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Former CIA Deputy Director Phillip Mudd on Sunday told Fox News that Boston bombing suspect Dzokhar Tsarnaev should be charged as a murderer because the crime looked more like the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado than an attack planned by al Qaeda.

During an interview on Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace asked Mudd if there were signs that al Qaeda was behind the Boston Marathon bombing.

"The only fingerprint I've seen might have possible have been ideology, but not operations," Mudd explained. "But every step of the way here was pretty rudimentary. For example, if you look at some of those initial photos, you've got a kid with a hoodie and a cap. If he wants to obscure himself, the hoodie goes on, the cap forward."

"If he had operational training, I want to know who did it because they were amateurs."

Mudd added that he feared that people were being too quick to categorize the crime as terrorism.

"This looks more to me like Columbine than it does al Qaeda," the counter terrorism expert observed. "Two kids who radicalized between themselves in a closed circle go out and commit murder. I would charge these guys as murders, not terrorists."

Wallace pressed Mudd on how he could dismiss the fact that Dzokhar Tsarnaev's brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, spent six months in Russia "where there are a lot of radicals."

"I'm not writing that off," Mudd insisted. "What I'm saying is we want to categorize this... with a simple term, and at looking at the psychology of clusters like this -- which I did for 20 years -- the psychology is not that simple. It's two kids who decided, for whatever ideology, that they wanted to commit murder. And the murder piece is significant as the terrorism piece."

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The founder of a Colorado gun group is looking forward to November's "hunting season" because it will be "time to hunt Democrats."

Dudley Brown, who serves as the executive director of Rocky Mountain Gun Owners and the executive vice president of the National Association for Gun Rights, used some violent rhetoric during a Wednesday interview with NPR about how gun owners would deal with Democrats who supported President Barack Obama's proposal for universal background checks.

"I liken it to the proverbial hunting season," Brown quipped. "We tell gun owners, 'There's a time to hunt deer. And the next election is the time to hunt Democrats.'"

"This is a very Western state with traditional Western values," he pointed out. "And citizens had to have firearms for self-defense, and right now that's still the case."

A 2010 post on Sarah Palin’s Facebook page had placed crosshairs over Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ congressional district only months before the Democratic congresswoman was shot in January of 2011. Palin had said supporters should “reload” and use their votes to “aim for” the Democrat’s defeat.

(h/t: Think Progress)

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We've got stories that continue to come out about voter suppression everywhere from Arizona, to Colorado, to Pennsylvania to you name it, and stories like this one just coming out this week -- Florida 'Glitch' Wipes Out 1000 Early Votes In Black Area.

And this recent news from Ohio where their Secretary of State Jon Husted is doing his best to become the next Katherine Harris or Ken Blackwell -- Last-Minute Ohio Directive Could Trash Legal Votes And Swing The Election.

But never mind all that. If people don't like it that the Republicans are doing their best to keep them from voting or their votes from being counted, well that's too bad according to Mitt Romney's number one neocon fan-girl -- Wash. Post's Jennifer Rubin Dismisses Voter Suppression Concerns As "Sour Grapes".

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From this Saturday's Journal Editorial Report, after the Fox panel members spent some time weighing in on the latest polls and doing their best to get the audience pumped up about Mitt Romney's so-called "momentum" in the national poll and playing a portion of the President talking about Willard's "Romesia," the WSJ's Dorothy Rabinowitz decided to play the "angry black man" card to attack President Obama.

FREEMAN: But the other issue is, look, this is a well known incumbent late in the race. He's probably persuaded most of the people he's going to persuade and I think his campaign speeches now are telling you that, because it is a very fiercely partisan, ideological message that he's delivering as he travels to these swing states. He is not talking to independents.

GIGOT: Let's get a clip of that. We want to give an illustration of what James just pointed out.

(VIDEO)

OBAMA: It turns out it's not a five-point plan Governor Romney has got, it's a one-point plan:  Folks at the very top get to play by their own rules -- pay lower tax rates than you do, outsource more jobs, let Wall Street run wild.  And if this plan sounds familiar, it's because we tried it. […]

Now, Governor Romney knows this.  He knows his plan isn't any different than the policies that led to the Great Recession.  So in the final weeks of his election, he's counting on you forgetting what he stands for.  He's hoping that you, too, will come down with a case of what we like to call Romnesia.

(END VIDEO)

GIGOT: Romnesia. I've got it. You've got it, so what's ahhh... what do you think of that?

