Another place to cut government spending: Obama Labor Department spending millions to help establish unions worldwide

Why should our government be funding union activity in the US let alone the rest of the world?  From Fox News:

. . . The bureau for the past several years has purportedly made numerous awards -- worth millions of dollars -- to the United Nations, the Solidarity Center and other similar groups, “whose stated objective is to help establish labor unions in foreign countries," the senators said. 

They also said the bureau recently awarded a Colombian labor organization $1.5 million to help workers improve their collective bargaining rights and $2.2 million to the Solidarity Center, an AFL-CIO organization, to strengthen unions in Haiti and Peru. 

In addition, the bureau purportedly awarded a $1.5 million grant to an international development company in 2011 to assist labor unions in Vietnam engage in collective bargaining, the lawmakers said.  . . .

'Duck Dynasty' Tops all Wednesday's cable and broadcast series in the much desired 18 to 49 demo

Pretty amazing that this show was the top rated TV show in the most desired demo on Wednesday.

Duck Dynasty shows no signs of slowing. The A&E series' season finale drew a record 9.6 million viewers during its one-hour episode -- and an equally impressive 5.5 million adults 18-49. 

That haul in the key demo puts it ahead of all of cable and broadcast offerings for the night -- including American Idol. Duck Dynasty's 4.3 rating with adults 18-49 rating tops the preliminary showing for Idol (3.2 rating) by 34 percent. . . .  

In the network's adults 25-54 demo, Duck Dynasty outperformed its 18-49 showing with an average 5.5 million viewers. It also raked in 2.6 million adults 18-34. . . .

That show gives me some hope given how strongly the stars in the show are against gun control.  It is nice to see these stars giving President Obama a trashing on the issue.

“Hey, look here, the President was just on the news about gun control, but hey, luckily our congressmen and senators, they voted it down. But look, America hasn’t got a gun control problem, we have got a sin control problem. Nothing has changed with the human race, OK? We’re a bunch of flawed people, OK? And Duck Dynasty, look here, Duck Dynasty is full of flawed people that have turned to Jesus, OK? That’s the difference.” . . .

Remember those claims that 90% of Americans wanted the Senate background check bill to pass?: Well, it was clearly wrong

Despite assurances by the likes of Nate Silver that these are solid polls showing "Overwhelming majorities of 80 to 90 percent of the public say they favor background checks," I have previously noted my skepticism of these claims.  To me, it wasn't too surprising that the Senate voted down the gun control bill about 10 days ago.  My concern is that people were really just being asked about whether they wanted to keep criminals from getting guns, not about the particular legislation being voted on by the Senate.  Well, now there is another poll by the PEW Research Center that I think is much more accurate.  It asks people whether they are happy that the Senate gun control bill was stopped.  Apparently, both Republicans and Independents are generally happy that it was stopped.  My guess is that Republicans should pay a lot more attention to what Independents and Republicans wanted than Democrats who would never have voted for the Republicans anyway.  It looks to me that Republicans voted the way that their constituents wanted.  So Republicans shouldn't really care that among all voters the poll showed support of 47 to 39 percent.  They should look at the results by political affiliation.

Many, such as the New York Times, paint a picture of Senators who both simultaneously opposed the will of 90 percent of their voters and at the same time quake in fear of the NRA. Here is a piece by Joe Nocera at the New York Times on April 19th:

The four Democrats — along with many Republicans — quake in fear of the National Rifle Association. In 1994, Baucus voted in favor of the assault rifle ban — and then nearly lost his re-election bid. He never again stood up to the N.R.A. Yes, his phones were undoubtedly jammed this week. Still, it seemed to me that his unanswered phone was a potent symbol. I could almost picture him cowering in his office, waiting for us to stop asking why he sold the country down the river. . . .

Note in Baucus' case, he is retiring and yet he still voted against the so-called "universal background check" bill.  Might Mr. Nocera re-examine his piece?

The one US Senator who gun control advocates claim has been hurt by her opposition to the Senate gun control bill is Kelly Ayotte (see also here, though one will note that six months and a lot of other things have occurred since the last approval rating poll for Senator Ayotte).  Yet, it is interesting that the Democratic controlled state House of Representatives in New Hampshire isn't passing new gun control either.  From the New Hampshire Union Leader:

"NH State House Unmoved by Newtown Shootings" was the headline of a Patch.com story about a recent gathering of "area gun violence experts," hosted by the Portsmouth Democratic Party (of course) and including a representative of States United to Prevent Gun Violence, at the Portsmouth Public Library. 

