.e., crazy) may be the correct identifier for Laughner.  In the 1950s, he would have been talking about Martians and mind control.  In the 1700s, he would have been concerned about witches and the devil.  This video is more evidence of his profound reality disconnect.  Also, from his YouTube site, check out some of the books that informed his reality (emphasis mine):

Books:

I had favorite books: Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Wizard Of OZ, Aesop Fables, The Odyssey, Alice Adventures Into Wonderland, Fahrenheit 451, Peter Pan, To Kill A Mockingbird, We The Living, Phantom Toll Booth, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Pulp,Through The Looking Glass, The Communist Manifesto, Siddhartha, The Old Man And The Sea, Gulliver’s Travels, Mein Kampf, The Republic, and Meno.

The suspect’s last name is apparently Loughner, not Laughner as was originally reported; Ben Smith of the Politico has more: “Alleged shooter left social media hints.” Ed Morrissey collates and embeds the videos posted under Loughner’s name at Hot Air.

Update (1:45 PST): Mark Knoller of CBS tweets, “Hospital says neurosurgeons have finished operating on Giffords and are optimistic about her recovery.”

Update (2:00 PST): Scroll down to the bottom of this Doug Ross post for a possible photo of the suspect.

Gov. Brewer orders Arizona flags to half staff.

Michelle Malkin has a lengthy round-up of news on both the shooting and the spin from the left.

Late Update: At “Putting the Narrative Before the Horse,” I look at a much earlier example of the media rushing to create a narrative, no matter that it didn’t the facts of a shooting incident that left one official dead and another critically wounded. Additional updates and opinion on Saturday’s incident will appear in separate posts on the blog. And stop by the Pajamas homepage for additional reaction from other PJM bloggers.

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Via Terry Teachout:

embedded by Embedded Video

YouTube Direkt

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If you missed any of our posts this weekend because you were enjoying the holidays (and we hope you enjoyed your Christmas weekend as much as we enjoyed ours), here are some of the highlights:

• In the Future, Everyone will be Edward R. Murrow for 15 minutes
• Ed Driscoll.com makes Doug Ross’ “2010 Fabulous 50 Weblog Awards List.”
• ‘Lovergirl’ Singer Teena Marie Dead at 54
• But Getting There will be Half the Fun
• The 25 Percent Solution
• The Gray Lady Waxes Nostalgic
• Paul Krugman: Left Has ‘Nothing Comparable’ To Conservative Media
• Snowfalls Are Now Just a Thing of the Past
• Obamanomics Question of the Day
• ‘So You Lost Your Election’
• Latest Political Battlefield: Seattle Bus Advertising
• “NY Mayor Bloomberg Was ‘In Cahoots’ With Planners of Ground Zero Mosque”

Or just start here and keep scrolling.

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Back in mid-2008, Jim Geraghty spotted the white-hot anger that Obama-supporting “progressives” aimed towards Hillary Clinton, her husband Bill, Hillary-supporting Geraldine Ferraro, and even Hillary’s voters in the presidential primaries, and wondered just what was going on. This was only a year and half after the left attempted to sandbag Joe Lieberman, going so far as to picture him in blackface at the Huffington Post, just six years after nominating him to be Al Gore’s veep. And it was months before Sarah Palin became a household name, in part because of the left’s wrath being directed at her. One expects the tolerant, progressive, diversity-obsessed left to cling bitterly towards its anger to conservatives, but not towards each other — and certainly not with this level of vitriol.

As Jim wrote on Friday, the Angry Left, having turned on the man they elected to the White House, came full circle this week:

Once you start marinating in this nastiness, it starts to seep into how you think and speak, and perhaps you can’t turn it off. It is now defining the Left. Michael Moore. Bill Maher. Joy Behar. It didn’t just stay in the grassroots and celebrities; it came to the halls of Congress with Alan Grayson.

We on the right hated Hillary Clinton back in the 1990s. Then the 2008 campaign comes along, Hillary is perceived to be the less liberal candidate than Obama, and suddenly Air America’s Randi Rhodes is calling her a “big [f-word]ing whore.” This is Hillary Clinton we’re talking about. Ten years earlier, almost every Democrat in America loved her, and we were the ones calling her names. But once she’s not their preferred choice, they can turn on her and denounce her in the same tone they would use to denounce a conservative Republican.

And now, finally, it comes full circle. Now they’re sneering at Obama. Their guy. The guy whom they adored, perhaps as much as any party has ever adored its leader, in 2007 and 2008. Now they say, “[F-word] him.”

Hey, pal, that’s the President of the United States. Show some respect.

(How did it come to the point where we have to be the ones to demand that?)

And of course, concurrent with that fire and brimstone rage is the desire to create messianic figures out of perfectly ordinary politicians — witness first the transformation of Al Gore from Bill Clinton’s vaguely wonkish veep and robotic board-stiff failed presidential candidate in 2000 to The Goracle, maaan, followed in very short succession by the deification of political neophyte Barack Obama. This early 2008 quote from JournoList founder Ezra Klein hints at the frenzy to come throughout that year:

Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I’ve heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.

