Sense of humor

Anyone care to lay odds on how long it will be before the same right-wingers who chide folks on the left that they "need to get a sense of humor" about anti-liberal jokes hinging on violent eliminationist fantasies go apeshit over Steve Colbert's manifest failure to pay proper obeisance to George W. Bush?

It'll go something like this:

"I say we shoot 'im!"

"I say we hang 'im!"

"I say we shoot 'im, then we hang 'im!"

Double journalistic standards

The Los Angeles Times, today, in stripping Michael Hiltzik of his blog for posting comments pseudonymously:

[E]mploying pseudonyms constitutes deception

The Los Angeles Times, in 2005, regarding faux White House correspondent Jeff Gannon, whose real name is James Guckert:

What is a journalist?

As Brian Montopoli noted at the time:

If Fitzwater or Neuman honestly believes that there is any comparison to be made between Helen Thomas and a fake journalist with a fake name working for a fake news outlet asking fake questions at a real press briefing, then Neuman's feigned befuddlement over what a journalist is begins to seem less feigned. Alas, if the Los Angeles Times sees fit to print lazy and misleading pieces such as this, then the craft may indeed be facing an identity crisis, the likes of which Jean-Paul Sartre described 50 years ago.

I get letters

... some of which are just too funny not to share:

The chief "hate" I find, Dave, is the hate you have for your own race. But reading your site and not knowing your personally, (which could modify my view, of course,) I get the impression that you believe ethnic pride and will-to-power, can ultimately be eradicated from the world, and best, perhaps, if such as you can chiefly politic with success against that demonstrated as you believe,by your own group.

As Yugoslavia shows, you are living in la la land. And you have no idea what "hate" is or you wouldn't throw the term around and expect so many others to immediately buckle to your femme impulses....

From someone named "Ken Hoop."

Just to repeat (and expand) something I said over at Firedoglake:

My "race" is the human race.

My "people" are the American people. And they come in all colors, shapes, and creeds.

The values of justice, fair play, equal opportunity, and basic human decency are what bind us. They are indeed essential for our long-term survival -- not just as a nation, but as a part of humanity.

Folks like "Ken Hoop" are doing their damnedest to harm that cause.

A little local fascism

Remember how Ann Coulter once extolled "the benefits of local fascism"?

Well now, thanks to Loyola-Chicago student Laura Patrizi's blog report, we know just what she means:

The protesting from the balcony only increased with time with shouts of "ANN IS A RACIST" to even an immature, yet mildly amusing, call for "Show us your tits."

Ann addressed her supporters in the crowd with this statement. "You're men. You're heterosexuals. Take 'em out." She chided them further when they did not rise. Before you knew it there was about 25 students marching to the balcony to supposedly "take out" the protestors above. I saw a priest holding students back and deans and security warning the students to go back to their seats. Chaos erupted. Ann left after taking one question.

Pretty soon she'll be adding an English version of the "Horst Wessel Song" to her speech schtick.

Fun and games, eliminationist style

OK, let's hear again how the nativists' bile toward Latino immigrants isn't racist in the least:

Lastly we have the story of a flash-based video game that's spreading through internet via e-mail called "Border Patrol". The object of the game is to kill as many "wetbacks" as possible as they scramble across the US border. The targets included: 'Mexican Nationalist,' 'Drug Smuggler,' and 'Breeder' (pregnant woman with two small children).





NBC San Diego

( if there's any doubt as to who is behind this game, note the Star of David on the flag. This is typical iconography of the neo-nazi and white supremacist hate groups to represent "Jewish" control over US policy.)

A quick google search turns up hundreds of sites offering the game, and a look at the comments section at gamers sites show that many feel there is nothing wrong with the game whatsoever.

5. Frankly, I don't see this game as "racist" at all. No more than "kill the Cubans" or whatever in GTA. Shooting immigrants that come over the border by some is considered a ligitimate solution to our border security problems. It is not "racist" to enforce US laws. Naming the types of border crosses is more like stereotyping, not racism. It seems that the three kinds of boarder crossers described in the game pretty accuratly reflect the realities of people's motivations for illegally crossing. That is not "racist." As a whole most Americans DO want to clamp down on ILLEGAL immigration. We have nothing against immigrants. But the US is a nation of laws, and it is not right, in my opinion, to reward those who break the law. American politics and policy should not be at the whims of a group of people WHO AREN'T even citizens, or even legal residents in the country, as is happening now. This game just happened to find its way into some liberal jerkwad's inbox. I find his attitude and lack of thick skin about people's freedom to express themselves a much greater danger to society than some stupid flash game.

Posted at 7:08PM on Apr 19th 2006 by jp007 0 stars

11. I love this game!!!

And no... I don't like Mexicans!

Posted at 7:20PM on Apr 19th 2006 by Deustchland 0 stars

31. I love this game but all you idiots obviously forget something called freedom of speech. The one who made this movie has every right to make it just like the KKK and black panthers have the right to march in the streets along with the illegal immagrants protesting saying they should have the right to do what they want in our country. And anyone who says illegal aliens should have any rights in our country ARE IDIOTS! They are no citizens, they robed your rights to come here and probably helped bring in drugs. but im sure you're all abunch of liberal drugies who want more. You people are the ones that need to be shot. but im sure joystiq will delete this cuase liberals only believe in rights and freedoms for themselves.

Posted at 8:01PM on Apr 19th 2006 by Josh 0 stars

Nooooo. That isn't the least bit racist. How could anyone think that?

Incidentally, the White Aryan Resistance site that created the game is a well-known neo-Nazi organization founded by the notorious Tom Metzger.

You might want to point that out to your conservative, Minuteman-supporting brother-in-law when he e-mails it to you.

[Hat tip to Mike Moore. No, not that one.]

All the guns

Liberals are constantly inflaming the culture war. They seem to forget which side has all the guns.
-- From "Fun Facts About Liberals", on the popular IMAO T-shirt

Boy, we just can't get enough of that right-wing eliminationist humor. Of course, IMAO has something of a history in this regard.

For more, see Digby.

I was especially struck by the T-shirt's back:



Particularly since, as Digby observes, this shirt is being promoted by none other than Ms. "Unhinged" herself, Michelle Malkin.

Last I heard, Malkin was promoting herself as an "investigative journalist." She's constantly referred to as a "professional journalist," though there are reasons to question that. Especially given her recent behavior.

So I'm left wondering:

-- Does Malkin's endorsement of the shirt represent a suicide wish? Or is she no longer a journalist? I'm so confused.

-- Will Malkin wear one of these shirts next time she shows up at a journalism convention?

Just curious.

Immigration and the racial pot

One of the ways that the nativist right has historically succeeded in America is by using race as a wedge issue: setting up interracial competition in a way that drives apart and isolates various groups so that particular "out" groups can be scapegoated.

So it is with the current crop of nativists agitating against Latino immigration. They're also doing their damnedest to recruit African Americans to their cause by claiming that all these Latinos are hurting them when it comes to getting work. And so far, they're having at least some level of success:

Several black activists plan to join members of the Minutemen Project to protest illegal immigration, which organizer Ted Hayes touted as the "biggest threat to blacks in America since slavery."

The protest, organized by Hayes' Crispus Attucks Brigade and the American Black Citizens Opposed to Illegal Immigration Invasion, is scheduled to start at 1 p.m.

Hayes, a homeless activist, alleged that most homeless people in Los Angeles are black and illegal immigration compounds the problem since blacks refuse to accept the "slave wages" that many illegal immigrants accept.

... "While all Americans are suffering from this invasion, we blacks are suffering the most," Hayes said. "We feel like the leaders promoting this issue are being insensitive. This country wasn't built on the backs of immigrants like (Villaraigosa) says. It was built on the back of West African slaves."

If there is angst about illegal immigration among blacks, it's not very well grounded. As a recent New York Times report explained, illegal immigration's actual impact on the wages of American workers has been slight at best, including at the lower end of the pay scale.

Moreover, as Earl Ofari Hutchinson explains, the chief employment problem for young black men is not competition from illegal immigrants, but persistent discrimination against them:

But several years before the immigration combatants squared off, then University of Wisconsin graduate researcher Devah Pager pointed the finger in another direction, a direction that makes most employers squirm. And that's toward the persistent and deep racial discrimination in the workplace. Pager found that black men without a criminal record are less likely to find a job than white men with criminal records.

Pager's finger-point at discrimination as the main reason for the racial disparity in hiring set off howls of protest from employers, trade groups and even a Nobel Prize winner. They lambasted her for faulty research. Her sample was much too small, they said, and the questions too vague. They pointed to the ocean of state and federal laws that ban racial discrimination. But in 2005 Pager, now a sociologist at Princeton duplicated her study. She surveyed nearly 1,500 private employers in New York City.

She used teams of black and white testers, standardized resumes, and she followed up their visits with telephone interviews with employers. These are the standard methods researchers use to test racial discrimination. The results were exactly the same as in her earlier study, despite the fact that New York has some of the nation's toughest laws against job discrimination.

As Hutchinson explains, Latinos are being scapegoated as a way to divert attention from the real problem:

Dumping the blame for the chronic job crisis of young, poor black men on undocumented immigrants stokes the passions and hysteria of immigration reform opponents, but it also lets employers off the hook for discrimination. And it's easy to see how that could happen. The mountain of federal and state anti-discrimination laws, affirmative action programs and successful employment discrimination lawsuits give the public the impression that job discrimination is a relic of a shameful, racist past.

