Hillary Clinton Tamara Dietrich of the Newport News Daily Press pokes fun at gun owners who think Barack Obama is not a friend of gun owners.

A black man gets elected president and half the country dives for the panic room, buying up guns and squirreling away supplies like fatalists awaiting the End of Days. That’s an exaggeration, of course. Barack Obama is biracial, not black.

Lovely of Ms. Dietrich to bring up race in an article on guns, or for that matter, any other topic except … um … race. I know plenty of gun owners who fear new restrictions on their right to own or carry guns. I also know plenty of gunophobes who think guns are icky, can’t imagine why an sane person would want to own one, and would be delighted to see government take everyone else’s guns away. I do not know a single individual, however, who is in favor of having his guns taken away from a white guy, but opposed to having them taken away from a black guy. Do you? Does Dietrich? If not, what the hell point is there in bringing race up?

Further, even if race were a legitimate topic of discussion in this context, the notion that Obama’s white mother precludes him from being “black” is evidence that the infamous “one drop rule” never really went away, it just came full circle. In the days of Jim Crow, one drop of black blood meant you were black. Now, per Ms. Dietrich, one drop of white blood apparently means you can’t be. Query how many American blacks meet Ms. Dietrich’s definition of “black.” It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know why the average African-American has a lighter complexion than the average African-African. But I digress.

“Hee hee heeeee …” chortles “HG Robinson” in the very first post to reporter Peter Dujardin’s story last week on the local run on weaponry. “Clearly President Obama is looking to ban handguns and close loopholes in the law first chance he can. … You gun nuts better stock up now.”

First, Obama hasn’t said he wants to ban handguns.

His former colleague John Lott begs to differ on that, but just for grits and shins, let’s go Lambert on the guy and assume he’s lying. For all you or I know, maybe Obama never really did say he wanted to ban handguns. He did, however, write that he did, nodded when asked if he did, voted against the law stripping his home town and a few suburbs of their “right” to perosecute homeowners who use otherwise lawfully owned handguns in otherwise lawful self defense, refused to sign the Heller brief supporting a common-senes reading of the Second Amendment (or even the wishy-washy brief offered by the Bush Administration) and appointed Eric Holder, who had signed a different Heller brief advocating the “collective” (read: no) rights interpretation, a view too extreme even for the four dissenting Justices in that case. So pardon me when I refuse to take an ounce of solace from the fact that Obama supposedly never came out and said “I hereby want to ban handguns.” To the extent that actions speak louder than words, he screamed it.
(more…)

In a piece about the interplay between the election and the World Series, the Ass. Press helpfully “fact” checks Senator McCain in a manner that would make Annenberg Political proud:

McCain told several hundred people standing in a cavernous warehouse: “Now, I’m not dumb enough to get mixed up in a World Series between swing states. But I think I may have detected a little pattern with Sen. Obama. It’s pretty simple really. When he’s campaigning in Philadelphia, he roots for the Phillies, and when he’s campaigning in Tampa Bay, he ‘shows love’ to the Rays.”

As a chorus of boos built, he added:”It’s kind of like the way he campaigns on tax cuts, but then votes for tax increases after he’s elected. Or the way he says he backs the middle class and then goes and attacks Joe the Plumber after Sen. Obama’s asked a tough question. What’s that all about?”

In fact, Obama did not attack Joe the Plumber; rather he criticized McCain for suggesting that the Ohio plumber who wants to purchase the plumbing business where he works is in the same economic shape as most working class voters.

It sure is comforting to know that “in fact” Obama and his followers never attacked Joe the Plumber. The Ass. Press said so, and even dropped in an f-bomb on top of it, so who am I to question?

Apparently, the real Hillary Clinton is no more amused by the prospect of a joint appearance with Sarah Palin than Amy Poehler’s version of her was. Quoth the Ass. Press:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has canceled an appearance at a New York rally next week after organizers blindsided her by inviting Republican vice presidential candidate and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, aides to the senator said Tuesday.

