DICK WINTERS, whom many will remember from Band of Brothers, has died at the age of 92.

IF YOU DON’T WANT PEOPLE TO HAVE CONTEMPT FOR GOVERNMENT, STOP ACTING CONTEMPTIBLY: Dem Congressman: If Violent Rhetoric Didn’t Cause This Shooting, It Will Cause Next One.

“SMART DIPLOMACY” with Britain.

ATLANTA: Unprepared For Global Warming.

DAILY CALLER: Secret Puerto Rico Bailout? “The Obama administration is eying a secretive tax deal critics charge is an indirect bailout for Puerto Rico to the tune of billions of taxpayer dollars. The U.S. territory, desperate for revenues in the midst of the recession, surprised industry with a $6 billion tax on foreign firms – including a significant bloc of U.S. pharmaceutical firms – late October in a rare weekend legislative session without any public debate in advance. But now U.S. taxpayers, not the firms, could end up footing at least a significant chunk of the bill.”

JIM LINDGREN: When Loughner wrote of the “second United States constitution,” he very probably meant the second US constitution, the one following the Articles of Confederation.

MICHAEL MOYNIHAN: Dave Neiwert’s fake fascism quote.

ED MORRISSEY: The media misses a good opportunity to keep quiet. “This brings us to the fallback notion that even if this shooting wasn’t caused by Palin or Tea Party activism directly, it still provides a teaching moment for the dangers of political rhetoric and that we should take advantage of it with some kind of national debate. That is nothing more than an attempt to impute blame where none exists and causality where it clearly hasn’t been established, or even suspected.”

JAMES TARANTO: The Authoritarian Media: The New York Times has crossed a moral line. “The New York Times has seized on a madman’s act of wanton violence as an excuse to instigate a witch hunt against those it regards as its domestic foes. ‘Instigate’ is not too strong a word here. . . . The Times is far from alone in responding to the Tucson massacre with false accusations and inflammatory innuendoes against its foes. We focus on the Times because it is the leader–the most authoritative voice of the left-liberal media, or what used to be called the ‘mainstream’ media.” (Bumped, because it’s important).

BECOMING REMOVED from politics as we normally understand it.

REVIEWING THE REVIEWERS: A roundup of book reviews from all over.

VIDEO: Barry And Sarah Talk Violence.

PAWLENTY UPDATE: Pawlenty talks about his Palin comments with Ed Morrissey. “I’ve been using the day to say people shouldn’t try to connect this to Sarah Palin, because there’s no evidence of that and that it’s unfair. In fact, I just got off Cavuto here five minutes ago and said exactly that on the air; I’ve been saying that throughout the day. So to say somehow this is, you know, the reverse of it, that somehow I’ve been criticizing her just isn’t accurate.”

INDEED:

The mainstream media sunk to new lows in its collective coverage of the Jan. 8 Tucson shooting tragedy.

Selective media members may start backpedaling on their outrageous claims that a heady mix of talk radio and that rootin’ tootin’ Sarah Palin were to blame for the tragedy. That doesn’t dismiss their dereliction of duty.

The media’s ghastly performance may also be a window into how it will cover the 2012 presidential elections. Any attempt at criticizing President Barack Obama may be labeled “hate speech.” Any violence that breaks out during the campaign cycle, no matter the cause, target or provocation, may be labeled Tea Party-approved behavior. Who needs facts?

It’s too soon to say exactly how the media will misbehave over the next two years. One thing is clear — outlets from MSNBC to The New York Times and CNN are capable of just about anything to smear the Right. The Tucson coverage confirms it.

The 2008 “Slobbering Love Affair” coverage might seem quaint by comparison.

Luckily, fewer and fewer people care what they say. A trend that their current dereliction of duty is only accelerating.

Meanwhile, Prof. Jacobson. notes this article from the Daily Mail: How America’s elite hijacked a massacre to take revenge on Sarah Palin.

The reality is that there is as yet no evidence that the political Right, and the Tea Party in ­particular, has — as its opponents say — ‘blood on its hands’ over the Tucson murders.

While some liberals have slyly implied that Loughner was a Tea Party supporter, former classmates remember him as being ‘Left-wing’ and ‘liberal’.

Another said he was ‘on his own planet’, which seems nearer the mark. No existing political organisation – including the Tea Party – comes close to championing Loughner’s deranged world view.

Paranoid and nihilistic (he kept a miniature altar with a replica human skull in his backyard), he had clearly surfed the wilder shores of political views on the internet, preaching about the evils of religion, and even picking up and espousing a theory that the government was using grammar as a form of mind control.

