Will the Latino vote decide Election 2008?

-- by Dave

Herny Fernandez has offers this noteworthy analysis:

 Here’s how 538 lists the top 6 states in terms of return on investment:

1. Colorado
2. Nevada
3. New Hampshire
4. Virginia
5. Ohio
6. New Mexico

Three of those states (Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico) have Latino voting blocs more than large enough to decide the outcome. For both campaigns, this race is coming down to the ability to inspire Latino voters.

With polls consistently showing Obama holding a 2-1 advantage among those voters -- particularly in those three states -- that's good news for Obama. But he can't afford to stand pat, either.

It's true that Obama has done a fine job recently of attacking McCain for his two-facedness on immigration. But at the same time, as Roberto Lovato has adroitly observed, immigration has been put on the backburner as an issue for Democrats. This was especially the case at the Democratic National Convention, where the only discussion of immigration came early in the final day, in the form of speeches by Rep. Luis Guiterrez and Bill Richardson (as well as a brief mention in Obama's acceptance speech).

It's not enough to point out that McCain has been trying to play both ends against the middle on immigration. To win these voters, Obama needs to enunciate a vision of immigration reform built on common sense and the wisdom enough to see the big picture. It's an opportunity to demonstrate real leadership.

As it turns out, the election could depend on it. The economy will be this campaign's landmark issue, no doubt -- but making the right play on immigration could prove decisive in a neck-and-neck contest.

Calling out ol' Two-Face McCain

-- By Dave

John McCain's campaign-long attempt to play it both ways on immigration -- pandering to his party's nativist wingnuts while attempting to tell Latinos he's their pal (just don't tell anyone) -- is finally starting to catch up with him.

America's Voice has an ad calling him out on it. As you can see from watching it, it's very effective in making clear his hypocrisy in falsely blaming Obama for the failure of comprehensive immigration reform in 2006 -- when in fact the fault lay with the raving xenophobic wing of the Republican Party.

The ad substantiates the thrust of Obama's own Spanish-language attack ad nailing McCain along similar lines. And the best part of all this has been watching the right wing howl in protest. (Score!)

Rush Limbaugh (whose constant use of demeaning stereotypes when he talks about Latinos played a substantial role) in particular has been whining that "Obama is stoking racial antagonism" by supposedly taking his quotes out of context. But when Limbaugh offers the actual context, it's clear that, indeed, he was indulging demeaning stereotypes as usual. Epic fail, dude.

Indeed, it is to laugh: Obama is stoking "racial antagonism"? This, from the guy whose unending defense of "white culture" and constant attacks on multiculturalism are staples of his massively popular radio show? This, from the guy who told his audience that Obama should just "renounce his race" and "become white"? The guy who informed us that Donovan McNabb got ahead in the NFL because he was black? The guy who calls illegal immigrants an "invasive species"?

Also muddying the water has been conservative Latino columnist Ruben Navarette, who insists that the McCain ad is perfectly accurate. Um, well, maybe not so much: Frank Sharry has the definitive response to Navarette.

Oddly enough, McCain's prevarications on immigration haven't been tallied among the naked falsehoods he's been peddling lately. But really, they are among the clearest examples of his two-faced approach to politics.

GOP official: Hispanics 'consider themselves above blacks,' won't back Obama

-- by Dave

LP at New MexicoFBIHOP notes that Bernalillo County Republican chairman Fernando C' de Baca told a BBC reporter:

"The truth is that Hispanics came here as conquerors," he said. "African-Americans came here as slaves.

"Hispanics consider themselves above blacks. They won't vote for a black president."

If I were Republicans, I wouldn't be counting on this view being particularly widespread among Latinos. Especially if Latino Republicans -- and John McCain supporters at that -- go around spreading the word that the party is wedded to old racial divisions.

The New Mexico Independent has more.

What goes around...

-- by Sara

Right now, the GOP has to be rueing the day they ever brought up Jeremiah Wright.



And, you know, they can't blame anybody but themselves. They started it. There used to be a gentleman's agreement -- at least among white Protestant politicans, which was almost all of them -- that you didn't drag people's private religious beliefs into the campaign arena, any more than you'd drag in the sordid details of their family lives (including health issues, mistresses, addicted wives, pregnant daughters, and gay sons). Even public people were assumed to be entitled to some level of a private life, and that protection definitely covered their religious views, affiliations, and activities.

That custom, if it still existed, would have made the above clip a political non-issue. If a vice-presidential candidate wanted to credit her governorship to a faith-healing witch hunter from another country far away -- well, the press was well-trained to ignore such aberrations, and look the other way.

But, of course, the religious right went ahead and broke that agreement, and then spent the next 30 years making the Godliness of its candidates a centerpiece of their politics. And now, finally, that strategy has come all the way back around and bit them squarely on their wide, rosy butts.

Six months ago, they couldn't stop talking about Jeremiah Wright, and what his "radical" (code for: angry black ghetto thug) theology said about the presidential potential of his parisioner, Barack Obama. Now, of course, they have no interest at all in talking about Thomas Muthee and what his truly bizarre brand of neo-Pentecostalism might say about Sarah Palin's intentions for the country. Double standard? Of course.

But we shouldn't let them off that hook. Since they brought up the subject, let's go ahead and have that conversation. All of it.

For example, while we're at it, we should be taking stock of this new SPLC report examining the strength and numbers of the "Joel's Army" movement. While this group has been a concern of right-wing watchers for the past few years, I got my first public sighting of them last summer -- at the Northwest Washington County Fair, of all places. The military mothers' group had put together a big scrapbook showing all the county's service men and women, with a page for each one with personal histories (high school attended, parents' names, deployment dates, etc.) and photos. It was a very popular and moving exhibit. My husband and I went through it twice.

What struck me was that better than half of the troops from this rural ag county were either homeschooled or had attended Christian schools. Some families had two and three sons serving. A few photos showed them in battle dress, Bibles in hand; or in other religious contexts. Being aware of Joel's Amry, I couldn't shake the impression that some of these families had bred these kids for military service the way most middle-class families groom their kids for college. I was looking at at least a few of the faces of this new army of Christian warriors, young men (and a few women) who joined the military not just out of patriotism or job experience, but also to gain the skills they expected to need someday to take the country for Jesus -- by force.

