Gun Control Advocates Make Up Facts

By John R. Lott Jr. as posted on Big Government.com

People walking the streets armed with guns must be dangerous, right? The Brady Campaign and the Violence Policy Center keep claiming that even those individuals who have legally obtained permits to carry concealed handguns are extremely dangerous. With millions of Americans already having been issued such permits from the various states, this is an important issue.

The gun control organizations have frequently made these claims in the press. The Associated Press articles by Erik Schelzig and by Jim Abrams have given extensive, uncritical coverage. Members of the gun control organizations have made these claims unchallenged on such places as Fox News and on the Huffington Post. But the gun control advocates inaccurately describe many shooting cases, choosing to ignore that the majority of incidents involve people properly defending themselves.

Over the past three years, the number of active permit holders in the United States has gone from about 5 million to more than 6.2 million today. The numbers issued by the state regulatory agencies show time after time that these permit holders abide by the law.

Take Florida, which currently has the most concealed handgun permit holders in the country and is one of the two most populous states with right-to-carry laws. Between Oct. 1, 1987, and May 31 this year, permits had been issued to 1.8 million people. On average, the permits had been held for quite a long time, well over 10 years. For all those individuals across the more than 22 years of legal carry, there were only 167 cases where the permit was revoked for a firearms related violation, or about 0.01 percent of permit holders. While the state doesn’t provide a precise breakdown of the reason for those revocations, the vast majority were apparently for people who accidentally carried their concealed handgun into a gun-free zone, such as an airport or school.

Throughout the past 30 months, beginning January 2008, only three additional permit holders have had their permit revoked for a firearms-related violation. With more than 739,000 active permit holders, that is an annual revocation rate of 0.00017 percent.

In sharp contrast, the Brady Campaign and the Violence Policy Center portray Florida as Ground Zero for problems with concealed handgun permit holders. They boldly assert that 17 Florida permit holders have “killed” people with their guns over the past three years and that this one state by itself accounts for 17 of the 96 “killer” permit holders nationwide. The other 79 cases are scattered across 26 other states, with no other state accounting for more than 10 cases. Florida is also said to account for 2 of the 7 cases where permit holders are said to have killed law enforcement officers.

So what is the evidence? The gun control groups don’t actually point to actual court cases. They look at news stories and selectively report what is reported in those stories. For Florida, there are eleven “pending cases.” The gun control groups assume that anyone involved in a shooting will be convicted. Indeed, in 7 of the 11 cases no one was even charged with a crime. Three cases involved suicides, and three had convictions for some type of offense. (See this link for a detailed presentation of sources.)

But there is something that the gun control advocates conveniently omit: When a permit holder uses a gun defensively and kills an attacker in a public place, the police often arrest them. Typically, he will later be released, but the police must first investigate what happened. The police can’t just take the shooter’s word for it that they used the gun defensively.

Take the four pending cases where charges were filed, two of which involved the “killing” of law enforcement.

– Humberto Delgado, Jr. was charged with the death of a police officer. Delgado obviously engaged in a horrible crime, but there is one major problem with the stories as presented by the gun control groups. He also was charged with carrying a concealed firearm. If he had a concealed handgun permit, he obviously couldn’t have been charged with this crime. Delgado was just your typical criminal, who didn’t have a permit, who killed a police officer.

– James Wonder was charged with the death of an off-duty Customs and Border Protection Agent Donald Pettit. Pettit is said to have engaged in road rage against Wonder and then followed Wonder’s car into a Post Office parking lot solely to continue harassing Wonder. Pettit had over shot the parking lot and had to circle back to go into it. He had no intention to do business with either the Post Office or any other nearby business. Pettit was clearly the aggressor in the situation. The Sun-Sentinel newspaper wrote on August 29, 2008: “local lawyers said [Wonder] may be able to make a strong claim under Florida law that he was within his rights to shoot Pettit.” One measure of the severity of the case is that Wonder was released on a very minimal bond of $10,000. Neither the Brady Campaign nor the Violence Policy Center noted these points in their discussion of the case.