Apparently, inviting certain people to a rally without warning them of who all else is invited constitutes “blindsiding.” Was Palin blindsided as to Hillary, too? Then again, when was the last time anyone invited you to any major event without “blindsiding” you as to who else may be invited?

It actually gets worse, though. Funny-money quote:

“Her attendance was news to us, and this was never billed to us as a partisan political event,” said Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines. “Sen. Clinton will therefore not be attending.”

‘Cuz everybody knows that if you only invite Democrats to an event, it’s not a partisan event. But if you invite Democrats and Republicans, it is.

Via Uncle, Memphis Online has a story about the ongoing controversy surrounding the constitutionality of Helena-West Helena’s unconstitutionally inane name curfew. Like most media sources, its presentation is even-handed and takes no side on the merits or the constitutionality of the curfew in question. Like this byline:

Small Arkansas town divided over whether safety trumps Constitution

Nope, no side-taking there. None whatever. Move along, people, nothing to see here.

The original Messiah selflessly died for his disciples’ sins, so it’s truly touching to see how eager today’s disciples are to return the favor. The new meme seems to be to ignore whatever outlandish claim the Obamessiah may make, and pretend he said something far more sensible instead. The virtual ink had barely dried on Powerline’s fact-checking of Time’s lame defense of the Gaffemaster when Mark Silva of the Chicago Tribune chimed in with an even more outlandish defense of the same:

After all the grief that Obama has taken from the RNC and from rival John McCain this week over the Democrat’s comment that motorists could save some more oil if only they put some more air in their tires, it turns out a search of the clips — conducted by a motivated party — has found that the administraiton [sic, three layers of editors notwithstanding] of President Bush — George H.W. Bush — was telling Americans the same thing back in 1990.

Note how easily and effortlessly this alleged journalist managed to convert Barack Obama’s howler about proper tire inflation supposedly saving “all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling” into a common-sense observation that it could save “some more oil.” No, duh. Of course it can save “some more oil.” If all Obama had said last week was that proper tire inflation could save “some more oil,” or that good maintenance is generally a good idea, there would be no controversy now. Math may not be Mr. Silva’s forte, but here’s a free clue: “some oil” does not equal “all the oil that they’re talking about getting off,” nor does it come close.

This sleight of hand is reminiscent of the Gorons who defended their Messiah’s outlandish claim to have “[taken] the initiative in creating the Internet” by pointing out that he had sponsored some legislation to promote it, decades after others had taken the intiative in creating it. Gore was never the media darling that Obama is, so he took his share of ridicule over that infamous quote, tempered by the fact that it was frequently misquoted and for some, the fact that he was widely misquoted was bigger news than the goofy quote he had actually made. As for Obama, one has to wonder if there is any claim so outlandish that he could not make it and expect his disciples in the media to try. If anyone working for the Obama campaign is reading this, here’s how to test my theory: feed some line into Obama’s teleprompter stating that all experts agree that an apple a day will increase your life expectancy by 230 years. We’ll have our laughs for a few days, buttressed by even more laughs when Barack tries to turn it around by claiming Republicans are opposed to healthy diets. Within a week, some “journalist” from Time, Newsweek or the Chicago Tribune will come back claiming Obama was right after all, because some obscure bureaucrat from the Eisenhower Administration made a vague pronouncement that apples really are good for you.

But did some some obscure bureaucrat from the Bush-41 Administration actually say “the same thing” as Obama is saying now? Per this alleged journalist’s article, the answer would be … mmmmmm … no. We didn’t have YouTube in 1990, so the PSA itself is not on the web, but according to the N.Y. Times article:

The new public service announcements give drivers tips on how they can save gasoline. One television ad, which will be broadcast later this year, shows a gigantic oil gusher that is not coming from a well, but bursting forth from the valve on a tire. The announcer tells viewers that by slightly increasing the air pressure slightly in their tires, they can save 50,000 barrels of oil each day.

