06. Kem - Love Calls: Procrastination

I am struggling through reading for classes, and procrastination is calling my name much more than any love, but still I love this song.

Why Egypt Matters: Assorted Resources

Sometimes when we're hit with news about protests or unrest in the world, I like to write an explanation of why the news is important. I don't have time to write much, and for the situation in Egypt, I don't need to because so many journalists and analysts have done so already. Here are some links to help you understand why we should be concerned about instability in Egypt and what could happen:

In this first video, CBS Morning recaps the unrest and its causes:

President Hosni Mubarak's 30-year regime has fueled the uprising in Egypt and many citizens are going to continue their fight until they topple his reign. Elizabeth Palmer reports.

In this second video, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appears on CNN and answers the question of "Which side in Egypt Does U.S. Support?"



From Reuters, A Q&A about U.S./Egypt relations:

Below are key questions about the U.S.-Egyptian relationship, drawn chiefly from reports released this week by Jeremy Sharp of the Congressional Research Service, the nonpartisan research arm of the U.S. Congress, and by Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington.

WHY ARE THE UNITED STATES AND EGYPT ALLIES?

Egypt's decision in March 1979 to become the first Arab state to sign a peace treaty with Israel cemented its relationship with the United States and has resulted in its receiving an annual average of $2 billion in U.S. aid in the years since.

Read more.

From the BBC:

If Egyptian unrest turns into an Egyptian revolution, the implications for the Arab world - and for Western policy in the Middle East - will be immense.

Egypt matters, in a way that tiny Tunisia - key catalyst that it has been in the current wave of protest - does not.

Egypt, the most populous Arab state, can help determine the thrust of Arab policies - whether towards Israel or Iran or in the perennial quest for Arab consensus on issues that matter. ...

Read more.

From The Huffington Post:

Egypt has been a key ally for the U.S. in the region since the 1970's, and is currently the second highest recipient of U.S. foreign aid (after Israel).

It tells the story in a slide show.

At Nasdaq in World Markets:

What is happening in Egypt matters a great deal to global investors. It may be a relatively small market, but events like what we are watching punctuate the shifts in risk and capital flows that have been building up.

Egypt matters very much to the rest of the Middle East and has been seen as the one rock in a regional tinderbox of political, religious and social fuses. But if Cairo is the key to the Middle East, it is key to us — the entire Arab world is watching. ...

Read more.

Columnist Mona Elthawy tells CNN that a series of American presidents have chosen stability in Egypt rather than democracy.



Finally, experts try to guess what's next in Egypt, while Mubarak names his a Vice President:

His 30-year regime now facing intense pressure, Mubarak announced Saturday that the Arab world's most populous nation would once again have a deputy leader. For that role, he tapped Omar Suleiman, the intelligence chief who has been a powerful behind-the-scenes player for a long time.

Suleiman has been called "a thug." Read more here.

Big Fat Personal Data Leaks: Privacy and Controlling Your Personal Narrative

"Show me your friends and I'll tell you who you are." That's one of those sayings we hear repeated and consider wise. You could probably come up with any number of similar quotes that suggest we can discern the nature and character of a person by what they say, do, wear, and even who they marry. Common sense right?

But what if the person judging who you are is not looking at you in the real world but the virtual world? Your personal data may have been aggreated by a robot-driven website that seems reliable but is not. Or the researcher for a potential creditor, perhaps, could view via Google and also out of context the snippet of a blog post or a poem you wrote and form an opinion of you that could influence decisions about your future or judgments of your life's work. That could happen, assuming the researcher has poor research skills.

And here's an example used often to strike fear into early Internet adopters: What if that picture of you dancing on the bar in college that you posted years ago, before you understood privacy settings, and have long since deleted is nonetheless visible to potential employers or business partners on a Way Back Machine?

These kinds of considerations may be more troublesome for bloggers and others who've gone full throttle into social media, but even those who are not online have concerns. What if in some public record somewhere, due to a clerk's typo, you are classified as divorced with children, but you've never been married nor do you have a child, and yet, when people search for you in Google or Bing, that part of the record is fourth on first-page results, ressurected by a website using an error-ridden public database?

Some of us might shout then that our privacy's been violated and our lives misreported. Another might say, "not really" because we've brought these spectres to our doors ourselves through our love of network technology. And another might argue less privacy makes the world a safer place.

Technology complicates an old American issue, whether we have the right to privacy. Once upon a time in America expectations of privacy were considered a threat to society; it was illegal for people to live alone; and in a country made up of small villages, any hopes of keeping a secret was deemed a novel idea. I heard this on an episode of House, but nerd that I am, I looked it up, and it's true.

For all our whining today about loss of privacy in the digital age as though privacy is a guaranteed right of American citizenship, the fact is that the right to privacy has often been in jeopardy. Our government's willingness to protect this right has been less than unequivocal, and now, due to computer networking technology, modern humans may be going back to the days of fewer secrets, to live their lives as open books. ... Continue reading at WritingJunkie.net

Joan Rivers Calls Michelle Obama "Blackie O"

Not known for careful language, Joan Rivers (Remember her behavior on Celebrity Apprentice?) has put her foot in her mouth again. The Root.com reports:

"We used to have Jackie O," and "now we have Blackie O!" Joan Rivers proclaimed on the Howard Stern radio show today in her commentary about first lady Michelle Obama's style. Rivers said she was going to tell the joke onstage, but held back because she knew it could offend African Americans. But it didn't take much urging from Stern for her to share it on the radio.

Before I even read the post at The Root, I figured Rivers would justify her offensive language by throwing out that she's Jewish, and that's just what she did. How predictable! Apparently the connection Rivers sees between two minority groups is freedom to insult each other. Read more.

Man Wins $404,000 in Internet Libel Suit

CNN reports that Gene Cooley has been "awarded $404,000 for libelous internet postings surrounding the death of his fiancee."

The Chicago Sun Times says that shortly after the death of Cooley's fiancée, who was shot to death by her ex-husband, "an anonymous poster hiding behind six user names labeled Cooley, among other things, a pervert and a drug user." He lived in a small town, Blairsville, Ga., and ended up losing his job and having to move 200 miles away to Augusta to be free of the lies about him by a woman who, as it turns out, didn't even know him. ... Read more.

The Atlanta Journal and Constitution has a thorough story related to Cooley's ordeal that also examines privacy online. Read it here.

Move Forward: Obama's Second State of the Union

It's time for Americans and our politicians to seek unity for the sake of the nation, and "instead of re-fighting the battles of the last two years, let's fix what needs fixing and move forward." That was the theme of President Barack Obama's second State of the Union address that he delivered to the nation tonight. More than once he used the phrase "move forward," appealing to Democratic and Republican Party legislators to work together, and finally, invoking the American Dream, he relayed a stream of images designed to inspire striving for our ideals.