– Gabriel Mobley shot two people outside a bar, and the gun control groups’ discussions fail to mention the defensive nature of Mobley’s actions. A friend of Mobley’s had an argument with two other men in a bar. Mr. Mobley separated the men, but the two waited outside and Mobley’s lawyer, Richard Della Ferra, told me that they pounced on Mobley and his friend as soon as they left the bar. Witnesses saw one of the two attackers throw a punch that shattered the friend’s eye socket. Mobley says that he shot when he thought one of the two men was reaching for a weapon, and police found the DNA of one of the men on a steak knife at the scene.

– On January 7, 2008, Adam Hill was accused of accidentally firing his gun, the bullet fatally striking a friend while the friend had visited Hill to use his washing machine. Since the case has yet to go to trial, the law office that is representing Hill was unwilling to discuss the case, but they did say that the news articles did not accurately represent what had happened in the case. The law office representing Hill in his legal case emphasized to me in a telephone discussion that news articles on these cases can be quite misleading because defense lawyers warn their clients not to talk to others about their case, including the press.

Two of the three convictions in Florida are quite different than what gun control groups represent. One involved a boyfriend who accidentally shot his girlfriend when he was showing her how to use a gun in her home. There was no evidence of arguing or any disagreement. In another case, the issue was whether the permit holder had done enough to avoid the confrontation. A convicted felon confronted the permit holder. According to newspaper accounts, even the prosecutor acknowledged: “Kallenbach was in some way defending himself during an escalating altercation between the men caught on the security video” and that “People can look at that tape and interpret it two or three different ways.”

While this discussion focuses on Florida, the just released third edition of More Guns, Less Crime provides a detailed analysis for all states from 1990 to July 1, 2008. In state after state, permit holders are extremely law-abiding. In Arizona, there were 99,370 active permits as of December 1, 2007. During 2007, 33 permits were revoked for any reason — a 0.03 percent rate. In Texas, there were 288,909 active permit holders. Of these, 160 were convicted of either a misdemeanor or a felony, a rate of 0.05 percent. That is about one-seventh the conviction rate in the general adult population, and the convictions among permit holders are for much less serious offenses.

I went to some other cases from the gun control groups after July 1, 2008. In two of the other five killings involving law-enforcement, it also appears as if the person who fired a gun didn’t have a concealed handgun permit. In one case, in Pennsylvania, Christina Korbe fired a shot killing a police officer when police raided her home. The police were serving an arrest warrant on her husband, and she didn’t know it was the police who were breaking into her home, and she was concerned about the safety of her two children, ages 4 and 10.

The Brady Campaign and the Violence Policy Center evaluate the benefits of concealed handgun laws based solely on the claimed costs — they don’t compare the cases where defensive uses occurred to the bad things that happen, but only count what they claim are the bad cases. They ignore lots of amazing defensive gun use cases. But even more bizarrely, they count legitimate self-defense cases as bad events even when no charges are filed or the permit holder is later exonerated.

MODERN CIVIL RIGHTS: COCKFIGHTING AND SAME-SEX PROMS

Ann Coulter

Watching TV this week, at first I thought Republican Senate nominee Rand Paul had flown a commercial jet into the World Trade Center. But then it turned out that he had only said there ought to be discussion about whether federal civil rights laws should be applied to private businesses.

This allowed the mainstream media to accuse Paul of being a racist. Twisting a conservative's words in order to accuse him of racism was evidently more urgent news than the fact that the attorney general of the United States admitted last week -- under oath in a congressional hearing -- that he had not read the 10-page Arizona law on illegal immigration, the very law he was noisily threatening to overturn.

And really, how could the U.S. attorney general have time to read a 10-page law when he's busy doing all the Sunday morning TV shows condemning it?

Eric Holder's astonishing admission was completely ignored by ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, The Associated Press, Time or Newsweek, according to Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center.

I just want to say: I think it's fantastic that the Democrats have finally come out against race discrimination. Any day now, maybe they'll come out for fighting the Cold War. Perhaps 100 years from now, they'll be ready to fight the war on terrorism or champion the rights of the unborn.

It would be a big help, though, if Democrats could support good causes when it mattered.

But as long as the media are so fascinated with the question of why anyone would want to "discuss" certain aspects of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, maybe they should ask Al Gore why his father was one of the leading opponents of the bill.

Or they could ask Bill Clinton, whose mentor, Sen. William Fulbright, actively supported segregation and also voted against the bill. Or they could talk to the only current member of the Senate to vote against it, Democrat Bob Byrd.