But that isn't the case, and Pager's study is hardly isolated proof of that. Countless research studies, the Urban League's annual State of Black America report, a 2005 Human Rights Watch report and the numerous discrimination complaints reviewed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over the past decade reveal that employers have devised endless dodges to evade anti-discrimination laws. That includes rejecting applicants by their names or areas of the city they live in. Black applicants may be incorrectly told that jobs advertised were filled already.

The nativists' appeal to black Americans will continue to be very limited, however, for one primary reason that Tom Grayman laid out at MYDD:

Conservatives -- particularly white conservatives -- often cite the current incongruity between black attitudes and black leadership actions on this issue as a sign that the national African-American leadership is "out of touch" with its own constituency.

They are wrong. Even though blacks -- particularly lower-income blacks -- may not be comfortable with seemingly unchecked immigration, they're even less comfortable with the crew agitating most vocally against it. You will not see blacks kickin' it down on the border with the Minute Men, or in the streets outside Tom Tancredo's office showing their support. There's one simple reason, and it is not that these activists are Republican.

It's that the current anti-immigration movement reeks of racism.

It's not just an odor, either: It's a hard reality, as a new four-part report from the Anti-Defamation League explains in considerable detail:

Spurred in recent weeks by the debate on Capitol Hill and the groundswell of grassroots activism in support of America's immigrant community, extremists have become increasingly emboldened by, and fixated on, the controversy over immigration policy, encouraging their supporters to capitalize on the issue by encouraging anti-immigrant activism, and even violence against all Hispanics.

While white supremacists have for many years attempted to exploit rising anti-immigration sentiments in the U.S., the level and intensity of their attacks against Hispanics has reached dangerous new highs, with right-wing extremists joining anti-immigration groups, distributing anti-immigrant propaganda and holding frequent anti-immigration rallies and protests.

As a result, Hispanics, regardless of their citizenship or immigration status, increasingly are becoming the targets of hatred and violence from hardcore white supremacists.

The report goes on to explore the kind of targeting that's been occurring:

White supremacists have not simply expressed racist convictions, but have urged each other and white Americans generally, to "fight back" against the perceived invasion of the "white" United States by Hispanics from Mexico.

The rhetoric in such pronouncements has grown increasingly radical. "Beaner Brown Supremacist Militias of Latino Communist immigrants firmly intend to conquer [the southwest]," suggested a topic heading on the white supremacist Legion of Saints message board recently. "Will White Americans sit back, watch it happen & let them do it? Or will White Americans 'remember the Alamo!?'"

The execrable Hal Turner (Sean Hannity's pal) gets his own section in the report, which details some of his radio-show pronouncements:

October 31, 2005: "Slowly but surely we are headed toward the solution that I have been advocating for years: KILL ILLEGAL ALIENS AS THEY CROSS INTO THE U.S. When the stench of rotting corpses gets bad enough, the rest will stay away."

October 11, 2005: "For years I have been publicly advocating on my radio show and this web site, that Mexican illegal aliens be SHOT DEAD as they cross into the U.S. illegally…I plant the seeds verbally and the seeds grow in the minds of others…I am proud to advocate even MORE killings!"

July 15, 2005: "I once again advocate EXTREME VIOLENCE against Mexicans…Once they're dead, their heads should be cut off and put on pike poles as a warning to others."

May 17, 2005, responding to news that a restaurant owned by the mayor of Denver had employed an illegal alien who allegedly murdered a police officer: "…his policy of affording sanctuary to other illegal aliens makes Mayor John Hickenlooper worthy of being KILLED. I sincerely hope that someone takes a rifle with a scope and puts a bullet through [his] head."

May 15, 2005: "I advocate extreme violence against illegal aliens…I think it would be terrific to trap them by their ankles in steel bear traps then beat them to death when you return and find them in the trap…Oh, if any American sides with the illegals—like a bigmouth politician or a politically correct, ass-kissing local sheriff, lawyers, judges, or the like—it would be a real public service to kill them too!"

We heard similar rhetoric recently in communications between a "border patrol" organizer and a group of neo-Nazis, advising the latter to engage in a campaign of violence and harassment against Latinos.

This kind of rhetoric isn't going unheeded, either. As night follows day, there has been a spike in hate crimes against Latinos nationwide.

Finally, the report explores the activities of supposedly "mainstream block watch" operations like the Minutemen:

The vigilante border patrol groups have operated for several years but have expanded greatly in the past twelve months, spurred on by the media attention given to the so-called "Minuteman Project." In April 2005, Chris Simcox, who founded the Arizona-based Civil Homeland Defense, a border vigilante group, and Jim Gilchrist, based in California, joined forces to create the Minuteman Project, whose purpose was to gather thousands of volunteers for a month-long watch for illegal border crossers in Arizona. The project, which was highly publicized among right-wing extremists and white supremacists, attracted far fewer volunteers, many of them armed, during its first week. However, the publicity generated by the event resulted in numerous Minuteman chapters and spin-offs forming across America, even in states such as New York, Virginia, Vermont, and Illinois. These groups use the same radical rhetoric: that the United States is being "invaded" by Mexicans who must be stopped.

That message was clear at a three-day summit, "Unite to Fight Against Illegal Immigration," held in Las Vegas, Nevada, in May 2005. More than 400 anti-immigration activists gathered at the event to hear speakers describe illegal immigrants as "the enemy within" and "illegal barbarians," while suggesting that America was "at war" with illegal immigrants and urging people to "take America back."

That isn't just an odor of racism. That's what you call a pervasive stench.

And it isn't just African Americans who can smell it, either.

Killer whales indeed

Check out this video. Especially the ending.

Who's accountable?

The irreplacable Digby dug up an interesting exchange the other day between a student [edited] and President Bush:

Q Thank you, Mr. President. It's an honor to have you here. I'm a first-year student in South Asia studies. My question is in regards to private military contractors. Uniform Code of Military Justice does not apply to these contractors in Iraq. I asked your Secretary of Defense a couple months ago what law governs their actions.

THE PRESIDENT: I was going to ask him. Go ahead. (Laughter.) Help. (Laughter.)

Q I was hoping your answer might be a little more specific. (Laughter.) Mr. Rumsfeld answered that Iraq has its own domestic laws which he assumed applied to those private military contractors. However, Iraq is clearly not currently capable of enforcing its laws, much less against -- over our American military contractors. I would submit to you that in this case, this is one case that privatization is not a solution. And, Mr. President, how do you propose to bring private military contractors under a system of law?

THE PRESIDENT: I appreciate that very much. I wasn't kidding -- (laughter.) I was going to -- I pick up the phone and say, Mr. Secretary, I've got an interesting question. (Laughter.) This is what delegation -- I don't mean to be dodging the question, although it's kind of convenient in this case, but never -- (laughter.) I really will -- I'm going to call the Secretary and say you brought up a very valid question, and what are we doing about it? That's how I work. I'm -- thanks. (Laughter.)

A classic Bush non-answer: "I'll ask about that." Digby goes on to explain how this is emblematic of an administration out of control and unanswerable to anyone, which really is the larger problem here.

But this instance also raises a very specific issue that likewise strikes at the very real dangers posed by the Bush regime -- namely, the way government, and particularly the Pentagon, is using private contractors as a way to avoid accountability.

In the case of the Iraqi contractors, the lack of accountability runs the gamut from outright embezzlement of government funds to abuse of Iraqi citizens.

But even more pernicious is the Pentagon's hiring of private contractors for gathering domestic intelligence:

Lockheed Martin Corp. is seeking a counterintelligence analyst to work for the Pentagon's newest intelligence agency, the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), in its Colorado Springs facility to "create and deliver briefings, write reports, and represent Counterintelligence Field Activity," according to a Web classified ad.

These positions and thousands like them are part of a growing trend at the Pentagon to contract out intelligence jobs that were formerly done primarily by service personnel and civil service employees.

But, by using contract employees, government agencies lose control over those doing this sensitive work and an element of profit is inserted into what is being done. Also, as investigations have revealed, politics and corruption may be introduced into the process.

The office of Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte has quietly begun to study the contracting issue because "it already is a problem," a senior intelligence official said in a recent interview.

A related concern for intelligence agencies inside and outside the Pentagon is that the government is training people and getting them security clearances, but they then leave for better pay offered by contractors, sometimes to do the same work.

This is all part of a Pentagon push to expand its domestic surveillance:

The Defense Department has expanded its programs aimed at gathering and analyzing intelligence within the United States, creating new agencies, adding personnel and seeking additional legal authority for domestic security activities in the post-9/11 world.

The moves have taken place on several fronts. The White House is considering expanding the power of a little-known Pentagon agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, which was created three years ago. The proposal, made by a presidential commission, would transform CIFA from an office that coordinates Pentagon security efforts -- including protecting military facilities from attack -- to one that also has authority to investigate crimes within the United States such as treason, foreign or terrorist sabotage or even economic espionage.

The real burning question, as Kurt Nimmo suggests, is one of accountability:

--If these private contractors decide to break the law in pursuit of this intelligence, who is there above them to prevent that from happening?

-- And if they do break the law, who in the chain of governmental command would face any consequences?

Tim Shorrock, writing for Mother Jones,, explained awhile back that in fact there is no accountability anywhere in the system for these contractors:

Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, believes that the kind of military intelligence work contracted to CACI, Titan Corp., and other companies is particularly ripe for problems because intelligence agencies "operate under unusual authority." He adds: "I don't think the current oversight system is equipped to monitor the activities of contractors. That is one of the central lessons of the Abu Ghraib affair."

