An Arizona district GOP chairman in the Phoenix area, Anthony Miller, and four of his lieutenants resigned after the Giffords shooting:
In an e-mail sent a few hours after Saturday’s massacre in Tucson that killed six and injured 13, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, Miller told state Republican Party Chairman Randy Pullen he was quitting: “Today my wife of 20 yrs ask (sic) me do I think that my PCs (Precinct Committee members) will shoot at our home? So with this being said I am stepping down from LD20GOP Chairman…I will make a full statement on Monday.”
Miller beat a Tea Party candidate backed by Sheriff Joe Arpaio for his party post. And there’s this:
Miller said when he was a member of McCain’s campaign staff last year has been criticized by the more conservative party members who supported Republican opponent J.D. Hayworth. The first and only African-American to hold the party’s precinct chairmanship, Miller said he has been called “McCain’s boy,” and during the campaign saw a critic form his hand in the shape of a gun and point it at him.
“I wasn’t going to resign but decided to quit after what happened Saturday,” Miller said. “I love the Republican Party but I don’t want to take a bullet for anyone.”
(via)
Update: And legislators carry pistols onto the floor of the House.
stuckinred
Wasn’t one of the morons strapped with an AR 15 at the Obama rally in Arizona last year African American?
stuckinred
Yup, sure was.
Superluminar
Both sides do it! Both the Teabaggers and the Republicans, that is.
Linda Featheringill
Oh, my.
Live long and prosper, Mr. Miller. There are other jobs out there.
Pretending to shoot people never was funny but maybe some repubs are figuring that out.
zattarra
And people still contend that Saturday was not an act of terrorism. Seems to have gotten the response that terrorists expect from this country.
alwhite
I heard that some blogger named Cole called somebody an asshole; that must be the reason!
Seriously, how much longer can the beltway boys go on pretending we don’t have a problem that they themselves caused? Assuming they do how will they be able to walk it back?
StonyPillow
Donât let their cacti fool you â Arizona is a place to embrace.
Caravelle
Yay intimidation !
David Fud
Oh, I can’t imagine what is going on, seeing as the politician in question is… well… not exactly the color of a lily.
Who could have thought that there were elements like this in the Tea Party?
hueyplong
Today on Fox and Friends: The disgusting story of a disgruntled former employee whose words have been twisted by the librul media. You can just look at him and see he’s susceptible to bribes from libruls trying to cash in on their assassination attempt on Rep, Giffords to force gun control on loyal Americans.
And Democrats do it too. Didn’t Gibbs resign just last week?
Etc., etc.
I get the impression that the chairman and his wife aren’t worrying about the possibility that a schizophrenic is going to get a weapon into his hands and include them in a random killing spree by pure chance. If that were the case, resigning his post would seem kind of unrelated to the general threat. I get the impression that they see lots of potential threats out there with specific motivations. It doesn’t appear that any of the threats come from those hateful, Mein Kampf-wielding libruls who have done so much to lower our public discourse with their multisyllabic words and other provocations.
sherifffruitfly
What’s happening is just what the Village Voice said a few months back. We white folks have simply lost our minds.
And we won’t admit it (because White Unity trumps everything, on our priorities list).
stuckinred
Joe has Chirsti, Chaddick and Pawlenty on this morning.
Barry
@David Fud: IIRC, there was a recent article about Strauss (of Chicago and fascist-loving infamy) which mentioned that a couple of other jewish fascist-sympathizing philosopher colleagues in Germany in the late 1930’s did not leave, because they felt that they were Germans first.
In a large group of people, there’ll always be some dumb suckers who don’t realize that they are at the top of the purge list, or some evils guys who figure that they can play Quisling for big bucks.
Mike M
Hasn’t this guy heard? Nobody is to blame here, it was just a crazy coincidence that a schizophrenic marinated in toxic rhetoric in one of the most racist backward areas of the country and ended up demonizing a Congressperson and going on a shooting spree.
One has nothing to do with the other, why can’t he see that?
Xenos
I worry that it is more dangerous for him now that he has made such a noisy exit from the scene – he has definitely harmed the reputation of the teatards with this.
All this new is going to murder the tourism business in Arizona. New Mexico’s gain, I suppose.
Alex S.
Since conservatives faced with a choice between moderation and even stricter conservatism always choose the latter option, the new conservative standard is to allow crazy gun freaks – who might or might not be standard members of the Precinct committee – to go on a killing spree.
c u n d gulag
Well, the chicken finally coming home to shit all over the place.
