Michele and listened to the memorial at Tucson last night. I think this may have been the first public memorial I have ever watched. I missed both Reagan's Challenger speech and Clinton's Oklahoma bombing speech. I don't know why I usually don't like to listen to these sort of things but did want to hear Obama's comments ( which were billed as being about ten minutes), but I am glad I listened. 

At first I was taken back by the boisterous crowd. I was expecting a church – with hushed, somber, rhetoric -  and I got a basketball arena. But -starting with the opening prayer – I was moved by the whole thing. I thought Obama was at his best and it reminded me of Lincoln's Gettysburg Speech – not so much in the words but in the internal timing of the speech. I was not the only one that felt that way.

But, in the end, it was not so much what Obama said, but the obvious emotion that was so powerful.

I'm going to just blatenly rip off Time magazine on this:

He says he's just a goofy dork on a silly network, with prank-calling puppets as his lead-in. But when it comes to events like Sept. 11, the Iraq War and Monday night's post-assassination processing, Stewart has increasingly been turned to as not just the man to mock the absurdity of our media-political machine, but also to make sense out of the madness. Whether he recognizes his role or not, Stewart has become an influential barometer as to the seriousness of an offense (Rick Sanchez), the merits of an argument (John McCain, on “Don't Ask, Don't Tell”) and the hypocrisy of lawmakers (the 9/11 health care bill). And every once in a while, in moments of startling sincerity and intimacy, he has also embraced the challenge of trying to process a nation's fear and pain.

In fact, over the span of a decade, he's done the latter so well that we now look to him for our dose of sanity amidst the chaos:

If I had to give up everything on the internets except one thing; that one thing would be the New York Times. Not so much for its front page news which is pretty interchangeable with alot of other sites – the Los Angeles Times, Al Jazeera,  and The Christian Sciense Monitor, are my favorites – but for all the stuff that is one level down.

One thing that is one level down is a daily column on what is happening  today -  minus one hundred and fifty years – in the Civil War. I really do not know the Civil War very well. I know General Grant pretty well but not what else was happening at the same time, but in a different place. Reading this everyday in the New York Times is fascinating. Everything seems to be happening so slowly and quickly at the same time. It is not at the pace of a history book, it is at the pace of life. Life with lots of different people – with lots of different agendas – doing different things at the same time. Even if you are not interested in the Civil War, check it out.

I read that Jared Loughner is insane. Duh. To try to kill somebody – to kill people who you don't even know – should be one of the definitions of insane. It seems to me that healthy, ,sane, people don't kill other people.   This jerk-off seems so insane that he is still smirking.

I have always been troubled by insanity as a defense because it presumes that somebody can kill and be sane. That -somehow – taking another person life; that thinking one has the right to take another person's life; seems, to me, insanity in its self. My belief is that his guy is insane and … so what. He didn't know what he was doing, or he couldn't control himself … so what. 

People are dead – most of them just randomly killed – more people have had their lives changed forever. Changed probably for the worse. It is so sad, it is just a goddamn shame.  

Three days ago, I had never heard of Salman Taseer but I had heard of Pakistan's blasphemy laws and how some Christian woman was going to be executed over them.For reasons that I have not spent a whole lot of time working on, stuff like that just sends me around the bend with rage.

The whole blasphemy thing just seems – to me – to be truly insane. 

Then this asshole kills a governor over it. And then smirks when he is arrested. He is a true believer. A real zealot; a nutcase. And then a group of imams says the killer is a Muslim hero and then – and this goes against all I thought I knew about Pakistan – a bunch of lawyers strew roses in front of him as he walked into court.  

All of a sudden, John Boehner seems reasonable. And he doesn't have nuclear weapons.