Personally, I've noticed a pretty distinct geographic split on gun laws between ordinary people (i.e. non-cops) who live in cities -- and everyone else. People who live in rural or suburban areas are a lot more attached to having few restrictions, and seem more likely to vote for those running against gun control. Most city dwellers I know are strongly in favor of gun control, maybe because gun-related crimes are so much more common here. There's got to be some middle ground somewhere, because some days, it's like the Wild West out here.

Last week, the City of New York announced a first-of-its-kind undercover investigation of illegal online gun sales. The video above features the actual audio from the investigation, which covered 125 sellers from 14 different states, using 10 different websites. Enforcing this particular loophole seems like something reasonable people should be able to support, right?

Their recommendations are as follows:

The evidence that online sales pose a threat to public safety is mounting. Sales conducted over the internet have been connected to mass shootings at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University, the murder of police officers, illegal sales to minors, domestic gun trafficking operations and Mexican drug cartels.

In 2011, the City of New York launched an unprecedented undercover investigation of private firearms sales online. Our investigators set out to determine whether private sellers advertising guns for sale on the internet are complying with federal law by refusing to sell to people who could not pass a background check.
The following report sets forth our findings and makes recommendations for government and private-sector
reforms to prevent criminals and other prohibited purchasers from easily acquiring illegal guns online.
The results:

• 62 percent of private gun sellers agreed to sell a firearm to a buyer who said he probably couldn’t pass a background check.

• City investigators posing as illegal purchasers asked five of these sellers to meet in person and exchange the guns for cash. All five agreed. The investigators bought four handguns and a semi-automatic assault rifle while recording the transaction with hidden cameras.

Continue reading »

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I lived in a small Victorian town outside Philadelphia in 1991 when a tornado came through, and even though the town was only one square mile, there were so many trees down, it took an hour to get from one end of the town to my apartment -- and we didn't have power for three days. I can only imagine the scale of the cleanup that New Yorkers face today:

A flash storm that followed tornado warnings powered through New York City Thursday evening, with winds up to 70 miles per hour knocking down trees, damaging buildings, destroying cars and causing the death of at least one person.

The severe weather wreaked havoc on the city’s transportation system in the middle of the evening commute. All Long Island Rail Road service was suspended out of Manhattan due to downed trees on the tracks near Sunnyside, Queens. LIRR service was also disrupted between Brooklyn and Queens, and the entire 7 subway line was inoperative for several hours.

Several roadways were closed to vehicular traffic because of the debris. A woman was killed when a tree toppled onto her vehicle on the Grand Central Parkway near Jewel Avenue, authorities said.

The storm also knocked out power to more than 24,000 customers in Queens and 4,800 households in Staten Island, according to Con Edison. More than 570 customers were without power in Brooklyn. New Jersey power authorities said about 40,000 households were without electricity in the wake of the storm.

Nearly an hour after the storm passed, 911 switchboards were inundated with calls of injuries but it was unclear just how many were considered serious, a spokesman for the Fire Department said. The spokesman said several firefighters responded to scenes in Queens and Brooklyn where motorists were stuck in their vehicles after having trees fall on them.

Aaron Donovan, a Metropolitan Transportation Authority spokesman, urged LIRR passengers to “sit tight for the moment” and not head to Penn Station or Jamaica. New passengers were being turned away from Penn Station, he said.

The MTA was mobilizing shuttle buses to take LIRR passengers from the station in Jamaica, Queens, to points east, but Donovan urged passengers not to go to Jamaica because of limited bus capacity.

While a tornado was never officially declared, a trained weather spotter reported seeing a funnel cloud about two miles north-northeast of Staten Island’s Huguenot neighborhood, according to National Weather Service spokesman Sean Potter. Wind speeds of 70 mph were estimated for Staten Island, while parts of Brooklyn saw sustained 60 mph winds, Potter said.

Brandon Smith, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s office in Upland, N.Y., said the agency received “lots of reports of damage in Staten Island, Brooklyn and Queens” in the wake of the storm. “Primarily tree damage, large branches all over the place,” he said.

Detectives Killed for Mob, Indictments Say

By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

Two retired New York City police detectives, onetime partners who had long been suspected of ties to organized crime, were charged by federal prosecutors yesterday with taking part in eight murders on behalf of the Mafia - most while one or both were still active members of the police force.

