Orcinus

Photo essay: Why Brisenia Flores matters

2011-02-21T17:27:00.000-08:00

[A portrait of Brisenia Flores at the Community Center near her home, where she played daily.]

-- by Dave

I drove out to Arivaca, Arizona, on Tuesday, the day after a jury convicted Shawna Forde of two counts of first-degree murder in the home-invasion shooting deaths of 9-year-old Brisenia Flores and her father, Raul Junior Flores. I went to take some pictures, look around, and get a feel for the landscape, both physical and cultural.

Mostly, I wanted to see how the murders had rippled through the community, because distant rural places like this are always tight-knit communities where everyone knows everyone else. Everyone I talked to used the same word: "Devastating."

A woman at the community center just down the street knew Brisenia and her mother -- who did volunteer work at the center -- very well. She pointed to a picture of Brisenia hanging on a main beam inside the center, a black flower attached to a corner, and explained, "She came here every day." Brisenia, she said, was bright and sweet and devoted to her parents, as they were to her.

The murders, she told me, took place only two days before the start of the community center's annual summer camp, where Brisenia always enrolled, and where all the kids in the camp knew her too. The center brought in grief counselors to try to help the kids understand what had happened to their classmate and friend. She said she kept trying to explain to them that they were never going to see her again, and they couldn't grasp it. Finally, she said, she had to simply tell them straight out that she was dead. And then everyone cried.

"It was horrible," she said.

Arivaca is a little ranching community where the main activity is at the feed store during work hours and at the mercantile and bar the rest of the day. It mainly exists for services to ranchers in the Arizona desert. And it is only 28 miles, by the road to Sasabe (and slightly shorter as the crow flies) from the Mexico border.

Thus, it used to be quite a popular thoroughfare for border-crossing immigrants, but everyone in town told me that most of that had gone away in the past couple of years, thanks to an intense increase in the presence of the Border Patrol in the area. And it was true: I passed a Border Patrol checkpoint going to and from Arivaca, and encountered probably 20 different BP vehicles in different locales along the 23-mile drive between the town and I-19.

The immigrant traffic also drew people like Shawna Forde -- people who hated immigrants crossing the border from Mexico and were determined to stop it. And so a little girl whose parents, and grandparents, and their whole extended family, had grown up American in Arivaca wound up becoming a victim of the radicalism and hatemongering turned to violence that always, inevitably accompanies the Nativist mindset.

The Flores' home was just down the dirt road from the community center about a mile, part of a rural neighborhood that northeast of the town itself, a bunch of small homes spread out on large tracts.

The place had been mostly cleaned up since the tragedy, but there were little signs outside: plastic roses placed on the door the killers had come through; a child's lamp, and a sign for a garden, and a teeter-totter. All the signs of a normal, simple, sweet life suddenly ripped away by something monstrous from out of nowhere.

When a sweet, innocent life is cut short like this -- especially by an act as monstrous as this one -- it always horrifies us, just as the case of another Arizona 9-year-old slain by a madman, Christina Green, has resonated deeply with the public. And so often in such cases, the monstrousness and the tragedy simply overwhelm us, leaving us to throw up our hands and decide that it's beyond our understanding, that there's no explaining such events.

But there's no such mystery about what killed Brisenia. We know. We can see it clearly. And we need to be talking about it.

The people who broke into her home late at night while she was sleeping with her new puppy on the living-room couch and cold-bloodedly shot her in the face while she pleaded for her life were people who did not see her, or her father or mother, as human beings. They were people who had become so accustomed to dehumanizing Latinos that they didn't care about the devastation they brought to Arivaca and the lives of this family. They were so consumed by hate that they had no humanity left themselves.

The dehumanizing language of scapegoating and eliminationism -- the naming and targeting of other humans for the supposed social ills they incur, followed as always by words urging their excision from society, if not the world -- is endemic on the American Right. And among right-wing extremists, it intensifies, grows and metastasizes into something lethal and monstrous.

You can hear this very language in Shawna Forde's 2007 appearance at a Yakima "town hall" forum on immigration:

Cerna: Shawna, let me ask you about the issue of economics. You've heard constraints from growers, you know, that the apple harvest is very important in this state, particularly in this region. What do you say to the growers?

Forde: We've got a prison system. Let's utilize it.

....

Forde: I'd like to see two things on there. Not just about the people who came here legally, and are here legally, but how about the Americans who have been affected and died because of the illegal invasion in our country? How about our sovereignty?

And securing our borders and protecting our nation is extremely important. And I know the Minutemen and many organizations will not stop -- we will start at the local level and work our way up -- we will not stop until we get the results that we need to have.

This kind of language is not particularly rare -- indeed, it is common on the American Right, particularly the Nativists who are eager to deport all of the nation's undocumented immigrants, and it's endemic to the Minuteman movement in general, where you can find similar eliminationism at every corner, including people like Chris Simcox:

I feel that the people that are coming across, invading this country, I think that they should be treated as enemies of the state. We need to putting them in work camps. Anyone could walk through these borders of this country bringing bombs, chemicals, weapons of mass destruction. I think they should be shot on sight, personally.

And their many followers:

No, we ought to be able to shoot the Mexicans on sight, and that would end the problem. After two or three Mexicans are shot, they'll stop crossing the border and they'll take their cows home, too.

The mainstream media, particularly the folks at Fox News, have refused to recognize that this is what's occurring. Indeed, even at CNN, the only cable network to adequately report on the murder of Brisenia Flores, it's completely ignored and glossed over. As C&L commenter Karen noted:

No one is bothering to expose the actual ideology of this woman or her splinter group, or how they don't care about Mexican life.

.... The reporter calls this a "tragic and strange story." Tragic yes. Strange? Why? It's actually (sadly) banal. This shit goes on all the time. Murders like this happen every day. The only strange part is the involvement of splinter Minutemen, but that angle isn't pushed. It's the only angle that makes this a socially relevant story, and it's glossed over like a tangential fact. Like the real story is the heartless shooting.

As the folks at Presente observed after the verdict:

Though we received a verdict that condemned these atrocious murders, we also recognize that the Brisenia Flores’ case is not the isolated incident that some media reports make it out to be. Rather, it has galvanized the attention of the entire Latino community across the country as it reflects the anti-immigrant, anti-Latino hatred organized by extremist groups. Latinos – the fastest-growing and largest ethnic minority group in the U.S. – understand and experience the phenomenon of hatred that has rapidly expanded in the nation. In fact, Latinos are closely watching media outlets that provide a platform for hatred promoted by extremist groups like MAD and the Federation for American Immigration Reform – a group Forde represented on a PBS show, for instance. Latinos are closely watching those media outlets that irresponsibly allow hateful groups attack to Latinos and immigrants, fanning the flames of fear and violence in our communities.

The details revealed in the murder trial have touched us all in a deep and unique way. These important details reflect the deepening and mainstreaming of the most noxious and dangerous strands of hatred in the United States. They move us to continue efforts to make sure there are no more hate-crimes and to take action in condemning media outlets that help disseminate hatred.

In life, Brisenia Flores was ordinary and happy little girl living in the Arizona desert. In her tragic death, she has become a powerful symbol of our own lost humanity.

The bitter fruits of dehumanization always strike at our hearts. If we choose to turn away, we can easily focus on the pain and not on the meaning. But if little Brisenia's death can transcend that choice -- if we look it in the face and understand how this happened, and why -- then it will not be nearly so meaningless.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Karl Rove blames 'Birthers' on a 'White House strategy' to ensnare unwitting Republicans in 'Birch Society' trap

2011-02-17T22:24:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

We're already accustomed to Bill O'Reilly's standard MO when it comes to polls: If it makes Democrats and/or President Obama look bad, he shouts it to the skies. If it makes Republicans look bad, he simply doesn't believe it and declares the poll methodologically faulty.

And so it was no surprise when, given the recent polling demonstrating that a majority of Republican primary voters are suckers for the Birther conspiracy theories, O'Reilly last night flatly declared the polls wrong:

O'REILLY: And in the "Impact" segment tonight, new poll by a Democratic organization says 51 percent of Republican primary voters believe President Obama was not born in the USA. I do not believe that poll. And here's the reason. The sample is so minuscule, very few people vote in Republican primaries. And to isolate them would be a challenge even for Gallup, much less a political polling center.

So, here is a better poll. According to CBS news, 58 percent of Americans believe the President was born in America, just 20 percent say he was born in another country. The rest don't seem to care. There is no question that some Democrats are trying to marginalize Republican opposition in 2012 by painting them as nuts, thus the birther polling.

Right -- because a a poll surveying all Americans is going to be just like a poll surveying Republican primary voters, eh?

Er, not exactly. Indeed, O'Reilly just unintentionally highlighted the stark differences between your average Tea Partying-Obama-hating-liberal-smacking Republican voter and the average sane, normal, decent American.

And then he brought on Karl Rove, who then declared that this whole Birther conspiracy theory was concocted by the Obama White House as a way to ensnare poor unwitting wingnuts in the "trap" of John Birth Society-esque conspiracy theories.

No, really, that's what he said:

O'REILLY: OK, so, there is no doubt in my mind after watching Gregory on "Meet the Press" on Sunday, grilling Speaker Boehner about the birth certificate and all of that that the liberal and Gregory is a liberal man, right? I'm not being unfair to him, am I?

KARL ROVE: No.

O'REILLY: OK. He may not acknowledge it but he is. So, it's divide -- let's divide the Republican Party.

ROVE: This is a White House strategy. They love this.

O'REILLY: How do you know it's the White House strategy?

ROVE: Look, the President could come out and say, 'Here are the documents.' They are happy to have this controversy continue because every moment the conservatives talk about this they marginalize themselves and diminish themselves in the minds of independent voters. And every moment we spend talking about this controversy is a moment we can't spend talking about the failed stimulus bill, the reckless spending, Obamacare, his failures in foreign policy and his failure to live up to the promises that he made in the 2008 election.

Look, he was born in Hawaii. If he was born in Kenya, then there must have been some massive conspiracy that said this guy being born in Kenya --

O'REILLY: The Factor already did the investigation and we --

(CROSSTALK)

ROVE: You know, birth notices in both Honolulu newspapers.

Got that? Even though the White House has produced a real birth certificate, the kind every person born in Hawaii uses to prove their citizenship, Rove thinks that somehow the "complete" certificate on file somewhere in Hawaii will change the Birthers' minds and convince them Obama was born in the USA. Right.

And that furthermore, the refusal to produce said certificate is actually a plot by the White House to make Republicans look like wacky conspiracy theorists of the John Birch Society mold:

O'REILLY: Ok. Now, there is though and you saw it at CPAC last week in Washington, D.C. -- there is an element of the Republican Party that's far right and that really loves this kind of discourse.

ROVE: The campaign for liberty types who are there for Ron Paul.

O'REILLY: Right. They love Ron Paul. They love Christine O'Donnell. They love that kind of stuff.

ROVE: Let's be clear about it. There is a healthy dose, an unhealthy amount of people in the -- in that movement who are 9/11 deniers. I keep running into them. They protest me. Ron Paul -- big Ron Paul stickers and so forth. They are birthers.

Look, we had people stand up and boo Dick Cheney and --

O'REILLY: They called him a war criminal.

ROVE: And because again, you have a very thin fringe.

O'REILLY: But how big is that?

ROVE: It's not big at all. Remember, Ron Paul who had a lot of very -- you know, sort of mainstream issues regarding, say, the Federal Reserve and hard money.

O'REILLY: Put a percentage of --

ROVE: It's a fraction -- tiny, insignificant.

O'REILLY: So this poll it says 51 percent of -- I know this poll is flawed.

ROVE: This poll is flawed. But I do say this; Republicans had better be clear about this. This we had a problem in the 1950's with the John Birch Society and it took Bill Buckley standing up as a strong conservative and taking them on.

And within our party we have to be very careful about allowing these people who are the birthers and the 9/11 deniers to get too high a profile and say too much without setting the record straight.

O'REILLY: But what percentage of Republican voters -- five percent; 10 percent?

ROVE: I don't know. But whatever it is, it ought to be less because we need the leaders of our party to say look, stop falling into the trap of the White House. Focus on the real issues.

Actually, this isn't the first time we've heard this theory on The O'Reilly Factor. And as we observed back then:

Now, if Goldberg and O'Reilly are so concerned that the public might conclude that mainstream conservatives are prone to far-right conspiracy theories and various other forms of wingnuttery, they might look in the mirror. It's the virtual definition of wingnuttery to even be asking why Obama won't release his birth certificate when he has in fact done so.

There's no Obama conspiracy keeping this garbage alive and tying it around the necks of mainstream conservatives. They're doing a very fine job of that themselves.

And in the case of Karl Rove, you simply can't defend John Boehner's manifest failure of leadership in refusing to denounce the Birthers and then turn around in the same breath and declare that Republican need to separate themselves from their nutty Bircher faction.

Fact is, these guys are caught, as they have been for awhile, in the toxic embrace of their increasingly extremist base, embodied by a Tea Party movement in which Birtherism is a supermajority belief.

What Rove won't admit (and Boehner's abject failure to lead on the issue implicitly concedes) is that Republicans would never win any elections without that same nutty element that has always helped elect them -- but which they want to write off as the product of an evil Obama plot. Like that's going to help them deal with it.

Full transcript here.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Finally! O'Reilly and guests tackle the Shawna Forde case. Of course, they lie and misinform from beginning to end.

2011-02-16T22:22:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

Of all the media entities that have ignored the case of Shawna Forde and her killer Minutemen, the silence at Fox News has been the most egregious and noteworthy -- particularly because Bill O'Reilly is fond of criticizing other news organizations for supposedly "ignoring" stories that he has deemed eminently newsworthy (even if, in fact, they haven't really ignored them at all, or it's in fact a story of dubious veracity).

So naturally we were pleasantly surprised when O'Reilly began tackling the Forde case last night with his panel of legal "experts," Lis Wiehl and Kimberly Guilfoyle -- and, to no one's great surprise, it was nothing but a pack of lies, disinformation and grotesque distortions, from start to finish.

For instance, here's O'Reilly's opening, having just discussed yet another case of an "illegal immigrant" having committed a murder, one of O'Reilly's favorite schticks:

O'REILLY: Now -- exact opposite on the political spectrum, in Arizona. A woman member of the Minutemen breaks into an illegal alien house?

GUILFOYLE: Right.

No, that's wrong: Both Raul Junior Flores and his 9-year-old daughter, Brisenia (as well as Gina Gonzalez, the girl's mother) were American citizens, born and raised in Arivaca.

And from a factually false opening, it goes rapidly downhill: Both Guilfoyle and Wiehl begin trading in even more factually wrong characterizations of Forde and her relationship to the Minuteman movement. Guilfoyle was perhaps the worst:

GUILFOYLE: This woman has some, um, problems otherwise. This wasn't really about immigration -- this was a woman who is a criminal, was working with this group to do drug ripoffs.

O'REILLY: She's a criminal herself.

GUILFOYLE: Yes. The organization she belonged to was Minuteman American Defense, otherwise known as MAD. But I did a lot of research on this case, and essentially she was using this organization to say, 'I'm gonna do rip-offs of drug cartels to fund my group.

O'REILLY: Ohhh, so she joined the group to find out where illegal aliens who might be dealing narcotics.

Wiehl at least points out that Forde didn't join MAD -- she founded it. But that's the least of the issues here: What's more important is that in fact this case had everything to do with immigration, which was the entire fuel motivating Forde's radicalism: She saw herself as a Minuteman "willing to take it to the next level" -- and she was using the drug money to do that.

Indeed, as we reported early on, she intended to metastasize MAD with the money so that it became a kind of super-militia whose larger purpose was to take on the federal government, not just over immigration but a whole panoply of related "Patriot" movement issues.

This wasn't about ordinary criminality: It was about right-wing radicalism. As Tim Steller at the Arizona Daily Star reported back then, she was talking to a lot of people about her plans for the group:

Accused ringleader Shawna Forde told her family in recent months that she had begun recruiting members of the Aryan Nations and that she planned to begin robbing drug-cartel leaders, her brother Merrill Metzger said Monday in a telephone interview from Redding, Calif.

"She was talking about starting a revolution against the United States government," he said.

In any event, at this point things in the O'Reilly Factor discussion became nothing but a farrago of falsehoods:

WIEHL: She was kicked out of two other organizations.

O'REILLY: Oh, she got kicked out of the Minutemen?

WIEHL: Well, that was the point. She was such a nut that she was kicked out of Minutemen. She started her own organization.

O'REILLY: All right, so her scam was, she would enter suspected drug dealers' homes and steal their drugs.

WIEHL: She thought he had $4,000 bucks in drug money, she wanted to go in there and get that money with her two accomplices.

O'REILLY: She killed how many people?

WIEHL: She killed the man, she killed the 9-year-old child --

O'REILLY: She killed a 9-year-old.

WIEHL: Yes. The mother of the 9-year-old was on the phone --

GUILFOYLE: She was present, she wasn't the shooter.

O'REILLY: Now, does she get the death penalty? Has she been sentenced?

GUILFOYLE: She is now eligible for the death penalty. The jury is considering it. Her defense at the time was, 'It wasn't me. It was the girlfriend of one of my codefendants.'

O'REILLY: But it doesn't matter, because she was convicted of the murders.

WIEHL: Right.

O'REILLY: So she's gonna go. All right, so then, uh --

GUILFOYLE: And she should -- and the Minutemen organizations don't want any association with her.

O'REILLY: And we want to emphasize that she was kicked out --

WIEHL: She was not part of the Minutemen.

GUILFOYLE: One of them, she was kicked out within 40 minutes of attending her first meeting!

WIEHL: She lied, she said she was leader, she wasn't any of those things.

O'REILLY: So she covered her own stupid organization as a cover for her own criminal activities.

GUILFOYLE: That's correct.

O'REILLY: Then she got what she deserved.

Both Wiehl and Guilfoyle are simply lying here: Shawna Forde was a significant figure in the Minuteman movement in Washington state for the better part of two years before she headed to Arizona. She appeared onstage in Everett with Minuteman Project cofounder Jim Gilchrist at a big Minuteman rally in 2007, and appeared on a public-TV town hall as a spokesman for both the Minutemen and the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which later -- much later -- repudiated her as their spokesman.

And while it's undeniable that she was bounced from a number of Minutemen gatherings -- not for being a nutcase who was too extreme, but for being a mouthy and unpleasant person -- the movement nonetheless was ripe territory for her self-aggrandizing style. She was kicked out of the Washington state chapter of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps not because they found her too extreme, but because she was caught stealing from the back bedroom of one of the local Minutemen's home.

Just to demonstrate how dishonest they are being here: Where does Guilfoyle get the anecdote that she was kicked out of one group within 40 minutes?

Well, from Steller's superb reportage for the Arizona Daily Star, which included this little nugget about her serial rejections by a number of Minutemen:

In August 2008, Forde showed up uninvited at Camp Vigilance, used by the Minuteman Corps of California and the private group Border Patrol Auxiliary as a base for patrols, said member Carl Braun. She was ejected after 40 minutes.

Last October, she showed up at a camp near Three Points where the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps had a group, Simcox said. There, too, she was ejected not long after arriving, he said.

But let's go back and read the lede to that story:

Shawna Forde was a rogue, many border-security activists say, or an impostor or a criminal.

They say the woman now charged in connection with the home invasion and shooting deaths of an Arivaca marijuana-trafficking suspect and his 9-year-old daughter was not really one of them.

But interviews with so-called Minutemen and their critics, as well as reviews of recently scrubbed Web sites, suggest Forde was well-placed in the border-security movement and represented a persistent radical wing.

"Shawna Forde was very much a known entity in this movement and, to some degree and to different folks, tolerated for quite some time," said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University-San Bernardino.

Here's Shawna bragging to Scott North of the Everett Herald in early 2009 about her border-patrolling activities in the Arivaca area:

Additionally, she claimed herself that she was "not insignificant to this movement":

Of course, Forde is a well-established liar and braggart with the opposite of credibility. But in this case, it was true -- largely because, through thick and thin, she had a loyal and longtime defender in Jim Gilchrist, the cofounder of the Minuteman Project.

Indeed, as North reported over a year ago, Gilchrist was running updates on Shawna's border patrols on his Minuteman Project web site even after the Flores murders -- in a report that tried to blame the murders on illegal immigrants. Moreover, he then corresponded with her by e-mails to query about the story that the authorities were after her:

Gilchrist stood by Forde when her ex-husband was shot, after her reported rape and after her mysterious shooting, when she was wounded in the arm. When The Herald in February revealed Forde's history of childhood felonies and teenage prostitution, Gilchrist said what mattered more was her ability to overcome a troubled past.

"She is no whiner," he wrote at the time. "She is a stoic struggler who has chosen to put country, community and a yearning for a civilized society ahead of avarice and self-glorifying ego."

Gilchrist remained in touch with Forde after she left Everett without giving detectives a chance to question her closely about the attempted murder of her ex-husband.

On the Minuteman Project Web site, Gilchrist continued to post press releases and Forde's dispatches detailing her Arizona border exploits.

One of the last arrived on May 31, just hours after the Arivaca killings.

Forde reported that she and her group had been in "boots on the ground" patrols of the border for eight days and had observed thousands of pounds of dope being smuggled into the country.

"A (sic) American family was murdered 2 days ago including a 9 year old girl," Forde wrote. "Territory issue's (sic) are now spilling over like fire on the US side and leaving Americans so afraid they will not even allow their names to be printed in any press releases."

In a few days Gilchrist began receiving e-mails from a Minuteman in Tucson who had previously let Forde's teenage daughter live at his home. The man asked Gilchrist why a SWAT team had shown up at his door looking for Forde.

"I called her," Gilchrist said. "She was as calm as can be."

Forde told him there was no cause for worry. The man, she said, was a disgruntled former member of her group.

At the same time, though, she was sending out a list of 17 people around the country she wanted contacted if she was arrested or killed. After her arrest, Gilchrist learned he was 10th on her list.

He and Steve Eichler, executive director of the Minuteman Project, almost certainly were among the last people Forde e-mailed before her June 12 arrest. They talked about adding her and her officers to their Web site's list of national Minutemen leaders.

"The border is going to be HOT. Good things to come my brother," Forde wrote Eichler that morning. She was in police handcuffs later that day.

Gilchrist has since scrubbed references to Forde from his Web site. He says she appears to have cloaked her true self behind the Minutemen movement.

"We all have to be aware that there are individuals who have motives other than altruistic ones," he said. "But you don't know until they present themselves."

I wouldn't want either of these legal "experts" as my attorney. Not if they claim to have done heavy "research" into a story and then the best they can come up with is a pack of falsehoods.

But that's about the best we can ever expect to get on The O'Reilly Factor.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Shawna Forde case briefly gets a touch of the 'liberal' media's attention. Plus: Shawna speaks

2011-02-15T22:20:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

We've been remarking for awhile how strange it is that the case of Shawna Forde has received so little media attention, especially because of its naturally sensational elements and the fact that it has real political and social significance. Indeed, one of the most common reactions we've observed among readers to whom we've presented the case has been: "Why haven't I heard about this?"

Even with yesterday's conviction on two counts of first-degree murder for the killings of 9-year-old Brisenia Flores and her father, it hasn't gotten a great deal better: the story, for instance, ran as only a "brief" in the New York Times, and didn't appear at all in the Washington Post, even though both had written briefly about it previously.

Well, at least CNN -- the only cable-TV network to have bothered to pick up the story previously -- did a full-length segment on the story, which ran on Anderson Cooper's show.

It pretty well covered the bases, although it repeatedly emphasized that Forde had been "kicked out" of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps for being "emotionally unstable" and that she was supposedly not associated with any of them -- even though in fact Forde maintained a close association with Minuteman Project cofounder Jim Gilchrist right up to the moment of her arrest, and was very much part of the larger Minutemen movement.

Easily the best coverage of the case came from the local reporters at the Arizona Daily Star and from the Daily Beast's Terri Greene Sterling, who yesterday pulled off a coup by getting Forde to talk to her for a post-conviction interview.

As we observed yesterday, one of the more remarkable aspects of the announcement of the jury's verdict was how utterly unfazed by it Forde seemed to be. Sterling zeroed in on this:

Forde, dressed in a navy-and-cream blazer and navy pants, remained calm as she listened to the verdict, even though the murder charges could lead to a death sentence in a state that does not shy from executions. The 43-year-old former child burglar, mom, beautician, and self-professed Minuteman from Everett, Washington, kept her composure, because, she told The Daily Beast in an exclusive post-verdict jailhouse interview, “you can’t freak out with the whole world watching you.”

Speaking by videophone in the Pima County Adult Detention Center, the woman prosecutors dubbed a braggart and a killer—who reportedly boasted she would “kick down doors and change America” with her border vigilante activities—maintained her innocence.

Wearing glasses, no makeup, and black-and-white striped jailhouse pajamas, Forde told me she was “extremely saddened” by the verdict. The jury of 11 women and one man also found Forde guilty of attempted murder, two counts of assault, two counts of robbery and one count of burglary. The jury gave a clear victory to prosecutors, who accused Forde of cooking up a plan to steal drugs and money from Raul Flores by gaining entry to his Arivaca, Arizona, mobile home with accomplices on the pretense of being law-enforcement officers in search of fugitives.

The verdict was “surreal” to Forde, but she said she took it like a “pro.” As the leader of Minutemen American Defense, or MAD, which she described as a large organization of patriots, she said she’d learned to “take things step by step, revamp, assess, and move forward.”

Forde also claimed that she sympathized with Brisenia's mother, Gina Gonzalez, who was shot in the home invasion but survived, and later identified Forde as the leader of the gang. But then, she had a very bizarre way of expressing it:

“I know in her mind,” Forde said of Gonzalez, “I am guilty and she hates me. I know her tragedy is extremely sad.” But on the other hand, she said “people shouldn’t deal drugs if they have kids.” (No drugs were found in the trailer.)

Forde told me she’d “lost a daughter” and she knows from experience Gonzalez will feel pain “the rest of her life” and her “tragedy is extremely sad.” “I wish I could say I was sorry it happened,” Forde said. “I am not sorry on my behalf because I didn’t do it.”

Forde, of course, is a prodigious liar. Fortunately, the jury figured that out.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Master interrupter O'Reilly whines that David Gregory was 'disrespectful' of John Boehner in MTP interview

2011-02-15T22:18:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

Bill O'Reilly was in his usual High Umbrage mode last night over the way Meet the Press' David Gregory grilled House Speaker John Boehner over his manifest failure to provide some real leadership among Republicans by knocking down the continuing belief by so many conservatives that President Obama is Muslim -- embodied in that Frank Luntz/Sean Hannity "focus group" from Iowa that was dominated by fools who continue to believe that the president is not a Christian.

Of course, O'Reilly didn't bother to mention that the original media miscreancy that gave rise to the Boehner grilling occurred on Fox -- but this was just another classic case of O'Reilly defending his Fox colleagues for their smear-laden propaganda and claiming that it was perfectly legitimate.

