As President Obama lifted the hearts of the nation Wednesday night, I find my own heart lifted. He’s entirely right to move past assigning blame for the massacre in Arizona, and I feel called, as the president asks, to live up to the expectations of Christina Taylor Green, the little 9-year-old girl who was murdered while coming to meet Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. (I say that, it must be noted, as one who earlier pointed my finger squarely at Sarah...

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In his speech tonight in Tucson at the memorial service for victims of the weekend shootings that left Rep. Gabrielle Giffords gravely wounded, President Barack Obama called for a New Era of Civility in U.S. Politics. It was one of the more powerful addresses that Mr. Obama has delivered as president, harnessing the emotion generated by the shock and loss from Saturday’s shootings to urge Americans “to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully” and to “remind ourselves of all...

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This surely is not how Republican John Boehner expected to launch his new speakership, or open the new 112th Congress. He planned to follow the pomp of the first week with a big, partisan vote Wednesday to repeal last year’s landmark healthcare reform law. But then Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was gunned down on Saturday in a parking lot in her Tucson, Arizona district, and everything changed. That repeal vote was put on hold, as was the rest of the...

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Senator John Kerry spoke at the Center for American Progress today on gridlock and globalization citing the dangers that the current wave of political gridlock pose for our nation. Ezra Klein noted in the WaPo that Kerry’s speech was “an ambitious and plausible diagnosis of our country’s economic problems as partly political in nature, and it’s a sensible and complete vision for how we could move forward.” Klein also said that Kerry’s speech was one that “President Obama should be...

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Politically motivated violence is nothing new in U.S. history, and fringe elements have advocated all sorts of policies. The key is for the nation at large to reject such violence, according to former president Bill Clinton. Clinton traces such violence back to George Washington coming out of retirement after serving as president to command troops to put down the Whiskey Rebellion. “Once in a while, over the last 200 years, we’ve crossed the line again. But by and large,...

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What might be the most eerie is how Gabrielle Giffords herself foretold of the attack that nearly killed her Saturday, and succeeded in killing several others in Arizona, including a 9-year-old little girl. Giffords, nearly a year ago, warned that the murderous language and imagery that Republican Sarah Palin uses against her political adversaries would have consequences. The 40-year-old Democrat was right, of course, although she couldn’t have imagined that one of those consequences would be a bullet in...

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A remarkable breadth of friends and well-wishers is reacting to Saturday’s attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, in which the Democrat was shot at close range at an event in her Tucson, Ariz., district. The shooting prompted an outpouring not only from Democrats including the likes of President Obama and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, but also from others, as well, particularly those in the science and technology communities. A gunman, reportedly identified as Jared Loughner, fired on Giffords and...

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The shocking and unfathomable tragedy in Arizona earlier today should be pause for all of us to think about the political rhetoric in our country at this time. I feel that so many of us have had this looming feeling for sometime now that the rise in hate speech would lead to a fatal event such as the one in Tucson today that claimed the life of 6 people and has left Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in critical condition. As Andrew...

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