WAR OF PERCEPTION

ACORN Officials Videotaped Telling 'Pimp,' 'Prostitute' How to Lie to IRS

Officials with the controversial community organizing group ACORN were secretly videotaped offering to assist two individuals posing as a pimp and a prostitute, encouraging them to lie to the Internal Revenue Service and providing guidance on how to claim underage girls from South America as dependents.

The videotape was made public Thursday on BigGovernment.com, a political blog launched by Andrew Breitbart as a companion site to his BigHollywood.breitbart.com blog.

 

In the videotape, made on July 24, James O'Keefe, a 25-year-old independent filmmaker, posed as a pimp with a 20-year-old woman named "Kenya" who posed as a prostitute while visiting ACORN's office in Baltimore. The couple told ACORN staffers they wanted to secure housing where the woman could continue to maintain a prostitution business.

ACORN — the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now — bills itself as the nation's largest community of low- and moderate-income families "working together for social justice and stronger communities," according to its Web site.

 

 The organization has been accused by Republicans and conservative activists with fraud in voter registration drives around the country and has been under fire since last year for its support of President Obama and for its planned participation in next year's census.

A spokesman for ACORN, Scott Levenson, when asked to comment on the videotape, said: "The portrayal is false and defamatory and an attempt at gotcha journalism. This film crew tried to pull this sham at other offices and failed. ACORN wants to see the full video before commenting further."

On the videotape, "Kenya" can be seen telling an ACORN staffer that she earns roughly $8,000 a month. The ACORN employee then suggests to "Kenya" that ACORN could submit a tax return for 2008 showing that she made $9,600 for the entire year — instead of $96,000 — and that ACORN would charge "Kenya" $50 instead of the usual $150 fee for preparing her taxes.

ACORN offers tax preparation and benefits application services free of charge during tax season; it charges nominal fees during non-tax season.

The ACORN staffer can also be seen suggesting that the prostitute list her occupation as a freelance "performing artist."

"It's not dancing, trust me," the "pimp" says.

"But dancing is considered an art," the ACORN staffer replies. "[Exotic dancers] usually go under performing artists, or yeah, they usually go under performing arts, which will be what you are — a performing artist."

The "pimp" later says that he and "Kenya" plan to bring up to 13 "very young" girls from El Salvador to work as prostitutes. Although an ACORN staffer points out their plans are illegal, she also suggests that the girls can be claimed as dependents.

"What if they are going to be making money because they are performing tricks too?" the pimp says.

"If they making money and they are underage, then you shouldn't be letting anybody know anyway," the ACORN staffer says, and laughs. "It's illegal. So I am not hearing this, I am not hearing this. You talk too much. Don't give up no information you're not asked."

The "pimp" then asks ACORN staffers to "promise" not to discriminate against his sex worker because of "who she is and what she does," according to the audiotape.

"If we don't have the information, then how are we going to discriminate?" the ACORN staffer replies. "You see what I am saying?"

If the girls are under age 16, the ACORN staffer says on the tape, then they are not legally allowed to work in the state, regardless of what they do.

"So it's like they don't even exist?" "Kenya" asks.

"Exactly," the ACORN staffer replies. "It's like they don't even exist."

The staffer goes on to suggest that as many as three of the underage girls can be listed as dependents at the home, but a "flag" will be raised if as many as 13 are listed.

"You are gonna use three of them," the staffer says. "They are gonna be under 16, so you is eligible to get child tax credit and additional child tax credit."

The ACORN workers also appear to be promoting the group's services to the "pimp" and "Kenya."

A second ACORN employee can be heard on the audiotape suggesting that the couple join the organization for an annual cost of $120 prior to attending one of its first-time homebuyer seminars, which are underwritten with taxpayer funds.

Later, when the "pimp" asks what would happen if the organization is somehow connected to the scheme, the ACORN staffer replies, "First of all, it's not gonna damage us because we not gonna know. And with your girls, you tell them, 'Be careful.' Train them to keep their mouth shut."