The SPLC report expresses deep concern over the size and intensity of the Joel's Army movement:

LAKELAND, Fla. — Todd Bentley has a long night ahead of him, resurrecting the dead, healing the blind, and exploding cancerous tumors. Since April 3, the 32-year-old, heavily tattooed, body-pierced, shaved-head Canadian preacher has been leading a continuous "supernatural healing revival" in central Florida. To contain the 10,000-plus crowds flocking from around the globe, Bentley has rented baseball stadiums, arenas and airport hangars at a cost of up to $15,000 a day. Many in attendance are church pastors themselves who believe Bentley to be a prophet and don't bat an eye when he tells them he's seen King David and spoken with the Apostle Paul in heaven. "He was looking very Jewish," Bentley notes.

Tattooed across his sternum are military dog tags that read "Joel's Army." They're evidence of Bentley's generalship in a rapidly growing apocalyptic movement that's gone largely unnoticed by watchdogs of the theocratic right. According to Bentley and a handful of other "hyper-charismatic" preachers advancing the same agenda, Joel's Army is prophesied to become an Armageddon-ready military force of young people with a divine mandate to physically impose Christian "dominion" on non-believers.

"An end-time army has one common purpose — to aggressively take ground for the kingdom of God under the authority of Jesus Christ, the Dread Champion," Bentley declares on the website for his ministry school in British Columbia, Canada. "The trumpet is sounding, calling on-fire, revolutionary believers to enlist in Joel's Army. … Many are now ready to be mobilized to establish and advance God's kingdom on earth."

Joel's Army followers, many of them teenagers and young adults who believe they're members of the final generation to come of age before the end of the world, are breaking away in droves from mainline Pentecostal churches. Numbering in the tens of thousands, they base their beliefs on an esoteric reading of the second chapter of the Old Testament Book of Joel, in which an avenging swarm of locusts attacks Israel. In their view, the locusts are a metaphor for Joel's Army.

Despite their overt militancy, there's no evidence Joel's Army followers have committed any acts of violence. But critics warn that actual bloodletting may only be a matter of time for a movement that casts itself as God's avenging army.

Those sounding the alarm about Joel's Army are not secular foes of the Christian Right, few of whom are even aware of the movement or how widespread it's become in the past decade. Instead, Joel's Army critics are mostly conservative Christians, either neo-Pentecostals who left the movement in disgust or evangelical Christians who fear that Joel's Army preachers are stealing their flocks, even sending spies to infiltrate their own congregations and sway their young people to heresy. And they say the movement is becoming frightening.

As Bruce Wilson at Talk2Action has recently pointed out, three of the four churches Sarah Palin has attended share affiliations with the New Apostolic Movement, of which Joel's Army (as well as the now-defunct "Jesus Camp") are a part. It's a tenuous link of circumstantial evidence -- but it's no more tenuous or circumstantial than the arguments the right has been using all along to tie Obama to various radicals. Palin has spent her life in these churches, and (unlike Obama) has publicly admitted her political debt to a "witch-hunter" whose beliefs are much farther from the Amerian mainstream than Wright's ever were.

By their own standards and rules of evidence, Sarah Palin's association with New Apostolic churches and her admitted personal associations are serious issues that cast a long shadow on her intentions for this country. If the GOP ticket wins, there's a one-third chance that the world's most powerful country -- including the biggest army the world has ever seen -- will end up in the hands of a woman who believes that God put her where she is; and subscribes to a religion that is overtly and unapologetically raising its children to destroy American democracy.

The odds of their success are small. Two-thirds to three-quarters of all fundamentalist-raised kids leave the faith before the age of 40, most in the first decade after they leave home. Odds are good most of these young warriors will find more peaceful lives on other paths.

But they are already leaving their mark on our military (as both Mikey Weinstein and Andrew Bacevich have reported); and we'd best not understimate the fresh appeal extremist movements can have in the wake of economic collapse or military defeat. With the prospect of both looming in our future, it's probably just as well that that old gentleman's agreement is no longer in place to protect the likes of Sarah Palin.

Sarah Palin’s Bircher Mag: What Was In It

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

According to Ben Smith, Team McCain has an explanation for that copy of the John Birch Society organ, The New American, that Sarah Palin was displaying in the 1995 photo of her that appeared in the New York Times:

"This photo from the early to mid 90s shows the Governor having her photo taken in front of a three ring binder of information from local citizens presented regularly to Wasilla council members by the town clerk," said Palin spokesman Michael Goldfarb. "These binders featured material given by members of the public to all council members."

Really? Well, you can see the first page of the story at left. Here’s a PDF file of the entire piece [minus a page we'll insert soon]. The text is also available here. And here’s a shot of the cover.
As you can see from reading it, it’s largely a long-winded exercise in needless paranoia: The author seemed to believe that a relatively benign gathering of governors to hash over states rights was part of a covert conspiracy to remake the Constitution.

Why exactly would this article be part of "material given to the council by members of the public"? It has nothing to do with Wasilla, or even city governance. Nor, for that matter, is the piece bound in with the rest of the material in the binder; Palin has set it out separately.

Smith notes that the then-editor of New American at the time reported (quite accurately) that the publication distributed copies of the piece widely with the intent of flooding state and local civic offices. And indeed, this piece looks not quite like the original (the piece on Palin’s desk has printed material below the second black bar), suggesting that what we’re looking at is one of those reprints.

So it’s a perfectly reasonable explanation that some citizen, at a bare minimum, dropped it by for distribution to the council and that just happened to be the page that Palin had opened to when time to pose for her photo.

However, that doesn’t explain everything.

Rather than being randomly selected, it appears that Palin has chosen this piece carefully — it appears to be, after all, an official City Hall portrait (at least, it’s not just a snapshot). The Birch flier has been pulled out and neatly arranged. Nor is it hole-punched for the three-ring binder; rather, it seems to have been placed on top of the briefing materials separately.

Why choose as an illustration of one’s work on the Wasilla City Council an article dealing with an international conspiracy to destroy the Constitution under the guise of a states’ convention? Phil Munger has some ideas.

So do we. We’ll report back on this when we know more.


In the meantime, it’s worth getting some context for this. As we explained, the Birch Society in the 1990s was also heavily involved with promoting the idea of "citizen militias." Here’s a copy of the cover of The New American two issues before the "Con Con Call" edition — specifically, from Feb. 6, 1995.
Here’s the text of the cover story from that edition. As you can see, this was an entirely sympathetic piece about the militias (one that actually devoted most of its space to attacking the SPLC and the ADL), which concluded:

While the legal standing of many of the militia organizations may be uncertain, there should be no uncertainty about this: Bill Clinton, Janet Reno, Louis Freeh, and their federal minions can be counted on to fully exploit any and all incidents involving militias, and to be monitoring the actions and rhetoric of militia members. Together with the media, they will attempt to construct the spectre of a terrible armed threat amongst us. Unfortunately, there appear to be many in the ranks of the militia movement who will play right into their hands. And if that doesn’t happen on its own, the militias provide the perfect medium for federal agents provocateurs to instigate outrageous offenses that can be used to justify even more draconian gun control laws and police-state repression.

