Obama Doesn't Want Daughters "Punished" With a Baby

I goess we could call these his "terminating the family" values:

"When it comes specifically to HIV/AIDS, the most important prevention is education, which should include -- which should include abstinence education and teaching the children -- teaching children, you know, that sex is not something casual. But it should also include -- it should also include other, you know, information about contraception because, look, I've got two daughters. 9 years old and 6 years old. I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby. I don't want them punished with an STD at the age of 16. You know, so it doesn't make sense to not give them information."

And how is that information working for the community so far?

Obama is stating publicly that if his daughters can't keep their knickers on when they become teenagers and they get pregnant as a result, he encourages them to get an abortion. Pregnancy is a "punishment," according to Obama, the man who tries to convince people he's not a radical, but just like one of us.

It was bad enough that Barack Obama wouldn't remove his daughters from exposure to Jeremiah Wright's unhinged rantings, and that he continues to have them attend a church where the current pastor is no less radical in his doctrine.

Now He's informed his chldren via the media that daddy will drive them to Planned Parenthood if they get knocked up.

Once again, Barack Obama is making me question not just his ability to lead this nation, but even his ability to be a marginally-responsible father.

Running From His Record: Obama's Lies Confirmed by His Own Hand

I ripped into Barack Obama's utter disdain of firearms and his desire for blanket bans on entire classes of firearms in a post for Pajamas Media back on February 22. The article, Obama Shooting Himself in the Foot with Anti-Gun Stance, noted:

In his answers to the 1998 Illinois State Legislative National Political Awareness Test, Obama said he favored a ban on "the sale or transfer of all forms of semi-automatic weapons."

By definition, this would include all pistols ever made, from .22 target pistols used in the Olympics to rarely-fired pistols kept in nightstands and sock drawers for the defense of families, and every pistol in between. Obama's strident stand would also ban all semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, whatever their previously legal purpose.

Obama's desire to ban all semi-automatic firearms (including those most commonly used for hunting and target shooting) and all handguns are positions well to the left of mainstream American views, as are many of the other political positions he took in the 1998 survey.

Running as a moderate and inclusive presidential candidate a decade later, Obama has tried to explain away his leftist positions on that survey, and an earlier 1996 survey, as being the work of campaign aides who misstated his positions.

The Politico bursts that explanation this morning, in a report that notes that Obama himself answered questions in an interview with the group that created the 1996 questionnaire, and even included the candidate's hand-written notes on an amended version of their questionnaire.

Some members of IVI-IPO, the group that authored the 1996 survey, are not happy with Obama's changing views.

The group had endorsed Obama in every race he'd run — including his failed long-shot 2000 primary challenge to U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) — until now.

The group's 37-member board of directors, meeting last year soon after Obama distanced himself from the first questionnaire, stalemated in its vote over an endorsement in the Democratic presidential primary. Forty percent supported Obama, 40 percent sided with Clinton and 20 percent voted for other candidates or not to endorse.

"One big issue was: Does he or does he not believe the stuff he told us in 1996?" said Aviva Patt, who has been involved with the IVI-IPO since 1990 and is now the group's treasurer. She volunteered for Obama's 2004 Senate campaign, but voted to endorse the since-aborted presidential campaign of Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) and professed disappointment over Obama's retreat from ownership of the questionnaire.

Other members of the group still support Obama, but it frankly doesn't matter.

Barack Obama has tried to package himself this time around as a uniting, moderating force in American politics, but his dozen-year long record from 1996 through his current Senate ranking as America's most liberal Senator shows him to be well to the left of mainstream positions not only among Americans in general, but even within the Democratic Party.

Instead of running on his liberal views, Barack Obama is trying to minimize the public's exposure to them without refuting his still-held radical beliefs, just as he's tried to run away from his relationship to a radical Marxism-inspired church with a bigoted, America-damning pastor without quitting the church or severing his relationship with Wright, just as he has no refuted his dinner-party friendship and board of directors relationship with a proud terrorist who lost his girlfriend in the group when she blew herself up trying to create bombs to target a dance for American soldiers.

Far from being a uniting force in American politics, Barack Obama has shown himself time and again to be a shifty radical attempting to lie his way into higher office. Unfortunately, his hope of surviving the general election un-vetted by the media and his opponents is falling apart.

Amusingly, the superdelegate system that Democrats created to avoid another embarrassing McGovern-type landslide defeat is primed to fail in it's primary mission by nominating another left-wing radical with little chance of winning, and a real possibility of of suffering another embarrassing landslide defeat once the gloves come off in the general election.

I can hardly wait.

Yon on the War

Michael Yon is in Mosul, where we thought the bulk of the fighting in Iraq would be over coming weeks as Iraqi Army units supported by American forces are preparing to route out the last of al Qaeda's significant urban presence.

I shot him an email yesterday to see what he may have heard, and he got back to me this briefly this morning to point me to telephone call he recorded with Glenn Reynolds. You can hear it here.

He's also got a new book coming coming out, and you can follow the links to pre-order it at the link above.

The Pitiful Josh Marshall

I don't typically go after other bloggers directly, but this particular combination of smugness and idiocy got under my skin.

Perhaps if one intends to publicly attack a political figure for the craven act of extending a deadline when things start getting dicey in combat, one should actually verify that such an extension has been made.

It hasn't, according to the AP article appended to the very NPR story he linked to.

Al-Maliki's office also announced it has given residents in Basra until April 8 to turn over "heavy and medium-size weapons" in return for unspecified monetary compensation.

The deadline is separate from the three-day ultimatum announced Wednesday for gunmen to surrender their arms and renounce violence or face harsher measures, government adviser Sadiq al-Rikabi said.

The move instead appeared to be aimed at noncombatants who may have weapons like machine-guns and grenade launchers either for smuggling purposes or to sell to militants or criminal gangs.

Two different deadlines have been set down, the original being a deadline on small arms, and the second, separate deadline for "heavy and medium-size weapons." The small arms deadline has not been changed, and it is the deadline on larger weapons that takes effect on April 8th.

On the bright side, he can always find work among his peers.

Barack Obama: Lying Again

Break out your shovels, kids. It's getting deep:

"Had the reverend not retired, and had he not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and were inappropriate and mischaracterized what I believe is the greatness of this country, for all its flaws, then I wouldn't have felt comfortable staying at the church," Obama said Thursday during a taping of the ABC talk show, "The View." The interview will be broadcast Friday.

Jeremiah Wright has never publicly apologized for any of his rhetoric, from his racial bigotry to his conspiracy theorizing, or his anti-Americanism.

Even with Wright gone, Trinity United Church of Christ still practices Black Liberation theology, a bastardization of Marxist socialism, racial victimhood, and Christianity—and pretty much in that order of importance—as Karl meticulously detailed in a post at Protein Wisdom. Wright's replacement, the Rev. Otis Moss, will not deviate from those teachings in any significant way, and Moss shows little signs of even toning down the rhetoric, as he compared criticism of Wright's comments to a lynching and compared Wright to Jesus in his Easter sermon.

Note well:

The criticism surrounding Wright has not softened the services at Trinity United Church of Christ, where Obama has been a congregant for 20 years. Instead, Moss defiantly defended their method of worship, referencing rap lyrics to make his point.

"If I was Ice Cube I'd say it a little differently — 'You picked the wrong folk to mess with,'" Moss said to an enthusiastic congregation, standing up during much of the sermon, titled "How to Handle a Public Lynching."

Barack Obama is lying when he says that Wright apologized, and lies by implication when he tries to convince America that Trinity has somehow changed with Wright's retirement.

The quarterback may have changed, but Trinity is still playing the same game, using the same playbook based upon radical victimhood, and Barack Obama is still apparently the head cheerleader.

If Obama was truly offended by Wright's vitriol, he would have walked out on Moss as well, a pastor mentored at Wright's knee and apparently cut from the same cloth, preaching the same shop-worn victimhood at the same church.

Barack Obama was not offended at the radical messages of hate being preached at Trinity, he was just offended that they was exposed.

Update: Comments whacked before. Now working.

Great Moments in Military Procurement History. Or Not.

I have a pistol made in 1927, and have owned battle rifles and carbines made from 1945 to the Vietnam War-era. In these firearms I've more often fired modern ammunition of recent commercial manufacture, but I've also used surplus military ammunition, decades old. For many collectors of military firearms, shooting aging surplus ammunition is a commonplace proposition, and the results are generally acceptable.

There are however, several wars on, and civilian shooters in the United States are having to compete with government contractors who scrounge up that foreign surplus ammunition in large quantities to provide to U.S. allies under contract. The result is higher prices for quality surplus ammunition, or in some instances, little serviceable ammunition at any price.

The New York Times, God bless them, actually broke an interesting story today about one of those ammunition contractors, a 22-year-old Miami man who now seems to be in a great deal of trouble for selling Chinese ammunition he scrounged up on the world market and repackaged, which is a violation of federal law and his contract.

The relevant parts of this story are how the man in question, Efraim Diveroli, slipped through the cracks of the procurement system to become a supplier, and how some scrap-worthy ammunition was shipped to our allies. I'm sure as details of that SNAFU become available, they'll work to make sure that similar unvetted characters responding to vague RFPs can't game the system again.

I would take minor issue with the Times and other news outlets, however, for suggesting that older ammunition is inherently flawed or obsolete ammunition.

Ammunition can degrade over time based upon the chemical compounds used in its construction and the environmental variables under which it is stored. Ammunition manufactured to high standards and stored in specific, controlled conditions, however, can last almost indefinitely. Ammunition manufactured in the 1960s and properly stored can certainly still be viable and reliable, while ammunition created last week using substandard components may be scrap before it leaves the assembly line.

The author of the NY Times piece who broke the story, C.J. Chivers, deserves respect for some excellent investigative journalism.

What Change?

His Vacuousness made an appearance at a townhall meeting in Greensboro yesterday, which was duly recorded by our local media.

It may come as a shock to some, but the candidate of "change" offered precious little of that miraculous substance during his appearance, instead relying on standard liberal doctrine that is far older than the candidate himself.

"We're at a defining moment in our history," Obama told a packed house at the Greensboro Memorial Coliseum. "We can't wait to fix our schools. We can't wait to fix our health-care system. We can't wait to bring good jobs and wages back to the United States of America. We can't wait to bring the war in Iraq to an end."

But how fresh are Obama's ideas, really? Does he represent change, or just recycling? Let's dissect the excerpts of his speech above.

Fix Our Schools
Hardly a revolutionary idea. As Obama was speaking in NC, perhaps we should look to Charles B. Aycock, North Carolina's first "progressive" governor, who became North Carolina's "Education Governor" during his term from 1901 to 1905. Aycock's role in some other historical moments are probably better left undiscussed, but the fact remains that Obama is recycling an argument almost 110 years old.

Fix Our Health Care
Refresh my memory... didn't the other Democratic presidential candidate work on this a decade ago? Such rhetoric has been standard fare from "progressive" reformers for more than 90 years, and even President Harry Truman had his national health care plan shot down in the 1940s. Obama is recycling ideas between 60-100 years old.

Good Jobs and Wages
Obama is sometimes credited for being a powerful speaker like William Jennings Bryan, and he doesn't mind borrowing rhetoric that echoes down through history from Bryan's 1896 and 1900 presidential runs, either. Change? He's offering rhetoric more than 100 years old.

End the War
Historian Henry Littlefield suggests that Bryan's anti-imperialism phase, which in some ways mirrors Obama's desire for a headlong retreat from Iraq, inspired L. Frank Baum's character of the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. Going back a bit further, Obama's rhetoric sounds even more like that of the "copperhead" Democrats of the U.S. Civil War, a faction of "peace" Democrats who were strongly opposed to the war from the beginning, demanded immediate peace regardless of the consequences, and railed about how that the conflict cost too many lives and too much treasure. Obama's recycling the ideas of abandoning a people struggling for democracy because things are just too hard, an argument more than 140 years old, and just as bad then as it is now.

Barack Obama's campaign is perhaps a campaign for "change," but it is change rooted in revolutionary politics from the 1860s to the 1940s. He echoes "progressive" promises of "change" heard by our great-great-grandparents, great-grandparents, and our grandparents (in their youth). He is a new salesman, offering old merchandise.

If he's lucky, Barack Obama can still convince folks that he's "retro," but the fact remains that most of his political ideas are older than the Model T Ford, as relevant in this modern world, and as just as costly to repair.