Like the defense industry, the intelligence business is driven by a network of lobbyists and a web of close connections between government and the private sector. But unlike the arms industry, intelligence contractors operate in a world where budgets are classified and many activities -- from covert operations to foreign eavesdropping -- are conducted in secret. Even the bidding for intelligence contracts is often classified. As a result, there is virtually no oversight of the intelligence community and its corporate partners. That was one of the central findings of the 9/11 commission, which called congressional supervision of intelligence and counterterrorism "dysfunctional."

However, this administration is nothing if not predictable. Were a reporter to ask anyone in the administration about this surveillance, it's a near certainty they'd be told that it was a good question that would be looked into. Next! [Laughter]

Politics and the environment

One of the things that often gets lost in the hurly-burly of politics -- especially when the burly is being hurled as much as it is under the current regime -- is that the gamesmanship often becomes bigger than the reality of how policies play out in the real world.

What often results is that, while we remain preoccupied by the minutiae of the political shell game, those realities accumulate, a step at a time, until they release an avalanche of disaster that can no longer be swept under the political rug -- and, indeed, becomes the most pressing political issue of the era.

One of these making headlines currently is the matter of gas prices and American oil dependency, manifesting the growing warnings about the peak oil phenomenon (The American Prospect recently did an exemplary job of compiling the requisite information and analysis on it).

As James Wolcott noted awhile back, a lot of this falls at the feet of our current national leadership:

The only explanation, apart from Bush's cognitive disability in facing reality, is that he sociopathically doesn't care about the coming calamity endangering the planet because he and his cronies will be financially prepared even as most Americans lose their standard of living.

It isn't just Bush, of course; the same could be said of the entire leadership of the conservative movement, including its media figureheads. Nonetheless, as I pointed out at the time of the Katrina disaster,, Bush embodies what is congenitally wrong with movement conservatives:

Those policies were a product of this administration's priorities, which in the end are always about promoting the well-being of the moneyed class at the expense of the middle classes and poor, while effectively driving a wedge within those classes. That's no conspiracy; it's just the way the world works, especially with men like Bush in charge.

The Katrina disaster, though, was the embodiment of the power of nature to overwhelm the false "reality" created by movement propaganda and White House spin. The disaster was a fiasco for Bush because it laid bare his administration's incompetence. The nation saw, clearly, that this malfeasance in disaster response and preparedness was similarly reflected in the mounting disasters and casualties in Iraq, in the growing national income gap, in confronting corruption within their own ranks, and in those steadily skyrocketing gas prices.

But of all the historical gaffes committed by this administration -- and by conservative-movement rule generally -- perhaps none will have greater long-term ramifications for Americans and for the world than its manifest failures in confronting the realities of global warming. Like Katrina, it is a mounting force of nature that cannot be wished away by spin. And like the peak oil crisis, it will affect millions of Americans and the very way we live. There's a reason Al Gore is out stumping on the issue now: He was right in 1992, and he's right now.

Even a manifestly Establishment organ like Time magazine recognizes that this is not, in the stock characterization of corporate apologists (see especially Michael Crichton), mere fear-mongering. The evidence and scientific consensus has become insurmountable, and any "controversy" that might remain is largely manufactured for the benefit of vested short-term interests.

Nonetheless, the response both of movement conservatives at large and the Bush administration in particular has been simply to "deal with it", to just "adapt" to whatever changes we might wreak on the global environment:

Perhaps the action -- or rather, inaction -- that most typifies Bush's disastrous approach to the environment has been his handling of the global-warming phenomenon. After spending most of his campaign and the first two years of his Oval Office tenure denying that the problem even existed (a la Rush Limbaugh's typically hallucinatory assertions), the administration did a stark about-face and admitted that global warming indeed is real. However, the Environmental Protection Agency's report said that -- even though the phenomenon is certain to destroy many of the nation's natural resources, particularly forested areas, alpine lakes, glaciers and wetlands -- no serious steps were warranted outside of "voluntary" efforts by corporations to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, and typified those looming disasters as requiring mere "adjustments" on the part of Americans. A couple of days later, Bush dismissed the report as the work of "the bureaucracy."

Moreover, as Chris Mooney has been steadily documenting, this administration, and Republicans in Congress as well, have simply subverted science so that contradictory data is suppressed.

Are salmon counters finding too few salmon on the Columbia? Cut their funding!

Likewise, government data-gathering that indicated a looming environmental disaster has been meeting an ugly death at the hands of the Bushevistas:

Employees and contractors working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with a U.S. Geological Survey scientist working at an NOAA lab, said in interviews that over the past year administration officials have chastised them for speaking on policy questions; removed references to global warming from their reports, news releases and conference Web sites; investigated news leaks; and sometimes urged them to stop speaking to the media altogether. Their accounts indicate that the ideological battle over climate-change research, which first came to light at NASA, is being fought in other federal science agencies as well.

What are those NASA scientists trying to say? That we're looking at a significant natural catastrophe that will raise ocean levels at rates unheard of in geological history, incuding climatic changes and certainly rapidly increased extinction rates:

This new satellite data is a remarkable advance. We are seeing for the first time the detailed behavior of the ice streams that are draining the Greenland ice sheet. They show that Greenland seems to be losing at least 200 cubic kilometers of ice a year. It is different from even two years ago, when people still said the ice sheet was in balance.

Hundreds of cubic kilometers sounds like a lot of ice. But this is just the beginning. Once a sheet starts to disintegrate, it can reach a tipping point beyond which break-up is explosively rapid. The issue is how close we are getting to that tipping point. The summer of 2005 broke all records for melting in Greenland. So we may be on the edge.

Our understanding of what is going on is very new. Today's forecasts of sea-level rise use climate models of the ice sheets that say they can only disintegrate over a thousand years or more. But we can now see that the models are almost worthless. They treat the ice sheets like a single block of ice that will slowly melt. But what is happening is much more dynamic.

Once the ice starts to melt at the surface, it forms lakes that empty down crevasses to the bottom of the ice. You get rivers of water underneath the ice. And the ice slides towards the ocean.

Our NASA scientists have measured this in Greenland. And once these ice streams start moving, their influence stretches right to the interior of the ice sheet. Building an ice sheet takes a long time, because it is limited by snowfall. But destroying it can be explosively rapid.

This is what we know is happening right now. Hansen then tells us what this means for us in the future, largely in terms of the rate of change:

How fast can this go? Right now, I think our best measure is what happened in the past. We know that, for instance, 14,000 years ago sea levels rose by 20m in 400 years -- that is five meters in a century. This was towards the end of the last ice age, so there was more ice around. But, on the other hand, temperatures were not warming as fast as today.

How far can it go? The last time the world was three degrees warmer than today -- which is what we expect later this century -- sea levels were 25m higher. So that is what we can look forward to if we don't act soon. None of the current climate and ice models predict this. But I prefer the evidence from the Earth's history and my own eyes. I think sea-level rise is going to be the big issue soon, more even than warming itself.

It's hard to say what the world will be like if this happens. It would be another planet. You could imagine great armadas of icebergs breaking off Greenland and melting as they float south. And, of course, huge areas being flooded.

How long have we got? We have to stabilize emissions of carbon dioxide within a decade, or temperatures will warm by more than one degree. That will be warmer than it has been for half a million years, and many things could become unstoppable. If we are to stop that, we cannot wait for new technologies like capturing emissions from burning coal. We have to act with what we have. This decade, that means focusing on energy efficiency and renewable sources of energy that do not burn carbon. We don't have much time left.

This is just taking into account the Greenland ice cap, which alone would contribute to a global oceanic rise of 15-20 feet were it to melt; it doesn't begin to account for what's happening to the much larger polar ice caps.

Mary at the Left Coaster put it just about right:

What's clear is we have no more time to waste. And we can't wait until Bush is out of office to get moving. The wholesale evacuation of New Orleans is a small harbinger of what we will see along all our coasts. 30 meters is more than 95 feet and many places like Portland, Oregon have sizable elevations significantly lower than that. (In downtown Portland, the US Bank Tower is at an elevation of 34 feet.) Manhattan would be gone as would much of Florida.

In the United States alone, much of the Florida Panhandle and the Gulf Coast would be underwater, as well as major population centers along both coasts. Then there are the thousands of South Pacific islands that would be inundated, as well as the numerous major coastal populations in Asia, Africa and Europe.

Neither does all this take into account related global-warming phenomena such as the warming of frozen methane at the bottom of the world's ocean's, or the catastrophic effect of oceanic warming on major ecosystems like the world's coral reefs and salmon populations. We're not simply endangering our own habitat and that of wildlife; we're putting the world's food supply at serious risk.

All this stands in direct contradiction of the corporate apologists and conservative naysayers who, like Rush Limbaugh and friends, have tried to pretend that there really isn't a problem here. How many have spouted suppositions -- such as claiming that any ice-cap meltoff would take "thousands of years" -- that now look Pollyanish?

Yet, how many have paid a price for it? Will Bush, for that matter, ever pay a price for his stubborn inaction, besides the condemnation of history that he already seems to be earning?

Probably not, because there will always be an army of sycophants, people invested (both financially and emotionally) in the conservative movement and Bush, leaping to gloss over the mounting evidence. The primary tactic here, as with the Bush approach to science generally (especially the question of Darwinism and "intelligent design"), is to pretend that the views of a tiny fringe of (mostly well-financed) dissenters have status equal to an unusual broad consensus among the vast majority of informed scientists.