"These girls are like 14, how can we trust them?" the pimp asks.

"Just be very, very careful," the ACORN staffer says. "Whatever you do, always keep your eyes in the back of your head."

Reached by FOX News, O'Keefe said he was "shocked" at the level of assistance provided by ACORN staffers.

"I was prepared for them to call the police, throw me out of the office and be hostile," he said. "Without hesitation, they helped me every way they could with evading taxes and setting me up with a brothel, with getting around federal tax laws — doing everything they could to help us. I was completely shocked."

House Republicans issued a report in July accusing ACORN of engaging in a scheme to use taxpayer money to support a partisan political agenda. California Rep. Darrell Issa, the top Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, called for a criminal investigation into the group, which dismissed the report as a "partisan attack job."

Fox News

Saul D. Alinsky: A role model for left-wing satanists

The 1972 Vintage Books paperback edition of Rules for Radicals by Saul D. Alinksy has a page of quotes just before the table of contents. In the last of the three quotes, Alinsky himself said the following:

"Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins -- or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom -- Lucifer."

On page 71, speaking of his training program for political organizers, Alinsky remarked:

"The qualities we were trying to develop in organizers in the years of attempting to train them included some qualities that in all probability cannot be taught. They either had them, or could get them only through a miracle from above or below."

And, on the last page of a 1972 Playboy Interview with Saul D. Alinsky, he said:

ALINSKY: Sometimes it seems to me that the question people should ask is not "Is there life after death?" but "Is there life after birth?" I don't know whether there's anything after this or not. I haven't seen the evidence one way or the other and I don't think anybody else has either. But I do know that man's obsession with the question comes out of his stubborn refusal to face up to his own mortality. Let's say that if there is an afterlife, and I have anything to say about it, I will unreservedly choose to go to hell.

PLAYBOY: Why?

ALINSKY: Hell would be heaven for me. All my life I've been with the have-nots. Over here, if you're a have-not, you're short of dough. If you're a have-not in hell, you're short of virtue. Once I get into hell, I'll start organizing the have-nots over there.

PLAYBOY: Why them?

ALINSKY: They're my kind of people.

I'm not sure whether Alinsky really was a Satanist/Luciferian of some sort or whether he was just joking. He may well have been just joking. The man certainly did have a sense of humor.

When asked his religion, he would always say that he was Jewish. But, on many levels, he seemed to have distanced himself from his Orthodox Jewish background. For example, in Rules for Radicals, when praising Moses as a "good organizer," Alinsky did so in a manner rather irreverent toward the egotism of the Biblical God (pp. 89 to 91).

Be that as it may, he's an excellent role model for politically left-leaning Satanists, whether theistic or symbolic. (When I say "role model" I mean only in a very general sense, not one to be followed slavishly.) Certainly he can be said to have manifested his true will. And he espoused a lot of values that are familiar to today's Satanists, such as his emphasis on power, self-interest, creativity, and practicality.

Rules for Radicals is full of pragmatic realism. For example, on page 88:

"In mass organization, you can't go outside people's actual experience. I've been asked, for example, why I never talk to a Catholic priest or a Protestant minister in terms of the Judaeo-Christian ethic or the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount. I never talk in those terms. Instead I approach them on the basis of their own self-interest, the welfare of their Church, even its physical property."

Alinsky accomplished a lot. He built many organzations that gave lot of people the power to improve their lives.

In Part 7 of the 1972 Playboy interview, Alinsky said:

"The biggest obstacles we faced were the apathy and despair and hopelessness of most of the slum dwellers. You've got to remember that when injustice is complete and crushing, people very seldom rebel; they just give up. A small percentage crack and blow their brains out, but the other, 99 percent say, "Sure, it's bad, but what can we do? You can't fight city hall. It's a rotten world for everybody, and anyway, who knows, maybe I'll win at numbers or my lottery ticket will come through. And the guy down the block is probably worse off than me.

