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“That hunger and malnutrition should persist in a land such as ours is embarrassing and intolerable.” So declared Richard Nixon in May 1969 in his now widely forgotten “Special Message to the Congress Recommending a Program to End Hunger in America.” In that document, he summoned the country to a new level of generosity and concern and laid out a series of strong legislative steps and executive actions, including a significant expansion of the food-stamps program.

While campaigning for the White House in 1968, Mr. Nixon did not focus on the existence of a serious hunger problem. His conversion came as public calls to do something about hunger rose — driven, in part, by Senator Robert Kennedy’s highly publicized trip to Mississippi in 1967 where he encountered nearly starving children and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s focus on hunger as part of the Poor People’s Campaign.

GOP aides are criticizing the House Republicans’ partisan witch-hunt over the Obama administration’s handling of the attacks on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya last year, arguing that the Party should focus more on substantive issues, such as lessons learned and how to recalibrate diplomatic security.
Roll Call reports that Republican aides are saying staffers are getting bogged down chasing bogus accusations.

The Oklahoma tornado disaster has killed at least 24 people, left hundreds injured and caused millions of dollars in damage. But that has not stopped a senator from that same state from declaring that he will not approve federal aid for victims of the disaster unless the spending can be offset with cuts.
The tornado damage near Oklahoma City is still being assessed and the death toll is expected to rise, but already Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., says he will insist that any federal disaster aid be paid for with cuts elsewhere.
CQ Roll Call reporter Jennifer Scholtes wrote for CQ.com Monday evening that Coburn said he would “absolutely” demand offsets for any federal aid that Congress provides.
Coburn added, Scholtes wrote, that it is too early to guess at a damage toll but that he knows for certain he will fight to make sure disaster funding that the federal government contributes is paid for. It’s a position he has taken repeatedly during his career when Congress debates emergency funding for disaster aid.
Okay, let’s see if we can help Sen. Coburn and others who object to disaster relief spending without offsets find the cuts they want.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that Arizona’s ban on all abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy is flatly unconstitutional, striking it down without additional comment.

The state’s Republican majority passed the law last April, making Arizona one of the most restrictive states in the union for reproductive rights. Experts said that the law was so broadly written and carried with it so little medical expertise that it actually applied to women after their 18th week of pregnancy — meaning that, for a time, the state classified women as pregnant up to two weeks before they even had sex.

When New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was asked in mid-May about his political bona fides, he replied, “I’m a damn good Republican and a good conservative Republican.” Believe what he says—especially the “conservative” part.

Read more: http://www.thenation.com/article/174352/chris-christie-gop-moderate-fuhgeddaboudit#ixzz2Tx6evIG2

A week’s worth of gun reports, courtesy of Wordle.
We get some interesting reader email here at the Gun Report – some of it nice, some of it not so nice. But Jonathan Greene, a data miner at a company called Acme Informatics, recently wrote to tell us that he took a selection of Gun Report entries and created a word cloud. This is a text graphic in which words that appear more frequently are given greater prominence. Mr. Greene designed his cloud by hand, extracting different parts of speech and determining frequencies for each adjective. In his version, “dead” and “early” appear most prominently.

We liked the concept so much that we ran the last week’s worth of gun reports through Wordle, a Web site which generates big, colorful word clouds. As you can see in the above image, “shot” appears most prominently, which is to be expected, and “shooting” is the next most prominent word. After that is “man,” which reflects the vast majority of both the victims and perpetrators of gun violence. “Night” and “Saturday” are next, which makes sense, as Saturday is a very busy day for shootings, as are the evenings.

And lastly, the word “early” looms large in both word clouds, probably because the vast majority of shootings seem to occur in the dead of night, between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m. Here is today’s report.

—Jennifer Mascia

A 4-year-old child is recovering in the hospital after being shot in Brighton, Ala., Sunday afternoon. Someone shot into an occupied vehicle in which the child was a passenger at around 3 p.m. Police are soliciting tips from the public.

—WVTM-TV

An accidental shooting claimed the life of a 12-year-old in Dayton, Ohio, Sunday morning. Deputies responded to a home on Riverpark Parkway just before 11:30 a.m. and determined that the shooting was an accident.

—2News

A shooting in East Palo Alto, Calif., left a 15-year old boy dead and two others injured Sunday night. Four teens were sitting in a car when someone approached and fired several rounds into the vehicle. 15-year-old Jose Quinonez suffered multiple gunshot wounds and was pronounced dead at the scene. The other two victims, ages 15 and 16, were transported to a hospital. Police are soliciting tips.

—CBS SF Bay Area

Charles McIver Jr., 14, was shot and wounded while sleeping in his Sanford, N.C., home Sunday night. Family members said they believe his older brother was the intended target of the gunman. Deputies said they have no leads in the shooting. Almost 30 shell casings were found in the road.