Witness Jonah Goldberg (complete with an approving link from Professor Lloyd Christmas) opining that simply pointing out that the scientific consensus on global warming is overwhelming means you're cutting off debate:

And if you disagree, get ready for the witch hunt. Major news media have gone after scientists who argue there's still time to study global warming rather than plunge into some half-baked environmental jihad that could waste possibly trillions of dollars.

Of course, people like Goldberg -- who seem, strangely, not to blanch the slightest at the prospect of half-baked geopolitical jihads that definitely waste trillions of dollars, as well as thousands of lives -- couch their charges in words like "could" and "possibly," because they really don't know.

And that, for conservatives, is the key: Because we really don't know what will happen, nor can we prove the cause beyond any reasonable doubt, we should just continue with the status quo. Even for centrist/liberal observers like Mark Kleiman [note: this analysis was done as a class exercise, and does not necessarily reflect Kleiman's views] this cost-effectiveness argument trumps everything. If we can't prove it, then won't taking action run the risk of just being a big waste of money?

This is the same misguided calculus behind the Katrina disaster, when federal officials believed the tiny likelihood of a large enough hurricane made levee upgrades a lesser priority:

This calculus is deeply flawed, for the reason that just played out in New Orleans: Even if there were only a 0.5 percent chance that the city would be hit by a Category 4 hurricane or worse -- a questionable figure in any event, given that hurricanes have been rising in frequency and intensity in recent years -- the costs of allowing the flooding that would ensue under the existing system to occur were so high as to be incalculable. Planning to simply evacuate the city in the event of a Catgory 4 or 5 hurricane was horrifically bad planning.

Likewise, the costs of doing nothing to reduce carbon emissions, as well as to slow the rate of global warming to a reasonable pace, are so high as to be incalculable. When the potential costs include massive economic and demographic dislocations, massive natural disasters (including, most likely, more Katrina-sized storms), and massive starvation and loss of life, those trillions of dollars will seem like a drop in the bucket.

And that's presuming that it actually would prove to be a waste. In reality, many of the potential solutions could actually deliver real efficiencies to the economic system. We won't know until we try.

Conservatives can sit on their hands all they like. It's time for the rest of us to learn just to ignore them and get moving. They have already earned their place in history, and it won't be a kind one.

For the rest of us, the mounting and irrevocable evidence of a looming disaster -- from melting ice caps and starving polar bears to vanishing reefs, glaciers, and alpine lakes to tropical storms of historical ferocity -- demands that we act. It's called responsibility. And it's one of those things where actions always speak louder than words.

The beast within

If you listen to Lou Dobbs or Michelle Malkin or Sean Hannity, you'd have the impression that the Minutemen are just a bunch of sincere citizens whose only concern is hearing the border. Sure they are.

That would explain why a Colorado legislator received racist death threats late last week for making some disparaging remarks about the Minutemen:

Colorado Rep. Terrance Carroll received an e-mail Thursday, purportedly from a supporter of the Minuteman Project, the anti-illegal immigration group, that referred to lynching and told Carroll to "enjoy hell."

The Denver Democrat turned a copy over to the Colorado State Patrol, which is investigating.

Carroll, a lawyer who is black, said he was most bothered by the lynching reference.

"It was disturbing," he said. "This nation has an awful history of lynching."

The e-mail said, "You are so SOOOO lucky lynching and the firing squad for treason aren't available punishments anymore . . . I'd vote you in, in a heartbeat . . . "

"Enjoy Hell, Yellow Belly," the e-mail continued. "It takes a patriotic man to represent his country, and Sir, you are neither patriotic . . . nor a man."

What inspired this ugliness? Some remarks Carroll made earlier in the week, suggesting a little turnabout as fair play for the Minutemen:

The subject line in the e-mail read, "Build a wall around Colorado to keep out the minutemen." Carroll said that was a reference to a joke he made, which appeared in the Rocky Mountain News.

"I said, 'Perhaps we should build a wall around Colorado and keep Minutemen out,' " Carroll said.

He said the joke was made about what he sees as doomed approaches to "trying to stem the flow of immigration."

I'm sure I sound like a stuck record, but this incident is also notable for the naked eliminationism expressed in the e-mail. But then, eliminationism and racism are essentially two sides of the same coin.

So, for that matter, are the nice, "sincere citizens" and the ugly brutalists on the unlit side of their ranks -- whose presence, of course, is just a coincidence.

The annual question

Yesterday being the 11th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, I suppose I should just be grateful that, this year at least, we're not cursed with an Ann Coulter profile in Time.

Still, every year since 2002, this sad anniversary reminds me of a question I still haven't heard answered:

Why wasn't April 19, 1995 the "day that changed everything"?

Oh, those merry Minutemen

To hear their mainstream defenders tell it, those poor Minutemen are being smeared as racists merely for demanding secure borders. And the Minutemen constantly repeat the refrain.

But they never seem able to explain why their cause seems to draw so many overt, unrepentant racists. Recently, one of the Minutemen offshoots, an outfit called Border Guardians, has been making common cause with the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement, according to a new SPLC report:

A prominent anti-immigration leader has secretly urged the nation's largest neo-Nazi group to launch a campaign of violence and harassment against undocumented workers in the United States.

Laine Lawless, who started a group called Border Guardians last year, sent an April 3 e-mail to Mark Martin, "SS commander" of the Western Ohio unit of the National Socialist Movement, which has 59 chapters in 30 states. It was titled, "How to GET RID OF THEM!"

The e-mail from Lawless, who was also an original member of Chris Simcox's vigilante militia before it morphed into the Minuteman Project in early 2005, detailed 11 suggestions for ways to harass and terrorize undocumented immigrants, including robbery and "beating up illegals" as they leave their workplace.

"Maybe some of your warriors for the race would be the kind of people willing to implement some of these ideas," Lawless wrote. "I'm not ready to come out on this. ... Please don't use my name. THANKS."

At the request of Lawless, who declined to respond to questions from the Intelligence Report, Martin posted her suggestions to a number of neo-Nazi bulletin boards. Those suggestions included:

-- "Steal the money from any illegal walking into a bank or check cashing place."

-- "Make every illegal alien feel the heat of being a person without status. ... I hear the rednecks in the South are beating up illegals as the textile mills have closed. Use your imagination."

-- "Discourage Spanish-speaking children from going to school. Be creative."

-- "Create an anonymous propaganda campaign warning that any further illegal immigrants will be shot, maimed or seriously messed-up upon crossing the border. This should be fairly easy to do, considering the hysteria of the Spanish language press, and how they view the Minutemen as 'racists & vigilantes.' "

The report makes clear that Lawless played an integral role in founding the Minuteman Project:

Lawless, the former high priestess of Sisterhood of the Moon, a lesbian pagan organization, has been heavily involved in anti-immigration extremism since 2004, when she joined Simcox's Civil Homeland Defense outfit, as it was then called. That same year, she invited "militiamen" nationwide to "crawl through the woods in a ghille [sic] suit with sniper rifle" on her private ranch in Cochise County, Ariz. "I coordinate with Chris [Simcox], so anyone who wants to come is welcome," she wrote in a post to an online user group, "A Well Regulated Militia."

Lawless was featured in numerous media reports on the first Minuteman Project campaign in April 2005, during which she patrolled side-by-side with Minuteman vice-president Carmen Mercer. Lawless also traveled to Texas to join the Texas Minutemen in October, when she was quoted in The Austin Chronicle saying she gets an "intellectual and political orgasm" from spying on pro-immigration groups. In that interview, she accused one pro-immigration activist of inserting chants of "White Power!" into an audiotape of Minuteman rallies to discredit the movement.

Meanwhile, according to USA Today, the Minutemen are expanding to a nationwide membership:

The Minuteman Project is authorizing state chapters for the first time, says executive director Stephen Eichler. The group, created in 2004, organizes armed patrols on the southern U.S. border and calls in the Border Patrol when members spot people trying to cross illegally. President Bush referred to them in March 2005 as "vigilantes."

Eichler won't release membership numbers but says about 200,000 people identify themselves as Minutemen. By the end of the year, Eichler says, the group expects to have 500 chapters in states across the country, including Minnesota and elsewhere in the Midwest. Members could help with border surveillance or focus on immigration enforcement in their own communities.

"Over 5,000 people have come forward and said, 'I'll do anything,' " he says. "Right now, about 200 people that we have contacted look pretty serious." Eichler says the group will do background checks to prevent white supremacists from forming chapters.

The Illinois Minuteman Project, which is patterned after the California-based group, has about 600 members and is growing rapidly, says Rosanna Pulido, who just returned from patrolling the Arizona-Mexico border.

"Our membership is going up every day," she says. "We're getting flooded. Nothing has generated interest like the pro-immigration protests." The group plans a May 4 debate with a proponent of citizenship for illegal immigrants in Chicago and a town hall meeting May 6 in Rockford, Ill.

Meanwhile, the white backlash to the recent pro-immigrant marches keeps building, with recent protests in Cullman, Alabama, and Kansas City, Missouri, each drawing several hundred participants. In the latter, the crowd cheered the call for "a 2,000-mile wall."

