At least two people were shot when a gunman opened fire at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Wednesday, authorities said.

D.C. police spokeswoman Traci Hughes said a person walked into the museum with a rifle and shot a guard. Hughes says the shooter was also shot.

The suspect was in police custody and the weapon was recovered, officials told CBS News correspondent Bob Orr.

Hughes says the victims' conditions were not known. Both were being taken to a hospital.

U.S. Park Police gave slightly different information, saying three people had been shot.

The museum normally has a heavy security presence with guards positioned both inside and outside the museum. All visitors are required to pass through metal detectors at the entrance, and bags are screened.

The museum, located just off the National Mall near the Washington Monument, is a popular tourist attraction. It draws about 1.7 million visitors each year.

The Israeli Embassy said it plans to issue a statement later Wednesday.
 

---------------

The shooter has been identified as James von Brunn, a white supremist and a member of the rightwing Free Republic web site.

From Free Republic (now scrubbed but saved):

........Obama could not get a simple security clearance with the information the government has on him ---- NOBODY COULD!

NOW he is privy to every top secret America has!

What is going on??? WHERE ARE THE GOOD PEOPLE IN THIS COUNTRY - ARE YOU OUT THERE???

Submitted by: James W. von Brunn

Cheney Acknowledges Passing The Buck On GM: Bush Didn’t ‘Want To Be The One Who Pulled The Plug’

Last night on Fox News, Vice President Cheney admitted that the Bush administration deliberately decided to pass the buck on GM and let President Obama deal with the problem. Cheney admitted that he thought the “right outcome was going to be bankruptcy,” but that President Bush didn’t want to “be the one who pulled the plug.” Instead, the Bush administration put together a costly auto bailout to stem the tide until President Obama took office.

When announcing his $17.4 billion auto bailout in December 2008, Bush said that “bankruptcy now would lead to a disorderly liquidation of American auto companies.” Cheney is now saying that they were thinking about bankruptcy all along, but instead used billions of dollars of taxpayer money to push their problems onto the Obama administration.

Even former Republican senator Rick Santorum last week went on Greta’s show and chastised the Bush administration, saying that officials “blew it” for punting the problems onto Obama:

SANTORUM: President Bush blew it. You know, he went out and convinced the Congress to give him a bunch of money to save the financial sector and then decided to take a little piece of that and give it to General Motors and Chrysler. Why? He punted. He basically said, I don’t want this failure to be on my watch. I want to let Obama deal with it. And we all knew at the time that letting Obama deal with it means the government’s going to come in and run the show, and that’s exactly what’s happened.

Of course, even though Obama has managed to prevent a “disorderly liquidation of American auto companies,” it isn’t good enough for Cheney. Of course, Cheney offered no alternative vision during last night’s interview.

Transcript:

VAN SUSTEREN: On last question is on GM. We’ve spent an awful lot of money since last fall on GM to only have them end up in bankruptcy. Going back to last fall, would you have let them go into — or would you have pushed them into bankruptcy, do you think then, I mean, now that we’ve spent billions, or did you think that it was sort of a good idea to do what we’ve been doing?

CHENEY: Well, I thought that, eventually, the right outcome was going to be bankruptcy. They had to go through such a dramatic restructuring to have any chance of survival that they had to be able to renegotiate labor contracts, and so forth. And the president decided that he did not want to be the one who pulled the plug just before he left office.

VAN SUSTEREN: Why?

CHENEY: Well, I think he felt, you know, these are big issues and he wouldn’t be there through the process of managing it, but in effect, would have sort of pulled the plug on GM and that was one of the first crises the new administration would have to deal with. So he put together a package that tided GM over until the new administration had a chance to look at it, decide what they wanted to do.

VAN SUSTEREN: But it’s cost us billions to get — I mean, you know –

CHENEY: It has.

VAN SUSTEREN: I mean –

CHENEY: And now the government –

VAN SUSTEREN: I mean, and we’ve now spent billions.

CHENEY: And now the government owns a big chunk of General Motors. That bothers me. I don’t like having government own those kinds of major financial enterprises. I think it’s — it does damage to our long-term economic prospects when we get government involved in making those kinds of decisions.