But why has what was once called “liberalism” gone so far off the rails? How did an ideology which prides itself outwardly on coolness and a Holden Caulfield-inspired hatred of hypocrisy work itself into a constant fever pitch, vibrating back and forth between judging everything from the binary prism of SUX and ROX?

One reason is that the underlying ideology itself, whose roots were forged in the 19th century, is now increasingly sclerotic. As James Piereson noted in Camelot and Cultural Revolution, American liberalism retracted slightly in the 1950s, tamping down its revolutionary fervor, cementing its hard-won gains from the first half of the century, and attempting to create the patina of a timeless and permanent ideology. That form of establishment liberalism was of course all too quickly shattered, as Piereson noted, by the assassination of JFK by a Marxist revolutionary, and would be increasingly usurped by the New Left of the late 1960s, whose much more punitive worldview Obama has marinated in throughout his life.

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Ann Althouse spots an endless reoccurring cliche amongst Leftwing Elites:

Welcome to my world: Dane County, Wisconsin, home of people who tell themselves they are the smart people and those who disagree with them must certainly be dumb. They don’t go through the exercise of putting themselves in the place of someone who thinks differently from the way they do. But how would it feel to be intelligent, informed, and well-meaning and to think what conservatives think? Isn’t that the right way for an intelligent, informed, and well-meaning person to understand other people? If you short circuit that process and go right to the assumption that people who don’t agree with you are stupid, how do you maintain the belief that you are, in fact, intelligent, informed, and well-meaning?

What is liberal about this attitude toward other people? You wallow in self-love, and what is it you love yourself for? For wanting to shower benefits on people… that you have nothing but contempt for.

You see this worldview manifested endlessly among the left, whenever you hear the hyperbolic phrase, “I can’t understand why anyone would be a conservative/Republican/libertarian/vote for Bush/vote for Reagan, etc.” Well, why the heck can can’t you? Is it really that difficult to mentally spend a few minutes in our shoes? We’re always asked by the left to celebrate diversity, and to try to understand those not like ourselves. How hard it can be to get a handle on why someone has a different view on say, income tax rates, transfer payments, small business, and government handouts than you do? Or why he likes to get his news from channel #360 on his DirecTV dial than say, channel #202 or #356?

Another example of this mindset can be in the title of Harry Stein’s terrific book last year, which grew out of a conversation he had with a self-described “liberal,” when Harry dared to supply the voice of reason at a dinner party in 2008 and suggest that the young would-be emperor, soul-fixer and lightworker had no clothes.

Perhaps the ultimate mote in a far leftist’s eye can be found here.

(H/T: IP)

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At Forbes, Joel Kotkin writes, turn out the (AlGore-approved twisty flourescent) lights, the party’s over in the no-longer quite-so-Golden State — though it’s just getting started in Texas:

Ultimately the “green jobs” strategy, effective as a campaign plank, represents a cruel delusion. Given the likely direction of the new GOP-dominated House of Representatives in Washington, massive federal subsidies for the solar and wind industries, as well as such boondoggles as high-speed rail, are likely to be scaled back significantly.  Without subsidies, federal loans or draconian national regulations, many green-related ventures will cut as oppose to add jobs, as is already beginning to occur. The survivors, increasingly forced to compete on a market basis, will likely move to China, Arizona or even Texas, already the nation’s leader in wind energy production.

Tom Hayden, a ’60s radical turned environmental zealot, admits that given the current national climate the only way California can maintain Brown’s “green vision” will be to impose “some combination of rate heights and tax revenues.”  Such an approach may help bail out green investors, but seems likely to drive even more businesses out of the state.

California’s decline is particularly tragic, as it is unnecessary and largely unforced. The state still possesses the basic assets–energy, fertile land, remarkable entrepreneurial talent–to restore its luster. But given its current political trajectory, you can count on Texans, and others, to keep picking up both the state’s jobs and skilled workers. If California wishes to commit economic suicide, Texas and other competitors will gladly lend them a knife.

As with President Obama, Sacramento politicians are determined to further transform California into Europe, even as Europe is waking up — with quite a hangover  — to the fiscal horrors brought on by its Nanny State obsessions.

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Ed Morrissey writes that it’s time for Eric Holder to go:

Let’s face it.  Barack Obama and Eric Holder gambled their entire national-security credibility on the Ahmed “Foopie” Ghailani trial, arguing that they could get convictions of detainees captured abroad by military and intelligence assets while using federal courts as a venue rather than the military commissions that Congress repeatedly authorized for that purpose.  Holder scolded critics who pointed out all of the reasons that such a strategy was much more likely to fail for “politicizing” the process, especially in regard to the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, whose case is more problematic than Ghailani’s, where the FBI did a large part of the investigation before intelligence assets were used to seize and interrogate Ghailani.

The failure of Holder’s DoJ to win anything more than a single conspiracy count against Ghailani as a result of using a process designed for domestic criminals than wartime enemies shows that the critics had it right all along.  It also shows that both Obama and Holder have been proven spectacularly wrong, since a man who confessed to the murder of over two hundred people will now face no more than 20 years, with a big chunk of whatever sentence Foopie receives being reduced by time already served.