The nativist faction has just begun. Here are some of the counter-protests being organized in the next few weeks in response to the immigration marchers:

April 22: Saturday, 9 a.m. at the offices of the pro-migrant Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (Northwest Treeplanters and Farmworkers United), in Woodburn, Oregon. Protest planned by Oregonians for Immigration Reform.

April 23: Sunday, 2 p.m., The National Mall in Washington, D.C. A "Pro-America 'Secure Our Borders' Demonstration."

April 24: Monday, 10 a.m., Washington, D.C., at Lafayette Park opposite the White House. Protest arranged by 9/11 Families for Secure America.

April 24: Monday, nationwide state capitol protests. Protest arranged by Concerned American Citizens.

May 3-12: Protest Caravan each day across America. Protests arranged by the Minuteman Project.

If folks like Laine Lawless have their way, these marches will be thick with those very extremists the nativists claim not to be.

Radio Rmalkin

Michelle Malkin loves all the perks that come with being a media figure -- the TV appearances with people like Bill O'Reilly fawning all over her, the kid-glove treatment from journalists, the fame and recognition. It's all quite lovely, especially when it translates into dollars.

Most of all, it seems, she likes the power: the ability to disseminate her point of view and have it be not only widely read but widely adopted as "factual" by a substantial number of people. (In Malkin's case, it's almost purely the power of propaganda, since that is primarily what she purveys.)

In the end, that means her point of view is acted upon, both officially and unofficially. That, as anyone in the "mainstream media" knows, is real power.

Malkin wants that power. She just doesn't want any of the responsibility that comes with it.

And it can easily be abused. You can use your megaphone to lie shamelessly. You can use it to smear the good name of public officials. You can use it to rewrite history. And you can use it to intimidate the "little people" who don't possess the same kind of power.

Because these potential abuses exist, a sense of ethics is obligatory for anyone who possesses this power. It's why the Society of Professional Journalists has a Code of Ethics that abjures such behavior.

Violating the Code won't get you fired per se, but it certainly brings into question your professionalism and honor. It also brands you, forever, as deeply irresponsible.

Particularly when it comes to using that power to attack ordinary citizens and subject them not just to ridicule but actual threats and potential violence.

As Georgia 10 points out, there is an entire section in the Code urging restraint when it comes to the media's power to intrude on and affect people's private lives.

This is especially the case when it comes to handing out people's personal contact information: phone numbers, e-mail addresses, even home addresses.

Because without that restraint, mass media can become an instrument of humankind's worst impulses -- including mass violence and genocide.

Remember, most recently, what happened in Rwanda: the owners of talk radio stations, working in the interest of the moneyed class, used their megaphones to target individuals who were then slaughtered by mobs armed with machetes:

"In Rwanda," Gowing writes, "hate radio ... systematically laid the groundwork for mass slaughter from the moment it was licensed in July 1993." It also helped facilitate the genocide, as RTLM broadcast names, addresses and license plate numbers of Tutsi targets. "Killers often carried a machete in one hand and a transistor radio in the other," according to Power.

RTLM and the propaganda it broadcast did not happen by accident. Rather, the founding of the station in 1992 by Hutu hard-liners closely associated with the government and its subsequent activities were "directly promoted by government authorities" as "the political and military elite established RTLM as part of this broader strategy to thwart the impact of internal reform." Further evidence of this strategy is found in the fact that prior to the genocide the government distributed free radios around the country in order to allow Rwandans to tune into RTLM, and that RTLM was "allowed to broadcast on the same frequencies as the national radio when Radio Rwanda [the national state-owned station] was not transmitting." Though officially private, RTLM "was essentially the tool of Hutu extremists from the government, military and business communities."

There is a good reason that using the power of mass media to expose individual citizens' private lives to abuse and threats is considered unethical: It represents unchecked and abusive power. No one interested in holding the public trust should either want or seek it.

Yet this, of course, is exactly what Malkin did this week in publishing, on her blog, the home phone numbers of three students who led anti-military protests on the campus of UC-Santa Cruz.

Predictably, the students were deluged with hate mail and phone calls, including a number of death threats.

Malkin not only refused to take the numbers down -- in response, she reverted to her timeworn victimization schtick, posting some of the nasty e-mails she received in return and pretending there was nothing wrong or unethical in her behavior.

We're all too familiar with this routine. After all, it's what the entirety of her book Unhinged was predicated upon. Malkin, as I said then, is like the lunatic who walks around the public square and pokes people in the eye with a sharp stick, and then is shocked, shocked, that anyone would respond with anger and outrage.

Of course, there's more than ample reason to question Malkin's professionalism. Indeed, this isn't the first time Malkin has shown a predilection for abusing the power of her large readership.

Back when Unhinged first came out, I noticed a little anomaly:

Y'see, the early reports on the book indicated that not only would Malkin feature nasty, ugly quotes from nasty, ugly liberals on the back cover, but it would include their e-mail addresses.

And that's what they showed when Malkin appeared on O'Reilly's show the other day. O'Reilly even specifically mentioned it.

But when my copy arrived, the nasty quotes were there ... but not the e-mail addresses.

We've never been told why the addresses were removed, but one has to assume that Regnery did so on advice of counsel. It's also my understanding that one of the scurrilous and ugly quotes was actually penned by a 14-year-old, though I haven't confirmed that; but it certainly underscores the nature of this kind of retaliatory abuse of the power of mass communication.

Malkin's not the first right-wing blogger to try the Rwanda radio routine on one of their perceived enemies. Remember that the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler (who resides on Malkin's blogroll) attempted a similar tactic against someone deemed "despicable" enough to warrant having someone visit them at their home.

I've seen this tactic being used by radio talkers in Montana as well:

The primary targets of Stokes' venom, though, were conservationists and environmentalists, for whom not even the most appalling comparison nor the most groundless accusation was adequate: Stokes constantly referred to them as Nazis, and the central thrust of all his attacks was that "greens" were responsible for nearly everything that was wrong with life in Western Montana, particularly the depressed economy. Indeed, Stokes has referred frequently to Patriot conspiracy theories, and not merely on the subject of environmentalists (who are viewed by militia types as a cult intent on enslaving the rest of mankind); he's also trotted out Patriot theories on such subjects as taxation and the Constitution.

Unsurprisingly, his audience reflects this kind of proto-fascist orientation. Many of his callers have outright advocated violence against conservationists, and Stokes has encouraged them to do so.

The real-life consequences of all this talk made quite clear that this was not merely "entertainment," and that Stokes' "hot talk" was doing more than just garnering ratings. Beginning in the summer of 2001, local conservationists began receiving a series of death threats, some delivered in person, others by phone. Car windows were smashed in, tires slashed. Strange men would show up in people's yards at twilight, then run off when confronted. People's homes were vandalized. Others would be followed home by men in pickups or on motorcycles. Sometimes the teenage children of the targets were threatened.

And egging all of these people on was John Stokes. Sometimes callers would announce on his show that a local conservationist was on vacation, which would present an opportunity to "visit their home." In others, a caller would simply give the home address of an environmental activist who had just been vilified as "Satanic" on the air by Stokes.

It's doubtful that Michelle Malkin has ever heard of John Stokes. No doubt she cooked up the idea of publishing these students' personal-contact info -- which they gave out in a press release that was clearly intended not for broadcast but for media contact purposes -- more or less on the fly. It just felt good, so she did it.

But it fits in with a pattern of behavior, not just by Malkin but by right-wing pundits generally, of pretending that ethics don't really matter -- or that longtime ethical standards just don't exist.

Maybe she just spent too much time hanging out with Ben Domenech when he was editing Unhinged.

But it's clear that she has a little problem. No, make that a big problem.

Reconquista!

How the nativists saw the immigration marches:

"Green cards? We don't need no steenking green cards!"

Their response:

"Today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Mexican infiltration, Mexican indoctrination, Mexican subversion and the Mexican Reconquista conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."

___

This seems to be the upshot of the current drumbeat coming from the Sensenbrenner/Tancredo wing of the conservative movement, thrummed most prominently by such luminaries as Michelle Malkin ("Welcome to Reconquista" reads her headline). Having already characterized the current wave of Mexican immigration as an "invasion", she is more recently making the unsubstantiated claim that:

Aztlan is a long-held notion among Mexico's intellectual elite and political class, which asserts that the American southwest rightly belongs to Mexico. Advocates believe the reclamation (or reconquista) of Aztlan will occur through sheer demographic force. If the rallies across the country are any indication, reconquista is already complete.

Stepping into line with the reconquista theory this weekend was the Washington Times, which ran a long profile describing the theory rather credulously:

La reconquista, a radical movement calling for Mexico to "reconquer" America's Southwest, has stepped out of the shadows at recent immigration-reform protests nationwide as marchers held signs saying, "Uncle Sam Stole Our Land!" and waved Mexico's flag.

Even as organizers urged marchers to display U.S. flags, the theme of reclaiming "stolen" land remained strong. One popular banner read: "If you think I'm illegal because I'm a Mexican, learn the true history because I'm in my homeland."

"We need to change direction," said Jose Lugo, an instructor in Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder at a campus march last week. "And by allowing these 50,000, 50 million [immigrants] to come in here, we can do that."

The revolutionary tone has surprised even longtime immigration watchers such as Ira Mehlman, the Los Angeles-based spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

"I've always been skeptical myself about this [reconquista], but what I've seen over the last few weeks leads me to believe that there's more there than I thought," Mr. Mehlman said.

