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Conservative rocker Ted Nugent on Monday insisted that he had just been using a metaphor when he called President Barack Obama "the Chicago gangster" and then asked a NRA television host to "help me shoot somebody."

In an interview on NRA News, host Cam Edwards explained that the president's proposed universal background check legislation might as well be called "the Ban Ted Nugent Act of 2013."

"Do you realize, Ted, that under the language right now, any time somebody went to your ranch and you loaned them a gun to do some hunting or to do some plinking that would be a five-year felony?" Edwards told Nugent.

The Motor City Madman reminded Edwards that it was only a year ago that he had promised to be "dead or in jail" by the Spring of 2013 if Obama was re-elected.

"And I know it caught a lot of my friends off guard, when I said if this America-hater, if this freedom-hater, if this enemy of America becomes the president again I'll either be dead or in jail," Nugent recalled. "So it's funny that I might be dead or in jail. And that is so indicative of how callous and disconnected some are, because you are talking about arbitrary, punitive, capricious draconian felonies."

The rocker went on to complain that most people were not willing to take action even thought the federal government had engaged in "freedom-stomping and jack-booted thuggery."

"And here we are, with the Chicago gangster, ACORN rip-off scam-artist-in-chief because we, who know better, were silent," he quipped. "And the Nugent guy, well he's a radical. And again, it's not about me. I don't want a pat on the back. I don't need one."

"But when I kick the door down to the enemy's camp, would you help me shoot somebody?" Nugent asked Edwards. "Just help me clear the room."

He quickly added that his threat to "shoot somebody" had been "a metaphor."

"I'm not recommending shooting anybody. It's a metaphor of how to counterpunch the enemy if someone is willing to be on the frontline."

After interviewing Nugent last year, the Secret Service eventually determined that he was not a threat to the president.

(h/t: Media Matters)

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CNN host Soledad O'Brien on Thursday scolded Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and told him he should know better than to try to link assault weapons to "black violence on blacks" because most recent mass killings had been carried out by white men.

Following National Rifle Association chief Wayne LaPierre's Wednesday testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee that he opposed universal background checks at gun shows, O'Brien asked Grassley why not support something that seemed like an obvious part of the solution.

Grassley argued that universal background checks would burden people trying to buy a gun on Sunday.

"Obviously we have some background checks, it's how encompassing do you do it?" he explained. "Do you do it for one father selling to a son or another relative or how do you cover everything? I think that's the issue. And also, the extent to which you have private sales on Sunday between relatives, and maybe you can't access the system all the time and as fast as you want to do it."

O'Brien pressed Grassley on why he opposed an assault weapons ban, when even the temporary 1994 ban had reduced the number of crimes involving those firearms by between 17 percent and 72 percent, according to a 2004 study by the University of Pennsylvania.

"I guess you can argue over numbers," Grassley replied, adding that the Columbine High School massacre had occurred during the 1994 ban.

"Part of the argument is if you start now that there's potential down the road to make some of a difference," the CNN host pointed out. "Sometimes I hear the argument that you're never going to get rid of all the guns or you're never going to get rid of all the assault weapons. It seems to me to be a little bit of a specious argument."

O'Brien then wondered why Grassley was also against a "common-sense kind of thing" like tasking the Center for Disease Control with studying gun violence.

"The Center for Disease Control is all about studying diseases, and ownership of guns is not a disease," Grassley insisted.

"Public health?" O'Brien noted. "If you look at a city like Chicago, where there has been just massive, massive deaths from gun violence. That's not a public health issue?"

"Well, I think that's the place in our society where you would study the issue of black violence on blacks," the Iowa Republican asserted. "Most of those guns are pistols and not the guns that you're talking about on this program."

"Well, certainly when we are looking at assault weapons, I know that you know that most of the perpetrators have been white men," O'Brien remarked while noting that the CDC had spent $2.5 million studying gun violence in 1993.

"I would think that anybody who wants to figure out how to stop people from dying in gun violence -- whether it's suicide, whether it's small children being killed in a massacre, whether it's domestic violence -- that just studying the issue would be a good idea for everybody," she continued.

"I said I agree with you because that's part of the mental health issue that we have to deal with, yet, during this debate," Grassley replied. "Because in everyone of these instances that keeps cropping up, where mass killings, people had mental health issues. They shouldn't have had guns in the first place."

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A 15-year-old girl was killed on the South Side of Chicago on Tuesday, just a week after she performed at President Barack Obama's inauguration.

Hadiya Pendleton was hanging out at Vivian Gordon Harsh Park near her high school at around 2:30 p.m., "when someone jumped a fence, ran up to them, and opened fire," according to WBBM-TV.

Pendleton was taken to University of Chicago Comer Children’s Hospital where she died an hour later from a gunshot wound to her back. A 16-year-old boy was also wounded in the attack.