The private sector then I think will be very different, function differently, if it’s full of government-owned enterprises, than would otherwise be the case.

Yesterday, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) launched the Media Fairness Caucus, made up of about a dozen House Republicans, aiming “to fight liberal media bias.” The group will “point out unfair stories, meet with members of the media, and write op-eds and letters to the editor to highlight media bias,” Newsmax reported. Appearing on Fox News today, Smith declared that “liberal media bias” is a bigger threat to the United States than the recession or terrorism — and Fox’s Bill Hemmer seemed to agree:

SMITH: Let me just say — this is going to sound radical, I don’t mean for it to be radical — but to me, the greatest threat to America is not necessarily a recession or even another terrorist attack. The greatest threat to America is a liberal media bias. …

HEMMER: I would not necessarily call that radical.

Watch it:

http://thinkprogress.org/20...

Smith must be concerned about a media system that hosts Liz Cheney a dozen times in ten days, or invites twice as many Republicans on as Democrats to discuss the stimulus package, or consistently favors conservative commentators and politicians on the Sunday political talk shows. Not to mention an entire cable network that blatantly cheer-leads for the far right.

In a letter to supporters, the Georgia Republican said that his words had been "perhaps too strong and direct" last week when he called Sotomayor a reverse "racist," based on a 2001 speech in which she said she hoped the rulings of a "wise Latina" would be better than those of a white male without similar experiences. Gingrich's remarks created a furor among Sotomayor's backers and caused problems for GOP figures who have been pushing to bring more diversity to the party.

After calling Judge Sonia Sotomayor a “reverse racist” last week, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh said Wednesday that he may now possibly support President Barack Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court.

Too late for that, boys.  You've caused irreparable damage to your party.

"I think that they say that Rush Limbaugh is the 800-pound gorilla in the Republican Party," Schwarzenegger said during the online chat with CNN.

"But I think that's mean-spirited to say that, because I think he's down to 650 pounds," he quipped.

Manuel Miranda, the controversial leader of conservative groups allied against Sonia Sotomayor, said on a blogger conference call that African American voters are different from Hispanic voters because Hispanics “think just like everyone else” on issues, “unlike African Americans.”

Miranda, you’ll recall, is the fellow who’s organizing a campaign to pressure the GOP Senate leadership into filibustering Sotomayor. As I noted below, Miranda had to resign as a GOP Senate staffer after getting nailed hacking into the computers of Senate Dems and swiping their strategy memos.

Today, Miranda did a conference call with conservative bloggers organized by the Heritage foundation, where he discussed Sotomayor. Asked how Republicans could oppose her while avoiding charges of racism, Miranda said they had to wage substantive attacks. Then he segued into a discussion of the views of Hispanics on issues, saying:

“By the way, Hispanic polls, Hispanic surveys, indicate that Hispanics think just like everyone else. We’re not like African Americans. We think just like everybody else.”

The audio is here; the key bit starts at around the 42 minute mark.

To be clear, Miranda didn’t appear to be saying that African Americans are unlike everyone else in that they don’t think. He seemed to be saying that everyone, including Hispanics, thinks one way on issues, and African Americans think another way. Perhaps Miranda meant otherwise, but this seems clumsy or wacky at best and seems to crudely isolate African Americans as a political group.

Miranda’s group is putting severe pressure on GOPers to follow his group on Sotomayor, though you have to wonder whether they’ll follow his lead if this is what he really thinks.

http://theplumline.whorunsg...

In Sam's latest Weedpatch Gazette (which he has banned dissenting voices from posting in) he makes the following assertion:

Perhaps like me you listen to the prognosticators of a rosy financial scenario out of the Obama camp and get the feeling a whole lot of people are in for a shock of disillusionment.

What Sam fails to point out is that conservatives have criticized the Obama camp not for "rosy" scenarios, but for speaking to the American public of gloom and doom.

Sorry Sam, but you can't have it both ways.

And what's the point of creating a blog if you are merely looking for an echo chamber?  It not only goes against the purpose of a blog, but it stifles the exchange of ideas, something our founding fathers were venomously against.

A spokeswoman for Bobby Jindal says the Louisiana governor didn't intend to imply that an anecdote about battling bureaucrats during Katrina directly involved the governor or took place during the heat of a fight to release rescue boats.