A more accurate headline would have read, "Portsmouth Gun Control Panel Unmoved by Reality." 

According to the story, the "gun lobby" is so strong in New Hampshire that it will be next to impossible for anti-gun politicians to pass "universal background checks," allegedly making massacres like the Newtown tragedy more likely in this state. . . .

A collection of polls on gun issues is available here.

Other tangentially related material

By the way, the Nate Silver analysis of how Senators would vote on the Manchin-Toomey bill has some major problems, he uses a very unreliable measure of gun ownership from Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (it shows among the lowest gun ownership rates of any survey that I know of).  If you use a bad survey, you get a lot of noise and it makes it more likely that you won't get a statistically significant result.  I also like the way he runs a regression after the fact rather than predicting how people were going to vote before the Senate vote.  Letting him play around with different factors (we have no idea how many regressions that he ran before he decided to report the one that he did) makes the predictive power of that regression pretty useless.

UPDATE: Democratic polling firm Public Policy Polling (PPP) claims to find drop in support for five Senators, but for some of these polls the time since the last poll has been over six months, though a couple of others have just been since February.   

UPDATE: Obama's approval rating on guns has also fallen.  As one headline put it, "Obama's Approval Rating on Gun Control Plummets."  Here is part of the June 4th article:

Nearly half of voters think President Obama's doing a poor job at handling gun control, according to a Rasmussen Reports poll released Tuesday. Only 37 percent of voters give Obama positive reviews for the way he's handling gun control as opposed to the 46 percent of voters who give him a poor rating.  

The president's poor approval numbers have been climbing over the past few months. They were 34 percent in February and have climbed 13 points since then. . . .

The New York Times misses the real academic fraud: How academic research is biased towards finding statistically significant results that aren't really there

Suppose that you do an experiment and you don't get the "desired results." So you redo the experiment again and you get the "right" results.  Do you just report those results?  It seems that many commonly practice this.  The problem is that if you were to do an experiment many times, but only publish the one experiment that works, you have to adjust the statistical significance for the number of times that you redid the experiment.  Suppose that you did the experiment 10 times and that one time you got results that were significant at the 10 percent level.  Pretty obviously, you really didn't get statistically significant results.  The New York Times in its discussion of Stapel's fraudulent research doesn't seem to understand this problem.  Given that the others in psychology that were interviewed apparently view this as standard practice and assuming that is indeed the correct implication that they are giving, it means to me that the research in psychology is usually fraudulent.

Obviously there is a bias towards publishing research with statistically significant results in journals, and this bias creates the wrong incentives for academic authors.  But it raises the question what if anything one can learn from most academic research.  (BTW, it is one reason that I often try to publish redoing the different combination of control variables in my regressions.)  From the New York Times:

In one experiment conducted with undergraduates recruited from his class, Stapel asked subjects to rate their individual attractiveness after they were flashed an image of either an attractive female face or a very unattractive one. The hypothesis was that subjects exposed to the attractive image would — through an automatic comparison — rate themselves as less attractive than subjects exposed to the other image. 

The experiment — and others like it — didn’t give Stapel the desired results, he said. He had the choice of abandoning the work or redoing the experiment. . . .

"MIDDLE SCHOOL’S ANTI-BULLYING ACTIVITY: GIRLS ASKED TO KISS GIRLS"

From the Illinois Review:

. . . School administrators . . . held a bullying-prevention workshop for students at Linden Avenue Middle School during which the college facilitators asked girls to kiss girls. 

When confronted by angry parents who were not notified ahead of time about this activity, Principal Dr. Katie Zahedi claimed that “the sessions were…about saying no to unwanted advances….In planning the discussion, we made it clear that absolutely no discussion of any sexual acts is appropriate to middle school, and they used the examples of a kiss….It was…ultimately about respect and safety.” . . .

Here is a marginally related story.

A Riverton High School math teacher and coach of the sophomore girls' basketball team has been arrested and charged with raping a [female] student. . . .

Two figures from my book "At the Brink"

California retroactively increases taxes all the way back to 2008

I can understand why these businessmen thought that their accounts had misread the tax law.  This is just too unbelievable.  What do you think that this will do to people's willingness to invest in California in the future?  From The Hill newspaper:

The state’s tax officials have announced that they are retroactively canceling a tax incentive for startup companies in the state, and now presenting those companies with tax bills that date back to 2008 – plus interest. 