Misreporting the Second Recent Iraqi Offensive

One of the wonderful things about modern communications technologies is that just about anyone can comment about popular culture and breaking news events as they happen. The downside? Just about anyone can comment about popular culture and breaking news event as they happen, and some of them work for news agencies.

The best examples of why this isn't always a good idea are the short-sighted, knee-jerk reactions of some journalists and pundits to the recent crackdown by the Iraqi central government on rogue Shiite militias and criminal gangs supported by Iran that have been operating in Baghdad and southern Iraqi cities.

For months and years we've had critics of the Iraq War whining that American forces would always be forced to take the lead in combat, that Iraqis were lazy and untrainable, and that Iraqi security forces were too corrupt to ever be regarded as a competent stabilizing force against rogue militias, Iranian infiltrators, and criminal gangs.

And yet as Iraqi security forces moved into Basra and elsewhere to combat criminal gangs and militias extorting profits from the nation's oil industry meant for distribution to all Iraqi's by the central government, do we hear anyone critical of U.S. and British involvement in Iraq praising Iraqi government forces as they mount their own major operations with limited U.S. involvement?

No.

Instead we get McClatchy's Washington "Truth to Power" Bureau running a headline that the attacks were "threatening success of U.S. surge." The truth, of course, is the exact opposite of what McClatchy reports.

Because the surge was successful and coincided with the Sawha movement among Sunni tribes, al Qaeda has been pushed into Mosul and the surrounding Ninevah province, where Iraqi security forces took the lead weeks ago in an operation that hopes to surround, cut off, and kill the last significant Sunni terrorist strongholds in Iraq.

Because of the success of the surge and the increasing competence of Iraqi security forces, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki decided that it was time to lead an offensive in Basra, a city long controlled by competing Shia militias that are often little more than criminal gangs. Maliki has given the militias 72 hours to lay down their arms or face "the most severe penalties."

Iraqi-led missions are targeting both Sunni and Shia extremists in hopes of asserting the monopoly of force any country must have for stability, moves that should be seen as encouraging for Iraq's long-term future.

Sadly, most reporters and ( like-minded bloggers) seemed bogged down in viewing the still-breaking news stories in Sadr City, Kut, Basra, and other Iraq cities through the prism of short-term U.S. domestic political consumption, an arena in which they would hope to exert a corrupting influence.

For many of these people, success is not an option, initiative is to be panned, and gains made are to be spun away or minimized until a Democrat wins the White House and the war can be properly lost.

Unfortunately for them, the Iraqis seem to be taking an acute interest in determining the future of their nation on their terms, not those terms dictated by the media, Iran and others championing defeat.

The Prime Minister of Iraq is all but publicly daring Muqtada al-Sadr and his Iranian allies to engage Iraqi government forces to determine the future of Iraq, a battle that the Iraq government's forces would win convincingly.

These are moments of growth for Iraq's fledgling democracy worth celebrating... providing of course, you want the nation to succeed.

It Never Stops: Obama's Church Published Letter Alleging Israeli "Ethnic Bomb."

Middle America, I'm sure this sort of stuff appears in your church bulletins all the time.

Israel and South Africa worked on "ethnic bombs" to kill blacks and Arabs, and Libya was designated as a terrorist state by the U.S. for supporting African liberation movements?

There is more nuttiness here than in a Payday bar, but rest assured that Barack Obama never saw this bulletin, and certainly doesn't agree with it, just as he's never seen or agreed with any of the other insanities that have been uttered in his church of choice over the past 20 years.

You'll note that this was published on Trinity's "Youth Day," as part of "Family Month" according to the note at the bottom left of the page.

The Sadrists' Mistake

The Guardian claimed that the "surge" in Iraq was about to unravel because of strike threats from Sunni militiamen they reported last week, but if you head over to a newly-redesigned Pajamas Media today, you'll see that the threats of a strike were resolved weeks before the Guardian stories ran.

The stories were an attempt to grab defeat in the media while the threat of actual defeat on the ground seems ever more fleeting.

Yesterday, left-wing surrogate McClatchy Newspapers—they even has the ridiculous "Truth to Power" tagline—attempted to claim defeat from the opposite perspective, noting that some of the Sadrists in Iraq seem to be feeling a bit rambunctious after a long period of relative silence.

The left side of the blogosphere, always willing to latch on to even the hint of bad news without even pretending to vet their sources, were quick to declare this as reason 6,578,902 that we've already lost the war in Iraq and it is time for our troops to come home, or to at least within spitting distance.

Reality, of course, is another story.

It has long been known that at some point the Iraqi government would have to take on the criminal element that gravitated to the Sadrists, and unfortunately for these Sadrists, they waited far too long to engage. They haven't stood a chance of a military victory against IA forces for at least two years, which is why al Sadr himself continues to issue ceasefires from the safety of Tehran. Recent attempts by Sadrists to use threats and the force of arms for political ends is now likely to consolidate the power of the central government behind a string of Sadrist defeats in Basra and Baghdad.

Those on the left seem to think that any deviation from stasis in Iraq is a sign of failure, but the fact is that for a society to be stable, the government must first establish a monopoly of force.

Part of that involves either incorporating or destroying militias. In Sunni provinces, the Iraqi government is slowly incorporating the Sons of Iraq into both security and non-security positions even as they root-out the remains of al Qaeda. In Shiite areas including parts of Baghdad and Basra, this means eliminating the influence of criminal gangs hiding under al Sadr's banner.

The conflict isn't exactly a welcome development—even a temporary increase in violence will impact the innocent—but the longer-term consolidation of power by the federal government requires an eventual dissolution of Sadr's militia. Most hoped that such a dissolution of al Sadr's power would be purely political in nature, but the Sadrist gangs seem to have made the mistake of engaging Iraq's modernized security forces directly, the resolution of the long-expected inter-sect conflict will likely be more immediate than most expected, and much to Muqtada al-Sadr's dismay.

Would You Please Invite Big Brother In?

Via Instapundit, an attempt by the Washington, D.C. Police to convince residents to allow officers into their homes for voluntary gun searches.

A crackdown on guns is meeting some resistance in the District.

Police are asking residents to submit to voluntary searches in exchange for amnesty under the District's gun ban. They passed out fliers requesting cooperation on Monday.

The program will begin in a couple of weeks in the Washington Highlands neighborhood of southeast Washington and will later expand to other neighborhoods. Officers will go door to door asking residents for permission to search their homes.

Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said the "safe homes initiative" is aimed at residents who want to cooperate with police. She gave the example of parents or grandparents who know or suspect their children have guns in the home.

If "safe homes" were the actual goal of the program, then perhaps residences that were searched and found to be without firearms would be provided with suitable defensive weaponry and an offer of free training from teh D.C. police. Of course, the program isn't about safety, but is instead a last desperate bid by the District of Columbia to disarm their citizenry in advance of the expected verdict of the U.S. Supreme Court in the Heller case.

It's an attempt at fascism, but at least it is polite fascism.

Is Anderson Cooper Roland S. Martin Simply Making Things Up?

On Anderson Cooper's CNN blog this morning, Roland S. Martin claims that Barack Obama's radical minister Jeremiah Wright got his "chickens coming home to roost" commentary from a former Ronald Reagan official.

One of the most controversial statements in this sermon was when he mentioned "chickens coming home to roost." He was actually quoting Edward Peck, former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq and deputy director of President Reagan's terrorism task force, who was speaking on FOX News. That's what he told the congregation.

He was quoting Peck as saying that America's foreign policy has put the nation in peril:

"We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, Arikara, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo. Terrorism.

"We took Africans away from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism.

"We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel.

"We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenage and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hard working fathers.

"We bombed Qaddafi's home, and killed his child. Blessed are they who bash your children's head against the rock.

"We bombed Iraq. We killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to pay back for the attack on our embassy, killed hundreds of hard working people, mothers and fathers who left home to go that day not knowing that they'd never get back home.

"We bombed Hiroshima. We bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye.

"Kids playing in the playground. Mothers picking up children after school. Civilians, not soldiers, people just trying to make it day by day.

"We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff that we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost.

"Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism. A white ambassador said that y'all, not a black militant. Not a reverend who preaches about racism. An ambassador whose eyes are wide open and who is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised. The ambassador said the people we have wounded don't have the military capability we have. But they do have individuals who are willing to die and take thousands with them. And we need to come to grips with that."

Martin's claim is shall we say, interesting.

The most famous single citation of "The Chickens Coming Home to Roost" was as an alternate title of the Malcolm X speech, God's Judgement of White America, where X attributed the assassination death of John F. Kennedy to the historical evils of white America at that time.

I suspect that is a far more likely source for Wright's invocation of that particular phrase, especially when we consider the historical contexts of both Wright's speech after 9/11, and X's speech after Kennedy was killed.

At best, Jeremiah Wright credits here a "A white ambassador" for saying "Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism."

There is no support provided by Martin for the claim that Peck said anything about "chickens coming home to roost," or any of the rest of what he cited.

Interestingly enough, I can't find any evidence of Peck saying anything Martin attributes to him, and the only references on Google to this are liberal blog posts that uncritically link back to Martin's article, taking him at face value.

There is no doubt at all that Peck was and has been a fierce opponent of the war in Iraq, but I'd ask you to hunt through Google yourself, and see if you can find any of what Martin claims Wright quotes from Peck.

I can't find it, and like Ace, I think Martin just might be making this up as he goes.

I will be more than happy to apologize if wrong, but Martin has not "shown his work," and until he back his claim with a direct quote, and can prove that Wright was citing Pecks' lesser known comment instead of X's infamous speech, then I have no reason to trust him.

Update: First, while this was Cooper's blog, Roland S. Martin (not this guy) wrote the post, so I was wrong in attributing it to Cooper. I've updated the text and title to reflect that.

A special thanks to PG (in the comments, who also pointed out the name flub) for providing the link this illuminating video of Wright's speech:

It is over 9 minutes long, but if you'd like to get to the portion relevant to just this claim by Roland S. Martin, pay special attention to what is said by Wright from 3:14-3:46.

Wright does indeed invoke Peck, and in particular, where Peck invokes the specific Malcolm X speech cited above.

In short, Martin is being duplicitous when he claims that Wright was citing Peck, he was instead citing Malcom X through Peck.

You wouldn't get that from Martin's blog entry, but then, I don't think you were supposed to.

Still Flogging the False War-Related Ammo Shortage

Jeff Quinton alerted me to this story online at Baltimore Radio station WBAL earlier this week, and still online:

Quartermasters with the Baltimore County Police Department became aware of a higher demand on ammunition as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and planned accordingly.

Bill Toohey with the department says their supplier was giving the priority to military ammo and it was difficult to get "day to day" bullets.

Toohey says as a result they switched suppliers who is not so dependent on military contracts. He says they also purchased a nine month supply of bullets instead of the usual six month supply. "At the moment we have more than enough to get us through so if there is a problem we have some pad to fall back on," says Toohey.

The Sheriff in Washington County and police chief in Hagerstown say in addition to have a shortage of ammo for their agencies they are also paying more for bullets.

Toohey says the cost of bullets has also gone up in Baltimore County. He tells WBAL Radio that they were spending $209 dollars per one-thousand bullets that the officer's use now the county pays $278 per thousand. "But again they saw this coming and built it into the budget," says Toohey.

The problem with this story? It is unequivocally false, as was the original Associated Press article that first made a similar claim last summer.

If Wikipedia is correct, the BCPD uses the Sigarms SIG Pro 2340 as their primary sidearm, a firearm that does not use the 9mm NATO pistol cartridge used by our military. It is therefore false to claim that that any ammunition shortage of this caliber of bullets is due to military usage.

The same Wikipedia entry notes that for backing up the SIG Pro, the Remington 870 pump-action 12-gauge shotgun plays a secondary role. 12 gauge-shotguns, while used by the military for specific roles (typically door-beaching, CQB, and guarding prisoners), is used in far fewer numbers than the M16/M4 weapons systems. Claiming that a war-related shortage of ammunition affects the BCPD shotguns is also false.

The only possible firearm cartridge used by the BCPD that could conceivably be impacted by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the .223 or 5.56x45 NATO round used by the relatively few BCPD officers issued M16 or M4-type firearms.

But this claim is also untrue.

As I noted in great detail on my post of August 20, 2007, the ammunition factories and production lines that supply our military are completely separate from the ammunition factories and production lines that supply ammunition to police and the general public.