The only thing that could possibly make these assholes tone it down is self-preservation.
Maybe they’re starting to see that once you let the nasty nutty genii out of the bottle, not only can’t you get it back in, but it can ‘go rogue’ on you.
Sadly, I still think until one or more of thee assholes is shot for being insufficiently conservative or angry enough, it’ll be ‘business as usual.’
And until a few of the shooters admit that they were listeners of Radio Rushwanda or Beck viewers, or some other conservative blowhard, no one will say anything to them. And even then, I wonder what they’ll do? They seem to cower before them now.
Well, you reaped, it. Now “SOW IT” MFer’s! *
*Unfortunately, the main targets will still always be Liberals and Democrats.
THE
Max Blumenthal at the UK Guardian says Arizona is on the brink.
WarMunchkin
The hell? Guns on the floor of a legislative session… I thought people read about the Sumner incident? I guess we should all be walking around in body armor now, or starting to aggressively research low-cost, unencumbered ballistic shielding. If there are, as Maddow said, 90 guns to every 100 people, it feels like it would make sense for there to be at least 180 pieces of full body armor, no?
Platonicspoof
Or
What the Arizona is Happening in Hell?
(Apologies to BJers, sheriff Dupnik, et.al., in AZ for doing it too.)
The Grand Panjandrum
For all of the great posts on the Confederacy it is a simple fact that they ain’t got shit on Arizona. McVeigh and Nichols spent a lot of time in Arizona. The area surrounding Kingman is rife with militia types. And I don’t mean the fat middle aged guys dressed up for weekend fantasy games.
JMC_in_the_ATL
Dear Arizona,
Thank you!
Love,
Mississippi
TR
This just in: Sarah Palin is still an asshole, still playing the poor little victim here.
kay
So they lost on the top slot. Big deal. The petulant crybabies lost, so naturally they have to bully and intimidate the winner, and run him out of office.
Tea Partiers don’t have any respect for election results. That may be a problem for a political movement.
TOTAL CONTROL, or they’re not playing.
rickstersherpa
Ken Silverstein in Harper’s wrote an article in July about the collapse of Arizona. Its whole economic model has blown-up, and housing prices have fallen by more than half since the peak of the bubble and are likely to fall more. Being a homeowner myself, I know something like this can make one unhappy. And Right-wing talk radio and Fox is there to tell them who is to blame: Hispanics and our Black President. I won’t go into all the sociology and anthropology about why people go so tribal in hard times, but its a fact that they do. It is why Hitler and the Nazis went from less then 2% of the vote in the 1928 election in Germany to 38% and the largest party in the Reichstag in 1932 as the German economy collapsed and unemployment went to 30%.
http://harpers.org/archive/2010/07/0083023
——————————————————————————–
…Besides its aging mining industry and its few remaining aerospace plants, Arizona doesnât manufacture or even sell much of anything. Phoenix is a branch-office town, not a headquarters town, and much of the population works low-paying jobs at call centers and assembly plants. Yet over the past half-century, the population of Arizona has grown faster than that of any other state besides Nevada. Between 1950 and 2009, Phoenix swelled from 105,000 people toâŻ1.5 million, making it the fifth largest city in the United States. The climateâone of those âfive Câsââhas been a major attraction, especially for senior citizens. So have low taxes, weak business regulation, and (for a long time) cheap housing, especially when compared with neighboring California. The engine of economic growth in Arizona was growth itselfâreal estate in particular, but also a host of related industries: construction, hauling, landscaping, roofing, painting, remodeling, swimming-pool maintenance, architecture, plumbing, and on and on.âŻ
Real estate prices rose wildly in Arizona during the past decade, pushed, as elsewhere in the country, by low interest rates, ARMs, and the reckless practices of such companies as Countrywide Financial and Goldman Sachs. When the market went bust, Arizonaâalong with Florida, Nevada, and Californiaâcrashed particularly hard. Last spring, Phoenix became the first major American city where home prices had fallen by half from their mid-decade market peak. Recent figures show that 61.5 percent of Phoenix mortgages are âunderwater,â with commercial real estate in even worse shape. It is unlikely that a major office building will be erected in Phoenix in the next five years. Since its peak in 2006,⯠the stateâs construction industry has lost roughly 113,000 jobs, a drop of almost 50 percent. The official unemployment rate is above 9 percent, but that figure nearly doubles when people who canât find full-time work and people who have given up are factored in. The Arizona Department of Health Services estimates that as many as 260,000 Hispanics have left the state since late 2007, partly because of anti-immigrant laws and sentiment and partly because jobs dried up.
