A few days ago we flagged to your attention that at their convention over the weekend, the NRA asked one of its vendors to take down one of their ‘zombie’ firing range manequins because it was obviously designed to look like President Obama. (The maker also wasn’t shy about admitting the target practice dummies were designed to look like Obama.) And then it turned out that Discovery Channel had used the Obama dummies to pour bullets into during one of their shoot’em up documentaries. We finally heard back from the Discovery Channel folks today. They say they don’t see any resemblance. Don’t know what the problem is.

This is a claim not yet proven. But if it’s true, it’s pretty awful …

Sgt. 1st Class Naida Hosan is not a Muslim — she’s a Catholic. But her name sounded Islamic to fellow U.S. soldiers in Iraq, and they would taunt her, calling her “Sgt. Hussein” and asking what God she prayed to.

So before deploying to Afghanistan last year for her second war tour, she legally changed her name — to Nadia Christian Nova.

This did not solve her problems.

Instead, matters escalated. Nova complained to her superiors about constant anti-Muslim slurs and jokes. She says they responded with a series of reprisals intended to drive her out of the Army, leading her to consider suicide.

Read the rest here.

Heritage Foundation: We didn’t know our immigration expert thinks Hispanics are genetically inferior.

Ex-Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., who pleaded guilty to spending campaign cash on things like Michael Jackson and Van Halen memorabilia, is apparently a heck of a karaoke singer. He’s so good, in fact, that a congresswoman thinks it should be taken into consideration as part of Jackson’s sentencing.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) was flirting with the fringe for a little bit here today. He offered an amendment dealing with guns onto a bill that, of all things, dealt with water resources. The amendment likely would have fueled a conspiracy theory that alleges the Obama administration has been buying up all the nation’s ammo to keep it out of the hands of gun-loving regular folk. But by early this afternoon, he apparently had second thoughts and yanked the amendment.

Let me be the first to say that Republicans in Congress have perfectly good reasons for not wanting to return to “regular order” budgeting, just like Democrats had good reasons for not wanting to pass a budget the past four years and Republicans had good reason during that time to pressure Democrats to return to the “regular order” budgeting they now oppose.

But they’re not reasons anyone’s admitting to, and they’re definitely not evidence one party has a greater commitment to the rules and norms of budgeting than the other. It really all comes down to the fact that Republicans can’t negotiate budget policy without the threat of a debt default looming over the whole process.

They’re not even doing a great job of hiding it. Read More

One of the co-authors of that Heritage Foundation immigration study argued that Hispanics had genetically based intellectual deficits which made it impossible for them ever to match the IQ of whites and that low IQs should be the basis for barring potential immigrants.

We don’t know enough to assign blame on who should have known or done more to rescue those three women held captive in Ariel Castro’s house in Cleveland. We don’t know if anyone, the cops or neighbors, could have done anything more. But this article captures one thread of the story – the neighborhood in question is one just starting to get cleaned up from widespread prostitution and drug dealing. Poking your head around or asking questions about odd or shady-seeming behavior wasn’t necessarily a good idea. And a decent number of homes were all or half boarded up. Here’s the piece.

This comes from the department of dodged bullets or missed opportunities, depending on your predilections. But independent of your point of view it’s a pointed reminder of the deceptiveness of the Romney campaign. Read More

Anderson Cooper interviews Charles Ramsey, the guy who helped free those three women from that house in Cleveland. After the jump … Read More