Rushdie tweeted:

And then he got mad at those who took issue with his “pun.” For example, when answering critics who mentioned his armed guards protecting him from Iran:

FYI I’ve had no armed guards for 10 yrs. And nobody’s arguing against arming cops, soldiers. Just gun happy individuals like those here.

So, Rushdie can have armed guards but a normal American, who can’t afford said protection, can’t have a gun in their home to protect themselves?

Anyway, I responded to Rushdie’s tweet with, “The worst abt what @SalmanRushdie wrote about Bane is he thinks it’s witty. He’s a crappy writer made famous only bc of Islamic fascism.”

And then he blocked me. Tolerance in action.

I understand making errors, but what Brian Ross did yesterday was worse than the simple mistake he apologized for. I agree with James Taranto 100 percent when he calls what Ross, George Stephanopoulos, and ABC did in labeling the Colorado shooter as a member of the Tea Party as not a simple error, but “sinister”:

The shooting suspect, ABC later reported, is a 24-year-old Ph.D. candidate. Other reports say he is white, and he does not appear to be Hispanic. Politico notes that the network has corrected and apologized for the error:

“An earlier ABC News broadcast report suggested that a Jim Holmes of a Colorado Tea Party organization might be the suspect, but that report was incorrect,” ABC News said in a statement. “ABC News and Brian Ross apologize for the mistake, and for disseminating that information before it was properly vetted.”

This strikes us as insufficient. Simply as a matter of journalistic craft, the report was appallingly shoddy. Ross pointed the finger at an innocent man based on nothing but the coincidence of a common name and the man’s residence in the same city of 325,000 where the crime took place.

Let us amend that. There was one other factor, and this is what makes the ABC error not just amateurish but sinister: the innocent Jim Holmes’s involvement with the Tea Party. For more than three years liberal journalists have falsely portrayed the Tea Party as racist and potentially violent. After the January 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, Ariz., speculation immediately began that the suspect was a Tea Partier. Even after it was proved that he was not, the New York Times published a despicable editorial blaming conservatives anyway.

Ross and ABC were out on this limb alone. Either other journalists learned their lesson from Tucson, or it didn’t occur to them to look for a political motive this time (it was a more plausible hypothesis in a shooting that targeted a politician).

It is reasonable to interpret Ross’s hasty unsubstantiated report as an expression of hostility–bigotry–toward the Tea Party and those who share its values, which are traditional American ones. ABC’s carelessness here is in sharp contrast with the way the mainstream media treat criminal suspects who are black or Muslim. In those cases they take great pains not to perpetuate stereotypes, sometimes at the cost of withholding or obscuring relevant facts such as the physical description of a suspect who is still at large or the ideological motive for a crime.

Oikophobia is no less invidious than other forms of bigotry. ABC and Ross have apologized for their irresponsible reporting, but they have something more to answer for here. Their careless and inadvertent falsehood was in the service of a big lie.

Now, I have yet to read any report that ABC is investigating how this crap made it on the air. Here’s the exact exchange from yesterday:

Stephanopoulos: I’m going to go to Brian Ross. You’ve been investigating the background of Jim Holmes here. You found something that might be significant.

Ross: There’s a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colo., page on the Colorado Tea party site as well, talking about him joining the Tea Party last year. Now, we don’t know if this is the same Jim Holmes. But it’s Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colo.

Stephanopoulos: OK, we’ll keep looking at that. Brian Ross, thanks very much.

One, Ross should be fired. And two, Stephanopoulos needs to answer why he even asked Ross to add this information to the broadcast if this was all there was. 

Just hours after a horrible shooting in Colorado that left a dozen dead and many more wounded, MSNBC’s NOW with Alex Wagner brought up the issue of gun control.

Contributor and former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell blames what he believes to be a lack of sufficient gun control legislation on the NRA’s “overinflated influence” in this country.

The MSNBC panel did not include a counter balance to the pro–gun control members.

See the whole segment here.

Mayor Bloomberg tweets:

Well, at least he hasn’t blamed the attack on a crazed gunman angry at health-care reform, like he did with the Times Square bomber in 2010.

Can’t fix boring. The Daily reports:

Aaron Sorkin has been doing press all week defending his critically-panned HBO show, “The Newsroom,” but behind the scenes he’s cleaning house.

Most of the writers on the cable drama about a Keith Olbermann-type television news demagogue have been fired, sources with knowledge of the show told The Daily. “They’re not coming back, except for Sorkin’s ex-girlfriend [Corinne Kinsbury],” one source said. [Sorkin is currently dating "Sex and the City" actress Kristin Davis.]

The show was renewed early for a second season and it’s unclear how many writers will replace the departing staff.

In the mostly collaborative world of TV, Sorkin is famously known for penning most the scripts himself, and “The Newsroom” had a smaller writers’ room than most TV shows with less than 10 credited writers. It’s not uncommon on other TV series run by powerful showrunners to turn over staff.

“Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner is known to replace scripters every season, sometimes right after they turn in an episode.

“I create these shows so that I can write them,” Sorkin told Vanity Fair in the May issue. “I’m not an empire builder. I’m not interested in just producing. All I want to do is write. I came up as a playwright — writing is something you do by yourself in a room.”

“That said, I couldn’t possibly write the show without that room full of people. I go in there, and we kick around ideas. I’m writing about all kinds of things I don’t know anything about. So they do research for me,” the Oscar-winner added.

The rest here.

Val Patterson may be redefining the obituary.

Patterson passed away on July 10 at the age of 59 after a battle with throat cancer. In his self-penned obituary, Patterson “came clean” about a series of minor crimes and falsehoods he never publicly confessed.

“I really am NOT a PhD,” he admitted. “What happened was that the day I went to pay off my college student loan, the girl working there put my receipt into the wrong stack, and two weeks later a PhD diploma came in the mail.

Mr. Patterson went on to confess that “I AM the guy who stole the safe from the Motor View Drive Inn back in June, 1971. I could have left that unsaid, but I wanted to get it off my chest,” He also admitted to kicking rocks into the Old Faithful geyser at Yellowstone National Park, and to being “banned for life” from Disneyland and Sea World in San Diego following youthful high jinks.”

What a great interview. Justice Scalia was informative, funny, and thoroughly handled Piers Morgan like no guest I’ve seen. All of the clips here.

One thing the MSM is not reporting on the entire Obama-transcript issue is the particular nature of an education at Columbia College that makes transferring into the college after two years of college someplace else so incredibly difficult — and rare.

Columbia’s “thing” is they have what they call the “core curriculum” — a set of classes that every student must take, usually in a student’s first two years. Now, because Columbia has so many required courses compared with other colleges or universities, the school actually discourages transfer students who, like the president, already have two years of college behind them:

To be eligible to enroll as a transfer student at Columbia, you must have completed, or be registered for, 24 points of credit (the equivalent of one year of full-time study) at another institution. Candidates with more than four semesters of college coursework elsewhere are not encouraged to apply. Columbia’s academic requirements and institutional policies make completion of all graduation requirements in a reasonable and timely fashion unlikely. If your college or university is not in the U.S. or Canada, please consult the International Transfer Students Web page.

It’s not impossible to transfer into Columbia from another school and graduate in two years, but it’s difficult. This fact alone makes what the president did an anomaly. And when something’s out of the ordinary, like this is, questions follow. And as a Columbia grad, I am pretty curious to see how he did in the same classes I took.

One item of note, Columbia — then and now — requires two years of a foreign language. We’ve heard from the president many times how he wishes he spoke a second language. What we haven’t heard is him saying, “Boy, I wish I’d paid more attention to those silly Spanish classes while I was at Columbia.” The president was supposed to have taken a foreign language, but he acts like he never did. It’s not out of the ordinary to forget what was learned in college, but maybe he could let us know what language he took while at Columbia but then forgot? Is that too much to ask?

Now, yesterday Eugene Robinson gave me permission to make assumptions on what the president might be hiding by not releasing his transcripts, and there are a variety of theories out there among Columbia alumni on it — that he lied on his application to gain admittance as a foreign student, that he’s hiding the fact that most of the classes he took might — just might — lean slightly left.

Well, if you take at look at my transcript you’ll find classes like the “Economics of Socialism” and “The Economics of Centrally Planned Economies.” Am I a closet socialist, or did I take classes that fit best in my schedule? Again, after almost two years spent on required courses at Columbia, one sometimes has to pick classes by time as much as by content.

So, knowing what I know about how difficult it would be for the president to take all of his core classes and then get enough other classes in to get his degree, I highly doubt that he’s shielding anything. There would be a limited amount of classes open to him that would allow him to do all of this in two years.

This leaves the more sinister theories that he gamed the system somehow to get in. And until he tell us, in the words of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, “we don’t know” what he’s hiding. Also of note, Schultz questioned Romney as an American. Although it’s yesterday’s Sununu comment that gets the most ink, of course. Schultz:

It would be nice if we had a candidate for president who was committed to America. Mitt Romney is committed to making sure that either he makes the most money as humanly possible, or his investors do.

I keep reading that the president needs to release his thesis. Columbia doesn’t require one. For some majors, Columbia requires a seminar class in which you write a paper and present it to the class. But there is no permanent record of these papers. If there were a record, Rich would surely be amazed at my knowledge of Soviet oil production from 1950 to 1990, the topic of my seminar paper — all 15 pages of it in the biggest font and widest margins I could get away with.

And I’ll end on this oddity: Columbia requires every student to prove they can swim. Since I’ve seen pictures of the president riding the waves in Hawaii, I won’t ask that he release the results of his swim test.