Chicago police said that many of those in the park were gang members, but Pendleton had no known gang affiliations.

The girl was majorette and a volleyball player, friends told The Chicago Tribune. She had performed at inaugural events in Washington, D.C. last week with the King College Prep band and drill team.

As of Tuesday evening, police had no suspects in the shooting. The 4400 or 4500 blocks of South Oakenwald Avenue, where the shooting occurred, was considered to be a low-crime area. No serious crimes had been reported there between Dec. 19 and Jan. 20.

"It’s a great neighborhood," Roxanne Hubbard resident Roxanne Hubbard explained to the Tribune. "Nothing like this has happened since I’ve been here."

Bonita O’Bannion told WBBM-TV that she was shaken after hearing at least six gun shots during the Tuesday shooting.

"There has to be an end to it," O’Bannion said. "It’s just too much. The children cannot go to school. They’re in fear."

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CNN host Erin Burnett on Wednesday suggested that the National Rifle Association (NRA) had not crossed the line by targeting President Barack Obama's daughters in an advertisement.

The NRA advertisement released on Tuesday branded the president an "elitist hypocrite" for opposing armed guards in schools while his own daughters were being protected by the Secret Service. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney slammed the ad as "repugnant and cowardly" because "a president's children should not be used as pawns in a political fight."

Speaking to Burnett on Wednesday, CNN contributor Roland Martin agreed that the NRA was "weak and cowardly."

"There's no need to invoke the president's daughter's in this conversation," Martin insisted. "I can guarantee you that had anybody invoked the daughters of President George W. Bush in a similar ad attacking him, folks on the right would be just as upset. It makes no sense."

"But what about the fact that politicians use their kids when they want to politically all the time?" Burnett wondered.

The CNN host then displayed a photo of Bill and Hillary Clinton holding hands with their daughter Chelsea, followed by a second photo of Barack Obama with his arms around daughters Malia and Sasha.

Burnett explained: "Remember the famous picture of Chelsea Clinton, after the Monica Lewinski affair, walking between her parents? Or -- hold on, let me just finish -- this time before the DNC, when the White House released the picture of the president with his two daughters snuggling on the couch -- there it is -- watching Michelle Obama."

"You know, they use their children for political purposes when they want to," she opined.

"First of all, walking with Chelsea to the helicopter, they were going on vacation," Martin replied. "And so what are they supposed to do? Take her to another helicopter or through the back door or somewhere?"

"It was the hand holding!" Burnett interrupted.

"Okay, so what? If there was a photo and there was no hand holding then it's okay?" Martin shot back. "I mean, seriously, that is not the same as putting an ad out where you mentioning the president's daughters. It makes no sense. And, again, if you're the NRA, you don't have to actually do that, you don't have to go that far. If you want to do that, why don't you go to Chicago and say, 'How many armed guards are in Chicago schools where the president is from?' That's legitimate."

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Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) and conservative columnist George Will told a Sunday panel on ABC News that gun violence in the United States was caused by mental illness, video games, violence in the media and even "unparented" boys from single-parent homes -- but they refused to accept that gun control was part of the problem.

"Look, I'm a concealed-carry permit holder," Chaffetz explained. "I own a Glock 23. I've got a shotgun. I'm not the person you need to worry about. And there are millions of Americans who deal with this properly. It's our Second Amendment right to do so. But we have to look at the mental health access that these people have."

"The gun rules are very stringent. There's a lot conjecture out there that I don't think would necessarily solve this particular problem. And I want to look at anything we think will solve all the problems, but we have to, I think, look at the mental health aspect."

"As a parent, we all shed a tear," Chaffetz added as he choked up. "You put violence and death and gore in a movie, you're not going to get an R rating. You do something else, okay. I got to tell you, I think the movie ratings are terribly misleading when it comes to violence, death, gore and glamorizing."

Will, however, pointed to boys in single-parent homes as a source of the problem.

"We ought to bring in Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago," he insisted. "Chicago is an epidemic of violence with young, largely unparented -- that is, no father in the home -- adolescent males. That's a problem quite separate from this."

The conservative columnist also worried that the massacre of 20 children at an elementary school in Chicago would be used to "ratchet up the security of schools and elsewhere in public spaces."

"Our public spaces are already blighted by this," Will ranted. "For generations, people have been using the water on the [National] Mall to run little sailing boats. Now, the government in its wisdom has banned remote-control little boats on the mall water in Washington because it somehow represents a security threat to the country. We have to be a little bit reasonable."

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After watching the better part of a couple of days of coverage on this tragic school shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in CT, I was glad to see at least one show on television where there was a discussion about the fact that what happened there, and the trauma that those children and their families are going through right now, is an all but too common occurrence which is sadly all too familiar to Americans living in our inner cities across the country.

