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Fox News host Eric Bolling on Friday insisted that assault-style rifles which can shoot "four or five rounds per second" were "protected under the Constitution."

In his weekly appearance on Fox & Friends, Fox News host Geraldo Rivera predicted that President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden would be successful in enacting some measures to control gun violence after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, but it would be difficult to ban weapons like the Bushmaster AR-15 that was used to slaughter 20 children.

"There really is some movement now for the first time in many decades to have some meaningful reform," he explained. "What I don't expect -- I think it's a long shot, I think the Second Amendment advocates are very strong, they have an excellent case constitutionally -- and it's going to be very, very difficult to ban assault-style weapons. I would love to see them banned except for sanctioned gun clubs, law enforcement and the military."

"You need to address, when you say assault-style weapons," Bolling interrupted. "Because most people understand an assault weapon is currently, not necessarily banned, but almost impossible to own as a civilian."

"You're talking about a fully automatic," Rivera pointed out. "But you're also enough of a gun advocate to know that with a semi-automatic, you can get off four or five rounds per second."

"Absolutely," Bolling agreed. "And that's protected under the constitution. And why are they even putting that in discussions?"

"When does the liberal left say, 'Enough, semi-automatic rifles are banned'? Boom. Then one day, they say, 'You know what? Semi-automatic handguns are illegal also,'" he added.

"Why do you need 30 rounds in the clip of your Glock [handgun], in the clip of you 9 mm?" Rivera wondered. "Why do you need 30 rounds? What are you going to do with 30 rounds in your pistol?"

The Fox News morning show then played a 2008 clip of then-candidates Biden and Obama promising not to take people's shotguns, which was accompanied by a red siren and a graphic that read, "Hypocrisy Alert."

"A lot of people are afraid that one thing is going to lead to another," co-host Steve Doocy opined.

"I think that paranoia is unfortunate," Rivera replied. "I think when you examine those people who are stocking up arsenals of AR-15s and .223 Bushmasters, they are often people who are so deeply suspicious of their own government that it is bitterly ironic that these are the same people who claim a mantel of patriotism."

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It looks like Mike Huckabee isn't too happy about all the grief he got for his comments the previous day on Fox, about the tragic shooting at the elementary school in Connecticut, because he came back on the next morning on Fox & Friends and tried to walk them back, at least in part.

Huckabee Tries To Walk Back Comments On God And School Shootings:

On Fox & Friends Saturday, he attempted to clarify his comments, saying, "Yesterday, I was on Neil Cavuto. He asked me, you know, where was God? I said, you know, we've systematically removed him from our culture, from our schools. Well, I've been barraged by people who have said that I said, well, if we just have prayer in schools, this wouldn't happen. That's not my point."

Huckabee continued:

HUCKABEE: No, my point is a larger point -- that we have as a culture decided that we don't want to have values, that we don't want to say that some things are always right, some things are always wrong. When we divorce ourselves from a basic sense of what we would call, I would say, collective morality where we agree on certain principles to be true always, then we create a culture -- not that it specifically creates this crime. It doesn't. But it creates an atmosphere in which evil and violence are removed from our sense of responsibility.

Yet while Huckabee now claims that his initial point wasn't that "if we just have prayer in schools, this wouldn't happen," Huckabee told Cavuto on Friday, "We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?" Huckabee concluded his remarks by saying, "Maybe we ought to let [God] in on the front end and we wouldn't have to call him to show up when it's all said and done at the back end."

As Huckabee acknowledged on Fox & Friends Saturday, his remarks have drawn much attention from the media.

I don't think he did himself any favors here. And of course, he's insisting that now isn't the time to talk about gun control... or tomorrow.... or any time this week. We'll do that later, which means never. But of course it's not too soon for him to spend his entire upcoming show this Saturday night talking about the tragedy and how to talk to your children about it.