But the real howler in all this was the segment's overarching narrative -- namely, as O'Reilly put it, that Gregory somehow conducted a "disrespectful" interview.

This is pretty funny, really, coming from a guy who just conducted an interview with the President of the United States that was remarkable for the utter lack of respect he exhibited -- not just in the nasty tone of his questions (such as how Obama felt about all those people who "hate" him), but even more particularly in the way he relentlessly interrupted the president, refused to let him finish a sentence, and .

Indeed, some folks even put together a video detailing all the interruptions:

Apparently, O'Reilly would have been fine if it were Obama getting the grilling from Gregory. But when it's a Republican, and the source of the matter is Fox Propaganda -- well hey, that's a whole nother story, Fox respects Republicans by tossing them softballs and giving them Hannity Jobs -- and it respects Democrats by treating them like crap.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Shawna Forde: Guilty of all eight counts in the Flores family murders

2011-02-14T22:13:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

The jury in Shawna Forde's trial for the murders of 9-year-old Brisenia Flores and her father, Raul, spent nine hours deliberating the case before delivering its verdict today in Pima County Superior Court, and it was clear there was little doubt in their minds: Forde was found guilty of all eight counts in the case, including two counts of first-degree murder, one count of attempted murder for the shooting of Brisenia's mother, and an assortment of burglary, robbery and aggravated assault charges.

I was there to observe. The jury's verdict came in relatively short time this morning in Tucson, and it was an efficient affair: Forde, wearing a light plaid suit jacket and pants, entered with her attorneys, looking confident and smiling. The jury then filed in, and delivered their verdicts to the judge. The court clerk then read them aloud, along with the jury's findings: guilty, guilty, guilty, with no doubts at all about any of the qualifying issues.

Strangely, Forde was almost perfectly emotionless: She looked straight ahead, chatted with her attorneys, and even smiled occasionally. Indeed, she continued to exude the bravado that has been her style from the outset -- even as she was led back out of the courtroom to her awaiting prison cell.

There were plenty of emotions flowing, though -- much of it directly in front of me. As the verdicts were announced, Brisenia's mother, Gina Gonzalez -- who not only survived the shootings, but delivered damning testimony in the trial -- began weeping softly, as did her sister and mother, who accompanied her.

Now the trial heads to the penalty phase, with a hearing tomorrow to discuss mitigating factors in the sentencing, which will be followed by deliberations to determine whether or not she ends up on Arizona's death row. (Arizona currently has only one other woman facing the death penalty -- Wendi Andriano, convicted in 2004 of murdering her husband. (Arizona's preferred method of execution is by lethal injection.)

As Presente observed in its press release praising the verdict:

Though we received a verdict that condemned these atrocious murders, we also recognize that the Brisenia Flores’ case is not the isolated incident that some media reports make it out to be. Rather, it has galvanized the attention of the entire Latino community across the country as it reflects the anti-immigrant, anti-Latino hatred organized by extremist groups. Latinos – the fastest-growing and largest ethnic minority group in the U.S. – understand and experience the phenomenon of hatred that has rapidly expanded in the nation. In fact, Latinos are closely watching media outlets that provide a platform for hatred promoted by extremist groups like MAD and the Federation for American Immigration Reform – a group Forde represented on a PBS show, for instance. Latinos are closely watching those media outlets that irresponsibly allow hateful groups attack to Latinos and immigrants, fanning the flames of fear and violence in our communities.

The details revealed in the murder trial have touched us all in a deep and unique way. These important details reflect the deepening and mainstreaming of the most noxious and dangerous strands of hatred in the United States. They move us to continue efforts to make sure there are no more hate-crimes and to take action in condemning media outlets that help disseminate hatred.

Kim Smith at the Arizona Daily Star has the complete wrapup.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Glenn Beck calls on the latter-day General Ripper to bolster his IslamoMarxistFascistSocialist conspiracy theory about Egypt

2011-02-13T22:11:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

Glenn Beck, we can all see, is really plunging wildly over an emotional cliff in his increasingly bizarre attempts to defend his wild conspiracy theories about the unrest in Egypt. And it's been such an epic meltdown that it's been hard to keep track of all its many variations.

But the researchers at Media Matters happened to catch one of the more hilarious of these: Beck bringing on a onetime commanding general in Iraq -- Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin -- to defend his theory as being on the money. That's right: the guy who brought you Abu Ghraib, on to warn of yet another dire threat.

Of course, the last we happened to notice Boykin poking his head out of his lead-lined nuclear bunker was when he was explaining how Marxism is being insidiously implemented in America under President Obama -- rather like another general we once knew:

As we observed at the time, this was what Boykin saw as America's biggest problem:

I'm a Special Forces officer, I'm a Green Beret and I've studied Marxist insurgency, it was part of my training. And the things I know have been done in every Marxist insurgency are being done in America today.

Among the signs that we are now on the verge of a complete Marxist takeover?

-- The bailouts, which Boykin says "nationalized" large chunks of the economy.

-- Gun control, which Boykin claims that Obama is pursuing by agreeing to a United Nations small-arms treaty.

-- The hate crimes law, which Boykin claims is about being able to silence pastors and other critics.

And then, of course, the coup d'grace:

The final thing has been to establish a constabulary force, a force that can control the population. You say "well, we don't have that." Well, let me remind you that prior to the election, the President stood up and said that if elected he would have a nation civilian security force that would be as large as and as well-equipped as the United States military.

For what?

Remember Hitler had the Brownshirts and in the Night of the Long Knives, even Hitler got scared of the Brownshirts and killed thousands of them.

So you say "are there any signs that that's happened" and the truth is yes. If you read the health care legislation which, by the way nobody in Washington has read, but if you read the health care legislation it's actually in the health care legislation.

There are paragraphs in the health care legislation that talk about the commissioning of officers in time of a national crisis to work directly for the President. It's laying the groundwork for a constabulary force that will control the population in America.

Of course, one couldn't listen to this rant without being instantly reminded of General Jack D. Ripper. I obtained some documentary footage of Gen. Ripper and mashed it up with the Boykin video so you could do a comparison/contrast.

As Kyle notes:

Let me also just point out that Senate Republicans actually had Boykin on their witness list to testify against Elena Kagan at her confirmation hearing until they dropped him at the last moment.

Gee, I can't imagine why.

Let me also point out that Boykin is not only one of the brilliant geniuses behind Abu Ghraib, he also played a major role in the horrendous disaster at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993.

What is not known about Waco is that the final assault plan was amended on the ground by the tactical field commanders on the very day of the assault. That alteration had been discussed and rejected by the FBI brass over several weeks. Nonetheless, the FBI HRT commander, Richard Rogers implemented the rejected plan via a loophole signed by Janet Reno the morning of the final assault on April 19. That alteration was identical to the gassing and demolition plan that two Delta Force advisors seconded to the Justice Dept. in a principals meeting of April 14. Those two advisors supported the rejected plan that was later implemented "hypothetically" in order to conform to the letter of Posse Comitatus law. I also have published a peer-reviewed article with this finding. It is based on government documents--all open source. The rejected plan supported by Jeff Jamar, Richard Rogers, and the two Delta Force officers resulted in a disaster that did not have to happen. It was an ill-advised tactical approach to a religious community that feared that Satan was attacking them.

Those two Delta Force officers were Peter J. Schoomaker and "Jerry" Boykin, now both top officials in the US Army in charge of military planning for the war on terrorism.

Hey Glenn -- we're convinced!

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

The Shawna Forde trial: As case goes to jury, cable TV networks continue to ignore the story

2011-02-13T22:08:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

[Video via KOLD-TV.]

One of the prevailing questions about the case of Shawna Forde, even as her trial was getting under way, was whether the mainstream media would bother to notice.

A Washington Post piece actually tried to tackle this very question, but only dropped a little toe into the lava pit:

But unlike the Krentz case, the trial has been a largely local story.

"There's a few places writing about this, but it is not getting the attention it deserves," said Eric Rodriguez, vice president of the National Council of La Raza. "It should be shocking to more people. Is there any circumstance where what took place is acceptable to people?"

Krentz's shooting, which for a time was a staple of news coverage and has been brought up in homeland security hearings on Capitol Hill, struck a nerve in part because of the government's failure to deal with illegal immigration. Arizona, which the Pew Hispanic Center reported this month is home to 400,000 undocumented immigrants, has passed tough legislation in recent months to crack down on those who are in the country illegally.

The trial is now in the hands of the jury, and I haven't yet seen a single cable-network report on the story -- particularly not on Fox News Channel, which has had complete silence on the case. I'm flying down to Tucson tomorrow and will be reporting from the scene when the verdict is delivered. (The project is being funded by the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute.)

Meanwhile, the local media have done an excellent job of covering the trial, particularly the reporters at the Arizona Daily Star, led by Kim Smith, who wrap up the closing arguments made Thursday:

Shawna Forde thought so highly of herself she believed she could create a new world, decide who was a drug dealer and who wasn't and who should live and die, prosecutor Rick Unklesbay told jurors Thursday.

The truth, however, he said, is, "What Shawna Forde is is a common thief and a murderer."

Unklesbay spent approximately 90 minutes Thursday going over the evidence he says proves Forde, 43, was the mastermind behind a May 30, 2009, Arivaca home invasion that left Raul Junior Flores, 29, and his 9-year-old-daughter, Brisenia, dead of multiple gunshot wounds.

Two other suspects in the case, Jason Bush and Albert Gaxiola, are scheduled to go to trial this spring.

The prosecutor reminded jurors that at least four witnesses testified Forde bragged about her plan to fund her Minutemen American Defense organization by robbing drug-cartel associates during home invasions.

Among those witnesses were her sister, two FBI informants and Oin Oakstar, an Arivaca drug smuggler.

Flores and Brisenia died because of Forde's greed, Unklesbay said.

Forde may not have pulled the trigger, "But make no mistake about it, she's the one who planned the event, recruited the people to do it and she went in there with them," Unklesbay said.

The Daily Star team has also been filing a lot of the details in the trial at their courthouse blog. Definitely worth checking out.

Meanwhile, the folks at Presente have created a website and poster demanding justice for Brisenia Flores:

Go here to sign a petition demanding justice for Brisenia.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Embracing their inner extremist at CPAC: Ron Paul wins the straw poll again

2011-02-13T22:05:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

Well, it won't make The Donald very happy, but here we go again:

For the second year in a row, Ron Paul won the presidential straw poll at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, earning 30 percent of the vote.

The Texas congressman, known for his libertarian views, ran for president in 2008 but was never a serious contender for the GOP nomination.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a 2008 GOP candidate who is expected to run again, came in second place with 23 percent of the vote. Romney won the previous three presidential straw polls before Paul snapped his streak last year.

Many convention-goers booed when the results were announced but the Paul supporters drowned them out with chants of "Ron Paul! Ron Paul! Ron Paul!"

Paul's consecutive victories in the straw poll have frustrated many GOP faithful who would rather see a more credible contender win. A CPAC official told Fox News that the big story is not Paul winning again but rather the strength of Romney's second-place finish.

I think we can just pretty much repeat what Logan said last year at this time:

Now, I don't disagree with everything Ron Paul has to say, but I would never vote for him and boy, did he ever get destroyed by the GOP base during the 2008 Presidential campaign. Talk about the proverbial ship without a rudder. This wasn't some online poll that got freeped, this was taken in person at the GOP's biggest annual event.

It's always helpful when a guy who really is a right-wing extremist gets the support of the GOP's most ardent activists. Tells us a lot about the direction they want to go, at the very least.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Another non-violent Tea Partier gets eight years in prison for assaulting Obama supporter with pool cue

2011-02-11T22:03:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

Because, of course, Tea Partiers are just innately civil, nonviolent people who only want to reduce government spending:

Tea party member gets 8 years for attacking Obama supporter

A Gwinnett judge sentenced a tea party member to serve eight years in prison for attacking and hospitalizing a President Barack Obama supporter during a 2009 bar room altercation, a prosecutor said Thursday.

Jurors convicted Carnesville resident Larry Morgan, 39, of aggravated assault and two counts of aggravated battery this week for smashing several bones in the victim’s face with a pool cue on Jan. 31, 2009 — a few days after Obama’s inauguration. Deliberations took only an hour.

The single blow, which broke the pool stick in half, happened about 1:30 a.m. at Will Henry’s Tavern in Stone Mountain, said Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Taylor, who prosecuted.

The victim, Patrick O’Neill, then 24, was hospitalized for five days and endured a months-long recovery. He testified that he suffered numerous facial fractures, including a broken nose and orbital ethmoid bone, Taylor said.

“The pictures of his injuries were some of the most egregious pictures I have seen,” Taylor said. “(He) is very lucky to be alive.”

According to testimony, trouble began when Morgan was talking to other bar patrons about his negative feelings about Obama, when one of O’Neill’s friends said he had voted for the president.

Morgan replied, “Well, you are stupid as hell,” before making some racist comments or jokes, witnesses testified, Taylor said. All people involved were white, she said.

Later, O’Neill and his friend were laughing about or poking fun at Morgan’s comments when he became angry, fetched a pool cue and broke it across O’Neill’s face. The impact was so forceful that the victim had no memory of being struck or the circumstances leading up to it, Taylor said.

Morgan, who testified he considers himself a tea party member, told the court he was acting in self-defense. He claimed O’Neill and his friend had threatened “to beat him up in the parking lot,” Taylor said, recalling testimony.

There, you see! It's just another liberal plot to make Tea Partiers look like violent thugs.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Like Howard Beale on hydrocodone: Glenn Beck approaches final meltdown in extended angry rant

2011-02-11T22:01:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

There really isn't much to say about Glenn Beck's opening rant for his Fox News show yesterday. It really pretty much speaks for itself.

Which is to say: Better ready that nice rubber room for the pudgy guy.

It does feature what will no doubt become a classic line:

BECK: You want to call me crazy? Go to hell. Call me crazy all you want!"

See, this is like all those times Beck has pretended that he was asked his viewers, "What if I'm right?" He never seems to reckon much on the consequences of his being wrong.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

If multiculturalism is dead, what do its critics propose to replace it with?

2011-02-09T21:59:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

[media id="19612" embed="true" image="true" download="true"]

Britain's new Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, joined in what is becoming an increasing right-wing chorus in Europe proclaiming the failure of multiculturalism, coming shortly on the heels of German chancellor Angela Merkel's similar proclamation in October.

This, of course, pleases the cultural warriors at Fox News, especially John Bolton, who was on Greta Van Susteren's show last night proclaiming how right Cameron is.

For the sake of argument, let us concede at least that multiculturalism has developed some important flaws over the years, some of which the conservatives have identified. What none of these critics have explained, however, is what system of racial ethics they would champion in lieu of multiculturalism.

If multiculturalism is dead, what do they propose we replace it with?

Remember: As I've explained many times, multiculturalism -- a concept first proposed by the father of modern anthropology, Franz Boas -- was specifically a direct reaction against white supremacism, and eventually overthrew it as the dominant American worldview. Most American critics are coy about what they would replace it with -- though of course, there are some Nativists who are not: they want to resurrect the white-supremacist ethos that was dominant in America for much of the first half of the 20th century and before.

Nonetheless, it was a concept tailored for America -- in part because of the national "melting pot" that has been our history, and in part because Boas saw it as a specifically democratic ethos. This may go a long way in explaining why the Europeans are continuing to struggle with it.

Consider, for instance, Cameron's chief rationale invoking what he calls "state multiculturalism":

"State multiculturalism is a wrong-headed doctrine that has had disastrous results. It has fostered difference between communities," the Conservative leader said in a speech.

"And it has stopped us from strengthening our collective identity. Indeed, it has deliberately weakened it."

Cameron defined "state multiculturalism" as "the idea that we should respect different cultures within Britain to the point of allowing them – indeed encouraging them – to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream."

But that's the root of the problem, isn't it? Arriving immigrants in Europe are never treated -- either legally or culturally -- as real citizens, full participants in the society and culture. You can claim French citizenship, but if you're Muslim, no one in France treats you as a Frenchman.

Europeans have been distinctly slow -- indeed, expressly reluctant -- to assimilate their arriving immigrants, and this has ultimately driven the arriving cultures into insular enclaves, for their own self-protection and sustenance.

It's not so much that multiculturalism has failed in Europe as that Europeans have distinctly failed at being multicultural -- in many regards because of their own deeply embedded racial and cultural attitudes about arriving immigrants and their own native ethnic identities. And now, they're blaming that failure on the arriving immigrants instead of taking a good hard look in the mirror.

Sort of like the people like John Bolton, who made similar remarks about American immigrants. He also made a claim typical of revisionist right-wing jingoes:

BOLTON: I think it's absolutely fundamental in a country like ours, where we have always welcomed immigrants, we have insisted that they all go into the melting pot.

That's simply historically false -- at least, prior to the arrival of multiculturalism after 1950. Look, for instance, at how we treated Asians for years: We denied them citizenship and the right to naturalize as citizens until after World War II, forcing thousands of Asian immigrants to exist here in a kind of political limbo that only their children were able to climb out of, thanks to birthright citizenship (and yes, the Nativists of that era worked to deny those Asian-American immigrants that right, too, back then).

Moreover, it was a commonly held belief that Asians could never become "real Americans" -- "oil and water never mix" was the oft-heard explanation for this belief -- because they were deemed too "alien" to ever become full-blooded Americans and full participants in our society. Indeed, the term "illegal alien" was devised to describe Asian immigrants after the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act -- an expressly racist piece of legislation dubbed the "Asian Exclusion Act" (it forbade all further immigration from Asia) and the foundation upon which our modern immigration laws rest even today.

These views were based on the prevailing racial ethos of those times. It has been only since the rise of multiculturalism after 1950 as the gradually prevailing ethos that America began not only recognizing but welcoming immigrants of all races and ethnic backgrounds -- and actually assimilating them. Before multiculturalism, all immigrants faced real difficulties, and nonwhite immigrants in particular were kept out of the "melting pot" almost entirely.

So this again begs the question: If David Cameron thinks multiculturalism is a failure, what does he propose to replace it with? Does he favor the right-wing approach that ultimately favors white supremacy? Or does he have some hithero-unknown system of racial ethics in mind?

The rest of the world would like to know.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Birthright-citizenship bill stalls: Arizonans may be hesitating to invite another firestorm

2011-02-09T21:57:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

You know that plan by Arizona Senate President Russell Pearce -- the architect of SB1070 -- to push through legislation that would deny the children of undocumented immigrants their traditional American citizenship by birthright?

Seems it ran into a bit of an obstacle this week:

A bid to deny citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants faltered Monday when proponents could not get the votes of a Senate panel.

After more than three hours of testimony at the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Ron Gould, R-Lake Havasu City, yanked the two measures. Gould said he lacked the backing of four other members of the Republican-controlled panel, which he chairs.

Gould said he will keep trying to secure votes. And Senate President Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, said, if necessary, he will reassign the proposal to a more friendly committee.

There was a lot of testimony about the bill, including an invited "expert" who urged the senators to pass the bill just so the state can immediately embark upon an expensive legal defense that they hope will go all the way to the Supreme Court -- where he predicts there will finally be "clarity" on the 14th Amendment's guarantee of citizenship to every person born on American soil.

But other than that, the committee heard nothing but criticism, including testimony from children begging them not to take their citizenship away, to a Democratic senator who wanted to know how people would prove their citizenship: Would they have to carry copies of their parents' birth certificates too?

However, I will just about guarantee that the testimony that convinced this committee full of Republicans to think twice before committing the state's taxpayers to this misadventure came from the business community:

The proposals also drew opposition from the business community.

Kevin Sandler, president of Exhibit One, said he worried about the message adopting such a law would send.

Sandler said his firm, which provides audiovisual equipment to courts across the nation, had to lay off six employees after some out-of-state firms boycotted Arizona businesses after lawmakers adopted SB 1070 last year. That measure gives police more power to detain illegal immigrants.

"We've created a toxic environment," he told lawmakers. "Businesses don't want to move here."

He said companies looking to relocate pay attention to the political climate in a state.

"What we've really done is create a not-open-for-business environment here."

And Glenn Hamer, president of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry, told legislators they should leave the question of citizenship where it belongs: in Congress.

Arizona's economy is completely in the toilet, far more so than in most other states. And while it may not be the chief culprit, the reality is that the furor over the immigrant-bashing SB1070 dearly cost the state -- not just with the boycott, which had a major impact, but with the dramatic loss of tourism dollars thanks to Republicans' incessant and hysterical fearmongering in defense of the bill.

And remember that Pearce already snookered his Republican colleagues by promising not to promote this bill in order to win his Senate presidency, and then promptly reneging on it. They demanded the promise because they know that their most important job should be resuscitating the state's economy, not trying to strip Latino children of their citizenship and embroiling the state in another disastrous controversy.

Oh well. Arizonans are getting what they deserve for electing these fools and cretins.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Stuart Varney is a lying scumbag. Just sayin'.

2011-02-08T21:55:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

Megyn Kelly invited the resident expert in all things British at Fox, Stuart Varney, on to discuss that sensational story from the Telegraph claiming that the Obama administration was selling British nuclear secrets to the Russians.

Of course, Varney believes every word of the story, even though it has in fact been pretty readily debunked. And lots more, too:

VARNEY: There's an increasing feeling in Britain that the American administration doesn't like the British, for whatever reason.

KELLY: What's the evidence of that?

VARNEY: Well, there's two symbolic items, and two more serious items. To first, the symbolism: The first act of President Obama when he walks in the White House -- send back a bust of Winston Churchill, the great statesman between America and Britain. Second --

KELLY: Why did he do that?

VARNEY: Because his father -- President Obama's father -- disliked the colonial administration in his native Kenya.

Varney then described the other supposed anti-British offenses: the White House's clumsy gift gaffe of presenting the Queen with an iPod; the administration's ardent prosecution of British Petroleum over the catastrophic Gulf oil spill; and now, the supposed nuclear-secrets release.

Kelly ran through these and actually demonstrated that they're all either nonsense -- such as the supposed "secrets" release, which has been debunked by the State Department (it seems we've been providing Russia with this information since 1991, and everyone has known about it) -- or otherwise perfectly explicable. But she was at a loss on the Churchill-bust charge, which Varney again asserted has convinced Britons that President Obama "dislikes" them:

KELLY: But the thing about the bust -- has the White House ever come out publicly to explain why they sent that bust back?

VARNEY: It was apparently because President Obama's father, who was a native Kenyan --

KELLY: Have they admitted that?

VARNEY: I believe that is out there. I've not read the formal statement. But an explanation was requested. And the explanation was that Obama's father, being a native Kenyan, disliked the British colonial rule in Kenya, which ended in 1963.

Now, the folks at Media Matters are more polite than I am. They called this a "fact-free Obama smear and a "betrayal of reality." Actually, this is just a flat-out baldfaced lie.

Because in reality, back when the explanation was requested, a very clear one was given by both the White House and the British embassy: The bust had been a loan to the White House that expired with President Bush's tenure and was simply due to be returned.

A British Embassy spokesman said: "The bust of Sir Winston Churchill by Sir Jacob Epstein was uniquely lent to a foreign head of state, President George W Bush, from the Government Art Collection in the wake of 9/11 as a signal of the strong transatlantic relationship.

"It was lent for the first term of office of President Bush. When the President was elected for his second and final term, the loan was extended until January 2009."

Varney is right in at least one respect, though: This theory linking the return of the bust to Obama's father and his Kenyan background has been "out there" alright -- floating around the GlennBeckosphere since at least last summer, when Beck adopted Dinesh D'Souza's cockamamie theory that Obama is secretly an anticolonialist, just like his father from whom he was utterly estranged and for whom he had no known affinity.

As Matt Gertz observes at MM, in a sane and rational world in which journalistic standards actually meant something, Varney would be fired for this kind of naked race-baiting:

That is an extraordinary and -- if true -- damning allegation. Such allegations, when made on an avowed "straight news" program, demand evidence. But Varney offered no evidence whatsoever. Instead, Varney portrayed his claim as conventional wisdom that is "out there."

One of two things is true: Either Fox News is sitting on a story that would be massively damaging to the Obama administration, or they are employing a hack who pushes libelous, evidence-free speculation during its news reports.

It's pretty obvious that Door No. 2 is the only one that's going to open. But at Fox News, it will almost certainly make no difference.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

The Reagan Mythology: It has little to do with the man

2011-02-07T21:53:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

[H/t commenter Mugsy]

It was pretty hard this weekend to find anything but warm, gushing encomiums to Ronald Reagan on his 100th birthday anywhere on the teevee -- particularly at Fox, where the fawning coverage doubled as an opportunity to bash President Obama. The one exception was this brief report from ABC News' Jake Tapper.

While far from complete, it at least covers some of the more significant differences between the real president that Ronald Reagan was and the fake myths about him that have become enmeshed in right-wing conventional wisdom since -- and thus embedded as truth for mainstream media.

But really, this only points to the larger truth about this whole weekend's worth of praise for Reagan, which included a special halftime program at the Super Bowl, fergawdsake. As Charles Pierce adroitly observes:

By way of historical comparison, the centennial of Franklin D. Roosevelt's birth took place in 1982. The halftime entertainment at that year's Super Bowl -- the telecast not yet having been blown up to 96.5 hours -- consisted of Up With People singing a medley of Motown hits. Somewhere between those two events is something that says a great deal about this nation, not much of it encouraging. Maybe the NFLPA should change its acronym to PATCO and eliminate all confusion.

Much as Reagan himself was during his presidency, his image is now functionally just a stand-in for conservative-movement ideology. Whatever conservatives need him to be now, that's what the Reagan Myth stands for -- even though, as Jon Perr points out, today's Tea Partiers would call Reagan a RINO.

And that's why, as Will Bunch explores at length in his great book, Tear Down This Myth, there has evolved in fact a cottage industry around the mythologization of Ronald Reagan -- naming airports and boulevards and buildings after him, constantly burnishing his achievements, constantly celebrating various Reagan anniversaries, including slightly odd ones like his 100th birthday. This industry exists not to much to celebrate Reagan the actual president, but to embed conservative mythology in the nation's political landscape -- even after its disastrous consequences are made manifest:

There has always been a place for mythology in American democracy – the hulking granite edifices of the Capitol Mall in Washington are a powerful testament to that – but this nation has arguably never seen the kind of bold, crudely calculated and ideologically driven legend-manufacturing as has taken place with Ronald Reagan. It is a myth machine that has been spectacularly successful, launched in the mid-1990s when the conservative brand was at low ebb.The docudrama version of the Gipper’s life story, successfully sold to the American public, helped to keep united and refuel a right-wing movement that consolidated power while citing Reaganism – as separate and apart from the flesh-and-blood Reagan – for misguided policies from lowering taxes in the time of war in Iraq to maintaining that unpopular conflict in a time of increasing bloodshed and questionable gains.