—WRAL.com

A woman was wounded after a gunman allegedly opened fire on three people in a Pomona, Calif., parking lot late Sunday. Eileen Montoya, 34, was found suffering from several gunshot wounds. The shooter also fired at two other people but missed. Police are soliciting tips.

—Inland Valley Daily Bulletin

A man is in custody after police say he shot and wounded his son in Denver, Colo., Monday morning. Police say the man shot his son in the arm during an argument. The father was taken into custody. The victim will survive.

—DenverPost.com

A man was shot in the leg by someone in a passing car as he walked down a Jacksonville, Fla., street Monday afternoon. After the shooting, the victim hobbled down Plymouth Street to the Sunrise Food Store, where the manager told him not to get blood in the store and to wait outside for an ambulance. It was the second shooting in the neighborhood in three days.

—Jacksonville.com

A man was injured Monday afternoon in a shooting in the Longwood Manor neighborhood of Chicago, Ill. Shortly before 1:30 p.m., a man believed to be in his 60s suffered a gunshot wound to his shoulder. The victim was taken to the hospital in critical condition. Police are investigating.

—Chicago Tribune

Gigi M. Riley, 32, was shot twice at her South Bend, Ind., home early Monday after she awoke to a loud bang and encountered a shadowy figure at the front door. The intruder shot her twice and fled. Police do not believe the shooting was random. The victim recently admitted that she led a scheme that used bogus tax returns to defraud the government for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

—South Bend Tribune

Bobby Blair, 26, was shot in the leg in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Monday afternoon. The shooting took place in the back of a house near the garage. A gun was found nearby. Police are searching for the suspects.

—KCRG.com

A 19-year-old man was shot while walking down a street in Whiting, Ind., Monday night. A vehicle pulled up to the victim and a man stepped out and the two exchanged words. The victim was then shot in the back with a handgun. The suspected shooter fled.

—NWITimes.com

A man was shot in a home in Ramsey, Ind., Monday morning. When officers arrived they found a woman on the porch and a man inside who was dead from gunshot wounds. The investigation is ongoing.

—WISHTV.com

D’Andre Goodley, 18, was shot and killed after he and two others were attacked Sunday night in the small Acadia Parish community of Branch in Louisiana. The other two victims were transported to the hospital with gunshot wounds. Police said the shootings followed an altercation involving the victims.

—The Advocate

A 20-year-old man was found with wounds from a shotgun inside an apartment on the west side of Spartanburg, N.C., late Monday afternoon. He died at the scene. Police believe the shooter is a woman about the same age as the victim. She is being questioned.

—GoUpstate.com

Authorities are investigating a late-night shooting in Laurens County, S.C., that left a man injured Sunday. After the shooting, the victim showed up on a homeowner’s front porch with gunshot wounds in his leg and groin area. He was flown to Greenville Memorial Hospital.

—WYFF4.com

Gunfire erupted early Sunday outside a Garland, N.C., club, resulting in injuries to three men in their 20s. Police said they are not being identified for fear of retaliation. The shooting occurred at the Boom Boom Room, which was host to about 200 people. “The victims have stated that they did not see anyone shooting,” Capt. Rodney Hester said. “They just heard the gunshots before being struck.”

—fayobserver.com

According to Slate’s gun-death tracker, an estimated 4,283 people have died as a result of gun violence in America since the Newtown massacre on December 14, 2012.

But as I mingled with my fellow honorees, there was a pang of concern that I would like to think is not driven by jealousy. Sites like ours, even when they are hooked to established news organizations, are starved for funding to pay for the journalism they provide. Others do spectacularly well, less because of the eyeballs they attract than for the personal information their readers freely give up that is desired by potential advertisers.

That is the appeal of Tumblr, a 6-year-old social blogging service that has yet to earn much money because it has shunned advertising, thereby gaining the trust of its users who willingly share massive amounts of private data. Tumblr’s CEO told the Los Angeles Times in 2010 that he was “pretty opposed to advertising,” but Yahoo undoubtedly has other plans.

More than 100 mourners turned up on Saturday night to a candlelight vigil for Mark Carson, the 32-year-old gay man shot and killed by a homophobe early Saturday morning in New York City. Carson’s murder, which is being treated as a hate crime, is the latest and most violent in a recent string of anti-gay attacks in the city, a place whose progressive leanings have yet to fully overpower a resilient streak of homophobia.

Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn will seek to offset federal aid to victims of the devastating tornado that hammered through Oklahoma City suburbs on Monday with cuts elsewhere in the budget, as if he’s competing for sociopath of the year. 90 lives have been taken, hundreds hospitalized, lives turned upside down and Coburn’s response is that the poor people can pay it. Sure politics is pure lunacy but he’s taking over the asylum while holding his own constituents hostage.