If that sounds like a declaration of war on entrepreneurs in the Golden State, you wouldn’t be far off as far as Brian Overstreet is concerned. 

Overstreet is the tech entrepreneur widely credited with having broken the story on a holiday season decision by the California Franchise Tax Board (FTB) to retroactively rescind a tax program that had incentivized companies to stay and grow in the state. The FTB about face was driven by a court decision that said the tax incentive was inappropriately granted only to companies with 80% of their assets in California. . . .  

“If you followed the law, did nothing wrong, and created jobs in California, you received a legal reduction in the state tax on capital gains you paid when you sold your company.” Overstreet explained to me. “Now, five years later, you get a bill for new taxes plus interest for up to five years.” . . .

Gun control push not going away: "Senators Quietly Seeking New Path on Gun Control"

Admittedly, given that this is from the New York Times, it might not be something that one wants to put much weight on, but it is still a warning that one should be careful about:

Talks to revive gun control legislation are quietly under way on Capitol Hill as a bipartisan group of senators seeks a way to bridge the differences that led to last week’s collapse of the most serious effort to overhaul the country’s gun laws in 20 years. . . .

Meanwhile Vice President Biden promises:

"For the first time ever, you have people who are for gun safety, for increasing background checks," Biden said. "Two out of three of them say it will be a major determining factor in how I vote. That's the political dynamic that has changed. So I think we're going to get this anyway. I think this will pass before the year is out, within this Congress." . . .

Earlier Senator Harry Reid made this promise:

"Make no mistake, this debate is not over," Reid, D-Nev., said Thursday after lawmakers voted down a string of amendments to the bill. "In fact, this fight is just beginning." . . .Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said the bill is not dead, though it might have to be altered."Either through the fury of constituents who were wronged yesterday or by revisions to the bill, we will try to bring this back up," Murphy said. . . . 

UPDATE: "Manchin says he's working to get another Senate vote on gun background check" 

. . . Manchin told “Fox News Sunday” that he’s going to rework the proposal to get it back to the Senate floor.
“We’re going to work this bill with all of our hearts,” he told Fox News. . . .
On Friday, Toomey said he had no plans to revive the proposal.
"My own view is very simple: The Senate has had its vote. We've seen the outcome of that vote. I am not aware of any reason to believe that if we had the vote again that we'd have a different outcome," he said, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Manchin told Fox: “I don’t think he’s done.” . . .
Senate Majority Harry Reid said days after the defeat of the Manchin-Toomey proposal that he has “hit pause” on efforts to pass comprehensive gun-control legislation.
He said last week the proposal remains a work in progress but no action is being taken now.

The full transcript of the Fox News Sunday interview is available here.

Apple might have $145 Billion in cash, but tax laws are forcing it to borrow money

Apple has huge amounts of cash, but they can't get at the money without paying a large tax penalty.  So the tax law is forcing Apple to borrow a large amount of money that it shouldn't have to borrow.  From Buzzfeed:

The most interesting part of Apple's earnings report wasn't its $43.6 billion in revenue or $9.5 billion in net profit. Nor was it the 37.4 million iPhones and 19.5 million iPads sold over the last three months. It was the fact that, despite having just under $145 billion in cash and short-term marketable securities on its balance sheet, the company plans to borrow money by issuing debt for the first time in its history. 

Apple did not specify how much it planned to borrow, saying only that it "expects to announce more details about this in the near future." Sure, the company needs to find money to fund the extra $50 billion it plans to spend on share buybacks by 2015, which at a total of $60 billion makes it the largest single share repurchase program in corporate history. It also needs more money for its 15% dividend increase to $3.05 per share. . . . 

"Seventy percent of Apple's cash is overseas and would be taxed if they brought it home to buyback stock," said BTIG analyst Walter Piecyk. . . .

Obama morns victims of Boston Bombing with only a White House photographer present

Does this strike one as being extremely contrived and artificial?  This seems ripe for a SNL skit to poke fun at this self importance.  From Politico:

Tuesday morning, a peculiar announcement trickled out of the White House press office: President Barack Obama would be holding a moment of silence for the victims of the Boston bombings. At the White House. By himself. No press or other intruders allowed.

Except the White House photographer.

That Obama assumed Americans would want an iconic photo of him privately mourning the victims of the bombings was emblematic of a kind of hubris that has enveloped the president and his White House as the president commences his second term. . . .

Debating Geraldo Rivera and Brady Campaign's Dan Gross on Obama's Background Check proposals

The audio of the discussion is available here.

