Too soon: The NRA fundraised in Colorado and other states just days after the mass shooting in Aurora last month, Bloomberg reports. “The future of your Second Amendment rights will be at stake. And nothing less than the future of our country and our freedom will be at stake,” a four-page NRA fundraising letter sent just three days after the theater shooting read. The Denver-based Colorado Ceasefire Capitol Fund, a gun-control advocacy group, called the letter “very insensitive.” “Couldn’t they have waited at least a week, especially here? People’s souls are really wounded,” the group’s president asked. Bloomberg notes that revenues from membership dues have dropped off at the NRA, so fundraising may be increasingly desperate. The letter makes wild and erroneous claims about President Obama wanting to "confiscate" people's guns.
Obama lags in money bags: Mitt Romney outraised Obama again last month, this time by more than $25 million. The Obama campaign is trying to downplay the fundraising gap, but some donors are worried, the Hill reports. “We know we will be outspent, that’s just the reality, ” Jen Psaki, a spokesperson for the Obama campaign admitted to reporters yesterday. “Everything we hear from the president's camp is they're unhappy and perhaps surprised in their fundraising operation. It took a while for the Romney fundraising surge to happen, but when it happened, it happened strongly,” said Michael Malbin, the executive director of the Campaign Finance Institute.
Meanwhile, a new Gallup poll shows that President Obama is losing 9 percent of his supporters from 2008 to Romney this year. While 86 percent of Obama supporters will stick with the president, 92 percent of John McCain voters will go for Romney, with just 5 percent of those picking Obama instead.
More on shooter's neo-Nazi past: Wade Michael Page, the neo-Nazi who allegedly attacked a Sikh temple in Wisconsin Sunday, frequently incited other white supremacists to action on Internet forums, the AP reports. “Get involved and become active. Stop hiding behind the computer or making excuses,” he wrote last year. “Stand and fight, don't run," he implored in an April message. "Passive submission is indirect support to the oppressors. Stand up for yourself and live the 14 words," he add (the 14 words are a white supremacist mantra, related to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Page also wrote that he would leave the U.S. if Herman Cain, the black Republican former presidential candidate, won the presidency.
Giffords shooter switches plea: Jared Loughner, the 23-year-old college dropout accused of shooting former Rep. Gabby Giffords and killing six others in Tucson, will likely plead guilty today, if a judge finds him mentally competent. A federal judge has set a competency hearing for Loughner this morning, where the alleged killer may change his plea. Loughner previously pleaded not guilty, but would change his plea in order to accept life in prison and prevent the possibility of execution.
More Palestinian problems for Romney: Jewish Voice for Peace, a liberal Jewish group, says it has 17,000 signatures that it will deliver to the Mitt Romney’s Boston headquarters asking that he apologize for his recent remarks in Israel in which he suggested that Palestinians were poorer than Israelis because they’re culture was less virtuous. Romney initially denied that his comments related to culture, but then wrote an Op-Ed in the conservative National Review defending the culture claim, making it one of Romney’s quickest triple-flips on record. The petition states,“Your comments were not a reflection of the values Jews, Americans, and our allies hold dear. We call on you to apologize to the Palestinian people for your willful lack of understanding of the facts on the ground and the racist assumptions behind them.”
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