Glenn Reynolds adds:

And making an even bigger mockery of the whole thing is the Administration’s claim of “post-acquittal detention power.” So the whole thing was just a show trial anyway. Ah, remember the fierce moral urgency of change? Apparently, it was the fierce moral urgency of show trials. But that doesn’t get Holder off the hook. He botched a show trial, after all . . .

How do you botch a show trial, when the user manual is so easy to follow?

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We’ll try to keep this post open for early results as they come in. No doubt, there will be plenty of issues with spin and “fog of war,” so take these for what they’re worth — and if your polling place is still open but you haven’t voted yet, stop reading and hit it.

Exit polls from Drudge, 3:00 PM PDT:

Arkansas: Boozman (R) defeats Lincoln (D)

Ohio: Portman (R) defeats Fisher (D)

North Dakota: Hoeven (R) defeats Potter (D)

Wisconsin: Johnson (R) defeats Feingold (D)

From Breaking News:

Dan Burton, GOP, elected U.S. House, District 5, Indiana.

Jamie Dupree, Cox Radio:

Early returns from Indiana Senate, Coats (R) up 55-40%; early from Kentucky Senate Paul (R) up 57-43%

Mark Hemingway, Washington Examiner (3:20 PM PDT):

CNN calls IN-5 and IN-6 for Burton and Pence.

Josh Kraushaar of the Hotline:

Exit polls show Rubio +21 in #FLSEN

Update 3:40 PDT: Drudge is calling IL 49-43 Kirk over Alexi Giannoulias.

Update: 5:18 PDT (sorry for the lag — I needed to go vote as well!) From Instapundit:

FOX CALLS FLORIDA FOR RUBIO. Connecticut called for Blumenthal. Delaware for Coons. New Hampshire for Ayotte. Missouri for Roy Blunt over Robin Carnahan, whose ObamaCare support killed her. Mikulski to hold on in Maryland despite last-minute revelations of a fling with Matt Labash. (Heck — that sealed the deal for her!) Shelby in Alabama.

At Hot Air, the first Humpbot sighting of the night for Rubio, plus this:

Here’s one to please grassroots righties: Tom Perriello, who defended his ObamaCare and stimulus votes and brought The One in to campaign him last week, is reportedly kaput. That’s not an official call, but he’s eight points down with 63 percent reporting. Meanwhile, right next door in Virginia, Rick Boucher still trails by six with 69 percent reporting. That’s a huge bellwether if it holds; now we’re looking at something in the neighborhood of 65 seats or more.

More as it comes in.

Update (6:01 PDT): Since this afternoon, I’ve been part of gang contributing to the PJM election post, where I was duplicating much of my material from here. Rather than cutting and pasting back and forth, just click here and keep refreshing for regular updates.

One last update (6:10 PDT): On Twitter, Josh Kraushaar of the Hotline reports, “NBC says the House will flip to the GOP — first to call it.”

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As Mickey Kaus writes, “Uh-oh. President Obama seems to have learned nothing from the disaster of the ‘cling-to-guns-and-God’ talk that almost derailed his campaign in 2008. He’s back at it—blaming voters for failing to ‘think clearly’ because they’re ‘scared’ about the economy:”

Insulting voters is rarely a good way to win them over. But usually the “blame the customer” approach, as Mark Shields calls it, takes hold in the wake of an election defeat. Obama has broken new ground by moving it up to three weeks in advance of the vote.What if he’s right? In two years, the economy will have recovered and voters will feel better about his policies. But the election is in three weeks, when—according to his own theory—voters will act out of scared, hard-wired confusion. Why make them angrier? (‘You poor, scared, confused people, I know more “facts” and “science” than you do.’) Always Be Condescending! It’s a form of political malpractice—making yourself look good to supporters, and to history, and to yourself, at the expense of the fellow Dems who are on the ballot.

But Obama’s talk Saturday night wasn’t as bad as his San Francisco lecture. It was worse, in this sense: It’s one thing to say those poor people in Pennsylvania are hostile to gay rights, say, because all their “jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them”—and that they’ll change when they get the jobs back.  It’s another thing to say those poor people will change when they get their jobs back when you’ve had two years to get them their jobs back and have conspicuously failed. At that point, blaming “false consciousness” becomes a semi-delusional way of dancing around your own inability to remove the root of that false consciousness. A little humility is in order. If true humility is unavailable, false humility will do.

A few days ago, Jonah Goldberg diagrammed the Hindenburg-sized excesses of “Obama’s Outsized Ego:”

Last week, the president of the United States attacked Karl Rove by name — twice! — in a speech. He recently begged a crowd of black supporters not to “make me look bad” by staying home from the polls. In an interview with Rolling Stone, he scolded young voters that if they don’t vote, it will be proof they “weren’t serious in the first place.”

It never dawns on him that were it not for the unseriousness of those voters, he might still be a one-term junior senator from Illinois.

“You know, I actually believe my own bull—,” Obama told the author of Renegade: The Making of a President, Richard Wolffe.

Exactly. And that’s why he’s gotten into this mess.

Why would someone who actually believes the shovel-ready manure he tossed on the campaign trail in 2008, and went along with the charade that he’s the second coming of Lincoln be expected to find humility — fake or otherwise — at this point in time?