After speaking with spokesmen from three of the largest ammunition manufacturers in the United States, it became clear that the primary cause of the shortage of ammunition for police departments was the direct result of increased consumption by police departments.

Police departments (and civilians) are purchasing more .223 Remington/5.56-caliber firearms, particularly military-style carbines.

Once purchased, police officers much train to acquire and maintain their proficiency with these weapons, and it is the increased consumption of ammunition by police that is most directly responsible for their own ammunition shortages, as manufacturers we unable to catch up with increased police demand.

Another cause of the shortage is increased demand in developing nations for raw materials used in cartridge manufacturing, particularly brass and lead.

What... you think that China was able to produce all the lead for their toy industry internally? No, they purchase those materials on the global market, including the United States, which drives up raw material prices.

Sadly, though Jeff Quinton addressed the factual inaccuracies of the story yesterday morning, and I contacted both the BCPD and WBAL's newsroom shortly afterward to retract their false story (after providing them with the names of contacts of the three largest military and civilian ammunition manufacturers, Brian Grace of ATK Corporate Communications, Michael Shovel, National Sales Manager for CORBON/Glaser, and Michael Haugen, Manager of the Military Products Division for Remington Arms Company Inc), the news outlet seems less than interested in discovering the facts than in pushing a poorly-sourced story that relies on police quartermasters, men in no position to have direct knowledge of why demand has risen.

WBAL's newsroom seems far more interested in taking the lazy way out than practicing professional journalism. If you would like to ask WBAL to retract this demonstrably false story, you can contact them here.

Be polite, and perhaps we can make sure they stay on target in the future.

State Dept Workers Fired for Accessing Obama's Passport Info

Via MSNBC.

The State Department says it is trying to determine whether three contract workers had a political motive for looking at Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's passport file.

Two of the employees were fired for the security breach and the third was disciplined but is still working, the department said Thursday night. It would not release the names of those who were fired and disciplined or the names of the two companies for which they worked. The department's inspector general is investigating.

The Obama campaign, sensing a possible escape route from Barack's current string of self-inflicted wounds, quickly moved into victim-mode.

Milk it, baby.

Bill Burton, spokesman for Obama's presidential campaign, called the incidents "an outrageous breach of security and privacy." He said this is "a serious matter that merits a complete investigation," adding that the campaign will "demand to know who looked at Senator Obama's passport file, for what purpose, and why it took so long for them to reveal this security breach."

As noted by the well-traveled Jim Geraghty, the only personal data that would be in Obama's passport that is not already publicly-accessible information would be the Illinois Senator's Social Security Number and his travel history. Geraghty then goes on to speculate about a certain rival campaign that might be interested in accessing that travel information.

Left-of-center blogger Will Bunch at Attytood follows that line of speculation and digs up an interesting nugget in his update:

1. The office that handles passports, consular affairs, is indeed run by a woman named Maura Harty, who's a....wait for it -- Clinton administration holdover. Remember, no one has implicated her or any State Department employees -- the two people who were fired were contract workers.
2. The greatest interest in Obama's overseas travel has been expressed by Clinton supporters. One area of interest -- and I really don't understand what exactly they were getting at -- is Obama's European travels, or non-travels.

There are links attached to that speculation, but I think it only fair you go over to Bunch's site, read what he has to say, and click on the links there.

So, are the Clinton's behind this?

Could be, but other bloggers on the left have immediately focused—sigh—on BushCheneyHalliburtonRove, the real source of all the world's ills.

John Amato's post on the subject is typical in this vein, as is Skippy's capitalization-challenged entry (Note to Skippy: the whole "e.e. cummings" orthography was cute in eighth-grade, but unless you wanted to regarded on the same intellectual plane as the other noted current practitioner of that form, it is well past time to "move on").

So which political camp is behind this?

While my speculation is hinged on nothing more substantial than anyone else's, I suspect that it is just what it appears; a couple of contractors that had their curiosity get the better of them.

I worked for a financial services company years ago, and trainers that would use the dummied copies of the accounts of certain internationally-known celebrity clients in orientation to keep the class awake. There was never any ill-will involved in using the client's accounts, just a certain sort of stupid Stuart-ish "look what I can do!" voyeuristic element premised more on curiosity than malice.

That in mind, I rather doubt that any particular political motivation was behind this, even though a Clinton campaign tie seems like intriguing blog-fodder if it can be proven that the employees were Clinton supporters.

If, on the other hand, the turn out to be over-enthusiastic Obamaniacs trying to get a little closer to their hero,expect the news cycle on this to be shortened as a result.

Of course, for now, the Obama campaign is relishing in the breach, as it takes—if only for fleeting moments—the focus away from Obama's "pastor problem" and the fallout from the vacuous speech he gave where he refused to cut ties to Rev. Wright or his church's radical, racially-focused, Marxist-driven Black Liberation theology.

Obama will milk this story for all it's worth, for a long as he can.

I think, however, that the damage is already done.

Update: Sorry Obama. Clinton and McCain had their files breached as well. So much for this ginned-up outrage being able to long obscure his real problems.

ANOTHER Pastor Problem for Obama? PLUS: A Reporter in the Tank

When it rains, it pours:

Without permission from CBS 2, the Fox News Channel ran Wednesday evening parts of a 2-year-old story by CBS 2 Political Editor Mike Flannery on language used by State Sen. James Meeks, who is now a delegate pledged to Obama.

"We don't have slave masters, we got mayors," Meeks said then while preaching. "But they are still the same white people who are presiding over systems where black people are not able to be educated. You got some preachers that are house n------. You got some elected officials that are house n------. Rather than them try and break this up, they're gonna fight you to protect that white man."

Here's what I believe is a copy of the original CBS News story, which contains Meeks' language.

What is striking about this story, apart from the Wright-like, racially-divisive language of Obama-pledged superdelegate, Democratic member of the Illinois Senate, and Chicago Baptist minister Meeks, is the remarkable tone of of the CBS reporter on this story, Mike Flannery.

Flannery's story is extremely defensive in nature, and seeks to make apologies for Meeks' choice of language, which originally appears two years ago.

An important part of the truth that Fox News did not report Wednesday night is this: Shortly after Flannery's story aired two years ago, Rev. Jesse Jackson said it was time to stop using the N-word. And Rev. Meeks announced from his South Side pulpit that he was "retiring" the N-word from his vocabulary.

Although Meeks was never very close to Obama, last month he was elected as a delegate pledged to Obama.

Look for Obama's critics to repeat this tactic in the weeks and months to come. Sen. Hillary Clinton demanded he denounce Louis Farrakhan. Obama did. Tuesday, it was his longtime pastor.

Could Flannery's defensiveness and pro-Obama bias be any more apparent?

Flannery's CBS News bio says that he "has been the political editor for CBS 2 since 1980."

How long he has tossed his objectivity out the window and began voicing such obvious support for one candidate is less apparent.

Update: A correction above. Meeks is a delegate pledged to Obama, not a superdelegate pledge to Obama.

Not Ready To End the Fight

Via AP at Hot Air, Marine Cpl. David Thibodeaux's stirring response to MoveOn.org and the Dixie Chicks.

Somehow, I don't think Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton (or their supporters) will be big fans.

Obama's Speech: The Morning After

Presidential candidate Barack Obama's speech yesterday was written by the candidate himself, and attempted to transcend race while justifying his continuing twenty-year commitment to the church led by Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Many reviews of the speech were predictably glowing in their admiration for the Democratic Senator from Illinois, but that reaction was far from universal among op-ed writers, even in a media that is generally accepted to be left-of-center ideologically.

While giving credit to Obama's speech as a "fine political performance," Michael Gerson, writing in the Washington Post, noted:

Obama's excellent and important speech on race in America did little to address his strange tolerance for the anti-Americanism of his spiritual mentor... ...In Philadelphia, Obama attempted to explain Wright's anger as typical of the civil rights generation, with its "memories of humiliation and doubt and fear." But Wright has the opposite problem: He ignored the message of Martin Luther King Jr and introduced a new generation to the politics of hatred.

King drew a different lesson from the oppression he experienced: "I've seen too much hate to want to hate myself; hate is too great a burden to bear. I've seen it on the faces of too many sheriffs of the South. . . . Hate distorts the personality. . . . The man who hates can't think straight; the man who hates can't reason right; the man who hates can't see right; the man who hates can't walk right."

Barack Obama is not a man who hates -- but he chose to walk with a man who does.

Writing in a similar vein in the Boston Herald, Michael Graham opined:

Obama is right when he reminds us that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. But where he is cynically and shamefully wrong is insisting that we all have fallen as far as he has.

The reason many of us are horrified by the senator's connection to the Rev. Wright is that most Americans can't imagine spending 20 minutes listening to his ignorant rantings, much less 20 years. Most of us would never even consider joining a church that preaches racial theology of any kind, much less the overt racism of the "black values system" at Obama's church.

And now we're supposed to believe that this man is going to heal our souls?

Likewise, Thomas Sowell likened Obama to a con man:

Someone once said that a con man's job is not to convince skeptics but to enable people to continue to believe what they already want to believe.

Accordingly, Obama's Philadelphia speech — a theatrical masterpiece — will probably reassure most Democrats and some other Obama supporters. They will undoubtedly say that we should now "move on," even though many Democrats have still not yet moved on from George W. Bush's 2000 election victory.

Like the Soviet show trials during their 1930s purges, Obama's speech was not supposed to convince critics but to reassure supporters and fellow-travelers, in order to keep the "useful idiots" useful.

Stated Mark Davis in the Dallas Morning News:

Mr. Wright has spent years infecting congregations with sick obsessions about an evil, racist America. That congregation has largely responded with cheers of agreement. Yet Mr. Obama insists he has absorbed only the "loving" portions of Rev. Wright's Christianity, not the portions that have heaped condemnation on our country, on white people, on Israel and on specific political figures he reviles.

How conveniently selective. Can you imagine a conservative politician able to skate away from decades of association with a pastor who spent frequent occasions spewing fiery condemnations based on race and politics?

In the Jerusalem Post, Armstrong Williams points out the obvious:

This past week was not an exemplary moment for the man who has prided himself on integrity and honesty throughout this campaign. The fact is that the senator has no plausible excuse for why he remained a member of Rev. Wright's church. He and his family should have immediately left that congregation for the embrace of a church that teaches the Bible rather than the alienation, lunacy and outright mockery of Christian teachings.

Even reliably left-of-center Maureen Dowd was forced to concede in an otherwise glowing review in the New York Times:

The candidate may have staunched the bleeding, but he did not heal the wounds. His naive and willful refusal to come to terms earlier with the Rev. Wright's anti-American, anti-white and pro-Farrakhan sentiments — echoing his naive and willful refusal to come to terms earlier with the ramifications of his friendship with sleazy fund-raiser Tony Rezko — will not be forgotten because of one unforgettable speech.

When the story of Wright's damning of America broke last week, it became obvious that to stay a viable political candidate in the general election, Barack Obama would have to substantially distance himself from a pastor and congregation that practices a form of radical theology firmly rooted in a toxic mix of racial identity politics, conspiracy-theorizing, and Marxism.

Obama's speech attempted a transcendent rise out of a hole of his own digging by excusing his intimate relationship with a controversial church and pastor, without actually distancing himself from either Rev. Wright or his underlying theology. Instead, Obama claimed falsely, "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community."

Obama was not asked to disown the black community. He was asked to sever ties with a purveyor of a poisonous mindset, and he has failed to do so.

Lacking that concrete act of denial, Obama's grand eloquence was revealed as all too typical political pandering.

"Just words," indeed.

Barack's Broad Brush

Re-examining Barack Obama's Jeremiah Wright damage control speech today, I am drawn back again and again to this paragraph.

Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity's services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

Any church embodies the community from which it is drawn, but Obama attempts sleight of hand when he asserts that "other predominantly black churches across the country" adopt and share views "that may seem jarring to the untrained ear" as a way of excusing his pastor.

Obama implies that because Trinity United Church of Christ has continually employed a senior pastor unable to control his anger, anti-Americanism, and conspiracy-theorizing during Barack's 20 years at that church, that other predominantly African-American churches are afflicted with the same disease.

I belong to a deliberately diverse church with a substantial African-American congregation and an African-American senior pastor that spends a considerable portion of her time in the pulpit. We are without a doubt a church with a lot of "dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear," and we even occasionally have folks overwhelmed by the Holy Spirit fall out in the pews...