As Bunch recently observed, in recalling the way the so-called liberal media attended to Reagan's funeral on bended knee:

The death of Reagan some six-and-a-half years ago, and the remarkable tenor – not to mention the depth -- of the news coverage, especially on cable TV news channels, marked something of a turning point. It showed the extent to which a vast content-hungry media world – much more extensive than when Reagan was president in the 1980s, when their main concern was the half-hour evening network newscast -- was eager to swallow the manufactured myths about Ronald Reagan, and thus honor what the unnamed TV executive told Hoagland, that “today history is what we say it is.” Any chance for an honest portrayal of Reagan and his presidency – the dangerous overreach of the Iran-contra scandal, the growing embrace of deficit spending (both in Washington and for credit-card-laden consumers), or even the positive idea that his greatest contribution to history was a heartfelt desire to rid the world of nuclear weapons (an idea out of step with modern conservative thinking) – has been tossed down the memory hole for the last decade.

What the American people have been news-fed instead has been an ideology loosely based on Reagan, called Reaganism – a notion that has led to the Tea Party’s hatred of anything involving government and the bogus ideas that taxes can only be cut or that diplomacy with America’s rivals is for wimps. With each passing election, more and more of the electorate is too young to have remembered or experienced the real Ronald Reagan, yet are searching for an idealized president based on these right-wing perpetrated fallacies. Many of the worst aspects of the George W. Bush presidency – more tax cuts for the rich, soaring deficits, and “axis of evil” bluster – were rooted in this legend of a man who wasn’t there.

My own recollection of Reagan was that he destroyed the Republican Party for moderate Republicans such as I was at the time, especially by empowering the Religious Right. It drove people like me out of the GOP, and we've never looked back.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Bill O'Reilly wants to assure us that Fox News isn't 'out to get' President Obama. Uh-huh.

2011-02-07T21:50:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

Bill O'Reilly phoned in to Fox News' Happening Now program this morning to talk over his interview with President Obama with Martha MacCallum retrospectively.

O'Reilly's real impressions sound like classic cases of projection: He thinks, among other things, that the president is "thin-skinned" and probably "self-centered." Indeed. Our impression of O'Reilly exactly.

And then he tried to pull a fast one:

MACCALLUM: I also want to get your thoughts -- at the very beginning of the interview, I appreciated that you took a moment to thank him, and to thank the administration, for some help that they gave us at Fox News in helping two of our colleagues, Greg Palkot and Olaf Wiig, and the whole thing kind of reminded me too of that moment, way back, when they talked about the fact that Fox News wasn't a news organization. And clearly we were treated in a very respectful way in this whole thing. I just wanted to get your thoughts on all that.

O'REILLY: Well, look, you have to understand that interview that we did yesterday was the most widely viewed interview of all time, because of the Internet -- you know, the moment it was done it was all over the world, everybody was looking at it. And I wanted people who don't know Fox News, and all they hear about is the liberal media defining us, to know that we don't have any personal animus against the president of the United States -- and he did, and Robert Gibbs and the State Department did really, really good work in helping Palkot and Wiig. That's the truth. So why not say that?

And why not say that to him? And I wanted him to get the message that, look, we're not out to hurt you. We the network. There might be guys like Hannity and Beck who really feel that you're not a good president and your policies are destructive. But we have other people on the staff who feel the opposite.

So, yes, Fox News is skeptical of President Obama, more so than the liberal networks, of course. We're not personally invested in hurting him and I think that that statement up top was true. It needed to be said. It was in the context of the event, and I'm glad I said it.

Of course they don't hate President Obama at Fox News. They just call publicly wish for him to fail and announce their intention to make him fail. They just call him a racist, a socialist, a fascist, a radical Marxist revolutionary, and an America-hater.

But hey, it's nothing personal. Really.

And those "staff" members who "feel the opposite"? OK, my guess is that they're all members of the janitorial staff. Because you'll sure as hell never see them on the air at Fox News.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Fox talkers use Reagan's birthday as an opportunity to bash Obama

2011-02-07T21:49:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

As you might imagine, Fox News was practically a nonstop Ronald Reagan 100th birthday commemorative channel over the weekend, with practically wall-to-wall coverage of events and speeches at the Reagan Library. And at times it was so maudlin that it was embarrassing.

Pretty typical of this was a segment yesterday featuring Greg Jarrett and Casey Stegall discussing the day's events, as Stegall gushed over what a moving tribute it all was, and Jarrett eagerly agreed.

And of course, this also meant that Fox couldn't miss the chance to bash President Obama by comparison. So immediately afterward, Heather Childers -- a new weekend co-anchor at Fox -- came on with a George W. Bush lackey named Christian Whiton, speculating about how Reagan might have handled the crisis in Egypt.

Interestingly, Whiton insisted that Reagan would have been on the side of the pro-democracy marchers because "he just believed in freedom that much."

Then he and Childers proceeded to slag Obama:

CHILDERS: You just mentioned 'tear down this wall' -- four words, changed the worlds, helping end Communism, and of course, the fall of the Berlin Wall -- those words, pretty straightforward, unlike President Obama's initial words to Hosni Mubarak calling for an 'orderly transition.' Did Obama do the right thing initially?

WHITON: No. And you know, Ronald Reagan also believed in being somewhat concise in foreign policy, especially the big goals. And he knew what was really behind the threats we faced -- he had spent the better part of three decades before he took office in 1981 thinking about the threat from Russia -- not just its more apparent manifestations like the Red Army in Eastern Europe, the Red Army in Afghanistan, ICBMs, but understood what drove it, the Communist ideology. And he understood that ultimate victory meant undermining Communism.

But in the same way, not only President Obama but his predecessor in the White House have not really made the same analogy of our current conflict. We haven't identified Islamism as the chief thing that unites groups from Al Qaeda to the Islamic Brotherhood, the Hezbollah. Nor have we figured out how to fight it, and President Obama, the Obama administration saying that it would be fine for the Muslim Brotherhood to be part of a future Egyptian government shows that our Washington foreign-policy establishment really doesn't understand today's threats the way Ronald Reagan used to.

CHILDERS: And while President Reagan had some dramatic successes, there still remain some questions regarding his policies with South Africa and apartheid. He maintained a constructive-engagement policy. Are there lessons to be learned from that in dealing with Egypt.

WHITON: There are. You know, President Reagan was a very principled person, but he was not a Boy Scout, nor should we want our presidents to be Boy Scouts. You know, one analogy, the Philippines was run by an autocrat, and we partnered with that autocrat, Ferdinand Marcos, out of necessity, because the bigger objective we were working toward was the defeat of Communism. But we still always behind the scenes and sometimes in front of the scenes put pressure on Marcos to reform politically, to liberalize. And then when the Filipinos took to the streets to demand his ouster, we helped facilitate that ouster. So you can work with unsavory characters, and unfortunately often you have to do that in diplomacy, but keeping your eyes on the bigger picture, which at that point was the defeat of Communism, and at this point ought to be the defeat of Islamism -- you know, keep your eye on that ball and you'll do OK. And I think Ronald Reagan knew that.

CHILDERS: It's so obvious from the ceremony today -- Ronald Reagan followed words with action -- he believed in being clear -- famously called for the Soviet Union, called it an 'evil empire' -- pretty clear words. Do you think Obama's problem is that he appears to waver, or was that necessary in the initial stages of the revolution going on in Egypt?

WHITON: Well, there was tremendous wavering at first, then the president came out and said a few positive things about democracy and freedom, but he has no credibility on that issue, and actions have not been followed with words. You can't say that and then turn around later and say that, you know, the Islamic Muslim Brotherhood ought to be welcomed into an Egyptian government. You can't welcome people into your political system who want to destroy that political system unless you're willing to have it be destroyed.

You know, Reagan backed up his rhetoric against the Soviet Union -- we supported freedom movements in the Eastern Bloc, we supported Solidarity in Poland, we fielded a 600-ship Navy, a Strategic Defense Initiative missile defense, all sorts of other things. So when President Obama, and frankly before him, with President George W. Bush, when they say nice things about democracy, people around the world judge us on our actions, not on our words, and frankly, actions haven't followed words as they did under the Reagan administration.

This is all just so incoherent that it's laughable. If Ronald Reagan was so clear and straightforward about dealing with threats to the United States, then how does Whiton explain the fact that Reagan secretly traded arms for hostages in his dealings with Iran?

Indeed, Reagan's "clarity" and obsessive focus on Communism at the expense of all other potential threats led to the Reagan administration financing and creating monsters who later became real threats to American security themselves. We can't forget, after all, that is was the Reagan administration that propped up the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, against whom we later engaged not just in one but in two wars. Nor can we forget that it was the Reagan administration that underwrote the Afghanistan resistance that then gave birth to Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

But comparing Mubarak to Marcos is indeed worthwhile -- though not in the way Whiton seems to think. Because in fact the Reagan administration -- which had been Marcos' staunchest ally -- notoriously dithered while the "People Power Revolution" gathered. It was only when Marcos' removal became a fair accompli that the Reagan White House acted to help him remove to Hawaii -- absconding with millions of dollars in gold bullion certificates.

In contrast, the Obama administration has been a model of quiet consistency on the situation in Egypt, where it has been pushing Mubarak to liberalize consistently, and has been consistent in supporting the pro-democracy forces marching in the streets, as Whiton clearly believes we should.

Meanwhile, right on Fox News, we have right-wingers like Dick Morris arguing loudly that, in order to defeat Islamism -- which Whiton thinks is our top priority now -- we need to strongly support Mubarak and his thugs.

Really, right-wingers can't seem to be able to decide whether to crap or go blind when it comes to Obama and Egypt. The only thing they know: Obama Bad, Reagan Good.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Camille Grammer touches on Fox's toxic effects on our personal lives

2011-02-05T21:47:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

Normally I'm about as interested in Hollywood divorces as I am in grass-growing competitions and NASCAR, but I thought Camille Grammer's dissing of her ex-husband, wingnut actor Kelsey Grammer, was interesting for what it said about the state of our national discourse and how that filters down into our private lives and personal relationships.

Camille Grammer, interviewed early this week on Joy Behar's HNN show, indicated early on that she and her now-ex-husband no longer saw eye-to-eye politically. And that seemed to be part of a larger drifting apart in the relationship, because they no longer had sex, either:

BEHAR: Was it his fault or your fault or both?

GRAMMER: It could be both, but it was more on his end.

BEHAR: More on his end?

GRAMMER: Yes.

BEHAR: OK, well then again, good to be rid of him.

GRAMMER: [Laughs] You know. I miss intimacy. I think that's a really important part of a marriage, is to be intimate with your partner. And we didn't really have that.

BEHAR: It really is nice. But cuddling is fun.

GRAMMER: Oh, I love cuddling.

BEHAR: You didn't do that.

GRAMMER: He was too busy watching Fox News. He didn't want to cuddle.

BEHAR: Well, there's a real turn-on.

Of course, when Fox's Bret Baier ran an item on this yesterday -- minus any video -- he was properly appalled: "Fox News has been blamed for a lot of thing, but this probably takes the cake."

And on the superficial level of Hollywood divorces, it would be silly indeed to read too much into this. It is, after all, purely anecdotal evidence from a single relationship.

Nevertheless, the general phenomenon she's describing is a dynamic I believe has been repeated on a massive scale over the past decade and more: friendships, family relationships, marriages and other close personal relationships soured because one of the two people involved has become a fanatical devotee of movement conservatism, particularly through the cultlike auspices of talk radio and Fox News TV -- and the other person in the relationship does not.

We've all encountered it: former college pals, or hometown buds, or old flames, or coworkers, or brothers-in-law, or grandfathers -- all convinced now that you've become a bad person because you're aiding and abetting those evil liberals in their attempt to destroy America. And what happens on an interpersonal scale is often ugly. It happens at Thanksgiving tables, at weddings and family reunions, when you go home to visit and see your old friends, or at work with people you've been friends with for years.

There are several reasons for it. The first is that the relentless message of the right-wing talkers, whether at Fox or on the radio, is simple and unmistakable: Liberals are bad people, sick in their souls, and they want to destroy America and your way of life. Day and day out, that's the message the True Believers get. And boy, do they believe it.

The second is that, as Nicole reported awhile back, it's been definitively established that Fox News watchers are deliberately malinformed -- that is, they believe a broad array of things that are factually untrue, but have been told by Fox News that they are true:

Fox News is deliberately misinforming its viewers and it is doing so for a reason. Every issue above is one in which the Republican Party had a vested interest. The GOP benefited from the ignorance that Fox News helped to proliferate.

As we've explained on many occasions, this kind of rhetoric alienates people from reality -- including the people who choose to live in that reality. By functionally unhinging people -- there is no other way to describe the effect of persuading people to believe, doggedly and unshakably, in things that are provably untrue, even in the fact of irrevocable factual evidence -- it serves to drive a real wedge between them and everyone else, while conversely forging powerful bonds with the like-minded.

Finally, it must be understood that the mission of both Fox News and talk radio is not merely to propagandize with disinformation, but also to inflame. This is why conspiracy theories -- which, functionally speaking, are narratives intended to induce simultaneous feelings of powerlessness and paranoia -- abound on Fox News. There's no one quite as congenitally angry as a congenital Fox Watcher.

No wonder Grammer didn't want to snuggle. What Fox News does is make people want to go out and beat up liberals. As Joy Behar says: What a turn-on, eh?

This isn't a problem just affecting Hollywood marriages. It's affecting millions of personal relationships, and in a decidedly poisonous way. Fox News, as Bill O'Reilly likes to say about the "far left," really is bad for America -- bad for our politics, bad for national discourse, and really, really bad for our friendships and family ties, the very real fabric of our society.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Hannity and Bozell bash media -- especially Chris Matthews -- for insufficient fearmongering over Egypt

2011-02-04T21:44:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

The right-wing Media Research Center's Brent Bozell was on Sean Hannity's Fox News show last night to talk about how horrible the American media have been in covering the situation in Egypt. How have they been horrible? Why, apparently because they aren't being sufficiently Becklike in fearmongering over an imminent radical Islamist takeover:

BOZELL: What happens when the government crumbles? What happens when this country is reduced to utter anarchy? What happens when the killings begin and the death begins? Are they still going to credit Barack Obama's soaring oratory for that, or are they going to separate them? What happens if an Islamic caliphate takes over? Are they going to credit his soaring oratory at that point? No they won't.

And what happens, Brent Bozell, if the government remains standing but reconstitutes itself as a democratic republic? What happens when the violence subsides? Will you and Hannity be going on the air and abjectly apologizing to your audiences and the American public and President Obama and to your media colleagues for needlessly fearmongering and spreading panic?

Um, no. You won't.

But Bozell reserved his special reservoir of venom for Chris Matthews, who dared compare the Muslim Brotherhood to the Tea Party. This, of course, made Hannity's an Bozell's collective pea-sized brains explode:

BOZELL: Look, I listen to Chris Matthews and I have two reactions to that. My first reaction is, 'Let's put aside civility for just a minute and to say, I'm just so sick and tired of these disgusting, horrible, despicable attacks, I'm going to slug you and deck you one of these days.'

But that's wrong. That's the wrong reaction. The right reaction is to listen to him, and to listen to him clearly, and just start laughing at the guy.

Look, if a meteor came out of the heavens and hit New York City, he would blame the Tea Party for it. He would blame Michele Bachmann for it.

HANNITY: No. He would probably blame George W. Bush or Sarah Palin. Let's be honest.

BOZELL: Yeah, but if it hit Fox News, he would say it's OK.

Yeah, and if it his NBC News instead, Bozell and Hannity would say it was OK.

Especially because we know that "first reaction" is, for right-wing clowns like these two, the one we're going to get most of the time. Especially when it's being encouraged by top-tier pundits on a cable network with an audience of millions.

Oh, but if a liberal protester is overheard saying nasty things, why, that's proof positive that it's the "left" that cannot be civil.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Beck wonders about his Egypt/China/New Zealand/Europe theory: 'Is it so farfetched, really?' Um, yeah, it is.

2011-02-04T21:43:00.000-08:00

--by Dave

Glenn Beck seems to be a little nonplussed that everyone is pointing and laughing at his typically GlennBeckian apocalyptic conspiracist take on the events in Egypt.

On his Fox News show yesterday he basically doubled down:

They were reacting with surprise afterwards, you know, like what? I've never heard that. Because she's 100 percent wrong.

First of all, that's not the network's theory. That's not Fox's theory. That's my theory. My theory. And it's not Van Jones or anything else.

Let me ask you this, let's start here. Since when is having a theory when you're trying to figure out what's going on a bad thing in America?

And it's really less theory than it is facts in their own words. But, just in case, let me show you what my "theory" is. And I stand by it. Everybody on the left, this is my theory and I stand by every word of it.

Groups from the hardcore socialists and communist left and extreme Islam will work together because of the common enemy of Israel and the Jews.

It's not just capitalism, it's not the United States, it's your way of life in the West. And I stand by that.

Groups from the hardcore socialist left and communism and extreme Islam will work together to overturn relatively -- relative stability because in the status quo, they are both ostracized from power and the mainstream in most parts of the world.

That's -- here, I'll even put it up for you -- Glenn's theory. Here it is. Got it?

That's it and I stand by it. Is it so farfetched, really?

Yes.

This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Dick Morris thinks Obama administration should back Mubarak and his thugs, 'aggressively confront' protesters

2011-02-03T21:41:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

Dick Morris has always given me the creeps, because he just gives off this nasty toe-sucking-troll-who-lives-under-the-bridge vibe. I guess after last night, we can make that a fascist toe-sucking troll:

MORRIS: I think that what Mubarak should be doing and what the Obama administration should be doing is aggressively confronting the demonstrators. I think that if we encourage the military to stand down, if we encourage the Mubarak supporters to refrain from controversy or even from violence, we really are opening the door to Islamic fundamentalist domination.

That was Morris describing why President Obama is really to blame for the crisis in Egypt to Laura Ingraham last night on Fox's The O'Reilly Factor. Notice that Morris couches the words so that he's not directly calling for the American administration to engage in acts of violence, but he does clearly say we should openly condone and support a dictator's street thugs in committing acts of violence.

This came as part of Morris' ongoing campaign to claim the President Obama "lost Egypt", or as he put it last night, Obama "broke Egypt, and now he owns it" -- a claim that seems to be gaining some circulation at Fox, which is increasingly desperate for anything, anything it can grasp for attacking Obama in this situation.

Even Dick Morris's disgusting grunts from under the bridge.

Todd Gregory at Media Matters has more.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Bully BillO comes out to smack Colmes for daring to suggest liberals don't hate America

2011-02-02T21:38:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

Now here's an irony: Bill O'Reilly accusing Al Jazeera of being anti-Semitic because it includes guests who clearly fit that description. Meanwhile, the Glenn Beck Anti-Semitic Elephant in the room goes politely ignored.

Of course, what this was really about was, once again, right-wing Fox talkers like O'Reilly and Monica Crowley using unrest abroad as a way to smear liberal Americans as insufficiently patriotic. And so when Alan Colmes called them out for it, his reward was to get the BillO the Bully Full-On Nasty treatment.

It happened last night on O'Reilly's opening "Talking Points Memo" segment:

"Talking Points" could provide hundreds of examples of anti-Semitism and "hate America" rhetoric displayed on Al Jazeera, the network Sam Donaldson admires.

And he's not alone. Here's what Brian Stelter wrote in The New York Times on Tuesday: "As recently as Friday, the conservative Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly branded Al Jazeera as 'anti-America.' … But that view has been largely drowned out by people like [Sam] Donaldson who have hoisted up Al Jazeera English for its protest coverage."

Totally absurd. Any fair-minded person who follows Al Jazeera knows it is anti-American and anti-Semitic. Only on the far left can it find acceptance.

Sure. And it's true that it's there are many examples of anti-Semitic guests on Al Jazeera -- just as it's true that Fox has had on its airwaves a broad assortment of nativists and other far-right extremists over the years as well.

But even more important, one of Fox News' leading anchors -- and a frequent onstage and on-air cohort of O'Reilly's -- is under siege from Jewish rabbis outraged by Beck's anti-Semitic slurs of George Soros and his obscene overuse of Nazi and Holocaust comparisons and metaphors.

Oh well. That -- like any criticism of the network at all -- is NEVER mentioned at Fox.

Because as the segment that followed with Colmes and Crowley amply demonstrated, this was less about bashing Al Jazeera and was really all about bashing liberals -- as Crowley made explicit. And that set off the fireworks:

CROWLEY: Well, I -- I don't want to attribute this directly to Sam Donaldson but I would say to make a broader point that the far left in this country is essentially anti-American.

COLMES: Oh please, now that's disgusting.

CROWLEY: They are -- and so a lot of their -- a lot of their philosophy.

(CROSSTALK)

COLMES: That's disgusting. That's sickening.

CROWLEY: I'm not saying you, Colmes, I'm saying the broader far left has an anti-American agenda that in many ways dovetails…

(CROSSTALK)

COLMES: Who, who? Tell me who? Who on the left?

CROWLEY: …with the kind of reporting -- reporting that we see come out of Al Jazeera.

O'REILLY: She's saying the far left.

COLMES: Who? Who? Who are you calling anti-American? I'm so tired of people calling people on my side anti-American.

(CROSSTALK)

O'REILLY: Are you a far-left guy?

COLMES: I don't know. You have called me that.

O'REILLY: Sometimes your positions are far left.

COLMES: All right, fine. But am I anti-American?

O'REILLY: I don't think you're anti-American. But certainly the far left is taking anti-American positions.

COLMES: But look, but let's stop this name-calling. Let's stop demonizing anybody you don't agree with and call them anti-American.

O'REILLY: I just ran a "Talking Points Memo" that backed up, all right, with four specific things that this is an anti-Semitic, anti-American network and I could do 40 of them.

COLMES: But you said those were people on the network as guests.

(CROSSTALK)

O'REILLY: There is no counter. Why don't you grasp this? I'm getting a little mad at you. Grasp this! There is no counter on it, you got it? There is no counter on it!

COLMES: Yes, I hear what you say. It's free speech.

O'REILLY: So it's this, yes, it's free speech. Shouldn't be praised by a pinhead like Donaldson.

Nor should O'Reilly's speech be praised ... by anyone. Smearing, lying, and bullying should get you removed from the airwaves, not enshrined as one of cable's most prominent anchors.

Memo to BillO: There is a big "counter" hanging around your neck. And his name is Glenn Beck.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Right-wingers don't care if Planned Parenthood video was already exposed as a hoax -- they'll do it live!

2011-02-02T21:36:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

It tells you just how degraded our national discourse has become -- how utterly corrupted by the Fox Propaganda Channel it has been -- that two of its leading anchors can run an entire segment legitimizing a hoax video tape, even though its contents were exposed as a hoax even before they were released. And no one even so much as raises an eyebrow.

That's what happened last night on The O'Reilly Factor, when Bill O'Reilly and Fox's John Stossel devoted an entire segment to attacking Planned Parenthood as "disgusting" for the supposed behavior revealed in another Breitbartesque attack by video hoax on another liberal institution.

O'Reilly and Stossel, however, then use the affair to launch into attacking Planned Parenthood for receiving taxpayer subsidies -- and that really is what they're on about. Interestingly, Stossel uses the logic that because some people see abortion as murder, they are being forced to underwrite murder in their views -- a position O'Reilly ardently adopts as well.

Peculiar that neither of them apply the same logic elsewhere: Many people see killing innocent civilians in the course of a war as murder too -- something our tax dollars likewise heavily underwrite. But you'll never see an O'Reilly segment attacking taxpayer funding for the DoD.

But what's truly disgraceful that they then dismiss the overwhelming fact that Planned Parenthood had already reported these "sex traffickers" to authorities -- thereby exposing the hoax in progress. Here's their release of last week:

Last week, Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) alerted federal authorities to a potential multistate sex trafficking ring. Over a five day period, visitors to Planned Parenthood health centers in six states said they were seeking information from Planned Parenthood about health services Planned Parenthood could provide to underage girls who were part of a sex trafficking ring. Subsequent to alerting U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, Planned Parenthood learned the identify of one of those involved and believes these visits are likely a hoax by opponents of legal abortion seeking to discredit Planned Parenthood, which delivers preventive health care and abortion services to three million women each year.

Media Matters has the full details of the hoax.

Yet, in spite of all this, when Lila Rose and Co. published the video yesterday, it was widely treated through Unsurprisingly, the wingnutosphere ran whole-hog in embracing the video as legitimate, including the fine folks at National Review, RedState and Malkin's Hot Air.

Moreover, as Ned Resnikoff at Media Matters explored in some detail, Rose's video actually pretty clearly demonstrates the falsity of what she claims it shows:

In a so-called "sting" video professional hit artist Lila Rose claims to have uncovered evidence of systemic corruption within Planned Parenthood to cover up "child sex trafficking." Not only do Planned Parenthoods recent actions flatly contradict that claim -- so does the content of the video itself.

In fact, even if we were to assume that Rose's heavily edited smear job is accurate - and there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical - the video very clearly establishes that the alleged wrongdoing is counter to Planned Parenthood policy: the employee on Rose's tape makes it clear that the actions in question would have to be concealed from others at the organization.

You can judge for yourself. Here's the video:

[media id="19563" embed="true" image="true" download="true"]

People for the American Way also has a terrific rundown of the facts:

Anti-abortion activist Lila Rose, a photogenic young activist who Religious Right leaders hope to make the new face of the anti-abortion movement, claims that the video Religious Right groups are circulating “proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Planned Parenthood intentionally breaks state and federal laws and covers up the abuse of young girls it claims to serve.” False. In fact, far from proving a pattern of illegal activity, the Live Action project demonstrated that Planned Parenthood has strong institutional procedures in place to protect young women. When Live Action activists appeared at numerous facilities presenting themselves as seeking help with a child sex trafficking ring, Planned Parenthood wrote to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder requesting an FBI investigation. Live Action attempted its “sting” across the country; the one Planned Parenthood staffer who violated those procedures and is featured in Live Action’s video was fired.

There's a lot more on Rose's background there as well.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Planet Beck nears critical mass with wingnutty theory about Egypt uprising,

2011-02-01T21:34:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

[media id="19554" embed="true" image="true" download="true"]

Like Steve Benen, I'm beginning to wonder if our favorite Big-Time Wingnuts are about to implode under the critical mass of their own overpowering wingnuttery. It seem as though Sarah Palin's bizarre "WTF" rant of the other night -- while not particularly spectacular in the context of a political career rich with embarrassing moments -- may have been the pebble that finally tipped even her reflexive defenders in the other direction. (You sure can't find anyone outside of Planet Palin who will defend it.)

Then there's Glenn Beck in the past couple of days. Conor Friedersdorf's reaction reflected the consensus: "the fact that Roger Ailes and his associates air this kind of nonsense –couched in these kinds of assurances! – is indefensible." As Benen says:

Over the last year or so, Fox News' Glenn Beck has lost about a third of his audience, which is a pretty significant drop, and may very well lead the deranged media personality to think of ways to bring viewers back.

One way, for example, may be for Beck to be even more creative when sharing crazy visions of global affairs. Yesterday, the strange man did his best to explain events in Egypt with a take that really has to be seen to be believed. Chris Hayes called it "a tour de force of paranoid ignorance," which sums it up nicely.

As you can see, all he's really doing is reinforcing what even some of Beck's Believers are now beginning to realize: that he's an ignoramus peddling cockamamie conspiracy theories with no regard to facts or truthfulness.