This was published two months before militiaman Tim McVeigh blew up 168 people in Oklahoma City. Sure enough, the JBS shortly afterward began flogging the theory that McVeigh was actually working for the FBI — and still does.

One has wonder whether this reading material crossed Councilwoman Palin’s desk approvingly as well.

Is Sarah Palin a closet John Bircher?

-- by Dave

Michael Shaw at BAGNewsNotes found this 1995 image of Sarah Palin at her Wasilla City Council desk. It appears to be her official portrait, and a mundane one at that.

What's striking, as Michael points out, is the article in front of her: It's a piece about the "Con Con Call" -- one of those hysterical non-issues that conspiracy theorists of the far right in 1995 were shrieking about, involving an attempt by a handful of governors to organize a convention aimed at fighting what they saw as states' subordinate status. (Yes, the shrieking shut it down.)

One of the organizers of that particular torch-bearing mob was the John Birch Society. And sure enough, the article that Palin is proudly displaying in this portrait is a copy of the March 1995 edition of New American, the house organ of the Birch Society.

The article in question was written by Don Fotheringham. (It's no longer in the NA's archives, but you can read the text of it at this site.)

The Birchers are best known for their ardent McCarthyism and their long career in promoting cockamamie conspiracy theories about supposed Communist infiltration of government -- not just in the '50s and '60s, but well into the late '80s, until the fall of the Soviet Union. At that point, they simply picked up the same act and transferred it to promoting similar theories about the "New World Order" under Bill Clinton in the 1990s. (Chip Berlet has one of the best disquisitions on the Birch Society's long career.)

These same theories were the raison d'etre of the militia movement -- and indeed, the Birch Society ardently promoted the militias and related "Patriot" activity. I used to see their material on sale at militia gatherings regularly.

So it's probably not a coincidence that Sarah Palin was proudly reading Bircher magazines at the same time she and her husband were attending Alaskan Independence Party gatherings and making friends with its leaders, and the same year her husband signed up as a member. Because the AIP, as we've detailed, has a long history of being part of this same "Patriot" movement contingent.

It might be no wonder that an AIP follower like Todd Palin doesn't believe he has respond to official subpoenas. After all, "sovereign citizenship" -- fancy words for "I'm exempt from your laws" (based on the notion that the government was "illegitimate") -- was a staple of the Patriots, too.

That's quite the VP nominee John McCain picked there.

Can Bush's DOJ do its job in protecting Obama?

-- by Dave

Troy Eid, the Rove-appointed U.S. Attorney in Colorado who tossed off the case of the would-be Obama assassins, is deeply concerned about meanie bloggers he blames for the resulting spate of bad press. He might better spend his time reading his own affidavits.

Here's the AP version of what was in the affidavit:

Johnson later told a federal agent that the men talked about assassinating Obama only because he was black, according to a federal arrest affidavit. Johnson said he also heard Adolf say that he wanted to kill Obama "on the day of his inauguration" and that he would "find high ground to set up and shoot Obama," the affidavit said.

And yet in his press conference announcing there wasn't "enough evidence" to pursue conspiracy charges against the men, Eid said:

"You know, they didn't, they didn't reveal a plan. I think what you can see in the affidavit was, uh, a lot of racist rantings and a lot of dislike for the idea of Senator Obama as an African-American person of color being able to pursue that office."

Not only did these men have a plan, they had the material for carrying it out and appeared to be in the early stages of doing so. Investigators found high-powered rifles, ammunition, disguises, walkie-talkies, and maps, all indicative of a coordinated plan to assassinate Obama.

As Brad Jacobson at Media Bloodhound notes, you couple all this with the admission by one of the participants, and it's clear that Eid's office had before them (as the FBI made clear in recommending charges be filed) evidence of motive, intent, and plan -- as well as both the means and the capability of carrying it out. Moreover, as is always critical in conspiracy cases, they evidently took steps to do so.

This is the same U.S. Attorney who was forced upon Coloradans by Karl Rove, despite being profoundly compromised by his associations with Jack Abramoff. Not only was Eid hired while Monica Goodling was calling the shots, his chief deputy was "vetted" by Goodling.

Two questions arise -- one minor, one major:

-- How often has Troy Eid ignored the FBI's recommendations in the past when it comes to filing charges in cases of this nature? (We know when it came to a black man inside a prison threatening John McCain -- despite a clear lack of capability of actually carrying out the threat -- Eid was eager and willing.)

-- Is this administration -- and particularly this Justice Department, as deeply compromised as it has become by the Bush White House's crass politicization -- capable of ensuring that true threats against Democratic figures like Obama are taken seriously and dealt with appropriately?

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

Troy Eid and the Obama plotters: Blaming the bloggers

-- by Dave

Having grotesquely failed in taking seriously the plot by three white-supremacist tweakers to assassinate Barack Obama in Denver, Colorado’s Rove-appointed U.S. Attorney, Troy Eid, is complaining in the Denver Post that the resulting negative coverage is all the fault of anonymous liberal bloggers:

Long before respected mainstream news organizations, including The Denver Post, got so many of their story leads from anonymous Internet scribblers whose veracity and competency cannot by definition be verified.

Eid goes on to contend that "faceless bloggers" are destroying journalistic standards by publishing "wild internet rumors" that journalists then feel compelled to run. And that, you see, is why there were questions about his handling of the tweakers case. Not, you know, because they demonstrated a clear and bizarre double standard in his enforcement of the law.

Well, for what it's worth, this "faceless blogger" was one of the first bloggers tackling this case. I don't know to what extent we drove the subsequent reportage, but I do know that these posts generated a great deal of traffic.

And I have never blogged under anything but my own name. As you can see, my mug shot adorns my posts here. I am not faceless or nameless.

I also happen to have the credentials to be raising these questions: I've written books on the far right, have covered numerous federal court cases involving the far right, have covered FBI standoffs and have gotten to know a number of both FBI agents and federal prosecutors, and I know how these cases operate. In 2000, my reportage on domestic terrorism for MSNBC won a National Press Club Award for Distinguished Online Journalism.

And yes, I'm a blogger and a journalist, and proud of it.