...And yet, somehow, we've kept from attacking other races or our country in the process.

Is it true that other predominately African-American congregations applaud when their pastor exhorts them to sing out "God damn America," or is it more likely that most African-American churches focus on honoring the words of Jesus Christ as written in the Bible, and leave the responsibility of damnation to God?

Do other predominately African America churches profess a values system seemingly based more upon the color of their skin than the content of Jesus' character?

Is it a commonly held belief in predominately African-American congregations nationwide that the CIA created the AIDS virus to target minority communities, and that we deserved the terror attacks of September 11, 2001?

Or is it more likely that such illness is isolated to congregations that are pustules of anger, ignorance and intolerance?

I choose to believe that regardless of race, all Christian congregations focus primarily on the Word of God and helping their communities, not blaming others for their misfortunes, real or imagined. Likewise, I choose to believe that congregations of every color focus on thanking God for the blessings he has bestowed upon us, not damning this imperfect nation for the sin of being less than divine here on earth.

Barack Obama would excuse his pastor and his congregation and his own failure to stand up to their bile and bigotry with a defense of "everybody else does it, too."

But that defense—at least I hope—isn't true.

Barack Obama seems content to tar all African-American churches with a wide brush in order to defend the failings of his own church, his pastor, and his own character.

As an individual Christian and a member of the body of Christ, I can forgive him.

As a voter, I don't see why anyone should.

Barack's "Race" Speech

Drudge has an advance copy of Barack Obama's "race" speech online here.

I'll follow this live, as it happens.

10:15: He hasn't arrived.

10:25: Ditto.

10:30: While we wait, let's get to the "meat" of the advance copy posted on Drudge.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

And yet, if I ever attended a church where the pastor said that we should "God Damn America" and resided in the "US of KKK-A" or the "United States of White America" that giant thundering sound you would hear is the congregation leaving en masse. As we know from the multiple videos, Barack's church cheered Wright when he uttered such hateful, distorted speech.

There is speech with which we disagree and then there is hate speech. Can Barack Obama tell the difference? Apparently not.

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren't simply controversial. They weren't simply a religious leader's effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, Reverend Wright's comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Interesting, how Obama seems to use language to isolate Wright's bombastic pronouncements as a more recent, near-term thing, when we know for a fact that his radical behavior goes back years, well prior to both U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Deceptive?

You betcha.

10:40: Barack has still not begun. There may be some sort of a problem at the podium instead of cold feet; technicians seem to be examining things now.

Back to the advance copy.

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way.

But the truth is, that isn't all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God's work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

Most minsters I've known in my life participate in the same sort of community outreach and ministry as Obama's speech describes here. He does still not explain adequately why he chose this pastor, and this congregation to call home for 20 years, which preaches an out-of-the-mainstream brand of Christianity.

10:45: Still waiting. More from the advance copy, after skipping down a bit:

That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

No minster is perfect... they are human like the rest of us, a fact with which we can all agree, and all have their faults and human failings.

Wright's career, however, has provided us with speeches far more radical, self-isolating, divisive, and at least occasionally bigoted and paranoid than most of us are used to hearing from a senior pastor. Having not attended a dedicated African-American church (though my present church includes a senior black pastor and a very diverse congregation) I cannot help but wonder if Obama is accidentally tarring all African American churches as radicals by portraying Trinity as a mainstream African-American congregation.

10:53: Some guy is talking now, quite weakly. Hot Air is liveblogging, and notes that it is Sen. Harris Wofford.

10:54: Obama arrives. I'm going to watch it through the conclusion, and then post a reaction afterward.

10:57: Okay, nix that... does he seem flat and uninspired in his delivery, or is it just my perception?

10:59: "...seared into my genetic makeup." Seared? Seared into his memory? He just Kerried himself.

11:05: Obama's pacing, I think, is meant to be deliberate, but comes across as plodding. I haven't yet heard any crowd reaction. Were they instructed not to cheer, are they listening in rapt attention, or did they fall asleep?

11:07: FWIW, he isn't deviating from the advance copy.

11:08: Got the the part about his grandmother:

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

Seems to be warming up a little now.

11:10: Finally some applause after this line:

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

11:11: Did he just wait for applause, and not get it? AP says he got a "smattering of applause" I'll take his word for it.

11:13: He says:

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

That was four to five decades ago... are we to believe that Wright's inability to evolve from 1960s-era positions is an admirable trait? As this speech comes from a man who counts still-proud terrorist leader William Ayers as a friend, perhaps.

11:15:

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community.

Yes. and the SPLC tracks such groups.

11:20: Let the class warfare begin!

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances – for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives – by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

11:21: Starting to warm up the this theme.

11:27: Time to honor one of our most color-blind institutions by bringing them home in dishonorable defeat:

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should've been authorized and never should've been waged, and we want to talk about how we'll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

Stripping them of the victory they've fought, bled and died for, while leaving Iraq to whatever genocide befalls it... it's patriotic!

11:29: Now he's going John Edwards on us—hardcore class warfare rhetoric, with a personal twist:

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that’s when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother's problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn't. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

Where's the puppy? Didn't she have a starving puppy?

11:32: Mercifully, it's over. Once I finally regain control over my gag reflect, I'll check around the blogosphere for other reaction to his speech.

Update: Michelle Malkin also live-blogged Obama's speech, as has Mary Katharine Ham. Very interesting and mixed reactions at The Corner, a few of which note that the speech wasn't aimed at you or me, but Democratic superdelegates that might be getting cold feet... an interesting conjecture. At PW, Dan Collins' labels the speech "movingly schmaltzy."

It will be interesting to see which portions of the speech most move the media, and I'll try to provide some of those reactions later today.

Update: Perhaps instead of the media's reaction, we should instead focus on what people are saying in response in the comment threads allowed by some news organizations.

The first page of this comment thread is running strongly against Obama, with 18 of 25 responses firmly against him. I can only imagine how he did among the other 700+ commenters so far here, but what I found most unsettling is several instances where Obama supporters lambasted those who did not like the speech as being racist. That is not going to help him.

On the CBS News thread, reaction is more mixed, and at times incoherent. Typical, I suppose, of the CBS News audience.

At The Politico, the comments are overwhelmingly in favor of Obama, with most commenters thinking he did an excellent job. Some comments, however, appear to be astroturfed.

General reaction upon reading these comment threads?

It doesn't seem that Obama could lose his hardcore supporters if he was caught with "a live boy or a dead girl" as the saying goes, and some of his supporters—though thankfully a distinct minority—are echoing Wright by labeling those who did not like the speech as racists. There does not seem to be an great number of on the fence moderates joining the Obamanation as a result of this speech, and there are signs, particularly on the ABC News thread, that the has lost some moderate Democrats for not disassociating himself from Wright.

It was a speech that was effective for those predisposed to be affected, but one that did not seem to sway many who thought Obama simply didn't do enough to address concerns that the 20-year association with Wright have brought forward.

Barack might have recaptured Democratic superdelegates with his performance today, but he probably lost the general election as well.

Reasonably Disarmed

Heller v. District of Columbia goes to the Supreme Court today, as a group of Washington, D.C. residents contend that the ban on operable firearms inside homes in the District of Columbia—including an outright ban on handguns not registered prior to 1976—violates the Second Amendment and is unconstitutional.

Robert A. Levy, co-counsel to Heller has an op-ed posted in today's Boston Globe that highlights the correct individual rights argument.

Predictably, the editorial board of the New York Times has an op-ed of their own against the individual rights perspective, which they seem to feel applies to the First Amendment, but not the Second.

They write, quote dishonestly:

Today the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a politically charged challenge to the District of Columbia's gun control laws. The case poses a vital question: can cities impose reasonable controls on guns to protect their citizens? The court should rule that they can.

The District of Columbia, which has one of the nation’s highest crime rates, banned private ownership of handguns. Rifles and shotguns were permitted, if kept disassembled or under an easily removed trigger lock. It is a reasonable law, far from the ban that some anti-gun-control advocates depict.

What is "reasonable" about a law that turns a homeowner into a felon the moment he takes a trigger lock off his firearm (including rifles or shotguns) and loads it during a home invasion to protect his family? The Times refuses to address the obvious unfairness of this law, and the fact that it completely precludes any legal armed self defense, even during the most violent of crimes.

As you might expect from the Times, they follow one deception with another.

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the law violates the Second Amendment, which states: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." The decision broke with the great majority of federal courts that have examined the issue, including the Supreme Court in 1939. Those courts have held that the constitutional right to bear arms is tied to service in a militia, and is not an individual right.

The 1939 case in questions is of course, United States vs. Miller in which a pair of bootleggers were arrested for transporting a sawed-off shotgun in violation of the National Firearms Act of 1934, which required certain firearms to be registered and a $200 transfer tax be paid every time an NFA firearm was transferred. The two men were charged for not paying the $200 tax on the the shortened shotgun. Neither of the bootleggers nor their defense showed up for the Supreme Court case, as Miller had been killed by that time, and the other defendant, Layton, accepted a plea bargain.

In reality, Miller is a very murky ruling, having been cited by both gun control advocates and gun rights advocates alike. Far from being a pro-gun control case, Miller is inconclusive at best, which the Times dishonestly and purposefully overlooks.

They continue:

The appeals court made two mistakes. First, it inflated the Second Amendment into a sweeping right to own guns, virtually without restriction or regulation. Defenders of gun rights argue that if the Supreme Court sticks with the interpretation of the Second Amendment that it sketched out in 1939, it will be eviscerating the right to own a gun, but that is not so. Americans have significant rights to own and carry guns, but the scope of those rights is set by federal, state and local laws.

The second mistake that the appeals court made — one that many supporters of gun rights may concede — was its unduly narrow view of what constitutes a "reasonable" law. The court insisted that its interpretation of the Second Amendment still leaves room for government to impose "reasonable" gun regulations. If so, it is hard to see why it rejected Washington's rules.

Again, only at the Times could they attempt support a law that completely outlaws the use of a firearm as a firearm as a "reasonable" restriction.

Perhaps if the District of Columbia ruled that their citizens had the right to own a printing press"or today, a computer printer"but required it to be kept disassembled or locked up, and made it illegal to either load it with paper or ink, then the Times might change their tune.

That, of course would require far more intellectual honesty than exists at the Times, and it seems that putting truly innocent people at risk to the whims of criminals does not weigh heavily on their souls.

Posted by Confederate Yankee at 09:00 AM | Comments (14)

Did Obama Attend Wright's Most Provocative Sermons? It Doesn't Matter.

There is a lot of heat flying around the blogosphere (and even the mainstream media) this morning over whether or not Illinois Senator and Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama attended Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC) on days that the church's pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., uttered inflammatory rhetoric that most Americans seem to feel is at least occasionally anti-American and borderline racist in nature.

Obama claimed late Friday that he was not in attendance for any of Wright's most explosive sermons over the past 20 years he has been attending TUCC, including sermons where Wright lambasted this nation as "United States of KKK A" and stated "No, no, no, not 'God bless America,' God damn America" amid other provocative statements uttered during other sermons published on Youtube and in news outlets Friday and over the weekend.

Writing in Newsmax—a news outlet with a less than sterling reputation for accuracy—over the weekend, Ronald Kessler cites fellow NewsMax reporter, Jim Davis, who claims that Obama was indeed present for a Wright sermon he attended at TUCC on July 22, 2007, where:

...the minister blamed the "white arrogance" of America's Caucasian majority for the world's suffering, especially the oppression of blacks.

[snip]

If Obama's claims are true that he was completely unaware that Wright's trademark preaching style at the Trinity United Church of Christ has targeted "white" America and Israel, he would have been one of the few people in Chicago to be so uninformed. Wright's reputation for spewing hate is well known.

In fact, Obama was present in the South Side Chicago church on July 22 last year when Jim Davis, a freelance correspondent for Newsmax, attended services along with Obama. [See: "Obama's Church: Cauldron of Division."]

In his sermon that day, Wright tore into America, referring to the "United States of White America" and lacing his sermon with expletives as Obama listened. Hearing Wright's attacks on his own country, Obama had the opportunity to walk out, but Davis said the senator sat in his pew and nodded in agreement.

