President Obama's speech to the National Council of La Raza yesterday began, oddly enough on the deficit, but later he went on to defend his position on not instituting a formal policy of "deferred action" for undocumented immigrants who might be eligible for the DREAM Act should it pass:

THE PRESIDENT: Believe me -- believe me, the idea of doing things on my own is very tempting. (Laughter.) I promise you. Not just on immigration reform. (Laughter.) But that's not how -- that's not how our system works.

Roger Cohen tries to compare alleged Oslo terrorist Anders Behring Breivik to Jared Lee Loughner:

On one level Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian responsible for the biggest massacre by a single gunman in modern times, is just a particularly murderous psychotic loner: the 32-year-old mama’s boy with no contact with his father, obsessed by video games (Dragon Age II) as he preens himself (“There was a relatively hot girl on [sic] the restaurant today checking me out”) and dedicates his time in asexual isolation to the cultivation of hatred and the assembly of a bomb from crushed aspirin and fertilizer.

Hitler!*

*Okay, technically by himself, but whatever.

In case you're wondering who Pam Geller, one of the anti-Muslim bloggers cited in the manifesto of alleged Oslo shooter Anders Behring Breivik, sees as responsible for the shootings:

This whole exercise is ridiculous. Anders Behring Breivik is responsible for his actions. If anyone incited him to violence, it was Islamic supremacists. If anything incited him to violence, it was the Euro-Med policy.

So, if there's a terrorist attack committed by a Muslim, Muslims are responsible. If it's committed by an anti-Islam right-winger, then it's also Muslims' fault, and those damned tolerant liberals, too.

My post at Greg's today is about right-wing anti-Islam bloggers suddenly discovering the evil of collective blame:

Pamela Geller, who along with Professional Islamophobe Robert Spencer has been active in opposing the construction of mosques in the U.S., wrote: “This is just a sinister attempt to tar all anti-jihadists with responsibility for this man’s heinous actions.” Spencer, for his part, wrote: “as if killing a lot of children aids the defense against the global jihad and Islamic supremacism, or has anything remotely to do with anything we have ever advocated.”

Walid Shoebat, a "terrorism expert" with a dubious background who was paid by the U.S. government to train law enforcement in counterterrorism, is frequently cited in the manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik, the alleged right-wing terrorist who is accused of killing more than 90 people in Oslo last week. Brevik cites Shoebat more than 15 times.

Scott Lemieux reviews "Hot Coffee," a documentary that describes how corporate interests leveraged the 1994 Liebeck v McDonald's case into a successful movement to curtail civil suits: