One of New York City’s mayoral candidates is demanding that Anthony Weiner apologize to Hispanics for his use of “Carlos Danger” as an online pseudonym.

Rev. Erick Salgado, who hails from the Bronx and is of Puerto Rican descent, claims the name is insulting to Hispanics. “For Anthony Weiner to hide under a Spanish name to do his bad behavior is very insulting to the Spanish community,” Salgado said yesterday.

“I believe he have [sic] to apologize to the Latino community. Every time many people do wrong behavior [sic], it’s always a Carlito, a Pedrito, a Miguelito. But behind that name, it was really not a Carlito. It was a ‘Anthony Weiner.’ You have to apologize to the Latino community. It’s an insult,” Salgado said.

Salgado resigned as the President of Radio Cantico Nuevo, a radio ministry, in order to run for mayor of the Big Apple. You can see his remarks in the video below.

Via Politicker. 

A woman who served on the Zimmerman jury told ABC News that “George Zimmerman got away with murder,” but that there was not enough proof to convict him of either murder or manslaughter.

The woman went by her first name, Maddy, and identified herself as Juror B29. She told ABC’s Robin Roberts that she continues to struggle with the decision, saying, “I felt like I let a lot of people down.” However, she explained, ”as the law was read to me, if you have no proof that he killed him intentionally, you can’t say he’s guilty. . . . As much as we were trying to find this man guilty . . . they give you a booklet that basically tells you the truth, and the truth is that there was nothing that we could do about it.”

When asked if the case should have gone to trial in the first place, Maddy replied, “I don’t think so.” ”I felt like this was a publicity stunt,” she explained.

The interview will be broadcast tomorrow on ABC’s Good Morning America at 7 a.m. EST.

Former congressman and current New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner told reporters that he engaged in sexually explicit Internet exchanges with up to three women after his resignation from Congress. “I don’t believe I had any more than three,” the Democrat said at a campaign event in Brooklyn, after reporters asked how many of the relationships took place after his resignation. Weiner left the House in June 2011, after first vehemently denying, and then confirming, rumors that he exchanged lewd text and picture messages with several women.

Via Politico.

Sydney Leathers, the woman at the center of the latest Anthony Weiner sext scandal, told Inside Edition that the New York City mayoral candidate told her that he loved her, and that she said told him the same. Leathers had the following exchange with Inside Edition’s correspondent: 

Q: “You told Anthony Weiner that you loved him?
A: “Yes”
Q: “Did he tell you he loved you?”
A: “Yes.”

“I cared about him a lot,” she said in an exclusive interview set to air tomorrow, but admitted she didn’t quite love him at the time. “He was very important to me.”

Leathers says her feelings have since changed, especially after watching the disgraced former congressman at Tuesday’s press conference with his wife, Huma Abedin. “I’m disgusted by him. He’s not who I thought he was,” she said. She also offered Abedin a tear-filled apology. 

As Weiner was preparing for his mayoral campaign, Leathers said he asked her to delete their correspondences. “He was trying to be someone he wasn’t,” she explained.

Leathers is one of at least three women Weiner has now admitted to having sexually-explicit correspondences with since his resignation from Congress in 2011. Leathers, an Indiana native, is a 23-year-old former field organizer for the Obama campaign.

In a twist of irony, a Colorado group has had to cancel its upcoming gun buyback event because of a background-check requirement imposed by the state’s new strict gun-control laws.

According to the new law, which was passed shortly after the Newtown school shooting, gun purchasers have to undergo a background check at a licensed firearms dealer. The InstaCheck system used by dealers is not portable, meaning that Together Colorado, a state community organization, cannot hold a buyback event at the Boulder County sheriff’s compound as originally planned.

“The bottom line is what we anticipated doing would still be legal — but procedurally we can’t follow through with it at this time,” said sheriff Joe Pelle.

The group could hold the event at a local firearms dealer, but would still have to pay the dealer for a background check for every transaction. Pelle said that process would be “very unproductive.”

Although the turned-in guns would have been given immediately to the sheriff’s office, some remaining parts were to be given to a local metalworking artist to use for a gun-violence-awareness sculpture.

President Obama invoked Abraham Lincoln today in his speech on the economy in Jacksonville, Fla., arguing that the first Republican president favored spending on infrastructure.

“The first Republican president’s a guy from my home state,” Obama said. “He was a pretty good president named Abraham Lincoln.”