âTexas has oil and gas, and Nevada has gambling, so they generate money even during a recessionâbut Arizona needs growth to grow,â Grady Gammage Jr., a lawyer and real estate developer, told me at his office in Tempe, thirteen miles from downtown Phoenix. âWeâre also not a low-problem state like Vermont. Weâre a big border state with only a few private institutions to take care of social problems.âŻWe need government….â
JRon
@Xenos: Frommer advised staying away from AZ starting in 2009..
JRon
@stuckinred: Why do people watch Morning Joe? I’ve never understood it.
harlana
@TR: And of course, she doesn’t have the guts to face questioning from the media, she just issues her little statement from FB. Oh yeah, she’s a tough gal alright.
harlana
@JRon: I am completely with you. It is positively vomit-worthy. I admit, with shame, I am watching CNN instead, but that’s only in the mornings and only because of Morning Ho.
Even so, now Gov. Christie on CNN, “the new face of the GOP” – who, as they are now discussing, called NJ teachers’ union a “group of thugs”
*sigh*
WarMunchkin
@kay: It’s not that – in their minds they can’t really lose an election because they’re “the people”. What actually happens is ACORN black helicopters down from the sky and changes everyone’s votes with their voter fraud machine laser.
JCT
@TR: Yes, over at TPM you can see pics of her aggrieved face next to the shot of Kelly holding his wife’s hand in the ICU. It’s abundantly clear who the victim is in her alleged brain.
“Blood libel”, Sarah you sack of shit?
WereBear
They won’t back off, they have no shame, and any sense of reality has been utterly lost.
Won’t someone come up with some new tools and strategies, because the old ones ain’t workin’.
kay
@WarMunchkin:
But this is exactly what the sheriff was talking about. He said “good” people won’t run for office, and that’s true. He meant “sane” people, but he can’t say that.
Honestly, who needs it? The reward for serving in a local GOP precinct or district is constant intimidation by lunatics, even POST election?
This wasn’t a campaign tactic. The election was over. They lost. They still wouldn’t leave it alone.
vtr
Tangentially applicable and perhaps noted earlier: The New Hampshire legislature last week, according to the Boston Globe, overturned a ban on weapons in the State House and will permit concealed weapons on theHouse floor and in the visitor’s gallery. This week GOP leaders said the incident in Tuscon underscored the need for self-protection.
agrippa
@rickstersherpa:
Ricksherpa, I think that economics has a lot to do with it. As your post describes.
AZ is in the desert, with few resources. All that growth can not be sustained.
The Raven
“…legislators carry pistols onto the floor of the House…”
When male hominids are scared, they often produce masculine display behaviors.
Croak!
lllphd
@JCT:
yeah, and ain’t it just a bit more than ironic that palin uses the phrase “blood libel,” which conventionally applies to jewish victims? and of course, gabby is jewish.
sarah strikes out again. thought her base – and her punditry – will love it.
Svensker
@The Raven:
Except the packing legislator is a gal.
El Cid
I’d just like to re-emphasize Miller’s (the first guy resigning) question:
Just say that again to yourself.
Do I think that my Precinct Committee members will shoot at my home?
Precinct Committee. This is the depth of the violent petulance of today’s right, which is, of course, exactly the same of violent petulance of post-Reconstruction segregationist South. Or the height of anti-immigrant and anti-Red hysteria-driving in the 1920s.
It’s an escalation of what fundamentalist Christianists in driving for power in the 1980s by running for ever level of office, leading not least to their takeover of so many school boards.
If they can’t control the entire apparatus of the political system, from bottom to top, well, by God, it’s time to drive out the traitors.
someguy
See, what’s lost in all this talk about insanity is that the police were looking for an accomplice on saturday. Nice to see how that’s been swept under the rug by the Republicans who run the state. But the Party chairs know the deal.
Linda Featheringill
@someguy:
I think the police thought someone had brought the shooter to the area. It turns out, the man they were looking for and found is a cab driver. He may have brought someone to the area but still not be implicated in the crimes.
The Raven
@someguy: They found the “person of interest,” but he turned out to be unconnected with the shootings. Apparently Loughner acted alone.