You see, Beck believes that events in Egypt are the culmination of conspiratorial forces he's been railing about for some time now -- essentially revolving around an obscure book by French anarchists that nobody is actually reading, The Coming Insurrection.

Basically, Beck foresees a Middle Eastern "Caliphate" overtaking Europe and China controlling big chunks of new territory, all fueled by a "Marxist" and "Islamist" conspiracy:

I believe that I can make a case in the end that there are three powers that you will see really emerge. One, a Muslim caliphate that controls the Mideast and parts of Europe. Two, China, that will control Asia, the southern half of Africa, part of the Middle East, Australia, maybe New Zealand, and God only knows what else. And Russia, which will control all of the old former Soviet Union bloc, plus maybe the Netherlands. I'm not really sure. But their strong arm is coming. That leaves us and South America. What happens to us?

Then Beck went on Bill O'Reilly's show and explained the nutshell version:

BECK: No, I think we're actually possibly the witnessing Archduke Ferdinand moment. Archduke Ferdinand was the guy who was killed -- shot, a few months later started the First World War. I think we're in real danger.

...

BECK: I understand that, but what you're not taking into account is that that is what the average person thinks, just like the average person on the street of -- of Cairo thinks they're swept up in some freedom movement. It is not about freedom. It is being orchestrated by the Marxists, communists and primarily also the Muslim Brotherhood.

Sean Easter and Todd Gregory at Media Matters have a thorough roundup of the madness, and conclude by observing:

All of this was offered up in service of his theory that the protests in Egypt are the manifestation of The Coming Insurrection, an obscure book that French police believe was written by a member of a small group of anarchists. Beck has repeatedly described the anonymous author (or authors) of the book as "communists." He's tied George Soros and President Obama to The Coming Insurrection, as well.

So, a diverse group of the Egyptian people are in the streets protesting an autocratic leader, and Glenn Beck has decided that this is directly connected to an anonymously written anarchist tract from France that he's been obsessing about for the past two years?

Normally, we are in the business of debunking the falsehoods and smears that Beck promotes. But how do you debunk pronouncements that quite obviously bear no relationship to reality?

The real question is: Why would anyone ever take this man seriously on any subject?

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

California wingnut arrested outside Michigan mosque with explosives: Just another 'isolated incident'

2011-01-29T21:26:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

Now, I don't know about you, but when an agitated man drives all the way from California to Dearborn, Michigan, with a trunk full of Class C explosives (high-end fireworks, mostly) and is arrested outside an Islamic center for making terrorist threats -- well hey, I just naturally assume that this has nothing, nothing whatsoever to do with the right-wing Islamophobic hatred that's regularly ginned up by radio and TV talkers.

From the Detroit Free Press:

About 700 people were attending a funeral inside the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, the largest mosque in metro Detroit, when Dearborn police arrived to arrest a man in a car in the parking lot.

He had driven to Michigan from California and reportedly was overheard in a bar making threatening comments about Muslims or Arabs. His car was loaded with large, illegal fireworks, police said. Now, Roger Stockham, 63, is jailed on charges that include making a false report or threat of terrorism.

"He's very dangerous," said Dearborn Police Chief Ron Haddad.

Now, how do we know that this couldn't possibly have been a right-wing ideologue? Why, because he had been arrested back in 2002 for threatening President Bush -- which is always a certain sign of left-wing politics, according to every right-wing talker on the planet. From the Detroit News:

A decorated Army veteran accused of plotting to blow up a Metro Detroit mosque served time in federal prison for threatening to kill President George W. Bush and bomb a Vermont veterans' clinic in 2002.

Ah, but then we read the details of that particular arrest:

In the Vermont incident, he told authorities at the time of his arrest at a Veterans Affairs Department complex in Colchester that his minivan was full of explosives. A search found no explosives.

Before the arrest, Stockham called a local paper twice to say he was going to explode bombs in the neighborhood. In one call, he identified himself as "Hem Ahadin," saying he was "a local Muslim terrorist on a roll."

He ranted against the VA, the FBI and Bush, largely because of the things the president had said about Iraq in a speech earlier in the week.

According to affidavit filed in U.S. District Court, Stockham threatened to carry out "jihad," or holy war, against the VA office in White River, Vt.

In other words, the threat against Bush was made in the context of Stockham pretending to be an Islamic terrorist -- that is, he threatened Bush because he wanted his listeners to believe he was a Muslim, since he wanted authorities to assume whatever act he committed was an act of Islamist terrorism.

Most of all, the man had been diagnosed with (and treated for) mental illness on several occasions, which we all know means you can't possibly blame right-wing rhetoric for having helped inspire the act, right?

Yep, just another isolated incident.. We're up to 21 and counting, by the way.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Frank Luntz gets called out for his phony Obama-bashing 'focus group' after the SOTU

2011-01-29T21:23:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

[media id="19523" embed="true" image="true" download="true"]

It really isn't any news to our readers that Frank Luntz is one of the most ethics-challenged "pollsters" out there, particularly since he really has had so much influence on our national discourse by his significant role in shaping right-wing talking points.

But as Ellen at NewsHounds observed the other day, he really reached new depths with his dog-and-pony "focus group" on Fox News with Sean Hannity that followed President Obama's State of the Union address -- because it was so obviously larded up with Obama-haters:

Given that 53% of the country voted for Barack Obama, 15 or 16 people should have been Obama voters to make it a representative sample of Americans. Furthermore, given their level of hostility to Obama, especially when he is enjoying a resurgence in the polls, you have to wonder how many of those 13 were Obama-voting Republicans or Tea Partiers. Luntz also repeatedly asked his group questions designed to elicit negative comments about Obama.

Today, the L.A. Times' James Rainey lowered the boom with a devastating critique:

The kangaroo court convened with Chief Justice Hannity declaring Obama "flat," redundant and out of touch. Luntz didn't even bother to stifle a smile when he told the 29 members of the focus group, "I don't want you to feel under pressure because of what Sean Hannity just said."

Luntz asked those seated in the front row to give a word or two to assess Obama's performance. Seven of 10 let him have it. "Platitudes," said one, followed by "empty, redundant, political, not connected with America, hyperbole and Obama conflicting...."

Never mind trying to find neutral language — the goal of any truly nonpartisan pollster — so as not to taint the subjects. In one question, Luntz allowed the panel to say only that the speech had exceeded or fell short of expectations. No chance for the panelists to stake out the likely middle ground. Lo and behold! Most of them said the speech fell short.

Perhaps the slipperiest of Luntz's tricks played on the most important question of all: how Obama has handled the economy. First noting that the president called the "worst" of the recession over, Luntz later said: "How many of you believe the recession is over, raise your hands?" He then relayed the result: "Three of you. So obviously that must have undercut credibility when he said it?"

Of course, when you misstate what a politician says — in this case taking out the all-important qualifier that Obama referred to the worst of the recession ending — it's not hard to make that politician look woefully out of touch.

In an exchange of e-mails the next day, Luntz defended his claim. He said his panel had "dialed downward" (with hand-held devices for keeping running tabs on the speech) at the moment Obama spoke about the recession. "It's what they heard," Luntz said. "I realize Obama said the worst of the recession is over, but they heard the recession is over."

The day after our little e-mail chat, Luntz clearly intended to keep mangling Obama's message. "The president said the recession is over," he said on the Fox Business Network's "Imus in the Morning." Naturally, people are too "angry" and "agitated" to hear that kind of talk, he said.

Indeed. As you can see from the video above, Hannity sets the tone from the outset, clearly advising the "focus group" on what the tenor of their remarks should be -- though Luntz lamely tries to tell them not to pay Hannity any mind:

HANNITY: First of all, I thought a lot of this was flat, surprisingly so, inasmuch as we've heard a lot of this before -- earmark reform, transparency, for example. It almost seemed like the "Yes, we can" magic disappeared a little, maybe because we've heard it before.

But the thing that struck me Frank, and I'm dying to find out what your group says, is the disconnect. I did not feel the president had the sense of urgency, how bad unemployment, the debt, the deficit is, when he called for $400 billion in savings, when he accumulated $3.4 trillion in new debt since he's been president. It seems like he's trying to sell the same policies.

FRANK LUNTZ, POLLSTER: Let's fan out what our 29 people in Atlanta had to say. And I don't want you to feel under pressure because of what Sean Hannity just said. I want a word or phrase to describe what you thought of the speech.

And it just goes quickly downhill from there.

Nice schtick you've got there, Frank. It's obvious you're addressing those concerns about not getting as much airtime on Fox as you used to, as Rainey notes:

He has suggested that his airtime has previously been cut on Fox because his findings didn't comport with the outlet's orthodoxy.

All "fixed" now, eh?

Full transcript here.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Full video of 'New Black Panthers' scene reveals GOP attorneys orchestrating the affair

2011-01-29T21:21:00.000-08:00

[Video from U.S. Commission on Civil Rights]

-- by Dave

It was pretty obvious from the start that the whole New Black Panthers Party "voter intimidation" controversy was a Breitbart-like right-wing operation intended to gin up fear among white voters, made for heavy airplay on Fox News -- and later, to become an Obama-bashing tool, especially in the hands of Bush-appointed right-wing operatives still inside the Justice Department.

Now Ryan J. Reilly at TPM Muckraker has a great little scoop demonstrating that this whole scene in fact was being orchestrated by GOP attorneys: It turns out that the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which has been devoting a great deal of energy to the matter, finally released the full two-and-a-half-minute video showing the New Black Panthers being chatted up by police outside the polling station in Philadelphia -- and then afterwards, the "poll watchers" -- lawyers hired by the GOP -- orchestrating the scene:

In the extended version of the footage, posted by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights this month, a police officer tells Morse to back off. That's when the commotion begins.

The video shows someone off-screen to Morse's left, telling the officer "I got him, I got him." A man who appears to be Chris Hill, a Republican poll watcher who was accused of intimidating voters at the polls by another woman at the location, says "Put it down. You've got enough."

Then Bartle Bull chimes in. "Don't you threaten him with your hands. You're threatening him. Don't you use your hands!"

Soon an individual seems to grab Morse's arm or his camera -- the screen moves erratically. "I'm a fucking professional videographer," Morse tells the person trying to stop him from filming. "I was paid... to come from L.A. today."

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which has doggedly pursued the Justice Department's handling of the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case, released the final version of their report this week, complete with responses from all the commissioners on the panel. Two Democratic commissioners who have dissented from the investigation pointed out the additional footage in their reply and note that while the Justice Department handed over a full copy of the video, the Commission didn't see fit to post it online until this month, far after the report had been finished.

The video shows that the white Republican poll watchers who showed up to the majority African-American precinct knew exactly what kind of media sensation they had on their hands.

"We're on the same team," says another Republican poll watcher off screen.

"You're fucking up the story. Don't fuck up the story," one unidentified poll watcher tells Morse.

"You guys are lawyers, I'm a videographer," Morse says.

The USCCR issued its full report, including evidentiary material, earlier this week, and as you can see it's a pretty divided affair, largely along partisan lines -- though in fact conservative Bush appointee Abigail Thernstrom backs up her earlier concerns about the investigation with a brief but scathing dissent:

This investigation lacked political and intellectual integrity from the outset, and has been consistently undermined by the imbalance between the gravity of the allegations and the strength of the evidence available to support such charges. Some commissioners offered serious, principled critiques of the process, and questioned the evidentiary record. Their views were contemptuously ignored by the commission's majority.

The majority charges that racial double standards govern the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act in the Holder Justice Department. If that can be convincingly demonstrated, it will be a grave indictment of this administration.

But that evidentiary showing awaits further investigation by the Department of Justice and Congress. I applaud that investigation, and hope that it will shed more light on this important question than the tendentious report provided by the commission’s majority.

Indeed. As we explained previously:

So a little perspective is perhaps helpful here: There are indeed black racist hate groups (the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors is another). However, they are dwarfed both in size and in sheer numbers by white racist hate groups. Check the SPLC's compendium of hate groups and you'll see what I mean: they outnumber anti-white racists by about 99 to 1.

Oddly enough, we never get any reporting about these hate groups from Fox News -- except when they want to attack the Department of Homeland Security's bulletin warning about the rising likelihood of violent terrorism from right-wing extremists. Then, they're all too eager to simply whitewash away the very existence of white supremacists and far-right terrorists.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Liberals don't want to 'silence' conservatives -- they'd just like to have an honest democratic debate

2011-01-29T21:18:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

Right-wingers seem to have a problem understanding how this whole free-speech thing works. They seem to believe, for instance, that it's perfectly acceptable for them to say the most outrageous things imaginable as part of their rights to free speech -- but if someone stands up and exercises their free-speech rights by criticizing what they said, then by God, they're trying to take their rights away!

Like those brilliant minds over at the Right Scoop:

What is really at work here is the Left trying to control the speech of a small group of impressionable people – Republicans. They could care less about how civil the nation is but if they can keep the Republicans from name calling, they end up looking better than they would if Republicans constantly reminded America of their socialist agenda.

This idea intrigues Fox's Megyn Kelly yesterday morning, and so she invited Alan Colmes on to chew it over. She found she had more than she bargained for:

COLMES: When Sarah Palin responds to the State of the Union address and uses the acronym WTF, and says it was a 'WTF' speech, that is really uncalled-for and over the top. That is --

KELLY: Why can't she say that? What is the problem with saying that?

COLMES: I didn't say she couldn't say that. But I have a right to get on the air that's absolutely absurd -- let her say it! In fact, I want her to say more of that stuff! But we have the right to come on and say that's absolutely absurd and ridiculous! I'm not saying anybody should be shut down.

KELLY: Yes, but others are. You're not.

COLMES: Come on, who's saying anybody should be shut down?

KELLY: This call for civility.

COLMES: Wait a minute, Megyn. Who's trying to shut who down? Who's trying to shut anybody down? Who?

KELLY: Well, that's the question. The theory is -- the theory is that this call for civility in fact an effort to silence critics who -- let me just finish the theory -- this is from this article -- the theory is -- other conservatives have said this -- that they're trying to silence Republicans or conservatives or Tea Party people who have been -- who have been successful in winning back control of the House, winning back more seats in the Senate, and they're worried about how successful they might be in 2012.

COLMES: Paul Broun of Georgia, the congressman who said that Obama was just spewing his venom, said the reason Democrats wanted to sit with Republicans was to shut them down, to shut them off, to silence them. That's absurd!

This is a crazy conspiracy right-wing theory that somehow is accusing the Left of when they call for civility, what they really want is to shut you up? No!

What's wrong with just calling for civility for its own sake? So we should be condemned because people on my side call for us to be civil? And they expand this into some kind of bad evil plot to shut you down? That's crazy!

Let's stipulate, perhaps, that civility is a lofty but probably unreachable goal. But let's also stipulate that democratic debate itself is impossible when one side threatens, intimidates, smears, and invokes violent eliminationist rhetoric against the other -- especially if it simultaneously refuses to engage in a debate over the facts of the issues but instead devotes its energy to shrieking hysterically about false "facts" and conspiracy theories.

Civility would be great. But honest, clear debate without the cloud of violence is what we desperately need.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

The Shawna Forde trial: The lunatic-fringe supporters make their presence felt

2011-01-28T21:14:00.000-08:00

[Photo by Dave Ricker.]

-- by Dave

[image display="original" link="source" alt="Laine-Disguise.JPG" width="412" height="318" id="8572"][/image]

Yes, it's true: Shawna Forde has her defenders -- one of her old Minuteman border-watch associates, in fact, who has concocted a conspiracy theory that this was all a setup to pin the crime on Shawna and the Minutemen. She even has an explanation for how Forde managed to get ahold of survivor Gina Gonzalez's jewelry.

Her name is Laine Lawless, and she is a scheduled witness in the case, which means she can't attend court hearings until after she testifies. So yesterday she brought the Shawna Forde trial to a screeching halt mid-testimony when she tried to sneak into the courtroom wearing a really cheesy disguise:

The capital murder trial of Shawna Forde came to an abrupt halt this morning when a witness in the case - one of Shawna Forde's biggest supporters - came into the courtroom in disguise, violating a court order that all witnesses remain outside the courtroom.

Laine Lawless, wearing a black wig, short trenchcoat and sunglasses, was immediately spotted by reporters and detectives. One of the detectives alerted prosecutor Rick Unklesbay, who immediately asked to approach the bench of Judge John Leonardo.

The jurors were quickly ushered out of the room and Leonardo asked Lawless if she did not understand him when he told her on Tuesday that she and all other witnesses are not allowed in the courtroom until after the attorneys release them from their subpoenas.

Lawless told the judge she understood his order, but objected to it as she is a "citizen reporter" who has a right to be in the courtroom. She insisted she was told she was not going to be called as a witness, something the attorneys for both sides denied telling her.

In fact, prosecutor Kellie Johnson told Judge Leonardo she has exchanged e-mails with Lawless since Tuesday reiterating she is still under subpoena and can't be in the courtroom. Johnson said she told Lawless if she objected to the court order to take it up with the judge.

Lawless said she doesn't remember what the dates on the subpoena are and believes those are relevant.

At prosecutor Rick Unklesbay's suggestion, Judge Leonardo told Lawless that she is not only banned from the courtroom unless or until she's called to testify, but she's banned from the courthouse. In answer to her question, the judge said she can get someone else to file any motions she has objecting to his ruling.

Here's Laine Lawless in action back in 2006:

We've written about her previously -- and believe me: In the dictionary, under "piece of work," they have Laine Lawless's picture:

Lawless, in fact, has been a significant figure on the Minuteman front for some time now, not least because she formed one of the first spinoff groups. She played a key role in helping Chris Simcox organize one of his earlier versions of the Minutemen, the Civil Homeland Defense, and was one of the characters who showed up on video when the Minutemen first organized their border watch.

However, she got the boot shortly afterward, no doubt because she's such a lunatic that not even Simcox wanted to be associated with her. So she started up her own Minuteman offshoot, and it was shortly in the business of forming alliances with real neo-Nazis and even offering them advice on how to harass Latinos:

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.' "

In other news, Forde's sister testified -- and that wasn't good

Aranda told jurors she met Forde when Forde was 18 or 19 years old and has only seen her four or five times since then.

On one of those occasions, in April 2009, Aranda testified her sister talked about robbing people associated with drug cartels to fund her Minutemen group.

"I didn't take it seriously, mainly because she has a habit of exaggerating. She likes to talk big," Aranda said.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Mexican drug cartels go shopping for their guns in Arizona

2011-01-27T21:09:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

In Arizona, everyone is freaked out about the violence by Mexican drug cartels south of their border, which was one of the reasons we repeatedly heard from leading state officials as one of their excuses for passing SB1070.

But then it turns out that the ease with which you can buy a gun in Arizona is fueling that violence directly:

The seizure of more than 700 guns and the indictments of 34 people announced on Tuesday are further confirmation that Arizona has become an iron highway for weapons into Mexico, according to federal authorities.

Many legal purchases by straw buyers at Arizona gun stores are being financed and orchestrated by Mexico's Sinaloa cartel, federal officials said.

The cases announced Tuesday involved the purchases of many AK-47s, .50-caliber rifles and other semiautomatic weapons in single-day transactions at gun stores by straw buyers paid by the cartel, U.S. Attorney for Arizona Dennis Burke said.

"This is a huge problem in this state. It is a strange phenomenon," Burke said at a news conference at the Phoenix office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives. "Drug cartels go shopping for their war weapons here in Arizona."

At least 17 people were arrested Tuesday in five cases involving a joint crackdown by the ATF, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, the Internal Revenue Service and the Phoenix Police Department.

Gee, I can remember when, a couple of years ago, Obama administration officials pointed out that many of the guns being used by the Mexican drug cartels were being originating in the USA -- and the NRA and Glenn Beck exploded in angry denial, implying that such imprecations upon the fine name of American arms sellers was an attack on the Constitution itself!

[H/t Jamie]

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Glenn Beck digs up a case of left-wing political violence. One.

2011-01-27T21:05:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

Thinking that somehow this will refute the people who are criticizing him for inspiring terrorist acts and death threats against people he has targeted for national on-air vilification, Glenn Beck has dug up the peculiar case of Casey Brezik, a mentally ill (diagnosed schizophrenic) 22-year-old who last September tried to slash the throat of a man he mistakenly believed to be the governor of Missouri. (A more dispassionate account is here.)

Well, there's little doubt that Brezik is a far-left anarchist -- but that doesn't place him anywhere within the same political spectrum as mainstream liberals, other than that they are both generically somewhere on the Left. The same as American neo-Nazis are on the Right along with mainstream conservatives.

More to the point, there's no indication that anyone held Democratic Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon up for extreme demonization or that there was political discourse from the Left identifying him as the source of all evil. Rather the contrary. Brezik selected him not because he was inspired by any kind of mainstream liberal rhetoric (particularly not any broadcast on a major news network).

This stands in rather stark contrast to the issues confronting Beck and his reckless and smear-laden demonization of people and institutions in a way that inspires violence.

Because where that is the issue, we have more than one incident. We have many, many more.

Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that Glenn Beck's incident with Brezik is indeed a case of left-wing violence. OK. Now let's place that singular case up against this:

Full details here.

Tom Schaller discussed this in an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun recently, citing my work here:

To my critics, I pose a simple challenge: Produce a comparable list of violent acts or attempted acts during the past two years perpetrated by those who support economic fairness, reproductive choice, universal health care, environmental protection, animal rights or any other liberal cause against corporate executives, pro-life organizers, small business owners or white evangelicals.

Mind you, this list doesn't even begin to assess the threats and assaults, which are so much more voluminous they're much harder to track. (We'll undertake that task shortly.)

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Speaking of 'WTF moments': Palin launches into weird babble about Spudnuts

2011-01-27T21:01:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

Sarah Palin almost talked dirty to us last night on Greta Van Susteren's Fox show:

PALIN: Speaking of last night, that was a tough speech to have to sit through and kind of stomach, because the president is so off base in his ideas on how it is he believes government is going to create jobs. Obviously, government growth won't create any jobs, it's the private sector that can create the jobs.

And his theme last night of the State of the Union was the WTF -- you know, winning the future. And I thought, OK, that acronym -- spot on! There were a lot of WTF moments throughout that speech.

In Palinville, this is what passes for cleverness -- along with such witticisms as "lamestream media" and "lock and load". Plus, it fits her whole naughty-librarian schtick -- we all know what that 'F' stands for, don't we? It's enough to make one collapse in a gale of giggles.

In a later segment, she expanded on the "WTF Moments" with one of her own:

VAN SUSTEREN: Governor, last night there was a lot of talk about the 'Sputnik moment' that the president talked about. Um, do you agree with him -- is this our moment?

PALIN: That was another one of those 'WTF moments' that when he so often repeated the 'Sputnik moment' that he would aspire Americans to celebrate. He need to remember that what happened back then with the former Communist USSR and their victory in that race to space -- yep, they won, but they also incurred so much debt at the time that it resulted in the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union.

Pardon this brief interjection from Karen Famigheti at Media Matters, responding to identical dumbassery from the Dumbest Blogger in the Wingnutosphere:

It's mind numbing to have to point this out, but Obama's reference to Sputnik refers to the U.S. competing against the Soviet Union during the Cold War space race.

In calling this our "Sputnik moment," Obama was calling on America to "reach a level of research and development we haven't seen since the height of the Space Race" in order to create jobs and remain competitive. He was not expressing sympathy with the former Soviet Union.

Ah well. Sean Hannity indulged in precisely the same obtuse dumbassery last night. But really, Palin was just warming up her dulcet vocal cords for the real coup de grace:

PALIN: So I listen to that Sputnik moment talk over and over again and I think, 'No, you don't need one of those. You know what we need is a Spudnut moment. And here's where I'm going with this -- and you're a good one, because you're one of those reporters who actually gets out there in the communities, find these hard-working people and find solutions to the problems that Americans face.

Well, the Spudnut shop, in Richland, Washington -- it's a bakery, it's a little coffee shop that's so successful -- 60 some years, generation to generation, a family-owned business. It's not looking for government to bail them out and to make their decisions for them. It's just hard-working, patriotic Americans in this shop -- we need more Spudnut moments in America!

And I wish that President Obama would understand -- in that heartland of America, what it is that really results in the solutions that we need to get this economy back on the right track, it's a shop like that!

Ooooookay. Whatever you say, lady!

Actually, I grew up with Spudnuts. They were wildly overrated doughnuts that supposedly used potato flour. They were a chain popular in the interior West mostly; we had one in my hometown too. Here's a brief history of them. And here's a link to the Spudnut shop in Richland that Palin extols.

I'm hardly one to look down on small businesses -- they're a vital part of the economy. But even a Spudnut shop can't delivery its doughtnuts if the federal government doesn't provide it with infrastructure like freeways and water-reclamation projects -- all keys to Richland's economy.

Moreover, the Spudnut shop in Richland certainly wouldn't exist if it weren't for government-created jobs: for most of its history (especially after 1940), the chief source of employment there has been the Hanford Project nuclear-reactor testing station.

Good ol' Palin is always good for a twofer: Loopy and clueless all in one swell foop!

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

The Shawna Forde trial: Survivor Gina Gonzalez takes the stand, and the jury hears the 911 call

2011-01-27T20:56:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

The Shawna Forde murder trial got into full swing the past couple of days, with some riveting testimony featuring the sole survivor of Forde's killer Minuteman-gang home invasion, Gina Gonzalez -- some of it on the taped 911 call she made the night her daughter and husband were shot and killed.

The Arizona Star has been covering the trial assiduously, including this stark account of Gonzalez' testimony yesterday:

She testified about people posing as law enforcement officers coming into her home and shooting and killing her husband, Raul "Junior" Flores, shooting and wounding her, then turning the gun on their 9-year old daughter Brisenia.

"He's all out of bullets by then because he's used them on me and Junior. So he stands there and he loads the gun right in front of her (Brisenia)," Gonzalez says.

Prosecutor Kellie Johnson asks, "And is this something you can see happening?"

Gonzalez answers, "I can hear it happening. I can hear her telling him to 'please don't shoot me.'"

The child is shot and killed.

The jury also heard the now-famous 911 call Gonzalez made before the killers came back and she opened fire on them:

The Star has the report from the courtroom of the 911 dispatcher's testimony:

Remsburg was called to the stand to lay the foundation for the dramatic and seemingly-never-ending call placed shortly after 1 a.m. May 30.

"Somebody just came in and shot my husband and daughter," Gonzalez tells Remsburg.

As she pleads for help and starts to tell Remsburg details of what has happened, she suddenly starts yelling.

"They're coming back! They're coming back in!"

At least five gunshots are heard before Gonzalez yells out "Get the (expletive) out of here!" and more gunshots ring out. (She later asks if her shooting at the gunman will be "held against her" and Remsburg laughs and tells her it was clearly self-defense.)

When she gets back to the phone, Gonzalez again pleads for Remsburg to hurry.

"They shot my husband and they shot my daughter and they shot me. Oh my God, I can't believe this is happening."