Well, hey! There’s your smoking gun right there, as 50,000 barrels of oil a day constitutes “some” oil, and so does “all the oil that they’re talking about getting off.” Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to quantify that “some” by determining how many years it would take us, at a rate of 50,000 barrels a day, to save as much oil through proper tire inflation as we would hope to obtain from the shale and the Outer Continental Shelf combined. [I deliberately left out ANWR since Obama's "they" presumably includes McCain, who is scared to death of that place.]

UPDATE: Dave Price has more.

Recently the NRA challenged Philadelphia’s five illegal gun ordinances in court. The court struck down two, while dismissing challenges to the other three for lack of standing. There appear to be three schools of thought on standing:

1. Uncle view: “Standing” is legalese for “I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for you damn meddling kids.”
2. Xrlq view: Standing is legalese for “Don’t you think we have enough friggin’ lawsuits in this country as it is?! Just imagine what screwy decisions we’d get if courts were open to people who had no stake in the issue being decided, or perhaps even hoped they’d ‘lose!’”
3. Philadelphia Metro view: Standing is legalese for “Court gives city right to enforce some gun laws.”

   H/t: David Hardy.

… how much Dan Besse’s campaign had to pay the Whizz Urinal not only to endorse him themselves, but also to run five letters praising him and zero letters opposing him on a single day.

Today’s Winston-Salem Journal suggests there is some kind of competition among papers over who can be the most obnoxiously liberal while pretending to report news. Today’s top front-page story by Sean Mussenden and Bertrand M. Gutierrez carries the following headline and byline:

Minorities Most Affected by Foreclosures

For risky loans, a lesson in black and white

Oh. My. God. Can you believe those evil lenders are actually taking people’s houses away on account of the color of their skin rather than the contents of their character bank accounts? I can’t believe that in 2008, lenders would actually foreclose on houses just because the owner checked “black” (or worse, “I do not wish to furnish this information”) on the original loan application.

Oh wait, that’s not what they’re doing after all, never mind. Apparently, it’s the subprime mortgages that cause foreclosures. Give a man a regular mortgage at a good rate, and he’ll never default. Give the same guy a subprime mortgage, and we will:

Mortgage lenders were more likely to sell subprime loans to Hispanics and blacks than to whites during the recent housing boom. As a result, minorities are at a greater risk than whites of losing their homes as the real-estate downturn accelerates.

Silly me, I always thought that the causal arrow between subprime mortgages and high foreclosure rates pointed the other direction, but what do I know?

No word yet from the evil industry, who must be hiding in the shadows somewhere, so here’s the obligatory sob story instead:

[Current homeowner and non-foreclosee Terri] Martin nearly lost her $71,300 home in the Waughtown area of Winston-Salem two years ago after the interest rate on her subprime mortgage jumped to 11 percent, leaving her with monthly payments of more than $800. A lawyer helped her renegotiate the terms to avoid foreclosure.

I’m sure my California readers are heartbroken to read that a monthly mortgage payment adjusted all the way up to $800 and beyond. I mean, that’s almost as much as I paid for a two-bedroom apartment while living on student loans in law school!

“If I did not have God on my side, I probably would have committed suicide,” said Martin, a school-bus driver and mental-health worker. “I was fighting to keep my house, and all my income that I did have coming in was going to pay my mortgage and to keep my other bills here going, so, yeah, it was rough.”

Rough indeed, for someone living on an income that in many parts of the country won’t qualify you to own a home at all.

So why did Ms. Martin’s non-foreclosure almost happen? You have to go to the bottom of page 16, well after the “jump,” to find out. We’ll get to Ms. Martin’s details in a minute, but first a more general announcement from the don’t-confuse-us-with-factivists:

Fair-lending advocates and civil-rights groups see parallels in the current subprime gap to other racially tinged historical lending patterns.

In past years, blacks and Hispanics have had difficulty getting mortgages, in part because some banks were reluctant to build branches or loan money in minority neighborhoods, especially poorer ones. The practice is known as “redlining.”

Right, ‘cuz everybody knows that if there’s one thing lenders like better than making as much money as they possibly can, it’s deliberately making less money by intentionally withholding services from a discrete segment of otherwise qualified borrowers. That worked great for decades, but eventually, a few lenders lost religion and started making even more money by selling subprime loans to the same people again. Now the whole industry is in the crapper, in no small part because they now own a gazillion crappy houses no one wants to buy in crappy neighborhoods no one wants to live in. All because a few lenders stopped “redlining” and started selling loans to whoever could (barely) qualify for them.

