On Monday afternoon, Fox News ran a segment suggesting that the Department of Homeland Security is buying up large quantities of ammunition to prevent law-abiding Americans from defending themselves. The story came two days after the DHS justified the purchases in a letter to lawmakers and Fox itself dismissed the theory as a conspiracy in its signature nightly news broadcast.

Conservative websites — including Alex Jones’ Info Wars — have been buzzing for months about DHS’ efforts to allegedly buy-up 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition to exacerbate shortages and disarm Americans in the aftermath of the Newtown shooting.

A number of Republican lawmakers, including Rep. Doug LaMalfa (CA), Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), and Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS), have written letters to DHS asking “whether the purchases are part of a deliberate attempt to restrict supply to the American people” and on Monday Fox News’ America Live hosted LaMalfa to discuss his concerns:

MEGYN KELLY (HOST) Is the government buying up bullets to use against us? Are you one of those who believes that?

LAMALFA: Well, that might be reaching a little far at this point. We’ve asked the questions of DHS. What is the reasoning behind doing this? And when you talk to your constituents out there across my area and across the whole country there is an extreme shortage of ammunition as it is now. And when they hear a story like this, is this what’s contributing to us not being able to get ammunition for our sporting or protection or what have you. And we’ve asked questions of dhs what are your procurement standards here and why are you doing it this way and we’re hearing well, it’s over a five-year period and buying it in bulk, okay. We might be able to appreciate that, but it is a heck of a lot of rounds of ammunition and for some very dubious-sounding reasons.

The segment seems misplaced, however, since DHS responded to lawmakers’ questions about the purchase on Friday and Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer dismissed the story as a conspiracy theory that night on Special Report. Watch the two side-by-side:

In its letter to lawmakers, the agency explained that it regularly purchases ammunition in bulk to save money and noted that “the 1.6 billion number was misleading because the language of DHS’s purchase said it would need ‘up to’ a certain amount.” That letter came a month after DHS offered a detailed justification of its purchase to Coburn in February, who later claimed that he was satisfied with the reply.

As Krauthammer explained to Fox News viewers on March 22, “Senator Coburn who isn’t exactly a liberal said number one the amount of ammunition is less than in previous years. Number two, it’s about a tenth of the ceiling that the DHS has allowed,” he said, adding, that the ammunition is “being used for the training of agents like the border security agents who have to go to the range a lot and stay sharp.”

“I hate to disappoint the conspiracy theorists, they’re gonna have to come up with something new and they will,” he concluded. Apparently, his fellow Fox News hosts and producers are still coming up short.

During a roundtable discussion on Friday, Fox News’ Lou Dobbs agreed with a network contributor who argued that Americans need to access military-style assault weapons to protect themselves from an Iranian invasion.

“What scares the hell out of me we have a president, as we were discussing during break, that wants to take away our guns, but yet he wants to attack Iran and Syria. So if they come and attack us here, we don’t have the right to bear arms under this Obama administration,” Angela McGlowan, a former lobbyist for News Corp., said in the midst of a conversation about violence in Syria.

Dobbs quickly agreed, adding, “we’re told by Homeland Security that there are already agents of Al Qaeda here working in this country. Why in the world would you not want to make certain that all American citizens were armed and prepared? ” Watch it:

The panel also falsely argued that widespread gun ownership in Israel has helped prevent terrorist attacks, though access to firearms is strictly limited to people who “can prove their professions or places of residence put them in danger.” Approximately “170,000 guns are licensed for private use in Israel,” while assault weapons are “banned for private ownership.”

[HT: MMFA]

Culture warrior and Fox News host Bill O’Reilly sounded the alarms on his show yesterday over the looming threat being posed by secularists towards…the Easter bunny.