Even though the country was engaged in the Civil War, Obama argued, Lincoln did not neglect infrastructure improvements.

“And yet in the middle of [the war], he was still thinking about ‘how do we build that transcontinental railroad? How are we going to widen our canals and our forts so that we can move products all around the country and eventually the world? How do we invest in land-grant colleges so that our workers are now skilled and can get those new jobs? We’re going to invest in the National Science Foundation to make sure that we stay ahead of everybody else when it comes to technology,’” Obama said in his speech at the Jacksonville Port Authority.

The National Science Foundation was not founded until 1950. President Obama was likely referring to the National Academy of Sciences, which was incorporated during Lincoln’s presidency.

“He made those investments, the first Republican president,” Obama maintained. “He didn’t say, ‘well, that’s not the job of government to help do that.’ He wouldn’t have understood that kind of philosophy. ’Cause he understood there’s some things we can only do together. And rebuilding our infrastructure is one of them.”

Obama promised that his focus on helping the economy through infrastructure investment would continue through the rest of his presidency, and challenged Republicans to come up with their own plans.

“I’m laying out my ideas to give the middle class a better shot,” he said, “and if the Republicans don’t agree with me, I want them to lay out their ideas.”

The president contended that his understanding of the GOP’s ideas, repealing Obamacare and slashing budgets for education, research, and infrastructure, did not constitute an economic agenda.

I’d invite you to read two articles today, one from the Left and one from the Right, outlining different aspects of the systematic repression and persecution that characterizes much of the Muslim world today.  

Over at CNN, Nina Burleigh outlines our government’s truly embarrassing non-response to allegedly “allied” governments that imprison rape victims. After outlining story after story that made news only because the targets of persecution were Western women, Ms. Burleigh gets to the political heart of the matter:

The U.S., incredibly, has had three female secretaries of state in a row who never put this issue on the table despite many meetings with kings and princes. We should be applying much more political and diplomatic pressure on these countries to give women their basic human rights.

We should also be supporting the brave women in these countries fighting for change.

Exactly so. The treatment of women in much of the Middle East is so abysmal it has to be seen to be believed. But they are of course not the only victims of oppression.

Today at the Hoover Institute, Bruce Thornton writes about the “Christian Tragedy in the Muslim World”: 

Few people realize that we are today living through the largest persecution of Christians in history, worse even than the famous attacks under ancient Roman emperors like Diocletian and Nero. Estimates of the numbers of Christians under assault range from 100-200 million. According to one estimate, a Christian is martyred every five minutes. And most of this persecution is taking place at the hands of Muslims. Of the top fifty countries persecuting Christians, forty-two have either a Muslim majority or have sizeable Muslim populations.

It is a sign that we have utterly lost our minds that many Americans worry far more about “Islamophobia” than they do about this very real oppression, and many Americans will mock critics of the Muslim world as bigots or extremists for condemning conduct that should shock the conscience of any civilized person.  

It’s one thing to be so blinded by multicultural nonsense (failing to appreciate that it is the Muslim world — not America — that desperately needs to embrace “diversity”) that we can’t clearly identify evil, it’s another thing entirely to subsidize oppression on a grand scale. Read this ABC News chart of American aid recipients and weep:

I’m no math major, but even a lawyer can see that we subsidize oppressive Muslim governments to the tune of roughly $8 billion per year — collectively far more than we give our closest Middle Eastern ally (and vibrant Democracy), Israel. We’ve certainly debated aid for Egypt in recent weeks and months, but note that Pakistan receives far more aid than Egypt. At the ACLJ we have an office in Pakistan that works overtime defending Christians from trumped-up blasphemy charges, and gruesome tales of Pakistani intolerance are legion. Shall we also mention Osama bin Laden’s hiding place for the better part of a decade, or the Pakistani intelligence service’s spotty (at best) record on fighting the Afghan Taliban? Pakistan has American blood on its hands and American dollars in its banks.

For too long — through Republican and Democratic administrations — we’ve turned away from abuse of women, ignored the persecution of Christians, made excuses for terrorism, and attached few meaningful conditions to our billions upon billions of dollars in aid. Instead, we’ve wrung our hands about our own “imperialism,” vigilantly policed our alleged Islamophobia, and kept writing checks to intolerant regimes — even as extremism flourished.

