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Speaking at a memorial service at the University of Arizona
in Tucson, President Obama honored the victims of last
weekend's shooting rampage in that city, sharing
thoughts about those who had died and lauding the heroic
behavior displayed during and after the attack.
Mr. Obama also spoke of the ideal of representative
democracy; Saturday's shooting had taken place at a
meet-and-greet for constituents -- called "Congress
on your Corner" -- hosted by Rep. Gabrielle
Giffords (D) of Arizona, who was gravely injured in the
attack.
Obama stunned the assembled crowd by revealing that
Congresswoman Giffords had opened her eyes for the first
time since the attack right after the president and his wife
visited her in her hospital room. Giffords's husband,
space shuttle commander Capt. Mark Kelly, sat next to
Michelle Obama in the front row.
But amid the expressions of hope and mourning, the president
also dove into the national controversy over whether
political passions and inflamed rhetoric had created a
climate conducive to the attack by the gunman.
"At a time when our discourse has become so sharply
polarized -- at a time when we are far too eager to lay
the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those
who happen to think differently than we do -- it's
important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we
are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way
that wounds," said Obama, speaking at the
university's McKale Memorial Center.
The GCP event was set for 4 hours, from 5 to 9 pm local time
(00:00 to 04:00 UTC). The result is Chisquare 14318.128 on
14400 df, for P = 0.684 and Z = -0.479. Obama spoke from
about 5:40 to 6:10 (this is a rough guess).
It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny
statistical
effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish signal from
noise. This means that every "success" might be largely
driven by chance, and every "null" might include a real
signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect
can
be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of
similar analyses.
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