THE ECONOMIST: Spinning Tucson: Krugman’s Toxic Rhetoric. “This struck me as irresponsibly premature, and one might have thought that, given a little more time and information, Mr Krugman would change his tune, or at least turn down the volume. Nope. . . . At this point, there is simply no sound reason to believe this deranged young man was fired up by ‘toxic’ or ‘eliminationist’ conservative rhetoric from Michele Bachmann or whomever. Why are we even having this conversation? It’s nuts. It’s offensive.”

It’s Krugman. Related thoughts here. “Another way of describing Fitzsimmons’s and Krugman’s comments is that they were fantasies. In the absence of facts, each man constructed a fictional story to explain what had happened. These stories tell us nothing about the external world, but they give us a window into the psyches of Fitzsimmons and Krugman.” Indeed they do. Plus this: “It seems to us there is a very strong case to be made that the ugliest political rhetoric of the past 48 hours has been that coming from the side whose leading voices are attempting to make sense of a senseless crime by blaming their opponents for it.”