I knew you would come through with an example on the left.

My point being, save elections, how do people elevate the political discussion out of the slime-fest that is more and more common. I wouldn't vote for Stark for dog-killer after a comment like that.

And, yes, ShannonLee was clearly doing hyperbole for effect……..she was reading too many Jazz columns lately!

Anyway- my earlier comment was that off the top of my head, the first example that came to mind was Pete Stark during the SCHIP debate saying that Bush ought to want to keep kids healthy since he was sending them to Iraq to 'get their heads blown off for his amusement.'

I think he did apologize eventually, but it's still way beyond the pale to say something like that and I don't see how it would differ in terms of inciting potential violence against the president than your example of Tiller being publicly called a baby killer, or the potential to incite it against Obama or any other Dem for the 'death panel' or euthanasia of grandma.

In answer to tidbits, the only way I see sort of behavior to stop this is for people in their own parties to start policing the discourse. I never had more respect for John McCain than the town hall where he snatched the microphone from a woman who was scared of the “Arab Hussein Obama” and defended him as an American.

“American.” That's a funny term, isn't it? Not one you hear much these days. I'll say it again: hate sells and those being sold on hate are being suckered by people who are laughing all the way to the bank. I'm sure Rex Rammell has talkshow opportunities waiting for him after he loses in primaries.

And that's where I'm puzzled about RCP because to me it seems slightly right leaning, but also provides balance from sources like TNR, Salon, Krugman, etc, and their headlines seem pretty straightforward. Maybe they went through a period of being more snarky with the headlines, but if so I must have missed it. An example of a rightie site that does that is Hotair, and I have to admit to some guilty pleasure laughing at some of their titles (while also sometimes rolling eyes or feeling they've gone too far.)

As for tidbit's question (“what can we do about it?”), I have long had the idea that a lot of this is the consequence of gerrymandered voting districts. Since candidates in these districts don't really have the slightest chance of loosing to a candidate from the opposing party, they don't have to talk about, or even consider, opposing views, and therefore they pander more and more to the base. As a result of this, all thoughts of moderation, reasonableness, or civility are out the door.

Now, I don't really have any good way to fix this, but surely someone somewhere could come up with a way to redistrict so that each side would have to take into consideration the views and thoughts of the other side in order to get elected. Independent judicial panels, maybe? Again, I'm not sure, but it should definitely be taken out of the hands of the individual state legislatures.

http://www.reddit.com
http://www.drudgereport.com balanced against http://www.huffingtonpost.com
http://www.politico.com
english.aljazeera.net/
Outside the beltway
The Moderate Voice
http://www.politicshome.usa.com

I check some others but these are the ones I check pretty religiously. If the title is offensive to one side or the other I tend to not even bother as its pretty obvious what views they hold and I am tired of being insulted. I am also tired of the other side being insulted. I am interested in actual news and not opinion. If I want opinion I come here or Outside The Beltway or Reddit since I tend to prefer comment strings to the actual articles and on those sites the debunkable is often debunked which is why I use them.

RCP lost me when too many of their titles became inflamatory and I moved to politicshome and found a larger selection to read from and many more blogs as the handful that RCP used to have were shaded a heavy red when I quit checking them.

I will say that most of the above sites rarely if ever make me happy because they are speaking what I already believe. This could be because I am somewhere between a socialist and a libertarian or it could be because I am a history geek and both sides are always trying to re-write history. I realized that every time I clicked on an inflammatory article I gave them one more reason to post more inflammatory articles so I stopped. The best way to silence the extreme voices is to ignore them. Clicking the links to be “moderate” is a path to further extremism as much as being an extreme right or leftist gives you no standing to whine about the other sides extremism. It reminds me of the 90's habit of flipping between CBS/ABC and Fox and calling yourself a moderate while not understanding that all of your media is coming from corporate financially conservative media though the Fox portion is in the more extreme camp.

TMV's inflammatory titles I tend to ignore because the titles and the articles rarely remain on one side only which is why I like the site.

And what do you do when those in congress spout te death panel rhetoric? Ot is rhetoric about a program fair game? If it is, I would argue that any president advocating killing grandma is in the same danger as an abortion doctor who murders babies. The line between rhetoric and insane action has been crossed long before this latest example of Obama tags.

Where do you draw that line?

I retract my reference to Shannonlee's early comment. Thanks for pointing that out.

I was responding to a couple of frequent TMV commenters here who were making assertions about RCP that I found incredibly inaccurate. I assume, since you do in fact use RCP as a source, that you'd agree with me on the inaccuracy of their statements.

Now, I probably shouldn't have gone in the direction of bringing TMV into it at all. and for that I apologize. The reason I did was because I do sometimes find myself scratching my head as to where people get their ideas, and why they seem to be viewing our political world from such an angle (and yeah, I know, we all think that we're the reasonable ones and everyone else is a partisan whacko…but still…) I think it's a big problem that people won't even look at other sites that might be examining the news and opinion from one side or the other- even if that site is not into the kind of inflammatory and propagandistic type of stuff which shannonlee alleged was the case for RCP (and it's simply NOT.)

When you look at Memeorandum, too, increasingly you see that left or left leaning blogs only link to certain stories while right or right leaning blogs only link to certain other stories. Everyone seems to be comfortable with reading what confirms their own preexisting biases instead of being willing to challenge their views.

As to your initial post- I really didn't comment on it at all, but was responding to a tangent that came up in the comments. I obviously (or in case it wasn't obvious) condemn any jokes that in any way insinuate assassination of any elected official.

You're right, only half are incendiary, the other half I agree with

Seriously though, a well reasoned argument is no problem. Where people typically see extreme or tasteless statements is in the comments. Not necessarily RCP, I'm talking generally here.

My problem is the lowering of congressional bald face scare tactics that have surfaced in the past few years. How can an elected rep or sen say he believes there's a call for “death panels?” I don't recall a dem making such outlandish statements, but I'm sure you'll point out ant i have missed.