A recent news bulletin announced that police in Nova Scotia broke up a plot by two men who aimed to carry out mass murder at a shopping mall and then commit suicide. 
 
 Here is what the Associated Press said about the plot in its second paragraph: 
 
 “Police and other officials said it was not related to Islamic terrorism.” 
 
 Whew, that’s a relief. And a surprise. 
 
 If you shared my instant reactions, you also are wondering what the hell is going on with the Obama administration. When the liberal Associated Press feels the need to address readers’ assumptions about Islam and terrorism, we have a reached a tipping point. 
 
 Make that a worldwide tipping point. With the pope and Cardinal Timothy Dolan joining Jewish leaders and growing numbers of Muslim officials in Arab lands speaking honestly about the horrors perpetrated under Islam’s name, that leaves President Obama as the odd man out. 
 
 Not every Muslim is a terrorist. But almost all terrorists are Muslims. Those two statements are both accurate, as even Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi tacitly conceded when he scolded Islamic clerics for failing to halt the spread of jihadists. But inconvenient truths don’t matter to Obama. 
 
 The president’s ideological blinkers will be on vivid display this week, with 60 countries invited to a White House summit on extremism. But aides made clear there would be no change in the willful ignorance. 
 
 “We are not treating these people as part of a religion. We’re treating them as terrorists,” an official told reporters. 
 
 This is nuts. Although the Islamic State, al Qaeda, Boko Haram and the Taliban cite Islam as the basis of their death cults, Obama argues that their acts are contrary to Islam, and therefore, refuses to associate them with Islam. 
 
 Thankfully, Christian leaders finally realize they cannot count on the president and must themselves sound the alarm about what is happening in Muslim countries. The beheading of 21 Coptic Christians in Libya was the latest outrage linked to a genocidal religious cleansing. 
 
 As the pope and Dolan made clear, the victims were killed because of their faith, with the Islamic butchers calling them “people of the cross” and “crusaders.” 
 
 The fact that Jews are singled out for their religion is hardly in doubt — except at the White House. After Obama foolishly used the word “randomly” to describe the slaughter of four Jews in a Paris kosher deli, aides scrambled to defend him. They soon gave up, conceding what French authorities said all along — the slaughter was an anti-Semitic attack by a follower of the Islamic State. 
 
 Obama’s hesitation to admit the obvious fact about the victims echoes the refusal to properly call Islamic terrorists what they are. 
 
 At the same time, he has no problem standing up for Islam when he thinks its adherents are wronged. Although police have not concluded that the murder of three Muslims in North Carolina had anything to do with religion — the killer confessed and denied religion was an issue — the Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation and Obama issued a statement suggesting the murders were hate crimes. 
 
 “No one in the United States of America should ever be targeted because of who they are, what they look like, or how they worship,” he said. 
 
 Remember, too, that he recently singled out the Crusades to warn Christians about getting on their “high horse” over Muslim killers. 
 
 If the issue were only semantics, it would be minor in the grand scheme. But the refusal to concede that Islamic terrorists are, in fact, Islamic leads to flawed understandings of the problem and missed chances for potential solutions. 
 
 One example of the garbage-in, garbage-out dynamic is the ridiculous assertion by a State Department official that jobs programs are part of the answer. 
 
 “We cannot win this war by killing them,” spokeswoman Marie Harf said on MSNBC, arguing that America should “help them build their economies so they can have job opportunities for these people.” 
 
 The rot of denial runs deep, and starts at the top. 
 
 It’s a rotten way to run a government 
 
 There he goes again. 
 
 Gov. Andrew Cuomo is still sending mixed messages about his commitment to cleaning up Albany, saying on TV that “You’ve always had and you probably always will have some level of corruption.’’ 
 
 Technically speaking, he’s right. But the context — a parade of government perps, including the arrest of former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver — makes Cuomo sound too defensive and casts doubt on his latest promise to do something about the rotten apples. 
 
 Earlier this month, he proposed ethics demands that he said the Legislature must pass before he would sign a budget. He conceded then that “we have not yet proven . . . that Albany writ large can be trusted.” 
 
 He was right then, and wrong now. His suggestion that the crime wave is nothing extraordinary recalls Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s warning about “defining deviancy down.” As the late senator noted, rot becomes permanent when people accept the abnormal as normal and give up trying to fix it. 
 
 Cuomo also said in the NY1 interview that there are no plans to hang the customary portrait of former Gov. Eliot Spitzer because he resigned in a prostitution scandal. 
 
 The old Soviet system of erasing out-of-favor pols from history comes to mind. Sure, Spitzer was a disgrace, but he belongs on Albany’s wall of governors. If nothing else, his face will be a daily reminder of what happens when politicians think they are above the law. 
 
 Let Client No. 9 take his place. And let his successors take their cue from his fall. 
 
 A ‘law’ unto Dem selves 
 
 In my next life, I want to come back as a progressive. That way, I’ll know everything for certain. 
 
 After a federal judge put a temporary halt to President Obama’s immigration orders, Mayor Bill de Blasio and his Mini-Me, Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, declared the judge wrong on the law. 
 
 Neither is a lawyer, but that didn’t stop them. The mayor called the president’s actions “lawful” and said he was confident the ruling would be overturned on appeal. 
 