As with the 1957 and 1960 civil rights acts, it was Republicans who passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act by huge majorities. A distinctly smaller majority of Democrats voted for it.

In the Senate, for example, 82 percent of Republicans voted for the act, compared with only 66 percent of Democrats. In the House, 80 percent of Republicans supported the law, compared with only 63 percent of Democrats.

With even all Democrats coming aboard on opposition to race discrimination (and it only took them 45 years!) I think we can stipulate that everyone in America is opposed to discrimination against blacks.

Now let's talk about the "civil rights" lawsuits that are actually brought in modern America. Today's "civil rights" lawsuits have nothing to do with black Americans. Worse, blacks are used as props to benefit the Democrats' favored constituencies: feminists and trial lawyers.

Democratic political consultant Bob Shrum pioneered the technique, running ads against Republican Ellen Sauerbrey in the 1998 Maryland gubernatorial race, accusing her of having "a civil rights record to be ashamed of." To really drive the point home, Shrum's ads showed sad-looking black people in front of a mural of Africa.

Of course, if I were forced to appear in political ads for Bob Shrum, I'd be sad, too.

But the only "civil rights" bill that Sauerbrey opposed had nothing to do with blacks. It was a sexual harassment bill that was so silly that Democrats in the Maryland legislature helped kill it.

Similarly, the vast bulk of "civil rights" lawsuits today have nothing to do with race. Although plaintiffs will jam every possible allegation of discrimination in their complaints, in 2009, according to the website of the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, 65 percent of all civil rights claims brought had absolutely nothing to do with race discrimination.

These days, a typical federal "civil rights" case is the one brought this year by the Game Fowl Breeders Association in New Mexico claiming their "civil rights" have been violated by a state law banning cockfighting.

Another modern "civil rights" lawsuit charged that a McDonald's restaurant violated the Americans With Disabilities Act by hanging a bathroom mirror two inches too high for people in wheelchairs. The error was made when employees replaced the original mirror, which had been destroyed by vandals, with a shorter one.

The restaurant owner, Ron Piazza, corrected the problem as soon as it was brought to his attention, but he got sued anyway. Curiously, the plaintiffs had retained their McDonalds' receipts, allowing them to claim damages for 27 separate visits to the restaurant.

And of course there are all the lesbians shutting down high school proms across the country because they can't take their girlfriends to the dance as the Founding Fathers intended.

This year's graduating class at Itawamba Agricultural High School in rural Mississippi will never have a school senior prom because the ACLU brought a lawsuit on behalf of Constance McMillen demanding that she be allowed to bring her girlfriend and wear a tuxedo.

With cockfighting bans and heterosexual proms, Martin Luther King's work remains unfinished!

Half a century ago, Democrats beat up the Freedom Riders. Today the Democrats insult the Freedom Riders by comparing them to irritating lesbians, lawsuit-happy disabled persons and cockfighters.

The question is not whether the federal government should be telling private businesses they can't engage in race discrimination. The question is whether federal civil rights laws should prevent any discrimination other than race discrimination.

COPYRIGHT 2010 ANN COULTER
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1130 Walnut, Kansas City, MO 64106

Right Wing Extremist Linked To Time Square Bombing Attempt

NOT REALLY. LOL But I bet that headline gave all visiting Libtards a twitch.

How about...

Pakistani Taliban Behind Times Square Bomb Plot, Officials Say

The investigation into the Times Square bomb plot has revealed that the Pakistani Taliban were behind the failed attack, top Obama administration officials said Sunday.

The investigation into the Times Square bomb plot has revealed that the Pakistani Taliban were behind the failed attack, top Obama administration officials said Sunday.

Despite conflicting claims over the past week from military and law enforcement officials, as well as Taliban leaders, Attorney General Eric Holder and White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan said that authorities now believe suspect Faisal Shahzad acted at the direction of the Taliban in Pakistan and was probably funded by them.

Brennan told "Fox News Sunday" that Shahzad had "extensive interaction" with the group, which he described as virtually "indistinguishable" from Al Qaeda. He said investigators believe the suspect was trained by the militant network.

"It looks as though he was operating on behalf of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan," he said. "This is a group that is closely aligned with Al Qaeda. It has a murderous agenda similar to Al Qaeda, they train together, they plan together, they plot together. They're almost indistinguishable."