He delivered his message with the recent Arizona shootings hanging in the air as psychic backdrop. That recent tragedy has caused America to examine what some may call a vociferous polarization poisoning American politics. In the opening of his speech, he mentioned Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords by name, who was shot that day but is recovering, and he referenced Christina-Taylor Green, the nine-year-old who died. ... Continue reading at BlogHer.com.

Oprah Welcomes Half-Sister Patricia

By now you've heard the news that Oprah Winfrey has a half-sister named Patricia. Oprah did not learn of this news until late October of last year, and on Thanksgiving, she and Stedman Graham drove to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to meet Patricia.

The talk show host has made it clear that Patricia is the daughter of her mother Vernita Lee and is not the daughter of Oprah's father, Vernon Winfrey. Also, Patricia, who has two children of her own, resembles Oprah's deceased sister of the same name, Pat, in an eerie way. Read more at WritingJunkie.net, where you will find video and more links to Oprah's family reunion story.

Ann Pettway Used Facebook to Turn Herself In: More on Carlina White Kidnapping Case

Adding social media drama to the Carlina White kidnapping case, ABC News reports Ann Pettway aka Agnotta Pettway used Facebook to turn herself into authorities. Pettway is the woman who raised White under the name Njedra Nance, and is expected to face federal kidnaping charges in court today in Manhattan court.

White was kidnapped from a hospital in Harlem, New York, when she was only nineteen days old by a woman disguised as a nurse and was possibly Pettway. The young woman recently solved her own kidnapping 23 years later and has since been reunited with her mother Joy White and father, Carl Tyson, as well as her siblings and extended biological family.

Pettway is reported to have been pregnant during the time of the kidnapping, but lost her baby.

FBI Arrests Ann Pettway, Carlina White's Fake Mother

The Associated Press reports that the FBI has apprehended in Connecticut Agnotta Pettway aka Ann Pettway. She is the woman who raised Carlina White , the young woman who solved her own kidnapping case recently to be reunited with her biological family in New York.

White, who was raised under the name Nejdra Nance, was kidnapped in 1987 from a Harlem, New York, hospital when she was only 19 days old by a woman disguised as a nurse. It's possible that Pettway, pictured left, may also be that woman.

Per the AP at Yahoo News:

Ann Pettway surrendered Sunday morning to the FBI and Bridgeport police on a warrant from North Carolina, where she's on probation because of a conviction for attempted embezzlement, FBI supervisory special agent William Reiner said.

CNN reports that a "warrant had been issued Friday in North Carolina for Pettway's arrest."

Carlina used the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to find her biological family after Pettway could not produce documentation to prove she was her mother. For many years White/Nance had suspected she did not belong to Pettway. As you can see from her picture here, Carlina looks nothing like the woman who claimed to be her mother for years.

Hat tip to MsLadyDeborah for alerting me to this latest news.

Glenn Beck Endangers Senior Citizen's Life

The New York Times and other news sources report that Glenn Beck's commentary has endangered the life of this 78-year-old woman who teaches political science. Fraces Fox Piven has been getting death threats since Beck has labeled her an enemy of the Constitution.

As I have said before, there's strong evidence to indicate a correlation between rising hate speech and monstrous crimes against humanity such as genocide, and certainly we can connect resentment with subsequent threats to their worst result, violent acts. If we could not, then criminal prosecutors would have a far greater challenge proving motives for murder. I don't know why we continue to debate the connection so much, especially since via television, radio, and the Internet it's easier to broadcast hate speech and influence the masses to target groups and individuals than it has been in the past.

We know that as hate speech builds so does violence. While cloaked in a love for free speech, the motivation for denying a connection between hate speech and violence or declaring hate speech to be a kind of speech that's "difficult to define" is most likely the desire to avoid change. I, too, am concerned that any legislation that makes people accountable for violence that results from hate speech complicates freedom of speech, but I also maintain that many of those who persist in denying the connection between the two only do so as a smoke screen to hide that they want to keep using such words to promote hatred themselves.

Read more and watch Piven's interview with Democracy Now at WritingJunkie.net.

Keith Olbermann Says Goodbye: Let The Rumors Begin!

While watching Real Time with Bill Maher last night, I learned that MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and the network were finally divorcing. Rachel Maddow was on and she said Olbermann seemed pretty calm about it all. Maher said he heard the news just before he went on the air.

Some media sources say Olbermann was fired; others say it was a mutual end-of-the-road decision after eight years. As you may recall, the anchor was suspended last year when it was revealed he donated money to Democratic candidates.

And there's much speculation that Comcast may have wanted Olbermann out. The FCC recently approved the deal for a Comcast takeover of NBC.

MSNBC's statement says:

"MSNBC and Keith Olbermann have ended their contract." ... "The last broadcast of 'Countdown with Keith Olbermann' will be this evening. MSNBC thanks Keith for his integral role in MSNBC's success and we wish him well in his future endeavors."

His departure seems abrupt. Media Bistro reports that Olbermann's "Countdown" show was MSNBC's top show in 2010. However, multiple sources say Olbermann and the network have had a fragile relationship for a while.

The New York Times gives MSNBC's new line-up as follows:

MSNBC announced that “The Last Word” with Lawrence O’Donnell would replace “Countdown” at 8 p.m., with “The Ed Show” with Ed Schultz taking Mr. O’Donnell’s slot at 10 p.m.

MSNBC itself also says "starting Monday, Cenk Uygur, msnbc contributor and host of the popular web show “The Young Turks,” will be filling in as host of the 6 p.m. ET hour."

Here is Olbermann's Good-bye message to his audience.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

It's been reported that he will be paid until his contract ends, which is usual, and it's possible his contract may require that he not sign with anyone else or pop up too soon in any "future endeavors" involving other networks. I think that I've read that he gets $7 million per year until his contract runs out in about two years. Politico says he has two years left on a four-year contract worth $30 million.

TMZ, the gossip site, reports he got some kind of secret deal.

Below, CNN's Anderson Cooper gives his take on the news, acknowledging that Olbermann provided formidable competition.

Kidnapped Carlina White Finds Parents after 23 Years

This is an amazing story from the New York Post, ABC News, and other sources:

Carlina White, separated from her family when she was kidnapped as a baby 23 years ago, followed her instincts to reunite with her biological parents, Joy White and Carl Tyson.

I remember this kidnapping being in the news after it happened in the late 80s. The woman who kidnapped Carlina was disguised as a nurse, and I shivered thinking about the grief of the baby's mother. My own daughter was about six years old then. The kidnapped baby was 19 days old.

