Is Rudy Giuliani running from his gun control message of years past, or his new message saying he's a Second Amendment supporter?

Rudy Giuliani is in Denver, but he canceled plans for a $1,000. a person fundraiser due to the Virginia Tech shootings. The parking valets were already in place when the cancellation notice was received -- just 30 minutes before the start of the event.

On this day of national tragedy, when we lost some of our finest to this senseless act, we stand together as a country to mourn those who lost their lives," Giuliani’s statement read. "My thoughts and prayers continue to be with the survivors and the many friends, colleagues and family members of those who perished. May God bless them all."

Is that really the reason?

More...

In light of the Virginia Tech shootings, the testimony that Alberto Gonzales was to give tomorrow has been postponed until Thursday. Although Gonzales was given the extra time because he "may be preoccupied on Tuesday with matters related to the shootings" (it's hard to see how), he now has two more days to get his story straight.

It is too early to be debating these things in light of today's Virginia Tech tragedy, but I found these reactions worthy of notice. Atrios is against security checkpoints on campuses:

Without meaning to minimize the tragedy, can we stop the hysterical calls for increased security measures on college campuses. Large residential college campuses are like small cities, places where people live, work, and study. Calling for absurd things like random bag checks and metal detectors in such an environment is like calling for such things on city streets.

Glenn Reynolds is for more guns on campuses:

. . . These things do seem to take place in locations where it's not legal for people with carry permits to carry guns, though, and I believe that's the case where the Virginia Tech campus is concerned. I certainly wish that someone had been in a position to shoot this guy at the outset. Had [guns been allowed on campus], things might have turned out differently, though we'll never know now.

I leave you with your thoughts on these thoughts.

Bump and Update (TL): 33 dead (including the shooter). I just got to the airport to fly back to Denver and this is all over the tv monitors. It's now officially the largest mass shooting in U.S. history. The gunman is dead.

Second update (TChris): 28 additional victims were taken to the hospital. It isn't clear whether the shooter was responsible for bomb threats earlier this week.

The first two victims were killed at about 7:15 a.m. local time at West Ambler Johnston dormitory, Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum said. Police said they didn't close the campus because they believed it was an isolated incident and the shooter had left the grounds.

"We secured the building, we secured the crime scene," Flinchum said. "You can second guess all day. We acted on the best information we had."

More here.

original post:

Tragic news at Virginia Tech:

At least 20 people were killed this morning at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University after a shooting spree at two buildings on the campus. ... The university's Web site later posted a notice that 22 had been confirmed dead.

Are judges permitted to express their opinions, or do they shed their First Amendment rights when they don a robe? Adam Liptak calls attention to a disciplinary proceeding against Arkansas Judge Wendell Griffen, who may lose his job (or at least face a suspension) because he made a speech that criticized the president’s decision to wage war with Iraq.

Last month, the commission voted to hold a hearing in the matter, saying there is probable cause to believe that Judge Griffen had damaged public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary. In an interview, James A. Badami, the commission’s executive director, elaborated. “If you are a staunch Republican and a Bush supporter and have to come before this judge,” Mr. Badami said, sounding exasperated, “and this judge has now said some terrible things about Bush and the Bush administration — and now those people are having to appear before him?”

Here’s a better question: when a judge issues campaign promises to be “tough on crime” by making sure that offenders stay behind bars, touts her past experience as a “law and order prosecutor,” and trumpets her endorsement by law enforcement officers across the state, how will someone who is accused of a crime feel about having to appear before the judge? After all, the judge will rarely know whether a party appearing in court is a Republican or Democrat, but the judge will surely know that the party is on the wrong side of criminal prosecution. Isn’t there a greater risk of partiality when the judge has made campaign statements suggesting that she will favor the prosecution over the defense and will follow a uniformly harsh sentencing policy rather than tailoring sentences to the specific offender?

The Pulitzer Prizes were announced this afternoon and among the winners was the Boston Globe's Charles Savage, for his reproting on President Bush's unprecedented use of signing statements:

The Boston Globe took the prize for national reporting for reports by Charles Savage documenting that President Bush had quietly disregarded more than 750 laws enacted by Congress since he took office. Mr. Savage found that the president attached “signing statements” saying he had the power to set those laws aside when they conflicted with his interpretation of the Constitution and when Congress sought to regulate the military.

Congratulations to Mr. Savage. The other winners on the flip.

Josh Marshall's vlog on tomorrow's Alberto Gonzales hearing asks the question "what would you ask Alberto Gonzales?"