General Electric cuts of loans to Gun Shops: Was there Obama administration influence?

Given how closely General Electric is linked to the Obama administration and the massive government subsidies that it receives, why doesn't anyone in the media try figuring out if their refusal to give loans to gun companies is related to GE trying to please to the Obama administration.

General Electric Co.  is quietly cutting off lending to gun shops, as the company rethinks its relationship to firearms amid the fallout from the school shooting in Newtown, Conn. 

This month, Glenn Duncan, owner of Duncan's Outdoor Store in Bay City, Mich., said he received a letter from GE Capital Retail Bank in which the lender said it had made "the difficult decision" to stop providing financing services to his store. Other gun dealers have received similar notices. . . .

While your planes are late because of the sequester, remember how Obama is selectively cutting spending

Those working on Obamacare are apparently being exempt from the budget cuts.  From The Hill newspaper:

The office implementing most of President Obama's healthcare law is not furloughing its workers as a result of sequestration, its director said Wednesday.
Gary Cohen, director of the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, said Wednesday that his office has not cut its workers' hours and pay as a result of the automatic budget cuts that went into effect in March.
Republicans have accused the Obama administration of politicizing the sequester by targeting highly visible programs like airport security and White House tours.
The fact that ObamaCare officials haven't been furloughed shows that the cuts are political, Rep. Greg Harper (R-Miss.) said Wednesday.
"We're talking about at least a 15 percent furlough of current air-traffic controllers, resulting in delays and perhaps safety concerns, but yet this has been a selective political item by the administration," Harper said. . . .

First note that during the air traffic controller striking during the Reagan administration, administrators were able to step in and they kept the planes flying.  Yet, today with a much smaller reduction in number of workers, we have hours of delays.  In addition, note that all airports are not facing the same impact from air traffic control cuts.  If you are going to make the cuts in air traffic control, it seems to me that the efficient thing to do would be to cut so that each place faces the same delays.  That way you could actually reduce total delays.

The chief of the FAA told Congress today that Washington-area airports will largely escape the effects of the air traffic controller furloughs — a blessing for lawmakers who fly out of the nation’s capitol. 

Michael Huerta, head of the Federal Aviation Administration, told a congressional panel that the Washington region’s airports are spaced out enough and have enough spare capacity that furloughs to air traffic controllers won’t hurt as much here. . . .

UPDATE: Even the Chicago Tribune finds that Obama wants to make the sequester cuts as painful as possible.

. . . So, what could the administration do to make a reduction of barely 1 percent of actual federal outlays — less than $45 billion of this year's roughly $3.8 trillion — turn citizens against Republicans who oppose more tax increases? Easy, or so the president's men and women figured: Cue the air controller furloughs! Let's stall some flights on the tarmac!
Sure enough, travel delays have followed. We're less certain, though, that this hostage-taking will cut the way the White House expects: The scheme relies on citizens being — how to put this delicately? — stupid enough to think that the Federal Aviation Administration can't find a more flier-friendly way to save $600 million. 

To believe that, though: 

• Americans would have to ignore the plan that U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., delivered in early March to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, detailing how LaHood's FAA could save twice that amount — $1.2 billion. 

• Americans would have to ignore House Republicans who note that LaHood's supposedly destitute FAA is spending some $500 million on consultants — and $300 million on travel and supplies. 

• And Americans would have to ignore Democrats' refusal to accept congressional Republicans' offer to give the administration more flexibility in sequester cuts — an offer House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., reiterated during a meeting Monday with the Tribune editorial board. No, the White House doesn't want flexibility. The White House wants what the president predicted March 1. . . . . 

Are the Boy Scout's policies and statements consistent on homosexuality?

Whatever one's views on people who are openly gay being allowed in the Scouts, my question is whether they are being consistent.  If the Boy Scouts of America are really just wanting the policy regarding homosexuality to apply to those members under 18 years of age, why does the organization continue to explaining the concerns over male homosexuals supervising young boys is not objectionable?

The BSA also consulted four experts in the field of child sex abuse prevention. The four conveyed a “nearly universal opinion” within their field that homosexuality is not a risk factor for the sexual abuse of children. . . .