Whether it's Chicago, or New Orleans or the other big cities across the country facing high crime rates, far too often the violence has been glossed over and ignored to the point by our national media, that it's just considered acceptable or something we're expected to live with.

As Melissa noted, to date Chicago has suffered at least 425 gun-related homicides in 2012 as of Dec. 14. The Huffington Post has more on that story here: Chicago Homicides Reach 400 This Year, City Turns To Twitter For Ideas To End Violence. And 117 of those victims this year alone were under the age of 21.

And in her home town of New Orleans, we've had 174 murders, most of which are gunshot deaths and in Los Angeles, there have been 512 homicides recorded for the year, and 75 percent of those deaths resulted from gunshot wounds.

HARRIS-PERRY: These are the gun related homicides that get treated as routine -- tragic, but expected. And yet, they need to be included when we talk about Newtown, CT, because their victims are just as real.

The Nation's Ari Melber followed with this:

MELBER: So while we understand exactly how terrible this is and why the story of it and the way it happened is so dramatic and we're rushing to it and the President's speaking to it, it's also true as a policy matter that if 27 people dying is something that connotes the President's attention or our attention and action, well then every day is this day, as you were saying and all around the country.

As Michael Eric Dyson noted, President Obama did bring up those in Chicago during his statement following this most recent shooting and made this important point:

DYSON: The reality is, we've become accustomed to believing that little black and brown kids and poor white kids in various spots across our landscape are doomed to this kind of violence by this... we are surprised it happened here. It's not supposed to happen here.

Which means by implication, that it's supposed to happen there, in Detroit, or Oakland, or California, in LA and the like. And I think that's the tragedy here.

As Harris-Perry rightfully noted a bit later in the segment, she just wants the same level of outrage when you're seeing these kids in our inner cities having their childhoods taken away from them with the violence that they are growing up around as a part of their daily lives as we've seen from these mass shootings that garner so much national attention in the media.

I hope if there is an ounce of good that comes out of this shooting, it's that conversations like this one are more common where we're talking about what we can do to put a stop to gun violence along with a host of other topics that are all interwoven with the same subject and those are not just gun control and gun violence, but mental health, providing adequate health care for all of our citizens, education, poverty, our social safety nets and just what kind of country we're allowing way too many of our children to grow up in.

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Fox News co-host Greg Gutfeld on Tuesday seemed to find something amusing the deaths of children in cities like Chicago as he asserted that all 17 year olds killed by guns were in gangs.

Fox News' The Five devoted a segment of their Tuesday show to talking about what -- other than a gun -- contributed to the tragic murder/suicide involving NFL football player Jovan Belcher and his girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins.

Co-host Dana Perino noted that Rush Limbaugh, who has been divorced three times, suggested that there might have been a better outcome "if there had been a marriage."

"There are many babies born out of wedlock in -- all across America and all races, in particular in African-American families and growing in Hispanic and White families as well," Perino explained.

"In this case, there's no doubt in my mind that alcohol played a direct result in this guy shooting his girlfriend and shooting himself," co-host Bob Beckel remarked. "I don't think anybody -- myself included, who's a recovering alcoholic -- anybody who has a history of alcoholism should not -- underscore -- not be allowed to buy guns."

"Okay, but we already did the gun argument," Perino said, attempting to change the subject.

"Bob, it's not the gun," co-host Eric Bolling volunteered. "It's fast money, it's quick celebrity, it's alcohol, it could be brain injury, it's the decay of the America family, it's all of them. But you can't blame the gun. Just can't blame the microphone when [sports broadcaster Bob] Costas says something really ridiculous. It's not the gun."

"I'm glad Costas used the opportunity to get to it and I'm going to continue to use it right now," Beckel continued. "The fact is there are more kids killed in this country..."

"What do you mean by kids, by the way?" co-host Greg Gutfeld shouted. "Give me an age!"

"Children, five to 17," Beckel replied.

"What do you think that's from?" Gutfeld asked. "Why don't you just say what it is? What's a 17 year old who's killed by a gun? What do you call that, Bob? That's called gang violence. Where does that occur? Chicago. There you go. Welcome to Chicago."

"That's ridiculous," Beckel insisted as Gutfeld began to smile. "All industrial countries combined have less deaths of children than the United States."

"When you say kids, it's 17 year olds in gangs," said a grinning Gutfeld. "We're talking about gang violence. Where does most of the gang violence occur? In gangs."

"I didn't say gang violence," Beckel pointed out.

"Look, I'm right on this," Gutfeld quipped with a hearty laugh.