Having seen Gonzales too many times before, I know that he can't and won't answer anything, so to me the first question to ask yourself is what are you trying to accomplish? To me this is more of a public relations event than anything else. So what is the goal? Expose Gonzo? He'll do that himself. Expose Rove? Gonzo can't and won't. He'll pretend he does not remember or was not involved. Expose Bush? Same answer.

Here's what I would do. First, make the Senators divvy up the topics. And try, if possible to give them yes or no questions to answer. In this case, that should be easy.

Documents and the testimony of Kyle Sampson allow for the questions to write themselves. For example, show Gonzales an e-mail that discusses the White House's role in making the fired USAs list. Read it. Ask Gonzo if it is true that, for example, "Harriet Miers said . . ." Is it true that "[what Kyle Sampson testified]"

And so on. I would not look to Gonzales to provide anything except obvious obfuscation but let the questions and the documents be the testimony.

What do you folks think?

Via Digby:

[Former University of Florida football coach and current South Carolina coach] Spurrier brought up the [Confederate] flag issue Friday while accepting a leadership award from City Year at the service group’s Ripples of Hope banquet at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center.

. . . “It would make us a more progressive, better state, I think, if the flag was removed. But I’m not going to go on any big campaign to have it removed. That’s not my position,” Spurrier said in an interview with The State. “But if anyone were to ask me, that would certainly be my position. And I think everyone in there, it was their position, too.”

Spurrier said it was “embarrassing” last year when someone waved a Confederate battle flag behind the set of ESPN’s “GameDay” before the Gamecocks’ home game against Tennessee.

Good for the former Heisman winner and legandary Ole Ball Coach. But the "best" was yet to come.

Fred Hiatt wrote:

Fortunately some of the coolest heads in this discussion belong to Senate Democrats such as Barack Obama (Ill.) and Carl M. Levin (Mich.), the chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Both have suggested that if Mr. Bush vetoes a bill containing a withdrawal mandate, as he has promised to do, Congress should nevertheless approve the war funding.

Fred Hiatt is not exactly fact based but Obama's muddled answers on the question lend themselves to just such distortions. But there is an easy way for Obama to settle the question - endorse Reid-Feingold.

Show Fred Hiatt, and the rest of us where you stand on the issue Senator Obama. You might want to ask for a retraction as well Senator.

Senator Levin, on the other hand, has nothing to complain about.

Via Greg Sargent, Senate Majority Leader Reid says:

Asked by a reporter if Congress would be making some kind of offer to Bush in the quest for a compromise, Reid said: "The offer is that the President sign our bill."

Great! But Senator Levin already is plannning the fifth best plan or something.

I guess Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) is not one of those Democrats Krugman claims is being influenced by the base:

Levin said Democrats remain committed to sending Bush a compromise package with the withdrawal language intact, to express the strong concerns among Democrats and some Republicans that the Iraq war is exacting too high a cost for the country to continue.

That language is likely to track closely with the Senate approach, which sets a goal instead of a hard date. "We're going to send him, first of all, hopefully, a very strong bill which would say that we're going to begin to reduce troops in four months as a way of telling the Iraqi leadership that the open-ended commitment is over," Levin said.

"If we don't have the votes to override, and it appears that we don't -- but we never know until that vote is taken -- we will then hopefully send him something strong in the area of benchmarks as the second-best way of putting pressure on the president to put pressure on the Iraqis."

And if the second best way fails then the thrid best way and so on.

This is a joke. There is one way - Reid Feingold. And it does not have to pass.

mcjoan highlights Paul Krugman's kudos to the Democratic base for pulling the Democratic Party to majority positions on Iraq and other issues:

Normally, politicians face a difficult tradeoff between taking positions that satisfy their party’s base and appealing to the broader public.... But a funny thing has happened on the Democratic side: the party’s base seems to be more in touch with the mood of the country than many of the party’s leaders. And the result is peculiar: on key issues, reluctant Democratic politicians are being dragged by their base into taking highly popular positions. Iraq is the most dramatic example.... It took an angry base to push the Democrats into taking a tough line in the midterm election. And it took further prodding from that base — which was infuriated when Barack Obama seemed to say that he would support a funding bill without a timeline — to push them into confronting Mr. Bush over war funding. (Mr. Obama says that he didn’t mean to suggest that the president be given "carte blanche.")

Certainly on 2006 that was true. But, is the Party listening to the "base" now on Iraq? What is the base saying? Are the Netroots clamoring for Reid-Feingold? Is the Party flocking to it?

I think Krugman is more accurate in this:

The only risk the party now faces is excessive caution on the part of its politicians. Or, to coin a phrase, the only thing Democrats have to fear is fear itself.

I think the base should think about that and consider whether it is pushing our politicians hard enough on Iraq and Reid-Feingold. I don't think we are