According to ABC's story, Carlina always thought something was off between her and the family she grew up with in Bridgeport, Connecticut. It bothered her that the family didn't have a birth certificate, social security card for her, or other paper work and that she didn't look like them. Recently, she decided to look up her birth year on the website for the Center for Missing and Exploited Children and spotted a picture of an African-American baby kidnapped in her birth year along side an age-progression image of what the baby would look like now. She thought it looked like her, and so, she called the center and told them "I don't know who I am." DNA testing confirmed her birth mother is Joy White of New York. Her father is Carl Tyson.

She's been reunited with her biological family, which includes her parents, siblings, nieces, and aunts who are praising God and elated to have her home. Carlina also has a child of her own. It was her attempt to get prenatal care and a driver's license that made her aware that the woman who raised her did not have any documentation for her. When confronted, the woman admitted she was not Carlina's biological mother. ... Continued at WritingJunkie.net.

Security Guard Fired for Posting Woman Falls in Fountain Video to YouTube after Texter Gets Lawyer

UPDATE: Fox News reports that Marrero has a criminal record and some speculate that she may have staged her fall to get money. The speculation is understandable, but nevertheless posits a less probable scenario unless Marrero's detractors are saying the security guard was also involved with the staging. If the security guard had not caught the fall on tape, laughed and put it on YouTube, and the whole world did not sit back and laugh or ridicule her, then what proof would Marrero have that she suffered emotional insult?

Also, it's pretty hard to predict which YouTube video will go viral. If the guard knows how to do that, then that's where his fortune lies.

She got up and walked away physically unharmed, she admits, and it was her fault that she fell (not paying attention while texting and walking). She seems to know she should not have been walking and texting and be only angry that the guard laughed and posted the video rather than doing his job to make sure that she was unharmed?

So, who can she sue other than than the security company for which the guard worked? They've already fired the guy, who was clearly being irresponsible and an idiot on the job, but is that the company's fault? So, where are the grounds for a lawsuit? A staged fall with a lawsuit over the YouTube posting only works if the security guard was in on the staging, too, right?

Some attorney's said the fountain should have a railing. I say, "No. Marrero should watch where she's going."

As for her having a criminal record for other pending charges against her for theft, while that doesn't sound good, it has nothing to do with the what the security guard did (unless, of course, he was in on it).



The woman who was walking while texting through a mall and then fell into a fountain told her local news station that texting while walking is dangerous. She could have walked into a bus, she said. However, she's also armed herself with a lawyer.

Cathy A. Cruz Marrero said that she's been humiliated by the video a mall security guard posted of the mishap to YouTube where it went viral. It's nearing two million hits as I write this post. And that security guard has been fired, relays ReadingEagle. The Atlanta-based company that has the Pennsylvania contract has issued the following statement:

"U.S. Security Associates provides security for Berkshire Mall in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, where a woman recently fell into a small fountain while texting on her cell phone. The security officer responsible for sharing the video of this incident has been terminated and is no longer with company. U.S. Security Associates does not condone this type of behavior and will work closely with the property owners to ensure processes are put in place to prevent it from happening in the future."

WFMZ TV reported the story first and has more details:

The woman who is seen in the video falling into the fountain at the mall came forward Wednesday (January 19) to share her story with 69 News. ... In her first TV interview, Cathy Cruz Marrero said she was disappointed that the guard laughed at her fall when seeing the video rather than coming to her aid.

Marrero, who works at the mall, called the guard's actions "unprofessional." He didn't even send anyone to see how she was, she said. She wanted to ball up in bed and cry for days, but the next day she was able to laugh at herself. Still, she does not excuse the security guard laughing about it and posting the video. Even her relatives in Puerto Rico found out about it, she told the TV station.

Here is the security video that went viral below.



ABC's American This Morning anchors also talked about this story, but they didn't laugh as much as the CBS crew. One of its anchors said there's a program Marrero could have used to see where she was going while she was texting.



For me this whole incident gets us back to the issue of privacy in the digital age. As I wrote in my post about concerns over Spokeo.com's invasions of privacy, privacy is a relatively new concept in American culture and we may be returning to an era of having no expectations of privacy. Today, we should always assume in public that someone may be watching us and possibly filming as well.

But that security guard was wrong, and I'm not surprised he's lost his job. It's footage he only had access to due to his job, and so, it was not his to share. He should have performed his guard duties instead of laughing about it, even if it is amusing once you discover she wasn't physically injured (it's almost unbelievable), and then there is the common decency aspect: he didn't think about how the woman felt and what exposing her mishap to the world could do to her.

History of Right Wing Hate Speech? (Video)

I have not fact-checked the information in the first video, but it does match with what I remember hearing when I was a child when adults in my community talked about John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963 as well as the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968. People perceived southern conservatives of that period to be violently angry and that white segregationists' speech reflected that rage.

It is the same climate in which the 1963 church bombing occurred, the murder of Medgar Evers occurred, and later the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, although his convicted assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, deserves the same label that the press has given Jared Lee Loughner, mentally unstable. Both are considered to be disturbed and obsessed with a certain ideology or philosophy; Sirhan's was driven in part by anti-Zionism and Lougher's seems to be fascinated by nihilism.

The video below is of Mike Papantonio talking to Ed Shultz and is posted also at Ring of Fire. The two talk about the history of hate speech within the right wing movement. While I think Papantonio's logic is sound and his facts appear to be credible, I do not think everyone on the right condones or uses hate speech. I do, however, think that too many on the right who do not condone or use hate speech remain silent when their counterparts do which is why I gladly posted the video of two conservatives chiding another conservative for using racist speech.

I think this kind of talk show, Ring of Fire, is a left counterpunch to Rush Limbaugh and Glenn-Beck's type of talk shows, and they can fill a whole and serve a worthwhile purpose. However, I will have to spend some time doing fact checks before I yay or nay the style, substance, and format of Ring of Fire.



A friend of mine shared this video and others with me, and I think I'll pass them on to my rhetoric professor. In our next class she will be discussing how the term "rhetoric" has been used in the days since the Arizona Shootings. Since once definition of rhetoric is speech used to persuade, I look forward to hearing my classmates' and professor's thoughts about the recent debates on civil political rhetoric.

Until my friend passed along to me this and the video at the end of this post that has the same left wing pundits talking about Sarah Palin, I had not paid attention to Ring of Fire (Not much time to listen to pundits on either side lately); however, I do recall hearing that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was involved with a liberal radio show a while back. According to the show's Facebook page:

Ring of Fire is a weekly radio program hosted by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Mike Papantonio, and Sam Seder. Kennedy Jr., Papantonio, and Seder hold court over the news of the week and offer the real behind-the-scene details on those stories.