O’Reilly, perhaps best known for his annual winter jeremiads on the imminent destruction of Christmas, explained to his audience that “secular progressives” are seeking to destroy such holy biblical figures as grown men in bunny costumes so they can legalize marijuana and allow abortions on demand:

O’REILLY: Secular progressives are running wild with President Obama in the White House. They feel unchained, liberated, and they’re trying to diminish any form of religion. The goal is to marginalize religious opposition to secular programs. For example, in Canada and China a woman can have an abortion for any reason at any time. Secular progressives want that here. But traditional forces in America are in opposition. Therefore in this country, you can’t terminate a baby about to be born without a damn good reason. And if you do abort a late term baby, you could be charged with murder. SPs hate that. In Scandanavia, there are laws that say you cannot criticize minorities and if you do, you could be arrested. Secular progressives want laws like that here. Also the legalization of drugs, well under way in many places, and that is a secular cause. So, if the far left can marginalize Santa and the Easter bunny, of they can tell the children those symbols are obsolete and unnecessary, they then set the stage for a totally secular society in the future.

Forgetting for a minute that religiously-affiliated lawmakers are actually imposing tougher abortion laws around the country, that nobody is pushing for a law to criminalize free speech, and that legalizing drugs is far from a secular progressive cause, there is simply no “war on Easter.” O’Reilly points to a handful of small community centers and elementary schools that are hosting “spring egg hunts,” sometimes with a “spring bunny” emceeing the festivities. Nowhere to be found is the word “Easter,” laments O’Reilly, fearful that the nation’s six year olds will one day forget the religious symbolism of crawling around a grassy schoolyard on all fours searching for chocolate-filled plastic eggs. Each of the schools highlighted by O’Reilly has off the day following Easter Sunday, an opportunity for parents to teach their children about the significance of the holiday and a luxury rarely afforded to the practitioners of any other religion in the country.

Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham joined O’Reilly to discuss this latest atrocity, and both agreed that the fault belongs to the nation’s “traditional forces,” who aren’t doing enough, in their estimation, to fight back against the rise of secularism and the persecution of religious Christians. It’s a bold statement coming from two people who have a history of being the chief persecutors towards people of other faiths.

HT: Mediaite

Thanks to Congressional gridlock, automatic budget cuts took effect 14 days ago, threatening 700,000 jobs and gutting funds for vital programs in housing assistance, early childhood education, disaster relief, and national security. Secret Service staffing was also impacted, prompting the cancellation of White House tours last week. Republicans immediately attacked the decision as a political move designed to turn the public against the sequester and 14 Republican senators signed a letter demanding information.

The media has also latched on to preserve the White House tours, while largely ignoring other much more devastating sequester cuts. As Ari Melber of The Nation pointed out on Wednesday, there are 12,000 news stories concerning White House tours and less than 1,000 about the sequester’s impact on housing assistance programs, which disproportionately affect low-income Americans.

ThinkProgress examined this trend on three major cable news networks — Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC — since March 6. White House tours were mentioned 33 times as often (Fox News had 163 segments, CNN had 59, and MSNBC had 42) as mentions of other sequester impacts hitting the poor. Any discussion of sequestration’s steep cuts to housing assistance, food assistance programs, and Head Start early education was virtually nonexistent on all 3 networks in the same time frame. Fox News mentioned Head Start three times, ignoring housing and food stamps entirely; MSNBC mentioned Head Start 4 times, food stamps once, and did not cover housing assistance cuts at all. CNN stayed completely silent on all three issues:

While covering budget cuts, cable news channels have also largely avoided discussing military tuition assistance programs, which were suspended by the Marine Corps and the Army shortly after sequestration. CNN and MSNBC each mentioned the cuts to tuition assistance once since March 6, while Fox News took the lead with 11 segments.

The media’s silence on the most brutal sequester cuts is well in line with the fourth estate’s normal approach to poverty. During the 2012 presidential campaign, just .2 percent of campaign coverage by major TV, radio, and print outlets addressed poverty in any substantive way. More recently, the media mostly ignored the effects of spending cuts in the so-called “fiscal cliff” at the end of 2012, preferring to discuss tax hikes instead.

In response to the highly publicized backlash over White House tours, Obama is now signalling some tours may resume.