RABINOWITZ: Well, what we think of it is, what are we looking at here? We have to acknowledge, the President is a very angry man. That has been there evidently in the past, since that debate, all along...

GIGOT: But you know what Dorothy, here's the thing, he's always been such a cool customer. That's been his great appeal to so many people. It helped him in 2008 with John McCain. […] You're saying this is a different Obama we're seeing?

RABINOWITZ: Yes. When the sun is shining, reality is very different. What happened is that we heard the mantra for a long time now, we always knew this was going to be a close race. Well, maybe his handlers did, but Obama never did. You have to believe inside that you always thought that, but now, came Denver, he began to understand, this is reality. He is in danger of losing and everything that supported him, all of that sense of vast crowds – imagine what happened yesterday in Colorado.

If you took a look at Mitt Romney's immense crowds, that evokes the same, tremendous passion that Obama had, only it was Mitt Romney winning. So you have this enraged President and it comes out he can't stop, just as Biden could not stop, he cannot stop behaving inappropriately.

Ah yes, that "enraged President." Doesn't everyone see just how "unhinged" he is on the campaign trail, waging "class warfare" by daring to point out what Mitt Romney's policies are? The nerve of him. Par for the course, it's another day of upside down land and major projection of Romney's worst traits onto President Obama in Fox GOPTV land.

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Although former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson is gaining in the polls and is expected to be on the ballot in all 50 states as third-party presidential candidate, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus insisted on Sunday that the libertarian was a "non-factor."

During an interview with Priebus on CNN, host Candy Crowley noted that 4 percent of Colorado voters recently said they planned to vote for a third-party candidate.

"The conventional wisdom is that he's going to draw from Mitt Romney," Crowley explained. "And it makes a difference in Colorado, it makes a difference in Virginia, it will make a difference in North Carolina."

"It doesn't worry me," Priebus replied. "I think people understand that they're not going to throw their vote away when we have an election here that's about the future of America."

"We don't have a third-party candidate that's anywhere near the popularity of Ross Perot or John Anderson," he added. "I just don't see that happening. In fact, I see that it's almost a non-factor. And so, I'm not worried about it."

A recent Gravis Marketing/Capitol Correspondent poll found Johnson had support from over 10 percent of voters in Ohio, reducing Romney's support by over 6 percent.

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Republicans love to complain about voter fraud, but it seems when there are real problems with rigged elections, actual voter fraud or voter suppression, it's almost always their side that's doing it -- RNC Cuts Off Firm Over Voter Registration Fraud Allegations:

The Republican National Committee has ended its relationship with Strategic Allied Consulting, a firm it paid at least $2.9 million to register voters in several states this year, after investigators launched a probe into potentially fraudulent registration forms submitted by the company.

NBC reported on Thursday that the RNC dropped the firm after a Florida elections official referred more than 100 questionable voter registration forms to investigators.

“We’ve made it clear we’re not doing business with these guys anymore,” RNC spokesman Sean Spicer told NBC’s Michael Isikoff. “We’ve come out pretty strong against this kind of stuff — and we have zero tolerance for this.”

The firm, NBC reports, is run by GOP consultant Nathan Sproul, who has not responded to TPM’s requests for comment. Sproul’s other firm, Lincoln Strategy Group, has been paid by Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.

And here's more from Isikoff's report at NBC -- RNC cuts ties with firm over voter fraud allegations:

Continue reading »

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In yet another shining example of why The Five is probably one of the most IQ lowering hours of propaganda on television today, Fox news model Kimberly Guilfoyle compared Sandra Fluke to a political opportunist, and Greg Gutfeld compared her to a Chick-fil-A employee on this Wednesday's show.

Because we all know that Guilfoyle knows absolutely nothing about political opportunism. And a random idiot no one had ever heard of before this week attacking a restaurant employee and putting it on You Tube is exactly the same as Rush Limbaugh launching an national attack on Fluke.

If anyone is wondering what got Fox back on the attack of Sandra Fluke, it's because she dared to introduce President Obama at a campaign event this week in Colorado. If Republicans think that Democrats are done hitting them over the "war on women" and going after women's access to health care and reproductive services, or the fact that no one in the Republican party is willing to stand up to their misogynist in chief, Rush Limbaugh, I think they're sadly mistaken.