New York law enforcement officials initially said they did not have evidence to support claims made by the Pakistani Taliban that they were responsible for the attempted attack. The Taliban later reversed their claim.

Gen. David Petraeus also previously described Shahzad as a "lone wolf" merely inspired by Pakistani militants in a statement to The Associated Press.

But Holder said Sunday that investigators have found solid links back to Pakistan. He said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that the Taliban were "intimately involved" in the plot.

"We've now developed evidence which shows that the Pakistani Taliban was behind the attack," he said on ABC's "This Week." "We know that they helped facilitate it. We know that they probably helped finance it, and that he was working at their direction."

Shahzad, a U.S. citizen of Pakistani descent, was arrested Monday in connection with the plot.
Holder said investigators have found no evidence to suggest that the Pakistani government, which he described as cooperative in the investigation, had any prior knowledge of Shahzad's plans.

The Shattered Template In Arizona

American Spectator

By Jeffrey Lord on 5.4.10 @ 6:10AM

"You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about n….s, and they stomped the floor." -- Democrat George Wallace on his first, failed, race for Governor of Alabama

That sound you hear is a rare thing.

A liberal template is being shattered in Arizona. The template of race.

It's an important liberal template too. Central to the success of one of the biggest of liberal myths. The myth? That the electoral successes of the Left throughout American history have had nothing to do with race, much less racism. That in fact all those angelic lefties out there just want truth, justice and the American way for white and black and brown and yellow and red and any other combination of hues on the color scale. Kumbaya. Divide by race? How insulting!

The truth, however -- and that truth is reappearing vividly once again in Arizona -- is that the American Left could not have made it to the 21st century without tying itself tightly to abject racism. It has secured political success in the past by playing every possible race card from supporting, in order, slavery, segregation, lynching, the Ku Klux Klan and racial quotas, while fiercely opposing the legal immigration of Asians. The latter were labeled by Democrats as "a servile race" whose presence was objectionable because "they had not sprung from the great parent stock." Now, in the piece de resistance, the Left is using the race card with illegal immigration. And it is no accident that what began with racial appeals to whites (in opposing rights for blacks and legal immigration for Asians) moved on to racial appeals to blacks and now to brown-skinned Americans. The more the race changes, the more the approach stays the same.

The liberal media, but of course, is complicit. And, it is most import to understand, it has always been so. If liberals were the (literal) slave masters and segregationist bullies of America's past (and they were), the left-leaning press was the plantation PR agent. They approached progressives and their use of race in such a starkly deceptive fashion as to be a pluperfect example of what this magazine's editor in chief R. Emmett Tyrrell calls "the Kultursmog." Tyrrell defines the term (in his new book After the Hangover) as a liberal "pollutant" which "contaminates such vast areas of American culture with Liberal prejudices and bugaboos." There is no need to rehash here the details of all those Democratic Party platforms (26) that directly supported either slavery itself or segregation when they weren't whacking away at Asians. Suffice to say the American Left has danced, tangoed, waltzed, and fox- trotted when not sleeping with every incarnation of racism in America from the beginning to this moment. Somehow, this just never made it into the news of the day as reported by all those Lefty journos, the cultural smokestacks never getting around to pumping this particularly cleansing truth into the political atmosphere.

Case in point (there are an endless number) is the New York Times' handling of the death in 1924 of former President Woodrow Wilson, a hero then and now of the American Left.

The day after Wilson's death, befitting the importance of a powerful president, the Times published a three page review of Wilson's career. Three pages in fine print, beneath the headline Career of Woodrow Wilson as College Executive, Governor and President. There was not a single, solitary word that Wilson was not only a thorough-going racist, had avidly courted like-minded segregationists to get elected (carrying the 13 states of the "Solid South") but had used his presidential power to both segregate the federal government and appoint rabid progressive-racists to powerful posts, such as Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels. Daniels, on cue, promptly segregated the US Navy.

And of these decidedly important events which vividly illustrated the historic tie between the American Left and racists the Times reported: Nothing. Zero. Not one solitary word in a three-page, fine print career review.

The Times did have space for other headlines though during the so-called "Progressive Era." They are unintentionally revealing of the American Left's view of race.

