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A Fox News guest on Tuesday warned that a Democratic plan to expand gun background checks would allow the Ku Klux Klan to control black people and keep firearms out of the hands of women who had an abortion.

Conservative columnist Star Parker told Fox News host Sean Hannity that she had created a web advertisement linking KKK lynchings to gun control because "the Democrats in the Senate are insistent on passing background check laws."

"I thought it appropriate to remind Americans that we've been here before," she explained. "How is it that 5 percent of the population, the KKK -- six million people in a country of more than 100 million -- how is it that 5 percent were able to wreak havoc over 4 million new citizens, the former slaves? And one of the ways is because they systematically -- the Democrats in power, the Democrats in political power in the South -- systematically passed gun control laws in black code so that blacks would not be able to exercise their right to bear arms."

"Do you think that is the motive of some people now?" Hannity wondered.

"Come on, these are same Democrats that gave us Obamacare," Parker insisted. "Let me tell you something about this background check discussion that we don't get to ask about, how do we know what those qualifiers are going to be?"

"Because they're saying if you've had any mental problem in your background, well, does that mean that their going to ask questions about abortion?" she added. "Because people who have had abortion, according to studies, have a tendency to have mental challenges later on."

As Media Matters noted on Tuesday, a 2008 American Psychological Association task force found "no credible evidence" that "having a single abortion causes mental health problems."

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CNN media critic Howard Kurtz on Sunday said that Fox News host Sean Hannity had "surrendered the high ground" when he followed up an explosive interview with Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) by comparing the African-American congressman to a white supremacist hate group.

In an interview last week, Ellison had appeared on Hannity's show and blasted the Fox News host for being "the worst excuse for a journalist I’ve ever seen.”

Hannity responded two days later by linking Ellison to the controversial Nation of Islam and black militant Khalid Muhammad, whom he said wanted to “kill the women, everything white that’s in sight — kill the women, kill the babies, kill the children, kill the old people.”

The conservative host continued by saying that the Democratic lawmaker was the "equivalent" of the Ku Klux Klan.

“Do we have somebody then in Congress that is the equivalent on one side what the Klan is?” Hannity asked. “Because I view the rabid rantings of Khalid Muhammad as frightening.”

On Sunday, Kurtz noted that Ellison had made a mistake because "Hannity's not a journalist, he's a conservative commentator."

"What was troubling here was Ellison accepted the invitation to come on and then seemed only interested in attacking Hannity," the CNN host argued. "But I do have to deduct points over what Hannity did later in the week: He attacked Ellison, who is Muslim, for having written two papers supporting [Nation of Islam leader] Louis Farrakhan as a law student and suggesting that Ellison might be the -- quote -- 'equivalent' of the Ku Klux Klan."

"Even Hannity had to allude the fact that the congressman apologized a half dozen years ago for once having supported Farrakhan," Kurtz pointed out.

"And with that, Hannity surrendered the high ground."

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A Ku Klux Klan leader named Edward, who goes by the title "KKK Exalted Cyclops," is promising the "largest" rally in Memphis history after the city decided to remove Confederate names from three parks.

In an 9-0 vote on Tuesday night, the Memphis City Council approved temporary names for three Confederate-themed parks. Forest Park will become "Health Sciences Park," Confederate Park will be called "Memphis Park" and Jefferson Davis Park will get the name "Mississippi River Park."

On Thursday, the KKK Exalted Cyclops told WMC-TV that his group had started planning its response before the City Council even voted.

"You're going to see the largest rally Memphis, Tennessee has ever seen," he promised. "It's not going to be 20 or 30, it's going to be thousands of Klansmen from the whole United States coming to Memphis, Tennessee."

The KKK's rally is expected to be held in the newly-renamed "Health Sciences Park." Confederate Army lieutenant general Nathan Bedford Forrest, for whom the park was originally named, was elected to the post of KKK grand wizard after returning from the war.

The Memphis City Council acted quickly to change the park names because two state lawmakers have proposed the "Tennessee Heritage Protection Act of 2013," which would prevent local governments from changing the name of any "statue, monument, memorial, nameplate, plaque, historic flag display, school, street, bridge,building, park preserve, or reserve which has been erected for, or named or dedicated in honor of, any historical military figure, historical military event, military organization, or military unit."

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The Newton County Sheriff's Department in Georgia is investigating flyers that North Carolina's Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) say were distributed in as many as nine states on the East Coast to "counteract Martin Luther King's birthday."

"They need to get a life, really," Georgia resident Hadiyah Abdul-Mateen, who received one of the flyers even though she is black, told WGCL. "I hope it doesn't have anything to do with the fact that President Obama was re-elected."

