Breaking: Jared Lee Loughner Interned at NBC!

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) – Jared Lee Loughner, the accused gunman in the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the deaths of six innocent bystanders in Tucson, worked for NBC last summer during the Tea Party uprisings in Phoenix and Tucson. Loughner wounded 12 others in the attack.

While management at NBC’s New York offices have not responded to calls from the Associated Press this morning, sources close to the FBI investigation into the Arizona shooting say Loughner was a “gofer-type” employee whose primary duties included helping camera operators and sound technicians in the Phoenix/Tucson area.

“We all thought Jared was so cool,” said one NBC employee speaking on condition of anonymity. “He did a spot-on impersonation of George Soros.” The employee, who described herself as an associate producer/La Raza executive board member, said Loughner left his job at the network because of what he described as a “media conspiracy to improperly conjugate verbs.”

FBI sources say that the alleged gunman is not cooperating with investigators, but that he has asked them to deliver a message to NBC vice president in charge of cable programming. NBC management refused to reveal the contents of the message, but anonymous sources have informed AP that the alleged gunman was disturbed with MSNBC’s coverage of the shooting and with Keith Olbermann’s grammar.

There is no evidence to suggest that Loughner was tied to an alleged MSNBC plot to kill members of congress and pin them on Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh, but tension has been running high at the NBC cable news outlet over flagging ratings.

Just kidding.

We thought that, since the liberal media is creating news out of whole cloth to capture ratings, that we would try it. Our apologies to the Associated Press and NBC for using their trademarks in posting this blog. You guys can take a joke, right?

Log onto Left Coast Ledger for the latest coverage of Leftwing antics, inflammatory rhetoric, yellow journalism and outright fraudulent reporting. Left Coast ledger, where we aim for the truth with a 10-power scope.

Okay, okay! It was a metaphor.

Now For The Predictable War on Guns and Speech

When Geraldo Rivera, having departed his career in law, went to work for a New York ABC affiliate in 1971, he needed a story that would get him mega-exposure. Something that would fuel his new career and catapult him to stardom. He decided on mental illness.

Rivera targeted Staten Island’s state-run Willowbrook Mental Institution. With a stolen key, Rivera broke into the facility and exposed the mistreatment of patients, much of it due to overcrowding, and his blockbuster story was cinched.

The story made Rivera a national star and he mainstreamed tabloid journalism as legitimate news. Nowadays it is nothing for a Diane Sawyer to cook a story on a televangelist or for NBC to fix a field test against an automaker to grab headlines. It happens all the time.

Within three years of Rivera’s exposé, Willowbrook was closed and within seven more a class action lawsuit against the state of New York had garnered enough publicity that Congress passed the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act of 1980.

While there is no question that patients were being mistreated at Willowbrook, the reaction of liberals in Congress (with the help of a good-many Republicans) created a far worse and much wider-spread nightmare for the mentally ill in our nation.

The result of one journalist’s irresponsible reporting and government overreaction to it led to the dumping of hundreds of thousands of mentally ill patients onto the streets of our cities nationwide. Today it is virtually impossible to commit a disturbed individual—even for preliminary evaluation—without a court order and a ton of bureaucratic red tape.

Alleged Tucson shooter Jared Loughner wasn’t even considered for psychiatric evaluation, although many seemed to think he needed it. Six are dead tonight and many more injured because of government restrictions. The law that should have cleaned up Willowbrook instead ended it and thousands of mental health institutions across the country. The mentally ill became the new homeless.

In coming weeks Congress, aided by an anxious media, will move to implement laws on speech and gun control under the guise of protecting society from men like Jered Loughner. They will introduce legislation to restrict ammo magazine size, ban crosshair maps, even to outlaw Glock 19 automatic pistols, such as the one Jered Loughner used Saturday. They will attempt to ban what they consider inflammatory rhetoric in the conservative media and Public Square. Meaning any speech that offends them.

The Left overreacts to crisis by design; it is like a great sucking machine, siphoning off the rights of the citizenry into the “public trust.” Liberals in Congress aren’t interested in the rights of the public; they thrive on the accumulation of power for themselves. The speech they intend to restrict is aimed at anyone who doesn’t toe the liberal line; the weapons they will ban if given the chance are the ones in the hands of citizens.

Criminals will always think, say and do as they please until they are prevented from doing so; they will always have guns until someone takes them away. Government never takes guns from criminals; God knows law enforcement cannot do it most of the time.

Government takes speech and firearms from citizens and we must not let them do it any longer. Don’t let them overreact to the Tucson massacre.

Now is the time for citizens everywhere to mobilize: call and right you congressional representatives and senators. Tell them to leave our rights to bear arms and to express ourselves alone, tell them to fix the broken mental health policy they and their media buddies created.