PrairiePundit

Image via Wikipedia Byron York: By all accounts, an Internet documentary named " Zeitgeist " was the favorite movie of accused Tucson shooter Jared Loughner. Created in 2007 by New York-based conspiracy merchant Peter Joseph , "Zeitgeist" is a two-hour mash-up of old and new conspiracy theories involving religion, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and the Federal Reserve system. Its message is simple: "We've been lied to. We've been lied to by every institution." "He wanted to watch it all the time," a teenage friend of Loughner's told the Arizona Republic . "It was cool at first. But then it got weird. It was all he wanted to do." "Zeitgeist" has three parts. The first tells us that Christianity is a myth, and that religion in general conditions us to believe other myths. The second tells us that the most powerful of those other myths is 9/11 -- we call it an act of terrorism when it fact it was an inside j...

NY Times: A gunman described by police officials as well-dressed, well-educated and well-armed for his minute-long shootout with police on Thursday just outside the Pentagon has died from his wounds. Law enforcement officials said they still had not determined a specific motive for the gunman, identified as John Patrick Bedell, 36, but officials said he “had issues” and that there were records of previous brushes he had had with law enforcement officials. ... Messages posted on the Web under the username JPatrickBedell seemed to share some biographical details with the shooter and pointed to a distrust of the military and the government at large. “I am determined to see that justice is served in the death of Colonel James Sabow, as a step toward establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolitions,” the user wrote, referring to the suicide of an Army officer in 1991. A 2006 arrest report for a man identified as John Patrick Bedell, then 33 years old, appeared to co...

Charles Krauthammer: So Van Jones, the defenestrated White House green-jobs czar, once called Republicans "a--holes." Big deal. I've said worse about Democrats. I've said worse about Republicans. I've said worse about members of my family (you know who you are). How prissy have we become? Are we allowed no salt in our linguistic diets? Having once written a column praising Vice President Cheney's pithy deployment of the F-word -- on the floor of the Senate, no less -- I rise in defense of Jones. True, Jones' particular choice of epithet had none of the one-syllable concision, the onomatopoeic suggestiveness, the explosive charm of Cheney's. But you don't fire a guy for style. Another charge was that Jones was a self-proclaimed communist. I can't get too excited about this either. In today's America, to be a communist is a pose, not a conviction. After the Soviet collapse, Marxism is a relic, a pathetic anachronism reduced to its last redou...