Dana Milbank at The Washington Post:
In one sense, I agree with Cruz. The antiabortion movement did not kill those three people in Colorado Springs. The one responsible is the deranged gunman himself. But it’s a different matter to ask whether the often-violent imagery used by conservative leaders on abortion is unwittingly giving the unhinged some perverse sense of justification to contemplate the unspeakable. [...]
There will always be the irrational and the unstable. But when political leaders turn disagreements into all-out war, demonize opponents as enemies and accuse those on the other side of being subhuman killers, the unbalanced can hear messages that were never intended.
The Baltimore Sun:
None of the GOP presidential candidates may have asked for volunteers to attack a Planned Parenthood clinic, but it's not just "left-wing tactics," as Ms. Fiorina alleges, to ask whether there is a connection between such overheated rhetoric and the rise of real threats against an organization that provides legal health care to millions of women. It hardly seems coincidental that Mr. Dear reportedly used the same kind of language to describe Planned Parenthood supposedly trafficking in "baby parts" that the organization's political critics have.
But the sad truth is this: Just as tragedies like the Sandy Hook massacre failed to shame Congress into taking up meaningful gun control, this one won't stop Republican hard-liners from pushing for a federal government shutdown over Planned Parenthood funding. Rhetoric trumps reality and, sometimes, tragically becomes it.
The San Francisco Chronicle:
[H]ow long can the country afford to allow any angry citizen the chance to kill large numbers of people, simply because he has a grievance?
Congress knows that there are plenty of sensible proposals to increase background checks on gun buyers and limit possession of assault weaponry.
The cowardice is maddening, and the threat of this distinctly American brand of terrorism — mass shootings — is not going away.
Emily Bazelon at The New York Times:
Abortion opponents have every right to lobby to take the funding away, and to use whatever language they choose in doing so. The First Amendment protects them. But that doesn’t mean that the killings necessarily came from nowhere, or that no one cautioned that the recent burst of angry accusations carried a physical risk. In September, the F.B.I. warned of an uptick in attacks against abortion facilities, singling out “lone offenders” using tactics “typical of the pro-life extremist movement.” After the shooting, Vicki Saporta, president of the National Abortion Federation, said in a statement: “We have seen an unprecedented increase in hate speech and threats against abortion providers. We have been quite worried that this increase in threats would lead to a violent attack like we saw today.” [...]
Abortion is an American tinderbox. A small spark can light a big fire in a country with ample access to guns and far less to mental-health care. In my reporting, I’ve noticed a sharp rise in the targeting of Planned Parenthood in recent years. [...]
Questioned on Sunday about Dear’s reference to “no more baby parts,” Cruz cited a claim that Dear was registered to vote as a woman and called him a “transgendered leftist activist.” There’s no more evidence for this characterization than there was for Fiorina’s video claims. But it was handy, in the moment. In the past four years, Planned Parenthood’s opponents have concluded they can wage political warfare by creating a swirl of negativity around the organization with extreme rhetoric. The most vitriolic of them have marked off an increasingly narrow space for themselves, embracing the language of brutality and violence while disavowing real violence when it occurs.
Michelle Goldberg at Slate:
Naturally, abortion opponents will argue that it is unfair to hold them responsible for what crazy people do on behalf of their ideology. Liberals, after all, vehemently oppose blaming all Muslims for Islamist terror. We’re horrified when conservatives such as Cruz link the Black Lives Matter movement to the murder of police. Dear’s killing spree does not invalidate criticism of Planned Parenthood. (Though I’d argue that most of the criticism is invalid for other reasons.) But it defies common sense to insist that there is no connection between political rhetoric and political violence—to insist, essentially, that there is no such thing as incitement—particularly when there is a history of anti-abortion murder that goes back more than 20 years
Turning to the other big news of the day — climate change — we begin with The Boston Globe’s take:
AFTER TWO decades of failed efforts to forge a global agreement on climate change, the world is barely at the starting line when it comes to curbing emissions of the greenhouse gases that are dangerously warming the planet. President Obama candidly acknowledged that history on the opening day of the Paris summit Monday: “One of the enemies that we’ll be fighting at this conference is cynicism, the notion we can’t do anything about climate change.” [...]
But as serious as the divisions remain, the Paris summit opens with an unprecedented common sense of urgency. No country is denying its responsibility to deal with climate change. The question has finally become how, not whether, all countries can do their part. If the summit leads every nation to step up to the challenge of climate change with renewed vigor, it will be a success.
USA Today:
[D]eprived of the “U.S. can’t act alone” argument, the opponents have taken a new tack: It’s crazy to focus on the long-term threat from climate change when we should be concentrating on the more immediate threat from radical Islamic terrorism. After President Obama said the Paris summit would be a rebuke to terrorists, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani said he had never “heard anything more absurd from a president.” Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, speaking Monday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, called Obama’s remarks about the threat posed by global warming “one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen, or perhaps most naive.”
Actually, what’s dumb is the which-threat-is-greater argument. Radical jihad and global warming are different threats requiring different responses over different time periods. One is a battle against a warped ideology, the other an enormous economic and scientific problem. The world community is capable of dealing with more than one challenge at a time.
To postpone or cancel the climate talks in the wake of the Nov. 13 attacks that left 130 people dead in Paris would have been a huge victory for the terrorists. Indeed, the convergence of world leaders in France is a powerful statement that the world will not be cowed by acts of barbarism. As Obama put it Monday, “What greater rejection of those who would tear down our world than marshaling our best efforts to save it.”
Christopher Dickey at The Daily Beast:
Globally, according to UN estimates, climate change is forcing about 20 million people a year out of their homes, and by 2050 that figure could be 150 million. As reported by the Brookings Institution and others, such migrations, whether internal or across borders, create tensions that can turn violent, and in a truly vicious circle that violence can lead to further displacement.
Consider the territories carved out and threatened by the infamous African terror organization Boko Haram. Its fanatics operated in the vicinity of Lake Chad, which has all but disappeared over the last 50 years, shrinking from more than 22,000 square kilometers in the 1960s to fewer than 1,500 today.
As climate patterns shifted, drought set in and attempts to compensate with irrigation drained the lake’s waters. Before anyone had ever heard of Boko Haram, a 2008 report by the UN Environment Program noted, “The changes in the lake have contributed to local lack of water, crop failures, livestock deaths, collapsed fisheries, soil salinity, and increasing poverty throughout the region.” As the traditional populations moved out, Boko Haram moved in, terrorizing those who stayed behind
And, on a final noted, this must-read from Eric Roston at Bloomberg:
New research for the first time has put a precise count on the people and groups working to dispute the scientific consensus on climate change. A loose network of 4,556 individuals with overlapping ties to 164 organizations do the most to dispute climate change in the U.S., according to a paper published today in Nature Climate Change. ExxonMobil and the family foundations controlled by Charles and David Koch emerge as the most significant sources of funding for these skeptics. [...]
For Robert Brulle, a sociology professor at Drexel University who has conducted research on the topic, Farrell's research helps define how climate denial works. "Corporate funders create and support conservative think tanks," which then pass off climate misinformation as valid. The mainstream media pick up on it, which helps shape public opinion.
"This brings up the following question," Brulle said. "Why is the media picking up and promulgating the central themes of climate misinformation?"