It does look like there is going to be more violence. It might be a good time for Obama to go to Arizona and lead choruses of Kumbaya.
The Raven
@Svensker: “Except the packing legislator is a gal.”
Duh. Me croak stupid.
Roger Moore
@The Raven:
Why, so he can be the next victim?
AxelFoley
Shorter Anthony Miller: “I’m gettin’ my black ass the fuck outta Dodge. Deuces!”
Ash Can
@vtr: Wait, what? Concealed weapons in the visitors’ gallery? And this makes the legislators feel safer?
Some people just don’t know enough to come in out of the rain.
Catsy
Remind me again the dwindling number of ways in which the Tea Party movement materially differs from the Turtledove’s fictional Freedom Party in its early years? Because the lines are starting to blur a bit from where I’m sitting.
kth
Obviously those GOP officials are shrill Demoncrats aided and abetted by the lamestream media to spread a blood libel.
Earl Butz
We’ve turned the asylum over to the lunatics to run, and there is a sizable majority of this nation, including quite a few commenters on this blog and every single last member of the media (including John Stewart’s utterly disgraceful performance the other night), that still refuse to admit it.
SATSQ.
sukabi
I’d say that Sherrif Dupnik was right about the atmosphere of hate, that’s what’s going on in AZ…
Don’t have to even listen to Fox TV… it’s all over the am radio dial from the local yappers, a constant bleating about “the other”…
kindness
AZ….good people there….lotta nutz too.
wrt Sen. Lori Klein packing heat on the floor of the state capital….I think I’m gonna send her a case of her favorite alcoholic beverage to her Senate office…..Maybe it’d be fun to see what Tombstone 2011 will play out as.
backscratch
“What the Hell Is Happening in Arizona?”
Finally, somebody formulates the question with the precision it requires: As bad as it is, the state keeps getting worse.
It’s as if the undocumented immigrants who have been hounded out of the state were the ballast that kept it halfway sane. Now the balloon of flatulence and violence has come unmoored, hitting snags as it drifts along, showering poison on all below.
Nellcote
@kay:
from the HuffPoo:
Sloegin
Doesn’t help that you literally have a governor more comfortable with having people die (transplant patients) than having her political budgetary beliefs questioned or challenged.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@backscratch:
IMHO this should be a very early entrant in the comment-of-the-year contest, based on its quotient of “you know it’s so true and I don’t know which to do first, laugh or cry in response“. Of course 2011 bids to be a year full of surprises, so in all likelihood the competition is going to be stiff.
The Populist
@kay:
They want to take the GOP further to the right which makes me ask any reasonable con: You cry that the liberals have taken the Dems too far left (not the case at all BTW) yet the tea party thinks going further to the fringes of the right is the way to go.
Why is this okay?
The Populist
@Sloegin:
There’s a GOP state rep who has been urging Brewer to look at his proposals where he found ways to find the money to pay for transplants without raising anything on anyone. Weird how she won’t listen to REASON from somebody in her own party.
dww44
@Earl Butz:
So absolutely right
Stewart was indeed pathetically weak. Ranks almost right up there with Gergen’s facile pronouncements on CNN on early Sunday evening employing all the usual false equivalences stuff and letting the right off the hook for any culpability whatsoever. This whole thing is just the fault of one lone mad person. The easy access to guns and the proliferation of violent imagery had zilcho effect on Loughner, who, clearly living in a vacuum, just decided to go out and make his mark.
asiangrrlMN
@Earl Butz: I was disappointed in his response as well. Rachel Maddow did a much better job addressing the issues. She’s angry, and she’s not afraid to let it show.
AZ: They have learned that might makes right. Or, the right with might makes more right. It’s sad because the intimidation is working.
tkogrumpy
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: I second that emotion.
Mike G
Asked to use “blood libel” in a sentence, Palin said, “When you hunt a moose, blood libel to pour out of it.”
King of the Zombees
What is happening in Arizona is just the beginning. And it’s a sign of what’s to come for the country as a whole. The people we call lunatics and nut jobs are only taking out their frustrations as they are promised the stars from higher education but end up jobless, homeless and enslaved in debt. It’s a dirty, profit-making con game played on unsuspecting young, aspiring/dreaming individuals.
The fact is that what goes around comes around. And Arizona has started getting a taste of its own shit that it was throwing around at others.
Ex-president Bush once famously said “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me”. After that we stop the fools from fooling around!