Watching The Five try to mount a response to that and the Obama campaign's willingness to put Sandra Fluke back out there is pretty pathetic to say the least. If using a Chick-fil-A employee is the best they can come up with to counter Fluke out on the campaign trail for President Obama, I think they're in trouble.

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Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on Sunday said that even "handheld rocket launchers" could be considered legal under his interpretation of the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment.

In the wake of a massacre in Colorado that left 12 dead and 58 wounded, host Chris Wallace asked Scalia if the Constitution would support assault-type AR-15 rifles and 100-round clips.

The justice explained that under his principle of originalism, some limitations on weapons were possible. Fox example, laws to restrict people from carrying a "head axe" would be constitutional because it was a misdemeanor when the Constitution was adopted in the late 1700s.

"What about these technological limitations?" Wallace wondered. "Obviously, we're not now talking about a handgun or a musket, we're talking about a weapon that can fire a hundred shots in a minute."

"We'll see," Scalia replied. "Obviously the amendment does not apply to arms that can not be carried. It's to 'keep and bear' so it doesn't apply to cannons."

"But I suppose there are handheld rocket launchers that can bring down airplanes that will have to -- it's will have to be decided," he added.

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Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol on Sunday broke with fellow conservatives and backed restrictions the sales of "assault weapons" like the AR-15 that was allegedly used to kill at least 12 people and wound 58 others in Aurora, Colorado last week.

"People have a right to handguns and hunting rifles," Kristol told Fox News host Chris Wallace. "I don't think they have a right to semi-automatic, quasi-machine guns that can be used to shoot a hundred bullets at a time."

"And I actually think the Democrats are being foolish as they're being cowardly," he added. "I think there is more support for some moderate forms of gun control if they separated clearly from a desire to take away everyone's handguns or rifles."

"And you could put more pressure on moderate Republicans than people think. It's not as if Republicans from New York and Illinois and California couldn't -- that President Obama couldn't do what President Clinton did and put pressure on them [to pass an assault weapons ban]. President Obama on this one is just unwilling to take a strong stance."

But tea-party backed Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) on Sunday argued that 100-round ammunition magazines and AR-15 assault rifles like the ones used in Aurora are "basic freedoms" that are protected by the Constitution.

“The left always uses the term ‘assault rifle,’ and they’re really talking about semi-automatic weapons that are used in hunting,” Johnson explained. "These are rifles that are used in hunting. Just the fact of the matter is this is really not an issue of guns. This is about sick people doing things you simply can’t prevent. It’s really an issue of freedom.”

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Tea party-backed Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) says that the right to own high-capacity ammunitions magazines like the 100-round drum that was used to kill at least a dozen people in Colorado last week is a "basic freedom" that is protected by the U.S. Constitution.

Fox News host Chris Wallace on Sunday asked Johnson why people needed military-grade weapons like the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and large ammunition clips used by the shooter in Aurora, Colorado where at least 12 were killed and 58 were wounded.

"The left always uses the term 'assault rifle,' and they're really talking about semi-automatic weapons that are used in hunting," Johnson explained. "That's what happens in Wisconsin. These are rifles that are used in hunting. Just the fact of the matter is this is really not an issue of guns. This is about sick people doing things you simply can't prevent. It's really an issue of freedom."

"Does something that would limit magazines that can carry 100 rounds, would that infringe on the constitutional right?" Wallace wondered.

"I believe so," Johnson insisted. "There are magazines -- 30-round magazines -- that are just common all over the place. You simply can't keep these weapons out of the hands of sick, demented individuals that want to do harm."

"I would be very surprised if hunters in your state hunted with a 100-round ammunition feeding device," Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) disagreed. "In the bill I did, we exempted 375 rifles and shotguns by name so that no weapon used for hunting was effected at all. It's just the military-style assault weapons."

"But the result of that ban, it didn't solve any problems," Johnson insisted. "I look at the statistics and say it has no measurable effect. You can actually argue that it made matters worse. But I don't want to get into statistics. We are talking about basic freedoms."

In fact, Johnson would have likes to have seen more people armed in that Aurora theater.

"It's certainly one of the rationales behind concealed carry, where criminals actually had to be a little concerned before they commit a criminal act that maybe somebody could stop them," Johnson told Wallace. "And I think that is the truth, that if somebody -- a responsible individual -- had been carrying a weapon that maybe, maybe it could have prevented some of those deaths, some of those injuries. I mean, that's just the truth."

"And maybe you could have had a fire fight and killed many more people," Feinstein pointed out.