At some point this policy moves from naïve, to foolish, to pathetic, and — ultimately — to evil. Right now, we’re pathetic. If we keep paying for this oppression, we’ll be complicit in evil.  

President Obama was bound to receive a warm response from the audience attending his speech at the University of Central Missouri yesterday — because some students who disagreed with him weren’t allowed into the building.

Christopher White of The College Fix reports that students wearing “Tea Party T-Shirts and others who wore patriotic or Republican-inspired clothing” were turned away at the door under the guise of security concerns, despite the fact that they held tickets to the event.

I’d like to offer a helpful tip to all College Republicans who hope to attend an Obama speech in the future: Odds of admission improve if you wear a Che Guevara t-shirt, an “I Heart Kim Jong Un” campaign button, and/or a ballcap displaying the slogan “Obama Girl” prominently above the brim.

Representative Steve King (R., Iowa) stood by his comments on illegal immigration, asking his critics for an “open debate” and once again calling attention to the use of children and teenagers to deliver illegal drugs across the border.

King has drawn fire for a July 18 interview with Newsmax TV, during which he warned that not every minor brought to the United States illegally is a model of good behavior:

There are kids that were brought into this country by their parents unknowing that they were breaking the law. And they will say to me and others who defend the rule of law, “We have to do something about the 11 million. And some of them are valedictorians. . . . It’s true in some cases. But they aren’t all valedictorians; they weren’t all brought in by their parents; for every one who’s a valedictorian, there’s another hundred out there that they weigh 130 pounds, and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.

Earlier today, during his weekly press conference, House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) chastised King for his remarks, calling them “deeply offensive and wrong.” Boehner added, “What he said does not reflect the values of the American people or the Republican party.”

Meanwhile, Luke Russert of NBC News tweets that a group of immigrant students plan to deliver cantaloupes to King’s Iowa office this afternoon.

An official in Montgomery County, Pa., issued at least five marriage licenses to gay couples this week in defiance of the state’s law defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

Bruce Hanes, the Register of Wills in the suburban Philadelphia county, granted the licenses in order to come down “on the right side of history and the law.” He claims that he took a look at the Pennsylvania constitution and the Supreme Court’s striking down of the Defense of Marriage Act before deciding that the 1996 state law prohibiting recognition of same-sex unions as marriages should not impede him from issuing marriage licenses to gay couples.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit earlier this month in hopes of overturning the state law. State attorney general Kathleen Kane, a Democrat, has announced that she will not defend the law, leaving the defense to Governor Tom Corbett and his legal team, a local news source reports.

Corbett’s press secretary released a statement saying that “individual elected officials cannot pick and choose which laws to enforce.”  It went on to explain that Hanes is “constitutionally required to administer and enforce the laws that are enacted by the Legislature” and that the licenses he has issued are invalid.

Pennsylvania is one of the battleground states in the same-sex marriage debate, along with Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, and Oregon. According to the Christian Science Monitor, “a stampede toward the acceptance of gay marriage” in “unlikely” in states who currently do not recognize such unions, despite the Supreme Court’s DOMA ruling.

Jonah, I knew this one would make it to your in-box eventually, so I decided to go ahead and post it myself.

Rand Paul leads the GOP primary field nationally with 16 percent of the vote, according to the latest PPP poll, followed by Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and Paul Ryan with 13 percent each and Marco Rubio with 10 percent. Paul has gained ground among conservatives in the wake of his filibuster of CIA nominee John Brennan over the administration’s drone policy. 

The sixth-place finish for Rubio represents a fall for the Florida senator, who led each of the company’s polls since December. Rubio’s push for immigration reform appears to have hurt him among Republicans; PPP notes that he was “at 21 or 22% on all of our polls between January and March but his support has now dropped to half that level.”

Freshmen senator Ted Cruz leads among voters who define themselves as “very conservative,” with 20 percent of the vote, followed by Paul with 18 percent and Ryan with 17 percent.  to 18% for Paul and 17% for Ryan. Perhaps not surprisingly, Christie leads with “moderate” Republicans. 

The poll was conducted from July 19-21. 

The Bank of England confirmed yesterday that Jane Austen will be featured on the ten-pound note in a few years, ousting Charles Darwin. The decision follows a backlash in Britain over the bank’s announcement in April that 19th-century philanthropist Elizabeth Fry would be replaced on the five-pound note by Winston Churchill beginning in 2016, leaving only male faces (with the notable exception of the Queen’s) on British currency.