Near the bottom of p. 16, the authors take a quick breather and allow a little tidbit of token reasonableness as a special reward for the highly motivated readers who made it all the way through the lengthy article:

Mortgage-industry officials say that economics – not racism – explains the subprime gap. On average, minorities have lower credit scores, smaller incomes and fewer assets than whites, making them riskier customers in the eyes of the industry.

Wait, let’s see if I understand this. People with lower credit scores, smaller incomes and fewer assets are riskier customers to lend money to than people with high credit scores, higher incomes and more stuff? Really? Apparently so, at least “in the eyes of the industry,” even if the rest of us know better.

“Race is not a factor,” said Jay Brinkmann, the vice president for research and economics of the Mortgage Bankers Association, the leading industry group. “I’ve often wondered how you would ever get an entire industry to collude on a discriminatory practice.”

Oh, that’s easy. Just get Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and a few of the other usual suspects to make the allegation at least three times, and voilà, the lie becomes the truth.

Finally, finally, at the very end of the screed they explain what got Martin in trouble in the first place. Hint: it’s not race (unless, of course, you think “clueless” is a race):

Martin bought her house in the Waughtown area eight years ago. She didn’t know back then the difference between a fixed rate and an adjustable rate. She just liked the brick house on a corner lot.

In other words, it’s that evil, racist lender’s fault that for eight long years, Martin couldn’t or wouldn’t figure out on her own that fixed-rate mortgages have rates that are fixed, while adjustable rate mortgages have rates that can be … oh, I dunno …. adjusted?! Suddenly I’m having no trouble at all understanding why polls show this country on the brink of electing a President who doesn’t know that Al Qaeda In Iraq is either (1) part of al Qaeda, or (2) in Iraq. It is still “we, the people,” right?

[Full disclosure: I have never worked in the lending industry, but have worked for two companies affiliated with major lenders. No, I won't tell you who they are, and no, I sure as hell don't speak for them or any other employer, past or present.]

Allah catches Jerry Rivers in a whopper, in which Jerry falsely promised that Zina Linnik’s family would speak out on why Terapon Adhahn’s “immigrant” label should be replaced by “monster,” followed by a segment with her uncle in which Adhahn’s immigrant status didn’t come up at all (and in which the uncle would have taken the opposite view if it had). At the end of the segment, Rivers doubles down, demanding that Michelle Maglalang apologize for being an anti-immigrant (not anti-illegal immigrant, just plain anti-immigrant) extremist who thinks Adhahn’s detention by ICE has anything to do with whether he is in the country legally or should have been deported after his earlier crimes. It’s way past time for FoxNews to give Jerry the boot.

As an aside, I’m sure some will object to my use of the name “Jerry Rivers” to describe the guy who calls himself Geraldo Rivera, noting that “Jerry Rivers” never really was his real name. On the one hand, it might be worthwhile to point out that Bill Clinton’s legal name also was never really “Bubba” or “Slick,” Hillary’s was never really “Hildebeest,” John Edwards’s was never really “The Breck Girl”, and Vladimir Putin’s was certainly never “Pooty-Poot.” On the other, a careful, thorough and appropriately defensive reading of Snopes’s purported debunking shows that the Jerry Rivers story, much like Al Gore’s Internet, is mostly correct, and wrong only on a relatively minor detail. In the case of Al Gore, that minor detail is the fact that he technically didn’t claim to have “invented” the Internet, but did make an equally preposterous claim to have “created” it. In the case of Jerry Rivers, it is true that his last name was never “Rivers,” but it is also true that it wasn’t Rivera, either, and that he did indeed change both it and his first name to play up his Puerto Rican heritage when it suited him. It’s also worth noting, however, that Jerry Riviera’s father really did have the surname “Rivera,” which would have become Jerry’s original surname if not for his mother’s equally lame effort to downplay his Puerto Rican heritage earlier in his life. So when it comes to playing cheap identity politics, I guess you can see this particular apple didn’t fall too far from the tree.

