Mickey Kaus asks, “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.
Meanwhile, Jennifer Rubin notes that “Obama
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