"You're seeing people marching with Mexican flags chanting, 'This is our country.' I don't think that we can dismiss this as youthful exuberance or a bunch of hotheads," he said.

The reporter, to her credit, does include at least a touch of reality-based stuff:

Hispanic rights leaders insist there's nothing to the so-called reconquista, sometimes referred to as Aztlan, the mythical ancestral homeland of the Aztecs that reportedly stretches from the border to southern Oregon and Colorado.

Nativo Lopez, president of the Mexican American Political Association in Los Angeles, one of the march organizers, was infuriated when a reporter asked him about the reconquista.

"I can't believe you're bothering me with questions about this. You're not serious," Mr. Lopez said. "I can't believe you're bothering with such a minuscule, fringe element that has no resonance with this populous."

More to the point, the reporter -- as well as Malkin, and most of the other reconquista theorists -- seem confused about a very basic point: The belief that the Southwest is part of their historical homeland is a legitimate belief for most Latinos, and the marchers they cite seem to be expressing that point. They're also expressing the belief that this historical claim overrides the latter-day borders that would deny them their heritage. What's utterly absent is any claim that they intend to retake the Southwest for Mexico, which is what the reconquista theory is all about. On the contrary, they seem intent on becoming American -- but they also are claiming they have a right, by virtue of their heritage, to become one.

That doesn't sound like an invasion to me.

Of course, when I think of invasions, I usually think of armed forces crossing borders and attempting to defeat the other nation's military and ultimately depose its government. You know, what we did in Iraq. Planes, tanks, bombs, the works. Shock and awe.

I don't think of poor people trekking across the desert, looking to land some hard labor in our farm fields and on construction sites, quite the same way. But maybe that's just me.

Listening to the reconquista theories, I am taken back, back, back -- back to those halcyon days when conspiracy theories were the entire raison d'etre of the far right of America's conservative movement. Which is to say, every day of the past half-century.

After all, the far right can't really exist for long without a scapegoat, an Enemy, on whom it can blame all the world's ills. It has always been so, and will always be.

In the post-Civil War period, it was the ominpotent threat of "black rape" that inspired the American far right into a decades-long orgy of lynching whose effects remain with us today.

In the first half of the 20th century, it was the "Yellow Peril." This was a conspiracy theory which held that the Japanese emperor intended to invade the Pacific Coast, and that he was sending immigrants to American shores as shock troops to prepare the way for just such a military action. James Phelan, one of the "peril" theory's chief advocates, explained in 1907 that the Japanese immigrants represented an "enemy within our gates." Advocates frequently cited a 1909 book promoting this theory, Homer Lea's The Valor of Ignorance, which detailed the invasion to come and its aftermath. Moreover, the larger "Yellow Peril" was framed as simply a wave of nonwhite immigrants who would swamp the existing white population if left unchecked. (See more here.)

Then, for most of the post-World War II period, the Enemy was those dirty Communists. This, of course, inspired an entire universe of right-wing conspiracy theorizing, particularly embodied by the McCarthy witch hunts and their offspring, the John Birch Society.

With the demise of the Communist threat in the late '80s and early '90s, right-wingers were left with no one to scapegoat in elaborate conspiracy-theory fashion -- except, of course, for Bill "New World Order" Clinton. But he was only good for an eight-year stint (though if Hillary resurfaces in 2008, hey, they've got another eight more years' worth).

They've really been in need of a more permanent conspiracy-theory scapegoat, and the foreignness of radical Islam makes it difficult to successfully concoct any theories that stick, other than Hannityesque smears identifying liberalism with terrorism.

But reconquista? Woo-hoo! Made to order!

Already, it's a theory that's being endorsed by supposedly mainstream Republicans, even in non-border states like Connecticut, where one of the GOP candidates for Lieberman's seat, Paul Streitz, weighed in:

"It is time to get the troops out of Iraq and put them on the Mexican border. Thousands of Mexicans and other illegal aliens from other countries come into this country every day. This is an invasion, not immigration," Streitz said in a press release.

"The Mexicans are serious about their Reconquista claims to Aztlan. The Senate is headed toward surrendering the states of California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas," the press release continued.

In case anyone's wondering, this latest conspiracy theory in fact originated on the far right -- specifically, with Glenn Spencer, leader of American Patrol:

The so-called reconquista, an alleged plot to turn several American states into a Mexican state or some kind of puppet government controlled by Mexico, has been a top concern for Spencer for years. Back in 1999, he put it like this: "The consul general says Mexico is reconquering California. A Mexican intellectual suggests that anyone who doesn't like Mexicans should leave California. What else do you need to hear? RECONQUISTA IS REAL... . EVERY ILLEGAL ALIEN IN OUR NATION MUST BE DEPORTED IMMEDIATELY. ... IF WE CAN BOMB THE TV STATION IN BELGRADE [in the former Yugoslavia] WE CAN SHUT DOWN [U.S. Spanish-language stations] TELEMUNDO AND UNIVISION."

Spencer got involved in the anti-immigration movement in 1992, when he formed Voice of Citizens Together, also known as American Patrol, in California. In 2002, saying the battle was lost in that state, he moved to the "front lines" of the Arizona border, where he formed American Border Patrol. He was one of the first to call for border citizens' patrols and pioneered the use of surveillance technology.

He also was one of the first well-known anti-immigration activists to more or less openly court white supremacists and anti-Semites. He has attended conferences of American Renaissance magazine, which specializes in racist theories about blacks and others. He interviewed the magazine's editor, Jared Taylor, on his syndicated radio show. Another guest was California State Professor Kevin MacDonald, who is the architect of an elaborate anti-Semitic theory dressed up as evolutionary biology.

Spencer's voice has been particularly strident in pushing the reconquista theory as a Minuteman Project promoter:

Glen Spencer's Voices of Citizens Together (VCT) almost makes AICF look tame by comparison. A Mexican invasion, Spencer warns in his own videotape, is racing across America "like wildfire." There are drugs in Iowa, gang takeovers in Nevada, and "traitors" in the Democratic Party, the Catholic Church and among the "corporate globalists."

Bringing crime, drugs, squalor and "immigration via the birth canal," Mexicans are a "cultural cancer" from which Western civilization "must be rescued." They are threatening the birthright left by the white colonists who "earned the right to stewardship of the land." And this invasion is no accident.

Working in league with communist Chicano activists and their allies in America, Spencer warns, Mexico is using a little-known but highly effective plan ý a scheme already successful in "seizing power" in California ý "to defeat America."

The name of the conspiracy is the "Plan de Aztlan."

"Some scoff at the idea of a Mexican plan of conquest," says Spencer's video (which also features a scuffle between VCT and antiracist activists). The video then answers with an assortment of sound bites from Latino activists and Mexican officials -- including references to "la reconquista" (the reconquest) -- that "prove" that there is a Mexican plot to break the Southwestern states away.

A "hostile force on our border," the narrator warns, is engaging in "demographic war" against the United States. "Mexico is moving to capture the American Southwest."

Variations on this Aztlan conspiracy theory are now widespread on the American radical right. Columnists like Francis and Joseph E. Fallon, who has written on the subject for journals including American Renaissance and Mankind Quarterly, a publication specializing in race "science," have helped to publicize variations of the theory.

The theory was also heavily promoted by the Barnes Review, which otherwise prefers to occupy itself with Holocaust revisionism.

Of course, Michelle Malkin and the Washington Times will never tell you that this is where these theories originate. Nor will they ever be able demonstrate that the notion of reconquista exists among Latino immigrants as anything more than a fringe element.

All that they can do is offer anecdotal evidence, mostly pictures of people carrying signs claiming they belong here. And they'll tell you that what they're claiming is that this country belongs to Mexico -- when no such claim is in sight.

What matters to people like Malkin is whipping up their audience, appealing to their fears. Because fearful people are irrational people, and likely to defer to authority; malleable, because they're eager to be safe. For the lot of them, scapegoats are de rigeur.

What matters to the rest of us, though, is that yet another innately racist appeal from the far right gets neatly repackaged and sold to mainstream Americans as somehow legitimate. And that, folks, is how transmission works.

Immigration and eliminationism

Those mass marches are having their effect: They're scaring the crap out of the nativists.

And they're fighting back in the usual, expected fashion ... by lying and making ugly but empty threats.

At least, we hope they're empty. Because what they're advocating, increasingly, is eliminating all 11 million illegal aliens in the United States. How they'll achieve that is something, however, they leave to our imaginations.

Recently a powerful Arizona legislator named Russell Pearce, a Republican from Mesa, recently uttered the following in response to the marches:

They're illegal and they have no right to be marching down our streets. They have no constitutional rights. They don't have First-, Fourth-, Sixth amendment rights. They're here illegally and they chose to be here illegally.

Pearce heads the state's House appropriations panel, has served as a judge, and was for many years a law-enforcement officer. And he really believes this?

As Blogs for Arizona explains, illegal aliens in fact have all kinds of rights under the constitution, including due-process rights, free-speech rights, search-and-seizure rights, and criminal-justice rights.

Of course, we hear the word "illegal" all the time in the nativists' arguments. "What part of 'illegal' don't you understand?" is one of the Minutemen's favorite T-shirt slogans.

To which the appropriate response is: "What part of 'bad law' don't you understand?"

The bottom line in the immigration debate is that current immigration law -- as well as the proposals being floated by the Tancredo wing of the Republican Party (including James Sensenbrenner) -- is inadequate for dealing with the realities forced on us by economic forces which no amount of border fence and no mass expulsions will overcome. As I explained before, there are two forces driving the current wave of emigration: 1) a massive wage and standard-of-living gap between the United States and its immediate and most populous neighbor, and 2) the increasing demand for cheap labor in the United States.