The subject has been close to the heart of incoming Bank of England governor Mark Carney. “Mr Carney started discussions about female representation on banknotes on his first day in office,” the BBC reports. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne applauded him in a tweet saying that the choice showed great “sense and sensibility.”

The outgoing Bank of England governor, Sir Mervyn King, last month seemed to indicate that Austen was not an affirmative-action pick in response to public pressure but had been “quietly waiting in the wings” to replace Darwin for some time. “One thing which we are quite determined to avoid is any suggestion that the five pound note in some sense be reserved for women,” he said in his final public appearance.

Amusingly, the quote from Pride and Prejudice selected for inclusion on the bill seems to have been chosen by someone who didn’t read the book. “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!” were the insincere words spoken by the affected Miss Bingly to Mr. Darcy in a futile attempt to attract his attention:

Miss Bingley’s attention was quite as much engaged in watching Mr. Darcy’s progress through his book, as in reading her own; and she was perpetually either making some inquiry, or looking at his page. She could not win him, however, to any conversation; he merely answered her question, and read on. At length, quite exhausted by the attempt to be amused with her own book, which she had only chosen because it was the second volume of his, she gave a great yawn and said, “How pleasant it is to spend an evening in this way! I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! — When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”

Austen would no doubt appreciate the irony.

Tennessee, Alabama, and Kentucky boast the strongest auto-manufacturing industries in the country, according to newly released rankings from the corporate news magazine Business Facilities. Tennessee took the top spot on the combined strength of a General Motors plant in Spring Hill, a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, and a Nissan plant in Smyrna; all three factories are expanding operations in response to growing worldwide demand for cars and trucks. Alabama narrowly finished second – the Cotton State is home to Mercedes-Benz, Honda, and Hyundai plants, all of which are also ramping up production. And Kentucky finished third, thanks to growing Ford and Toyota operations. (The rankings, of “Automotive Manufacturing Strength,” were not based on just overall auto production, but took into account industry trends, growth potential, and current production statistics.)

All three top states have right-to-work laws, which prohibit employers from barring non-unionized workers, tending to weaken unions substantially. Longtime auto-industry capital and United Auto Workers stronghold Michigan passed a right-to-work measure late last year.

Ford and GM, by the way, both released their second-quarter earnings reports this week — and both of the iconic Detroit firms beat investor expectations, with Ford in particular showing an impressive profit. As the Wall Street Journal notes, “In the U.S., auto makers have outperformed the overall economy for the past several years. Auto output accounted for nearly 20% of the growth in the U.S. GDP since the second quarter of 2009, said Ford economist Ellen Hughes-Cromwick.”

While Detroit’s government languishes in bankruptcy, Ford, GM, and Chrysler have all fought their way back from the brink of destruction (albeit with taxpayer help, in the latter two cases), in large part by slashing pension costs and seeking out competitive business climates not dominated by unions and their political cronies. Those hoping to effect a similar turnaround in the Motor City itself might take note.

Via the Birmingham News.

Harry Reid is already calling himself a “cheerleader” for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid. He is also predicting she will likely enjoy a more successful presidency than her husband.

“I think that they’re a pretty good team, but she’ll handle things probably even better than he did,” Reid said yesterday after after listing the former president’s accomplishments in an interview with the PBS Newshour. The Senate majority leader, asked if his comments were sincere, did not back down. “Oh yeah,” he said.

Reid, who endorsed then-Senator Obama over Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary, now claims to the former secretary of state’s most enthusiastic supporter. “Hillary Clinton may have a bigger fan than Harry Reid, I just don’t know who it would be.”

POTUS is in Jacksonville to brag about local job creation and to pressure congressional Republicans to bankroll “shovel-ready” jobs programs. Not so fast on the credit-claiming, says the Sunshine State GOP, which today runs this “Eye Off the Ball” ad in the Florida Times Union saying the surge in private-job creation comes courtesy of Republican Governor Rick Scott’s program of tax cuts, regulation cuts, and debt reduction, and advised Mr. Obama that while “It is flattering you want to take credit” for Scott’s success, “it would be better if you learned some lessons” from him.

Mark Sanford’s scheduling blunder resulted in a fashion faux pas when he had to rush from the gym in order to make last night’s House votes. Good thing he already had running shoes on.