The first thing we have to do when we come into a community is to break down those justifications for inertia. We tell people, "Look, you don't have to put up with all this shit. There's something concrete you can do about it. But to accomplish anything you've got to have power, and you'll only get it through organization. Now, power comes in two forms -- money and people. You haven't got any money, but you do have people, and here's what you can do with them." And we showed the workers in the packing houses how they could organize a union and get higher wages and benefits, and we showed the local merchants how their profits would go up with higher wages in the community, and we showed the exploited tenants how they could fight back against their landlords. Pretty soon we'd established a community-wide coalition of workers, local businessmen, labor leaders and housewives -- our power base -- and we were ready to do battle."

Unlike many leftists, Alinsky avoided dogma. In Part 10 of the 1972 Playboy interview, he said:

"I've never joined any organization -- not even the ones I've organized myself. I prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it's Christianity or Marxism. One of the most important things in life is what judge Learned Hand described as "that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you're right." If you don't have that, if you think you've got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide. The great atomic physicist Niels Bohr summed it up pretty well when he said, "Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question." Nobody owns the truth, and dogma, whatever form it takes, is the ultimate enemy of human freedom.

Now, this doesn't mean that I'm rudderless; I think I have a much keener sense of direction and purpose than the true believer with his rigid ideology, because I'm free to be loose, resilient and independent, able to respond to any situation as it arises without getting trapped by articles of faith. My only fixed truth is a belief in people, a conviction that if people have the opportunity to act freely and the power to control their own destinies, they'll generally reach the right decisions. The only alternative to that belief is rule by an elite, whether it's a Communist bureaucracy or our own present-day corporate establishment. You should never have an ideology more specific than that of the founding fathers: "For the general welfare." That's where I parted company with the Communists in the Thirties, and that's where I stay parted from them today."

But his "belief in people" certainly did not translate into utopian idealism. Also in Part 10 of the 1972 Playboy interview, Alinsky said:

"People don't get opportunity or freedom or equality or dignity as an act of charity; they have to fight for it, force it out of the establishment. [...] Reconciliation means just one thing: When one side gets enough power, then the other side gets reconciled to it. That's where you need organization -- first to compel concessions and then to make sure the other side delivers. If you're too delicate to exert the necessary pressures on the power structure, then you might as well get out of the ball park. This was the fatal mistake the white liberals made, relying on altruism as an instrument of social change. That's just self-delusion. No issue can be negotiated unless you first have the clout to compel negotiation.[...]

In fact, of course, conflict is the vital core of an open society; if you were going to express democracy in a musical score, your major theme would be the harmony of dissonance. All change means movement, movement means friction and friction means heat. You'll find consensus only in a totalitarian state, Communist or fascist.

My opposition to consensus politics, however, doesn't mean I'm opposed to compromise; just the opposite. In the world as it is, no victory is ever absolute; but in the world as it is, the right things also invariably get done for the wrong reasons. We didn't win in Woodlawn because the establishment suddenly experienced a moral revelation and threw open its arms to blacks; we won because we backed them into a corner and kept them there until they decided it would be less expensive and less dangerous to surrender to our demands than to continue the fight. I remember that during the height of our Woodlawn effort, I attended a luncheon with a number of presidents of major corporations who wanted to "know their enemy." One of them said to me, "Saul, you seem like a nice guy personally, but why do you see everything only in terms of power and conflict rather than from the point of view of good will and reason and cooperation?" I told him, "Look, when you and your corporation approach competing corporations in terms of good will, reason and cooperation instead of going for the jugular, then I'll follow your lead." There was a long silence at the table, and the subject was dropped."

Given Alinksi's overall approach to organizing, he has been called a "Machiavelli for the common man." In Rules for Radicals, Alinksy's response to those who ask "Does the end justify the means?" was "The means-and-end moralists, or non-doers, always wind up on their ends without any means" (p. 25).

