On Monday’s the Last Word show, in its new 8:00 p.m. time slot, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell referred to the manufacturers of high-capacity magazines as "merchants of death" who purchase "their political protection from the NRA." As he continued his push for a ban on magazines with 30 bullets in light of the Tucson shootings, O’Donnell dismissed a statement from the NRA which argued that such magazines are useful in self-defense, and went on to make his latest attack on the manufacturers:

So the merchants of death are buying their political protection from the NRA and leave us to stare at our children and wonder: Who among them will be the next nine-year-old their high-capacity magazines unload on? The next Christina Taylor Green.

He went on to plead with President Obama to talk about gun control in the State of the Union Address, or otherwise "become part of the problem." O’Donnell:

If the President follows Republican and Democratic tradition tomorrow night and says not a word about gun and ammunition control, if he does not use this moment of his increasing popularity, if he does not believe he has the communication skills to convey the necessity to control the capacity of automatic weapons, then I, for one, will become disappointed in him for the first time. And he will become part of the problem.

Chris Matthews on Thursday actually showed a graphic image of the Capitol building with a red target on it and crosshairs in the foreground.

This hypocritically occurred moments before a lengthy segment on "Hardball" about violent rhetoric wherein he complained about "over-the-top references to guns all the time by people like Sarah Palin" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Charles Krauthammer on Thursday attacked the media's recent bogus call for civility in politics.

"The worst in uncivil discourse that we have had in the last decade occurred in the Bush years when the President was vilified, attacked, he was demonized, compared to Nazis," he told Chris Wallace on Fox News's "Special Report." "I do not remember the Times or the mainstream media all of a sudden wagging a finger and pulling a chin about the rise of uncivil discourse at the time" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

A recently-released analysis by the Pew Research Center reveals some interesting facts about the online conversation regarding the Tucson massacre. Most notably, it lends statistical weight to the claim that the left accused its ideological opponents of fostering a "climate of hate" to a far greater degree than did the right.

Though that may not be altogether surprising, the Pew study also revealed that the three news networks - the self-styled objective and responsible journalistic gatekeepers - were far more likely to blame conservatives alone for the tone of the national debate than even liberals in the blogosphere and twitterverse.

Two of the conservative opinion world’s heavyweights, humorist P.J. O’Rourke and Wall Street Journal writer James Taranto, both have responded in passionate, even moral fashion to the New York Times’s often disgraceful coverage of the Tucson shootings, in which six people were killed and Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was severely injured.

In their view, the Times used the tragedy to play political blame games against conservative politicians and talk show hosts. O'Rourke condemned the Times for "shameful," "ugly and offensive" reporting, while Taranto accused the Times of "reckless disregard for the truth."

First, some highlights from P.J. O’Rourke’s scathing take on the Times’ decline in the January 24 edition of The Weekly Standard, “The Times Loses It.”