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In a recent edition of City Journal, Fred Siegel explored how the radical environmentalism of the early 1970s created a new breed of “Progressives Against Progress,” as he put it:

In 1972, Sir John Maddox, editor of the British journal Nature, noted that though it had once been usual to see maniacs wearing sandwich boards that proclaimed the imminent end of the Earth, they had been replaced by a growing number of frenzied activists and politicized scientists making precisely the same claim. In the years since then, liberalism has seen recurring waves of such end-of-days hysteria. These waves have shared not only a common pattern but often the same cast of characters. Strangely, the promised despoliations are most likely to be presented as imminent when Republicans are in the White House. In each case, liberals have argued that the threat of catastrophe can be averted only through drastic actions in which the ordinary political mechanisms of democracy are suspended and power is turned over to a body of experts and supermen.

Flash-forward from the early 1970s to 2010, and Dana Milbank arguing in the Washington Post that “it is time to come up with an alternative to regulating carbon, a Plan B for climate change.”

Or as Tim Blair wrote at the start of 2009 when earlier hairshirt environmentalists made similar proposal, it sounds like an Ed Wood or Roger Corman movie — Plan B From Outer Space!

More Milbank:

Scientists are already pondering the use of smoke (sulfur dioxide injected into the stratosphere) and mirrors (installing reflectors made of metal or lunar glass a million miles from Earth) to cool the planet. It’s time for policymakers to get serious about these and other “geoengineering” proposals to cool the Earth and remove excess carbon.

None of this means giving up on carbon reduction, which remains the only sure way to prevent man-made climate change. But as the failure in Congress to reach consensus slows progress toward an international agreement, the wasted time could be used to create a fallback plan…

To keep the Earth from absorbing warmth, we could paint roofs, roads and pavement white. We could plant lighter, more reflective grasses, or cover the deserts with reflective aluminum. Boats or planes could spray ocean clouds with sea salt to make them whiter; pumping tiny particles into the atmosphere could mimic the cooling effect of volcanic eruptions.

The geo-engineering proposals that Milbank references above are favorites of John Holdren, the president’s “science czar” and in-house equivalent of Dr. Strangelove; I explored several of these in a Silicon Graffiti video last year titled…

A year after the University of East Anglia’s notorious ClimateGate incident, only a few weeks after the 10/10 group’s fascistic, “Kill ‘em all, let Gaia sort it out” video, do journalists such as Milbank realize how nutty they sound — at least to those us who dissent from the religion of Gaia?

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“Biden: If I hear one more GOP budget gripe, ‘I am going to strangle them’”, The Hill reports:

Vice President Biden jokingly expressed his frustration toward Republicans on Tuesday, accusing them of harboring insincere concerns about the budget deficit.

Biden jokingly said that GOP protests about the need for a balanced budget made him want to strangle them, which the vice president quickly clarified was a figure of speech.

“If I hear one more Republican tell me about balancing the budget, I am going to strangle them,” Biden said at a fundraiser in Minnesota, according to a pool report. “To the press, that’s a figure of speech.”

I dunno — as Richard Cohen would say, “his words were ugly;” this sounds like a powerful leader “enthralled by toughness, violence.”

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I’m late to this, but I wanted to mention a great find by Kevin D. Williamson at the Corner, who takes one for the team, reading Paul Krugman so the rest of us don’t have to:

You know, this actually explains something important, and, yes, I am serious. Paul Krugman writes in re: Isaac Asimov:

Asimov, and specifically the Foundation trilogy, was my great inspiration; I became an economist because I wanted to be a psychohistorian, saving civilization through the mathematics of human behavior.

The psychohistorians use mathematical models to predict the course of human civilization, and the founder of the science of psychohistory, Prof. Hari Seldon, takes on a kind of godlike role in guiding human history. Of particular interest are what are known as “Seldon crises,” which, as Wikipedia sums it up, “are part of the field of psychohistory, and refer to a social and political situation that, to be successfully surmounted, would eventually leave only one possible, inevitable, course of action.” One unique solution to a sociopolitical problem, determined with mathematical precision by a very powerful professor with friends in government. Talk about your fatal conceits!

On Earth, unhappy wretches that we are, we must labor under constraints. In politics, one of the most important of those constraints is the “knowledge problem” articulated by Mises and Hayek: Even the smartest, most motivated, best-intentioned bureaucrats cannot plan complex human undertakings—such as the workings of the economy, or subsectors of the economy—because they do not and cannot have access to data sufficient to make those decisions, the data being too complex and in constant flux. (Question: If governments actually know how to macromanage economies, why are there recessions?)

I love the Obamaesque narcissism contained within Krugman’s admission that “I wanted to be a psychohistorian, saving civilization through the mathematics of human behavior” — it’s his personal equivalent of the hoary cliche of newspaper journalists who, ever since the 1970s said they joined their profession to “change the world.”

(Has anybody ever asked a journalist “What would you like to change it into?”)

This isn’t Krugman’s first public embrace of a Galbraithian command and control economic worldview, of course. Last year Krugman even praised Richard Nixon, as part of the 37th president’s strange new respect among liberal journalists for similar reasons). It also brings to mind the cri de coeurs of Thomas Friedman, Krugman’s fellow Timesman, for totalitarian China.