"Woman Rescued from Negro"
"Woman Stabbed by a Negro"
"Negro Attacks a Teacher"
"Negro Kills a Sheriff"
"Negro Saves $30,000"

Got that? Not "Woman Rescued" or "Woman Stabbed" or "Man Attacks a Teacher" or "Man Saves $30,000." Noooooooooo. It's a Negro. Yet when a white man was caught sending bombs to three people, the headline ran: "Three Bombs His, Janitor Admits." Race never made the story, the man's ethnic surname identifying him as an Irish American. A white man.

This was -- and is -- the way the liberal media deals with race. It is a necessary base line for the success of the American Left. The Times was relentless in reporting blacks as perpetrators of all manner of bad deeds -- because this supported the need for progressive-racists to appeal successfully for white votes. It worked. And when Woodrow Wilson died, the historical record of what he had actually done -- the true nature of the relationship between the left and racism during the Wilson presidency -- vanished. Right in front of the eyes of 1924 Times readers. Then again, how can something vanish if it's never reported in the first place?

As time moved on, a strange similarity began to emerge as the Left finally engaged with American blacks.

Progressives presented big government to blacks in precisely the same way they presented it to white Southerners: tied tightly together to the idea of racial identity. Thus emerged a whole generation of progressive black politicians who were the mirror image of their white supremacist counterparts: each exploiting the combustible mix of racism and big government.

Nowhere has this approach been more prominently displayed then on Capitol Hill, where the Congressional Black Caucus has emerged blessed by the liberal media, with the progressive-racism formula burnished to a finely polished glow.

When liberal white Congressman Steve Cohen, elected from a Tennessee district that is 60% black, requested membership to what he assumed was the politically simpatico Black Caucus, he was refused. In stark terms worthy of a Klan member (underneath those hoods were big government leftists) denying membership to an eager -- but black -- leftist, Black Caucus member Congressman William Lacy Clay, Jr. bluntly delivered the response: "Mr. Cohen asked for admission, and he got his answer. He's white and the Caucus is black. It's time to move on. We have racial policies to pursue and we are pursuing them, as Mr. Cohen has learned. It's an unwritten rule. It's understood."

Yet this starkly racial rejoinder never made the liberal press so much as blink. Why might that be?

The original verbal attack by Southern progressives on supporters of equal rights in the Solid (which is to say Democratic) South was that so-and-so was a "n…lover." The term radiated hatred, as it was designed to do. The message was that race X -- African Americans in this case -- were inferior. And that if you deigned in word or deed to suggest otherwise, you were to be stigmatized by this description.

Today, "racist" is the new "n-word" for the Left.

It is used precisely by white, black, and Latino progressives in exactly the same way the "n-word" phrase was used in the Solid South by white progressives; to stigmatize, to render illegitimate for social -- and most importantly -- political reasons. It is not possible to have a "Solid South" or a "black vote" or "Hispanic vote" turning out for progressive causes en masse unless the race button is pushed.

And so, it's pushed.

The newest crop of those pushing the old progressive-race theme -- this time with Latinos -- include the well-schooled members of the Congressional Black Caucus. This being the group that proudly excludes non-blacks -- that would be Latinos as well as whites -- per Congressman Clay. So a group of Democrats that deliberately discriminates against Latinos and whites in the fine style of their party's tradition is out there using the r-word with all the skill of George Wallace if not the subtlety of Woodrow Wilson or the New York Times.

The "racist" label is quickly affixed to any and all who believe in a color-blind America, just as the "n-word" once was employed in the quest for progressive electoral victories based on appeals to white supremacy. This in turn fills American leftist politics with those who use only a marginally updated version of that George Wallace quote to succeed, simply substituting the "r word" for the "n word." As in:

"You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about racists, and they stomped the floor."

They are stomping the floor in Arizona, as seen here.

Not slow to cheer on the floor stompers was President Obama.

"It will be up to each of you to make sure that the young people, African Americans, Latinos, and women, who powered our victory in 2008 stand together once again."

And right there, the liberal template on race -- in use for the better part of two centuries -- has now begun to shatter.

Why?

The conservative media exists -- and from the Wall Street Journal to the Washington Times to the New York Post to Rush Limbaugh and the rest of talk radio -- the entire progressive-race axis is not only being exposed it is being mocked.

• Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal even brought in some establishment Republicans:

The establishments of the American political parties, and the media, are full of people who think concern about illegal immigration is a mark of racism. If you were Freud you might say, "How odd that's where their minds so quickly go, how strange they're so eager to point an accusing finger. Could they be projecting onto others their own, heavily defended-against inner emotions?"

Good question Peggy. Very good question with a lot of sad history that already gives the rest of us an answer.

• Jeffrey Kuhner in the Washington Times: "Mr. Obama is fracturing America. He is calling on the primacy of race and gender in order to perpetuate his national socialist revolution"

• Rush Limbaugh threw the "r-word" right back at Obama: "This is the regime at its racist best."

• Mark Steyn mocked the "r-word" as only a legal immigrant can:

As I write, I have my papers on me -- and not just because I'm in Arizona. I'm an immigrant, and it is a condition of my admission to this great land that I carry documentary proof of my residency status with me at all times and be prepared to produce it to law enforcement officials, whether on a business trip to Tucson or taking a 20-minute stroll in the woods back at my pad in New Hampshire.

Who would impose such an outrageous Nazi fascist discriminatory law?

Er, well, that would be Franklin Roosevelt.

• Bob Gorrell: The cartoonist featured in The New York Post perhaps scored as only a cartoonist can, with this gem showing a baffled Arizonan saying he only wants the law obeyed and those with proper documentation allowed in his state -- only to be fingered by an angry Democrat as a racist.

The problem for progressives is that in today's world millions of Americans of all colors -- those who really do believe in a color-blind society and live it everyday with family, friends, neighbors, employers, employees, colleagues and so on -- simply refuse to be played. A Rasmussen poll shows that 70% of Arizonans -- not just white Arizonans but all Arizonans be they white, black, brown, red or yellow -- want their border secured. Like people everywhere else in America they have locks on their door for a reason, and cannot fathom the idea that if their house were suddenly invaded by hundreds of uninvited and increasingly violent people of any race they would be deemed "racists" for calling the police.

But the push is on to make Hispanics the new white supremacists, to make the people in that Phoenix rally into the kind of people in this rally. To tie people together politically by the fact of skin color as opposed to the idea of America, of liberty, of freedom and economic opportunity for all.

Make no mistake: the reason progressives use race so desperately to win elections -- and have done so forever -- is that they are desperate. For control. Control over you, your health care, your taxes, your checkbook, your kid's schools, your view of religion -- everything and anything right down to the latest ploy to remove salt from your diet and plastic toys from McDonald's. And they can't get it unless they place the race card.

But time has moved on. It isn't 1924 anymore.

The liberal template on race is shattering. Seventy-percent of Arizonans know the game -- and so does the conservative media.

And we refuse to play.

Bloomberg-Words He Should EAT

See video HERE.

Robocop's Comment:

So what we have here is a "concerned" Islamofacist who has a "right wing agenda"?!? I don't think so. Mr. Bloomberg, you so suck. Jumping on the Clinton bandwagon linking conservative dissent to future violence will not work. There are too many decent Americans who are genuinely and peacefully concerned with the leftward dive this federal government is taking. There is no Timothy McVeigh in this incident to celebrate over. There is no additional excuse to limit our rights to express those concerns.

Follow Up

Times Square Car Bomb Suspect Faces Terrorism Charges After Admitting to Plot

snip

Holder said Shahzad, who has provided "valuable information" to investigators, attempted to carry out a "lethal terrorist attack" aimed at "murdering Americans in one of the busiest places in our country."

snip

CBS News reported earlier Monday that Pakistani authorities apprehended suspects connected to the terrorist plot during raids Monday night and Tuesday morning in different locations. Some of them may be related to Shahzad, according to the network.

snip

More than a dozen people with American citizenship or residency, like Shahzad, have been accused in the past two years of supporting or carrying out terrorism attempts on U.S. soil, cases that illustrate the threat of violent extremism from within the U.S.

Among them are Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, a U.S.-born Army psychiatrist of Palestinian descent, charged with fatally shooting 13 people last year at Fort Hood, Texas; Najibullah Zazi, a Denver-area airport shuttle driver who pleaded guilty in February in a plot to bomb New York subways; and a Pennsylvania woman who authorities say became radicalized online as "Jihad Jane" and plotted to kill a Swedish artist whose work offended Muslims.