Troy Eid is going to have to come up with a better excuse than this. Particularly as it becomes clear how badly he's botched this case. More on that later.

[H/t to Nicole at Crooks and Liars.]

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

McCain's Latest Lie: Spanish-Only Immigration Ad Blames Obama

-- by Dave

Is there anything the McCain campaign won’t lie about? It’s becoming pathological:

The McCain campaign has started airing a new Spanish-language television commercial in the battleground states of Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico that lays the failure of comprehensive immigration reform at the feet of Barack Obama and his Democratic colleagues -- despite the fact that Obama supported the bipartisan John McCain-Edward Kennedy efforts to enact such reforms and voted for their final proposal last year.

… "Obama and his Congressional allies say they are on the side of immigrants," the ad's announcer says in Spanish in the spot, released Friday. "But are they? The press reports that their efforts were 'poison pills' that made immigration reform fail. The result: No guest worker program. No path to citizenship. No secure borders. No reform. Is that being on our side? Obama and his Congressional allies: Ready to block immigration reform, but not ready to lead."

This is a complete reversal of the real picture: Republicans, not Democrats, killed immigration reform, and it had nothing to do with “poison pill” amendments. It had to do with right-wing Republicans who hated the “amnesty” portions of the bill that McCain himself supported.

As you can see in the above video, the nativist nutcases actually claim credit (with good reason) for killing immigration reform. And they will continue to be the largest obstacle. 

Even the Washington Times is calling bullshit on McCain's ad (with its own right-wing take, of course):

It's McCain's second attempt to try to tie Obama to unpopular congressional Democrats, and this one's a stretch. The immigration bill didn't die because of poison pill amendments; it died because it was unworkable from the start — a mishmash of ideas and policies that never quite worked together, that was always skewed too far toward amnesty to truly win much conservative support, and that never quite got the buy-in such a deal needed from both sides.

Remember, this is a bill that was so unpopular it was blocked by a bipartisan majority filibuster — usually the tool of the minority.

The McCain campaign, in its backup literature for the ad, points to "poison pill amendments" that Obama backed. But even there, their read on the situation is off. They argue Obama voted for the amendment to sunset the guest-worker program after five years. That amendment passed 49-48.

But the entire agreement was so fragile that without that amendment, sought by labor unions, even more Democrats would have voted against the final bill. In fact, the amendment was voted on twice — it failed the first time, but in order to keep Democrats from abandoning the bill they negotiated a second vote, which passed.

So it's arguable that amendment actually kept the bill alive longer than it otherwise would have lasted.

This is only the latest lie coming from these people, as we all know, and it has permanently changed the campaign narrative. McCain’s campaign has officially become the Fast Talk Express.

How the Big Shitpile will be good for Republicans

-- by Dave

It's been noted on many previous occasions that, no matter how bad the news arising from Republican mismanagement of the economy, or the war, or policy in general, the media find ways to explain how it's going to "be good for Republicans."

However, it may be hard to see how today's news about the freefall on Wall Street and the looming collapse of the American economy -- all the product, as Barack Obama correctly notes, of Republican policies and mismanagement -- will be good for Republicans. Especially with John McCain still running about insisting that "the fundamentals are strong." Could anyone be more clueless?

On the other hand, the GOP does have a knack for making sandwiches out of shitpiles, and no doubt they'll find a way to do it here.

Indeed, it looks like they already have a plan in action, according to the Michigan Messenger:

The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Michigan, a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to challenge some voters on Election Day.

“We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,” party chairman James Carabelli told Michigan Messenger in a telephone interview earlier this week. He said the local party wanted to make sure that proper electoral procedures were followed.

State election rules allow parties to assign “election challengers” to polls to monitor the election. In addition to observing the poll workers, these volunteers can challenge the eligibility of any voter provided they “have a good reason to believe” that the person is not eligible to vote. One allowable reason is that the person is not a “true resident of the city or township.”

Since this story came out last week, the GOP has gone on to recant that it will use such tactics. On the other hand, an update today reports that a former GOP operative says it's likely the Republicans will indeed use such tactics this fall:

“It is actually a very smart thing to do,” he went on, “particularly in this climate with so many foreclosures.”

For Republicans, he said, targeting the foreclosures would be a cost-effective and “probably” legal method of reducing Democratic votes.

If he were still in the election business, he said, “I’d be doing that all day long.”

Come this November, with the foreclosures piling up, you can count on it.

See? The Big Shitpile is good for Republicans.

Sarah Palin's just fine with vicious sexist smears ... of her foes

Poor, poor, put-upon Sarah Palin.

The McCain campaign has been whining about the supposedly vicious smears being directed at Sarah Palin by liberals -- and of course, has been roundly knocked down for it, since it's a classic strawman argument. (The Web ad they made whining about Obama's "lipstick on a pig" remark was so thoroughly eviscerated that it's been taken down from YouTube.) Indeed, it's clear that much of the reason McCain chose her was so that they could reignite the culture wars by making an inviting target of Palin, and then making her an object of soccer-mom sympathy.

But it's funny: Palin hasn't objected to vicious, personal and profoundly sexist political attacks ... when they've been directed against her political opponents.

This January, Palin was on a right-wing radio talk show in Anchorage hosted by a typical conservative smearmeister named Bob Lester. Dan Fagan at the Anchorage Daily News filled us in with the details at the time:

Lou Dobbs just loves to spread a little hate

-- by Dave

Lou Dobbs pays us a nightly visit from up-is-down Planet Bizarro in his weekday show. But this week, his special Bizarro launching pad is the "Hold Their Feet to the Fire" anti-immigrant lobbying push -- you know, the one sponsored by a hate group.

Sure enough:

DOBBS: Absolutely. And you're to be commended. The Federation for American Immigration Reform is to be commended. I know that you and I, our fellow radio talk show hosts, all of us who have been involved at the forefront of this issue for years now have taken a lot of heat. We have been called racists, xenophobes, all sorts of nastiness from groups that -- like the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has become a hate group of its own, referring to FAIR as a hate group simply because they want illegal immigration stopped and border security, port security put in place. How are you being received now? 

Actually, if all FAIR wanted was "illegal immigration stopped and border security put in place," no one would object, particularly not the SPLC, which takes no position on either of those issues.

What the SPLC cares about is the xenophobic demonization of immigrants, particularly Latino immigrants, in no small part because that kind of scapegoating serves as a major recruitment tool for hate groups that inflict violence on minorities. Watchdogging that part of the scenery is pretty much the SPLC's deal -- and FAIR has indulged it so egregiously that they've earned the bona-fide hate group distinction.