According to the Children's Defense Fund, two-thirds of the 5,740 children and teens killed by guns in 2008 and 2009 were victims of homicide. About one-quarter were victims of suicide. And another 5 percent died from gun accidents or other unknown causes. During that same period, 173 preschoolers were killed by guns, compared with 89 law enforcement officers who were killed in the line of duty.

(h/t: Media Matters)

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I would really love to see Sam Seder get his own show at either MSNBC or Current TV. He did a fine job filling in for Chris Hayes on Up this weekend, and here's his opening from Sunday's show -- How Republicans are using the crisis of poverty... against Obama:

At the Values Voters Summit on Friday, Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan whose budget was approved by the House with sweeping cuts to aid for the poor responded to new figures from the Census Bureau this week showing that 46.2 million Americans were living below the poverty line last year—a rate basically unchanged from the year before—but a rate not seen in this country in nearly 20 years.

Here's what Ryan had to say about Obama's record on poverty:

"The Obama economic agenda failed, not because it was stopped, but because it was passed. And here is what we got: Prolonged joblessness across the country. Twenty-three million Americans struggling to find work. Family income in decline. Fifteen percent of Americans living in poverty. Here we are, after four years of economic stewardship under these self-proclaimed advocates of the poor, and what do they have to show for it? More people in poverty, and less upward mobility wherever you look."

It's not the first time this election cycle that we've seen the right raise the specter of the poor. But poverty is raised not to offer prescriptions or remedies but to be used as a cudgel, as a means of playing on middle class fears of losing ground by suggesting not so much that they, too, could become impoverished but that the threat to their economic stability is the poor themselves, who are taking that ground from them.

Calling President Obama the "food stamp President" is not bemoaning the plight of those Americans who, in the wake of a devastating financial crisis have lost the means to put food on the table for their families, but rather, to imply that some "other" is living large, while the rest of "us" struggle. That said, we do know something about the people Romney relies on and what they believe about poverty.

Continue reading »

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The architect of former President George W. Bush's controversial 2000 and 2004 campaigns is calling on President Barack Obama to stop using "gutter politics" to suggest presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney could be guilty of a felony by lying about when he left Bain Capital.

After The Boston Globe revealed on Thursday that Romney was listed as the "sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president" of Bain even after he claimed he had retired in 1999, Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter noted that lying on SEC filings was a felony.

Rove on Sunday said the Obama campaign had crossed the line with that suggestion and insisted that the notion Romney was involved with Bain after 1999 was "total boloney."

"The fact of the matter is if the president continues to make this charge -- this outrageous charge -- that Mitt Romney is guilty of felonious activity and committed a felony, that's a big mistake," Rove opined.

"This is gutter politics of the worst Chicago sort."

And Rove knows gutter politics when he sees it.

During then-Gov. George W. Bush's 2000 campaign for president, Rove was accused of orchestrating a whisper campaign to suggest that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) "had fathered an illegitimate black child." In 2003, conservative columnist Robert Novak told federal prosecutors that Rove had also participated in outing CIA agent Valerie Plame in an effort to discredit her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, after he accused the Bush administration of invading Iraq under false pretenses.

(h/t: The Hill)

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Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) on Sunday advised presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney to "stop whining" about suggestions that he broke the law or lied to voters by saying he had "retired" from Bain Capital, even though Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) documents show that he was in charge of the company.

After The Boston Globe revealed on Thursday that Romney was listed as the "sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president" of Bain even after he claimed he had retired in 1999, Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter noted that lying on SEC filings was a felony.

On Friday, Romney scheduled last-minute interviews on five television networks to demand an apology from President Barack Obama.

"He sure as heck ought to say that he’s sorry for the kinds of attacks that are coming from his team," the former Massachusetts governor complained to ABC News. "If I were president of the United States, I would put a stop to it and apologize to my campaign for what has been done by his."

"What kind of a president would have a campaign that says something like that about the nominee of another party?" Romney asked during an interview with CBS News.

During an interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, Emanuel pointed out that Romney's protests made him look less than presidential.

"Stephanie cited the law and it's very clear," Emanuel explained. "Either the filing with the SEC is accurate and his personal financial disclosure is not honest or that's honest and the SEC [filing] isn't. Both can't be accurate."

"Give it up about Stephanie," he continued. "Don't worry about that. What are you going to do when the Chinese leader says something or Putin says [something] to you? Are you going to whine as your way? You cannot do that."

"As Mitt Romney said once to his own Republican colleagues, stop whining. I give him his own advice: Stop whining."

Emanuel added: "If you want to claim Bain Capital as your calling card to the White House then defend what happened to Bain Capital and what happened to those jobs that went overseas, those jobs that were actually cut and eliminated and the companies that went into bankruptcy. And the very companies that went into bankruptcy while Bain was still getting paid, same philosophy that led to him advocating that the auto industry go bankrupt."