Some relevant web pages: 1972 Playboy Interview with Saul D. Alinsky, on the Progress Report website, which also has an article Saul Alinsky and the Industrial Areas Foundation by Sanford D. Horwitt

Brief excerpts from Rules for Radicals on the websites of Latter Rain (a left-wing Christian site), Thinking Peace and Maurice Institute Library.

As even the Latter Rain site acknowledges, in an introduction to its excerpt from Rules for Radicals:

"Alinsky's field of action was the field of change and a constant stream of conflict. Alinsky knew that in today's world, people are not motivated by altruism, you need to somehow appeal to their self-interest. The right thing usually done for the wrong reasons. When he came into a community in order to organize it, he had to get the local churches involved. He said that he never appealed to the ministers or priests in terms of Christian principles because they did not really believe in Christianity. Therefore, Alinsky appealed to what really motivated them, their self-interests and talked more about membership and more money. It worked every time."

Some may ask: Is left-wing politics of any kind consistent with Satanism? LaVeyans have often equated Satanism with pure capitalism.

I do not see Satan as championing any particular social, economic, or political order. I see Satan as encouraging us to think for ourselves and to be in touch with our own personal nature. It is up to us to figure out what kind of social, economic, or political order would work best for us, given our own circumstances.

I personally feel that it's in my best interests to live in the kind of society that, on the whole, works best.

My opinion of pure capitalism and economic libertarianism is that they work fine in a society that is largely rural and where there are a lot of small farm owners, as was the case in much of the U.S.A. until the early 20th century or so. However, in a more urbanized society, neither pure socialism nor pure capitalism works well; some sort of mixed economy is needed and can indeed work well, as per the example of most (though admittedly not all) continental Western European countries.

In small towns, "big government" may seem utterly unnecessary. A lot of small towns even have volunteer fire departments. This would never work in a big city like New York. In a small town where everyone knows everyone, there are strong social incentives to do various kinds of volunteer work. The social rewards for volunteer work are much less in a large city.

In a highly urbanized society, the alternative to having at least a moderately limited "welfare state" is to have very high crime rates every time there's an economic downturn. This sort of thing happened quite a bit in the early 20th century, if I'm not mistaken.

Anyhow, as the financial troubles of the Church of Satan itself should more than adequately demonstrate, we Satanists need to drop the fantasy that we're a bunch of supermen. Yes, we should aim to empower ourselves through our own individual efforts, but it also helps to have organizations that empower entire communities.

By Diane Vera

 

 

 

Man carrying assault weapon attends Obama protest

PHOENIX – About a dozen people carrying guns, including one with a military-style rifle, milled among protesters outside the convention center where President Barack Obama was giving a speech Monday — the latest incident in which protesters have openly displayed firearms near the president.

Gun-rights advocates say they're exercising their constitutional right to bear arms and protest, while those who argue for more gun control say it could be a disaster waiting to happen.

Phoenix police said the gun-toters at Monday's event, including the man carrying an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle slung over his shoulder, didn't need permits. No crimes were committed, and no one was arrested.

The man with the rifle declined to be identified but told The Arizona Republic that he was carrying the assault weapon because he could. "In Arizona, I still have some freedoms," he said.

Phoenix police Detective J. Oliver, who monitored the man at the downtown protest, said police also wanted to make sure no one decided to harm him.

"Just by his presence and people seeing the rifle and people knowing the president was in town, it sparked a lot of emotions," Oliver said. "We were keeping peace on both ends."

Last week, during Obama's health care town hall in Portsmouth, N.H., a man carrying a sign reading "It is time to water the tree of liberty" stood outside with a pistol strapped to his leg.

"It's a political statement," he told The Boston Globe. "If you don't use your rights, then you lose your rights."

Police asked the man to move away from school property, but he was not arrested.

