Is President Obama really the Deficit-Cutter-in-Chief? After racking up massive deficits through his various Stimulus programs and facing continued losses from Obamacare, the White House is now trying to portray Obama as taking a leading role in solving the problem. Time after time, White House senior adviser David Plouffe told Sunday morning talk show hosts yesterday that Obama’s 2012 budget was already proposing ways to reduce the deficits over the next decade by $1 trillion. Surprisingly, not a single host challenged him on his math.

And the Obama administration strategy seems to be working. A new CNN poll conducted April 9-10 shows that by a 48% to 35% margin Americans think that Obama and the Democrats are more responsible than Republicans for the budget agreement to cut spending.

Mr. Plouffe asserted: “Well, first, on the 2012 budget, that would be $1 trillion of deficit reduction over the next decade and lowest level of domestic spending since Dwight Eisenhower. And he said it in the State of the Union, that was just a start.” He told this to Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace, and he repeated it almost word-for-word on NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week with Christiane Amanpour, and CNN’s State of the Union.

Yet, the assertions of bold deficit-cutting are absurd. The Congressional Budget Office just reported in late March that Obama’s newest budget plans will increase the deficits over the coming decade by $1.2 trillion, hardly the $1 trillion cut that Mr. Plouffe claims. The CBO, which has been designated by the White House as the ultimate referee on spending questions, was rather blunt in dismissing the president’s numbers, explaining that he was underestimating the expected cost-increases for existing programs as well as the price-tags of new ones.

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Everyone wants to keep guns away from criminals, but gun control advocates, such as Media Matters, don’t want to acknowledge that there are costs to disarming law-abiding citizens. Lately Media Matters has particularly been incensed that anyone would point out that the vast majority of denials from Brady Act background checks involve so-called “false positives” — law-abiding citizens incorrectly being identified as banned individuals.

Media Matters claims that all those stopped by the background checks from buying guns are prohibited individuals, that no mistakes are made by the government. And Media Matters is willing to engage in any amount of name calling and fraudulent photos to attack those who question their claims.

There are several things to understand about how the Brady Law background check process works. At gun stores or other registered dealers, would-be buyers have to fill out a form asking whether there are any criminal convictions or types of mental illness that would prevent them from legally purchasing the weapon. Falsely answering these questions amounts to perjury. If someone answers the question by saying that they have a background that prohibits them from buying, a gun dealers stop right there and do not even process those forms. And if someone is believed to have knowingly provided false information on the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) form and prosecutors believe that they can prove that knowingly false information was provided, the would-be buyer faces prosecution.

Yet, the NICS system accidentally flags many law-abiding people, stopping those who simply have the same name as a prohibited individual from buying a gun.

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Despite all our experience with permitted concealed handguns, the debate continues. There are always fears about what might happen.  A New York Times article on Monday repeated some of those concerns in an article on Utah’s permit system:

Peter Hamm, a spokesman for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, asserted that Utah’s policy was dangerous because many states were lax in submitting felony and mental health records to the federal database used for background checks.

“I think it’s absolutely shameful and ludicrously irresponsible to say that anybody anywhere who wants one of our concealed-carry permits, and thus will be able to carry legally in dozens of states, can just log on to our Web site and pay 60 bucks and that’s all she wrote,” Mr. Hamm said. . . .

It is interesting that the reporter, Dan Frosch, used the term “asserted” when describing the Brady Campaign’s claims.  Indeed, the article makes it clear that much more is required to get a permit than simply logging on to a website and paying $60.  Criminal background checks and a four hour training course are also necessary.  But there was a way of directly evaluating the Brady Campaign’s other claim that permit holders pose a danger to others.  In fact, it is easy to show that permit holders are extremely law-abiding by looking at the Utah Department of Public Safety’s quarterly “Firearm Statistical Review.”

With over 226,000 active concealed-handgun permits as of March 31, 2010, there were only 14 revocations for any type of firearms-related offense over the preceding twelve months. These offenses are also usually trivial, such as accidentally carrying a permitted concealed handgun into a gun free zone. (more…)

Trillions of dollars are at stake in the man-made global warming debate.  The Climategate scandal – where leaked emails and computer programs involve dozens of prominent scientists worldwide – has almost everything one would want in a good scandal: conspiracies, fraud, possible destruction of documents, and lots of heated exchanges.  But the media has been reluctant to look into the problems and even when the controversy has been acknowledged it has been quickly dismissed as unimportant.

Newsweek poo-poohed Climategate as just showing “a few scientists in a bad light” and that “there’s still plenty of evidence that the earth is getting warmer and that humans are largely responsible.”  The New York Times editorialized that “no one should be misled by all the noise” and that global warming was just too important “to let one set of purloined e-mail messages undermine the science and the clear case for action.”  Former Vice President Al Gore has been in full swing doing interviews the last few weeks, and the media has rarely challenged any of his claims.  Gore told Slate: “What we’re seeing is a set of changes worldwide that just make this discussion over 10-year-old e-mails kind of silly.”  He made the same comment unchallenged on MSNBC.  Yet, the thousand emails were written over thirteen years, and went right up through this year. (more…)