The charges, detailed in an indictment unsealed in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, were among the most startling allegations of police corruption in memory. read on

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We've always known that Newt Gingrich is a serial prevaricator, and has always provided us with plenty of material for the fulfilling the second half of this blog's name.

But last night on the Daily Show he did a special kind of lying: Pretending to be authoritative about how we handle terrorism cases, when in fact he was talking out of his butt.

Stewart: But why do you say they’re more radical?

Gingrich: Well, if you had gone to Bill Clinton and said, ‘We’ve just found this guy with his underwear burning because he tried to blow up an airplane’ --

Stewart: Wait, what? Woah. All I heard was Clinton and burning underpants – now I’m not sure what we’re talking about.

Gingrich: You’ve gotta keep focus.

Stewart: If you had gone to him and said –

Gingrich: Why don’t we make – Because he lived through Jimmy Carter’s sending prisoners to Arkansas, it helped him get beat in the 1983 election. And he understood there are certain things the American people have an aversion to, like trying to try terrorists in New York City, which is the place the terrorists tried to destroy. And that the American public doesn’t understand reading Miranda rights to terrorists in Detroit when it’s fairly obvious they’re terrorists.

Stewart: The only thing I would say to that is, didn’t they do the same with Richard Reid, who was the shoe bomber?

Gingrich: Richard Reid was an American citizen.

Of course, Richard Reid is in fact a British citizen:

Reid, also known as Abdul Raheem and Tariq Raja, was born a British citizen in Bromley, South London, to Leslie Hughes, who was of white English descent, and Colvin Robin Reid, whose father was a Jamaican immigrant of African descent.

Republicans are desperate to try to quash this point, because it completely undermines their favorite new meme (first promoted by Karl Rove), namely, that Obama is weak on terrorism because we shouldn't "Mirandize" terrorism suspects.

And they've been getting reminded of the reality a bit lately -- namely, that the cases are nearly identical -- and moreover, handling terrorists through the civilian court system simply makes the most sense.

So now they're just flatly lying about it.

You know, you have to appreciate that guys like Anthony Weiner and Joe Sestak will go on Bill O'Reilly's show to try to bravely counter his nonstop deluge of right-wing talking points. But as he demonstrated last night when he had them on to talk about the New York City terrorism trials, he just proved once again why it's never a winning proposition to go on his show, no matter how hard you try.

O'Reilly only invites liberals on to set them up for a shoutdown, really -- and that's what he did last night. Both Weiner and Sestak pointed out the absurdity of O'Reilly's fears about the civil court system setting the terrorists free -- and worse still, in O'Reilly's view, actually being permitted to stand up and voice their beliefs as part of their defense.

O'Reilly just wound up shouting at them about the four-year trial of Zacarias Moussaoui -- who in fact was convicted. But to O'Reilly, what was intolerable was that Moussaoui was able to use the trial as "propaganda" for radical Islam.

O'Reilly just doesn't believe in the American way of justice, and is afraid to let the world see our justice. Fortunately, many more of us are not so cowardly.

Jeez, between this guy and Pat Buchanan, what is up with NBC Universal?

Over the weekend, Meb Keflezighi became the first American to win the New York City Marathon since 1982. But CNBC's Darren Rovell isn't impressed. Darren Rovell doesn't think Keflezighi is really an American.

On his Twitter account yesterday, Rovell wrote "NYC Marathon winner Keflezghi may be a citizen, but can't count as American."

Rovell explained his bizarre views in an article on CNBC's web site:

It's a stunning headline: American Wins Men's NYC Marathon For First Time Since '82.

Unfortunately, it's not as good as it sounds.

Meb Keflezighi, who won yesterday in New York, is technically American by virtue of him becoming a citizen in 1998, but the fact that he's not American-born takes away from the magnitude of the achievement the headline implies.

"Technically American"? No: Keflezighi is American. Not on some technicality or by virtue of a loophole. He is, simply, an American -- and he isn't any less American simply because he did not share Darren Rovell's great good fortune to have been born in the U.S.

For the record, Keflezighi was born in Eritrea, but has been a naturalized citizen for 11 years, having immigrated to the US twenty-two years ago at the age of 12.

As the daughter and wife of naturalized American citizens, I find this wholly offensive, although I suspect that had Keflezighi had the Scandinavian looks of my husband, there would be absolutely no qualification of his citizenry.