The claim has quickly been disputed by those who have cited video evidence of Obama speaking at La Raza's annual conference in Miami, Florida that same day. Newsmax is still sticking to the claim, stating that Obama was at the church on the day of Wright's "white arrogance" tirade, along with a Secret Service protective detail, and that with early morning and an evening service, Obama had time to attend two of the three sermons and the La Raza conference that day.

I've contacted the Secret Service Public Affairs Office to see if they will be able to confirm or deny a protective detail guarding Obama at TUCC in Chicago on July 22, 2007 as they seem to be in the most credible position to resolve these claims, but I do not know if they are able to address such concerns, and even if they are about to confirm of deny Obama's attendance, I'm not sure that playing a game of "gotcha" pinning down Obama as an attendee at one of Wright's more explosive sermons is even of major relevance.

Certainly, confirming Obama's attendance would be a huge blow to his credibility as he stated categorically that he never attended church on days where Wright delivered one of his more inflammatory sermons, but that almost seems beside the point.

Whether or not he was there for one of "those" sermons, Barack Obama attended Wright's church for 20 years, and it is implausible that he was completely unaware of his rhetoric and radicalism during that entire time period.

Barack Obama is forcing us to chose between one of two narratives. Either he:

1. attended a church for two decades that featured a radical minister preaching a seemingly separatist and occasionally anti-American "Black Value System" (which curiously, was scrubbed from the church's web site over the weekend), considered Wright a mentor, was married by him, has his children baptized by him, and added him in an official capacity to his Presidential campaign (though in a largely ceremonial role), without ever really knowing anything about him or his beliefs, or;
2. Barack was aware of Wright's pronouncements and beliefs and agreed with him enough that he was a member of Wright's congregation for 20 years, only to then see Obama threw Wright "under the bus" when those beliefs became a threat to Obama's presidential campaign.

Which is it?

The latter seems far more plausible than the former, with or without the media being able to pin down Obama as having attended Wright's more bombastic recorded sermons.

Obama either displays a Gumpish cluelessness and a lack of self-awareness as a human being (not exactly sought-after traits in a President), or he agrees with the teaching of Wright to the extent that he became a member of his church and spent the last two decades as part of a congregation that was captured loudly applauding during extremist and conspiracy theory-laced sermons.

Voters polled by Rasmussen seem to have made up their minds:

Seventy-three percent (73%) of voters say that Wright’s comments are racially divisive. That opinion is held by 77% of White voters and 58% of African-American voters.

[snip]

Last Thursday, 52% of voters nationwide had a favorable opinion of Obama. That figure has fallen to 47% on Monday...

Despite recent claims that he shared none of Wright's extremist statements, Obama's chickens seem to be coming home to roost.

Update: As noted by "JustADude" in the comments, Obama was in Chicago July 22, 2007, which was noted at HuffPo, though Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor "stressed that the senator did not make a stop at Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ."

And This Is Why You Do Your Own Research...

You have to enjoy this bit of information in a Reuters story today by Daniel Trotta, where he simply parrots a claim made by anonymous police (my bold):

Interstate 95, which runs up the U.S. East Coast, is known to cops as the "Iron Pipeline" -- the conduit of choice for gun smugglers to move their hardware from the southern United States to New York city.

With formidable opponents in the gun manufacturers and gun owners, national politicians do little to stop this traffic, leaving gun control largely in the hands of local leaders.

"Where is the outrage in this country? Well, mayors see it," said New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. "We're the ones who have to go to the funerals. We're the ones that have to look somebody in the eye and say your spouse or your parent or your child is not going to come home."

Since Bloomberg became mayor in 2002, every gun homicide in the city -- including the killing of eight police officers -- has been committed with an illegal gun, police say.

The claim is false, and took me less time to prove than it took to write this sentence.

The following homicides were committed with legal police firearms since Bloomberg became Mayor:

• On May 22, 2003, 43-year old Ousmane Zongo, an immigrant from Burkina Faso, was shot four times by Police Officer Bryan Conroy in a Chelsea warehouse. In 2005, Conroy was found guilty of criminally negligent homicide and sentenced to 5 years probation. In 2006, the city awarded the Zongo family $3 million to settle a wrongful death suit.
• On January 24, 2004, Housing Bureau officer Richard Neri, Jr. accidentally shot to death Timothy Stansbury, a 19-year-old black man who was trespassing on the roof landing of a Bedford-Stuyvesant housing project. Stansbury was unarmed but had apparently startled Neri upon opening the roof door coming upon the officer. At that point, Neri discharged his service firearm and mortally wounded Stansbury. Although Commissioner Kelly stated that the shooting appeared "unjustified", a Brooklyn jury found that no criminal act occurred and that the event was a tragic accident. Neri was thus cleared of all charges.[35] The city later agreed to pay $2 million to settle a lawsuit filed by the Stansbury family. A grand jury declined to indict Neri but Kelly later suspended him for 30 days without pay and permanently stripped him of his weapon.
• On November 25, 2006, plainclothes police officers shot and killed Sean Bell and wounded two of his companions, one critically, outside of the Kalua Cabaret in Queens. No weapon was recovered.[37] According to the police, Bell rammed his vehicle into an undercover officer and hit an unmarked NYPD minivan twice, prompting undercover officers to fire fifty rounds into Bell's car. A bullet piercing the nearby AirTrain JFK facility startled two Port Authority patrolmen stationed there. [38] An undercover officer claims he heard one of the unarmed man's companions threaten to get his gun to settle a fight with another individual.
• On November 12, 2007, five NYPD police officers shot and killed 18-year-old Khiel Coppin. The officers responded to a 911 call where Coppin could be heard saying he had a gun. When the officers arrived at the scene, Khiel approached officers with a black object, which was later identified as a hairbrush, in his hand and repeatedly ignored orders to stop. This prompted officers to open fire at Coppin. Of the 20 shots fired, 8 hit Khiel, who died at the scene. This shooting has been ruled to be with both NYPD rules for the use of deadly force and the New York State Penal Law provisions, so no charges, criminal or administrative, will be filed against these officers.

It took my about 15 seconds to pull that information from Wikipedia, citing homicides committed with NYPD-issued (and therefore, presumably legal) firearms.

New York also has hundreds of homicides per year and shotguns and rifles are not illegal to buy, sell, or own within city limits, so even the claim that civilian homicides are all performed with illegally-owned firearms is also very suspect.

There is also the pesky little problem that not all firearms used in homicides are recovered, making it impossible to tell if the firearm used was illegally or legally owned.

Nice job vetting your story, Reuters. You're great stenographers, even if you aren't very good journalists.

Wright and Obama: It Only Gets Worse

The Wall Street Journal has published yet another damning sermon from Barack Obama's retiring minister of two decades, Jeremiah Wright.

The displaced anger, bigotry, and hatred displayed is chilling:

"We've got more black men in prison than there are in college," he began. "Racism is alive and well. Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run. No black man will ever be considered for president, no matter how hard you run Jesse [Jackson] and no black woman can ever be considered for anything outside what she can give with her body."

Mr. Wright thundered on: "America is still the No. 1 killer in the world. . . . We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns, and the training of professional killers . . . We bombed Cambodia, Iraq and Nicaragua, killing women and children while trying to get public opinion turned against Castro and Ghadhafi . . . We put [Nelson] Mandela in prison and supported apartheid the whole 27 years he was there. We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God."

His voice rising, Mr. Wright said, "We supported Zionism shamelessly while ignoring the Palestinians and branding anybody who spoke out against it as being anti-Semitic. . . . We care nothing about human life if the end justifies the means. . . ."

Concluding, Mr. Wright said: "We started the AIDS virus . . . We are only able to maintain our level of living by making sure that Third World people live in grinding poverty. . . ."

As the story of Wright's forceful bigotry finally forced it's way into the mainstream media yesterday at ABC News with the story Obama's Pastor: God Damn America, U.S. to Blame for 9/11, the people Barack Obama has chosen to surround himself with has come under sharp focus.

From a self-isolated, self-pitying wife, to a bombastic, bigoted minister, to an unreformed terrorist, Barack Obama has surrounded himself with very questionable ideological company, associations from which he has no defense. He wasn't forced to chose to spend time with this cadre of believers on the radical fringe, he embraced them willingly.

Predictably, as the media has come to focus on Obama's two-decade relationship with Wright, Obama supporters have been quick to attempt to minimize the damage. Unable to do it with a forceful denunciation of Wright's bigotry by Obama (Obama has only uttered the lamest of excuses), they have instead attempted to tar Republican candidate John McCain as being equally bad, for the support he has garnered from controversial evangelists Rod Parsley and John Hagee.

For those of you unfamiliar with these men, Parsley's most famous controversial statements include calling Islam a "false religion" that must be destroyed, opposition same-sex marriage, partial-birth abortion, hate-crimes legislation, and the separation of church and state. Hagee has been ripped an an anti-Catholic bigot, stated that Hurricane Katrina was an act of God against New Orleans for the city's "level of sin," and for claiming that the Qur'an has "a scriptural mandate to kill Christians and Jews."

There, of course, is a difference between John McCain's political endorsements by Parsley and Hagee, and Barack Obama's 20 years of willfully absorbing Wright's hatred, a toxicity to which he has willfully exposed family.

I addressed this attempt to equivilate Obama and McCain in a comment to the ABC News blog story Obama camp: 'Deplores divisive statements', which featured yet another inflammatory speech by Wright.

My comment read:

I see that some are already attempting to trot out a comparative argument, that Wright's offensive, bigoted, and paranoid rants are somehow lessened by invoking John McCain's support from John Hagee and Rod Parsley, two prominent evangelists who have also made provocative statements.

But here is the huge gaping difference between these attempts: Barack Obama has spent the better part of the past 20 years of his life listening to, absorbing, and yes, agreeing with Wright's sermons. If he did not agree with the bulk of those sermons, he would have of course left Trinity for another church--finding a church in Chicago that closely fits your own personal beliefs is not at all difficult, and Obama obviously agrees with Wright far more than he disagrees.

That Obama has spent 20 years listening to Wright, thought enough of him to use one of those sermons as the title of his book, "The Audacity of Hope," that he was married by Wright, had both of his children baptized by Wright and brought up in this church, listening to these paranoid and racist rants that differ little in substance from the words of a much more famous racist, Louis Farakkan, means that Obama AGREES with Wright far more often than he disagrees with him.

From that, what are we to make of Obama? Actions, indeed, do speak louder than flaccid conciliatory words that have only just now been uttered.

I say again the obvious: no American would spend 20 years listening to a minister with which he vehemently disagreed.

McCain, by comparison, is guilty of pandering to Haggee and Parsley because of the (unfortunate) influence they have over a powerful voting demographic.

I can find scant evidence that McCain has sat though one sermon from Hagee or Parsley, much less 20 years of them.

Which is worse?

The politician that panders for votes, or the man who has listened to and internalized anti-American, anti-Jewish, and anti-white messages for 20 years before ever once publicly disagreeing with them, and who is raising his children in this same toxic environment?

Not only am I certain Barack Obama is unfit to run this nation, I now question his ability to raise his own children, for the hatred he has willingly exposed them to since their births.

Yes, I went there. Read again Wright's rant in the WSJ article featured above, or some of his other hate speech (for that is what it is), and try to explain to me that a good parent exposes his children to an environment that exudes such naked anger, resentment, defeatism, and conspiratorial paranoia.

Perhaps some of you are comfortable having your children raised in such an environment, but I am not, and I do not think that someone who willingly exposes himself and his family to internalizing such vitriol for 20 years is the kind of person we need or want to lead this nation.

At PJM: Good News on Iraq Is No News

My latest article is posted at Pajamas Media.

UNC Murder Suspect Also a Duke Murder Suspect

From WRAL:

A teen arrested in the death of a University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill student has also been charged in connection with the death of a Duke University graduate student.

Lawrence Alvin Lovette Jr., 17, of 1213 Shepherd St., was arrested Thursday morning and charged with murder in UNC Student Body President Eve Carson's March 5 death. Authorities also charged him in connection with the January shooting death of Duke student Abhijit Mahato.

I'd like to know if investigators intend to ask Lovette and fellow Eve Carson murder suspect Demario James Atwater why they targeted college students.

Think it had anything to do with the strong suspicion that their victims would be unarmed?

Guilt by Association

The inflammatory rhetoric of Barack Obama's pastor of twenty-odd years has finally hit the mainstream media, as ABC News is reporting the story Obama's Pastor: God Damn America, U.S. to Blame for 9/11.

The lede:

Sen. Barack Obama's pastor says blacks should not sing "God Bless America" but "God damn America."