Fred Solop, a Northern Arizona University political scientist, said the incidents in New Hampshire and Arizona could signal the beginning of a disturbing trend.

"When you start to bring guns to political rallies, it does layer on another level of concern and significance," Solop said. "It actually becomes quite scary for many people. It creates a chilling effect in the ability of our society to carry on honest communication."

He said he's never heard of someone bringing an assault weapon near a presidential event. "The larger the gun, the more menacing the situation," he said.

Phoenix was Obama's last stop on a four-day tour of western states, including Montana and Colorado.

Authorities in Montana said they received no reports of anyone carrying firearms during Obama's health care town hall near Bozeman on Friday. About 1,000 people both for and against Obama converged at a protest area near the Gallatin Field Airport hangar where the event took place. One person accused of disorderly conduct was detained and released, according to the Gallatin Airport Authority.

Heather Benjamin of Denver's Mesa County sheriff's department, the lead agency during Obama's visit there, said no one was arrested.

Arizona is an "open-carry" state, which means anyone legally allowed to have a firearm can carry it in public as long as it's visible. Only someone carrying a concealed weapon is required to have a permit.

Paul Helmke, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said people should not be allowed to bring guns to events where Obama is.

"To me, this is craziness," he said. "When you bring a loaded gun, particularly a loaded assault rifle, to any political event, but particularly to one where the president is appearing, you're just making the situation dangerous for everyone."

He said people who bring guns to presidential events are distracting the Secret Service and law enforcement from protecting the president. "The more guns we see at more events like this, there's more potential for something tragic happening," he said.

Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan said armed demonstrators in open-carry states such as Arizona and New Hampshire have little impact on security plans for the president.

"In both cases, the subject was not entering our site or otherwise attempting to," Donovan said. "They were in a designated public viewing area. The main thing to know is that they would not have been allowed inside with a weapon."

Representatives of the National Rifle Association did not return calls for comment.

By AMANDA LEE MYERS and TERRY TANG, Associated Press Writers.

In Russia, Obama’s Star Power Does Not Translate

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY and ELLEN BARRY

MOSCOW — Let other capitals go all weak-kneed when President Obama visits. Moscow has greeted Mr. Obama, who on Tuesday night concluded a two-day Russian-American summit meeting, as if he were just another dignitary passing through.

Crowds did not clamor for a glimpse of him. Headlines offered only glancing or flippant notice of his activities. Television programming was uninterrupted; devotees of the Russian Judge Judy had nothing to fear. Even many students and alumni of the Western-oriented business school where Mr. Obama gave the graduation address on Tuesday seemed merely respectful, but hardly enthralled.

“We don’t really understand why Obama is such a star,” said Kirill Zagorodnov, 25, one of the graduates. “It’s a question of trust, how he behaves, how he positions himself, that typical charisma, which in Russia is often parodied. Russians really are not accustomed to it. It is like he is trying to manipulate the public.”

Others suggested that after decades of social turmoil, Russians were simply exhausted with politics, and had been so often disappointed by Western leaders that they were not inclined to get excited by the latest one. Asked by one Moscow newspaper what they expected to come out of Mr. Obama’s visit, most respondents had the same answer: traffic jams.

Some Obama aides said they were struck by the low-key reception here, especially when compared with the outpouring on some of his other foreign trips. Even Michelle Obama, who typically enjoys admiring coverage in the local news media when she travels, has not had her every move chronicled here.

In the background is the question of race, which Russians view through a complicated prism. For decades, Soviet propaganda hammered home the idea that the United States was an irredeemably racist country, as opposed to the Communist bloc nations. But Russia in recent years has been plagued by racist violence against people from the Caucasus region and Central Asia, as well as other immigrants.

Yet many young Russians, like David Zokhrabian, 21, who recently received a graduate degree in international relations from Moscow State University, said Mr. Obama’s race cut both ways. “Students in Moscow, they are pretty positive about this,” he said. “It’s cool, modern, progressive. All the students know American history, they know about segregation, so it shows us about democracy, how it can be.”