UPDATE: Rovell apologizes:

All I was saying was that we should celebrate an American marathon champion who has completely been brought up through the American system.

This is where, I must admit, my critics made their best point. It turns out, Keflezighi moved to the United States in time to develop at every level in America. So Meb is in fact an American trained athlete and an American citizen and he should be celebrated as the American winner of the NYC Marathon. That makes a difference and makes him different from the "ringer" I accused him of being. Meb didn't deserve that comparison and I apologize for that.

No, it didn't go away. In fact, the daughter of one of my best friends was just diagnosed:

Two more New Yorkers have died with confirmed cases of swine flu, the city’s health commissioner said on Tuesday, bringing the city’s total number of deaths related to the virus to four. Emergency room visits and hospitalizations also continued to rise.

The commissioner, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, said the two latest casualties, a 41-year-old woman in Queens and a 34-year-old man in Brooklyn, were linked to the H1N1 virus by lab tests completed on Monday and Tuesday. Both patients had underlying health conditions that put them more at risk, he said. He added that he could not say officially whether the flu had caused their deaths until autopsies were finished. Both died on Friday.

Officials have cited underlying conditions as a factor in all four deaths in the city, but they have not revealed those conditions, citing medical confidentiality.

[...] Dr. Frieden, speaking at a news conference at the health department, noted that both patients who died were relatively young. Health officials have said that there is some evidence that people born before 1957 may have been exposed to a similar virus and may have some immunity to the novel strain of flu that is circulating.

Hospitals that normally get about 200 visits to the emergency room each day are getting 2,000 per day, he said, and more than 25,000 people have gone to emergency rooms over the past month. The numbers are highest in Queens, but are increasing in Brooklyn and, to a lesser extent, in the Bronx and Manhattan.

Over the last five days, he said, 20 to 25 people a day have been hospitalized with the flu. Before the weekend, the city had recorded only 57 hospitalizations for flu during the entire preceding 30 days.

Bernie with his BFF.

Remember Bernie Kerik, that swaggering sack of testosterone? Looks like he's in real trouble now:

NEW YORK - Former New York City police Commissioner Bernard Kerik has been indicted on charges of making false statements to White House officials vetting him for the position of Department of Homeland Security secretary.

The indictment was handed up Tuesday by a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C. It means Kerik will face trials in New York and Washington.

Similar false-statement charges were brought as part of a larger case in New York but were dismissed and transferred to Washington, where prosecutors say the crimes occurred.

The indictment alleges Kerik falsely denied that as a public official he had any financial dealings with contractors seeking to do business with the city. Prosecutors say the contractors spent more than $255,000 renovating Kerik's apartment.

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New Yorkers like Jon Stewart are taking the news that Rush Limbaugh is leaving them in disgust really hard.

Stewart last night:

Finally!!!

Now for years -- for years -- for years New Yorkers have done everything in our power to get this guy to leave town. We passed laws making it tougher for hot-dog vendors to sell on the streets. We'd hold gay pride parades. There are barely any gay people in the city. We just thought it would make him uncomfortable, so we shipped 'em in!

We've all, as New Yorkers, come together to do this one thing: Get rid of Rush Limbaugh. He was the Truman in our citywide Truman Show.

We knew he was into drugs, so we cleaned up Times Square. Even opened up a Disney story in a place he would normally go to buy drugs. We knew he liked cigars. So we all in New York made an agreement that people who smoke cigars are douchebags.

Fleets! Fleets of Ivy-League-educated cab drivers pretended to be surly Middle Easterners just to annoy Rush Limbaugh. We outlawed murder -- figuring he's the kind of guy who's probably got a taste for it.

The whole reason we've gotta raise taxes in New York City is because of how expensive this whole decades-long charade has been! You know how much it costs to keep Chinatown filled with "Chinese" extras?

I don't even want to talk about it! But you know, now that I know that he's going -- I dunno, man, I feel weird. I feel weird inside. I guess there's one more thing I want to say to him:

If you're heading out from Uptown, take 42nd Street west to Ninth Avenue. make a left, go down four blocks, Lincoln Tunnel's on your right, and you know what? Here's my EZ-Pass. Get the f--k out of here.

Can we offer condolences to wherever it is he decides to relocate to?