SO MUCH FOR RIGHT WING EXTREMISTS Mr. Bloomberg!



Here is an additional statement from the Washington Times that sums it all:

snip

There was no joy in liberal land when the prime suspect in the Times Square bomb plot turned out to be a Pakistani-American. The right-wing terrorist boogeyman vanished. Leftist racial and ethnic profiling failed again.

"People of color" at Tea Parties

Journalists Guide To Firearms

Showdown at Saddleback

Debate evaluation by Larry Elder.

Oh, no, not another "town hall" meeting.

Or at least, that's how I first reacted when I learned Rev. Rick Warren of Saddleback Church intended to host an Obama-versus-McCain town hall forum at the evangelist's California church.

But the rules, this time at least, seemed intriguing. Warren intended to ask each candidate one-on-one questions for one hour, with the rival offstage unable to hear questions and answers. The second candidate would then come out and answer the same questions in the same order.

Obama, via a coin toss, went first, and answered the often simple, straightforward questions carefully or, as many in the mainstream media later reported, in a "nuanced" way. And then came McCain. He came across as funnier, more personable, more thoughtful, more specific and, for the most part, more direct.

Some highlights. Warren asked the candidates to define "rich."

Obama: "If you are making $150,000 a year or less as a family, then you're middle class, or you may be poor. But 150 (thousand dollars) down, you're basically middle class. Obviously, it depends on region and where you're living. I don't know what housing prices are doing lately. I would argue that if you're making more than 250,000 (dollars), then you're in the top 3, 4 percent of this country. You're doing well. Now, these things are all relative, and I'm not suggesting that everybody who is making over 250,000 (dollars) is living on easy street.

"But the question that I think we have to ask ourselves is, if we believe in good schools, if we believe in good roads, if we want to make sure that kids can go to college, if we don't want to leave a mountain of debt for the next generation, then we've got to pay for these things. They don't come for free. I believe it is irresponsible intergenerationally for us to invest or for us to spend $10 billion a month on a war and not have a way of paying for it. That, I think, is unacceptable. Under the approach I'm taking, if you make $150,000 or less, you will see a tax cut. If you're making $250,000 a year or more, you're going to see a modest increase."

McCain: "I don't want to take any money from the rich. I want everybody to get rich. I don't believe in class warfare or redistribution of wealth. Let's keep taxes low. Let's give every family in America a $7,000 tax credit for every child they have. Let's give them a $5,000 refundable tax credit to go out and get the health insurance of their choice. Let's not have the government take over the health care system in America.

"And, my friend, it was not taxes that mattered in America in the last several years. It was spending. Spending got completely out of control. We spent money in a way that mortgaged our kids' future. My friends, we spent $3 million of your money to study the DNA of bears in Montana. Now, I don't know if that was a paternity issue or a criminal issue. But the point is, it was $3 million of your money.

"So it doesn't matter, really, what my definition of 'rich' is because I don't want to raise anybody's taxes. I really don't. In fact, I want to give working Americans a better shot at having a better life."

Iraq? Obama called his decision to oppose the war "difficult," given -- at the time -- the popularity of the president. McCain said: "Not long ago in Baghdad, al-Qaida took two young women who were mentally disabled and put suicide vests on them, sent them into a marketplace and, by remote control, detonated those suicide vests. If that isn't evil, you have to tell me what is. And we're going to defeat this evil. And the central battleground, according to David Petraeus and Osama bin Laden, is Baghdad, Mosul, Basra and Iraq. And we are winning and we are succeeding, and our troops will come home with honor and with victory, and not in defeat."

The following day, on "Meet the Press," NBC's Andrea Mitchell said some "Obama people" suggested that McCain heard the questions in advance because he "seemed so well-prepared."

Indeed, McCain did seem better prepared -- to lead this country, that is.

Robocop's Comment:

I am not surprised that the liberal media kind of left out reporting on this debate. Makes you wonder what else they leave out when they report on this election.

If D-Day Happened Today...

Robocop's Comment:

Unfortunately, this is not far off base. The mainstream media would exhibit this kind of bias reporting if they were in the same state of mind back then as they are now. I love how the professor longed for negotiations with the Germans, stating "they did not attack Pearl Harbor." Kind of reminds us of the current war on terror.