The lede doesn't do justice to the actual language used by Rev. Jeremiah Wright or the repeated denunciations of the United States in his sermons, and I'll send you to the story itself to read his actual words.

Wright has had a great deal of influence over Obama as his pastor and spiritual mentor of two decades, in fact lending Obama the title of his book "The Audacity of Hope" from one of his sermons.

One cannot single out Wright as an isolated Obama associate.

To get a fuller sense of the kind of man Barack Obama truly is beyond soundbites and speeches, we are required to revisit the kind and caliber of people he surrounded himself with during his adult years.

In addition to accepting Wright's rhetoric for two decades, Obama has been married to Michelle Obama (formerly Robinson) since October of 1992, and she is known for having more influence over her husband than his closest political advisors, a fact hardly uncommon or surprising for a spouse. In her senior thesis at Princeton, Michelle Robinson focused on her feelings of racial isolation.

"My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before," the future Mrs. Obama wrote in her thesis introduction. "I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong. Regardless of the circumstances underwhich I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second."

It reads at the sad commentary of a person who has had the incredible advantages of an Ivy League education, but who can can only see herself through the prism of being apart and alone. These feelings perhaps indicate why she would feel drawn to the Trinity United Church of Christ where Wright preached his inflammatory style of racially-separatist doctrine, as he reinforced her long-held fears.

Having already spent much of her lifetime feeling like an outsider, and with a key spiritual influence attacking the United States, it is perhaps unsurprising that she finds connecting with her country—much less feeling "really proud" of it—an unnatural act.

In addition to such profound influences as his pastor of 20 years and his wife of more than 15 years, Barack Obama has had relationships with far more radical denizens of society, including unrepentant terrorist leader William Ayers of the Weather Underground.

The Weather Underground bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, and the State Department, and Ayer's girlfriend Diana Oughton and several other members of the group died while assembling bombs destined for a non-commissioned officer's dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey.

How did the Obamas interact with a man who said "I don't regret setting bombs; I feel we didn't do enough"?

Barack served with Ayers on the board of directors of the Wood Fund from 1999-2002, and they are at least casual friends according to Dr. Quentin Young.

In addition to these individuals, add Obama's already infamous relationship with political fixer Tony Rezko, currently in the middle of a corruption trial that sees him accused of placing bribes and accepting kickbacks, including kickbacks funneled to Obama's 2004 Senate run. Obama has since given $150,000 raised by Rezko to charity. Rezko was also involved in the purchase of a Obama's home by buying an adjacent lot, then selling part of that lot to the Obama's at one-sixth the price Rezko originally paid.

My boss at Pajamas Media, Roger L. Simon notes on his personal blog that he is "not much for guilt-by-association," a sentiment I generally share if the associate is only a fringe player in a person's life. For that reason support of Louis Farrakhan by Obama's church should not be held directly against Obama himself, especially as Obama finally distanced himself from Farrakhan.

But even without him, we are left with a disturbing picture of the people who have great, long-standing, and future influence in Barack Obama's life that cannot be easily dismissed.

Do Americans want as a president a man who sits in on board meetings with proud terrorists, followed a separatist and anti-American pastor for two decades, and who counts as his closest advisor a wife who has made obvious the disconnect she has with her country?

It is unfair to judge a man by casual associations, but no doubt fair to judge him on the company he keeps for years at a time.

Update: Rick Moran has strikingly similar thoughts, posted at almost the same time.

Spitzer...

...resigns.

I have no pity for Spitzer, as he brought this upon himself. I do, however, hope that his family finds a way to cope in this most difficult and public disgrace.

NC State: Gun-Free School Zone Not So Gun Free

I see N.C. State's new $250,000 WolfAlert system is having an effect on campus crime.

Or not:

Police at North Carolina State University are being especially alert after two armed robberies in two days, and they are urging the university community to do the same.

Investigators said one victim, a graduate student, was leaving a building on the Centennial Campus when two men armed with a handgun demanded his wallet late Tuesday afternoon.

Two male students told police they were near 2110 Avent Ferry Road at about 9 p.m.Monday when a man wearing a mask and armed with a knife robbed them.

In a chilling near parallel to the recent murder of UNC student body president Eve Carson, NCSU student Natasha Herting (running for student body president) and her roommates were victimized in an break-in of their off-campus apartment, leaving her to state:

"It was really scary just to think that you have no control – that someone could be in your apartment and you have four girls alone," she said.

The statement, of course is false. Four girls share that apartment, but they do have the legal option to assert control over the situation, even if they lack the inclination to assert that right.

Like everyone in North Carolina over the age of 18 who does not have a criminal or mental health record, Herting has the legal right—and one may argue, moral responsibility—to provide for her own safety by obtaining a firearm, learning to use it, and learning North Carolina's self defense laws.

As she and her roommates live in an off-campus apartment and are not subject to the restrictions of university-wide gun free free-crime zones, she very well could put herself in a position where at least she has some control over threats to her life.

Students on campus, unfortunately do not have such an option, a fact that criminals are are too well aware of.

Update: Durham police have detained a "person of intrest" in the Eve Carson murder case. The WTVD story is here.

Reuters: Gun Owners "Not Just Urban Criminals and Drug Dealers"

Thanks clearing that up, as I was a bit confused.

The American affinity for guns may puzzle foreigners who link high ownership rates and liberal gun ownership laws to the 84 gun deaths and 34 gun homicides that occur in the United States each day and wonder why gun control is not an issue in the U.S. presidential election.

The owners are not just urban criminals and drug dealers. There are hunters and home security advocates, and then there are the gun collectors.

Not that it matters, but Reuter's reporter Tim Gaynor interviewed two men from Douglas, Arizona in this article, Alex Black and fellow gun collector Lynn Kartchner. For whatever reason, Gaynor neglects to mention in the article that Kartchner is not just a collector, but a gun shop owner, though that fact emerges in the caption of a story-related photo.

Perhaps ironically, another photo that was shot for the story shows a customer in a Cabela's store in Forth Worth, Texas, features Cabela's salesperson Larry Allen showing a customer a handgun.

The firearm in question? A Taurus revolver marketed as "The Judge" which gained it's name according to Taurus, "because of the number of judges who carry it into the courtroom for their protection."

The judges that prefer this revolver, presumably, are not just urban criminals and drug dealers.

Update: I would probably be remiss not to mention that like the author, I too, would like to see gun control advocacy made an issue in the 2008 presidential election.

Manufactured Destruction

CAMERA has the goods on the BBC, which claimed in a video report that the family home of the terrorist that murdered eight students and wounded nine more last week was destroyed in retaliation by the Israelis.

It never happened.

For now, the house still stands, prompting CAMERA to wonder why BBC reporter Nick Miles would report a false demolition in a voiceover, and why the BBC would air a videoclip without properly vetting it.

This should be a career-ender for someone (or someones) if the BBC cares about their reputation as a legitimate news source.

Fallon Gonged in Favor of Petraeus

Admiral William Fallon, Commander, U.S. Central Command, is resigning:

Adm. William Fallon, the top U.S. military commander for the Middle East, is resigning, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Tuesday.

Gates said Fallon had asked him Tuesday morning for permission to retire and Gates agreed. Gates said the decision was entirely Fallon's and that Gates believed it was "the right thing to do."

Fallon was the subject of an article published last week in Esquire magazine that portrayed him as opposed to President Bush's Iran policy. It described Fallon as a lone voice against taking military action to stop the Iranian nuclear program.

Gates described as "ridiculous" any notion that Fallon's departure signals the United States is planning to go to war with Iran. And he said "there is a misperception" that Fallon disagrees with the administration's approach to Iran.

"I don't think there were differences at all," Gates added.

I suspect that there will be those on the fringe left who will be screeching about how Fallon's resignation is the prelude to a preemptive war with Iran—probably before I even finish this sentence—no doubt suggested by a certain Esquire article that stated the quite fanciful claim that "it's left to Fallon--and apparently Fallon alone..." to keep Dubya from bombing Iran into the stone age.

Barnett seems to have completely overlooked the fact that it has been Tehran, not Washington, that has publicly promised not just war, but genocide (but then, in the same article, it was Burnett that claimed Fallon was "waging peace" with the Chinese in his prior assignment, even as Fallon's replacement expressed concern over massive increases in Chinese military spending, so consider the source), but that probably has little to do with his resignation at this time.

No, as Blackfive rightly notes, Fallon's retirement comes not because of friction with the Bush Administration (though there may have been some), but because General David Patraeus is coming to town, no doubt as the Administration's favored choice to lead Central Command after his implementation of COIN strategy in Iraq.

My guess? Lieutenant General Raymond T. Odierno, who executed the surge so well, backfills Petraeus as Commanding General, (MNF-I).

How Long?

As you probably well know by now, New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer has been caught in an investigation linking him to a high-priced prostitution ring as a client.

ABC News is reporting the interesting detail that it wasn't an investigation of the prostitution ring that led to Spitzer's downfall, but his shifting of funds that led to his bank calling in authorities for what they thought was the possible hiding of bribes:

The federal investigation of a New York prostitution ring was triggered by Gov. Eliot Spitzer's suspicious money transfers, initially leading agents to believe Spitzer was hiding bribes, according to federal officials.

It was only months later that the IRS and the FBI determined that Spitzer wasn't hiding bribes but payments to a company called QAT, what prosecutors say is a prostitution operation operating under the name of the Emperors Club.

So it appears that Spitzer's bank called in the IRS over what it thought was money laundering (if I understand the account correctly, and I may not), and the IRS contacted the Justice Department, which tagged the FBI's Public Corruption Squad to run with the case.

This seems a pretty straightforward and logical sequence from my layman's perspective on how Justice might end up involved in the case. Bagging a governor for corruption—which apparently is what they thought they had at the beginning—seems to be a logical application of the FBI's Public Corruption Squad.

That the case turned out to be about prostitution instead of bribery seems to be a bit of a letdown, as noted by David Kurtz at TPM, who called it "anti-climactic."

Refer back to the ABC News story and you'll note that, "It was only months" into the investigation that the investigators were able to determine that Spitzer's money shifting was about covering up payments to the prostitution ring, and not hiding bribes. This brings up a logical series of questions that I've not seen many people asking yet.

• How long had Eliot Spitzer been procuring high-end prostitutes from the Emperors Club before his financial activity was deemed suspicious?
• Is his interest in the client side of prostitution a recent development, or is it part of an on-going pattern of behavior? If part of a on-going pattern of behavior, how long has Spitzer been using prostitution services, and has he patronized other services in addition to the Emperors Club?
• How was Spitzer introduced to the Emperors Club? Did he find the service on his own, or was he referred? If referred by others, is there the possibility that more politicians or business associates may be exposed in his wake?

These are some of the questions that come to my mind about this developing story, and it will be interesting to see if any information along these lines comes out as the scandal continues.

Update: Six years? Allah's got the roundup.

Spitzer Swallows

This going to be a huge blow his political career.

Gov. Eliot Spitzer has informed his most senior administration officials that he had been involved in a prostitution ring, an administration official said this morning.

Mr. Spitzer, who was huddled with his top aides inside his Fifth Avenue apartment early this afternoon, had hours earlier abruptly canceled his scheduled public events for the day. He scheduled an announcement for 2:15 after inquiries from the Times.

Mr. Spitzer, a first term Democrat who pledged to bring ethics reform an end the often seamy ways of Albany, is married with three children.

All snark aside, my thoughts and prayers go out to his daughters—I think they are teenagers—and his wife. The girls going to be humiliated at a particularly sensitive age, and my heart goes out to them for all the snide comments and snickers from their peers in their future. They did nothing wrong, and will have to pay the price of their father's apparent indiscretions, as will their mother.

One would hope Spitzer himself will try to find a way to lessen this impact on their lives, even if that means resigning from office to avoid the prolonged media circus that is sure to envelope the family as this story evolves.

Update: Fox News reports that Spitzer is is expected to resign, and faces indictment.

A View of "Fair Use"

Recently, Brian Ledbetter's photojournalism criticism blog Snapped Shot came under fire from the Associated Press for allegedly infringing on AP's copyrights, causing Ledbetter to take his site offline.

Snapped Shot came back online several days later, sans images, with many bloggers only a little less confused about what constitutes the "fair use" of agency images.

