Well, to be fair, rapper “Common” may not be reciting that particular line at his upcoming White House visit. But you can watch him recite that and other violent lines in the video below.

The Daily Caller reports:

First Lady Michelle Obama has scheduled a poetry evening for Wednesday, and she’s invited several poets, including a successful Chicago poet and rapper, Lonnie Rashid Lynn, Jr., AKA “Common.” However, Lynn is quite controversial, in part because his poetry includes threats to shoot police and at least one passage calling for the “burn[ing]” of then-President George W. Bush.

Here is the video, with some choice lines transcribed below:

And here is a partial transcript, slightly corrected where the Caller‘s transcription falls short. (The full transcript is at the Caller link. For fun, count the number of references to firearms:

A Letter to the Law

Whatcha gonna do if ya got one gun?
I sing a song for the hero unsung
with faces on the mural of the revolution
No looking back cos’ in back is what’s done
Tell the preacher, god got more than one son
Tell the law, my Uzi weighs a ton

. . . .

Use your mind and nine-power, get the government touch
Them boys chat-chat on how him pop gun
I got the black strap to make the cops run
They watching me, I’m watching them
Them dick boys got a lotta of cock in them
My people on the block got a lot of Pac in them

A reference to burning Bush? Why, yes! It’s clever because it both references the Bible, and slyly hints at assassinating a hated Republican president!

Burn a Bush cos’ for peace he no push no button
Killing over oil and grease
no weapons of destruction
How can we follow a leader when this a corrupt one
The government’s a g-unit and they might buck young
Black people in the urban area one
I hold up a peace sign, but I carry a gun.

Oh: don’t forget:

If you disapprove of this, that means you are a racist.

Thanks to Dana.

[Posted by Karl]

If you took the latest Quinnipiac University poll at face value, you might think so:

However, there is ample reason to not take this poll at face value. (more…)

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

I have written before that when it comes to some Democrats and particularly the President, “high gas prices are not an unintended consequence of their policies: it is the means by which they will accomplish their goal.”  Their goal is to raise the price of gasoline so that you reduce your consumption of it.  So therefore, via Instapundit, we get this New York Times article about how some Democrats plan to raise taxes on the oil industry.

Linking two of the politically volatile issues of the moment, Senate Democrats say they will move forward this week with a plan that would eliminate tax breaks for big oil companies and divert the savings to offset the deficit.

With high gas prices and rising federal deficits in the political spotlight, senior Democrats believe that tying the two together will put pressure on Senate Republicans to support the measure or face a difficult time explaining their opposition to voters whose family budgets are being strained by fuel prices.

President Obama and some top Congressional Democrats have said they want to take some of an estimated $21 billion in savings from ending the tax breaks and steer it to clean energy projects. But the Senate’s Democratic leadership is calculating that using it to cut the deficit instead makes it a tougher issue politically for Republicans who are trying to burnish their conservative fiscal credentials.

“Big Oil certainly doesn’t need the collective money of taxpayers in this country,” said Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, one of the authors of the legislation that Democrats intend to showcase. “This is as good a time as any in terms of pain at the pump and in revenues needed for deficit reduction.”

As part of the effort to build support for the measure, the Senate Finance Committee has invited multinational oil company executives to discuss the tax subsidies and other government incentives at a hearing on Thursday.

Many Republicans are certain to oppose the proposal, making it hard for Democrats to assemble the 60 votes that will be needed to break a filibuster, given the resistance from energy-state senators in their own ranks. Republicans have characterized calls by Mr. Obama and Congressional Democrats to end the breaks as backdoor tax increases that will only increase gas prices.

“Instead of returning again and again to tax hikes that increase consumers’ costs, the administration and its Democrat allies in Congress should open their eyes to the vast energy resources we have right here at home and to the hundreds of thousands of jobs that opening them up could create,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said in a statement.

Don’t tell me that the Democrats are too stupid to know that these taxes will be passed on to consumer.  Let’s remember how they pitch cigarette taxes: as a means of increasing the price of cigarettes and thus reducing smoking.  To quote Bill Clinton:  “One of the surest ways of reducing youth smoking is to increase the price of cigarettes.”  This is economics 101.

So they know what will happen.  They know that their plan will increase the cost of gasoline at the pump.  Some people are radical enough in their environmentalism that they will actually want this as a result.  But they are also betting on a good chunk of the American people being too stupid to understand that if you increase costs to gas companies, they will pass those costs on to you.

Now, personally I don’t like subsidies and special tax breaks generally, and would like to see a radical ending of such policies across the board.  But the Democrats aren’t advocating that, and I will be damned if they are going to single out this industry and make the price of gasoline, and only gasoline, go higher.

And the claim that it will reduce the deficit is bull, too.  First, if gas consumption is reduced, then you have to factor in those reduced profits for the oil companies when calculating tax revenues.  Second, high gas prices are an economy killer, so even if there is some modest increase in tax income from that tax hike in general, the drag on the economy will mean reduced taxes in other areas.  Again, they are depending on you being too stupid to see through all of this.

The only good news is we learn via the Washington Post (H/T: Hot Air) that gas prices might be going down this summer, by about 50 cents.  Which is about $2.50 than I would like, but I’ll take what I can get.

Still when you watch in horror each time you fill the pump remember this: some Democrats want you to feel this way and they have new proposals to make things even worse.

Update: Boston Herald predicts a $0.75 drop in gas prices?

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

I used to think that Democracy Now! was a dishonest liberal media outlet.  But today I revise my opinion.  Clearly they are a right wing organization designed to parody the left and make them look silly.

How else do you explain this?

I especially love the detail about how Geronimo’s great grandson, Harlan Geronimo, is among the offended.   Clearly that is a made up name, right?  Given that apparently “Geronimo” was not really named “Geronimo” but was actually named Goyaałé (if Wiki can be trusted and on this sort of thing it usually can).  [UPDATE BY PATTERICO: I beg to differ. See my update below.] Geronimo was just what Americans called him, reportedly after hearing Spanish speakers appealing to St. Jerome.

So clearly that is just a made up name, right?

Really, seriously, it’s the best satire outside of the Onion, except that it isn’t plausible that anyone would be that silly in real life.

Hat tip: The Blaze, which for some reason treats this obvious parody as serious.

Update: This all reminds me of a classic exchange in Hot Shots! Part Deux. At one point there was danger approaching our heroes, and one of the team members, Williams, talks on the radio about it:

Radio: Recon reports Indians on the warpath in your area. Over.

Wiliams: Ain’t no Indians around here. Over.

Radio: Do not take literally. Repeat. Do not take literally. The vultures are circling the carcass. Repeat. The vultures are circling the carcass. Over.

Williams: I see a couple of gulls, but I don’t…

Radio: The pit bull is out of the cage. The crips are raiding the store.

Williams: Hey, you yanking my crank?

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

UPDATE BY PATTERICO: Wikipedia can never be blindly trusted, ever. It is a good way to find original source materials that can be trusted, but as a Web site that can be edited any time, anywhere, trusting an unsourced allegation on Wikipedia is like proving your point by saying you saw it on the Internet.

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

Disposing of the body before there was independent verification, refusing to even release photographs of the body?  Heckuva job there, Barry. Now we get this from Pakistan:

Abdul cheerfully told me how he had lain awake five nights earlier and heard the thump of American helicopters as they swooped on the world’s most wanted man. So what did he think about the death of Osama Bin Laden.

‘Oh, I don’t believe he is dead,’ he said. ‘If someone was shot in that house, it was not him. You cannot trust the Americans, they have changed their story so many times already.’

Abdul is not alone in his disbelief. A survey found two-thirds of people in Pakistan share his refusal to accept Bin Laden’s death, despite confirmation by Al Qaeda. Even the country’s most revered lawyer told me ‘the ghost of Osama has survived his execution’ given the lack of concrete evidence, storing up problems for the future.

But, hey, while it might not be strategically wise in the War on Terror, it apparently works just fine as election strategy:

The latest NBC News poll finds that nearly two-thirds of Americans back President Obama’s decision not to release the photos taken after Osama bin Laden’s death.

Fifty-two percent said they strongly believe the Obama administration should not release the photos, and an additional 12 percent agreed, although not as strongly.

Which means he will feel little pressure to do the right thing, which is to be as transparent about this whole thing as possible.

Also, in Pakistan they arrested around forty people in Abbottabad in relation to the bin Laden capture:

Pakistani security forces have arrested 40 people in Abbottabad suspected of having connections to Usama bin Laden.

Pakistani sources called the arrests near bin Laden’s compound the “second phase” of the operation that killed the Al Qaeda leader, according to the Open Source Center.

Is this a sign of cleaning house, or finding scapegoats?  Honestly, it beats me.  But it seems implausible to believe that there weren’t a lot of elements in Pakistan that knew exactly where bin Laden was.

H/T: Hot Air.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

UPDATE BY PATTERICO: The quote suggests that, as much as the refusal to release the pictures, the administration’s bungling of the reporting is contributing to some of the skepticism. As commenter daleyrocks put it: “The SEALs killed Bin Laden and we got the 72 versions.”