But the same cannot be said for average Russians, he said, adding: “It looks weird to them. They just think that America has gone crazy.”

Many here noted that Russia went through an enthusiastic phase with President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, when Russians were reaching out to Americans. Mr. Clinton conducted a town hall meeting in Moscow that was broadcast across Russia (and featured a woman in the audience jumping up and hugging Mr. Clinton on camera).

By contrast, Mr. Obama’s speech on Tuesday, billed as his third major foreign policy address after speeches in Cairo and Prague, was not shown live on any of the major Russian channels, to the White House’s disappointment.

Mr. Obama used the speech, at the New Economic School, to declare that Russia and the United States “share common interests.” The Kremlin tightly controls Russian television, and it was not clear why officials chose to disregard the speech.

They may have believed that there would be little public interest, or they may not have wanted to provide Mr. Obama with unfettered access to the country, which might have allowed him to overshadow Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin or President Dmitri A. Medvedev.

Tom Malinowski, who was a speechwriter for Mr. Clinton, said Russian audiences were always the toughest to connect with.

“It is a jaded political culture that has had a very hard experience with a system that professed universal idealism while delivering unbearable suffering,” said Mr. Malinowski, now Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. “Some degree of cynicism about high-minded ideals is a natural outcome of that.”

He said Mr. Obama’s facility with language gives him the ability to talk around governments directly to people. Mr. Obama, he said, has the talent to “do that in every part of the world, except possibly Russia.”

Sergei Brilev, a top television anchor at Rossiya, the state-owned national channel, said that Mr. Obama’s oratory might not translate well into Russian. He recalled that when he watched Mr. Obama’s speech in Cairo with dubbing in Russian, he found it lackluster. It was only when Mr. Brilev, who speaks polished English, saw the original that he realized what all the fuss was about.

Russians tend to view Mr. Obama not so much with hostility as with indifference. “Despite Russia becoming part of the rest of the world in the last 5 or 10 years,” Mr. Brilev said, “the interesting thing about Russia is that so many things which fascinate the American and European publics are Page 26 stuff here.”

After relations with the United States curdled in the final years of President George W. Bush’s tenure, many people here were relieved by Mr. Obama’s election. But that does not necessarily mean they are overly optimistic about his pledge to improve ties.

Valery Kanishev, 68, a designer for the state circus company, said he was pleased that Mr. Obama had brought his children with him to Russia. But Mr. Kanishev said Mr. Obama’s address on Tuesday would not get him far with many older Russians, who grew weary of political speeches after enduring the wooden recitations of Leonid I. Brezhnev, the former Soviet leader.

In Soviet times, speeches were composed by committees, Mr. Kanishev said, “10 or 12 people who would drink a glass of cognac and then put something together.”

“Russians are the smartest people in the world,” he said. “The main thing is results. Our people don’t trust anyone.”

Younger people were generally more welcoming. Oksana Sytnova, 24, graduated first in her class at the New Economic School, an honor that was particularly sweet because Mr. Obama presented it to her at the graduation on Tuesday.

“For my generation, he is a very attractive politician,” Ms. Sytnova said. “And today’s speech showed that.”

First 100 days: Assault weapons ban

WASHINGTON - Campaigning before a church congregation on Chicago’s South Side one Sunday in July 2007, Barack Obama said an epidemic of big city violence was “sickening the soul of this nation.”

Among the potential cures, he said, was permanently reinstating a ban on assault weapons.

One-hundred days into his presidency, President Obama says it remains a goal. But it is one the White House has been forced to abandon.

Voices of agreement
President Obama and Vice-President Biden, “support making the expired federal Assault Weapons Ban permanent,” the White House website declares. Shortly after taking office, members of the Obama cabinet added their voices of agreement.