In the first video Papantonio is making the case that President John F. Kennedy was shot in a climate of hate speech in which people called him a communist and a "n*gg*r lover" (Papantonio doesn't use that last term, but I recall the charge), and so Papantonio argues that this is the same kind rhetoric we've seen rise again on the right (He's alluding to Obama being called a socialist and terrorist, I think, and some right wing pundits' accuasations that health care reform is reparations for black people, etc.).

He says that billionaires such as H. L. Hunt and Fred Koch funded campaigns against JFK, which included flooding Dallas, Texas, with anti-Kennedy posters:

The poster says that the president is wanted for treason against the United States. Now, understand, hundreds of thousands of these posters were distributed all over Dallas, all over Texas. They said he was a communist, that he subverted the Constitution, that he supported racial communist riots in America because of his civil rights stand. They said he was anti-Christian and promoted anti-Christian rulings by the Warren Court, that he was a despicable liar. Now, if you think about the history of what was happening then, you had H.L. Hunt and Fred Koch, who helped finance and organize, people don't realize this, they don't understand that Fred Koch helped organize and finance the John Birch Society, the same crowd that he had out in the streets in Texas weeks before John F. Kennedy shows up in Dallas. They're flying Confederate flags, they're screaming that Kennedy should be shot because he loved African-Americans, only they were much more ignorant and hostile in the way they talked about African-Americans, you can imagine.

Unlike someone at NewsBusters suggests, however, Papantonio is not saying people in Dallas were behind Kennedy's assassination nor that Sarah Palin pushed Jared Lee Loughner to shoot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and others in Arizona on January 8.

Papantonio is saying that these kinds of acts of violence correlate with periods in which hate speech flourishes. (With so much violence in society today, he should probably do more to lay the groundwork for this point, which is difficult to do in oral arguments on radio where people often miss nuance and in a time when so many don't know history and so don't recognize references. However, there is evidence that periods of unchecked hate speech against specific ethnic or religious groups precede genocide.)

The writer at NewsBusters, a right wing website, also says that Papantonio is perpetuating the myth that Dallas schoolchildren applauded when it was announced Kennedy had been shot. If he is correct and if the references the writer cites are not simply more attempts by southerners to rewrite history, then Papantonio should correct his mistake if he wants to show that he is above the Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs on the other side.

In this next video, Papantonio calls Palin "a political Frankenstein," meaning she's a creation of the political powers that brought her to the mainstream and now they can't control her. With his statement, please keep in mind that someone had to resign in March 2008 from Obama's campaign for calling Hillary Clinton "a monster;" so, Papantonio should probably be careful of going over the top with his own diction.

He also says that women find Palin "creepy," and he believes that the more people know about Palin, the less they like her, which is why, he thinks, her reality show was not renewed; the people who want her to run could see it was too much exposure, he supposes. I'm not sure that's the case, however.

But I do think that some of the people on the right who initially promoted Palin are sorry that they did so.

Please consider that the video segment below was recorded before Palin's "blood libel" speech, which has been severely criticized because in it she defends herself and seems more concerned about what people have been saying about her rhetorical strategies than she is about the shooting victims. She's been accused of playing the victim.

Shultz,by the way, says that without Palin's incendiary rhetoric, she's a nobody.



I'm trying to determine how I feel about this kind of passionate, sometimes virulent speech on the left (I am sometimes equally passionate). If we're going to call for civility, then what does that mean? Does that mean those on the left, if they have their facts straight, can't shout back at the right? What do we mean when we say we want a civil discussion of issues? And why does the craziness of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck have so many more supporters and higehr ratings than something like "Ring of Fire"?

Related: Sarah Palin vs. Barack Obama: An Issue of Rhetorical Ethos

Apology to Sarah Palin for Blood Libel from Her Fellow Americans (Video Commentary)

Considering how much I've already written about Sarah Palin's use of rhetoric, even posting video of her infamous "blood libel" speech with transcript at my personal website, I hesitated before posting this video that I found at New Black Man (H/T GC). It's "An Apology to Sarah Palin for the Blood Libel from Her Fellow Americans" by Anthony Kelley, a composer and professor, and it's a calm piece of satire.

"Remembering a Life" Read at MLK Celebration in Maryland

I discovered today that my poem "Remembering a Life" honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was read at a Hagerstown Community College celebration for MLK Day 2011. This is not the first time the poem has been recited at such an event. I started to learn of people reciting it and some of my other poems at special occasions around 2006, and I think I wrote about the recitations in 2008.

However, this event at HCC was captured on video by the area's local newspaper, the Herald Mail. You can watch the video here.

According to the paper's article:

"... and alumna Leticia West read a poem about King called “Remembering a Life” by Nordette Adams. ... The program concluded with a dramatic rendition of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech by the Rev. Darin Mency of Greater Campher Temple."

You can identify Ms. West reading in the video because the screen shows her name and the poem's title as she reads part of the second stanza.

The poem was also read at an Oklahoma State University MLK program this year and at Tufts University, and in 2008 in Roanoke, Virginia, at a ceremony marking the 40th anniversary of King's death a speaker quoted the poem.

Remove Your Personal Data from Spokeo? Unlikely

More than likely, any attempt to remove your personal data from Spokeo.com will only result in Spokeo having more information about you.



Everytime I look around on Facebook lately, someone is posting a warning about Spokeo.com, the same website discussed in the video above. Spokeo is a personal information aggregator promoting itself as a search engine with the tagline "not your grandma's phone book." The site is making public in one place people's personal data that is normally considered private, such as your home address and net worth.

The invasion of privacy has people up in arms. My first thought when I noticed the warnings was, "Another annoying site?"

(Related: Is privacy a relatively new concept?)

Over the years I've learned there's not much you can do about bits of your life seeping out online short of staying offline and living far below the radar or living off the grid completely. The only people who may be relatively safe are those with common names like "Jane Smith" because it takes so long to figure out which Jane Smith that only someone being paid to find the right one will bother. However, even Dick and Jane can be assured that somebody, somewhere is watching and gathering not only their personal data but also their social and buying behaviors.

Nevertheless, with so many people posting concerns about Spokeo.com, and then last night even one of my local TV stations doing a segment about it, I decided it was time to pay Spokeo a visit. I entered my own name and some friends and family member's names, and I quickly discovered that of the private information Spokeo makes public about ordinary people, some is accurate and some is totally bogus. Either way, the exposure is a problem. Fake information can sometimes cause more problems than factual information.

But seeing an elderly relative or young female relative's actual address show up is disturbing for obvious reasons. I thought about the risk Spokeo and other sites like it may pose for women who are fleeing violent ex spouses or boyfriends when it makes phone numbers and addresses visible to anyone or how easily it would be for a con artist to use the data revealed to perhaps show up at a senior citizen's house and claim to know the senior. Will it take someone being swindled of life savings or killed to run the Spokeos of the Net out of business?