Well, that at least answers the “how would you like to change the world” question for Friedman!

Of course, totalitarian regimes keep their dissent just offstage, unlike the out-in-the-open messiness of democracy. Which not surprisingly, the New York Times has little patience with, particularly when the voters aren’t in sync with the Gray Lady, as Noel Sheppard writes at Newsbusters:

The New York Times Friday called many of its readers “appalling” for their opposition to the Ground Zero mosque.

As NewsBusters reported moments ago, the Times released a new poll Friday finding that 67 percent of New York City residents are against the proposed location for the Islamic center.

At the same time, the Gray Lady, clearly not concerned about offending its dwindling number of patrons, chose to insult portions of its remaining readership with the following editorial:

It has always been a myth that New York City, in all its dizzying globalness, is a utopia of humanistic harmony. The city has a bloody history of ethnic and class strife. [...]

The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island are two pinnacles of American openness to the outsider. New Yorkers like to think they are a perfect fit with their city.

Tolerance, however, isn’t the same as understanding, so it is appalling to see New Yorkers who could lead us all away from mosque madness, who should know better, playing to people’s worst instincts.

That includes Carl Paladino and Rick Lazio, Republicans running for governor who have disgraced their state with histrionics about the mosque being a terrorist triumph. And Rudolph Giuliani, who cloaks his opposition to the mosque as “sensitivity” to 9/11 families without acknowledging that this conflates all prayerful Muslims with terrorists, a despicable conclusion. [...]

New Yorkers, like other Americans, have a way to go.

That’s a heckuva way to treat your patrons as well as prospective customers.

Yeah, there’s a lot of that going around these days, isn’t there? Or as James Taranto puts it, “Times to City: Drop Dead.”

Fortunately, most New Yorkers are made of heartier stock than the effete Gray Lady, as this humorous (and alas — language warning –it’s filled with plenty of New Yowk F**#&#&@-style language ) mock New York Post commercial implies.

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While Mad Men occasionally seems to think of itself as a period domestic soap opera that only tangentially focuses on advertising, invariably, its best scenes are in the office. “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword,” yesterday’s episode, pitted the firm’s founding owners, World War II vet Roger Sterling against office Japanophile Bert Cooper over their firm’s attempts to land the account of Honda, looking to break into the American motorcycle and car market in 1965. It certainly seemed like one of their more dramatic inter-office conflicts of the new season. (Language warning in clip below):

Mike Potemra of National Review wondered in the Corner last night if this episode was hastily rushed out as a metaphor for the Ground Zero Mosque controversy, but in actuality, it was probably written well in advance for this. (Certainly, Bert’s obsession with all things Japanese dates back to his debut early in the show’s first season, as does Roger’s WWII Navy background; no doubt the writers had planned to have the firm handle a Japanese account at some point in its run.)

While Roger’s actions may seem surprising to modern eyes, it took quite a while for many American businessmen who were World War II vets to forget the sting of the war. Witness this passage near the end of Skip Bayless’s 1989 iconclastic biography of Tom Landry, God’s Coach, describing former Dallas Cowboys owner (and former Army World War II vet) H.R. “Bum” Bright’s efforts to sell the team that year:

[Jerry] Jones simply was tap dancing as fast as he could, trying to find a way to put together a $140 million package that would keep him in the running with dozens of “big boy” bidders. Besides [Los Angeles Lakers owner Jerry Buss] there was a Japanese group said to be “price insensitive.” A source close to the sale says, “The Japanese were ready to make an offer with no real sense of how much the Dallas Cowboys were worth. To them it was like, ‘Oh, Dallas Cowboys! How much? Two hundred million? Three hundred?’ [Tom] Landry might have coached for another century if the Japanese had bought the team. But World War II had a profound effect on Bum. He just wasn’t comfortable with the thought of selling the Dallas Cowboys to the Japanese, whether or not the league would have approved it.”

And that was 1989. Meanwhile, even as tensions from World War II were still winding down in 1965, the Cold War was beginning to get hot. As Mad Men mentioned last night, in another ironic commentary with multiple modern connections, there were even the occasional Russian secret agents on American TV back then…

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As Mark Hemingway wrote at the Washington Examiner on Tuesday after watching Charlie Rangel’s rambling speech on the House floor,  “Rangel: Sure there’s an economic emergency, but ‘what about me?’”

Examiner congressional reporter Susan Ferrichio’s report on the 37-minute floor speech by Rep. Charles Rangel, R-N.Y., is a must read. It’s bad enough that Rangel remains so defiant, but his hubris is appalling — see this less than cogent defense:

“Don’t leave me swinging in the wind until November,” Rangel said at the conclusion of his speech. “If this is an emergency to help our local and state governments out, what about me?”

Incredibly, following Rangel’s rant, some members of Congress told Ferrichio they are still willing to defend him:

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., said he does not think Rangel is being treated fairly and that even though he advised Rangel not to take to the floor and give the speech, it was a good think in the end.

“The message I hope everyone got out of it is that this can happen to them,” Cleaver said.