I sent a request to AP Director of Media Relations Paul Colford this past Friday for a statement clarifying their view of what constitutes fair use, and the Associated Press provided the following response via email:

AP licenses its works (photos, news stories, video and so on) to newspapers, Web sites and broadcasters for the purpose of showing news events and to illustrate news stories or commentary on the news events.

If the entirety of the work is used (such as when a whole photo is reproduced), that is considered a substantial "taking" under fair use law. If there are many photos used, that is a substantial taking of AP's photo library.

In the case of criticism, the commentary or criticism has to be about the protected work, not commentary or criticism in general – not using, as in the case of Snappedshot.com, protected photos to illustrate something on which the blogger was commenting. One cannot post a copyrighted photo of President Bush to illustrate commentary criticizing the policies of his administration, for example.

Fair use does not give others the right to use AP content without paying for it, especially when the costs -- and risks -- of gathering news around the world continue to rise. As a result, the AP has been increasingly vigilant in protecting its intellectual property.

I agree unreservedly with the Associated Press that using an image merely for purposes of illustration is outside of fair use, and will seek to go through my 2,700+ post archive and remove images that violate this of my own accord in coming weeks.

According to the AP's response posted above, however, it does appear—and tell me if I'm wrong—that it is still acceptable to reproduce images that are the direct subject of criticism, or as the AP states it "the commentary or criticism has to be about the protected work."

In other words, the context of the blog post the image is presented in matters.

For example, merely posting the below Reuters image of their press vehicle hit by Israeli fire in 2006 in a general blog entry about media casualties in war would be unacceptable under "fair use" guidelines.

If, however, the photo in question is the subject of criticism, then you have a case of "fair use."

Hopefully, this clears things up.

Antichrist Superstar

Nicholas D. Kristof published an op-ed in yesterday's New York Times that insinuates that preferring another candidate to Barack Obama is a sign of bigotry.

Subtle.

...the most monstrous bigotry in this election isn't about either race or sex. It's about religion.

The whispering campaigns allege that Mr. Obama is a secret Muslim planning to impose Islamic law on the country. Incredibly, he is even accused — in earnest! — of being the Antichrist.

Proponents of this theory offer detailed theological explanations for why he is the Antichrist, and the proof is that he claims to be Christian — after all, the Antichrist would say that, wouldn't he? The rumors circulate enough that Glenn Beck of CNN asked the Rev. John Hagee, a conservative evangelical, what the odds are that Mr. Obama is the Antichrist.

I'm quite certain that there are some earnest, deluded souls out there that think Obama is indeed the Antichrist, but of course, there are people of questionable intelligence out there that feel the same way about George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, and even John McCain.

I must have missed Kristof's editorials excoriating these fringe theologists, but he certainly wouldn't single out those that would vote against his preferred candidate to the exclusion of others, would he?

But the "Antichrist" charge isn't at the heart of Kristof's argument, of course. This is:

These charges are fanatical, America's own equivalent of the vicious accusations about Jews that circulate in some Muslim countries. They are less a swipe at one candidate than a calumny against an entire religion. They underscore that for many bigoted Americans in the 21st century, calling someone a Muslim is still a slur.

Fascinating.

Let's set aside for a moment the fact that Barack Obama is not now a Muslim—and never has been—to examine Kristof's basic grasp of reality.

He states, "These charges are fanatical, America's own equivalent of the vicious accusations about Jews that circulate in some Muslim countries."

"Equivalent?" Really?

Perhaps being at the New York Times he gets a different perspective than most Americans do, but I've somehow missed the Sesame Street demonization of Muslims in American children's television, where an Amerrican Martyr-Me Elmo tells U.S. toddlers their duty is to kill those of the Islamic faith. Such programming exists in the Middle East, targeting Jews in general and Israeli Jews in particular, along with America. Should I being paying more attention to what my daughter is watching, or are Bob the Bomber ("Can we kill them? Yes we can!") and Dora the Exploder only constructs of his fevered imagination?

We have not seen calls from mainstream American Christian or political leaders to bomb Muslims communities within our nation, nor have we seen mass celebrations in the streets resulting from the murder of innocent Islamic school children when terrorists target them. Or perhaps when an al Qaeda terrorist blows up a market in Baghdad there are parades in Times Square, and the Times simply doesn't see such demonstrations as newsworthy. Somehow I find that unlikely, even for the naked, one-sided advocacy journalism now so common at the Times.

It is a fact that in many Muslim cultures Jews are the target of a blind and irrational hatred, and their popular culture is primed, from birth to death, for xenocide. Somehow, we simply don't see "America's own equivalent," hatred against Muslims outside the editorial bullpen.

Kristof's argument is disingenuous and dishonest, but that doesn't keep him from then equating this false construct to the very real racial bigotry that all of us hope remains confined to America's past. As Kristof's own research shows, "A 2007 Gallup poll found that 94 percent of Americans said they would vote for a black candidate." Hopefully we are beyond a candidate's race being a significant factor in American politics.

It is baffling that Kristof seems to need to stoke fears of another kind of bigotry in order to support his choice of presidential candidates, but that appears to be precisely his motivation.

Perhaps by keeping this demonstrably false claim alive he hopes to distract Americans from focusing on Obama's many real shortcomings, including his record as being the most liberal Senator in the United States, that he does not recognize the right of self-defense and advocates banning entire classes of common firearms, that he would raise federal government spending by $287 billion a year (more than any other candidate), and that even his own campaign acknowledges he is not ready to lead.

Nicholas D. Kristof would rather accuses Americans of being bigots and put them on the defensive than have them examine the radical doctrinaire liberalism of his preferred candidate.

Kristof hasn't told us anything about ourselves, but he has exposed a lot about how he would shape the views of his fellow Americans.

Obama's Plouffe: Retreat, At Any Cost

On the ABC News blog, Political Radar:

Obama campaign manager David Plouffe disagreed Friday with the suggestion that it would be responsible to leave "a little wiggle room" when establishing the date by which all U.S. combat troops should be out of Iraq.

"He has been and will continue to be crystal clear with the American people that if and when he is elected president, we will be out of Iraq in - as he said, the time frame would be about 16 months at the most where you withdraw troops. There should be no confusion about that with absolute clarity," said Plouffe.

In effect, Plouffe is confirming that no matter what the facts on the ground are in Iraq in January of 2009, Barack Obama, if President, would pull all American combat troops out of Iraq.

He is stating that Obama would continue to pull American combat troops out of Iraq, even if by doing so it would destabilize that nation's security situation and lead to much higher civilian casualties.

He is stating that for Obama, ideological purity and dogmatic conviction will be unswayed by changing circumstances, and states convincingly that these things are more important to him than morality or humanity.

I'm glad he cleared that up.

I'd hate to be led into thinking he was capable of change.

Up-Gunning The Campus Police

The story is a couple of days old, but should echo across campuses nationwide: University police are getting patrol carbines in Arizona:

Police departments at Arizona's three universities plan to arm their officers with military-style assault rifles within the next year, officials said Tuesday.

The new rifles would give campus police officers long-range shooting capabilities, allowing them to hit targets at the end of long hallways or atop tall buildings, officials said.

Arizona State University will be the first of the three schools to use the weapons. Officers there will be trained to use the rifles in the next few months, said ASU police spokesman Cmdr. Jim Hardina.

Officers will undergo 40 hours of training before using the weapons.

"We don't want to just throw rifles out there," Hardina said.

Eight officers at the University of Arizona will get similar training before a rifle program launches there in four to five months, officials said. Northern Arizona University officials said a rifle program was in the works, although a specific start date was not immediately available.

The precise firearms in question are semi-automatic Bushmaster carbines equipped with EOTech holographic optical sights, vertical foregrips and tactical lights, as shown in this article by Matt Culbertson of ASU Web Devil. As equipped, the firearms are well-suited for clearing buildings, which would probably be the most likely scenario to which they wold be deployed, in the event of the tragic situations like those at NIU and Virginia Tech.

This is a development that more college and university police forces should emulate.

While most full-time university police forces already arm their officers with handguns, the inherent accuracy and effective range of a carbine such as those purchased for use by ASU officers would both increase the range at which officers could engage threats in extreme situations, and also increase the likelihood of any shots fired finding their preferred targets.

Missed shots typically mean that more rounds have to be fired to end a threat, and each additional shot—particularly those shots that miss the target and continue downrange as the laws of physics require—increases the odds of innocent students, faculty, or staff members stopping a bullet.

It will be interesting to see if this idea radiates out to other university police departments.

UNC Student Body President Gunned Down

A body was found, shot multiple times in the head, yesterday morning about a half-mile from the University of North Carolina campus in Chapel Hill.

She has now been identified.

Chapel Hill police have identified a woman found dead near the University of North Carolina campus Wednesday morning as the university's student body president.

UNC senior Eve Carson, 22, was found shot multiple times in the head about a half-mile from campus.

The News & Observer seems to hint that the murder may have occurred during a carjacking.

Investigators are looking for Carson's stolen 2005 blue Toyota Highlander with Georgia license plate AIV 6690. They believe the vehicle was taken during the crime.

What a shame, to lose such a promising young person to seemingly random violence.

The University's statement is here.

Police are asking anyone with information to call 919-968-2760.

Selective Memory

James Gibney of The Atlantic writes that "U.S. military personnel have been raping Okinawans for the last 60-plus years," though graciously allowing that "the overwhelming majority of U.S. military personnel aren't sociopaths."

Gibney does not provide evidence of six-decades of continual sexual assault, but then, he wasn't shooting for accuracy, just overwrought hyperbole to justify his premise.

Writing in Asia Times Online, Chalmers Johnson notes that since the most infamous case in 1995, there have been precisely four similar incidents:

On June 29, 2001, a 24-year-old air force staff sergeant, Timothy Woodland, was arrested for publicly raping a 20-year-old Okinawan woman on the hood of a car.

On November 2, 2002, Okinawan authorities took into custody Marine Major Michael J Brown, 41 years old, for sexually assaulting a Filipina barmaid outside the Camp Courtney officer's club.

On May 25, 2003, Marine Military Police turned over to Japanese police a 21-year-old lance corporal, Jose Torres, for breaking a 19-year-old woman's nose and raping her, once again in Kin village.

In early July 2005, a drunken air force staff sergeant molested a 10-year-old Okinawan girl on her way to Sunday school. He at first claimed to be innocent, but then police found a photo of the girl's nude torso on his cell phone.

Not including the case dismissed this past week, that brings us a total of five recorded cases in the past 13 years.

By way of comparison, if Mr. Gibney really did have an interest in "The Price of Empire" in Okinawa, he could perhaps spend some time researching the number of Okinawan citizens either directly killed by the Japanese, used as human shields, or were ordered to commit suicide by the Japanese military during the Battle of Okinawa during the Second World War.

Estimates range into the high thousands.

I somewhat doubt, however, that this particular reality suits Mr. Gibney's preferred narrative, where American soldiers are the preferred oppressors.

Homegrown IED Targets Manhattan Military Recruiting Station

The NY Times City Room blog has the latest details:

The police have attributed the blast to an improvised explosive device, and police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said the device had been placed in an ammunition box like the kind that can be bought at a military supply store. Mr. Kelly spoke with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg at a news conference at 9:30 a.m. in Times Square. The authorities are looking into a possible connection to two earlier bombings at foreign consulates in Manhattan, in 2005 and 2007. Official said that in today’s attack, a man in a gray hooded sweatshirt was seen leaving the scene on a bicycle. Subways and traffic are running normally through Times Square.

They also have a useful slideshow of images from the scene, which gives us just enough information to start making some inferences about the bomb and the bomber.

Looking at images 1-3 in the slideshow, you'll note that the damage from the blast seems relatively minor. Image 1 give you a pretty good idea of precisely where the bomb was placed, as you can see how the shrapnel radiated out from a central point, which appears to have been (as we face the building) almost dead-center in front of the plate-glass window.

Slightly enlarging the same photo and cropping it to focus on the recruiting center front helps to see the central radiating point of the blast a bit better.

You'll also note in this closer view, and in the second and third images of the scene, that there was no attempt to make this an anti-personnel weapon, as there is no evidence of there being ball bearing, BBs, or another other sort of shrapnel that would form an intentional secondary blast mechanism.

The time of the blast was around 3:43 AM, when pedestrian traffic in the area is typically light and the recruiting station was closed. From the time of the blast and lack of shrapnel, we can make the guarded assumption that causing casualties was not the bomber's intention.