So, I clicked on its opt-out directions to remove my name and one of my children's names. I figured I'd tell friends and other family to go in and take their names out later, but as I thought about trying to remove my self, I decided to let it go. Like Hans Solo, I thought, "I've got a bad feeling about this."

I decided not to opt out because I suspected that the outcome of any attempt to remove myself would be that Spokeo ended up verifying my email address, which it would then post online or sell. Plus, if not Spokeo, then some other database down the road will pop up pimping uch private information again.

Investigators at Snopes.com came to similar conclusions:

"... removing your personal information from display by Internet aggregators isn't a one-time deal, but rather more like a never-ending game of Whack-a-Mole: You might swat down an aggregator site or two, but more of them will inevitably pop up. ... Our repeated attempts to request the blocking of a particular record through Spokeo's privacy page have found the procedure to be highly questionable: no attempt is made to verify that the person requesting the blocking of a record is the person identified by that record, our efforts have never resulted in a successfully blocked record, and Spokeo's customer service group did not respond to any of our inquiries. ... Attempts to initiate record blocking are frequently met with error messages claiming that the provided e-mail address is invalid or that "in order to prevent abuse, we must limit the frequency of privacy requests." ... All of this has led some to speculate that one of Spokeo's core businesses is actually collecting e-mail addresses or pushing sales of privacy services."

I think Snopes contributors are on to something, especially with that final point of speculation.

In the video at the top of the post, a privacy expert advises that you should be careful about what you put online in the first place. Remember nothing really disappears from the Internet. Somewhere, some database has grabbed it and archived your data for posterity.

Most likely, the government is the only entity that can stop this kind of intrusion by making it illegal for third party sources to make private citizens' information visible to casual Internet surfers without the citizen's explicit permission. I don't think the government can stop these aggregators from selling the information. The junk mail industry has thrived on these kinds of sales for years. But some kind of legislation should be able to stop aggregators from exposing the phone numbers, home addresses, and personal income of people with whom these sites have no direct relationship. Or at least perhaps some kind of privacy legislation can force these sites to reveal the original sources so citizens can have their information hidden at those websites or databases.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Intellectual Property, and Us

This MLK day, I want to share a public radio broadcast I heard on WWNO Saturday, "Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Public Imagination." Its producers at On the Media describe the show as follows:

On August 28, 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. did what he’d done countless times before, he began building a sermon. And in his sermons King relied on improvisation - drawing on sources and references that were limited only by his imagination and memory. It’s a gift – and a tradition - on full display in the 'I Have A Dream' speech but it’s also in conflict with the intellectual property laws that have been strenuously used by his estate since his death. OTM producer Jamie York speaks with Drew Hansen, Keith Miller, Michael Eric Dyson and Lewis Hyde about King, imagination and the consequences of limiting access to art and ideas.

The show, which I've embedded in this post, is packed with information about how King built his speeches and sermons, borrowing from numerous references and other preachers--a common practice. It's of particular interest to me because I've been studying notions of authors and authorship in rhetoric and writing lately.



NPR has an excellent database of the Civil Rights leader's speeches and its shows about King over the years. Once you get started listening, it's hard to stop.

Also, today LearnOutLoud.com sent out a link to to Dr. King's Nobel Peace Prize speech and I thought it was worth sharing. You can listen to the full speech at American Rhetoric and read the transcript.

Over at my Martin Luther King page at WritingJunkie.net, I always see hits go up starting around the beginning of December and continue until mid-April. Many of the visitors are looking for my poem "Remembering a Life," and Google or some other search engine sends them to that page. So, I don't say much new on MLK day usually because I've said what I have to say.

Steele's Out, Priebus's In as New RNC Chair

Republican David Frum's website, FrumForum.com, reports that the Republican National Committee has a new Chair: "Wisconsin State Chair Reince Priebus was elected the next Republican National Committee Chairman." The article charts the vote and a little bit of drama.

So, thist the party's first African-American Chair, Michael Steele is out. But we saw that coming.

Mike just wasn't getting results, and then there was that money problem and him playing the "race" card for his troubles. He had to go. And I for one will not miss his ridiculous exploits into HipHop.

Below is video of Priebus addressing his fellow GOP members, rallying the troops to beat President Barack Obama in 2012. He says Republicans must unite. He's right. The Tea Party's breathing down the GOPs neck so hard that the GOP seems inclined to carry the TP's coat.

But what's up with the huge gavels? Preibus has one in the video. Are Republican men trying to tell us something about compensation issues?

O.K. I'll quit playing. I suspect the gavel was a joke following John Boehner's big gavel as Speaker of the House.

College Releases Arizona Shooter's Video: CNN Tells How You Too May Have Lucid Dreams; A Loughner Ex Girlfriend Speaks

Pima Community College released the following video of Jared Lee Loughner rambling and ranting around its campus, and media enterprises are calling in more experts to decipher meaning behind his jumbled words and bizarre behavior. The school suspended Loughner last year after he showed myriad signs of being mentally disturbed and possibly a danger to himself, college staff and students. Multiple sources report college security was called five times to disturbances concerning Loughner while he was a student at Pima.



College officials told Loughner that he could not return without a mental health clearance from a psychiatrist. They also visited his parents, Randy and Amy Loughner, they've said, to discuss Loughner's case. However, the college did not try having Loughner committed.

Months after that suspension, Lougher shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 18 of her constituents on January 8 in Tucson, Arizona, killing six people. The FBI considers the act to have been an assassination attempt after finding plans at the 22-year-old's home. Among the six killed were a federal judge, John Roll, and 9-year-old Christina-Taylor Greene, who was born on September 11, the day of the World Trade Center attack.

In the video above, Loughner roams the Pima campus accusing its administration of denying him freedom of speech and of committing genocide against its students. He definitely does not seem to be functioning within the range of reason.

Time.com has a full profile of Lougner, "The Troubled Life of Jared Loughner," with an altered graphic of that spooky picture the media's running of him. Time has taken the spookiness a step further, coloring him red, and so, he looks more like some kind of devil.

I refuse to put that mugshot of Loughner, red or otherwise, on my blog. It's just too creepy.

Also, CNN.com had a guest on a day or so ago saying he thinks Loughner was into lucid dreaming, something I said in my first post that I published the day of the shooting, "Conscious not Conscience." It's not that mysterious. To dream lucidly simply means that you become aware that you are in a dream and can change the course of the dream's story, move objects, change the scene, etc.