I addressed the Rangel double standard at length last week. Let’s just take one of the many charges against Rangel: “Last year, the Sunlight Foundation claimed to have documented 28 instances in which ‘Rangel omitted assets worth between $239,026 and $831,000 that were either purchased, sold, or held from his financial disclosures.’”

That could happen to you? You could — oopsie! — simply fail to declare assets worth over $200,000, and do it 28 times?

I advise you to try that when you file your taxes. When the IRS comes to arrest you, give the armed federal agents a 37-minute stemwinder where you say, “Forget about the law, what about me?” Let’s see where that gets you.

Well, if you’re powerful Democrat lifer with a “what–me worry?!” attitude and loads of equally powerful friends who don’t care at all what the optics look like, it can get you quite a bit, no matter how ugly it looks to the rest of us. As Jonathan Tobin writes at Commentary, “Democrats Fail to Notice the Latest Writing on the Wall:”

Back in 1884, when Republican presidential standard bearer James G. Blaine sat down in New York for dinner with some of the wealthiest and notorious men in America, including financier Jay Gould, the gathering was widely lampooned in the press as a new version of the Book of Daniel’s Belshazzar’s Feast that preceded the fall of Babylon. The point was that the GOP and its cash-and-carry candidate was so blinded by its alliance with plutocrats that they were unable to read the proverbial writing on the wall. Unfortunately for Blaine, there was no latter-day Daniel available to translate that writing for him, and the scandal-plagued candidate became the first Republican to lose a presidential election in 28 years.

Last night, some 126 years after “Belshazzar Blaine” dined his way into the history books, that corrupt feast of the politically blind was replayed in the Big Apple. Except this time it was the Democrats’ assuming the part of the powerful potentates who care nothing about the rapidly approaching day of political judgment. The 80th-birthday party for embattled Rep. Charles Rangel at the Plaza Hotel drew out the high and the mighty of the New York Democratic Party: Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand and gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo all showed up to express solidarity for Rangel despite the numerous ethics violations with which he has been charged. A day after Rangel defiantly harangued the House of Representatives, challenging them to expel him for his pay-to-play shenanigans and tax cheating, the paladins of the party of the people were unashamed to associate themselves with the new poster child for congressional corruption.

Indeed, the most telling moment of the evening may have been before the festivities started when, according to the New York Times, former mayor David Dinkins responded to a heckler outside the hotel (who told him, “You know you are attending a party for a crook”) by giving that citizen the finger.

Meanwhile, another former media darling, who’s even further to the left of Dinkins, is also keeping it classy.

And of course, as we all know, it’s all Bush’s fault anyhow.

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Breaking news from KTUU, an Alaskan NBC affiliate:

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Dave Dittman, a former aide and longtime family friend of former Sen. Ted Stevens says Stevens was killed in a plane crash near Dillingham Monday night. Nine people were on board, including former NASA Chief Sean O’Keefe. Five people were killed in the crash, but other identities were not known, nor are the conditions of the survivors.

Late through the night rescue crews were battling bad weather conditions to reach the scene, where Good Samaritan personnel had already made it, said Air National Guard spokesman Maj. Guy Hayes.

A military C-130 and a Pave Hawk helicopter were waiting in Dillingham for the weather to break and reached the site just after 7:30 a.m. Tuesday.

The Air Guard received the call about the crash 17 miles north of Dillingham at about 7:00 PM Monday night.

A woman who answered the phone at former State Sen. Ben Stevens’ home said they would not comment.

Assuming reports of his death are unfortunately correct, Stevens was 86; his first wife was killed in a plane crash in 1978 (And yes, this is from Wikipedia, but presumably the general details are reasonably accurate):

Early in 1952, Stevens married Ann Mary Cherrington, a Democrat and the adopted daughter of University of Denver chancellor Ben Mark Cherrington. She had graduated from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and during Truman‘s administration had worked for the State Department.^[19]

On December 4, 1978, the crash of a Learjet 25C at Anchorage International Airport killed five people. Ted Stevens survived; his wife, Ann, did not.^[22] The building which houses the Alaska chapter of the American Red Cross at 235 East 8th Avenue in Anchorage is named the Ann Stevens Building in her honor.

Stevens and his first wife, Ann, had three sons, Ben, Walter, and Ted; and two daughters, Susan and Beth. Democratic Governor Tony Knowles appointed Ben to the Alaska Senate in 2001, and Ben served as the president of the state senate until the fall of 2006.

Ted Stevens remarried in 1980; he and his second wife, Catherine, have a daughter, Lily.

More as it comes in.

Update (1:10 PM PDT): While there had been some doubt earlier regarding whether or not Stevens was still alive, Reuters, the New York Times, and the Washington Post are all now reporting that sadly, he was indeed killed in the crash.

