Despite this nation’s unsavory history of presidential assassination, Arizona Police say they had no grounds to arrest the dozen or so protestors who showed up at a speech by President Obama with assault rifles slung across their shoulders. “It was a group interested in exercising the right to bear arms,” said Phoenix Police spokesman Sgt. Andy Hill, reminding that there is no law on the books to preclude citizens from sporting the high-powered, automatic weapons, as long as they have the proper permits and the rifles are not concealed. He also noted that his officers carefully monitored the protestors. Monday’s demonstration isn’t the first time gun-toting activists showed up at a presidential event to make a point in recent days. Another man with an assault made headlines in New Hampshire last week when he appeared at a town hall meeting with a gun holstered to his thigh. U.S. Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan told CNN that the armed protestors posed no real threat to the president. “We pay attention to this obviously … to someone with a firearm when they open carry, even when they are within state law,” Donovan said. “We work with our law enforcement counterparts to make sure laws and regulations in their states are enforced.” For many Americans, particularly African Americans, there is genuine fear that the first Black U.S. president would be considered a trophy for some lunatic with a gun. The rise in White supremacist groups, as documented by the Southern Poverty Law Center, fuels such concerns, and a recent government report revealed that President Obama faces about 30 potential death threats every day.

A Canadian group that monitors radio broadcast standards described a supposedly comedic skit about assassinating President Obama a “disturbing, wounding, abusive racial comment.” In a public chastisement of the French-language Radio-Canada Monday, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council said the on-air skit, which included the line that Obama would be easy to kill because he stands out against the White House, was far from funny. Read more.

Ever since Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated more than four decades ago, photographs taken at the scene of the murder have languished in a Life magazine’s vault, never before viewed by public eyes. Now, the dozen or so black-and-white photographs, taken by Life photographer Henry Groskinsky, are available online. They include shots of King’s entourage gathered in the motel room of the civil rights leader and standing on the balcony. There are also photos of hotel staff cleaning up King’s blood. Read more.

Obama assassination planners were “too disorganized.” Two White supremacists charged with plotting to shoot children, behead other Black Americans and assassinate Barack Obama while wearing White top hats and tuxes were likely too disorganized to carry out the plot, authorities said, and their planning was riddled with blunders. Paul Schlesselman, 18, of Helena-West Helena, Ark., and Daniel Cowart, 20, of Bells, Ark., are accused of hatching the plot. While authorities say they had guns capable of creating carnage, documents show they never got close to getting off the ground. Among the blunders: They drew attention to themselves by etching swastikas on a car with sidewalk chalk, only knew each other for a month after meeting over the Internet, couldn’t even pull off a house robbery, and a friend ratted them out to authorities. Despite making sure the plot was stopped, authorities did not believe Cowart and Schlesselman had the means to carry out their threat to assassinate Obama, said a federal law enforcement official who spoke anonymously to The Associated Press. Asked whether the two suspects had Obama’s schedule or plans to kill him at a specific time or place, a second law enforcement official who also was not authorized to speak publicly said, “I don’t think they had that level of detail.”
 

Authorities are keeping an eye on a Hollywood, Calif., house where an effigy of the Republican vice presidential nominee hangs from a noose. The Halloween display showing a likeness of Sarah Palin hanging by a noose has angered some residents who reported it as a hate crime, authorities said Monday. But Los Angeles County Sheriff’s officials said the mannequin sporting a beehive hairdo, glasses and a red coat does not rise to the level of a hate crime because it was part of a Halloween display. Read the rest here. Get more at You(th) Vote.

Homeowner crisis is hitting Blacks and Hispanics harder. A report shows that the racial mix of new homeownership in New York City changed dramatically in 2007, with fewer Blacks and Latinos getting mortgages. The report, released Monday by the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University, says that new home loans to White borrowers remained steady, while new mortgages to Blacks and Latinos dropped 44 percent and 34 percent, respectively. It is based on an analysis of federal mortgage data. The center says the report puts the credit crisis into perspective by showing how it affects homeownership by different ethnic groups. Furman Center Co-director Ingrid Ellen says the numbers suggest “that it’s going to be increasingly difficult for Black and Hispanic borrowers to get mortgages.”

Authorities scuttle skinhead plot to assassinate Obama.

 Two neo-Nazi skinheads are in jail today after law-enforcement officials broke up their plot to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and shoot or behead 99 Black people, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives (ATF) said Monday. Authorities disrupted the plans of the two would-be assassins to rob a gun store and target a predominately African-American high school in a murder spree that was to begin in Tennessee, federal officials said, in court records unsealed Monday in U.S. District Court in Jackson, Tenn. All together, the two men planned to kill 88 people, including 14 African Americans by beheading, said Jim Cavanaugh, special agent in charge of ATF’s Nashville field office. Read the rest here, and watch the video below.

A 22-year-old man is being held without bail for his recent comments

A 22-year-old Maine man with a SUV wired with red and yellow flashing lights and packed with weapons – including a loaded 9 mm handgun, knives, armor-piercing ammo and a machete – body armor and camouflage clothing stood before a judge Thursday to face charges that he had threatened to assassinate Sen. Barack Obama. Raymond Hunter Geisel (above) was arrested in downtown Miami Saturday and was ordered held at the Miami Jail without bail by a federal magistrate yesterday. Geisel, who told authorities that he was originally from Bangor, Maine, but was now living in a houseboat in the Florida Keys, said his handgun was for training for the bail bondsman class; the knives were for protection; and the machete was for cutting thickets in Maine. He allegedly made the threat against Obama in a bail bondman class in Miami, calling the senator a racial slur and saying, “If he gets elected, I’ll assassinate him myself.” Geisel denies he ever made threatening comments about Obama. The Associated Press, citing court documents, said that he told the Secret Service in an interview that if he “wanted to kill Senator Obama he simply would shoot him with a sniper rifle, but then he claimed that he was just joking.”