UPDATE: And if anyone didn't think HuckaJesus could amp the amount of crazy up any higher, here he is on his Saturday show on Fox, first attacking the liberals for daring to point out that he did indeed say lack of prayer in schools was responsible for this shooting, and then going into some bizarre rant about their fake war on Christmas and those supposed abortion loving liberals.

Then he brings in Geraldo who gives the viewers a disgusting blow by blow of how many times those poor children were shot, agrees with Huckabee that it's "evil" as opposed to say, mental illness that's responsible for what happened, and then compares the tragedy to the Holocaust.

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What's really frightening is that Huckabee has been discussed by our media as someone to take seriously as a contender for the presidency. He'd be getting way too much air time if he was only allowed to pollute our airways on late night infomercials at 3am on channels almost no one watches.

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Fox News host Geraldo Rivera on Friday said that "angry, old, white men" like Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) demanded Susan Rice give up any ambition to be secretary of state as a "minimum price" for the September attacks in Benghazi.

Speaking to the hosts of Fox & Friends, Rivera explained that female Republican Sens. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) and Susan Collins (R-ME) gave cover to "the angry, old, white men" by joining in their attack on Rice "and then it couldn't be a male-female issue against this poor, beleaguered black woman."

"Angry, old, white men?" asked co-host Gretchen Carlson.

"I am speaking expansively and metaphorically and for effect here," Rivera insisted. "But it became clear she couldn't be the beleaguered damsel in distress -- the poor, black, embattled ambassador. It became clear that she was the minimum price... she was the minimum price to pay for the administrations dissembling on the facts and circumstances of the Benghazi attacks. She was going to be the minimum price that the Democrats, that the Obama administration had to pay for that clear offense."

"In Washington, you make minimum prices. She's the sacrificial lamb."

NBC News White House correspondent Chuck Todd, however, on Thursday said that Rice had also been a victim of conservative media outlets like Fox News.

"She became victim of the attacks. ... and it was all driven, in many cases, by conservative outlets who were making her the center of the Benghazi story," Todd told MSNBC's Martin Bashir. "It's too easy now in the way our media landscape is set up: You can become collateral damage in a hurry, in the way you can just get piled on — whether it's Twitter, whether its advocacy journalism, talk radio. ... That's what she was. Make no mistake, she was political collateral damage."

(h/t: Mediaite)

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Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume on Sunday lashed out at mainstream media organizations for not spending as much time as Fox News trying to determine what mistakes the Obama administration made before and after the Sept. 11 attacks in Benghazi, Libya.

"One of the problems we're having here is that it has fallen to this news organization, Fox News, and a couple of others to do all the heaving lifting on this story," Hume complained to Fox News host Chris Wallace. "And the mainstream organizations that would be on this story like hounds if there were a Republican president have been remarkably reticent."

"There's been some good reporting but nothing on the scale and to the degree of specificity that you would expect by now," he continued. "Normally, the big news organizations would have this thing out there and we would know a lot more than we do about what the president did, what he knew, when he knew it, when he made what order he made and on what basis. We still don't know that and to some extent, a lot of the media who are a combined potent force have not done their job."

But on Friday, Fox News host Geraldo Rivera encouraged his colleagues at the network to stop the “politicizing” and “preposterous allegations” about President Barack Obama’s response to the attacks that killed four Americans in Libya.

“People, stop," Rivera urged the hosts of Fox & Friends. "I think we have to stop this politicizing. ... [T]hese preposterous allegations –- reckless allegations that paint a picture of some fat bureaucrat watching TV –- I think that’s really beyond the pale."

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Fox News host Geraldo Rivera on Friday urged his colleagues at the network's morning show to stop the "politicizing" and "preposterous allegations" about President Barack Obama's response to the Sept. 11 attacks in Libya.

Geraldo told the hosts of Fox & Friends that Rep. Mike Kelly's (R-PA) suggestion that the Obama administration was monitoring the attacks in Libya was in real time was "preposterous."

After host Steve Doocy defended the congressman's position, Geraldo shot back, "People, stop. Stop this right now. This whole notion of live TV and why didn't we respond is not what happened."

"I think we have to stop this politicizing," he added. "We're getting away from the real issues which was why wasn't there security before this happened. That's the issue. But these preposterous allegations –- reckless allegations that paint a picture of some fat bureaucrat watching TV –- I think that’s really beyond the pale."

(h/t: Mediaite)

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Fox News host Brian Kilmeade insists that Democrats in Congress were "playing the race" card when they walked as House Republicans were voting to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt.

Kilmeade on Friday asked Geraldo Rivera "who looks best" after Republican Representatives -- led by House Government and Oversight Committee Chairman Darrel Issa (R-CA) -- made history by voting to hold the nation's black attorney general in contempt.

Rivera pointed to the following quote by Justice Clarence Thomas: "And from my standpoint, as a black American, as far as I am concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas. And it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, you will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree."

Thomas was admonishing Democrats for accusing him of sexual harassing Anita Hill while he was her supervisor at the U.S. Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, but Rivera observed that the same could be said about Republicans' actions against Holder.

"The optics are horrible," he explained. "This is a terrible thing that John Boehner and Darrel Issa allowed."

"Anybody can play the race card any time they're not happy!" Kilmeade objected.

"Did race play a role in Clarence Thomas' [confirmation]?" Rivera asked. "Probably not. Did race play a role in Eric Holder being held in contempt? Probably not. But they have given sufficient ammunition to the other side to reach that conclusion."

"This is congressional graffiti. This is legislative vandalism," he continued. "Darrel Issa knew that there was not even a strong suspicion that Eric Holder knew about Fast and Furious. They could have negotiated this. They could have gotten the information they needed."

"Aren't you sick of the race card being played every time something controversial happens?" Kilmead exclaimed. "So no race card with Obamacare, that's no problem. But there's a race card when something goes wrong with Fast and Furious."

The Black Caucus, Hispanic Caucus, Progressive Caucus and other Democrats -- including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) -- walked of Congress in protest on Thursday as the contempt vote was being held.

"You’re seeing the whole diversity of the Democratic caucus," Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) told reporters. "This is a terrible day for the House of Representatives. What it’s about, we can’t decide for sure, but it’s not about Eric Holder and handing over papers. We don’t want to participate in something that has some kind of smell to it."

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Maricopa Country Sheriff Joe Arpaio is insisting that he "saved" a 6-year-old girl, who he believes was brought to the country illegally, by arresting her.

The Arizona Republic reported last week that the controversial Arizona sheriff's office had arrested the 6-year-old and 15 other people on the very day that President Barack Obama announced a new policy halting the deportations of many young immigrants.

On Sunday, Fox News host Geraldo Rivera asked Arpaio if he arrested the girl because he wanted to "stick it to the president."

"I don't think I did a Fast and Furious in reverse and arranged these 15 smugglers with a girl that is unaccompanied -- nobody knows who she is, where she's from -- into the United States of Amerca," Arpaio quipped. "I enforce the illegal immigration laws every day, Geraldo. So, that made a coincidence."

"I should be thanked by that congresswoman that you just had on for saving this girl," the sheriff added. "That's what they should be doing, these activists that don't like me enforcing the illegal immigration laws, including the president who mentioned me several months ago on the 1070 [anti-immigrant law] and what I'm doing."

Arpaio also promised to continue arresting young immigrants regardless of the president's new immigration policy.

"I will continue to arrest illegal aliens that violate the state laws of this state. So, nothing will change," he explained. "If we come across them again and they are in violation of any state law, they're going to be arrested are put in jail in my jails, and I presume if they're turned by over to the [federal] immigration, nothing will happen. So, that's the system we have right now."

Over the weekend, thousands of demonstrators had gathered in Phoenix to protest Maricopa County's "tent city," where inmates are forced to wear pink and live in canvas tents.

For his part, Arpaio defended the un-air conditioned tents by saying that the military also uses tents in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"It 130 [degrees] here," he told Rivera. "Do they have air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan for our troops?"

"Yes," Rivera pointed out. "In the tents, they do have air conditioning. I haven't been in an un-air conditioned tent in 10 years. Don't you think that's inhumane, sheriff?"

"No, why?" Arpaio replied. "I had a half a million people come through those tents. And they survived the weather and controversy. It's a good program, saved millions and millions of dollars."

The United States Supreme Court on Monday gutted (PDF) most of Arizona's controversial SB 1070 immigration law, but upheld that police could be required to inquire about immigration status when they stop suspects.

(h/t: Mediaite)

Geraldo Rivera has been sticking to his talking points that if Trayvon Martin had not been wearing a hoodie, he may not have been shot and killed by George Zimmerman and that "dressing like a wannabe gangster" contributed to his death. On his show this Sunday evening, Rivera was called out for his blame the victim game by Martin's attorney, who chastised Rivera for embarrassing his son again with the hoodie remarks and likened his justification of the Martin shooting to those who would justify rape by blaming the victim for what clothing they were wearing.

As our friends at News Hounds reported, this past Friday, Geraldo went on Bill O'Reilly's show and said this: Geraldo Rivera: It’s Reasonable For George Zimmerman To Have Racially Profiled Trayvon Martin Because Of His Size, Race And Hoodie “Thugwear”.

Here's more from their post on Geraldo being called out by Martin's attorney, Benjamin Crump: Trayvon Martin Attorney Tells Geraldo Rivera: You’re Embarrassing Your Son Again With Your Latest Hoodie Comments:

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After a week-long vacation, Stephen Colbert opened his show with a segment on the Trayvon Martin shooting, and as usual, Colbert was right on the mark with his criticisms. He went after Republican presidential candidates Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich for their extremely cynical responses to President Obama, who gave what any rational human being would consider a measured and thoughtful response when asked about the Martin shooting, saving the harshest critique for Newt Gingrich.

GINGRICH: Is the president suggesting that it had been a white who had been shot, that would be OK because he wouldn't look like him? That's just nonsense.

COLBERT: Yes, it's nonsense. And Newt knows nonsense. May I remind you, he's still running for president.

Colbert followed up with his "Word" segment, where he took Geraldo Rivera apart for blaming the hoodie Martin was dressed in for the shooting.

COLBERT: Yes. It was the hoodie's fault. A hooded sweatshirt can make an innocent teen look like a criminal. Just like a suit and glasses can make Geraldo Rivera look like a journalist.

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I guess Geraldo Rivera wants to invite some more criticism for his remarks this week on "Fox & Friends," blaming the victim because of his attire in the Trayvon Martin shooting case, because he decided to double down this Friday on Bill O'Reilly's show.

Fox's Geraldo Rivera: "If You Dress Like A Wannabe Gangster ... Tragedy Is Gonna Result":

Fox News contributor Geraldo Rivera is standing by remarks he made today regarding the killing of 17-year-old black teen Trayvon Martin. On Fox & Friends this morning, Rivera claimed that "the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin's death as George Zimmerman."

Tonight, appearing on Bill O'Reilly's Fox News show to talk about New York's stop-and-frisk practice -- a tactic employed by the New York City Police Department to curb crime that critics say unfairly targets young minority men -- Rivera again highlighted attire, including the "hoodie," as the reason most young men of color are branded as suspicious. He went on to repeat his advice to young minority men, including his own sons, to avoid dressing "like a wannabe gangster," because "some knucklehead is gonna take you at your word and the tragedy is gonna result."

He stressed, however, he was not "blaming the victim for his own demise" in Martin's case, saying that "it is reality" that minorities wearing hoodies "could attract the attention, not only of the cops, but of nutjobs apparently like this George Zimmerman." He added: "And when they see and respond -- it is a stereotype, it is repugnant, it is all the things that offend us, but it is real life."

He concluded by saying: "I care about saving the lives of minority youngsters."

Full transcript below the fold.

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