I can't find the CNN video with the guest discussing conscious/lucid dreaming, but the person interviewed speculated that Lougner may have gotten to a point of not being able to tell whether he was dreaming or awake because he was obsessed with the phenomenon. If that's true, then Loughner could have been shooting the people at the Safeway and thinking it wasn't real, he suggested. But we don't know what Loughner may have been thinking because he's still refusing to speak, sitting in a federal prison with a smirk on his face, say sources.

A CNN article gives directions for having one's own lucid dreams. As someone who came of age in a household with a mother studying various spiritual paths that incorporated meditation and also dream studies—keeping dream journals, etc., I'm familiar with the techniques; however, I think CNN is sensationalizing an experience that became far removed from its ordinary use in the mind of a madman.

In a video below, a former girlfriend tells ABC News what she remembers of Loughner.



And in other news, today all over the nation people celebrated the life and message of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man whose most popular speech is "I Have a Dream."

My Son Went Crash Bang Yesterday Morning

This was my day yesterday: At 8:30 a.m., I got a call. My son, 20, had wrecked my daughter's Chevy Cobalt. He was lost, and had made a bad turn, committing a failure to yield. An SUV hit the car on the passenger's side. Thank God he was alone in it.

The Cobalt then careened into a traffic light pole on Marconi and Harrison by City Park. The Other driver, one of the city's District Attorneys, was not injured. He was on his way to work at Tulane and Broad.

Again, thank, God. After the police left and the car was towed away, my daughter and I took my son to an emergency room to have him checked out. He had to have some glass bits removed from his hand, and also suffered a few bruises, but otherwise he's fine.

Next week it's back to grad school for me, and he and his sister go back to undergrad classes. Somewhere in middle of it I'll fit in a visit with my dad's physical therapist.

If this is the opening to the new semester, I'd better eat my Wheaties.

More than 'Blood Libel': Another Reason We Cringed at Palin

I did not want to overload my blog with another lengthy post about Sarah Palin. However, the controversy over her use of the term "blood libel' in her "America's Enduring Strength Speech" and reports that death threats against her are increasing spurred me to write something anyway.

Instead of publishing my thoughts here, I have published them at my personal website, WritingJunkie.net: "More than 'Blood Libel' Phrase: the Other Reason People Cringed at Sarah Palin's Arizona Shootings Speech." I end that piece, which includes the transcript of Palin's message, with these words:

I pray that no physical harm comes to Palin for the sake of her children and peace in this nation. However, I also hope that Palin will pay attention to the hate mail and phone calls she may be getting as a result of this controversy and begin to realize that nasty words, even figurative language suggesting calls to violence delivered in an environment charged with animosity and other negative emotions, can indeed lead to violent acts. After all, picking up a telephone or sending an email to threaten a person's life is also a form of violent action surpassing a passing thought. Will she connect these dots?

Some conservatives have been critical of Palin's word choice in the speech; however, far more have been supportive. Even Jews for Sarah Palin and Alan Dershowitz still defend her. Read more.

Oprah Fell Into Depression When Beloved Movie Failed

Oprah Winfrey tells Piers Morgan in an interview for his new CNN show that her greatest failure was the movie Beloved based on Toni Morrison's novel that won the Nobel Prize in literature. She said that after the movie bombed at the box office, she went into a depression for the first and only time of her life, feeling that she existed under a veil and asking her chef to prepare macaroni and cheese, her comfort food.

Morgan asked her how much macroni and cheese did she eat. She said "30 pounds worth." Winfrey has struggled publicly with weight issues for most of the 25 years of the Oprah Winfrey Show.

I didn't hide her revelation that she feels Beloved was her biggest failure the way some news sources have in their headlines because the information is not a secret to the multitude that follows the television mogul. It is a good movie, but I've always had the impression Beloved failed due to too much Oprah; she not only produced it but also starred in it, and some people felt she should have chosen someone else to play the role of Sethe, the main characer.

I'm not saying Oprah didn't do a good job of acting in the film (while a New York Times reviewer saw a few flaws in her performance, many critics thought she was "pitch perfect"). What I'm saying is that before I even saw the movie, I remember some average people in 1998 voicing objections to Winfrey casting herself in the leaing role.

I remember people back then saying they felt she wanted too much too soon even though she'd already debuted in the movie The Color Purple and also had appeared in Native Son. You have to wonder, however, why these people were so hard on Oprah starring in her dream project, one she took 10 years to bring to fruition, but have applauded stars such as Barbara Streisand for doing the same thing, producing and starring in movies.

Oprah blames Beloved's poor box office sales on her not understanding movie distribution and marketing well enough. She was surprised when her artistic film's box office sales were upstaged by the horror movie Bride of Chucky.

Piers Morgan's show premieres on CNN January 17 at 8 p.m. central. It replaces Larry King Live.

Sarah Palin vs. Barack Obama: An Issue of Rhetorical Ethos

With the tragedy in Arizona and challenges to vitriolic rhetoric, Obama's opponents are pulling up the relatively few examples of him speaking forcefully and Palin's defenders are pulling out an old 2004 bullseye graphic from a nonprofit Democratic action group, but the American debate challenging politicians, the media, pundits, and bloggers to dial back the ugly tone of our political rhetoric should not become a "you did it too" discussion. There's too much at stake.

It's true that political speeches have long used militaristic rhetoric. I say this up front because in evaluating the current debate about violent rhetoric and the Arizona shootings, I've already seen people who think that in order to silence discussions about dialing back the nastiness, they simply need to point out the use of violent figures of speech on both sides.

I'll even present this olive branch and admit that some progressives have also used "targeting" language when writing about or speaking of conservatives. For example, the Democratic Leadership Council used a graphic in 2004 that had bullseye images on a map about gaining back control from Republicans. I learned of this graphic because a member at BlogHer.com, Adrienne Royer, took issue with the graphic six years later when she wrote in 2010 about Sarah Palin's "Take Back the 20" poster.

The DLC is a group with which Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords herself has had some association, but we know that Giffords does not embrace the loose ownership of guns nor use incendiary rhetoric habitually. We can also learn that the Democratic Leadership Council (which is not the DNC as some misreport) is considered to be centrist, not extremist. For instance, they support the rights of Americans to own guns, but promote enforcement of ownership criteria and safety, the kind of laws that would have kept the mentally-ill Arizona shooter from having a gun in the first place. (As you will see later in this post, that's part of my point. We decide meaning and intent based on context and what we know of a person's beliefs, practices, and character. Conversations about toning down rhetoric must not become a tit-for-tat style debate.)


In addition, I am not one saying that one person's rhetoric or even one group's rhetoric pushed Jared Lee Loughner to shoot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, federal judge John Roll, little Christina-Taylor Green, and others Saturday in Tucson, Arizona. Giffords is recovering, but Loughner allegedly killed six and wounded 14 people.