How do you earn a "hate group" distinction? The SPLC's criteria is fairly simple: You have to be involved in the routine degradation and demonization of a target ethnic or other minority group: "All hate groups have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics."

How do we know that FAIR does this? Well, there are all the examples cited in the America's Voice ad, for starters. But we need actually look no farther than the reply to Dobbs given by FAIR's spokesman, former San Diego Mayor Roger Hedgecock:

HEDGECOCK: Well nationally, we both run up against this. And I'll tell you, it's a measure of our effectiveness. It's a measure of the unhappiness of the average American. The pragmatic middle of the road, problem solving, can-do American who has had it with the impacts of illegal immigration in their community.

The deteriorating schools, the filling prisons, the social costs, all the horrible stories that you know we have all talked about, and so I -- you know I wear the badge of their -- of their lies about us as an honor because it is an honor to see how much we are troubling these people who are enemies of sovereignty, who are enemies of our country, who want to open borders to the most -- in a national security moment, an open border is an invitation to suicide.

That's right, Lou -- because, as you know, these immigrants are bringing filth and disease and crime, lots and lots of crime with them. And terrorists too. No matter how many studies tell us that the case is otherwise, we just know these things to be true because, well, we want them to be.

Now how could anyone think these good folks are a bunch of racists? Jeeez.

Sarah Palin and Westbrook Pegler

-- by Dave

So it seems Sarah Palin – or at least one of her speechwriters – has been reading Westbrook Pegler. Here’s the Pegler quote she recited in her now Teh Awesomest Acceptance Speech Evah!

A writer observed: "We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity, and dignity." I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman.

As TPM notes, another of that same writer’s observations:

[It was] "regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara hit the wrong man when he shot at Roosevelt in Miami."

Here are some other things that writer observed:

[It is] "clearly the bounden duty of all intelligent Americans to proclaim and practice bigotry." (November 1963)

[His proposal for "smashing" the AF of L and the CIO was for the state to take them over.] "Yes, that would be fascism," he wrote. "But I, who detest fascism, see advantages in such fascism."

"I am a member of the rabble in good standing" [in a column that defended a lynching in California]

Oh, and Harry Truman, the president he supposedly was extolling? Pegler called him a “thin-lipped hater”.

That’s some fine political mentoring Palin has going on there, dontcha think?

Calling Out FAIR: Lobbyists Descend At A Hate Group’s Bidding

[Cross-posed at Firedoglake.]

For years, the Federation for American Immigration Reform has gotten away with posing as a mainstream immigration-reform organization. The mask has finally started to slip off the façade, thanks in no small part to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s devastating report on FAIR last year in which it was finally designated what we’ve known it to be all along: a hate group.

One of the main events involved in FAIR’s charade has been its annual “Hold Their Feet to the Fire” gathering of lobbyists, who then descend up on congressmen and legislators and their staffers to push their decidedly xenophobic brand of immigration “reform.” This year, CNN’s Lou Dobbs is even broadcasting from the event.

Well, turnabout is only, er, fair play. So this year, organizations seeking progressive immigration reform are holding FAIR’s feet to the fire – along with all the lobbyists and talk-show hosts participating. They’re running an ad campaign pointing out FAIR’s long history of indulging and promoting a frankly xenophobic and frequently outright racist campaign against immigrants.

The WaPo’s Mary Ann Akers reports:

The ad, paid for by America’s Voice and the Service Employees International Union, among others, asks, "When Did Extreme Become Mainstream?" And it notes FAIR has been "designated as a HATE GROUP by the Southern Poverty Law Center."
The ad includes three racially explosive quotes; one from John Tanton, founder of FAIR, saying, "As whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?" FAIR president Dan Stein is quoted saying, "Should we subsidizing people with low IQs to have as many children as possible?" Another quote in the ad, attributed to former Colorado governor Richard Lamm, a former FAIR advisory board chairman, says: "New cultures [in the U.S. are] diluting what we are and who we are."

America’s Voice has a complete rundown on FAIR.

Does anyone want to wager on whether Dobbs will mention the SPLC’s hate-group designation? Or whether, if he does, he’ll dismiss them again as an “open borders advocacy group” – even though the SPLC in fact has never taken any position on either border security or immigration policy generally?

UPDATE: FAIR responds:

WASHINGTON, Sept 09, 2008 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ — Having been unable to convince the American public that a mass illegal alien amnesty was justified or served any public interest, advocates for amnesty have launched an orchestrated and well-financed campaign to smear the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and others involved in defeating last year’s immigration bill. Using full-page ads in today’s editions of The Politico and Roll Call, this coalition of special interest groups uses inflammatory language and stock photos of individuals who have no association with FAIR to incite hatred against anyone who has the audacity to oppose their views on immigration policy. The tone and content of these ads demonstrates that their strategy to silence proponents of immigration reform has resulted in the ugliest and most negative public relations campaign in the history of American politics.

Instead of seeking to promote rational, intelligent, meaningful dialogue on immigration reform, one of the most important issues facing our nation today, the ad utterly distorts FAIR’s 30-year record of advocacy on immigration reform and merely parrots previous distortions. La Raza has claimed that one in seven Americans (which equals 45 million people) are members of hate or extremist groups. In fact, considering how many Americans oppose amnesty and support the enforcement of our immigration laws, this coalition might want to consider whether they wouldn’t simply save themselves time and money and simply call the American public in whole a hate group.

The ad’s sponsors have also forgotten to disclose their own political and economic interests in the immigration debate. Each of the organizations responsible for placing the ads invested heavily in failed lobbying efforts to pass the 2007 Senate amnesty bill. In the first half of 2007, America’s Voice alone spent $420,000; the National Council of La Raza spent $340,000. During the whole of 2007, SEIU spent over half a million dollars lobbying Congress on immigration and other issues.

In contrast to today’s ads that employ vitriolic language and images, any earnest attempt to investigate FAIR will reveal 30 years of consistent advocacy for changes to our legal and illegal immigration policies that make the interests of the American people paramount, not an afterthought. FAIR supports overall reductions in immigration levels in order to avert massive U.S. population growth. We seek to protect American workers against the erosion of the jobs and wages due to policies that flood our labor markets. We oppose immigration policies that strain vital public services, such as education and health care. FAIR favors securing unguarded borders that are an open invitation not only to illegal workers, but to criminals and terrorists. FAIR has testified before Congress on these issues about 100 times over the years and has been a source of information, analysis and commentary to every major newspaper and media outlet in the United States.

FAIR’s record is equally consistent with regard to how this nation should treat immigrants. Unlike our critics who seek to blur important distinctions, FAIR distinguishes clearly between immigration policy – which can and should be debated like any other public policy – and immigrants who deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. We believe that immigrants to our country should be admitted based on their individual merits, without regard to race, religion, ethnicity, or country of origin, and should be welcomed and integrated into the mainstream of American society. Finally, FAIR is one of only 155 charities nationwide – and the only immigration-related nonprofit – to be accredited by the Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance.

Does this ugly ad campaign reflect the tone of change we are to expect from the new wave of political operatives we can expect to descend on Washington at the end of this year? After all, isn’t a change from the nasty, divisive rhetoric of Washington what the American public is demanding? If it is, the state of public discourse in the U.S. truly is at a new low. FAIR stands by its record and we call upon all Americans to reject the blatant attempt on the part of a small coalition of radical organizations to halt meaningful debate about one of the most important public policy issues of our time.

Notice what’s missing: Any mention of the actual facts in the article. The only thing that’s "ugly" is the very real quotes from FAIR leaders and officials. Moreover, its listing as a hate group by the SPLC — which is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a "radical organization" — goes utterly unmentioned.

Memo to FAIR: It isn’t a "smear" by definition if everything that’s said is true.

McChange: GOP Wants To Pretend The Past Seven Years Didn’t Happen

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

That stampeding sound you heard last night at the Republican National Convention? That was the sound of conservatives running away from their own record.
Says John McCain:

“Change is coming! Change is coming! Change is coming!”
“We need to change the way government does almost everything.”

Says Sarah Palin:

John McCain and I are ready to shake up Washington, ready to challenge the status quo, to serve the common good, and to leave this nation better than we found it.

Right. But as Peter Baker adroitly observes, it’s pretty tough to claim to be the agent of change when your party has been in power for the past eight years.

Actually, Digby predicted this some time ago: That Republicans would begin claiming that Bush failed because he wasn’t a “true conservative.” But the stark reality is that – Bush’s timid and eventually short-lived resistance of the GOP’s nativist elements on immigration notwitshstanding – every single policy enacted under the Bush administration was done with not merely the full blessing but the adamant support of movement conservatives.

No doubt about it – John McCain and Sarah Palin would govern differently than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. They might even govern more competently.

But at the end of the day, their governance will be conservative governance.

We’ve just had nearly eight years of that. And here’s what we’ve gotten:

• Foreign-policy debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• A nation less secure and at greater risk of terrorist attacks than ever.
• A sinking economy.
• An expanding gap between rich and poor.
• Utter inaction on global warming.
• $5-a-gallon gasoline.
• An unresolved immigration problem.
• A debacle in public-school education testing and funding.
• Declining food and consumer-product safety standards.
• A government that spies on its own citizens.
• A government that tortures prisoners held in their detention facilities.

These messes weren’t the result of George W. Bush being too liberal and straying too far from the movement-conservative party line. To the contrary – they’re the direct result of him toeing that line to the millimeter. They are all the direct product of conservative governance.

That will not change if John McCain and Sarah Palin gain the White House. And no matter how
much they want us to forget that, well, we can’t. And we won’t.

FBI Wanted Obama Plotters Charged, But A Rove Appointee Said No

[Tharin Gartrell, 28; Shawn Robert Adolf, 33; and Nathan Johnson, 32]

-- by Dave

We noticed last week that it was awfully peculiar that Colorado’s U.S. Attorney, Troy Eid, had so airily dismissed conspiracy charges against the three white-supremacist tweakers who were caught planning to assassinate Barack Obama at last week’s Democratic National Convention in Denver.

Now it turns out that those suspicions were fully warranted:

KUSA - 9Wants to Know has learned three men in Denver planned to assassinate U.S. Senator Barack Obama during the Democratic National Convention in Denver by sneaking into one of his events and shooting him with a gun hidden inside of a camera, according to federal court records.

Nathan Johnson's girlfriend, whom 9NEWS is not naming because she's a juvenile, said it would have to be a suicide mission.

The plot is similar to that in the 1992 movie "The Bodyguard" starring actors Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston. In the movie, Costner stops an assassination attempt against Houston by spotting a weapon hidden inside a gutted-out TV camera.

Johnson, Shawn Adolf and Tharin Gartrell all thought that Obama had a suite in the third floor of the Hyatt hotel, where they were staying. In fact, the Senator was staying in another Denver Hotel.

The men were doing methamphetamine inside the hotel with two women on Aug. 23 discussing the plot to kill Obama, according to federal records.

Adolf said "it would not matter if he killed Senator Obama because police would simply add a murder charge to his pending charges," according to the records. There were seven outstanding warrants for Adolf's arrest.

The underage woman told law enforcement that Adolf also talked about using "a high-powered rifle 22-250 from a high vantage point" to shoot Senator Obama during his acceptance speech at INVESCO Field at Mile High during the DNC.

Even more significant, beyond the details of the plot, was the fact that, as the Colorado Independent notes, the FBI asked for more serious charges to be filed and were turned down.

Former FBI Agent and ACLU Counsel: St. Paul Police Behavior Is ‘Frightening’

Michael German

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

Yesterday afternoon I caught up with my longtime acquaintance Michael German, the ACLU’s National Security Counsel. I first met German in the 1990s when he was an FBI agent, and I knew he would have some insights into the descent of St. Paul into a virtual police state.

Here’s our conversation:

DN: Mike, I assume you’ve been watching event in St. Paul closely. What are you seeing there?

German: I have been following the policy that has enabled this sort of activity. It just stuns me that it’s gotten to this level where they’re actually targeting iWitness Video, when they’re so clearly engaged in journalistic work, it just stuns me.

Do you find this kind of behavior unprofessional on the part of the police in St. Paul?

It’s hard for me to know, not being there. Clearly, they are spending a lot of effort on people who are not a threat. And there may be people there who are a threat, and if they focus their activities on those people and not on people who are simply wanting to go to a political convention wanting to have a say and to express themselves – you know, that is a wasted effort. It’s not going to help them find the people who are going to do bad things by impeding the rights of the people who are there to express themselves. And so much seems to be focused on people who are simply trying to have their say and document what happens.

