Sunday links.

Nine year old Christina Greene was among those killed in the Tucson Massacre.

 

A Facebook page dedicated to all the victims of the Tucson Massacre can be found here.

“The way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district, when people do that, they have got to realize there are consequences to that,” said Gabby Giffords about Sarah Palin during the election.

Meanwhile, Chicago mayoral candidate Rahm Emanuel wants to reduce public employee pension benefits and promises to do so if elected.

We ignore education funding at our own peril says Robert Reich.

Ezra Klein says that the GOP did some Huck Finning when they read the Constitution.

It doesn’t matter why he did it. But the plate-glass window of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’s office was shattered last March after the final health-care vote. Judge John Roll, who was among the dead, had received death threats and spent a month with a protection detail. Roll was apparently a bystander to Loughner’s intended target—and maybe the gunman had no idea why he was aiming for Giffords either, maybe he didn’t know how she voted on health care or what her position on Arizona’s draconian immigration law was. It would be a kind of relief if Loughner operated not out of any coherent political context but just his own fevered brain.

But even so, the tragedy wouldn’t change this basic fact: for the past two years, many conservative leaders, activists, and media figures have made a habit of trying to delegitimize their political opponents. Not just arguing against their opponents, but doing everything possible to turn them into enemies of the country and cast them out beyond the pale. Instead of “soft on defense,” one routinely hears the words “treason” and “traitor.” The President isn’t a big-government liberal—he’s a socialist who wants to impose tyranny. He’s also, according to a minority of Republicans, including elected officials, an impostor. Even the reading of the Constitution on the first day of the 112th Congress was conceived as an assault on the legitimacy of the Democratic Administration and Congress. George Packer