Others will object to the fact that I referred to Michelle Malkin as Michelle Maglalang, on the grounds that Maglalang really was once her last name, and arguably still is (see, e.g., the copyright notice in In Defense of Internment). I guess there’s just no pleasing some people.

Last and least, it’s worth noting that unlike both the perp and the victim in this horrible case, neither Jerry Riviera/Rivera nor Michelle Maglalang/Malkin technically qualifies as an immigrant. Based on their original surnames, however, I’ll give you three guesses as to which of them is closer to being an immigrant, and the first two guesses don’t count.

UPDATE: Michelle responds.

UPDATE x2: Apparently, Jerry Riviera has minions in the blogosphere. This one, who cares so much about poor Zina that he can’t even spell her last name, finds it “darned inconvenient” for some straw version of Malkin that Adhahn “is NOT an illegal Mexican, but rather a legal resident from Thailand, and 8-year member of the elite Army Rangers.” These factoids should come in really handy if the guy ever encounters anyone who seriously believes that (1) only Mexican immigrants should be deported, (2) no legal immigrants should ever be deported, even upon conviction of serious crimes, and (3) none of these rules apply to Army Rangers anyway.

I’ve had to to there with “sunshine” laws in general, and their pollyannish names in particular. Society has long outgrown its fetish with real sunshine, too little of which can be problematic but too much of which causes everything from sunburn to melanoma. We (meaning all rational individuals, myself included) know damned well what too much literal sunshine can do; it’s part of the reason our homes and offices have roofs over them, for chrissake. Yet somehow we (and by that I mean the smarmy, non-royal “we,” which means either “you idiots” or “those idiots,” not any group of individuals that includes myself) seem to forget that the same problems exist with the figurative version of sunshine, i.e., the naive notion that disclosing stuff is always good.

News media are, unsurprisingly, among the worst offenders. In the big leagues, papers like the New York Times (and, to a lesser degree, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times) got the brilliant idea to publish every detail they could about the NSA wiretaps and the SWIFT program, both of which had until then been effective tools in the global war on something even more dangerous than Lite-Brites. Here in bush league territory, Christian Tejbal of the Roanoke Times thinks small and goes after ordinary citizens instead. Specifically, his idea of how to celebrate “Sunshine Week” was to liken Virginians with concealed handgun permits to registered sex offenders and publish their names and home addresses as punishment for exercising their Second Amendment rights.

The list stayed up for about a day, inviting comments. Here’s mine (the one they published):

Christian, your snotty article and your gross invasion of law abiding citizens’ privacy requires one of two actions:

1. Explain what the hell kind of good it was supposed to do for anyone other than the violent ex-lovers some CHP holders were trying to get away from (and whose violent exes now know where they live) or
2. Admit that you are an irresponsible jerk who has no business being a journalist.

Here’s the unpublished one that followed:

Christian Tejbal should be fired, as should anyone else who approved his boneheaded decision to invade the privacy of 135,000 law abiding Virginians. Now. That idiot’s idea of “sunshine” is precisely what got actress Rebecca Schaeffer (and Lord only knows how many others) killed. At least Schaeffer’s killer had to pay a sleazy detective agency $250 to obtain the information your pathetic excuse for a newspaper provides for free.

Lastly, here’s a little “sunshine” on the creep who started it all. I’m sure he won’t mind, as Sunshine Week isn’t over yet.

Christian Trejbal
675 School Lane
Christiansburg, VA 24073

Punk probably thinks “Christiansburg” is named after him.

UPDATE: The database was removed and replaced with a they-a culpa. My favorite part:

“When we posted the information, we had every reason to believe that the data the State Police had supplied would comply with the statutes. But people have notified us that the list includes names that should not have been released,” said Debbie Meade, president and publisher of The Roanoke Times.

No kidding.

UPDATE x2: Michelle Malkin has more. Don’t know how I missed this at the time.