Senators and Congressmen want an exemption from Obamacare

What is it Obamacare that Senators and Congressmen don't want it to apply to them?  One thing is clear that neither Democratic nor Republican politicians in Washington want the new regulations to apply to them.  Well, guess what?  Apparently Democrats have discovered that Obamacare will be very expensive.  From Politico:

Congressional leaders in both parties are engaged in high-level, confidential talks about exempting lawmakers and Capitol Hill aides from the insurance exchanges they are mandated to join as part of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, sources in both parties said. 

The talks — which involve Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), the Obama administration and other top lawmakers — are extraordinarily sensitive, with both sides acutely aware of the potential for political fallout from giving carve-outs from the hugely controversial law to 535 lawmakers and thousands of their aides. Discussions have stretched out for months, sources said. . . . 

There is concern in some quarters that the provision requiring lawmakers and staffers to join the exchanges, if it isn’t revised, could lead to a “brain drain” on Capitol Hill, as several sources close to the talks put it. 

The problem stems from whether members and aides set to enter the exchanges would have their health insurance premiums subsidized by their employer — in this case, the federal government. If not, aides and lawmakers in both parties fear that staffers — especially low-paid junior aides — could be hit with thousands of dollars in new health care costs, prompting them to seek jobs elsewhere. Older, more senior staffers could also retire or jump to the private sector rather than face a big financial penalty. . . . 

Please explain why New York State law bans one of these guns and not the other

West Virginia Boy returns to school after being arrested for wearing NRA t-shirt

Another bizarre zero tolerance example.  It seems clear that the point of terrorizing school children over guns is to traumatize them about guns.  From Fox News:

A West Virginia teenager who was arrested and suspended from school after he refused to remove an NRA T-shirt is back in class.
Fourteen-year-old Jared Marcum of Logan returned to Logan Middle School on Monday after serving a one-day suspension.
His father, Allen Lardieri, told 13 News that the situation was exaggerated and said, "I don't see how anybody would have an issue with a hunting rifle and NRA put on a T-shirt, especially when policy doesn’t forbid it."
The school district's dress code prohibits any profanity, violence, discriminatory messages, but the report noted that gun images are not on the list. . . .

Cheltenham Township man uses AR-15 to defend himself from criminal breaking into his house

A many who was already facing charges of aggravated assault broke into this home.  From the Philly Inquirer.

An Elkins Park man was killed late Friday after he forced his way into a stranger’s apartment in Cheltenham Township.Jasper Brisbon, 32, wandered up to a couple late Friday at the Lynnewood Apartments as the pair spoke outside their unit. . . .
But as they entered their home Brisbon jumped between them, forcing his way in.
The male of the couple ran to get a semi-automatic AR-15 rifle and insisted Brisbon leave. Brisbon refused. Instead, as the man yelled “Stop! Stop Stop!” Brisbon moved menacingly toward the man, police said.
The man fired a shot striking Brisbon in the torso and immediately called 911, police said.
An ambulance rushed Brisbon to Abington Memorial Hospital where doctors pronounced him dead. . . .
Police said the residents of the apartment . . . did not know Brisbon and that the AR-15 was legally purchased. 

Massachusetts' strict gun control laws apparently didn't stop the Tamerlan or Dzhokhar Tsarnaev from getting guns

The Massachusetts' gun control law may be associated with higher violent crime rates, but it didn't stop the Tsarnaev brothers from getting ahold of guns.  From Politico:

The two brothers suspected of bombing the Boston Marathon and engaging in a massive firefight with police last week weren’t licensed to own guns, according to a report. 

Cambridge, Mass., police told Reuters they had not issued a gun license to 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died after the firefight. The police departments in both Cambridge and Dartmouth said they didn’t issue 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev a firearms identification card, which would’ve allowed him to own rifles holding less than 10 rounds and shotguns. Dzhokhar, who is under 21, wasn’t eligible for a regular handgun license. . . .

Yet, the number of legal gun owners has fallen from 1.54 million to just over 200,000.  The main point though is that murder and violent crime rates have gone up.

Soros funded Florida Center for Investigative Reporting claims: "As Firearm Ownership Rises, Florida Gun Murders Increasing"

George Soros has funded the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, and you can see how they report the data in the most biased possible ways.  Eric Barton with the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting writes:

Murders by firearms have increased dramatically in the state since 2000, when there were 499 gun murders, according to data from Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Gun murders have since climbed 38 percent — with 691 murders committed with guns in 2011. 

Only partial numbers are available for 2012, but from January to June, there were 479 murders in Florida — 358 of them committed with a gun. That’s an 8 percent increase in gun murders compared to the same period in 2011. 