The racist flyer received by Abdul-Mateen urged her to join the Klan because "Our Aryan Heritage, Our American Culture, Our Christian Religion, Our White Homelands" were under attack by the so-called Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG).

Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard Chris Barker told WGCL reporter Steve Kiggins that the effort was "more of a recruitment drive" than an effort to intimidate residents, adding that he wanted to "let the neighborhood know that the Klan is there and that we're not going nowhere."

Barker claimed that his group had timed the distribution of flyers in states from Florida to New York to coincide with Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday.

"We just told our members to go out pretty much to counteract Martin Luther King's birthday, who was a known communist," he explained. "And we decided to put out Klan literature."

There is no law against KKK recruitment in Georgia, but the Newton County Sheriff's Department has urged anyone who received the flyers or felt threatened to call the department at (678) 625-1400.

(h/t: The Blaze)

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Police in Winnsboro, Louisiana confirmed on Monday that a woman had been set on fire over the weekend and racial slurs were found scrawled on her car.

Sharmeka Moffitt told police that she was attacked and burned by three men wearing white hoodies at a park in Franklin Parish on Sunday, according to KNOE.

At a press conference on Monday, police said that the letters "KKK" were spray-painted on the hood of her car.

Winnsboro Police Chief Kevin Cobb said that the FBI was investigating whether the incident was a hate crime, but authorities declined to classify the attack as racially motivated on Monday. The Franklin Parish Sheriff, Louisiana State Police and the state fire Marshall's office were also participating in the investigation.

A friend of the Moffitt family told KNOE that the victim had burns on 90 percent of her body and was currently in stable condition at the LSU-Shreveport hospital.

The Facebook page "Prayers for Sharmeka Moffitt" was created on Sunday night to support the victim and encourage the media to cover the story. By Monday afternoon, that page had received over 8,000 "likes."

UPDATE: Investigators are now saying that the injuries and "attack" were self-inflicted:

Two days after multiple law enforcement agencies began an investigation into the attack and burning of a Winnsboro woman at Civitan Park, authorities now believe the wounds were self-inflicted.

According to Winnsboro Police Chief Lester Thomas, evidenced gathered at the scene of the incident shows 20-year-old Sharmeka Moffitt's initial claims that she was attacked and set on fire turned out to be false claims made up by Moffitt.

"This is a case in which the investigators had to pursue the facts that were presented," Thomas said. "It's been a very disturbing case for everyone involved."

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A group of pastors in Alabama says that they are not racist even though only "white Christians" were invited to their three-day conference, which will include a cross burning and be attended by Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members.

Residents in Guin, Alabama became outraged earlier this week after they noticed flyers posted around the town that read, "Annual Pastors Conference All White Christians Invited." The groups Christian Identity Ministries and the Church of God's Chosen told WIAT that they just didn't have the "facilities" to accommodate non-whites.

"We're seldom ever have been invited to black Muslim events and we never have been invited to NAACP events and we never have been invited to join Jewish synagogues events and stuff," Christian Identity Ministries Pastor William J. Collier explained.

"It has nothing whatsoever to do with any kind of racism or hate or anything like that," he added. "And anybody who would brand it as that would be a racist and a hater themselves, you know."

Collier insisted that the "Sacred Christian Cross Lighting Ceremony" to be held on final day of the event symbolized an "opposition to tyranny."

"We are not burning a cross, look at the word is says it says light a cross," Christian Identity Ministries Reverend Mel Lewis told WIAT. "If you light a light in your house do you burn down your house. We often use fire. Our ancient fathers said fire was a cleansing element. Even the Bible says the earth will be purified with fire what purer element can we use as a symbol of our worship."

But the president of the NAACP's Birmingham Metro Chapter could not recall any past cross burning that had not been associated with racism or hate.

"The only context that I'm familiar with is one that is not very positive," Hezekiah Jackson said. "And one that really symbolizes an era that many of us have hoped to put behind us. And that is this whole era of Jim Crow, this whole era of white supremacy, this whole era of discrimination and racial hatred."

"I think it's really hard to clarify what's going on, but it seems to be some vestiges of what we call white supremacy here in Alabama. We just have to be honest about it."

The "Annual Pastors Conference All White Christians Invited" event ends on Friday. It is the fourth year that the whites-only conference has been held in Lamar county.

(h/t: Think Progress)

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Ann Coulter says that gun control laws are inherently racist and that the solution to incidents like the shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin is more "negroes with guns."

On Tuesday, Coulter used Martin's shooting to argue against gun control laws and said that every African American should arm themselves against the "Democratic Ku Klux Klan."