I don't blame a particular public figure or group because making such an argument without compelling evidence such as discovering Loughner built shrines to the Tea Party or Palin in his home is a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, an argument that connects dots carelessly. We might feel in our bones that certain kinds of rhetoric directly influenced the shooter's rampage, but we can't know exactly how the shooter's disturbed mind worked to drive him to that grocery store because he's not talking and who can trust what he may say should he speak?

Nevertheless, as someone whose graduate focus is rhetoric, I must disagree with the use of another fallacy that's arisen as we try to make sense of tragedy, the tu quoque ad hominem argument that is being used to quash a much-needed discussion about hate speech and inflammatory rhetoric in America. As one scholar defines it, the tu quoque ad hominem logical fallacy is the "so's your mom" fallacy; others call it the "you too" appeal:

Like the appeal to authority and ad populum fallacies, the ad hominem ("against the person") and tu quoque ("you, too!") fallacies focus our attention on people rather than on arguments or evidence. In both of these arguments, the conclusion is usually "You shouldn't believe So-and-So's argument." The reason for not believing So-and-So is that So-and-So is either a bad person (ad hominem) or a hypocrite (tu quoque). In an ad hominem argument, the arguer attacks his or her opponent instead of the opponent's argument.

In the current situation, with Sarah Palin in particular falling under the microscope, any argument about speech must naturally look at people. It's people who speak and so they and their words are the evidence. However, as we look at people in the context of how their rhetoric creates a positive or negative political climate that persuades others to take action, we should focus on patterns, tendencies to use violent rhetoric and to speak irresponsibly (twisting facts to create hate, etc.) to inflame others. It's the pattern of speaking provocatively with little concern about facts or consequence that's at issue here.

After seeing CNN's interview with Libertarian radio talk show host Neal Boortz, who by the way was immediately cocky with Don Lemon (Boortz was flattered that CNN follows him on Twitter and made a point to say that he does not follow CNN), I decided I needed to write something again about the tit-for-tat argument style of some conservatives.



At the Wall Street Journal, I guess they've discovered that so many people are looking for dirty rhetoric from President Barack Obama that the WSJ has annotated a post about a 2008 Obama comment he delivered in Pennsylvania. In the speech, Obama said said, "If they bring a knife, we'll bring a gun."

I remember that. Even then the right was attempting to throw onto then presidential candidate Obama the criticism the left and moderates had thrown at Republicans, which is that they promote and create climates of fear. It's a common tactic with them to resort to this kind of arguing or rock throwing when they want to deflect attention from complaints against the kinds of harmful speech they tolerate or at least try to convince the general public that there's nothing wrong with shades of hate speech. (Clinton seized on it as an opportunity to criticize Obama as well, thinking he had put his foot in his mouth with white, small town voters and that would help her win.)

But when we look at Palin, Beck, O'Reilly, Limbaugh (Limbaugh, btw, has a page up at his website now called examples of Obama hate speech)--when we look at these kinds of public speakers, we observe a pattern, a history, and a practice of either an inflaming to entertain strategy or a willingness to yell fire at a paranoid electorate. So our concern is not about occasional slips into edgier rhetoric or using militaristic figures of speech sometimes when getting out the vote. It's about the rhetorical term ethos, the appeal of their persuasion through their character to the pathos--the beliefs and emotions--of their identified audience.

Palin, Beck, and Limbaugh in particular know that their audiences identify with people who hide behind the Second Amendment to defend keeping guns and a desire to use them and also a fear that they will become oppressed under a socialist takeover. The latter is a fear that these pundits/speakers have exploited.

President Barack Obama, however, has a reputation for compromise, for not being extremist, and for being cool-headed. He doesn't court the NRA crowd and speak of the joys of gun-ownership, killing moose or turning back the clock in America through an active militia. He has not been reasonably associated with people who today talk in terms of overthrowing the government by violent means.

In fact, it was in Pennsylvania that he got into trouble with his "clinging to guns and religion" statement about certain kinds of people who oppose him or feared him taking office. The U.K. Guardian back then called the statement "an uncharacteristic moment of loose language" for Obama. "Uncharacteristic."

He's not been the one dividing America with rhetoric about "pro-America areas of the country" versus, I suppose, "anti-America" sections, as Palin has done. He's not like Beck, who worked people up into thinking Van Jones is a die-hard communist to be McCarthyed out of his position with the White House. Nor has Obama ever suggested that any group of Americans had engaged in a plot to hurt America the way Rush Limbaugh said African-Americans have been in a plot.

In fact, the president had to be pushed to use stronger language during the Gulf of Mexico oil spill last summer as some critics called him "too nice" and "not passionate enough." See the "whose ass to kick" video. Remember, Gen. Colin Powell even endorsed Obama for office because the man seems level-headed.

So, people know--I think that includes people on the right, too--they know when Obama's speaking figuratively and using a popular cliché to make his point. Too many on the right are being disingenuous when they seize on his words that are uncharacteristically fiery because unlike Sarah Palin, Obama does not have his people create websites like Take Back the 20 with gun sights over states and a list of opponents' names (a website she's removed from the Net since the Arizona massacre), and unlike Obama's opponents, he does not attract the kinds of supporters who proudly sport guns in public spaces. He and his family are the ones whose lives have been considered most endangered by the kinds of hateful rhetoric that started with his run for office. But the potential bullets claimed others.

This post is not intended to be a defense of Barack Obama. I am using the president's rhetoric and considering his ethos because some on the right are using his rhetoric as an example to defend themselves while not addressing the issue of ethos.

What I'm saying is that people are looking at people like Palin, who thinks she can win the Oval Office from Barack Obama in 2012, and the commonly-accepted talk of conservative pundits such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and even Bill O'Reilly, because these speakers have a reputation for wild speech. When we consider their histories of using inflammatory rhetoric to get attention, we by nature consider their ethos--their character--and that is part of why we cringe at the words coming out of their mouths. We think they use fighting words craftily with ill intent.

Added link, 11/14/11: At Pam's Coffee Conversations, Pamela Lyn has written the poignant post, "When Should I Believe You? - an ode to political discourse in America."

I am Number Four: David Caruso on John Smith's Origins

In the video below, director David Caruso talks about the origins of John Smith, the main character of the new movie I am Number Four, a Dreamworks production.



Looks like we science fiction and fantasy fans might have an adrenaline-rush movie to see next month.

I am Number Four, release date February 18, stars Alex Pettyfer and Dianna Argon of Glee. I also glimpse in the trailer Timothy Olyphant, who I love in the TV show Justified. Hot! Hot! Hot!