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Michael Gerson dubs President Obama “The accidental president;” Orrin Judd posits one likely reason for Obama’s hauteur and detachment:

Actually, Mr. Obama and Mr. Clinton share an important characteristic and share it with Ronald Reagan (among other leaders): the absent or virtually absent father [*]. This absence helps explain their ambition–the need to be tacitly approved of–but it did leave the three with some apparent emotional issues.Perhaps to the current president’s credit, he does not don a mask of false openness as his two peers did. While Ronald Reagan appears to have genuinely liked other people and to have disliked remarkably few, he was, nevertheless, so self-contained after growing up with an alcoholic father and dominant mother that he didn’t have room in his emotional life for much more than Nancy, thus his unhappy relations with even his own kids. Bill Clinton, meanwhile, seems to have developed into almost a sociopath, able to fake emotions at Ron Brown’s funeral one minute and yuck it up the next and acting the playful rogue in public while accosting or even, by various reports, raping women in private. At any rate, both men were rather different in one sphere of their lives than in the other.

Now it is certainly possible that we will one day discover that the cold and distant–even vacant–public persona that Mr. Obama presents is similarly hiding some much different private man, but, based on current evidence, it seems more likely that he is pretty much the cipher he presents as. After all, he has no religious beliefs, no political convictions, few if any friends, a wife who doesn’t much respect him, and he spends every chance he gets on the golf course–essentially alone.

Rather than being reserved, the cardboard cut-out may be Mr. Obama in his entirety.

[* Compare and contrast with the two three recent presidents who were sons of powerful fathers--JFK and both Bushes--who basically competed with and ultimately topped their examples. All three were quite comfortable in their own skins and made friends easily. GHWB was a tad too upper class to ever be entirely at home with the hoi polloi, but the other two were comfortable in any milieu.]

And speaking of detachment from the American people, mid-20th century Democrats at least once affected a populist tone, no matter how strained it seemed in the case of FDR and JFK. So much for that idea, Roger L. Simon writes:

Several weeks ago I wrote I thought Barack Obama didn’t really want to be president. The post generated a fair amount of discussion, pro and con.

Michelle’s $375,000 Spanish vacation — with the Daily Mail dubbing her a “modern-day Marie Antoinette” — is further proof of my thesis. What man who wanted to be re-elected (or see his party do well in November) would let his wife go off on such an “excellent adventure” in these economic times? Of course no one denies the right of people to have vacations – I’m coming to the end of one myself on my beloved Bainbridge Island — but closing Mediterranean beaches while booking 60-plus rooms in a five star Marbella hotel for her entourage? It is beyond tone deaf, perhaps to the level of subconscious (or even deliberate) self-sabotage.

At the very least, something most peculiar is going on. The first lady goes off on a jaunt worthy of 18th Century aristocracy at the very moment of her husband’s birthday. Is somebody trying to tell us something? Is somebody trying to tell her spouse something? Or vice-versa? Who knows? You won’t find out in the mainstream media — that’s for sure. They don’t even bother to check Obama’s college records. Perhaps the National Enquirer is on the case. They may be the only hope.

If I were still a member of the Democratic Party, I would be most concerned. What is going on in the White House seems to be so disconnected from the reality of our country — with some indicating real unemployment at a staggering 22% — as to be teetering on the brink of a pyschological disorder. And in this case that disorder would be a folie a deux of some sort because Barack and Michelle appear to be colluding in it in some way, whatever the state of their relationship. And that disconnect — between them and the American people — is growing.

Why is this happening?

Read on for some thoughts that Roger quotes from Dr. Sam Vaknin, the author of Malignant Self Love, appropriately enough.

Related: “Put it all together, and Obama has disconnected at a fundamental level from almost half the population, or that population has disconnected from him.”

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This morning around quarter to one or so, I was in my converted garage where I shoot those Silicon Graffiti videos, with headphones on. I was adding an update to my post about Mort Zuckerman, and about to watch a little of A&E’s World at War collection on DVD on the video computer, when I heard what sounded like a pretty good-sized boom — even though I hadn’t even pressed play on World War II yet.

At first I thought my house’s hot water heater, inside the closet in the room, might have malfunctioned.

No, it seemed fine.

Then I got paranoid — no, nobody kicked in the front door!

Then I looked out the window, thinking my next door neighbor had stormed out of his house and slammed his front door closed.

No, but the cockpit of his 1966-ish Ford Mustang was burning up. In the pitch-black night, there was a sickly orange glow easily visible from my front window.

I opened my front door just to confirm this was indeed happening, then I woke my wife up.

“‘Wake up honey, the neighbor’s Mustang is on fire!”

“One of our cars is on fire?”

“No, it’s the neighbor’s old Mustang. I’m dialing 911.”

I called 911, gave them my address, told them to look for the house next door lighting up half the San Jose suburb we live in. Having already gotten dressed, my wife grabs the little fire extinguisher we keep in the kitchen, which is definitely not up to this task. We ran outside. We woke the neighbors up, and about four or five minutes later — which seems so long at the time, I called 911 again — the fire department rolled up, and commenced dousing the car with water. (Their fire extinguishing equipment is definitely up to the task. Not to mention their skills and manpower.)

I took the above snapshot with a digital camera, but really didn’t want to shoot away, as the flash going off at 1:00 AM or so would likely be distracting, not to mention feel weird to the fire department and/or ghoulish to the neighbors. (Though this morning, the fire inspector was thrilled we had a photo.) And this is hardly news, except perhaps to the local weekly paper.