The part that really bothers me is the focus on people who are simply documenting what is happening. That is troublesome, because there is guidance being published by the Los Angeles Police Department, which has since been endorsed by the Department of Justice, called “suspicious activity reporting,” that essentially endorses targeting anyone who would document police activity as potential terrorist threats. Let me read it to you:

It is the policy of the Los Angeles Police Department to make every effort to accurately and appropriately gather, record and analyze information, of a criminal or non-criminal nature, that could indicate activity or intentions related to either foreign or domestic terrorism.

Now, the idea that it would be the policy of the Los Angeles Police Department to collect information on non-criminal behavior is outrageous. They should be focused on people intending to do harm.

It lists 65 behaviors that they say are behaviors related to terrorism, and the one that pertains here is “takes pictures or video footage.” [The entry on p. 40 reads: “Takes pictures or video footage (with no apparent esthetic value, i.e., camera angles, security equipment, security personnel, traffic lights, building entrances, etc.).”] “No apparent esthetic values?” So apparently they’re going to be sending police officers to art school to understand esthetic values.

But it actually mentions taking video footage of taking video footage of security personnel. So the mere taking of photographs or video footage of law enforcement – even law enforcement doing something improperly – they’ve identified that as a precursor to terrorism. So now you might understand why these police officers are focusing on people with cameras. It’s because it’s actual policy to do so.

It has the appearance of being very indiscriminate. They’re arresting legal observers, reporters, threatening to arrest kids, that sort of thing.

And the reporters are engaged in protected First Amendment activities. For the police to be impeding their ability to do their job is ridiculous.

When there are things for them to look at – you know, there are reports of people breaking windows, that sort of thing – sure, go chase those guys. You don’t have to have all these police on the street impeding activities of people who are just engaged in free expression. Spraying pepper spray into a crowd of people who are simply trying to get out of the way of police is not an effective way of policy.

What about the raids that took place Sunday? These were strictly preemptive raids, and they used some warrants that seemed questionable at best. Have you gotten a look at that?

I’ve just seen what’s been reported. And just from what’s been reported, it’s a mess – it was reported that one of the warrants even had the wrong address. Which kind of shows the level of unprofessionalism that you’re dealing with there. Again, it’s hard for me to say, not knowing exactly what’s there, but I understand that items to be seized included cameras and cell phones. That seems pretty outrageous – journals and things like that are being seized.

I would imagine from the ACLU’s point of view that that’s treading well over into areas of free speech.

Right. And the frustrating thing about it is that, like, the New York Police Department just paid over $2 million for the events surrounding the Republican National Convention four years ago to the protesters they arrested there. I don’t understand what it is that the police just don’t get – that impeding the rights of the people is not an appropriate way of stopping bad things from happening.

I don’t pretend that there aren’t people out there who have bad intentions on their minds. But if you can’t distinguish someone whose program is about videotaping protests as opposed to somebody whose program is going out and lighting things on fire, that’s problematic for the rest of us. Because if the police aren’t distinguishing between those two in their use of force, then none of us are safe.

To somebody observing it from the outside, it looks like something that would take place in a Banana Republic – the police using thuggish tactics, threatening and intimidating ordinary citizens. Ripping the press credentials off of Amy Goodman. It’s just outrageous.

And then there’s the excessive force in these raids, where you’re going in with machine guns. Police have a right to defend themselves, but the idea that you’re going in with that much firepower in a situation where there’s nothing to suppose that that sort of thing would be necessary — it’s frightening. It’s not what policing is all about. It’s a military raid, it’s not a police action.

But it is very police-state like, which is the most troubling aspect of it all.

Right. And you know, so much of it too – in the last number of years there has been an excessive of SWAT teams to service warrants where there really is not an expectation of hostility. It’s been well documented. And just the uniforms these police wear, where they’re increasingly looking like military uniforms rather than the peace officer on the street serving the community.

It’s the professionalization of the police on steroids. With the’ roid rage.

The idea that just because someone is pointing a camera at you, you have the right to take the camera away or destroy the film or the tape – which is something we’ve had documented – you know, that’s not part of policing. That they would feel they have the power to do that is troubling.

And again, with this type of order going out, and being endorsed by the Justice Department, is even more troubling.

You mentioned the $2 million paid out by the NYPD. And the other lesson of that is that these kinds of actions can be very costly for the civic entities that are responsible for them happening. At some point you would think the city of St. Paul would rein this kind of stuff in because they may be facing a big fat bill at the end of this road.

It’s interesting. We’ve seen this all over. We’ve seen it recently in Maryland, where the Maryland State Police were spying on antiwar and anti-death penalty groups, where the law enforcement agencies aren’t able to distinguish between what is a real threat and what isn’t. It’s not just the invasion of privacy and civil liberties, but what a complete waste of resources. And now the scandal has played out, and I’m sure it’s taken quite a portion of the leadership of the Maryland State Police. I’m sure if you asked them now whether it was worth it, investigating this peaceful group so you have this intelligence collected about them, and that intelligence itself showed that they were not doing anything improper, was worthwhile, I’m sure they would say, ‘No, I wish we could do it all over and not do this sort of stuff.’

Yet one police department does not seem to learn from the mistakes of another. Quite the contrary, they learn the techniques, but they don’t learn the ultimate costs.

The AP’s Lame-Ass Excuses For Ron Fournier

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

 

Michael Calderone at the Politico blog managed to get ahold of the talking points that the Associated Press is circulating to managers trying to deal with readers and service subscribers angry over Ron Fournier’s ongoing battle with his journalistic bias. Here they are.

Nearly everything in them has already been noted by Fournier’s critics; the talking points natter endlessly about his career, and downplay the significance of his dalliances with the McCain campaign and Karl Rove, taking Fournier’s own lame apology, such as it was — "I regret the breezy nature of the correspondence" — at face value. Like Fournier himself, AP refuses to recognize that the "breezy nature of the correspondence" revealed an inappropriate familiarness with Rove, just as the willingness to talk to the McCain campaign about a position with a campaign he’s covering reveals a partisan inclination inappropriate for anyone covering the campaign generally — and in both cases, the very clear appearance of a conflict of interest.

The essence of the talking points’ would-be refutation is contained in one sentence:

The analysis was similar in perspective, tone and content to what other journalists for major news organizations were writing or saying.

If they worked for Fox News or Town Hall, perhaps. It’s hard to tell: A search for "obama biden ‘lack of confidence’ " comes up with 38,300 hits — and a run through the first 20 pages indicates that every single one of them links in some fashion to Fournier’s hit piece. So if someone else said this, their influence was wildly overmatched by the massive reach of Fournier’s piece.

