Rightwing extremist strikes killing Dem congresswomans aide & 3 others.

At this point Rep Giffords is still alive although she was shot in the head. From AZ CBS:

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., and several others were shot in Pima County near Tucson today.

At least four people are confirmed dead at the scene, including an aide to Rep. Giffords.
Initial reports by CBS Affiliate KOLD that the Congresswoman was among the fatalities were corrected by her press people, who told KOLD that she is alive but in surgery.

“She is currently in surgery. She is still alive,” said Darcy Slaten, Public Affairs, University Medical Center in Tucson.

Eight others are being treated at the hospital as well.

The assailant reportedly sprayed bullets into an area where the Democratic lawmaker was hosting a “Congress on Your Corner” event at a Safeway supermarket.
A law enforcement source told CBS News that a man apparently stood up in the crowd during the town hall meeting, shouted something and then opened fire. Someone – possibly police or security – then shot at the gunman.

The gunman has been apprehended but it is unknown if he were wounded.
CBS News has learned that seven people are in the emergency room.

Giffords, 40, who just started her third term in Congress, was reelected in November after defeating Republican and Tea Party favorite Jesse Kelly by a margin 49 percent to 47 percent.

According to several sources the killer was a big Teabagger supporter. According to this DKos blogpost, courtesy of MadMikesAmerica, Kelly held a rally where he allowed his supporters to fire a fully automatic M16.

Sarah Palin has a warped connection too:

Palin’s Facebook page now carries a map featuring 20 gun sights, one for each of the Democrats targeted this year by her political action committee SarahPAC. Three of the gun sights, those where incumbent Democrats have already announced their retirement, are colored red.

Her husband is an astronaut, who was scheduled to go up in the near future.

Update: 3:42 PM ET Sheriff’s Dept: 18 Shot, 6 Dead, Giffords ‘Gravely’ Wounded

Richard J. Kastigar, the bureau chief for the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, tells CNN that 18 individuals were shot and six are dead. He adds that Giffords is “gravely” wounded. She is responding to commands after coming out of surgery.

Holy F*ckamoly – TeaParty movement started here???

Here is Bakersfield, CA. I knew I was living in the reddest part of Cali…but the whole friggin movement found life here? From The NewYorker writeup, sent to me by my blogger bud RJ:

John Boehner’s introduction to the political force that would make him the Speaker of the House of Representatives came on a cool April afternoon in 2009, on the streets of Bakersfield, California. Boehner, the Republican House leader, had come to town for a fund-raiser for his colleague Kevin McCarthy, who represents the area. The event was scheduled for tax day, April 15th—the date targeted for a series of nationwide protest rallies organized by a loosely joined populist movement that called itself the Tea Party. One rally was to take place in Bakersfield, and Boehner and McCarthy decided to make an appearance. “They were expecting a couple of hundred people,” Boehner recalls. “A couple of thousand showed up.”

The two congressmen witnessed a scene of the sort that played in an endless loop across the country for the next eighteen months: people in funny hats waving Gadsden flags and wearing T-shirts saying “No taxation with crappy representation,” venting about bailouts, taxes, entrenched political élites, and an expanding and seemingly pampered public sector. (Noticing an open window in a nearby government office building, some in the Bakersfield crowd shouted, “Shut that window! You’re wasting my air-conditioning!”) Although Bakersfield is in one of the most conservative districts in California, the Tea Party speakers assigned fault to Republicans as well as to Democrats. The event’s organizers had been advised that Boehner and McCarthy would be there but did not invite them to speak.

For Boehner, the Bakersfield rally was a revelation. “I could see that there was this rebellion starting to grow,” he says now. “And I didn’t want our members taking a shellacking as a result.”