There are also, as always, some telling details in the less-spectacular testimony and evidence presented in the court, particularly Gonzalez' encounter with a teal van beforehand:

The day before the slayings, Gonzalez said she and Brisenia were out in their yard looking for some missing car keys when a teal minivan drove by very slowly.

The woman inside reluctantly waved at her when she waved at the van, Gonzalez said.

She'd never seen the van before and she knows just about everyone in town from working at The Mercantile, Gonzalez said.

The incident was so odd, she mentioned it to detectives and they later found the van at suspect Albert Gaxiola's house, with Jason Bush's blood in it.

And then there's the jewelry belonging to Gonzalez that turned up in Forde's possession:

The jewelry stolen from her home that night (and later found in Forde's possession) was stuff she rarely wore: a belt buckle she'd had since she was 17, her wedding ring, earrings belonging to her late mother-in-law, etc.

The belt buckle had a "G" on it for her name and she was able to show detectives she had a bracelet matching one of the necklaces that was recovered.

Be sure to read Will Bunch's excellent take on the story.

The L.A. Times report is here.

Our ongoing coverage of the Forde case is here.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Kris Kobach the Con Man: SPLC report lays bare Nativist spokesman's scam for local municipalities

2011-01-26T20:53:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

Well, we've known for some time that Kris Kobach -- one of the co-authors of Arizona's Nativist immigration law, SB1070, and a frequent guest on Fox News whenever they need a reliably right-wing talking point on various immigration issues -- is something of a crook and a liar, since he rarely appears on TV without misleading the audience and presenting one fake "fact" or another that turns out to be utterly false.

Now the Southern Poverty Law Center has revealed that -- prior to his recent election as Kansas' Secretary of State -- Kobach basically made a living by scamming various municipalities into adopting outrageously unconstitutional anti-immigration statutes, and then leaving them holding the very large, expensive, dripping and fetid-smelling bag:

When Mr. Kobach Comes to Town

[snip]

The towns that passed nativist laws in Pennsylvania, Missouri, Texas and Nebraska, along with the state of Arizona, have spent millions of dollars to defend them in court, and almost every judicial decision so far has gone against them. One community, faced with skyrocketing legal costs, had to raise property taxes, and another was forced to cut personnel and special events and even outsource its library.

That was just the beginning. The four towns and one state examined in this report all saw a crisis in race relations as conflicts between Latino immigrants and mostly white natives escalated. Latinos reported being threatened, shot at, subjected to racial taunts and more. Police are having trouble getting cooperation from any in their Latino communities. Pro-immigrant activists have been threatened with notes that promise to “shed blood” to “take back” communities. The mayor of one town had his house vandalized after opposing a proposed law and was warned by federal agents to be careful; he ended up retiring after four terms in office. Angry protests and counter-protests, along with dangerously rising tensions, have rocked one town after another. In some communities, business districts have largely collapsed.

Behind all of this stands one man: Kris Kobach, a former Kansas City law professor who was just elected Kansas secretary of state. For the better part of the last six years, Kobach has been chief legal counsel to the Immigration Reform Law Institute, which is the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). He helped to write and defend in court the laws in Hazleton, Valley Park, Farmers Branch, Fremont and Arizona, and he is seeking to do even more.

The report is quite complete, including a timeline for each of the four municipalities Kobach has "helped".

And in an important way, he's done the same thing for Arizona, where he convinced the electorate that a scapegoating strategy and installation of a police state for Latinos was the way to solve their immigration issues. The state is already suffering badly economically, and it's been made much worse by the economic boycott that resulted from SB1070 and the mass departure of Hispanics from the state. Kobach, of course, has had plenty of help in damaging Arizona's economy, including the state's governor. Meanwhile, as the state crumbles, the Arizona Senate president thinks the real imperative is to end birthright citizenship for the children of immigrants.

Of course, now that he's been elected Secretary of State in Kansas, Kobach can just walk away and smile. Meantime, as the SPLC observes, he gets to continue doing his work scamming communities eager to walk the bigot's path.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Securing the border: Why a fence will never work until we reform the system

2011-01-24T20:45:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

You could just about hear the heart attacks happening at Fox News -- home of Republican nativists' favorite rallying cry: 'We have to secure the border before we can have immigration reform!' -- the other morning last week when documentary filmmaker Roy Germano -- whose last movie, The Other Side of Immigration, is a must-see for anyone serious about the subject -- came on to discuss a little clip he made recently.

The clip, which he put up on YouTube, shows two American girls easily climbing over the border fence that Minutemen, authorities and right-wing talk-show blowhards all seem to believe will keep out illegal immigrants.

Obviously someone booked it at Fox because they thought it would demonstrate what a lousy job the Obama administration is doing on border security. But the clip itself actually made clear that the whole concept of using a fence to control immigration is a joke.

As Germano put it: "I thought it revealed that the fence is quite absurd, it's not doing the job it's supposed to do, it's a waste of money, and it also has a lot of unintended consequences."

And then he offered his thoughts on how to really make the borders secure -- and as he explained, the only way we're going to be able to do that is by having a rational system of immigration, instead of the outdated, xenophobic system we currently have in place. This, of course, is when the heart attacks started happening:

GERMANO: If we are really serious about our border security, I think it's in our interest to be monitoring and regulating the immigration flow that is inevitable. There is a multi-million-dollar -- hundreds of million-dollar -- industry out there of human smugglers that will try to smuggle people in. They will build tunnels under the fence, they will get people over the fence.

So we should be investing in an immigration system that actually gives people the opportunity to enter the country legally. The typical Mexican has almost no way of entering the U.S. legally. So we should be expanding the number of visas we offer so that employers can hire the workers they need to meet the labor demand in our country.

SCOTT: All right, y-you have just lit up our chat room, I'm sure, because there are lots of unemployed people in this country who would like to have jobs, and they say, 'Why are we letting people in where there's so much unemployment in America?'

GERMANO: But there are certain sectors of the economy where it's the old, you know, 'immigrants do jobs that Americans don't want to do.' I go to western New York state a lot and I visit family farms who have had ads in papers for 20 years and have never had a native-born speaker respond to that ad. And they depend on immigrant labor. But our H2A visa program, which is the farm worker visa program, only has less than 70,000 visas for 800,000 to 1.2 million jobs that need to be filled on our family farm.

We've discussed this point quite a bit too. The only problem is that Americans are not only in denial about the numbers of unskilled-labor jobs their economy produces, but the willingness and ability of native-born Americans to actually fill them.

Here's the original YouTube clip from Germano:

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Beck and Francis Fox Piven: Do we have to wait for someone to get hurt before Fox acts?

2011-01-24T20:42:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

Movement conservatives seem to believe that they've won the narrative after the tragic shootings in Tucson -- namely, that Jared Lee Loughner was just a nutcase and there was nothing political about his attack on a Democratic congresswoman.

Indeed, they seem to believe that it's now conventional wisdom that whenever an angry right-wing nut violently attacks an oft-demonized liberal target, it has nothing, nothing whatsoever to do with the demonizing rhetoric that preceded it. Just another "isolated incident." Even if we ARE up to 20 and counting.

The problem with this "wisdom"? Reality has a nasty way of intruding, as David at VC noted yesterday, from a New York Times report about how Beck's obsession with Frances Fox Piven has now produced death threats against her :

Never mind that Ms. Piven’s radical plan to help poor people was published 45 years ago, when Mr. Beck was a toddler. Anonymous visitors to his Web site have called for her death, and some, she said, have contacted her directly via e-mail.

In response, a liberal nonprofit group, the Center for Constitutional Rights, wrote to the chairman of Fox News, Roger Ailes, on Thursday to ask him to put a stop to Mr. Beck’s “false accusations” about Ms. Piven.

“Mr. Beck is putting Professor Piven in actual physical danger of a violent response,” the group wrote.

Fox News disagrees. Joel Cheatwood, a senior vice president, said Friday that Mr. Beck would not be ordered to stop talking about Ms. Piven on television. He said Mr. Beck had quoted her accurately and had never threatened her.

“ ‘The Glenn Beck Program,’ probably above and beyond any on television, has denounced violence repeatedly,” Mr. Cheatwood said.

Not as often, however, as it has denounced Frances Fox Piven. We've given some ripe examples in the video above, but really, it pales in comparison to a more complete list, such as this account from Media Matters.

We've already seen what happens when Fox hosts hold individual people up for extreme demonization. When Bill O'Reilly called Dr. George Tiller a "Baby Killer" some 28 times, it was no surprise when a kook already worked up by an environment of hateful rhetoric walked into a church and shot Tiller in the head. And when O'Reilly more recently attacked Rep. Jim McDermott, a right-wing nutcase from California called McDermott up and issued a long string of obscene death threats.

Glenn Beck is a particular case. When a Beck fan named Charles Wilson was inspired to call and threaten Sen. Patty Murray, we heard nothing from Fox News. Likewise, when it became clear that would-be Tides Foundation terrorist Byron Williams was directly inspired by Beck as well, not a word was heard.

Now, having been directly confronted over the threats to Piven, this supposed news network is actually trying to stonewall its way past reality.

So far, we've been lucky that no one outside of two injured Oakland police officers has been physically injured by the nutcases Beck inspires. But death threats are a real injury too.

Which raises the question: Is Fox waiting until someone actually physically attacks Frances Fox Piven before convincing Beck to reel it in?

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Michele Bachmann gets out and tests the waters for her 'presidential' run

2011-01-22T20:40:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

So Michele Bachmann was out in Iowa sniffing around this week, and she says she was "encouraged" by the results.

And yes, she really is running:

"The Iowa trip is part of a bigger picture. There's a national story line here," said Bachmann communications director Doug Sachtleben, virtually begging for national media coverage.

That kind of talk is usually a bank shot.

... However, even in an increasingly crowded GOP field, mumbling about running for president in this age of 24-hour news cycles can attract much publicity for potential candidates, unless you're Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty. And much publicity can attract crowds and, oh, by the way, much money. Especially if you appear to ride a rising tide of popularity and empowerment for successful conservative females.

Over at Megyn Kelly's Fox News show yesterday, the "Power Panel" chewed it over -- and largely reached the same conclusion. Indeed, what seems likely is that Bachmann actually is running for vice-president -- she wants to position herself as part of a Palin-Bachmann 2012 ticket -- or potentially as Romney-Bachmann ticket.

One can always dream, can't they?

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

O'Reilly promotes effort to recall Sheriff Dupnik for 'divisive' talk -- with Nazi-coddler Russell Pearce cheerleading

2011-01-22T20:37:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

The right-wing flying monkeys have been out in force in pursuit of Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik ever since he spoke an important truth last week, in the wake of the tragic shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 20 others, in calling out irresponsible, vitriolic right-wing talkers for creating the kind of political and cultural environment in Arizona where hateful violent acts are encouraged. One of the leaders in the "Get Dupnik" crowd, in fact, has been Fox News' Bill O'Reilly.

So now, encouraged by all the attention they're getting from Fox, the local Tea Partiers in Tucson are trying to get Dupnik recalled:

A group opposed to illegal immigration has begun an effort to recall the sheriff in a special election. Meanwhile, a Pima County tea party group is planning on holding a "Dump Dupnik" rally next week outside his office.

"I haven't been a fan of Dupnik's for a long time, but this really was the straw that broke the camel's back," said Tom Rompel, co-owner of Black Weapons Armory in Tucson. "He's law enforcement. We expect 'the facts, ma'am,' not his opinion. He leans far left, always has, and frankly, people have had enough."

You've gotta love how people who are big fans of Sheriff Joe Arpaio -- the state's most outspoken bigot -- hate when Clarence Dupnik expresses an opinion or two, eh?

Conservatives have bristled at Sheriff Dupnik's insinuation that Republicans and the tea party movement were somehow responsible for the rampage. The Pima County Tea Party Patriots plan to "indict" the sheriff at their rally for "politicizing the shootings, blaming free speech for the crime without evidence, failing to protect Giffords, failing to recuse himself from the investigation, and embarrassing the community in front of the nation," according to the Arizona Daily Star.

Sheriff Dupnik's office issued a statement Wednesday saying he would have no further comment on the shooting.

Dan Baltes, executive director of Americans Against Immigration Amnesty, said he began looking into the recall effort after being deluged by phone calls and e-mails from the group's members, including many in Arizona. The eight-month-old organization is based in Salt Lake City in neighboring Utah.

"I've gotten e-mails from people who support the sheriff, who support what he did, and who want me to keep my nose out of it," Mr. Baltes said. "But for every one of those, I'm getting 50 saying 'Thank you,' and that's from Republicans and Democrats alike."

The group needs to gather 90,809 valid signatures within 120 days to qualify the recall for the ballot. The recall would require a special election, which could be held at the earliest in March 2012, said Pima County Elections Director Brad Nelson.

You can imagine our surprise (or rather the complete lack thereof), then, when O'Reilly devoted a segment to promoting this effort. And guess who he brings on to attack Dupnik for his "divisive" rhetoric? Why, none other than that Nazi-coddling nativist state Senate president and noted Friend of Joe Arpaio, Russell Pearce:

PEARCE: He has inserted himself -- not only did he inflame the issue with calling his constituents and the citizens of the state of Arizona racists and bigots because they want the laws enforced and border secured. He ignores the fact that Rob Chris was murdered on the border during a debate of 1070. He ignores the fact that Brian Terry was just murdered on the border as a border patrol agent and 12 Phoenix police officers killed and I can go on and on and on.

It's outrageous that he would accuse us of being racist and bigots because we want our laws enforced.

But in addition to that -- in addition to that he has refused to enforce Senate Bill 1070. That's a violation of his oath of office.

See, it's actually Dupnik's open dismissal of SB1070 that really sticks in Pearce's craw -- especially since Pearce was its chief architect. Now that he's out promoting the effort to strip Latino immigrants' children of their birthright citizenship, guys like Dupnik continue to make him look bad.

But then, Pearce and O'Reilly don't need Clarence Dupnik around to look bad. They do that all by themselves.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Why does Glenn Beck insist on getting Niemoller's famous poem wrong?

2011-01-22T20:35:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

Glenn Beck has a history of appropriating Martin Niemoller's famous poem, "First They Came..." -- one of the most memorable descriptions of the creep of Nazi totalitarianism -- for his own purposes, often by way of describing his own self-martyrdom, because of course it's really about people like him:

"You ever heard of the old poem 'first they came for the Jews'? Well, first they came for the banks, then it was the insurance companies, then it was the car companies."

"First they came for the Jews and I stayed silent-- next I'll show you the very latest attacks on me ..."

He was at it again on Thursday, declaring that attempts to confront his penchant for violent rhetoric and its effects on the public were an evil attempt to silence and persecute poor Glenn:

BECK: But the pink symbol should be a lesson to everyone. I don't care what you are, who you are -- everyone!

"At first they came for the Jews, and I didn't say anything. And then they came --"

Silence equals death. Never -- never allow someone to take away your First Amendment right of free speech. It's number one for a reason! Because that's the most important -- your right to assemble, your right to speak out! It's Number One. Guard it. Protect it. Revel in it. Responsibly share it.

Of course, that's the issue, isn't it? Not that anyone wants to take away Beck's rights to free speech -- but they are concerned because he is so profoundly irresponsible with his abuse of his media megaphone to demonize and smear other people and indulge eliminationist rhetoric against his "progressive" nemeses.

But it's really quite revealing that Beck NEVER gets Niemoller's poem right. There are a number of different versions with slight variations, but the most common is this one:

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists ,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

The first two victim groups cited were Communists and trade unionists. Both of whom happen to be groups high on Glenn Beck's list of groups he likes to demonize.

Indeed, for most his tenure at Fox we've been hearing about how President Obama is eeeevil because he's "surrounding himself" with "dedicated Communists" like Van Jones:

And of course, someday, he warns, we ordinary liberals are going to have to take those Communists out by "shooting them in the head".

Maybe that's why Glenn Beck never can get Niemoller's poem right: It really is about people like him.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Ah, smell the civility: Heavily armed blogger applauded Tucson shootings: '1 Down, 534 To Go'

2011-01-21T20:33:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

[media id="19438" embed="true" image="true" download="true"]

Call Bill O'Reilly -- he seems to want to be Top Civility Cop these days. There's a case -- wait wait wait, I mean an "isolated incident" -- for him up in Massachusetts he needs to get right on top of:

Arlington Man Loses Gun License Due To Blog About Tucson Shooting

A blog threatening members of Congress in the wake of the Tucson, Arizona shooting has prompted Arlington police to temporarily suspend the firearms license of an Arlington man.

It was the headline “1 down and 534 to go” that caught the attention. “One” refers to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head in the rampage, while 534 refers to the other members of the U.S. House and Senate.

Police are investigating the “suitability” of 39-year-old Travis Corcoran to have a firearms license

Whaddya think, audience? Is this guy a Pinhead or a Patriot?

Well, given a chance to apologize or elaborate or just somehow indicate a tiny molecule of decency, our teabagging "libertarian" hero answered thus:

“I dislike Representatives and Senators, and I think that each and every one of them is doing grave harm to the United States, and to the freedoms of the citizens of the US.”

I'm sure Bill will be all over this. Or will Fox just pretend this story out of existence, as it always does when right-wingers inflict threats and violence against liberals and the government? Hmmmmmm. Tough one.

Now watch while the Tea Partiers and gun rights nutcases turn Corcoran into a free-speech martyr. Because urging your audience to kill members of Congress and other threats and incitements to violence constitutes protected speech to these loons.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

The Shawna Forde trial: Will the mainstream media bother to notice?

2011-01-21T20:27:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

There's another infamous shooting of a nine-year-old girl that is making headlines this week in Tucson. This time, we wonder if the rest of the media will bother to cover it.

The little girl's name was Brisenia Flores. She lived near the border with her parents and sister outside the town of Arivaca, Arizona. On May 30 of 2009, a woman named Shawna Forde, who led an offshoot unit of Minutemen who ran armed border patrols for patriotic "fun". Forde's gang had decided to go "operational," which meant they concocted a scheme to raid drug smugglers and take their money and drugs and use it to finance a border race war and "start a revolution against the government". They targeted the Flores home, which had neither money nor drugs, based on dubious information. They convinced Flores to let them in by claiming to be law-enforcement officers seeking fugitives, then shot him point-blank in the head when he questioned them and wounded his wife, Gina Gonzalez. And then, while she pleaded for her life, they shot Brisenia in cold blood in the head. (Her sister, fortunately, was sleeping over at a friend's.)

You can listen to the wounded mother's 911 call here:

As Terry Greene Sterling at the Daily Beast reports, Shawna Forde's trial finally opens this week, having been briefly delayed by the Giffords shooting.

Already, we're getting some fascinating details about that riveting 911 call:

Gonzalez testified Tuesday she recognized Forde for several reasons. It was the first time she'd seen her in person since the incident, she wasn't wearing makeup (the women in the photo lineup were wearing makeup), she had the same smile and her hair was styled the same way.

As for the smile, Gonzalez said that after the shootings, the home invaders ransacked her house and then left. However, when she was on the phone with 911, she looked up and saw the woman standing on the threshold, smiling.

"She saw me standing there and her face dropped and she said 'Oh, (expletive)," Gonzalez said.

The woman went back outside and a few seconds later Gonzalez said she and the tall man exchanged shots. (Prosecutors think the tall guy was Jason Bush.)

We've been following the Forde case closely from the day it was first reported, in large part because it tells us so much about the mindset and behind-the-scenes operations of would-be border vigilantes.

Indeed, one of the things we look forward most to learning from this trial is the extent to which Minutemen cofounder Jim Gilchrist was involved: there is a considerable likelihood it will turn out he tipped off Forde that federal authorities were looking for her in connection with the murders.

We're also looking forward to perhaps finally seeing some coverage of the case in the mainstream media -- perhaps even Fox News, which has been assiduous in refusing to do so. I have to admit I'm baffled that, in a cable-TV business that prizes riveting audio snippets, it's gotten so little attention elsewhere.

But then, this case always cut against everyone's favorite "neighborhood watch" narrative. It's about time we laid that one to rest for good.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Glenn Beck: 'You're going to have to shoot them in the head,' and assorted other instances of violent rhetoric

2011-01-21T20:25:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

You know how Glenn Beck is now innocently proclaiming that he doesn't use violent rhetoric? On his radio show, he claimed you had to go all the way back to 2005 and his rant about killing Michael Moore to find any.

Er, not exactly.

For example, there was this from June 9, 2010:

The media and the politician have all of this wrong. In every single walk of life — you want to know why TV doesn't reflect you? You want to know why Washington doesn't reflect you? Because they don't understand, from the radical revolutionaries to the Islamic extremists — and yes, DOJ, they do exist — to the Tea Party movements.

Just because you in Washington and you who are so out of touch with life in the media, just because you don't believe in anything doesn't mean nobody else does. We do. You know why you're confused by this show? It's because I believe in something. You don't.

Tea parties believe in small government. We believe in returning to the principles of our Founding Fathers. We respect them. We revere them. Shoot me in the head before I stop talking about the Founders. Shoot me in the head if you try to change our government.

I will stand against you and so will millions of others. We believe in something. You in the media and most in Washington don't. The radicals that you and Washington have co-opted and brought in wearing sheep's clothing — change the pose. You will get the ends.

You've been using them? They believe in communism. They believe and have called for a revolution. You're going to have to shoot them in the head. But warning, they may shoot you.

Now, a few critics have misread this particular screed a bit; he's not advising his audience to shoot these liberals in the head, rather, he's actually advising mainstream Democrats that someday they're going to have to "shoot" the "far left revolutionaries" they've invited into their tents. But there's no question, regardless, that this is in fact classic violent rhetoric.

And as Jeffrey Feldman warned back in March when discussing the violent rhetoric of the 2010 campaign season:

When Americans threaten to use firearms to enforce their political views, the violent threats carried by that language undermines the system of public debate on which our system depends. Healthy political debate can sustain a great deal of anger and passion, but it cannot sustain repeated threats of violence and calls for violent assault as a form of political engagement.

Moreover, this particular ramble is so incoherent and confusing that he might as well be urging his audience to shoot liberals -- because frankly, that's what it comes out sounding like.

Perhaps just as importantly, rhetoric like this also sends a message: it gives permission to violent (and perhaps mentally unstable) actors to do their thing. Guys like Jared Loughner.

I've added some further examples of Beck's violent rhetoric -- all from his tenure at Fox, in the past two years -- to the video above in case anyone needed further evidence that, once again, Glenn Beck is lying.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

A former neo-Nazi fesses up: White-supremacist rhetoric was a foundation of sand

2011-01-20T20:22:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

If you want some insight into the culture behind the Spokane MLK Day parade bomb attack, read this fascinating bit of self-confession

I want to formally apologize for the image of hate that I helped bring upon this decent community. I could tell you I was ordered to do what I did and that I was young and dumb, manipulated and lied to, but it doesn't change the fact that it was still me. I wish I could take it back.

You don't have to forgive me and I don't blame you if you don't, but I need you, Coeur d'Alene, to know that I and so many before and after me are wrong. Hate is pointless, destructive to everyone involved, selfish, childish, and cowardly.

I'm sorry.

My name is Zach Beck and this is my story.

I was led to believe that without the white race, civilization as we know it would cease to exist. That the white race is the race of God and therefore it is the duty of the white race to bring forth His will, law, and word on Earth as it is in Heaven. That all non-whites are inferior to the white race and are subjected to our will, God's will. The proof of this? The Holy Bible. This is just a small piece of the foundation of the "white power" movement. I've spent the last 10 years eating, sleeping, talking, walking, thinking and believing this lie.

I was wrong.

I thought this was particularly noteworthy:

I grew up in California and Arizona playing an array of sports. While most kids tried to decide which party they wanted to go to that weekend, I was trying to decide between USC and UCLA. The first concert I attended was the Grateful Dead. My hair was long, my shirts were tie-dyed, and my friends were of every color and background. I dated girls of every race and lost my virginity to a black girl.

Two years later, he was a hardcore neo-Nazi and Aryan Brother. I remember seeing Beck in 2001 accompanying Richard Butler at the court hearings in Coeur d'Alene ordering the Aryan Nations compound be turned over, after the AN lost the property in a lawsuit over an assault by AN thugs. He was awfully baby-faced then, and I remember wondering how young guys like that got recruited into hate groups like the AN.

I also remember, incidentally, that Richard Butler periodically issued stern denunciations of violence as a tactic too.

The Zach Beck story is a reminder, perhaps, that young men can be extremely volatile at that age, especially when it comes to political ideology. People who know, say, a pot-smoking leftie in 2007 might be shocked at the wingnutty, paranoid young man they would encounter in 2011.

Just sayin'.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Hmmm. Elisabeth Hasselbeck seems to have forgotten that she called Palin's crosshairs ad 'despicable'

2011-01-20T20:18:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

Here's Elisabeth Hasselbeck last night on Sean Hannity's Fox News show, making excuses for Sarah Palin and her inexcusable "crosshairs" ads after the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, one of the ad's targets:

HANNITY: You know, I fear we are getting to the point, you can't say anything -- you can't say war room, you can't say targeting. You can't, you know, say, we are going to put a bull's-eye on a map.

HASSELBECK: Yes we can say that. And I will use yes we can. And this is why I believe and I think the more that we link and say, we cannot say anything -- I mean, look, I grew up in a family that was based on speak kind words as much as possible and if you don't, apologize. Work hard and operate with integrity. That goes without saying. I think most civil people in the United States of America agree that you shouldn't go outside of those boundaries. Right now to even say that we have to curb what we're saying only links any rhetoric to what happened in Tucson. There's no link. We haven't found a link. There's no evidence that man even watched cable news. That he heard Sarah Palin say anything or saw the map with crosshairs. None. So the more that this conversation continues, in my opinion, it is a weak link that is trying to be strengthened by the left to Sarah and this man again.

And here's Hasselbeck last March, when she agreed with her colleagues at The View that the ads were outrageous and dangerous:

"This hasn't been a great week in terms of, I think, the Constitution and where it says that you're supposed to, you know, everybody is, has a mandate to have insurance. But I think the way some Republicans are handling this is nothing more than purely despicable," Hasselbeck said. "The names that are next to and being highlighted by those crosshairs -- I think it's an abuse of the Second Amendment. I also feel as though every single person on here is a mother, a father, a friend, a brother, a sister, and to take it to this level is -- it's disappointing to see this come from the Party, and I would hope that leaders like Sarah Palin would end this."

Joy Behar thanked her for it, shaking her hand. "Republicans are not speaking out against this and you may be the first one to do it, and I salute you, my girl." Whoopi Goldberg would say "Republicans, whatever comes from this it's on your heads."

Something else Hasselbeck said was just flat-out bats--t crazy:

HANNITY: It is very sinister to me because I think there's an effort here to silence opposition voices. And, you know, to exploit a tragedy within two hours the way Paul Krugman did. Now, you really point out, this guy worshipped skulls, he is an atheist, he read Mein Kampf, The Communist Manifesto and smoked dope, and never listen to talk radio according to friends and never watch political debate and hated George Bush. But the narrative has been blame conservatives.

