Obama's "Mission Accomplished"
What his new faux-presidential seal symbolizes.
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Where does Obama get that "hate crimes against Hispanic people doubled last year"--an alleged increase he blamed on "people like Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh ginning things up"? The latest FBI statistics I can find are from 2006, not last year. They show about a 14% increase from 2005, by my calculation. Even the Southern Poverty Law Center only claims
According to hate crime statistics published annually by the FBI, anti-Latino hate crimes rose by almost 35% between 2003 and 2006, the latest year for which statistics are available.
A 35% increase over four years is not "doubled last year." (Never mind why the SPLC may have picked 2003 as their base of comparison).
Am I missing some Obama data source? Or is this an overly overlooked incident of Obama pulling convenient facts out of the air? ...
Suppose John McCain had said the same thing! ... Er, actually, McCain probably will say the same thing. And he'll probably get a pass too. Who'd attack him for it? Obama? The Dobbs-deriding MSM? This is not an area where you can rely on the normal adversarial political process to yield the truth, because Obama, McCain and the MSM essentially agree on immigration. ...
Backfill: Dobbs questioned Obama's stats, as did Lonewacko. But who else? ...
P.S.--Who's #1? Ruben Navarette, struggling to defend Obama, wrote:
Nevertheless, Hispanics in 2006 were considered by the FBI as the No. 1 victim of hate crimes motivated by one's ethnicity or national origin, and by a margin that was the highest since records have been kept.
What Navarette's hiding is the FBI's category of crimes motivated by "ethnicity or national origin" does not include crimes motivated by "racial bias"--a far larger category. In 2006, there were about 4 times as many attacks on African-Americans because of "racial bias" as attacks motivated by "anti-Hispanic bias."
Of course, it's entirely possible that many attacks on illegal immigrants go unreported due to those immigrants' fear of coming into contact with authorities. That means the FBI stats might be off. It doesn't remove the suspicion that Obama's stats are essentially made up. ...
Photograph of Ann Coulter on Slate's home page by Brad Barket/Getty. Photograph of a wedding cake with two grooms on Slate's home page by Hector Mata/AFP Photo. Photograph of Princess Diana on Slate's home page by Georges De Keerle/Getty Images. Photograph of Barack Obama on Slate's home page by Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images.



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