Bakersfield, and Kern County in general, is loaded with uneducated, bigoted rightwing nutters. An example: the percentage of high school students that go on to college is a pathetic 19% here, our dropout rate is 26%. If that doesn’t tell you something about the area, nothing will.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, during his reign as Governor, came here at least once a month to speak to the big corporate farmers and the oil barons. California’s horrible employer-favoring Workers Compensation laws, which were changed by Ahnold, were hatched here by Ahnold and fuckers that own Grimmway Farms.

So, blame it on Bakersfield folks…John Crocodile-tears Boehner loves Bako and it’s unwashed masses that consistently vote against their own self-interests and probably always will.

Video: Rand’s Teaparty Thugs stomp activist from MoveOn

Sick batshit bastards…yeah, they just can’t handle anything out of their own little world can they? And these fuckers vote? Scary shit…very scary how our country has turned to this type of violence. Free speech? Not at a Rand Paul event evidently. MoJo has more detailed story here.

Sign the statement here to demand that the assholes that run the Republican Party, Rand Paul and all their fuckwitted candidates denounce these batshit teabaggers and their violence.

This is a shocker: NAACP exposes ties between teabaggers and hate grps.

Nationalism is not always a good thing. From Alternet:

The Tea Party movement has links to white supremacists, anti-immigration groups, “birthers” and other “extremists,” according to a report released by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

The 94 page report, entitled Tea Party Nationalism (.pdf), investigates six national organizations “at the core” of the Tea Party: FreedomWorks Tea Party, 1776 Tea Party, Tea Party Nation, Tea Party Patriots, ResistNet, and the Tea Party Express.

*snip*

Although members of the Tea Party claim the movement is focused on dismantling an out of control federal government, reducing taxes, and balancing the budget, the report claims that the movement is permeated with concerns about national identity and race.

“In these ranks, an abiding obsession with Barack Obama’s birth certificate is often a stand-in for the belief that the first black president of the United States is not a ‘real American,'” says the report. “Rather than strict adherence to the Constitution, many Tea Partiers are challenging the provision for birthright citizenship found in the Fourteenth Amendment.

Citing one of the links between the movement and extremists, the report says Dale Robertson, the chairman of the 1776 Tea Party, invited Martin “Red” Beckman to be a guest on the Tea Party Radio hour that he co-hosts. Beckman, who was introduced as a “great guy” and “an authority on the Constitution” has been publishing anti-Semitic writings for over twenty years.

There is much more, and the report is very long and detailed…so check it out. Personally, I have seen and heard enough of these fuckwads here in the San Joaquin valley to know they are a batshit-crazy bag of bigots, racists and just all-around haters of everything that isn’t white or against those that speak out against injustice against all people of color, nationality, religion, poor folks or sexual orientation.

Joe Miller’s thugs arrest AK reporter asking questions.

From C&L’s VideoCafe:

From the Alaska Daily News:

    The editor of the Alaska Dispatch website was arrested by U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller’s private security guards Sunday as the editor attempted to interview Miller at the end of a public event in an Anchorage school.

    Tony Hopfinger was handcuffed by the guards and detained in a hallway at Central Middle School until Anchorage police came and told the guards to release Hopfinger.

    Hopfinger has not been charged but the owner of the Drop Zone, the private security firm that’s been providing Miller’s security, accused Hopfinger of trespassing at the public event, a town hall sponsored by the Miller campaign. The owner, William Fulton, also said Hopfinger assaulted a man by shoving him.

    Anchorage Police who responded to the call said they would leave it to the District Attorney’s office to decide whether to prosecute. They spent more than an hour taking statements, then left.

Dave N.: Gee, one can only imagine what the anguished screams would be sounding like if, say, this were a Democrat at a public event at a public school using thugs to rough up an accredited journalist — which Hopfinger is.(emphasis mine)

The must-read on this: Shannyn Moore at Mudflats. Does it not surprise anyone that Blackwater and far-right extremism figure into this?

Don’t you just love when Rethugs/Teabaggers and their brownshirts have a meltdown over simple questions they are asked? Video below.