HASSELBECK: But we never heard any of that for the first four days. You know, the left wing media, unfortunately Sean, and I've been trying not to have to blame anybody in this situation for, you know, wrecking the American people heard by unfortunately, they were so drunk on this cocktail of trying to convict Sarah Palin, that they neglected -- when I say neglect, that is with a huge bet that I will say that, neglected to give the American people information because they weren't searching for it. They had already found their killer.

They had already given a man total justification for taking a gun and taking the lives of several human beings and then trying to take the lives of more. Awful, I mean, today we are blessed with the news, right? We have great news about Giffords. And I think that that should have been their first priority, giving us the news, making sure that we understood that the rest were safe. They had the killer. But if you are a crazy person out there, and you know that you have an automatic out to blame it on a politician, what do you think you are going to do? They are lucky that not one more person went out on a spree that day.

What? Excuse me? Did I hear this right? Is Hasselbeck actually claiming that the people who warned against the potential for violence being inspired by Palin's ads were actually giving an excuse to the killer? Not only is that more outrageously speculative than anything written yet about Loughner, it points the finger right back at herself -- since at the time, she was one of the people criticizing Palin for the ads.

I guess Hasselbeck is blaming herself for Jared Loughner. Who'da thunk?

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

In Spokane, they know that MLK Day bomb wasn't an 'isolated event'

2011-01-19T20:14:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

[H/t Heather]

Well, as Nancy Goldstein points out at The Nation, the national media were pretty reluctant at first to identify Monday's thwarted bombing of the MLK Day parade in Spokane as domestic terrorism -- but not only was I not fooled, neither were the folks in Spokane, particularly not the FBI agents who know the territory.

As the Spokesman Review story points out, Spokane has a long and unfortunate history -- being the largest city close to what used to be the Aryan Nations compound in northern Idaho, 40 miles east -- of having to deal with domestic terrorism -- the kind committed by right-wing extremists who hate the government and hate nonwhites:

City Council President Joe Shogan praised the people who found the backpack and the officials who defused it. He noted the 1996 bombing of City Hall and said citizens must still be vigilant to prevent attacks.

“It would be nice to think that all this kind of activity was in the past, but obviously, it’s not,” Shogan said. “Too often, there’s that attitude that it can’t happen here. Well, it is happening.”

A pipe bomb packed with nails and screws exploded outside Spokane City Hall on April 29, 1996. There were no injuries, but the blast blew out a window in one of the doors and sent shrapnel flying into Riverfront Park.

Federal prosecutors later indicted white supremacists Chevie Kehoe, of Colville, and Danny Lee, of Yukon, Okla., for the bombing. Both also were later convicted for a 1996 triple murder in Arkansas. The two were accused of working to overthrow the government to set up a whites-only nation.

That was hardly the only time domestic terrorists have struck Spokane. Some of the earliest crimes committed by The Order in their 1984 crime spree occurred in Spokane -- mostly robberies. As it later turned out, the perpetrators were based in Metaline Falls, about an hour's drive north of the city.

Then there was the 1996 crime spree of the self-proclaimed "Phineas Priesthood" gang, which included a couple of bank robberies, the bombing of a Spokesman Review newspaper plant, and the bombing of a Planned Parenthood clinic.

This might be another "isolated incident" unconnected to any political agenda to the folks at Fox. But people in the Northwest know better.

Will Bunch raises the right question:

Has right-wing carping killed media coverage of major "domestic terrorism" case in Spokane?

An explosion and the potential for multiple murders that a shrapnel bomb could have caused to those celebrating Dr. King's legacy would have been a staggering blow to a nation that is still reeling and feeling the aftershocks of the first assassination attempt against a member of Congress in nearly 33 years. Even though the bomb didn't explode, the episode raises deeply troubling new questions about the extent of violent politically fueled anger in America in 2011, and why it seems that liberal targets like Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and now King Day marchers like the children pictured at top are the ones in the crosshairs, to use the controversial word of the day.

In other words, it's what Joe Biden might call a BFD. But you wouldn't know that if, for example, you visited the two websites that -- in my own 30 years of experience as a journalist, for better or worse -- do more than any other to set the agenda on national coverage in newsrooms across the country.

One of those (note I said "for better or worse") is The Drudge Report, which ultimate Beltway insider Mark Halperin has said "rules our world." In the 16 or so hours since the FBI went public with the "domestic terrorism" angle, Matt Drudge has spotlighted articles about things like a man arrested for taking photos at Miami airport, a blogger who may lose his firearms permit for a post related to the Tucson massacre, and laser incidents against airplanes -- but nothing about the thwarted Spokane bombing.

OK, so that's Matt Drudge -- but the silence of the leading mainstream news website -- that of the New York Times -- is a little harder to explain. I've checked their home page at least a half-dozen times since last night, and I have yet to see a featured story on the FBI investigating "domestic terrorism" in Washington State. The lack of Times coverage may explain while for the most part, the coverage of this story on cable TV -- the people who routinely hyped run of the mill car chases and blown-tire airplane landings -- has been very minimal. I say for the most part because there have been a couple of exceptions. "The Rachel Maddow Show" on MSNBC featured the Spokane story as major breaking news at the top of its broadcast last night, and for a time it was the lead story on the Huffington Post. Major news outlets -- but with a liberal orientation.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Bill O'Reilly dismisses evidence linking Beck to Byron Williams -- but Arizona 'threat' incident is a bigger deal

2011-01-19T20:10:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

Bill O'Reilly thinks the Eric Fuller story is a Big Fracking Deal, revealign the depths of depravity of the "far left" and their use of violence -- so much so that he devoted his opening "Talking Points Memo" segment to this thesis. A little later in the show, he brought on Alan Colmes and Monica Crowley to talk it over.

Crowley, predictably, complained that the "story was buried" by the rest of the media. That's because, in fact, it was rather more similar to the right-wing O'Reilly fan's arrest last week for threatening Rep. Jim McDermott -- which is to say, the story dealt with a threat and not actual violence. Did anyone happen to notice Fox News covering that story? I sure didn't.

But then Colmes started in with some serious points:

COLMES: Look, I object to something you said in the opening talking points. You said that the logical argument could be made that the far left encouraged an unbalanced guy. There's no more evidence of that than that the far right encouraged this guy Loughner to do what he did.

O'REILLY: Wait. There is evidence in the specificity of what the man said. The names that he used in the context of the threat.

Hmmmmm. Well, using that same criteria, we can definitively connect the man who threatened Jim McDermott to Bill O'Reilly now. Because not only did he call and threaten McDermott on the very same day that O'Reilly's column attacking him was published, but the caller specifically threatened McDermott over the very same issue for which O'Reilly attacked him.

But then it got really serious:

O'REILLY: Loughner had no -- and testimony now has revealed -- that he didn't watch cable TV. He didn't listen to talk radio.

COLMES: There is no evidence -- look, you could make the case that Byron Williams went to attack the Tides Foundation and shot up the California Highway Patrol because of stuff that Glenn Beck said about the Tides Foundation.

O'REILLY: You can't make that case.

COLMES: Sure you can. That's just as much equivalency there as what you're talking about!

O'REILLY: No, there isn't, because the overwhelming debate last week was about this story. It wasn't one guy. It was everywhere.

COLMES: But when a guy goes and wants to go attack the Tides Foundation and shoots up the California Highway Patrol because Beck is vilifying them and the ACLU -- there's equivalence!

O'REILLY: All I'll give you is it's circumstantial. But the evidence is far more compelling --

COLMES: You are doing, Bill, the same thing you are accusing the left of doing, by accusing the left of violent rhetoric.

O'REILLY: No I'm not. No I'm not. I'm only dealing in the facts. And the facts as we know it were presented.

O'Reilly is just flat-out lying. Because it was three months ago that a devastating story from Media Matters provided all the evidence you need to make that connection -- since Byron Williams himself went on the record and explained quite ineluctably that he was directly inspired by Glenn Beck.

Here are some of the things Williams said:

"I'm not gonna say anyone is worthwhile," he replies. "I would have never started watching Fox News if it wasn't for the fact that Beck was on there. And it was the things that he did, it was the things he exposed that blew my mind. I said, well, nobody does this."

... Byron says he thinks Beck has improved in recent months. "I don't think he's a natural newscaster, you know what I mean?" he says. "I look at it more like a schoolteacher on TV, you know? He's got that big chalkboard and those little stickers, the decals. I like the way he does it."

... "You know, I'll tell you," he says, "Beck is gonna deny everything about violent approach and deny everything about conspiracies, but he'll give you every reason to believe it. He's protecting himself, and you can't blame him for that. So, I understand what he's doing."

... "And I'd say, well, you know, that's the thing. It's that anything you do is going to be considered promoting terror attacks or promoting violence. So now they've got Beck labeled as this guy that is trying to incite violence. And what I say is that if the truth incites violence, it means that we've been living too long in the lies."

I don't believe O'Reilly is actually ignorant of these facts -- in fact, they read Media Matters almost obsessively over at Fox. O'Reilly is simply lying baldfacedly and pretending not to know these facts exist.

And Monica? Perhaps when your channel actually reports anything on the Byron Williams matter or Charles Habermann's threats, or for that matter any of the litany of threats and violence against liberals and the "government" perpetrated by right-wing extremists over the past two and a half years -- threats Fox either ignores completely or dismisses as "isolated incidents" -- then we may begin to take your complaint that no one reported much on the Fuller case seriously.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Right-wingers want to make Obama's message in Tucson into vindication for their hatemongering

2011-01-18T17:18:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

You just knew that when President Obama issued his call for a return to civility last week in Tucson, folks on the right would happily embrace the simple standard he elucidated -- "It's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we're talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds" -- to everyone but themselves.

Sure enough, there was Bloviating BillO last night on Fox, complaining because that evil liberal Richard Cohen had called Sarah Palin stupid, and Bill Maher said that the Founders would despise the Tea Partiers:

Delightful. Now, I don't hold Mr. Maher to the same standard as The Washington Post because he's a comedian, a man who makes a living expressing a point of view. But apparently the president's point of view, more civility, is not being embraced by Mr. Maher.

Also, I've gotten a lot of mail asking me why I don't come down on right-wing talk radio, and it's the same thing: Talk radio is entertainment. People on there make a living expressing opinions. It's not a news forum; therefore the standards are not the same.

Of course not -- they exist in the zone known as the Fox Double Standard: If it attack liberals and Democrats, it's OK. Otherwise not.

And then he gets into outright projection:

Immediately after President Obama's speech last Wednesday, "Talking Points" said that the call for civility would most likely not be answered, and we pointed to the money train as the primary reason.

Once again, there is big money in the hate industry, and it's easy to attack people.

Indeed there is -- after all, look at all the dough Fox is rolling in.

And he's right: Obama's call to civility most likely will not be answered ... by ANYONE on the Right. They're too busy pretending their vicious, violent and eliminationist rhetoric has no effect on people.

Especially rhetoric that singles out people for demonization and elimination. Rhetoric like this:

O'REILLY: So you would like to see the same kind of situation that happened after 9/11 attack now, where they would all come out and say, "Enough with this crap"?

BECK: Of course.

O'REILLY: Right.

BECK: Every American wants that. What I...

O'REILLY: Not every American. George Soros doesn't want that.

BECK: Frances Fox Piven doesn't want that.

O'REILLY: Who is Frances Fox Piven?

BECK: Cloward-Piven, from the 1960s. That's a theory that was inspired by the Watts riots and is being used right now. And she is actively, actively -- Columbia University professor used to be. I think she's -- at CUNY now. But she is actively saying, "Rise up, embrace your anger. Turn on your bosses, turn on the politicians."

O'REILLY: All right. She's Black Panther. Overthrow, kill the pigs.

BECK: She is -- she stands with the Clintons. Signing. She's very...

O'REILLY: Still around?

BECK: Oh, yes.

Yeah, that's some civility standard. Oh, but I forget -- O'Reilly obviously operates inside the Fox double Standard Zone too.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Just another 'isolated incident': Lethal bomb at MLK Day parade in Spokane spotted and disarmed before it can go off

2011-01-18T17:14:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

So much for civility ...

Bill Morlin reports for the SPLC:

A backpack bomb with the potential of killing or injuring dozens of people was found Monday along the route of a Martin Luther King Day “unity march” in downtown Spokane, Wash., authorities said today.

“It was a device that clearly was intended to harm or kill people,’’said Frank Harrill, a senior FBI agent and spokesman for the bureau’s Inland Northwest Joint Terrorism Task Force.

The FBI posted a $20,000 reward Tuesday and released three photographs, including one of the black Swiss-Army backpack that contained the destructive device.

Harrill would not discuss the type of explosive or its construction, including whether the backpack contained an explosive shield intended to spray shrapnel toward potential victims. He also declined to say if the device was intended to be detonated remotely or by a timer.

“It was set to detonate during a unity march on the King Holiday, so, obviously it had political or social overtones,’’ Harrill said.

There was no threat made before the device was discovered by three construction workers about a block from the city’s Opera House and Convention Center where various speakers, including Spokane Mayor Mary Verner, spoke after the march.

Here's the pictures of the backpack:

As KREM-TV reports, the bomb also disrupted the march temporarily, forcing it to take another route:

A witness found the backpack around 9:30 A.M. and called police. The witness told KREM 2 News the backpack appeared to have wires sticking out of it.

Police secured a safety zone around the device when they arrived on scene. Spokane City-County Explosives Disposal Unit used a robot to set off a charge on the bag to disrupt the device.

Roads remained closed in the area most of the day while authorities continued their investigation.

But I'm sure this just another isolated incident. Right? We're up to 20 and counting over the past two and a half years, for what it's worth.

The Spokesman-Review has more.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Beck compares himself to Martin Luther King again. Again, he acts more like MLK's persecutors

2011-01-18T17:10:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

Glenn Beck -- who's been doing his best to rip off Martin Luther King's legacy for some time now -- of course continued to do so in MLK's birthday yesterday, claiming he has a special affinity with King. How, you may ask? Why, because King too was accused by leading papers of the day of fomenting violence associated with the Civil Rights movement:

BECK: So here they are -- blaming Martin Luther King -- they're blaming him for the violence! That's the opposite of what he was. But this is the Establishment. This is the elitist view. It's what they wanted to print at the time -- that was the script. It didn't matter what people were seeing on TV -- it clearly was not Martin Luther King's fault. It might have been Malcolm X -- not related to the Martin Luther King movement. It was not William Ayers -- I mean, William Ayers was doing it, but William Ayers was not connected to Martin Luther King. Black Panthers -- not King. But that didn't matter to the media. The media just stuck to what was previously written because the elites had their story.

Of course, there's an important component that Beck is omitting here: The violence that often accompanied civil-rights marches were called "race riots," and they largely entailed assaults by angry conservative whites on the black marchers. This was the violence for which the editorialists in Chicago were absurdly blaming King.

Which underscores the real context that Beck loves to omit from his Martin Luther King encomiums: The people who were attacking King, viciously and violently, were conservatives. The people who supported him and marched with him were progressives.

Indeed, it wasn't just elite white newspapers who were accusing King of fomenting violence -- most notably, it was the deeply right-wing segregationists and race-baiters who were themselves the cause of so much of the violence around the marches who were then (in classic Southern "bloody shirt" style) claiming to be victims of black violence at hands of King and his marchers. These were the accusations the editorialists blithely picked up and ran with.

As Rick Perlstein explains in his great history of that era, Nixonland: "The notion that Martin Luther King was seeding violent confrontation became a conservative article of faith."

Nixonland also makes clear just who in Chicago was responsible for the violence that the editorial writers were blaming on King (p. 119):

August 5. Six hundred open-housing activists, ten thousand counter-demonstrators. Some wore Nazi helmets. Others waved Confederate battle flags, carried George Wallace banners, swastika placards that helpfully explained "The Symbol of White Power."

Martin Luther King, Mahalia Jackson by his side, led his legions forth: "We are bound for the promised land!"

"Kill those niggers!"

"We want Martin Luther Coon!"

Police trying to keep the two sides apart were screamed at: "Nigger-loving cops!" "God, I hate niggers and nigger-lovers," a reporter overheard an old lady say.

Martin Luther King walked past.

"Kill him! Kill him!"

"Roses are red, violets are black, King would look good with a knife in his back."

Instead he got a baseball-sized rock above his ear. He slumped to the ground -- the Gandhian moment of truth. "I think everybody in that line wanted to kill everybody that was on the other side of the line," a marcher later recalled. King got up and kept on marching. We shall overcome.

On the approach to Halvorsen Realty, someone did throw a knife at King's back. It caught some white kid in the neck instead. King had marched six weeks earlier through the Mississippi town where the civil rights workers Goodman, Chaney, and Schwermer were murdered. He had called it the most savage place he had ever seen. Now revised his opinion: "I think the people of Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate."

Here's a representative sample of the kind of things "elite" conservatives said about King at the time:

As I explained previously:

This, you see, was a flier that was distributed widely as part of a campaign to discredit King as a Communist. Among the foremost leaders in that campaign, especially among Mormons, was none other than the Church's future president, Ezra Taft Benson.

Here are some prime quotes from Benson:

“LOGAN, UTAH-Former Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson charged Friday night that the civil-rights movement in the South had been ‘formatted almost entirely by the Communists.’ Elder Benson, a member of the Council of the Twelve of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said in a public meeting here that the whole civil-rights movement was ‘phony.’” (Deseret News, Dec. 14, 1963)

“The Communist program for revolution in America has been in progress for many years and is far advanced. While it can be thwarted in a fairly short period of time merely by sufficient exposure, the evil effects of what has already been accomplished cannot be removed overnight. The animosities, the hatred, the extension of government control into our daily lives–all this will take time to repair. The already-inflicted wounds will be slow to heal. First of all, we must not place blame on the Negroes. They are merely the unfortunate group that has been selected by professional Communist agitators to be used as the primary source of cannon fodder. Not one in a thousand Americans–black or white–really understands the full implications of today’s civil-rights agitation. The planning, direction, and leadership come from the Communists, and most of those are white men who fully intend to destroy America by spilling Negro blood, rather
than their own.

Next, we must not participate in any so-called ‘blacklash’ activity which might tend to further intensify inter-racial friction. Anti-Negro vigilante action, or mob action, of any kind fits perfectly into the Communist plan. This is one of the best ways to force the decent Negro into cooperating with militant Negro groups. The Communists are just as anxious to spearhead such anti-Negro actions as they are to organize demonstrations that are calculated to irritate white people.

We must insist that duly authorized legislative investigating committess launch an even more exhaustive study and expose the degree to which secret Communists have penetrated into the civil rights movement. The same needs to be done with militant anti-Negro groups. This is an effective way for the American people of both races to find out who are the false leaders among them” (Ezra Taft Benson, General Conference Report, Oct. 1967).

See, in order for Glenn Beck to convince his fellow conservatives to claim the mantle of the Civil Rights movement, he essentially has to persuade millions of people who have opposed it with every fiber of their beings for most of their lives to completely reverse course and claim the opposite of their former beliefs.

This is the juncture where Beck's "Civil Rights" campaign runs smack into one of his own long-running threads -- namely, he has doggedly accused the Obama administration of harboring "Marxists" and "Communists": that was, after all, the predicate of his attacks on Van Jones. That happens to be consonant with Beck's running espousal of the works of Mormon leader W. Cleon Skousen -- a man who was in fact a close friend and ally of Ezra Taft Benson's, and shared Benson's belief that Martin Luther King was a secret Communist.

Does all this talk of secret Communist affiliations sound familiar? It should -- because one talk-show host in particular has been using it to smear, of all people, African American leaders, as a way to smear the nation's first African American president:

[embed src="http://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/flash/mediaplayer316.swf" flashvars="config=http://mediamatters.org/embed/cfg2?id=200909010028" width="425" height="300" resize="1" fid="10"]

We saw how that turned out, didn't we?

Beck doesn't remind us of Martin Luther King. He reminds us of the people who fomented lethal hatred against him. And then tried to claim that their violent and vicious rhetoric had nothing, nothing at all to do with his assassination.

Seems like a good lesson to remember on his birthday.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Sarah Palin tops the Lame List with her most pathetic, excuse-making, accusatory interview yet

2011-01-18T12:52:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

Boy, it really doesn't get much more lame than Sarah Palin's latest Hannity Job last night on Fox. Via Lynn Sweet:

HANNITY: A lot of these initial stories, Governor, had to do with this map that your PAC had put up during the last campaign, and the fact that Congresswoman Giffords was one of the people on, quote, "the target list," in the crosshairs that were there. What could you tell us about this map? And I'll get into more Questions after that.

PALIN: Well, that map wasn't an original graphic. In fact, for many, many years, maps in political races have been used to target certain districts that people would feel that they can get into those districts and find someone whom they believe would represent the constituents' will better than incumbent. And that is what this map represented that we used on my PAC. And the graphic that we used was crosshairs targeting the different districts. And, again, that's not original. In fact, Democrats have been using it for years. In fact, Bob Beckel, I believe that he had bragged on your show, Sean, that he is the one who invented these crosshairs or these targets. So, you know, that came up right away, that, oh, it must be a cause of this horrendous evil act of this shooter, that perhaps he saw that map and that incited him towards violence, which, of course, is ridiculous. Again, it's not an original use of an icon or a graphic.

Of course, what had gotten a lot of people's attention well before the Tucson tragedy was that Palin's 2010 campaign was soaked in violent, gun-related rhetoric like this, including exhortations to "Take Them Out" accompanying the gunsight graphic, as well as her oft-repeated exhortation to followers to "Lock and Load" and "Don't Retreat, Reload!" It just happened that Gabrielle Giffords was thus not just targeted by the graphic, but by Palin's rhetoric.

But doesn't she just sound like she's squirming like a seven-year-old, trying to explain to her teacher that honest, her dog really did eat her homework last night?

It continued on in this vein, only getting much worse when they tackled the subject of her wildly inappropriate appropriation of the term "blood libel" to describe her own supposed martyrdom:

HANNITY: And we are back with more of our exclusive sit-down interview with former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Governor, when you finally released your video, not surprising, more controversy involving you. I want to give you a chance to respond to this. One was the timing of the release of the video, which was I believe the day before the memorial. And the second one was the term -- "but especially within hours of the tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible." And, you know, some of your critics saying, you didn't know the historical significance. Other people criticized you for that phrase. But I want you to address the timing and that phrase.

PALIN: I don't know how the heck they would know if whether I did or didn't know the term "blood libel," nobody has ever asked me. And "blood libel" obviously means being falsely accused of having blood on your hands. And in this case that's exactly what was going on. And yes, the historical knowledge that people have of the term blood libel, it goes back to the Jews who were falsely accused back in medieval European times of using the blood of children. And you know, the criticism of even the timing of this statement is being used as another diversion, because I believe that there are many on the left, many critics, who don't want, for instance, Congress, to buckle down, get back to work.

There's this trifecta thing going on in our country right now that's going to bring America to her knees if Congress doesn't start addressing the issues at hand. That being our growing debt, a looming energy crisis if we don't start domestically developing our resources, and some of the national security policies that have been adopted and enacted, like the signing and the ratification of the START treaty that Russia's Duma won't even ratify because there are misinterpretations of what the preamble means.

So, we have these things going on right now that have got to be addressed, and Congress has got to get back to work. And it's just much easier, I believe, for critics of common-sense conservative agenda to try to divert and distract from the issues at hand, those tasks that must be addressed today.

HANNITY: What did you think of the criticism of those, though, in the Jewish community about the use of that term? I know others came to your defense, but what did you think about the critics?

PALIN: I think the critics, again, were using anything that they could gather out of that statement. And I'm, you know, you can -- you can spin up anything out of anybody's statements that are released and use them against the person who is making the statement. But, no, I appreciated those who understood what it is that I meant, that a group of people being falsely accused of having blood on their hands, that is what blood libel means. And just two days before I released my statement, an op-ed in the "Wall Street Journal" had that term in its title and that term has been used for eons, Sean.

Seriously? Her best excuse was that noted right-wing moron Glenn Reynolds used the term a few days before? Why doesn't she just admit that's where she got it from in the first place?

Guess it was more important to suggest that the attention paid to her idiocy was actually part of an insidious media plot to divert attention from the really pressing issues in Congress. Yyyyyyeah. OK.

As they useta say at Almost Live: "Lame! Lame! Lame! Lame!" "Indescribably lame." "L-L-A-A-M-M-E-E!"

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

The Battle Hymn of Sarah Palin

2011-01-17T21:35:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

Divine inspiration from somewhere in the heartland. I'll just let it speak for itself. And Sarah.

Here are the lyrics:

She's a cold blast from Alaska
Ingrained with common sense
She's not a Harvard lawyer
But she knew what the Founders meant
A cold blast from the north
That freezes Congress in their tracks
With God and the Tea Party
She's gonna take it back

[Chorus]
Sarah Palin, she won't listen to their bunk
Sarah Palin's comin' south to hunt some skunk
Sarah Palin, she'll throw them all in jail
And when she gets to Washington
It'll be cold as hell

Sarah has the wisdom
To walk through an open door
She is stomping out the wretches
Where the evil lines are stored
She will scrub the floors and sweep the riff raff into cracks
With God and the Tea Party
She's gonna take it back

[Chorus]

[Spoken]
Congress patted themselves on the back
For some new bill they just passed
I watch as my freedom slowly runs through an hourglass
They think they spend our money better than we do
But they can talk until they're blue and old
'Cause if they ever gave us anything
They always wanted something in return
Sarah knows.

Sarah's marching home

YouTube version is here.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Sorry, right-wing talkers. Loughner's rampage was a clear act of political terrorism directed at a liberal 'government' target

2011-01-17T18:39:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

Folks on the right are feeling quite confident that their tracks leading up to last weekend's tragedy in Arizona have all been covered, now that the Village has reached a consensus that, because Jared Loughner was probably mentally ill (and at a bare minimum profoundly unstable), his killing rampage couldn't possibly have been politically motivated.

The running line is that liberals who dared point out that vicious right-wing rhetoric directed at people like Giffords played a role in this "jumped to conclusions" before "the evidence was in". We think they may want to look in the mirror -- because as the evidence comes in, it's looking more and more like those liberals were right all along.

Like the crew of right-wing wankers who populate Fox's Journal Editorial Report, led by Paul Gigot and Dan Henninger, as well as the execrable James Taranto and Dorothy Rabinowitz:

GIGOT: Let's give an example of this. I want to read an excerpt from Monday's editorial of "The New York Times." "It is facile and mistaken to attribute this particular madman's act to Republicans or Tea Party members. But it is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger that has produced the vast majority of these threats, setting the nation on edge." Dan, your response.

HENNINGER: My response is that it has not only produced the vast majority of the anger that did that, it has produced the vast majority of anger that defeated them in the November elections, OK.

GIGOT: But it's not violent, Dan.

HENNINGER: Look, what Jared Loughner did has nothing to do with what we're talking about. Everybody agrees. But we're talking about it.

GIGOT: Right.

Actually, as we explained to Jennifer Rubin, not only is it violent, the violence is well documented, as has been the role of right-wing extremist rhetoric in inspiring the violence. We document 19 cases of extremist domestic-terror violence just in the past two and a half years; this does not even begin to take into account the litany of criminal violent threats against liberals in the past year.