But it is a reminder that your life can be upended in the wink of an eye, and that everyday life goes on as it does, even as Washington and the Overculture relentlessly reinvent and devour itself inside our computers and TV screens. I’m sure my neighbor had hoped to one day restore his vintage car; now it’s very likely a total loss, especially after the fire department crowbarred the hood and trunk to make sure that no embers remain. Fortunately though, no one inside the house or its neighbor’s homes was hurt.

And given how quickly and thoroughly the fire and police department responded, I’m very glad that I don’t live in this suburb of San Jose.

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That’s the question one of the headlines on PJM’s homepage ticker is asking; it links to this item in the Daily Beast: “Historian Andrew Roberts blasts Nick Kristof’s condescending New York Times review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and her new book, Nomad.”

Roberts writes:

Women’s liberation is something one might also have expected The New York Times to laud and support, yet the review there of Hirsi Ali’s latest book, Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations, by op-ed columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, was instead–unforgivably in my view—entitled “The Gadfly,” and subtitled, “Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s second memoir is as provocative as her first.”

The word “provocative” is often a term of approbation; here it is clearly intended pejoratively. The only people who could possibly be “provoked” by Nomad are Islamic fundamentalists who abuse women and beat children; much of the book is a passionate denunciation of the way violence is routinely used against children in the Muslim world. Of course, equally provoked are ultra-liberal Western commentators who regard any criticism of Islamic practices whatsoever, especially those specifically sanctioned by the Koran, as “provocative” and thus somehow illegitimate.

Thus when one of the high priests of American liberalism, Kristof, came to review Nomad in the Times, he was never going to be a cheerleader. “Since Hirsi Ali denounces Islam with a ferocity that I find strident,” he writes, “potentially feeding religious bigotry, I expected to dislike this book. It did leave me uncomfortable and exasperated in places. But I also enjoyed it.” This last sentence simply cannot be true, considering the viciousness of the rest of the review. It is merely an attempt to seem objective.

If one is looking for genuine stridency, don’t bother looking in Hirsi Ali’s calm, fact-based, even good-natured treatise about how changing Muslim education is the best way to defuse extremism, her criticisms of the savage beating of children, or her moving accounts of her family life before she somehow found the self-confidence to escape a corrosive and abusive world of pain, including a clitoridectomy imposed upon Ali at the age of 5 and finally an arranged marriage.

No, for true stridency one should instead read Kristof’s almost unhinged response to the book, in which along the disgraceful and untrue accusation of “feeding religious bigotry,” he states that Hirsi Ali “is working on antagonizing even more people in yet another memoir” (she’s written two), “she never quite outgrew her rebellious teenager phase” (she was an elected MP in Holland), “she is at her worst when excoriating a variegated faith” (she does not), and accusing her of “overheated and overstated rhetoric.”

If one is looking for overheated and overstated rhetoric, consider Kristof’s assertion of modern Islam that the reason that it is “one of the fastest-growing religions in the world today” is not simply that Muslims statistically have more children than Christians and non-Orthodox Jews, but instead because of ‘the warm hospitality toward guests, including Christians and Jews” (tell that to the Christian and Jewish communities that have been expelled from all too many Middle Eastern countries over the past six decades), “charity for the poor” (easy enough in oil-rich plutocracies without social security), and “the sense of democratic unity as rich and poor pray shoulder to shoulder in the mosque” (but can’t vote shoulder to shoulder in the non-existent polling booths).

Truly stomach-churning is Kristof’s remark, “Perhaps Hirsi Ali’s family is dysfunctional because its members never learned to bite their tongues and just say to one another: ‘I love you.’” That might be the New York shrink’s answer to every problem, but does it really help at the moment when, as in Hirsi Ali’s case, her father ordered her to marry a stranger? That is the reality for much of Somali Muslim womanhood today, and Kristof’s answer to that nightmare—which he would not for one moment contemplate allowing in the United States—is for everyone to have a nice big group hug and say they love each other.

Stridency a concern of a Timesman? Heaven forfend. And once again, as Kate Macmillan has written, “scratch a progressive, and you’ll find a misogynist.” And scratch a “liberal” feminist and you’ll find someone remarkably unsympathetic to the plight of women in the Middle East.

Hirsi Ali has that rare trait she shares with the most popular American conservatives that causes her to drive interviewers who in a sane world would be sympathetic to her cause stark into near apoplexy with heretofore repressed anger.

(And it’s not like the Gray Lady hasn’t trashed other organized religions in the past; albeit only those religions that don’t behead journalists in their name.)

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Blogger Will Collier emails:

Heads up… The Ft Lauderdale airport is being evacuated for an undescribed emergency.  Wife and I are trying to get home from vacation.

Just overheard TSA saying smoke is coming out of an air conditioner, but that they should not have cleared the checked in concourse.

I think my layover just got a lot longer…

Just one terminal evacuated.  Nobody is taking the emergency siren seriously, and that includes TSA.  Siren is still going off.

Huge mass of people around the terminal doors.

Local news is calling the evac precautionary.  That was news to the TSA boss.  He was also surprised the media is already reporting on it.

Will adds that “Local media now saying electrical fire in air conditioner”, and sends this photo of travelers being hustled out of the airport by TSA. (Click to enlarge):

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