1. The previous week's political events lost a great deal of their force when a gunman opened fire on moviegoers in Aurora, Colorado. The country's thoughts and prayers are with the people impacted, much more than with the summer campaign.

2. But politics always has a way of intruding. Brian Ross of ABC News initially wrongly fingered a Tea Party activist in the shooting, while others have begun to clamor for more gun control.

3. Federal "explosives control" laws didn't deter the man behind this event.

4. President Barack Obama is speaking in Colorado. He largely eschewed any attempt to politicize a similar event, the attack on Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, though the same cannot be said of some of his supporters.

5. Obama's Bain barrage has yet to do anything to change the deadlock in the polls. Mitt Romney even has a small, stastically insignificant lead in the latest Rasmussen poll. Gallup has Obama up by 1 point.

6. An interesting piece on Zell Miller's late-in-life political conversion, plus a story about Bob Kerrey's uphill battle to return to the Senate from Nebraska.