Gigot also elucidated their core insight with which the entire panel was in agreement, since it seems to be received wisdom among the Beltway Villagers now:

GIGOT: Is this going to hurt the people on the left who walked out on this limb? Because there's really no evidence that Loughner was motivated by anything political.

Then there was the crew at Fox News Watch, particularly host Jon Scott, who was similarly certain that Loughner's rampage was "not political":

I hate to break it to these folks, but there is indeed an abundance of evidence that not only was Loughner's rampage a political act, it was an act of domestic terrorism committed by someone who had been unhinged by far-right conspiracy theories.

Let's review just the facts we already had in hand, even before this weekend:

-- Loughner self-identifies as a terrorist. (See the videos he left behind; in our version, the page in which he identifies himself as a "terrorist" is at the 1:00 mark).

-- He also clearly has adopted two strands of right-wing conspiracism: He believes that American currency is "phony" because it no longer is on the gold standard, and he believes Alex Jones-esque conspiracy theories about "mind control." The SPLC's Mark Potok has more on this.

-- He had developed an unhealthy fixation on Giffords, but his hatred of her was largely political in nature and not personal.

-- There was a powerful campaign of demonization directed at Giffords throughout the 2010 campaign, including but hardly limited to Sarah Palin's attack ads -- much of it featuring rhetoric condoning the idea of targeting Giffords with guns.

-- Giffords was a mainstream moderate Democrat -- a classic target of hatred from the conspiracist right, which despises real liberals but reserves its special venom for centrist Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

If you have any doubt that this was an act of terrorism -- and is thus inherently political -- just consider one of the basic criteria of the definition of the word: Were people -- not just the public generally, but the target group as well -- terrorized by the act? Clearly the answer is yes: Democrats in Arizona, who already feel on edge, are clearly feeling terrorized now.

It cannot be emphasized enough that the target of a political act is a powerful indicator of the perpetrator's intent. Terrorists always intend to send a message with their acts, and the message is conveyed in the persons who are are targeted and become victims of their violence. There's no doubt that Jared Loughner sent a message with these killings: The lives of government-coddling Democrats and their enablers are forfeit.

And if there was any doubt that Loughner was unhinged by right-wing conspiracism, there was the report on Wednesday's Good Morning America:

One of Loughner's friends, a fellow named Zach Osler, says that the internet movie Zeitgeist “poured gasoline on his fire” and had “a profound impact on Jared Loughner's mindset and how he views the world that he lives in.”

We've written a lot about how Alex Jones' crackpot views, his connection to Ron Paul and his John Bircherite conspiracy theory websites and radio program are mainstreaming many of the most extreme beliefs in Conservativeland. (The ADL has a complete dossier in Jones.)

Michelle Goldberg explains in her piece, "Zeitgeist, the documentary that may have shaped Jared Loughners worldview""

We now know a little bit more about the matrix of ideas that helped inspire Jared Loughner’s murderous rampage on Saturday. According to a friend of his interviewed on Good Morning America on Wednesday, the conspiracy documentary Zeitgeist “poured gasoline on his fire” and had “a profound impact on Jared Loughner's mindset and how he views the world that he lives in.” He was also, according to his friend’s father, influenced by the documentary Loose Change, a classic of the 9/11 Truth movement. This does not mean that either of these movies is responsible for making Loughner do what he did, but it does show how his madness was shaped by a broader climate of paranoia, and offers a clue as to why he targeted Gabrielle Giffords.

Indeed, as we said a couple of days ago:

What most of us said from the start is that it was undeniable that the killings took place in a charged atmosphere in which all kinds of violent rhetoric had created an environment in which nearly everyone present on the ground felt something like this was inevitable -- because it creates permission for violent acts, and fuels the irrationality that makes violence possible. Sarah Palin's "target map" was only the most obvious example. So, for that matter, was that "target shoot" fundraiser by her Tea Partying opponent.

... But in the end, Loughner's motive matters less than the realities that people like Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik are well acquainted with already.

Dupnik had all the evidence he needed to make the kinds of remarks he made about the political and social environment in Arizona -- one that has gotten so virulently ugly that Democrats and liberals in Arizona increasingly are fearful for their physical well-being and are reluctant to self-identify as liberals. (Will Bunch had a terrific piece at Media Matters recently on this very subject; as someone with family and friends in Arizona, I can personally attest to this reality.)

Unlike Bill O'Reilly or Megyn Kelly or Monica Crowley, Dupnik actually lives in Arizona, and does know whereof he speaks. Moreover, there is abundant evidence about the vicious eliminationist hatred, some of it officially sanctioned by the GOP and Tea Parties, that was directed at Giffords personally.

I think this Danziger cartoon neatly sums the situation up:

(Digby has more.)

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Violent rhetoric and the mentally ill: The intersection of lethal irresponsibility

2011-01-17T18:37:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

I've got a post up at The Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute's blog, an effort to explain what it really means when a mentally ill person is inflamed by extremist right-wing rhetoric. Hint: The people who fill them with rage are not as blameless they want to claim:

For some time now, it's been something of a reflexive response by media pundits, particularly conservatives and "moderate" liberals, to point to mental illness when some violent and unstable person commits a horrifying act in the name of extremist right-wing beliefs. If they're just mentally ill, you can't blame the people whose ideas they happened to pick up, can you?

Thus we have witnessed a steady stream of "isolated incidents" in which angry, mentally unstable men walk into churches and shoot their liberal targets in the head, or walk into public spaces and open fire, or crash their planes into government offices and gun down police officers. Yet when all these, and a long list of similar incidents, occur, they are dismissed as "isolated incidents." Because, you see the perpetrators are just "nutcases."

Likewise, when an oddball college dropout named Jared Loughner walks up to Representative Gabrielle Giffords in a Safeway parking lot and shoots her point-blank, then empties another 30 rounds into the crowd around her, killing six and wounding 14 more — well, that can't be laid at the feet of his incoherent (but largely right-wing) belief system, can it? After all, he's obviously got mental problems, right? Therefore, it's just another isolated incident.

That's a cop-out, and a dangerous one. One of its chief consequences, in fact, is that the list of "isolated incidents" — and the body count that accompanies it — will just keep mounting. At some point, people will realize that the incidents are perhaps not so isolated after all.

Go read it all.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Apocalypse Next Year: Cavuto wonders if we're going to be like Tunisia in the near future

2011-01-16T13:27:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

Back when he first arrived at Fox, Glenn Beck got ribbed by Neil Cavuto for his apocalyptic fearmongering: "I just think that you're scaring people." They never repeated the performance.

But now Neil has to keep up with Glenn in the ratings. So yesterday he indulged in some distinctly GlennBeckian apocalyptic fearmongering -- wondering if America was about to be engulfed by rampant inflation that would inspire food riots like we're seeing in Tunisia.

Next up: Neil Cavuto's Doom Bunker!

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

OK, Glenn Beck: Are you man enough to take the CrooksandLiars Pledge?

2011-01-15T13:24:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

Sniff. Kinda makes you feel sad, doesn't it? Nobody wants to sign Glenn Beck's phony "non-violence" pledge. Hmmmmm. Wonder why that could be?

Here's Beck on Tuesday, whining:

BECK: The number of people so far who signed this pledge denouncing violence: 14 -- 14. Over 500 members in the House and Senate, and 14.

Now, I was going to show you the 14 names because I'm proud of those guys, but maybe some other time. I don't want this to turn into -- I mean, this is not the Committee on Un-American Activities. That's for Congress to do. Not a private citizen.

So, I don't want some list going around. I just want you to know it's 14. And I have heard all kind of reasons and excuses.

Some just say they just need more time. Some are afraid to be associated with it. Afraid? Some need more time to read it. It's not really that complex. I don't know if you know this. It's this long.

Others agree with it. Oh, Glenn, I'm telling you, we agree with it. We're in complete agreement here. I'm a little uncomfortable signing anything.

Really?

Yeah, really. And as if to underscore exactly why, he went on O'Reilly last night and whined about it some more ... and then launched into a vicious, demonizing smear of couple of leading progressive figures:

O'REILLY: So you would like to see the same kind of situation that happened after 9/11 attack now, where they would all come out and say, "Enough with this crap"?

BECK: Of course.

O'REILLY: Right.

BECK: Every American wants that. What I...

O'REILLY: Not every American. George Soros doesn't want that.

BECK: Frances Fox Piven doesn't want that.

O'REILLY: Who is Frances Fox Piven?

BECK: Clariton (ph) Piven, from the 1960's. That's a theory that was inspired by the Watts riots and is being used right now. And she is actively, actively -- Columbia University professor used to be. I think she's -- at SUNY (ph) now. But she is actively saying, "Rise up, embrace your anger. Turn on your bosses, turn on the politicians."

O'REILLY: All right. She's Black Panther. Overthrow, kill the pigs.

BECK: She is -- she stands with the Clintons. Signing. She's very...

O'REILLY: Still around?

BECK: Oh, yes.

In fact, Frances Fox Piven was on with Amy Goodman the other night, and had to express her own bewilderment at the bizarre way that Beck is depicting and smearing her, as well as her work:

As Media Matters points out, over at Beck's own website, The Blaze, commenters responding to the Piven story left these comments -- and they remained there ~~even today~~ [update: Some of these have now been taken down, though not all of them.]:

You see, Glenn, here's why no one is signing your Pledge: Because it contains this key point:

I hold those responsible for the violence, responsible for the violence. I denounce those who attempt to blame political opponents for the acts of madmen.

This is a copout, and everyone -- except right-wing hatemongers and their Village apologists -- knows it. Sure, everyone knows that crazy people do crazy things. But their heads get filled with crazy ideas by people who indulge in crazy talk for fun and profit. And the blood of the victims is on their hands too.

The proof is right there at your own site, and there in your own rants. You claim to want to bring everyone together -- and then viciously demonize people with whom you happen to disagree. Go look at those comments and try telling us again that your vicious demonization of people isn't whipping up violent hatred, the kind that eventually gets acted upon.

No one -- no one -- believes there is even an ounce of sincerity to your Pledge. We already know that you're the last person on the planet who should be preaching nonviolence. Especially because you go out and prove our suspicions: let's all come together except the progressives you intend to destroy.

You see, Glenn, as SEK at Lawyers, Guns and Money explained the other day, violent rhetoric is not always the outright advocacy of violence, as you seem to think: it is just as often rhetoric that invites a specific audience to reach the conclusion that violence is the only appropriate action to deal with a problem. And this kind of rhetoric, as we know all too well, is your specialty in trade.

So here's what we at CrooksandLiars propose: We'll sign your Pledge -- with one simple amendment.

Delete the copout "I hold those responsible" clause. And replace it with this clause:

"I will not unnecessarily hold up entire groups of people, or representative leaders of those groups, and demonize and dehumanize them as objects fit only for elimination, especially in a way that invites my audience to take violent action to prevent dire catastrophes of my imagining."

Make that change, and we'll happily sign your Pledge.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

'Moderate' Republicans try to do outreach with Latinos. Lots of

2011-01-14T13:21:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

[Video courtesy of America's Voice: H/t Maria and Jackie]

Establishment Republicans -- the business-friendly wing of the party -- have been trying to talk a good game when it comes to Latino voters -- their ruling Neanderthal Nativist wing notwithstanding. Now they're out hustling to convince Latinos that they really should vote Republican -- kinda like the way all good chickens should go vote for Colonel Sanders.

Jeb Bush and Newt Gingrich are out leading the charge, as it were:

But Republicans overall still lost the Hispanic vote nationwide by about 2-1 — not much different than in 2008.

Bush wants to change that. "The challenge, though, is that we have a situation right now where Republicans send out signals that Hispanics aren't wanted in our party, not by policy so much as by tone," he says.

But it's more than just the tone. It's one issue in particular, says Alfonso Aguilar, the executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles and a participant in Thursday's conference in Miami.

"Latinos are inherently conservative: They're socially conservative; they are entrepreneurial; they're pro-business. Immigration ... is that one issue that prevents us from winning the support of Latino voters," he says.

Yeah, if only they didn't have the people running the party right now out there demanding we alter the Constitution in order to deny Latino children their birthright citizenship.

But in realituy, gingrich of course talks out of both sides of his mouth, defending Arizona's SB1070 while trying to do Latino outreach. Similarly, Jeb is in denial about just how deeply in their thrall Republicans really are:

Even though anti-immigrant voices seem to be getting louder inside the Republican Party, Jeb Bush is convinced that they do not speak for most on the right.

"That view is in the minority even in the Republican Party," he says. "But, I think if you got to the point where legitimate, emotional concerns about the lack of border security and the lack of rule of law, once those issues subsided, then you would find a great majority of people that would support some solution to the large number of people that are here illegally."

One of the Republicans speaking out and pushing them to abandon their delusions has been conservative Latino columnist Ruben Navarette:

Columnist Ruben Navarrette, who is also speaking at the conference in Miami, says there is a new conversation going on beneath the surface in the GOP — particularly when it comes to the push by some Republicans to repeal the 14th Amendment in order to deny birthright citizenship to children born to undocumented parents.

"They're not fools — they realize that there are those places where they can overplay their hand, and I think the 14th Amendment change is a perfect example of a bridge too far," Navarrette says. "It's poison. You play with that, and I am never, ever going be able to go before a group of Hispanic women ... and convince them that the Republican Party isn't anything but a bunch of ogres."

Indeed. This weekend at the big shindig for GOP Hispanics he had the same message, as Frank Sharry blogged yesterday:

Early in the day, Bush stated:

It would be incredibly stupid [for the Republican Party] to ignore the burgeoning Hispanic vote.

Given the anti-immigrant rhetoric that emanates from so many GOP leaders these days, however, it won’t be a simple matter to win these voters back.

As a new America’s Voice memo makes clear, Republican leadership is stuck in a deep rut of denial and inflexibility when it comes to Latino outreach and their party’s position on immigration. They seem to think that taking up kinder, gentler “rhetoric” and reaching out on “common values”—instead of revisiting their party’s extreme immigration policies—will do the trick.

One panelist at the conference, conservative syndicated columnist Ruben Navarrette, made this very point quite passionately at this afternoon’s panel on media and messaging. From a live blog of the conference:

Update - 2:55 PM: Navarrette: "If you come away thinking that this is all about language and tone, you will miss the point... You are always going to be number 2... The problem is not the tone. It is the message itself—it is offensive, racist. You’ve got to fix the product.” […]

Commentator Alex Castellanos, Sr. disagrees. He appears to believe that a majority of Latinos agree with the Republican Party on immigration policy.

Helen Aguirre disagrees with Castellanos: "Jeb Bush is the only one who challenged Tom Tancredo. If the [majority of the] Republican Party disagrees but keeps quiet…"

Ruben Navarrette argued that the GOP has a track record on immigration that:

1. Deals with immigration dishonestly
2. Caters to that ugly element of racism -- "nativism/racism is in the bloodstream"
3. Offers "solutions" that ignore the problem.

Navarrette cites the fight to repeal the 14th Amendment and Arizona's SB1070 as two examples of false solutions on immigration.

Lotsa luck to these folks. They're going to need it: The GOP in reality is in the deep thrall of the Tea Partiers, who are some of the most mouth-foaming and nasty nativists in the country.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

It was inevitable: New tea-partying Republican senator thinks child labor should be legal

2011-01-14T13:18:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

Yes, we used to joke (or half-joke, anyway) that hey, next thing you know, Republicans are going to start demanding a return legalized child labor.

It's not a joke anymore.

As Ian Millhiser reports at Think Progress, Utah's newly elected Republican Senator, Mike Lee -- the Tea Partier who unseated Robert Bennett -- posted a video of a lecture he gave last week on the Constitution. It was quite a lecture: Not only does Lee reveal himself to be a far-right "Tenther" -- a conspiracist approach to the Constitution borne out of the Patriot/militia movement of the 1990s -- but as someone who believes child-labor laws are unconstitutional, too:

Congress decided it wanted to prohibit [child labor], so it passed a law—no more child labor. The Supreme Court heard a challenge to that and the Supreme Court decided a case in 1918 called Hammer v. Dagenhardt. In that case, the Supreme Court acknowledged something very interesting — that, as reprehensible as child labor is, and as much as it ought to be abandoned — that’s something that has to be done by state legislators, not by Members of Congress. [...]

This may sound harsh, but it was designed to be that way. It was designed to be a little bit harsh. Not because we like harshness for the sake of harshness, but because we like a clean division of power, so that everybody understands whose job it is to regulate what.

Now, we got rid of child labor, notwithstanding this case. So the entire world did not implode as a result of that ruling.

Millhiser explains just how misbegotten this argument is -- particularly since the Supreme Court, in overturning the rulings that enabled child labor in the first place, was unanimous about the right of the federal government to be involved in these matters.

But as Steve Benen adroitly observes, this whole episode is deeply emblematic of the important point that Paul Krugman made today -- namely, that the Right's embrace of this kind of ideology really reflects a significant divide in American politics, between people who simply believe people should want to return to the "good old days" before FDR and the New Deal, and people who believe that the incredible economic and cultural powerhouse that era produced was the product of a desirable balancing act between governmental power and individual rights.

As Krugman puts it:

There’s no middle ground between these views. One side saw health reform, with its subsidized extension of coverage to the uninsured, as fulfilling a moral imperative: wealthy nations, it believed, have an obligation to provide all their citizens with essential care. The other side saw the same reform as a moral outrage, an assault on the right of Americans to spend their money as they choose.

This deep divide in American political morality — for that’s what it amounts to — is a relatively recent development. Commentators who pine for the days of civility and bipartisanship are, whether they realize it or not, pining for the days when the Republican Party accepted the legitimacy of the welfare state, and was even willing to contemplate expanding it. As many analysts have noted, the Obama health reform — whose passage was met with vandalism and death threats against members of Congress — was modeled on Republican plans from the 1990s.

But that was then. Today’s G.O.P. sees much of what the modern federal government does as illegitimate; today’s Democratic Party does not. When people talk about partisan differences, they often seem to be implying that these differences are petty, matters that could be resolved with a bit of good will. But what we’re talking about here is a fundamental disagreement about the proper role of government.

Indeed, as we've pointed out several times, this desire to turn back the clock is a fundamental aspect of the GlennBeckian worldview that's become the foundation for Tea Party movement conservatism. Digby pointed this out awhile back, citing an essay by Ryan Grim and Arthur Delaney about just what kind of society Beck and the Tea Partying Right want to "take us back" to -- one like this:

As I explained back then:

These are child laborers from the early part of the last century. They were common fixtures on the American landscape. Possibly some of Beck's ancestors were among them. (Here's a gallery of pictures of them.)

... The United States has always been an essentially capitalist economic system. However, we have experienced periods in our history where this system has seriously malfunctioned, and we've made adjustments accordingly that have largely worked well making things better.

One of those dysfunctional periods came at about the turn of the last century, when McKinley was president, corrupt robber barons ran Congress, and the latter-day version of "strict constructionists" ruled the courts. "Laissez faire" capitalism ruled, and America was functionally an oligarchy.

Squeezed out were the working people: the average workweek was 80 hours, there were no weekends, no vacation, only a few holidays, and the barest minimum of pay. Benefits and health care were unheard of. Child labor was the rule.

What happened between then and now? "Progressives" began agitating for better working conditions, and began organizing as labor unions. After a long period of violent repression, these reforms gradually became government policy -- especially in the 1930s under FDR. Americans began getting 40-hour work weeks with weekends off, paid vacations and benefits.

Probably the most significant and lasting legacy of this period of "progressive" innovation was the progressive tax code. It has been a feature of the income tax since its institution in 1913. Who was one of its original champions? Theodore Roosevelt.

The fact is that the United States -- like nearly every single Western capitalist democracy -- is a variable blend of socialism and capitalism, free-enterprise economies with regulatory restraints and modest income redistribution. The result of those "progressive" reforms from 1900-1940 was the birth of the great American middle class and the quality of life we have enjoyed so long we've forgotten what it was like not to have it. People like Glenn Beck seem never even to have learned.

Indeed, when right-wingers like Beck and Goldberg attack "evil progressivism," it sounds a lot like they want us to return to the bad old days under McKinley, when American workers were indentured servants to the wealthy.

Of course, maybe now that they're both wealthy men, there's a simple explanation for that.

Lee, of course, comes from a comfortable moneyed background too: His father was dean of the BYU law school, and Lee himself is a high-powered attorney. Funny how that works.

The reality is that these people don't want to "restore America" to its "constitutional" roots -- they want to remake it into an oligarchy.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Tucson survivor: 'It looks like Palin, Beck, Sharron Angle and the rest got their first target'

2011-01-14T13:15:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

Amy Goodman at Democracy Now interviewed one of the survivors of Saturday's tragedy in Arizona, and we heard a familiar observation:

We speak with Tucson shooting survivor Eric Fuller. A 63-year-old disabled veteran, Fuller had campaigned for Arizona Democrat Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in her reelection campaign and was at the supermarket in Tucson on Saturday to meet with her. He was shot in the knee and also wounded in the back. "It looks like Palin, Beck, Sharron Angle and the rest got their first target," Fuller says. "Their wish for Second Amendment activism has been fulfilled."

Cue the right-wing waaaaaahmbulance. I wonder if Megyn Kelly or Bill O'Reilly will bring Fuller on Fox to browbeat him as they did Sheriff Dupnik for expressing the same view.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Yes, Jennifer Rubin, the facts do matter -- and they're not on your side

2011-01-14T13:13:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

For some reason, conservatives seem to believe "they won" the recent national conversation about the nature and content of our national conversation, sparked by Saturday's tragedy in Arizona. That, at least, was their takeaway from President Obama's speech at the memorial on Tuesday.

Indeed, the usual disinformation specialists are spreading the claim that Obama "threw liberals under the bus" because he didn't come out and openly adopt the argument posed by many Democrats -- namely, that the vicious and violent rhetoric that has become part and parcel of the American Right's dealings with Democrats has created an environment where death threats and violence are now everyday acts, scarcely worth a shrug of the eyebrow.

See, for instance, Jennifer Rubin in the WaPo yesterday:

A chorus on the left claimed causation between Sarah Palin and the killings (and then the amorphous "climate" and the deaths) and didn't much care for a careful analysis until it became clear their preferred narrative was false. As for the president, he doesn't buy it at all. He said: "And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their deaths help usher in more civility in our public discourse, let's remember that it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy, but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation, in a way that would make them proud." (Emphasis added.) Or, as I put it, rhetorical civility and mental illness are discrete problems. And it doesn't help the liberal line when it turns out this particular lunatic was a-political and didn't watch news.

So, for my friends on the left: facts count. You can't spin a narrative and not be expected to be called on the underlying, flawed premise.

Indeed, if the premise had been that there was "causation" between Palin's incendiarism and Jared Loughner's act, it would have been flawed -- but no one said that, particularly not Paul Krugman, whose Sunday column is the focus of much of the Right's animus.

What most of us said from the start is that it was undeniable that the killings took place in a charged atmosphere in which all kinds of violent rhetoric had created an environment in which nearly everyone present on the ground felt something like this was inevitable -- because it creates permission for violent acts, and fuels the irrationality that makes violence possible. Sarah Palin's "target map" was only the most obvious example. So, for that matter, was that "target shoot" fundraiser by her Tea Partying opponent.

And for what it's worth, it's certainly not a settled matter that Loughner was not acting out of unhinged beliefs that he obtained from radical-right sources -- as we said earlier, his online contributions heavily indicated such influences. Mark Potok of the SPLC has much more, and a thoroughly balanced take, on that.

But in the end, Loughner's motive matters less than the realities that people like Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik are well acquainted with already:

Dupnik had all the evidence he needed to make the kinds of remarks he made about the political and social environment in Arizona -- one that has gotten so virulently ugly that Democrats and liberals in Arizona increasingly are fearful for their physical well-being and are reluctant to self-identify as liberals. (Will Bunch had a terrific piece at Media Matters recently on this very subject; as someone with family and friends in Arizona, I can personally attest to this reality.)

Unlike Bill O'Reilly or Megyn Kelly or Monica Crowley, Dupnik actually lives in Arizona, and does know whereof he speaks. Moreover, there is abundant evidence about the vicious eliminationist hatred, some of it officially sanctioned by the GOP and Tea Parties, that was directed at Giffords personally.

Rubin is right: The facts do matter. Especially if you refuse to sweep them under the carpet.

And here are the facts about the mounting list of tragedies that folks on the right keep insisting are just "isolated incidents":

-- July 2008: A gunman named Jim David Adkisson, agitated at how "liberals" are "destroying America," walks into a Unitarian Church and opens fire, killing two churchgoers and wounding four others.

-- October 2008: Two neo-Nazis are arrested in Tennessee in a plot to murder dozens of African-Americans, culminating in the assassination of President Obama.

-- December 2008: A pair of "Patriot" movement radicals -- the father-son team of Bruce and Joshua Turnidge, who wanted "to attack the political infrastructure" -- threaten a bank in Woodburn, Oregon, with a bomb in the hopes of extorting money that would end their financial difficulties, for which they blamed the government. Instead, the bomb goes off and kills two police officers. The men eventually are convicted and sentenced to death for the crime.

-- December 2008: In Belfast, Maine, police discover the makings of a nuclear "dirty bomb" in the basement of a white supremacist shot dead by his wife. The man, who was independently wealthy, reportedly was agitated about the election of President Obama and was crafting a plan to set off the bomb.

-- January 2009: A white supremacist named Keith Luke embarks on a killing rampage in Brockton, Mass., raping and wounding a black woman and killing her sister, then killing a homeless man before being captured by police as he is en route to a Jewish community center.

-- February 2009: A Marine named Kody Brittingham is arrested and charged with plotting to assassinate President Obama. Brittingham also collected white-supremacist material.

-- April 2009: A white supremacist named Richard Poplawski opens fire on three Pittsburgh police officers who come to his house on a domestic-violence call and kills all three, because he believed President Obama intended to take away the guns of white citizens like himself. Poplawski is currently awaiting trial.

-- April 2009: Another gunman in Okaloosa County, Florida, similarly fearful of Obama's purported gun-grabbing plans, kills two deputies when they come to arrest him in a domestic-violence matter, then is killed himself in a shootout with police.

-- May 2009: A "sovereign citizen" named Scott Roeder walks into a church in Wichita, Kansas, and assassinates abortion provider Dr. George Tiller.

-- June 2009: A Holocaust denier and right-wing tax protester named James Von Brunn opens fire at the Holocaust Museum, killing a security guard.

-- February 2010: An angry tax protester named Joseph Ray Stack flies an airplane into the building housing IRS offices in Austin, Texas. (Media are reluctant to label this one "domestic terrorism" too.)

-- March 2010: Seven militiamen from the Hutaree Militia in Michigan and Ohio are arrested and charged with plotting to assassinate local police officers with the intent of sparking a new civil war.

-- March 2010: An anti-government extremist named John Patrick Bedell walks into the Pentagon and opens fire, wounding two officers before he is himself shot dead.