Stressing that these immigrants' status as "illegal" begs the whole question of whether the laws on the books are adequate or just. They just create a whole class of criminals out of people who come here to work, and the latter has always been the driving force in immigration throughout our history.

But the nativists don't care. They like simple solutions. It's easier to blame the poverty-stricken pawns in this economic game, and take their anger out on them, than to deal with the core problems. What they're interested in is a scapegoat. After all, that's what they do.

Constantly shouting "illegals!" furthers the nativists' aims by separating these people from the rest of us: they're non-citizens, and thus by extension almost non-entities. Perhaps even non-human.

That certainly seems to be the line of thinking adopted by at least one right-wing blogger (wouldn't you know it, another of those "reformed liberals" who now claims that he and his "Red State" kind represent the real America). In a post decrying those "illegal aliens," he compared them to rats:

We can learn from Buffalo, New York. Now in Buffalo the rat problem in the city was a huge one. Exterminators could not handle the problem. But then in 2001 the city mandated that everyone would have to begin using special anti-rat garbage totes that the rats could not open. With no way to get to the garbage, the rats left Buffalo. Now, they went to the suburbs and now the suburbs are fighting them. But it is no longer a problem for the people of Buffalo, New York. Here is how to do the same with our problem:

1) No services.

Absolutely no services of any kind for those who cannot prove they are in the country legally. Nothing but emergency medical care. Without all the social services, medical and other services provided for them, the illegals will find life here less attractive.

2) No schools.

Absolutely no schooling for anyone who cannot prove they belong here legally.

3) No easy birthright.

Change the law. Now, if you are born here, you are a citizen. I say, if you cannot prove that you were born here and that your mother was here legally at the time, then your citizenship is that of the mother and not of the USA.

4) No legal status. No drivers licenses. No bank accounts. No ability to sue a citizen. No legal standing for anyone who is in this country illegally.

5) No free lunch for "The Man".

Make it a criminal offense (and enforce it if it is already on the books) to hire an illegal alien, or to rent a dwelling place to him, or to sell him a home knowing that he intends to live there. Make employers provide documentation for all of their workers. You put the onus on "The Man" and it suddenly becomes less appealing to take advantage of the illegals.


THE RATS WILL GO SOMEWHERE ELSE

Anyone familiar with eliminationist rhetoric recognizes this motif: compare the object of elimination with vermin, and then describe the steps you need to take to "exterminate" them.

Indeed, the "rats" comparison has a particularly ugly history: it was, after all, one of the most effective pieces of imagery in film created by Nazi propagandists in drumming up hatred of Jews, as Richard Webster explained:

The film Der Ewige Jude, which formed part of a propaganda programme designed to justify to the German people the deportations of Jews which were already taking place, included a powerful montage sequence in which Jews were compared to rats. In the words of the commentary, 'rats ... have followed men like parasites from the very beginning … They are cunning, cowardly and fierce, and usually appear in large packs. In the animal world they represent the element of subterranean destruction.' Having noted that rats spread disease and destruction, the commentary suggested that they occupied a position 'not dissimilar to the place that Jews have among men'. At this point in the film, footage of rats squirming through sewers is followed first by the image of a rat crawling up through a drain-cover into the street and then by shots of Jewish people crowded together in ghettos.

In the Security Service report on the film, the comparison of the Jewish people to rats was held to be 'particularly impressive'.

There is, of course, nothing intrinsically anti-semitic (or racist) about the image of the rat. However, presenting images of Jews as unclean insects or rodents was perhaps the most effective way not only of arousing and confirming anti-semitic hatred but of directly inciting physical violence by stirring some of people's deepest fears and anxieties. The same idea was used in 'instant' propaganda exercises to prepare for mass murder. According to one account, peasants recruited by the Germans in occupied countries in order to help in mass murders were given an intensive training course which lasted only a few hours, and which consisted in the study of pictures representing Jews as small repulsive beasts (Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator, New York, Harper and Brothers, 1949, p. 54)

It also has a history of use in America, particularly in immigration and race debates. Recall, for instance, that James Phelan, a U.S. Senator from California, made nearly identical attacks upon Japanese immigrants. Phelan was urging the passage of immigration restrictions and "alien land laws" that stripped immigrants of the right to own land, and whipping up fears that the West Coast would (thanks to those evil "picture brides" and their progeny) soon be overrun by "yellow people," when he explained it thus:

The rats are in the granary. They have gotten in under the door and they are breeding with alarming rapidity. We must get rid of them or lose the granary.

It's also been used in recent years to demonize gays and lesbians.

Fortunately, the blogger in question seems to be extremely obscure, with limited influence. But it's interesting to see the "vermin" motif popping up increasingly in discussions of illegal immigration, particularly paired with discussions of rounding up and deporting all illegal aliens.

After all, it's not just obscure bloggers doing this. It includes guys like Michael Savage, who claims millions of listeners.

Likewise, you're hearing a lot of talk about rounding up and deporting all illegal aliens. But you don't hear any of them telling us how they intend to achieve this --despite the fact that we're talking about 11 million people and, without question, one of the pillars of an economy increasingly built on cheap labor.

You can hear this not just from organizations like VDare -- rated a "hate group" by the SPLC but endorsed by Michelle Malkin and many others -- but also from people with real influence and power, like Newt Gingrich and James Sensenbrenner.

Kinda puts that news a few weeks ago about Halliburton building mass detention centers to cope with an "immigration emergency" in perspective, doesn't it?

Bigotry and freedom

The religious right sure has a funny idea of what constitutes freedom in America. It's pretty clear that when they talk about free speech and constitutional rights, they intend it to include only themselves and no one else.

This doesn't merely cover such matters as sexual orientation. It even appears to include the freedom of religion.

Take, for instance, their latest campaign to give themselves the right to bash gays and lesbians:

The legal argument is straightforward: Policies intended to protect gays and lesbians from discrimination end up discriminating against conservative Christians. Evangelicals have been suspended for wearing anti-gay T-shirts to high school, fired for denouncing Gay Pride Month at work, reprimanded for refusing to attend diversity training. When they protest tolerance codes, they're labeled intolerant.

What's revealing about their argument, as always, is that they insist that antidiscrimination laws should only cover such "inborn traits" as race and gender:

Others fear the banner of religious liberty could be used to justify all manner of harassment.

"What if a person felt their religious view was that African Americans shouldn't mingle with Caucasians, or that women shouldn't work?" asked Jon Davidson, legal director of the gay rights group Lambda Legal.

Christian activist Gregory S. Baylor responds to such criticism angrily. He says he supports policies that protect people from discrimination based on race and gender. But he draws a distinction that infuriates gay rights activists when he argues that sexual orientation is different -- a lifestyle choice, not an inborn trait.

By equating homosexuality with race, Baylor said, tolerance policies put conservative evangelicals in the same category as racists. He predicts the government will one day revoke the tax-exempt status of churches that preach homosexuality is sinful or that refuse to hire gays and lesbians.

"Think how marginalized racists are," said Baylor, who directs the Christian Legal Society's Center for Law and Religious Freedom. "If we don't address this now, it will only get worse."

We've heard this argument many times before, most often when the issue of hate crimes arises: Because being gay, we're told, is a "chosen behavior," it is undeserving of civil rights protections.

As I've noted previously:

It's the same reason given by many evangelicals -- and particularly black and minority evangelicals, and people who claim they support civil rights -- for not supporting gays and lesbians in hate-crime protections: "You can't compare being gay to being black. One's immutable, one's chosen."

Well, yes, this is true when it comes to race. And even ethnicity. These are, after all, two of the three main legs of anti-discrimination and hate-crimes laws.

But it's not true of the third leg of these laws: religion. Last I checked, this too was a "chosen behavior."

If we restrict antidiscrimination laws only to "inborn traits," then the right to choose our religious faith (or lack thereof) will immediately be at risk, too.

Of course, this doesn't much bother fundamentalists, since they already claim that they represent the only "true" Christianity, and consider anything that departs from their dogma to be "unChristian." Along similar lines, they also claim that this is a "Christian nation" that should abide by Biblical laws.

But it should bother the rest of us -- particularly those whose religious beliefs may not be in line with the fundamentalists'.

It doesn't take much imagination, after all, to see the same principle -- that free speech rights include the "right" to discriminate, harass, intimidate, and threaten -- applied to other "chosen behaviors" like religious faith.

So if you're a liberal Methodist, or Catholic, or a Jew, good "Christians" believe they should have the right to discriminate against you, too.

It all leads one to wonder: Is ignorant, unAmerican bigotry also an "inborn trait"?

Ashamed

This may put me in the minority of bloggers, but I don't much care for blogging when I travel. Especially when I'm spending my days escorting my daughter through the commercial wonders of Disneyland, which primarily constitute serial adventures in line-standing and swollen, aching feet.

But duty beckons, thanks to Rick Moran of Right Wing Nuthouse, who wrote a lengthy response to my recent post at Firedoglake regarding the way that mainstream conservatism has increasingly come to reflect genuinely extremist values and ideas, largely through the sorts of thinly veiled appeals it makes.