Guns are now the weapons of choice in 75 percent of all homicides in Florida. That’s up from 56 percent in 2000. . . . .

Note that they could also have looked at robberies and aggravated assault rates with guns and they would have seen drops of 23 and 11 percent respectively.  If they had looked at murder rates with guns, those rose by 16 percent, versus the rate that they reported that didn't adjust for population growth of 38 percent.  Given that crimes can be deterred with guns, it seems to me that one will want to look at primarily at total murders, robberies and aggravated assaults.

Even more interestingly, gun sales have soared in Florida since 2008 and all the rates, both with and with out guns, fell since then.  The crime data is available here.

Unfortunately, mainstream newspapers such as the Miami Herald and the Lakeland Ledger pick up this report.

The claim that the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting is funded by Soros is found at various places including this piece in the Lakeland Times:

Take a look at the fast-growing number of Soros-funded centers - they are blooming everywhere, like tulips in the spring, the Colorado Center for Investigative Reporting, the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, the Philippines Center for Investigative Journalism and on and on - and even a cursory look at the selected subjects shows an amazing similarity. . . .

UPDATE: The FCIR lists funding sources here.

Note however that Soros and his OSI have given money to the Center on Media, Crime and Justice and that the Fund for Investigative Journalism has received money from Soros.  I assume that there are other ways that Soros has given money to FCIR, but this seems enough to me.

National Journal doesn't believe Obama's prediction that gun vote will help Democrats in 2014

My guess is that how these politicians vote is a lot better predictor of what the voters want than these biased polls.  From Josh Kraushaar at the National Journal:

. . . Yet, despite the embarrassing setback, Obama nonetheless argued that he still held the upper hand, politically: “If this Congress refuses to listen to the American people and pass commonsense gun legislation, then the real impact is going to have to come from the voters.”  That couldn’t misread the political environment heading into 2014 anymore. That’s the audacity of mope. 

Put simply, the 2014 Senate elections will be fought predominantly on the very turf that is most inhospitable to gun control–Southern and Mountain West conservative states. It’s no coincidence that three of the four Democrats who opposed the Toomey-Manchin bill are facing difficult reelections in 2014 and presumably are attuned to the sentiments of their constituents. Blame the National Rifle Association for the bill’s failure, but the lobby is feeding into already deeply held opposition to gun regulations and a broader sense of anxiety about the president’s and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s intentions–particularly given the president’s past publicized remark about “bitter” rural voters who “cling to their guns and religion.”  It doesn’t take much for the gun-rights crowd, significant in these states, to jump to inaccurate conclusions given that history. 

And how do the White House or allied groups plan on punishing gun-control opponents? The notion of challenging the Second Amendment Democrats is as fanciful as it is self-defeating. Democratic primary voters in the deep South have significantly different views on gun rights than their coastal counterparts. Even if they support expanded background checks, the chance of landing a candidate running a one-issue campaign against brand-name Democrats like Mark Pryor and Mark Begich defies common sense. Three years ago in Arkansas, liberals poured their money and manpower in to defeat former Sen. Blanche Lincoln in a primary with the state’s lieutenant governor. Even though Lincoln was unpopular in the state–later losing reelection to Republican Sen. John Boozman by 21 points–she fended off the challenge. . . .

Some notes on the recent polling here and here.  The Hill newspaper goes on about how thankful the Democrats are to getting the gun control debate behind them.

Democrats in Congress have quickly changed the subject from gun control to immigration reform and are relieved to be moving past an issue that divided them to more solid political ground. 

The political momentum from the resounding victories of Election Day stalled earlier in the week when Republicans punched out all three pillars of Obama’s gun-control agenda. . . .

Chris Wallace at 1:18 into this video asks whether people in Boston wished that they had guns for protection

Given how Wallace treated those who opposed additional gun control regulations during the recent debate, Wallace is showing some balance here.

Obama Administration admits that the Miranda decision does make it harder to convict criminals

If you really think that that Miranda makes it harder to find out information from a criminal and convict them as the Obama administration implies here, doesn't that imply that Obama believes that Miranda resulted in higher crime rates?

Rand Paul: The Only Way To Stop These Shootings Is To End Gun Free Zones

I really wish that Rand Paul didn't make the claim that all these initial denials were real dangerous people.  As I have pointed out, this claim is simply wrong (more detailed links and discuss is available here).  On the other hand, at 2:30 into the video he questions gun free zones.

Unfortunately, Senator Ted Cruz makes the same error here (see at 1:49 into the video).