We can also infer that the bomber had no intention of destroying the targeted building as well, as the blast was small, and the ammunition can that carried the device could have easily held far more explosives.

From the choice of target, lack of shrapnel, and low amount of explosives used, I think it only logical to conclude that the blast was political in nature, a violent though purposefully less-lethal bomb, if you can ever call an improvised explosive device "less lethal." For these reasons, I doubt it was the act of Islamic extremists.

This was an act of domestic terrorism.

I do not, however, feel comfortable blaming any specific anti-war group for this act, or even pinning this as an anti-war act at this point in time.

Anti-war groups, in general, are non-violent in nature, and those that lean towards the anarchist fringe that are violence prone tend towards vandalism, and generally, don't have the technical expertise to manufacture even such a simple device.

Whoever built this bomb may have sympathies towards the anti-war movement and/or anti-military feelings, but I would be surprised to find them affiliated officially with any specific anti-war or anti-military group, and would be even more surprised if anyone inside one of these groups had advance knowledge of the attack.

There are some news accounts noting that there were similar minor blasts carried out against the Mexican and British consulates in New York in recent years, each using blackpowder inside inert hand grenade casings, also carried out by a bomber on a bicycle.

This seems quite plausible, but we won't know more until the FBI announces the findings of their investigation.

Update: A reminder, via Ace-of-Spades, that the peace-loving left isn't always so peace-leaving:

Thirty-Eight Years Ago Today

March 6, 1970 at 11:55 a.m.

Three members of the radical activist group known as the Weather Underground, Diana Oughton, Ted Gold and Terry Robbins, blew themselves straight to hell when the bomb they were building, which was intended to blow up a dance at Fort Dix, exploded in an otherwise quiet New York neighborhood.

Had they been better bomb-makers, instead of killing themselves, they would have killed an untold number of American soldiers. In the name of peace.

Luckily, the Weathermen's expertise at bomb-making left much to be desired.

The Weathermen's hatred of the United States manifested itself in the bombings of the U.S. Capitol building, New York City Police Headquarters, the Pentagon, and the National Guard offices in Washington, D.C. The Weathermen's leader, Bill Ayers summed up the Weathermen's ideology as follows: "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, Kill your parents."

Yes, the Bill Ayer's above is the same man that has had Barack Obama as a dinner guest, and who served with Obama on the board of directors of the left-leaning Woods Fund from 1999 until 2002.

Diana Oughton, one of the deceased, was Ayer's girlfriend until some of the 100 pounds of dynamite they intended to use to bomb a non-commissioned officers' dance at Fort Dix detonated.

Update: Hot Air has surveillance video of the bike-riding bomber approaching the recruiting center, and the NYPD thinks they have his bike.

Was the suspect smart enough to wipe his prints from the bike?

Update: The bomber sent an anti-war manifesto to eight NY Democratic Congressmen.

Update: Coincidence? Authorities are now saying the anti-war activist that mailed the "We did it!" letters to Congress had nothing to do with the recruiting center blast.

Savages

I've watched for several days the story that has grown out of a short, grainy video that shows a Marine in Iraq throwing a puppy to its death.

The act shown in the video, whether it shows a real sadistic act of animal abuse or a Marine with a warped sense of humor throwing a stuffed animal, is sickening.

Perhaps even more sickening is the mob mentality that has overtaken some of those who have viewed the video, who took it upon themselves to post the names and home address of the Marine alleged to be in the video and that of his family members, inviting other Web vigilantes to commit violent acts against them.

It is understandable to be outraged by the act shown whether is if fake or real, but does any rational human being think that an appropriate response to such an act would be the rape or murder of innocent family members, as some have called for? As for the Marine at the center of the controversy, he is currently under protective custody because of threats against his life.

There seems to be far more outrage over this video of animal abuse than far more sadistic and frequent reports of greater acts of brutality committed against human civilians by militias, terrorists, insurgents, and criminals in Iraq. I wonder why that is.

Where are the Internet detectives on Digg when al Qaeda in Iraq shows video of a car bomb that wipes out innocent families? Why are these Youtube and blog denizens not clamoring to discover the identities and home addresses of Islamic fundamentalist thugs that film decapitations and torture?

Sadly, there is far less outrage for these human victims, and occasionally, there are even attempts to rationalize their inhuman brutality.

I'm sure that if they were asked about it today, every politician in Washington would tell you that they were "shocked and appalled" at the actions of the Marine in the video, and yet, most Congressional Democrats, including Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, would help set the stage for far worse in Iraq with a headlong, unconditional withdrawal that would make such depravity far more possible.

They seek to knowingly and willfully abandon Iraq to those would would do far worse than throw that nation's civilians down a ravine, because they think the war costs too much, or because it is unpopular with their constituents.

So many of the same people who have whipped up so much outrage over a dog are indifferent to greater depredations visited upon Iraqi women and children... and yet they claim that the Marine in the video is the savage among us.

Down to One

A little over a month ago, shortly before taking my concealed carry class here in North Carolina, I put up a post asking for advice on a carry gun, something small enough to carry concealed, but large enough to shoot accurately without discomfort.

What I learned during the class is that getting a concealed lawyer was perhaps my best bet, "if I could only find one small enough to shove in a holster.”

As that wasn't practical, I was back once again to deciding on a sidearm.

After a lot of Internet research, and talking to fellow shooters, I'd narrowed down my choices to three sidearms: the Smith & Wesson M&P Compact, the Springfield Armory XD, and the Glock 23, all in 40 S&W caliber.

I went with the 40 S&W as a compromise between the higher magazine capacity of 9mm pistols and the bigger hole of the a .45 ACP.

I liked the subcompacts from Springfield Armory and Glock, but didn't like the shorter sight radius or the fact that my pinky finger curled under the magazine. I also realized that because of my lifestyle, a slightly larger gun was not a limitation in where I could carry. The Smith, while an interesting design and a handgun that fit my hand very well, was simply too new of a design for me to feel comfortable staking my life on.

So it was down to the service model Springfield XD and the Glock 23, and from there, it was simply a matter of what fit my hand best, and which might be cheaper to shoot.

The winner?

Both the Glock and the XD fit my hand well, and in the end, the availability of a .22-caliber conversion kit sealed the deal in favor of the Glock 23.

While the addition of a conversion kit means more initial capital outlay, it also means that I can afford to practice far more frequently over the long term, an important consideration for a shooter on a budget. To be honest, if the XD had a reliable conversion kit available, I probably would have selected it, as it fit my hand just as well and I would have preferred the XDs fully-supported chamber.

Thoughts?

App State Student Fakes Campus Gunman and Shuts Down Entire University to Cover Up Broken Door He Didn't Want to Pay For

After the shootings at Virginia Tech and NIU, why not scare the crap out of everyone and shut down campus because you don't want to cough up a few bucks for a door you broke?

Matthew Haney did.

An Appalachian State University student who said he saw a gunman — setting off a campus-wide lock down Monday — made up the story, police said Tuesday.

Matthew Haney, from Durham, said he saw an armed man trying to steal his TV, but investigators said he lied. His apartment door was broken, and investigators said they believe he didn't want to report it to the management company.

That's Matthew Haney, of Durham, North Carolina, for all you future employers.

Was Obama's Iraq War Opposition Based upon a Relationship to Saddam's Arms Dealer?

That is the theory being floated by conservative blog Illinois Review, and frankly one I've heard speculated about before... but does that speculation hold water?

The theory goes like this:

Barack Obama has had questionable dealings (including the purchase of his home) with Tony Rezko, who is on trial on corruption charges, and who may have directed kickbacks to Obama.

Resko has had numerous business deals with Nahdmi Auchi, who once sold arms to Saddam Hussein and had other dealings with the Hussein regime.

Resko and Auchi also had business dealings with Aiham Alsammarae, a fugitive from Iraqi justice who allegedly stole $650 million from the Iraqi Ministry of Electricity, who is now apparently living in Chicago, despite having been convicted and sentence to 14 years in prison in Iraq.

All these questionable relationships. however, have not produced a "smoking gun," and there is no direct evidence of anything illegal transpiring between Obama and these three men (or any others) at this time.

His mere association with these men, however—men who have continually operated on the edge of the law, and sometimes over that edge into clearly illegal activity—is troubling, and peels off some of the veneer of a candidate who promises "change" but instead seems to be far less pure than the image he'd like to project.

I must wonder, however... will the same left-leaning blogs and news sites that so throughly flogged every questionable Bush/Cheney associate, association, and decision be as willing to investigate every nuance of Obama's questionable ties as they develop?

Frankly, I'm not holding my breath.

Grandma's Got a Gun

In rural parts of the country, it happens from time to time; a person appears uninvited on someone's property, and the landowner tells them that "elsewhere" is a better place to be. Typically these confrontations are benign in nature, even when on occasion either the property owner or the trespasser turns out to be armed.

Such was the case in Texas this past weekend when a Danish reporter wandered into the yard of an elderly Texas woman, and she shooed him off, a gun apparently in hand.

CNN's Ed Henry made quite a big deal out of the incident, promoting it as a near "international incident" writing in the lede that the Dane came "this close to getting shot."

He characterized the confrontation this way.

"I was just so occupied dictating my story that I didn't really see where I went," Svensson told me later. "I was just walking and talking."

What Svensson didn't realize was that he had stopped walking a couple hundred feet away, on the front lawn of an elderly woman. An elderly woman who looked through her window and didn't like that a strange man was standing outside her house. An elderly woman who had, um, a gun.

Next thing you know the woman is outside, no more than a few dozen feet from the journalist, demanding that he leave. "Suddenly she comes out and she says, 'Get off my property. You're trespassing,'" recalled Svensson.

Svensson was too preoccupied to notice the pistol, and was not aware that Texas law gives homeowners leeway on using a weapon when someone is trespassing on your property. All of us journalists across the street were too far away to see the pistol at first, until a Danish photographer with a telephoto lens announced to a bunch of us that there was indeed a weapon in the elderly woman's right hand.

Henry, of course, had no way of knowing if the journalist was actually in any danger, and he apparently was not. The citizen's interaction with the reporter seemed to have been limited to verbally warning the reporter off her property. She never raised the weapon or pointed it at the Danish journalist, and the one photo of the incident shows that the firearm was pointed at the ground. The journalist reported that he didn't even see a weapon when told to leave, according to Henry's own account.

And so it seems shocking to Henry that an elderly person has the right to be armed when confronting someone trespassing on their property, not knowing if the person wandering towards their door is a wayward Danish journalist, a petty thief, or someone with much darker intentions towards a seemingly frail victim.

That an elderly woman in a rural area warning off an intruder had the common sense to arm herself in case the intruder's intentions were something more than an innocent mistake never crossed his mind.

But, Henry, apparently, had the story he wanted. That being armed is a prudent decision for some in certain circumstances never crossed his mind.

Wishful Thinking

The most incompetent CBS News headline in recent memory, or the result of too much wishful thinking?

Via HotAir Headlines.

Barack Obama/Deval Patrick could not immediately be reached for comment.

Texans: Obama Wants Your Guns

I didn't think it was too much to ask the Barack Obama campaign to explain the candidate's position on firearms ownership prior to the Democratic primary in Texas.

Obama, after all, has a documented record of wanting to ban handguns, ban all semiautomatic firearms (rifles, pistols, or shotguns), and while he has been silent on the specific issue, would seem to be squarely against the right of law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns (CCH) as well,a right that has been granted in roughly 40 states.

I sent the Obama campaign a short list of questions this past Friday, asking the campaign to clarify his current position on citizens owning firearms for self defense, a right he has never specifically recognized.

I asked the Obama campaign to explain his views on concealed carry. This is a very relevant issue in Texas, where almost 91,000 permits were issued in the 09/2006-08/2007 period alone.

I asked if Obama still favored an outright ban on handguns, which was his position in the past. I asked if he would still like to see all semi-automatic firearms including rifles and shotguns, a position he has also held in the past.

The Obama campaign has thus far refused to respond to these questions, even though they had plenty of time to send me multiple emails asking me to campaign for him.

At this point, we can only assume, lacking any direct response to these sensible questions, that Barack Obama would still favor banning all handguns and semi-automatic firearms currently used by Texans (and of course, all other Americans) for self-defense, hunting, target shooting, and other legal uses.

I suppose this silence shouldn't come as a surprise.

Suddenly recognizing the rights of Americans where he hasn't seen them before is obviously a change he can't believe in.