I’m not sure this is working out as planned. As Prof. Jacobson comments: “Of all the despicable aspects of this shooting, the conduct of the left-blogosphere and mainstream media in hijacking this event ranks just behind the murder and mayhem itself.”

UPDATE: Reader William Girardot writes: “Given that Jared Loughner registered as an independent, isn’t it time to condemn the vitriol of the middle? We have borne the milquetoast rhetoric of the moderates for too long!”

REMIND ME AGAIN why I ever thought Hillary Clinton would make an adequate Secretary of State?

JENNIFER RUBIN: Anti-gay CPAC boycott not looking too successful or coherent.

A BUNCH OF new releases on Blu-Ray.

FROM IKE’S DILEMMA to Obama’s Disaster.

GENE HEALY: Politicians’ solutions to violence only harm citizens. And, usually, make us realize just how dumb politicians can be.

LOOKING AT LAW SCHOOL’S RETURN ON INVESTMENT:

As I’ve noted in some earlier posts about 21st century jobs, there’s also something quite dismaying in the fact that, for the first time I can remember in my adult life, we seem to be concluding that investment in human capital is not worth it. That might be true because the training is idiotic and not really “human capital investment” at all, but more like summer camp.

But the much more worrying possibility is that structural problems in the US economy mean that there isn’t a need for professionally skilled labor, because the economy can’t deploy people to these higher skilled tasks. In the case of lawyers, or people who might have become lawyers, that might be because capital has been wasted in pointless things that didn’t pay off, and now there isn’t enough capital to invest in new things for which lawyers — yes, even lawyers — would be useful in making happen. It can, and certainly has, happened to engineers, too, over the past fifty years.

Read the whole thing.

BILL WHITTLE: Firewall: Obama At Halftime.

And check out Bill’s Declaration Entertainment site.

BAD ADVICE: Mark Halperin, last seen musing that what Obama needed was a “horrendous act of violence” that would save his Presidency, is now advising people on the right that they should turn the other cheek when falsely accused of murder after the hoped-for “horrendous act of violence” occurred. To avoid “escalation,” don’t y’know.

Bah. As the man Halperin is struggling to save says, punch back twice as hard. But you can taste the desperation here. When the lefty talking-point assault hasn’t even convinced Barbara Walters and The Economist is calling it “toxic,” it’s a pretty major fail. So now it’s time for Plan B. It probably sounded good on some JournoList: Try baffling ’em with a bible reference — those Christianist tea partiers fall for that every time, right?

As I said, major fail.

The biggest worry after the November elections was that a lot of people on the right would declare victory and go home. The shameless attempt to politicize the Tucson shootings and scapegoat people on the right has generated a huge amount of anger. Tea Party folks being who they are, I suspect this will mostly manifest itself as grunt-level political work in preparation for 2012 — precisely the opposite of what the scapegoaters were hoping for: Don’t get mad, get even, by making 2012 an even bigger shellacking than 2010.

More from Ed Morrissey. “You know what would help us? The media actually doing its job rather than participating in the smear campaign. What exactly did Halperin and his magazine do to report that conservatives were being smeared, as he acknowledges three days later? If their Swampland blog is any indication, exactly zero.”

Halperin liked the idea of politicizing a tragedy to scapegoat Republicans when he wrote about it in December, and he helped push it along in January when the opportunity presented itself. And he’s still doing so. He’s a Democratic political operative. Just not a very good one.

Related: Poll: 57% of Americans don’t buy media spin on Tucson massacre.

OH, I DON’T THINK Markos Moulitsas is “inhuman.”

BERKELEY CHANCELLOR TIES LOUGHNER TO IMMIGRATION REFORM:

There are two possible explanations:

1. Birgeneau believes there is evidence that Jared Loughner was somehow connected to anti-immigration activism. If so, Birgeneau simply hasn’t been following the news about which he has used the authority of his office to opine, or has been on the inside of a bubble that keeps out the plain facts of the shooting.

2. Birgeneau has seen the news and knows there is no connection, but believes Jared Loughner was incited to violence by a vague ethos of hatred that permeates Arizona. If so, that tells us more about Birgeneau’s prejudices and irrationality than Arizonans’.

The Loughner affair has certainly served to reveal the prejudices, and lack of concern for facts or logic, that seem to animate much of our credentialed-but-not-educated class.

EUROPEANS need their myths.