From the Dreamworks site comes this synopsis:

Three are dead. Who is Number Four? D.J. Caruso (“Eagle Eye,” “Disturbia”) helms an action-packed thriller about an extraordinary teen, John Smith (Alex Pettyfer), who is a fugitive on the run from ruthless enemies sent to destroy him. Changing his identity, moving from town to town with his guardian Henri (Timothy Olyphant), John is always the new kid with no ties to his past. In the small Ohio town he now calls home, John encounters unexpected, life-changing events—his first love (Dianna Agron), powerful new abilities and a connection to the others who share his incredible destiny.

The movie is based on a book of the same name by Pittacus Lore. Booklist says:

Is Pittacus Lore a pseudonym? An introduction suggests that Lore is 10,000 years old and hails from the planet Lorien, so I'm going with yes. This fun bit of business is indicative of the book's commitment to its premise: 10 years ago, nine children fled war-ravaged Lorien and landed on Earth along with their adult teachers. As they mature, each child develops powers called Legacies, which help them fight the evil Mogadarians. The Nine can only be killed in order—and Number Three just bit it. That leaves Number Four: John Smith. At least, that's his latest alias, as he and his guardian, Henri, flee to a new town for the umpteenth time. There John encounters bullies, falls in love, and begins to, you know, move things with his mind. Though the finale bogs down in a cluttered monster battle, everything else is terrifically propulsive. Meanwhile, the backstory (Loriens are given credit for everything from Greek gods to the Loch Ness Monster) deserves the next story that Lore is surely concocting in his/her/its spacecraft right now. Grades 9-12.

Now that might be a Young Adult book for me to pick up. Below is one of the movie's trailers.

Remember Sarah Palin's Coin Conspiracy Suggestions? It and Other Crazy Talk Deserve Examination

As I said in my first post on the Arizona shootings when I posited that the shooter means "conscious dreamer" not "conscience dreamer"—I see no evidence that directly links Sarah Palin to shooter Jared Lee Loughner. Still, I add that we should be able to look at Palin's rhetoric and decide whether she is responsible and wise or callous and unfit for national public office.

I think that Palin has contributed to the climate of fear and anger with some incendiary rhetoric, and I've been saying so since she appeared on the national scene with John McCain in 2008. But people far more qualified than I am have evaluated her rhetoric as well. Anil Dash discussed Palin's use of language in his 2008 essay "What Sarah Palin is Saying." So, even though the media and bloggers are scrutinizing in particular one Palin message that features gun sights as the nation grieves over Saturday's Arizona tragedy, Palin's Take Back the 20 cross hairs campaign is only one loop on her rhetorical roller coaster.

I also have suggested that while Loughner may not have been influenced directly by the former Alaskan governor, his obsession with currency not being backed by gold seems a reflection of Glenn Beck's buy-gold punditry (God, Gold & Guns) and some of Palin's nonsense implying that the Obama administration, in a fit of "socialist" manipulation, is changing our money. I recall that back in 2009 even her Fox News buddies fact-checked her "coin conspiracy" wackery and found it wanting.

But also like Palin and Beck, Loughner worried about the United States Constitution and Americans lack of knowledge about it, a repeated concern of the Tea Party movement:

In December he (Loughner) posted on YouTube a statement reading, “The majority of citizens in the United States of America have never read the United States of America’s Constitution.”

Two days before the shooting, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who Loughner shot in the head and the FBI says he targeted for assassination, read the First Amendment during a public reading of the document in the House, a ritual promoted by conservatives entering Congress who feel Americans are ignorant of the Constitution.

However, as I said in my first piece, both sides, the right and the left, are trying to associate Loughner with their opponents and make it stick. He is a registered Independent though and can't be pinned to one party or ideology. Furthermore, he is an unstable man, mixed up about what he believes in any way that would make sense to a rational personal.

Does an acknowledgment that Loughner seems insane and concession that no one can be blamed in a concrete way for the shooting other than him mean that we should not take time to reflect on the vitriolic, political rhetoric that's taken hold of the nation? Does it mean we ignore that Arizona seemed excessively crazy itself last year with xenophobic pitches and racist throes flooding rallies and the air waves?

No, we must observe; we must examine.

While Palin may be crying foul in email to Glenn Beck over people pointing the finger at her, she's fed her share of conspiracy theories beginning with her "Barack Obama pals around with terrorists" statements during the 2008 presidential campaign. Remember that.

And yet, I agree with Barbara Walters, who said Palin hasn't said nice things, but people shouldn't blame Palin for this incident. Well, I agree in part. We can blame Palin for her attempts to bolster the kinds of conspiracy theories that feed the madness of people like Jared Lee Loughner. She should choose her words considerately, get her facts straight, and craft her rhetoric more carefully. Her supporters need to face that.

In a clip near the end of this post from The View on ABC, the panel and its moderator, Walters, focuses on Palin's infamous cross hairs poster. As reported at Business Insider:

Elisabeth Hasselbeck then showed the NY Post cover from the very morning of the shooting -- which happened to depict Peyton Manning with his head in cross hairs. "Are they then to blame if, god forbid, anything were to happen to Peyton Manning?"

Sherry Shepherd then made an excellent point that if after that front page someone had shot Manning, America would be asking the same questions about the front page as they are asking about Palin's cross hairs poster: was it a factor in the shooting?

I think it was also Sherry, or it could have been Whoopi Goldberg, who said people are focused on Palin because she may run for president. GOP strategist John Wevaver had a similar take, saying Palin is held to a different standard:

"You can't put the actions of this insane person on her doorstep or anyone's doorstep," he said in Palin's defense. But, he added, "having said that, there's a difference between how people judge the conduct of a blogger and a political leader or someone who may want to run for president of the United States."

People are wondering whether her decision to publish and promote the Take Back the 20 cross hairs graphic shows she's not fit to lead the nation.



Remember not too long ago, Whoopi and Joy Behar were in the spotlight because they walked off the set of The View in October 2010, saying that some of conservative pundit Bill O'Reilly's language was irresponsible. Walters disapproved of her colleagues decision to storm off. An angry Walters said to the audience that Whoopi and Behar should not have left the stage, but then she turned to O'Reilly and told him that his language that painted all Muslims as culpable for the 9/11 attack was "extremist."

Now, I'm wondering will Bill in the future blame all young white males for the shooting in Arizona?

One of the saddest pieces of the Arizona shooting story is the death of Christina Taylor Greene, the 9-year-old who died and who was also born on the day of the 9/11 tragedy. Her brief life is something to think about, perhaps with her death we will see how fragile we are, how we destroy the future with ill-chosen words, loose gun laws, and reducing services to help the mentally ill. We humans are not as smart as we think.