Sanford walked into the Speaker’s Lobby outside the House chamber in a sweaty T-shirt, gym shorts, and a pair of sneakers upon hearing that votes on the Department of Defense appropriations bill had been moved up an hour, according to Roll Call. In a feeble attempt to comply with dress protocol, Sanford had to borrow an aide’s blazer to sneak onto the floor to cast votes before hovering in the lobby. Sanford nixed Florida congressman Trey Radel’s suggestion to pull his shorts lower so that they would look more like pants.

When asked if he had thought he could squeeze in a workout before the evening’s votes, Sanford responded, “I think that’s a fair assessment.”

Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Reyes came under fire from the Military Religious Freedom Foundation earlier this week for posting a column titled “No Atheists in Foxholes: Chaplains Gave All in World War II” on an Air Force base website.

Serving at the Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska, Reyes was ordered to remove the column from the “Chaplain’s Corner” on the site because it allegedly offended atheist servicemen. The MRFF claimed that 42 airmen had complained and sent a letter on their behalf to the base commander about Reyes’s crime:

In the civilian world, such anti-secular diatribe is protected free speech. Beyond his most obvious failure in upholding regulations through redundant use of the bigoted, religious supremacist phrase, “no atheists in foxholes,” he defiles the dignity of service members by telling them that regardless of their personally held philosophical beliefs they must have faith.

The essay, whose title was drawn from a famous phrase uttered by a priest during a siege in WWII and referred to in a 1954 speech by Eisenhower, was removed from the website after the MRFF contacted Reyes’s superiors. Now the Foundation is seeking to have the chaplain punished for his “faith based hate” and for violating military regulations.

No such regulation seems to exist that would merit censoring Reyes, and his column (which, for the record, did not attack non-believers) should be protected by the First Amendment. The MRFF is essentially “saying that the coercive power of government must be used to punish a military office, who is also an ordained Christian minister, for making ordinary religious references consistent with his faith,” according to Breitbart.

Townhall has republished the complete text of Reyes’s short essay. See for yourself how “offensive” his message is:

Everyone expresses some form of faith every day, whether it is religious or secular.

Some express faith by believing when they get up in the morning they will arrive at work in one piece, thankful they have been given another opportunity to enjoy the majesty of the day; or express relief the doctor’s results were negative.

If the MSM loves to portray Republicans as thick-browed, Neanderthalic brutes operating according to a herd mindset, the Republican Study Committee (RSC) comes in for particular vitriol. Supposedly an inner circle of the most rabid, tea-party, hard-right ideologues ever to inhabit the pure confines of Washington, D.C., the 180-member RSC is the evil mastermind behind the obstructionist and destructive tactics of the GOP, at least according to MSNBC and the like.

Yesterday I got to sit in on the weekly lunch of the witches’ coven of the RSC. While the members’ comments are off the record, the discussion I witnessed on the Amash amendment (to stop the NSA’s blanket phone-record gathering) was as spirited and marked by differences of opinion as anything I’ve seen between Republicans and Democrats on the House floor. Amash’s amendment was narrowly defeated on the floor last night, but the afternoon’s internal RSC debate pitted libertarians against national-security wonks, former military officers versus federal prosecutors, small businessmen versus Washington insiders. There was absolutley no unanimity of agreement, no Rovian marching orders given or accepted, and no resolution of the issue. It was thoughtful but hard-edged, informed but passionate. It did credit to the RSC members grappling with a complex and important issue. I wish reporters of the MSM could have watched, but they probably would have assumed it was all for show, for their benefit. Their purposefully misleading “reporting” on Republicans is not merely a disgrace, but is grounded in ignorance of the range of views within even supposedly the most ideologically rigid segment of the party.

Marco Rubio wants to be the main sponsor of an upcoming Senate bill that would place a ban on abortions after 20 weeks.

“If someone else would like to do it instead of me, I’m more than happy to consider it, but I’d like to be the lead sponsor,” Rubio said. “I feel very strongly about this issue.”

The Florida senator said he was certain that a 20-week ban would be constitutional, but did not specify exactly how. But such questions may be moot in a Democrat-controlled Senate: Majority leader Harry Reid’s staff has said he doesn’t want to bring the bill up for a vote, though the senator did tell NBC he would be “happy to take a look at” the legislation.

The House passed a similar bill earlier this year following the verdict in the Kermit Gosnell case.