The spokeswoman, Melissa Sellers, said the story Jindal told in his response to Obama actually took place some days later in Lee's office -- though still in Katrina's chaotic aftermath --  as Lee was "recounting" his frustrations with the bureaucracy to someone else on the telephone.

Liberal critics have raised questions about the story, which Jindal told this way:

During Katrina, I visited Sheriff Harry Lee, a Democrat and a good friend of mine. When I walked into his makeshift office I'd never seen him so angry. He was yelling into the phone: 'Well, I'm the Sheriff and if you don't like it you can come and arrest me!' I asked him: 'Sheriff, what's got you so mad?' He told me that he had put out a call for volunteers to come with their boats to rescue people who were trapped on their rooftops by the floodwaters. The boats were all lined up ready to go - when some bureaucrat showed up and told them they couldn't go out on the water unless they had proof of insurance and registration. I told him, 'Sheriff, that's ridiculous.' And before I knew it, he was yelling into the phone: 'Congressman Jindal is here, and he says you can come and arrest him too!' Harry just told the boaters to ignore the bureaucrats and start rescuing people.

"It was days later," Sellers said. "Sheriff Lee was on the phone and the governor came down to visit him. It wasn't that they were standing right down there with the boats."

She said she didn't know who Lee, who died in 2007, was on the phone, about the incident with the boats when the governor described him as yelling into the phone.

UPDATE: I'd initially misunderstood Sellers to be saying Jindal and Lee didn't meet while rescue efforts were still underway. In fact, she said, the conversation took place in the aftermath of the storm, but after the boat incident.

"Bobby and I walked into Harry Lee’s office – he’s yelling on the phone about a decision he’s already made," Jindal chief of staff Timmy Teepell recalled. "He’s saying, 'This is a decision I made, and if you don’t like it you can come and arrest me.'"

Teepell said the exchange took place in the week following Katrina, when Jindal visited Jefferson Parish multiple times.

"He was boots on the ground all the time," he said.

http://www.politico.com/blo...
 

Porn in the USA: Conservatives are biggest consumers

A new nationwide study (pdf) of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states.

However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.

The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least with 1.92 per 1000. "The differences here are not so stark," Edelman says.

Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays – a 1% increase in a postal code's religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds.

Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don't explicitly restrict gay marriage.

Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year's presidential election – Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama.

http://www.newscientist.com...

Since Wayfarer locked his blog, here's the skinny on the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons:

False leprosy claim

The Spring 2005 edition of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons contained an article^[2] by Madeleine Cosman, headlined "Illegal Aliens and American Medicine," claiming, "Suddenly, in the past three years America has more than 7,000 cases of leprosy," citing a 2003 article in the New York Times as a reference. Among news outlets repeating this claim were WorldNetDaily^[3] and CNN anchor Lou Dobbs. In fact, the 7,000 number in the Times article was an apparent reference to all then-current cases of leprosy in the U.S.; according to the National Hansen's Disease Program of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, there have been just 431 reported cases of Hansen's disease (leprosy) over the "past three years."^[4]

Political contributions

Donations to political candidates by the AAPS' political action committee in 2000 and 2004 skewed rightward, with donations given to candidates registered as Republican, Libertarian or with the Constitution Party.^[5][6]

Doctors for Disaster Preparedness

The website for the group Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (DDP) is registered to Jeremy Snavely of AAPS. ^[7] DDP and AAPS also share the same mailing address, in Tucson, Arizona. ^{[8] [9]}

DDP is skeptical of climate change, as the title of their web page on the subject suggests: "Ozone hole, Global warming, and other Environmental Scares." ^[10]

http://www.sourcewatch.org/...

This is what Home Depot's founder Bernie Marcus said on a conference call yesterday:

"If a retailer has not gotten involved with this, if he has not spent money on this election, if he has not sent money to Norm Coleman and these other guys," Mr. Marcus said, apparently referring to Republican senators facing tough re-election fights, then those retailers "should be shot; should be thrown out of their goddamn jobs."

It's nice to know Home Depot supports the death penalty for not supporting their politics.

http://oxdown.firedoglake.c...

No more trips to Home Depot for me.