At his first news conference as attorney general, Eric Holder said, “there are just a few gun-related changes what we would like to make, and among them would be to reinstitute the ban.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton endorsed the idea during her trip to Mexico in late March. “These assault weapons, these military-style weapons, don’t belong on anyone’s street,” she said.

But the fire has gone out of President Obama’s goal of restricting the availability of firearms. “I don’t know of any plans,” said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, to seek an assault weapons ban from Congress.

Attorney General Holder admitted as much when asked, during a recent session with reporters, whether he expected any push for a ban this year to curb the flow of guns from the United States to Mexico.

His answer could have come straight from the National Rifle Association: “I think what we’re going to do is to try to, obviously, enforce the laws on the books.”

Support evaporated
Congress imposed a ban on what it called assault weapons in 1994, outlawing the sale and importation of 19 military-style weapons, copycat models with similar features, and high-capacity ammunition magazines. In a compromise with Republicans, the Democrats who controlled Congress agreed to let it expire in ten years unless it was renewed. By 2004, with Republicans in charge, support had evaporated.

Democrats again control Congress, and a Democrat is once more in the White House, the same conditions that allowed the ban to be imposed 15 years ago. But the make-up of Congress is different, with little appetite for restricting gun ownership.

The Senate’s majority leader is a westerner, Harry Reid of Nevada, where gun control is political poison. And though the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, comes from the more liberal San Francisco, she has shown no enthusiasm for reviving the assault weapons ban because of opposition among her colleagues.

Sixty-five House Democrats wrote Attorney General Holder in mid-March, saying they “would actively oppose any effort to reinstate the 1994 ban” and predicting “a long and divisive fight” if the administration tried to push for one. Many of them represent rural districts, where gun control is no more popular than in Nevada.

By the time President Obama made his trip to Mexico, he conceded the battle would be futile. “None of us are any illusion that reinstating that ban would be easy.”

“What we’re focused on is how we can improve our enforcement of existing laws,” he said.

Straw buyers
Enforcement of the nation’s gun laws is primarily the responsibility of ATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Its agents and inspectors check to see that gun dealers obey laws governing sales. They look for evidence of “straw buyers” – people legally entitled to buy guns who then sell them to criminals or others who don’t want any records tying them to a specific gun.

ATF says such buyers are responsible for a large proportion of guns that wind up in the hands of violent drug cartels in Mexico.

“These illegal purchases,” ATF’s William Newell told Congress last month, are “a key source and supply of firearms for drug traffickers.”

The best way to improve enforcement of existing gun laws, said one veteran ATF agent, is to put more badges on the street.

“Give us more people to inspect gun dealers, looking for straw buyers, in the states where the guns smuggled into Mexico are coming from,” he says.

The number of ATF inspectors has remained remarkably flat in the past two decades, while support staffing has grown in other federal agencies, including the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration.

ATF had 764 inspectors in 1990. It has 771 today.

The number of ATF agents has risen 32% during the same period, but it is a comparatively small agency. ATF has 2,441 agents today, compared to the FBI’s 13,040 and the DEA’s 5,235.

It’s no accident that the size of ATF’s inspections force has remained flat. The NRA has successfully fought efforts to expand inspections, claiming that licensed firearms dealers have been harassed.

“Despite its crime-fighting mission,” a recent report from the Congressional Research Service dryly observed, “ATF’s business relationships with the firearms industry and larger gun-owning community have been a perennial source of tension.”

If new agents are hired, says the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, “You need to make sure they’re directed to go after the bad guys, because owning firearms is a right in the United States, and what you don’t want to do is harass law abiding people.”

The NRA is on a roll. The Supreme Court ruled last year that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right of gun ownership, not merely the right of organized militias to arm themselves.

Unless the mid-term election brings a substantial change in the composition of Congress, an assault weapons ban has little chance of becoming law under Barack Obama, and ATF will not be able to count on a larger force of agents and inspectors.

Gun control, once considered a soccer-mom issue popular in suburban America, is again radioactive.

MSNBC