"We don't know the facts yet, but let's assume the conclusion MSNBC is leaping to is accurate: George Zimmerman stalked a small black child and murdered him in cold blood, just because he was black," Coulter wrote in a column titled "Negroes with Guns."

"If that were true, every black person in America should get a gun and join the National Rifle Association, America's oldest and most august civil rights organization."

Coulter later told Fox News host Bill O'Reilly that "gun control laws have been used historically to keep guns out of the hands of blacks."

"It was the Republican Party and the NRA that has always supported arming blacks in order to protect themselves from the Democratic Ku Klux Klan," she explained.

O'Reilly summed up Coulter's argument: "So what you're saying is if MSNBC's and NBC News' hypothesis is true that this was a racially-biased driven murder, that all African Americans should take that as a warning sign and arm themselves against that happening to them. Therefore, they should support the NRA, they should support he the law that allows you to fight back if threatened and they should arm themselves."

"Yes," Coulter agreed. "And the reason I thought of it is because liberals are leaping to exactly the opposite conclusion that, 'Oh, we have to get rid of these Stand Your Ground laws.' They're against easy issuing of concealed carry permits. As well as I point out in my column, Martin Luther King Jr., a Christian minister under constant death threats, applied for a gun permit after his house was fire bombed and the Alabama authorities, under the discretionary gun permit law, said, 'No. No, this Christian minister is not suitable for a gun permit.' That's how discretionary permits work."

"The history books will often try and twist the history by referring to the KKK and the racist as Southerners. Oh, no, no, no. The Republicans in the South weren't discriminatory. ... The one thing all of the discriminators and the KKK sympathizers -- or KKK themselves -- had in common was they were all Democrats."

"I think you've go a very good point here," O'Reilly observed. "Is the left really that concerned about Trayvon Martin or are they concerned, once again, ramming their agenda no matter what it is under the throats of the American people under the guise of being sympathetic towards this poor teenager and his family?"

Earlier this month, Harvard Professor Charles Ogletree pointed out that measures like Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law were racist in practice.

"Just think about changing the race," Ogletree said. “I want to see the first black man who uses the ‘Stand Your Ground’ defense and see if it works. I want to see the first white victim of the 'Stand Your Ground' by a black defendant and see if it works.”

(h/t: Mediaite)

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Authorities are investigating a possible hate crime after a sign honoring a civil rights hero was defaced in St. Louis.

The Missouri Department of Transportation removed the sign marking "Rosa Parks Highway" because it had been spray-painted with the letters "KKK," which is an abbreviation for the Ku Klux Klan white supremacist group.

St. Louis County Police dispatched their crime scene unit to investigate early Friday morning.

According to KSDK, the Ku Klux Klan had at one time sponsored the Adopt-A-Highway litter control program on that stretch of Interstate 55. But their sign was taken down after lawmakers dedicated the road to Parks.

(H/T: Think Progress)

Another Republican is itching to jump into the 2012 presidential race.

Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke is launching a 25 state tour to drum up support for a presidential run, according to the The Daily Beast.

While the presidential hopeful claims his views have evolved, he recently described himself as a "white civil rights advocate" to The Daily Beast's Eve Conant.

Duke last held office in 1992, when he served as a state representative in Louisana. Until 2000, he was Republican executive-committee chairman in his district.

"David Duke is launching a Duke for President exploratory committee, and will soon start a year long tour across America from his home base in Mandeville, LA," Duke's website claimed last year. "He plans to speak in every state and gauge the political response to his possible entry into the race for the Republican nomination."

"Over the past few weeks, since the release of his, 'David Duke Speaks to the Tea Party' video, thousands of Tea Party activists have urged him to run for President."

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This is one of those stories that you just don't expect to see, a holdover from what most of us thought was a bygone era of overt racism. Some background on how the persistence of one law professor brought some long overdue change to the University of Texas. The news report above is from KXAN Austin, from early May just as this became a news story. The ensuing uproar caused UT to change their tune from this initial news report.

(CNN) -- A University of Texas at Austin student dormitory named after a man prominent in the Ku Klux Klan in the 1800s may soon have its name changed, university officials said.

University President William Powers Jr. will ask the university system's board of regents to rename Simkins Residence Hall, following a recommendation by a 21-member advisory group, according to a press release from the university.

Gregory Vincent, the university's vice president of diversity and community engagement, told CNN affiliate KXAN that naming a public building after a self-proclaimed racist compromised the university's image.

"We're certainly not erasing Professor Simkins from the annals of UT history," said Vincent. "All we are saying is that honorific is a very special designation and it should not harm the university's reputation."

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