-- May 2010: A "sovereign citizen" from Georgia is arrested in Tennessee and charged with plotting the violent takeover of a local county courthouse.

-- May 2010: A still-unidentified white man walks into a Jacksonville, Fla., mosque and sets it afire, simultaneously setting off a pipe bomb.

-- May 2010: Two "sovereign citizens" named Jerry and Joe Kane gun down two police officers who pull them over for a traffic violation, and then wound two more officers in a shootout in which both of them are eventually killed.

-- July 2010: An agitated right-winger and convict named Byron Williams loads up on weapons and drives to the Bay Area intent on attacking the offices of the Tides Foundation and the ACLU, but is intercepted by state patrolmen and engages them in a shootout and armed standoff in which two officers and Williams are wounded.

-- September 2010: A Concord, N.C., man is arrested and charged with plotting to blow up a North Carolina abortion clinic. The man, 26-year--old Justin Carl Moose, referred to himself as the "Christian counterpart to (Osama) bin Laden” in a taped undercover meeting with a federal informant.

Mind you, this list is strictly directed toward incidents involving serious acts of domestic terrorism. It doesn't even begin to include the litany of violent threats and violent acts that have been directed with increasing intensity toward liberals in the past year alone:

-- The head-stomping of a liberal protester by a Rand Paul campaign official in Kentucky.

-- Mentally unstable nutcases threatening liberal campaigners in Washington state, Illinois and Vermont.

-- A swastika-laden white-powder-terrorism attack on a Democratic congressman's offices.

-- Thugs hired by the Republican candidate in Alaska roughing up and handcuffing a reporter for asking questions at a public event.

If Jennifer Rubin (or any other right-winger, for that matter) really wants to seriously deal with the reasons Americans -- particularly liberal Americans -- responded to Saturday's tragedy as they did, they need to look at both of these lists and make an honest reckoning.

Now, it may be true that liberals occasionally say some mean, cruel and unpleasant things about conservatives.

But I challenge the would-be equivocators out there who wants to claim that "the left does it too" to come up with a comparable list of liberal nutcases committing acts of domestic terrorism, heinous violence, threats and intimidation, and mass murder in which Republicans are all the targeted victims.

So when another one comes down the pike -- and it will, especially now that everyone on the Right has closed ranks, covered their ears and screamed in unison that they're not inciting violence with their violent rhetoric -- we'll know what to expect then, too. No matter how irrevocable the evidence establishing that this is another act of right-wing terrorism, they'll claim that it has nothing to do with them. It's just another "isolated incident" by a "lone nutcase".

Now, did President Obama really throw his liberal base under the bus the other night? Here's what Rubin says:

The final lesson for the left is this: for the sake of a second term, the president is willing to throw liberals under the bus. He's going to undo their economic mantra (by supporting the Bush tax cuts). He is going to undermine their approach to their war on terror (with drones, a long-term commitment to Afghanistan). And he is even going to make the liberal icons -- Krugman, the New York Times editorial board, Keith Olbermann and the rest -- look like fools. The "paper of record" has revealed, for any doubters, that the truth is the first casualty of its op-ed page.

Here's the only thing the president really said, which seems to be the source of their claim that he's repudiating their base:

If, as has been discussed in recent days, their death helps usher in more civility in our public discourse, let us remember it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy--it did not--but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way that would make them proud.

The WSJ's James Taranto thinks this is highly relevant too. But all Obama really said here is that "a simple lack of civility" was not the cause of the tragedy, and frankly, I've looked around, and there really isn't anyone making that case, though many on the right are trying to characterize their critics that way.

Obama was on a mission to heal last night. He didn't need to engage this fight -- indeed, it would have been a big mistake for him to have done it. But I didn't get the sense that he's sold on the idea that there's no problem here and that we should just move along, either. Time will tell on that front.

Meanwhile, I'll let Steven Budiansky's insights stand as all the answer necessary to Rubin's premature assertion that the conversation is over and her whitewashing side has "won":

The unstable young man who opened fire yesterday, it is already clear, was more of a nut than a political agent. But to those who would suggest that political violence is just some random occurrence, a meteorite falling from the sky and claiming its victims by chance, I would suggest they look to the way that delegitimization of democratic institutions, inflammatory and demagogic appeals to what our founders called "passion" over reason, and glorification of brutality have ever been the handmaidens of the descent to hell of once-civilized societies.

What we have seen in the last few years is not the usual political theater of opposing candidates who put on histrionic performances at election time and then are great pals off-stage; what we have seen is an ugliness and a willingness to play with fire that is something different — a willingness on the part of too many on the Republican side to pull down the temple itself if they calculate they might be able to salvage more of the ensuing rubble than the other guys. The Arizona sheriff in whose jurisdiction the shootings took place noted the unprecedented rise in death threats against all public officials that has taken place lately. The Secret Service does not talk about threats against the President but credible reports make clear that President Obama faces threats on a scale unlike anything ever before encountered.

Never mind even the childish braggadocio about "second amendment solutions" and "lock and load"; the daily inflammatory rhetoric about "tyranny" and "the end of freedom as we know it" and even the name "tea party" itself, invoking revolutionary resistance to despotism, have accelerated an unprecedented delegitimization of the democratic process itself, a suggestion that those who advance opposing viewpoints are not just political opponents but usurpers.

[Read the whole post, as well as his follow-up.]

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Limbaugh believes being called out for his violent rhetoric is part of a conspiracy to silence 'all of talk radio, Fox News'

2011-01-13T13:09:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

Well, they say that paranoia is an indicator of oncoming senility, but that would mean Rush Limbaugh has been getting senile for the past twenty years. In any event, he was in prime form yesterday:

This is not an isolated event. Every time something like this happens, some disaster, it doesn't take 30 minutes for the media to start speculating that it's talk radio, and now Fox News and the blogs on the right and everything else. I got a lot of people who sent me e-mails yesterday: "Rush, I thought you were a little bit over the top yesterday when you said the Democrat Party profits from murder, wants to profit." How else can I say this? Try to put yourself in my shoes and I want you to try to do this outside of the normal give-and-take and ebb-and-flow of the daily hardball that is politics. Here we have a deranged, obviously mentally insane young man who has fired on and killed a number of people, wounded others. On Saturday, I was in my home watching NFL football. I happened to be alone. I hadn't been to Tucson, Arizona, in 20 years and all of a sudden I read it's my fault, and I'm hearing people say it's my fault and that it's inspired by me and what I do. I want you to put yourself in my shoes. And then more and more powerful political people start standing up and making that claim, including the chief law enforcement official for that county, Clarence Dupnik, a law enforcement official who has the ability to influence jury pools.

... Now, I ask you, you all know that I am a political enemy of these people. These are the people that keep talking about limiting speech with the Fairness Doctrine. The other day Al Sharpton goes to the FCC to want hearings on me to get them to curb what I can say. He came out of there claiming the FCC's interested in holding these hearings. Look, I'm not telling you people anything you don't know. You know that there are constant assaults on the existence of this program. There are constant serious political efforts made to terminate this program and all of talk radio, Fox News and what have you. So we have this incident, and now I have to sit here and just let it roll off my back that I'm responsible for this. Anything I say is overreacting to it.

Next: The black helicopters are coming to take him away!

Isn't creeping paranoia also a sign of a guilty conscience? Who'da thunk?

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

What violent rhetoric? Another right-wing nutcase arrested for threatening congressman. Was O'Reilly the inspiration?

2011-01-13T13:05:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

Gee, and here I thought that all this talk about violent rhetoric was just a figment of our liberal imaginations:

One arrested in threats against Seattle congressman

A California man accused of threatening to kill Seattle Congressman Jim McDermott has been arrested and charged in federal court.

Charles Turner Habermann -- a 32-year-old Palm Springs, Calif., resident with a $3 million trust fund -- was arrested Wednesday morning on allegations that he made threatening phone calls to the office of the Seattle Democrat late last year.

Federal authorities contend Habermann admitted to making the calls because he was angry about taxes, but said he wouldn't risk losing his trust fund by attacking McDermott.

Federal prosecutors in Seattle described statements left by Habermann in two Dec. 9 phone calls as an "expletive-laden" effort to influence McDermott's vote on tax policy. According to charging documents, Habermann to have threatened to kill McDermott's friends and family, then, in the second call, threatened to put McDermott "in the trash."

Contacted by the investigators the day after the messages were left, Habermann allegedly admitted to threatening McDermott and an congresswoman not identified in court documents.

This guy was also quite obviously a Tea Party loving patriot, because he referred to the Founding Fathers frequently in his expletive-laden rant:

A McDermott staffer contacted the FBI on Dec. 10, reporting that the congressman's Seattle office had received the offending phone calls.

In one, the caller was heard calling McDermott "a piece of human filth," "a communist," and a "piece of (expletive) garbage."

"Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, or George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, if any of them had ever met uh, uh Jim McDermott, they would all blow his brains out," Habermann said in the first rambling message, according to charging documents. "They'd shoot him, in the head. They'd kill him, because he's a piece of, of, of disgusting garbage. …

"Any you let that (expletive) scum bag know, that if he ever (expletive) with my money, ever the (expletive) again, I'll (expletive) kill him, okay," Habermann continued, according to charges. "I'll round them up, I'll kill them, I'll kill his friends, I'll kill his family, I will kill everybody he (expletive) knows."

Here's what's really pretty remarkable about this: Remember that bizarre Bill O'Reilly column attacking McDermott for daring to suggest (while discussing whether to extend the Bush tax cuts) that Jesus might have been more concerned about helping the poor get their unemployment checks than he would in ensuring rich guys get their tax cuts?

It was published at BillOReilly.com, by pure coincidence, on December 9:

Which just COINCIDENTALLY happens to be the day that Habermann called and unleashed this rant from California.

Far be it from me to suggest that there might be some connection there. Heavens no. That would be uncivil and unfair. O'Reilly might unleash the Flying Monkey Ambush Squad Featuring Jesse Watters on me. Lord only knows what kind of hate-filled death threats I'd get then.

N in Seattle at DKos has more.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Obama's Tucson Memorial speech: Simply human

2011-01-12T13:01:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

What Digby said:

For my money it was the best speech he's given as president ---simple, human and uplifting in a difficult moment. As the father of two little girls himself his evocation of Christina Green was particularly poignant. He's not known for sentimentality, but he showed heart and it was good.

I unfortunately have a sinking feeling about it, regardless: Republicans have proven themselves remorseless and relentless in their hatred of all things Obama. Personally, I'm waiting for them to "Wellstone" this memorial -- and even though it was billed as a "celebration of life," the cheers that were heard will probably be used to attack Obama.

I've included the first serious outbreak of cheers at the gathering -- when Obama announced that Gabrielle Giffords had "opened her eyes" that evening for the first time since Saturday, a huge milestone in her recovery. It was a moving and heartfelt moment, and who wouldn't have cheered?

I guess we'll find out tomorrow.

Meantime, the transcript is below. I thought the speech was particularly outstanding here:

If this tragedy prompts reflection and debate, as it should, let’s make sure it’s worthy of those we have lost. Let’s make sure it’s not on the usual plane of politics and point scoring and pettiness that drifts away with the next news cycle.

The loss of these wonderful people should make every one of us strive to be better in our private lives – to be better friends and neighbors, co-workers and parents. And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their deaths help usher in more civility in our public discourse, let’s remember that it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy, but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation, in a way that would make them proud. It should be because we want to live up to the example of public servants like John Roll and Gabby Giffords, who knew first and foremost that we are all Americans, and that we can question each other’s ideas without questioning each other’s love of country, and that our task, working together, is to constantly widen the circle of our concern so that we bequeath the American dream to future generations.

Great words. I hope everyone listens.

UPDATE: Sure enough, like clockwork, Malkin chimes in and calls it a "bizarre pep rally".

UPDATE 2: Atrios and DougJarvus Green-Ellis at Balloon Juice have the same bad feeling.

Full transcript below:

____

To the families of those we’ve lost; to all who called them friends; to the students of this university, the public servants gathered tonight, and the people of Tucson and Arizona: I have come here tonight as an American who, like all Americans, kneels to pray with you today, and will stand by you tomorrow.

There is nothing I can say that will fill the sudden hole torn in your hearts. But know this: the hopes of a nation are here tonight. We mourn with you for the fallen. We join you in your grief. And we add our faith to yours that Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the other living victims of this tragedy pull through.

As Scripture tells us:

There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy place where the Most High dwells.
God is within her, she will not fall;
God will help her at break of day.

On Saturday morning, Gabby, her staff, and many of her constituents gathered outside a supermarket to exercise their right to peaceful assembly and free speech. They were fulfilling a central tenet of the democracy envisioned by our founders – representatives of the people answering to their constituents, so as to carry their concerns to our nation’s capital. Gabby called it “Congress on Your Corner” – just an updated version of government of and by and for the people.

That is the quintessentially American scene that was shattered by a gunman’s bullets. And the six people who lost their lives on Saturday – they too represented what is best in America.

Judge John Roll served our legal system for nearly 40 years. A graduate of this university and its law school, Judge Roll was recommended for the federal bench by John McCain twenty years ago, appointed by President George H.W. Bush, and rose to become Arizona’s chief federal judge. His colleagues described him as the hardest-working judge within the Ninth Circuit. He was on his way back from attending Mass, as he did every day, when he decided to stop by and say hi to his Representative. John is survived by his loving wife, Maureen, his three sons, and his five grandchildren.

George and Dorothy Morris – “Dot” to her friends – were high school sweethearts who got married and had two daughters. They did everything together, traveling the open road in their RV, enjoying what their friends called a 50-year honeymoon. Saturday morning, they went by the Safeway to hear what their Congresswoman had to say. When gunfire rang out, George, a former Marine, instinctively tried to shield his wife. Both were shot. Dot passed away.

A New Jersey native, Phyllis Schneck retired to Tucson to beat the snow. But in the summer, she would return East, where her world revolved around her 3 children, 7 grandchildren, and 2 year-old great-granddaughter. A gifted quilter, she’d often work under her favorite tree, or sometimes sew aprons with the logos of the Jets and the Giants to give out at the church where she volunteered. A Republican, she took a liking to Gabby, and wanted to get to know her better.

Dorwan and Mavy Stoddard grew up in Tucson together – about seventy years ago. They moved apart and started their own respective families, but after both were widowed they found their way back here, to, as one of Mavy’s daughters put it, “be boyfriend and girlfriend again.” When they weren’t out on the road in their motor home, you could find them just up the road, helping folks in need at the Mountain Avenue Church of Christ. A retired construction worker, Dorwan spent his spare time fixing up the church along with their dog, Tux. His final act of selflessness was to dive on top of his wife, sacrificing his life for hers.

Everything Gabe Zimmerman did, he did with passion – but his true passion was people. As Gabby’s outreach director, he made the cares of thousands of her constituents his own, seeing to it that seniors got the Medicare benefits they had earned, that veterans got the medals and care they deserved, that government was working for ordinary folks. He died doing what he loved – talking with people and seeing how he could help. Gabe is survived by his parents, Ross and Emily, his brother, Ben, and his fiancée, Kelly, who he planned to marry next year.

And then there is nine year-old Christina Taylor Green. Christina was an A student, a dancer, a gymnast, and a swimmer. She often proclaimed that she wanted to be the first woman to play in the major leagues, and as the only girl on her Little League team, no one put it past her. She showed an appreciation for life uncommon for a girl her age, and would remind her mother, “We are so blessed. We have the best life.” And she’d pay those blessings back by participating in a charity that helped children who were less fortunate.

Our hearts are broken by their sudden passing. Our hearts are broken – and yet, our hearts also have reason for fullness.

Our hearts are full of hope and thanks for the 13 Americans who survived the shooting, including the congresswoman many of them went to see on Saturday. I have just come from the University Medical Center, just a mile from here, where our friend Gabby courageously fights to recover even as we speak. And I can tell you this – she knows we’re here and she knows we love her and she knows that we will be rooting for her throughout what will be a difficult journey.

And our hearts are full of gratitude for those who saved others. We are grateful for Daniel Hernandez, a volunteer in Gabby’s office who ran through the chaos to minister to his boss, tending to her wounds to keep her alive. We are grateful for the men who tackled the gunman as he stopped to reload. We are grateful for a petite 61 year-old, Patricia Maisch, who wrestled away the killer’s ammunition, undoubtedly saving some lives. And we are grateful for the doctors and nurses and emergency medics who worked wonders to heal those who’d been hurt.

These men and women remind us that heroism is found not only on the fields of battle. They remind us that heroism does not require special training or physical strength. Heroism is here, all around us, in the hearts of so many of our fellow citizens, just waiting to be summoned – as it was on Saturday morning.

Their actions, their selflessness, also pose a challenge to each of us. It raises the question of what, beyond the prayers and expressions of concern, is required of us going forward. How can we honor the fallen? How can we be true to their memory?

You see, when a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations – to try to impose some order on the chaos, and make sense out of that which seems senseless. Already we’ve seen a national conversation commence, not only about the motivations behind these killings, but about everything from the merits of gun safety laws to the adequacy of our mental health systems. Much of this process, of debating what might be done to prevent such tragedies in the future, is an essential ingredient in our exercise of self-government.

But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized – at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do – it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.

Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding. In the words of Job, “when I looked for light, then came darkness.” Bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.

For the truth is that none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack. None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped those shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man’s mind.

So yes, we must examine all the facts behind this tragedy. We cannot and will not be passive in the face of such violence. We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of violence in the future.

But what we can’t do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another. As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility. Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.

After all, that’s what most of us do when we lose someone in our family – especially if the loss is unexpected. We’re shaken from our routines, and forced to look inward. We reflect on the past. Did we spend enough time with an aging parent, we wonder. Did we express our gratitude for all the sacrifices they made for us? Did we tell a spouse just how desperately we loved them, not just once in awhile but every single day?

So sudden loss causes us to look backward – but it also forces us to look forward, to reflect on the present and the future, on the manner in which we live our lives and nurture our relationships with those who are still with us. We may ask ourselves if we’ve shown enough kindness and generosity and compassion to the people in our lives. Perhaps we question whether we are doing right by our children, or our community, and whether our priorities are in order. We recognize our own mortality, and are reminded that in the fleeting time we have on this earth, what matters is not wealth, or status, or power, or fame – but rather, how well we have loved, and what small part we have played in bettering the lives of others.

That process of reflection, of making sure we align our values with our actions – that, I believe, is what a tragedy like this requires. For those who were harmed, those who were killed – they are part of our family, an American family 300 million strong. We may not have known them personally, but we surely see ourselves in them. In George and Dot, in Dorwan and Mavy, we sense the abiding love we have for our own husbands, our own wives, our own life partners. Phyllis – she’s our mom or grandma; Gabe our brother or son. In Judge Roll, we recognize not only a man who prized his family and doing his job well, but also a man who embodied America’s fidelity to the law. In Gabby, we see a reflection of our public spiritedness, that desire to participate in that sometimes frustrating, sometimes contentious, but always necessary and never-ending process to form a more perfect union.

And in Christina…in Christina we see all of our children. So curious, so trusting, so energetic and full of magic.

So deserving of our love.

And so deserving of our good example. If this tragedy prompts reflection and debate, as it should, let’s make sure it’s worthy of those we have lost. Let’s make sure it’s not on the usual plane of politics and point scoring and pettiness that drifts away with the next news cycle.

The loss of these wonderful people should make every one of us strive to be better in our private lives – to be better friends and neighbors, co-workers and parents. And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their deaths help usher in more civility in our public discourse, let’s remember that it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy, but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation, in a way that would make them proud. It should be because we want to live up to the example of public servants like John Roll and Gabby Giffords, who knew first and foremost that we are all Americans, and that we can question each other’s ideas without questioning each other’s love of country, and that our task, working together, is to constantly widen the circle of our concern so that we bequeath the American dream to future generations.

I believe we can be better. Those who died here, those who saved lives here – they help me believe. We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another is entirely up to us. I believe that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness, and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.

That’s what I believe, in part because that’s what a child like Christina Taylor Green believed. Imagine: here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy; just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship; just starting to glimpse the fact that someday she too might play a part in shaping her nation’s future. She had been elected to her student council; she saw public service as something exciting, something hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted.

I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it. All of us – we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations.

Christina was given to us on September 11th, 2001, one of 50 babies born that day to be pictured in a book called “Faces of Hope.” On either side of her photo in that book were simple wishes for a child’s life. “I hope you help those in need,” read one. “I hope you know all of the words to the National Anthem and sing it with your hand over your heart. I hope you jump in rain puddles.”

If there are rain puddles in heaven, Christina is jumping in them today. And here on Earth, we place our hands over our hearts, and commit ourselves as Americans to forging a country that is forever worthy of her gentle, happy spirit.

May God bless and keep those we’ve lost in restful and eternal peace. May He love and watch over the survivors. And may He bless the United States of America.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Fox talkers demand Sheriff Dupnik produce evidence. Since when has evidence ever mattered to Fox talkers?

2011-01-12T12:55:00.000-08:00

-- by Dave

[media id="19336" embed="true" image="true" download="true"]

Bill O'Reilly stepped up last night to make his contribution to the Right's jihad against Clarence Dupnik for speaking the truth about the environment in Arizona in which Jared Loughner's shooting rampage occurred, devoting three whole segments to running down Dupnik, including his opening "Talking Points Memo" segment in which he attacked Dupnik for mixing politics and law enforcement. This, from the guy who has a man-crush on Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

At least the first featured a defense of Dupnik from Alicia Menendez, the first yet allowed on Fox -- though it was, unsurprisingly, an incredibly weak-kneed one. This exchange was pretty revealing, though:

MENENDEZ: So you think that that rhetoric has nothing to do with this? Nothing at all? No connection?

O'REILLY: There's no connection at all. No I think that the man, -- and here's what I think, the man is a zealot. He's a zealot. He is using and abusing his position as a Sheriff, all right? To spout the political point of view. All right?

And two downsides. Number one, he ignites this whole thing because he did. And number two, he obscures the investigation. He obscures it. And I think it's wrong on both counts.

MENENDEZ: So why -- here -- so then, Bill, why are we sitting here talking about him instead of talking about what we do --

O'REILLY: Because we want to -- we want to neutralize people like him. That's why!

MENENDEZ: So he makes you nervous?

O'REILLY: He doesn't make me nervous. He makes me angry.

MENENDEZ: If -- if -- there's nothing legit about what he's saying, then why is he making you nervous?

O'REILLY: No, no, our -- our job here at the Factor, Alicia, as you know is to spotlight people who are harming the country and I think Dupnik is harming the country.

Then he brought on Elisabeth Hasselbeck and somehow managed to not ask her to clarify her previous thoughts on Sarah Palin's "crosshairs" in relation to this story. Instead, they bashed Dupnik some more:

HASSELBECK: The irony, Bill, is that we're looking at a law enforcement individual in a position of power, and in a profession where evidence is near-mandatory, right? To prosecute anybody. And yet there's no evidence to back up anything he's saying.

O'REILLY: Nothing.

This is what Fox talkers were saying all day long (Laura Ingraham made the same charge that morning on Fox & Friends, claiming that Dupnik had "no evidence."

First, let's stipulate: Dupnik had all the evidence he needed to make the kinds of remarks he made about the political and social environment in Arizona -- one that has gotten so virulently ugly that Democrats and liberals in Arizona increasingly are fearful for their physical well-being and are reluctant to self-identify as liberals. (Will Bunch had a terrific piece at Media Matters recently on this very subject; as someone with family and friends in Arizona, I can personally attest to this reality.)

Unlike Bill O'Reilly or Megyn Kelly or Monica Crowley, Dupnik actually lives in Arizona, and does know whereof he speaks. Moreover, there is abundant evidence about the vicious eliminationist hatred, some of it officially sanctioned by the GOP and Tea Parties, that was directed at Giffords personally.

But let's get serious: When has evidence ever mattered to the talkers at Fox News -- Bill O'Reilly especially?

When there have been ugly incidents of right-wing extremist violence directed at "liberal" or government targets in the past, everyone at Fox -- O'Reilly and his pal Glenn Beck in particular -- have just as adamantly denied that the kind of ugly right-wing rhetoric regularly broadcast on their programs had anything to do with it ... even when the evidence has been overwhelming that, in fact, it did.

For instance, when right-wing extremist -- and enthusiastic Fox News consumer -- Jim David Adkisson walked into a Knoxville church in 2008 and gunned down two people, he was explicit in his manifesto about his sources of inspiration:

"This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book. I'd like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I know those people were inaccessible to me. I couldn't get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It's the only way we can rid America of this cancerous pestilence."

Not only did much of the manifesto read like a juiced-up version of a typical O'Reilly "Talking Points Memo," but O'Reilly's books held a prominent spot on Adkisson's bookshelves. This is what you would call pretty substantial evidence of a connection. So when a Newsday op-ed writer had the audacity to point out the obvious ties between O'Reilly's (and the rest of the Right's) overheated rhetoric and this monstrous act, how did O'Reilly respond?

Why, he was outraged, outraged we tell you -- and sent his Flying Monkey Ambush Squad, led by Jesse Watters, to attack the woman with cameras outside her home as she was unloading groceries:

That was just the first time.

Then, when a right-wing extremist named Scott Roeder -- a regular reader of O'Reilly's columns in the "Operation Rescue" newsletter, a number of which targeted Dr. George Tiller for attack -- walked into a Wichita church and shot Tiller in the head, O'Reilly was just as adamant denying that his vicious rhetoric could have played any role whatsoever in the shooting. Our favorite instance was when he brought on his ever-reliable shill, Juan Williams, to stick up for his pal O'Reilly:

Similarly, when a young Pittsburgh white supremacist named Richard Poplawski -- heeding Glenn Beck's warnings that Obama was planning to take his guns away and might be planning to incarcerate people in concentration camps -- gunned down three police officers who came to his door, Beck was adamant in denouncing bloggers like us for pointing out that there was a pretty obvious connection here:

And when a longtime far-right fringe actor named James Von Brunn walked into the Holocaust Memorial Museum and gunned down a security guard, Beck scrambled to portray him as left-wing nutcase -- but hey, we shouldn't be blaming anyone but the killer himself for this blah blah blah ...

Later, O'Reilly and Beck got together to commiserate on just how nasty and awful those liberals were for daring to point to the, you know, actual evidence that the rhetoric they used may have helped fuel these acts of violence:

And then, when the evidence of a powerful connection between Glenn Beck's rhetoric and a planned act of extreme violence is demonstrated to be incontrovertible, as it was in the case of would-be tides Foundation terrorist Byron Williams, what do they do at Fox?

Nothing. They simply do not report on it. They pretend it simply didn't happen. And their cohorts in the rest of the mainstream media largely do the same -- which is how they're able to get away with it.

Evidence, schmevidence. Here's a fact: Jared Loughner could have the collected works of Glenn Beck by his bedside, and a poster-size reproduction of Sarah Palin's gunsight poster hanging over his desk, and these guys would insist they had nothing, NOTHING to do with this or any other act of violence.

After all, their continued livelihood depends on it. Too bad American TV news consumers can't figure that out, and respond accordingly.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]