It's noteworthy because, as readers know, this is a trend I've been documenting for some time, most notably in my two Koufax-winning series. And in all that time, I haven't seen anyone on the right try to tackle the argument in anything approaching a serious fashion. Most avoid my thesis like the plague, and if any do acknowledge it, it's usually given the standard substance-free airy dismissal (to wit: this is just too absurd to dignify with a response).

Alas, for all the words that Moran expends on my behalf, the end product is thin gruel indeed.

Take, for instance, Moran's claim that I "put the cart before the horse" regarding the movement of far-right appeals into the conservative mainstream; he claims, instead, that right-wing extremists have simply adopted mainstream positions and tried to spin them as their own:

The only problem with Mr. Neiwert’s notions of insidious issue creep by racists and fascists into the mainstream of conservatism is that he is blaming the responsible right for the fact that the racists adopted these issues, mixed them into an unrecognizable porridge of nauseating half truths and bowdlerized slogans, and spewed the result onto the internet and elsewhere trying to appear reasonable.

In short, while trying to connect Neo-Nazis to conservatives, Mr. Neiwert makes a classic, some would say stupid mistake; he puts the cart before the horse. It was not conservatives who adopted these issues from the extremists; it was the other way around.

This is his strongest argument, incidentally, and if his chronology were actually correct, he'd have a point. But it's not.

You see, David Duke and like-minded neo-Nazis were adopting these issues in the 1970s, well before they became part of Republican cant. And while it is true that many of them surfaced in the Reagan '80s, well before Pat Buchanan offered his formula for transmitting far-right ideas into the mainstream, the reality is that the trend has rapidly accelerated since then.

Take, for instance, the way the extremist right served as an echo chamber for mainstream conservative appeals during the Clinton years, especially in building up anti-Clinton animus with a whole raft of bizarre charges that formed the foundation for the impetus to impeach. Moreover, it's become embodied in the way that genuinely fringe figures like Randall Terry, Jim Gilchrist, and Jared Taylor have been subsequently embraced by the mainstream right as somehow representative of their ideals. It's also embodied in the way that Duke themes -- particularly his 1990s tomes describing how white America's values were in danger of being overrun by brown hordes -- keep popping up among mainstream conservatives; not surprisingly, the best example of this was Buchanan's book The Death of the West.

Moran's subsequent point borders on the downright inane:

I would suggest to Mr. Neiwert that his next article deal with the adoption by the Communist Party USA of many liberal issues such as racial justice, anti-war agitation, universal health care, and reigning in corporate power. Or better yet, he might want to take on Osama Bin Laden and that worthy’s peculiar habit of regurgitating liberal talking points about America, the war, and western civilization every time he makes a videotape.

Of course, it's Moran who himself is putting the cart before the horse himself here -- that is, extremists like the Communist Party are simply latching themselves onto legitimate mainstream issues, such as they did with civil rights in the 1950s -- if he thinks this kind of argument has any legitimacy. But it's clear he doesn't; he's just hoping to score rhetorical points, which only works if your characterization of the case is accurate. (As for Mr. Bin Laden, perhaps Moran hasn't noticed that the reality of fundamentalist Islamic radicals is that what they hate most about the West is embodied most in what are traditionally liberal quarters: free speech, sexual tolerance, a desire to break free from the chains of oppressive traditionalism.)

Perhaps more to the point, he seems not to understand that the concept of "transmission" -- that is, the movement of ideas and appeals from the extremist fringes into the mainstream through their careful repackaging -- does indeed hold as true for the left as for the right. Likewise, what he also neglects to comprehend is that the very real difference is that, for mainstream liberalism, such transmissions are nearly nonexistent now, however much they may have occurred in the past (and the historical instances are actually few and far between, and typically relegated to lesser issues, unless you're one of those nuts who believe FDR really was a communist). The nearly opposite is true of the mainstream right currently.

Moran goes on to not only demonstrate an abysmal grasp of the facts regarding right-wing behavior, he actually goes on to reproduce some of the same transmissions by way of acting as an apologist for his cohorts. To wit:

-- Michelle Malkin, he claims, has only a peripheral association with the hate group VDare, which exists only because they run her syndicated column. If Malkin's associations with the VDare clan ended there, he might have a point -- though a limited one, since columnists do have the right to deny anyone they like (or dislike) the right to run their work; if the National Alliance or Council of Conservative Citizens or Stormfront, all nakedly racist outfits, wanted to run Malkin's column, I would assume she would deny them that option (though that might be a bad assumption). Moreover, Malkin blogrolls VDare on not just her blog, but also on her subsidiary Immigration Blog. Additionally, she has on several occasions sprung to the defense of the VDare crowd, particularly Steve Sailer.

-- Glenn Reynolds, he claims, is really not a right-wing blogger at all but a libertarian one. Of course, Reynolds has made this claim for years as well, but those familiar with Reynolds' track record of uniform support for conservatives and their agendas, and converse animus towards liberals and theirs, tends to belie the claim. The decisive factor for me has been Reynolds' uniform support for the Bush administration's seemingly endless undermining of civil liberties, supposedly the heart of libertarian ideals. I have in my possession an e-mail that Reynolds sent in 1997 to a listserv I was on, attacking Clinton's post-Oklahoma City push for bolstering law-enforcement efforts for intelligence gathering on domestic terrorists and claiming that he didn't think any American should be willing to give up their privacy rights for the purpose of preventing terrorism; and yet his track record regarding the Bush administration has been precisely the opposite (uniform support for the Patriot Act -- which made the Clinton initiatives look minor in comparison -- and its sequel, as well as Bush's use of NSA for domestic surveillance).

-- He goes on to defend Reynolds' and other right-wingers smear of MEChA without really comprehending that what Reynolds did in calling MEChA "fascist hatemongers" and "racist and homophobic" was, among other things, to link MEChA to a group of Latino anti-Semites without any grounding for doing so, and then, after the mistake was pointed out to him, simply noted that the connection was in error: no apology, and no attempt to explain to his readers that his characterization was grossly off course.

-- Even worse, Moran defends Reynolds and Malkin by citing El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan (a document written in 1969) and noting:

The translation of that last little ditty is "On behalf of the Race, everything. Outside the Race, nothing."

But hey! Don't call them hatemongers!

Note that Moran calls this phrase MEChA's "motto" when, in fact, it is not; it's simply a slogan that appeared in some of its early organizing documents. Its actual motto is "La union hace la fuerza," or "Unity creates power."

Moreover, as I explained way back when, in a post that was included in the links of the Firedoglake post:

Most of the characterizations of MEChA's rhetoric have ranged from the extremely tendentious to outright gross distortions. And nearly all of them are devoid of both historical and current social context.

One of the prime examples of distortion in the debate is the way a number of the anti-Mechistas, including Malkin and Kaus, have zeroed in on the MEChA slogan: Por la Raza, todo. Fuera la Raza, nada.

Kaus offers the translation of this slogan that in fact has been used by every one of the MEChA critics:

(Many American Jewish groups fight against assimilation too, but I haven't seen any with a slogan equivalent to "For the Race, everything. For those outside the race, nothing.")

Before supposedly smart people go publishing such nonsense, it would help if they consulted, say, a native Spanish speaker (and one would think one would be available somewhere in Santa Monica).

A more accurate translation of the slogan would recognize that though "Por" translates to the English "For," it is used in a very specific sense of the word -- namely, "On behalf of" or "In the service of". "Fuera" is not "for those outside" but rather refers to the speaker, and means "Apart from." So what the slogan actually says is this:

In the service of the race, everything
Apart from the race, nothing

There is nothing remotely racist, particularly in the sense of being exclusionist or derogatory, about this, of course. The second line clearly only refers to the need to maintain one's ethnic and cultural identity. It is only racist if you deliberately mistranslate it: "For those outside the race, nothing."

Perhaps even more to the point, as I explained subsequently, "la Raza" is specifically a pan-racial concept, describing a populist notion of "the people," a notion that specifically includes a number of races, since the people of Mexico are actually constituted of a range of distinct races:

A more accurate translation would read, "In service of my people, everything; [for] apart from my people, [I have] nothing." There is neither the exclusionist nor the racist content that Malkin implies. La Raza, it must be noted, is not a racial concept but an ethnic one (it comprises multiples races, in fact).

This kind of sloppiness is typical of Moran's entire argument here. As you can see, his case simply falls apart when you examine it with any care.

In the end, though, I was most amused by Moran's remark that I "ought to be ashamed of [my]self."

And you know, it's true: I am ashamed of myself. I'm ashamed for having worked for so many years in mainstream media and, even while recognizing these trends as they developed in the 1990s, never having written about them with any detail or clarity because I thought it would be impolitic.

I'm ashamed for having assumed, for so many years, that the differences between the extremist right and the mainstream right were more significant than their similarities. That is, until it became all too apparent that the differences were growing smaller and the similarities growing much, much greater.

That's what I'm ashamed of.

But it's amusing that Moran would think I should be ashamed, yet he somehow couldn't bring himself to say the same of Ann Coulter when she called Muslims "ragheads" in a major convention speech; instead, he just called her "beyond over the top" and tut-tutted her obvious extremism. Though perhaps we should give him some credit for at least recognizing that.

However, he seems unable to bring himself to admit that Malkin and Reynolds -- let alone the Little Green Footballs or Lucianne Goldberg crowds, all of whom reside on his blogroll -- likewise have plenty to be "ashamed of." Indeed, it seems that there's little right-wing behavior he can find that anyone should be ashamed of.

Which is, really, a shame. But hardly surprising.