 Mark-Viverito chimed in to say Obama’s “plan is constitutional and necessary.” 
 
 Inadvertently, the would-be tyrants point up a big potential for savings. With progressives in power, we don’t need judges, courts, checks and balances. We could just turn back the clock to the 18th century and go for a monarchy. Who needs elections? 
 
 Times hooey on St. Louie 
 
 The New York Times reports that murders in St. Louis increased 33 percent last year, to 159 in a city of 318,000 people. By comparison, New York had 328 murders in a city of 8.4 million. 
 
 The Times headline said, “Rise in Murders has St. Louis Debating Why.” 
 
 Really? Perhaps murder is out of control because St. Louis has a political culture that reflexively attacks cops for doing their jobs, brands them as racists and orders them to ignore looters and arsonists. 
 
 Just a guess, mind you. ||||| For the right-wing, it’s not much of a leap to go from “President Obama is a secret Muslim” to “President Obama is secretly in league with the Muslim Brotherhood.” And in the wake of protests in Egypt, leap they did. 
 
 The Muslim Brotherhood is often a target of right-wing pundits like anti-sharia crusader Frank Gaffney, who last month claimed the group had infiltrated CPAC. And as the single largest organized opposition group in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has emerged as a target for the right as the protests continue. 
 
 On Hannity last night, Gaffney argued that “the Obama Administration’s policies are being viewed through, and actually articulated and implemented through influence operations that the Muslim Brotherhood itself is running in our own country.” 
 
 “You cannot possibly get your strategy right, you cannot execute it effectively if you don’t know that the enemy is actually giving you advice on how to proceed,” he said. 
 
 Video of his comments come in at the 4:10: 
 
 Gaffney was much more explicit to ThinkProgress yesterday, listing Homeland Security Advisor John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper, and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano as “questionable people who are sympathetic to the program of the stealth jihadists who have influence with the United States government.” 
 
 Watch: 
 
 Right-wing author Dinesh D’Souza, who wrote a book called “The Roots of Obama’s Rage,” told Newsmax TV yesterday that “for Obama, America is viewed as a neocolonial power occupying Iraq and Afghanistan,” so “from his point of view he sees the Muslims who are fighting against America, as in a sense, freedom fighters.” 
 
 He continued: 
 
 This gives Obama a somewhat romantic view of Islamic radicals. So he might not think the Muslim Brotherhood is a problem, because he might think, “well, look, these are the good guys trying to liberate Egypt from this horrible dictator who is supported by us, the rogue nation, the United States.” 
 
 And then there’s a story disseminated by the site World Net Daily , and picked up by a few right-wing blogs, that former U.S. ambassador to Egypt Frank G. Wisner met in secret in Cairo with a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and “discussed fall of Egypt with group dedicated to Islam’s global spread.” WND cites an unnamed Egyptian intelligence official as its source for the story. 
 
 Wisner was sent by the Obama Administration to Egypt after the protests broke out because of his close relationship with President Hosni Mubarek. 
 
 Robert Spencer picked up the story and said it’s “yet more indication that Obama actively favors the Muslim Brotherhood’s coming to power in Egypt.” The Fox News site Fox Nation also posted the story, though hedged that it was just a report. 
 
 Some of the outrage on the right probably stems from the White House’s statement on Monday regarding the Muslim Brotherhood, which is currently banned in Egypt. As reported by the Los Angeles Times, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs responded to a question in a press briefing about the Muslim Brotherhood’s role in the protests, and said that though it’s not clear that the protests are the result of one particular group or ideology, “it is clear that increase in democratic representation has to include a whole host of important non-secular actors that give Egypt a strong chance to continue to be the stable and reliable partner that the world sees in the Middle East.” 
 
 He added that the “standard” for participation is “adherence to the law, adherence to non-violence, and a willingness to be part of a democratic process, but not use that democratic process to simply instill yourself into power.” 
 
 Gibbs also emphasized that the Obama Administration has not had contact with anyone from the Muslim Brotherhood. 
 
 But Robert Spencer responded that Obama “has just given a green light to establish a government that, given numerous historical precedents, will likely be the precursor to an Islamic Republic.”
– Another day, another person calling President Obama a secret Muslim—only this time, the person in question has a history with Christine O’Donnell. Jon Moseley, who's described himself as manager of O'Donnell's failed 2008 Senate campaign and also worked as its treasurer, is a longtime activist who's toiled for decades for right-wing policy groups. Moseley made his “Obama is a Muslim” claims on his blog last year, reports David Corn in Mother Jones. (O'Donnell's 2010 campaign filings list a payment to him, but Moseley says it's for his 2008 work and that he's not affiliated with the current campaign.) Among his evidence on the president's faith: Obama once recited the Muslim call to prayer, which, “according to Islamic scholars,” Moseley wrote, “makes one a Muslim.” And there's the fact that he bowed to Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah but did not bow to Queen Elizabeth. And that he once misspoke and said he had visited 57 of the 58 states—57 actually being the number of states in the Organization of Islamic Conference. Moseley writes off Obama’s 20 years of church attendance as a means of “strategic deception.” In another article, Moseley claims “the forces of international communism” have “much influence” over Obama: So apparently he’s not just a secret Muslim, Corn concludes, he’s “a secret commie-influenced Muslim.”