Which is the point here: If AP’s standards for "analysis" include producing unbalanced propaganda for one side of a political campaign, then those standards have indeed fallen mightily since the reign of Walter Mears — who would never have been caught dead indulging such crap as emerges from the laptop of Ron Fournier. Especially because the AP’s reach is so deep and so powerful.

This is an abuse of their monopoly on newswire service, and their member-papers’ editors ought to be outraged.

Go here to sign our letter to the AP seeking Fournier’s removal from the presidential-campaign beat.

Live Blogging Obama's Speech

-- by Sara

My Group News Blog co-blogger Lower Manhattanite and I are in the press box at Mile High Stadium for Obama's speech and all the related festivities.

We're having a liveblogging party over at www.groupnewsblog.net. Come on over and join the fun.

The Obama Plotters: The Republican Double Standard In Law Enforcement Made Manifest

A 'serious threat'

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]
 

It seems there may be a reason federal law-enforcement officials are not interested in pursuing serious charges against the white-supremacist tweakers who were caught this week in Denver: The man making the decision is a Republican operative. And when it came to a threat against John McCain by a black man, he had a completely different approach.

The AP story describing the official pooh-poohing of the threat gives us a clue:

"We’re absolutely confident there is no credible threat to the candidate, the Democratic National Convention, or the people of Colorado," U.S. Attorney Troy Eid said in a statement.

But when a black man in prison sent John McCain a threatening letter containing baby powder, it was another story altogether:

The man accused of sending a threatening letter to John McCain through McCain’s Colorado headquarters office detailed the contents of his letter in an exclusive interview with 7NEWS Friday.

Marc Ramsey, an inmate in the Arapahoe County Jail, admitted that he sent the letter.On Friday afternoon, the US AttorneyTroy Eid announced Ramsey will be charged with knowingly threatening to harm or kill through the U.S. mail. The charge is punishable up to five years in federal prison and up to $250,000 fines.

"We won’t stand for threats of this kind in Colorado," Eid said. "A death threat is not a legitimate form of political expression," Eid said.

Hmmmm. Let’s see: Men with rifles, a caches of other guns and ammo, all talking about killing Obama … they’re not a "serious threat." But a man in jail sending baby powder, well, that’s a "serious threat."

So, who is Troy Eid?

Looks like Colorado needs to create another pair of binoculars (or a microscope) to look into the political agenda of US Attorney Troy Eid. The veil of secrecy has been lifted and it turns out that Eid’s appointment may have had much less to do with competency as a prosecutor than his reliability as a partisan political operative in the eyes of Karl Rove (with the almost certain glowing endorsement of Rove’s "mini-me" Dick Wadhams).

Today’s Rocky Mountain News report, Allard: Nominee’s rejection ‘strange’ Link fills in a picture of the Rove machine rejecting Allard’s firm endorsement of William Leone to stay in the job. He was a veteran prosecutor who had earned Allard’s praise as "…an effective federal prosecutor."

Eid feigns ignorance as to why he was selected by the Rove – Harriett Miers justice as political theater team. But, that doesn’t hold water under the degrees of separation test. Connecting the dots between Eid, Wadhams and Rove provides a "well, duh!" explanation.

Of course, this is the same administration that has ascertained that eco-terrorists who set houses on fire are the most serious domestic-terror threat facing us … while abortion-clinic bombers and racist-right thugs have fallen off the radar.

[H/t to cinnamonape.]

Would-Be Obama Plotters: Everyone’s Eager To Minimize The Threat

Robert Gartrell

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

Law-enforcement officials are dismissing the apparent plot by white-supremacist tweakers to shoot Barack Obama in Denver because it’s clear that they weren’t competent in the least.

And of course, that means the wingnutosphere is even more eager to dismiss it, as Nitpicker reports. This includes some faux-macho posturing about guns that actually only demonstrate the wingnuts’ base ignorance about them.

Well, we’ve already observed that we were fortunate that they weren’t very competent. But where there’s smoke … well, let’s just say we shouldn’t be quite so eager to just toss this off.

Especially considering that the chief reason for dismissing any concern is that they were tweakers. This rationale was touted by the cops and seized upon by the wingnuts. But even Rachel Maddow applied this logic:

“Know how you can tell a crime isn’t going to be successful?” (Rachel) Maddow asked her new friends. “Crystal meth.”

There’s some legitimate basis to this reasoning, but it’s not wholly accurate, either — because tweakers, while innately unstable and scattered, still are capable of wreaking extraordinary harm. Example No. 1: Tim McVeigh.

The Oklahoma City bomber and his Arizona buddy Michael Fortier were prodigious tweakers. At one point, McVeigh even exchanged some stolen guns for methamphetamine. As this 2001 piece about the relationship of meth to criminal behavior notes:

In fact, McVeigh’s lawyer made an argument during the trial that his client was a practicing, paranoid, delusional "tweaker," or meth addict, whose judgment had been irreparably impaired by his drug use.

The bottom-line issue is not whether these men were actually capable of killing Obama — considering the levels of security in Denver this week, any plot would have had only an infinitesimal likelihood of succeeding in the first place, and the plotters’ apparently addled state would have reduced that to nearly nothing. Yet it seems not to have crossed anyone’s minds that even if Obama was never at risk, any number of innocent bystanders stood in harm’s way.

No, the issue remains that there is an unusual level of visceral hatred towards Obama already extant because of his race. And that hatred is being whipped up to feverish levels by the dog-whistle race-baiting that is endemic to the right-wing attacks on Obama, as well as the general levels of violent rhetoric they have been deploying for the past decade and longer and rising in recent months.

These crazies don’t act in a vacuum. And the problem is one not just for their immediate targets, but for all of us.
 

When Wingnuts Attack Each Other … They Blame Liberals

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

 
All the wingnutosphere is gaga today over St. Michelle Malkin’s mugging at the hands of Alex Jones’ thugs. The Ole Perfesser, Gateway Pundit, Little Green Nutballs … you name it, they’re all over it like stink on shit.

That white-supremacist plot to kill Obama? Yawn.

But here’s the funny thing about it: Alex Jones is a far-right nutcase. I know it’s hard to imagine, but the guy actually manages to make Malkin look sane, decent and normal in comparison.

I used to write about Jones when he was heavily into "New World Order" and "Y2K Apocalypse" conspiracy theories in the 1990s. He only hates people like Malkin because they’re not far enough to the right for his tastes. Malkin, you see, is a"neocon," which the far right loathes almost as much as it despises mainstream Democrats.

You’d think that the wingnuts would figure out that these people are protesting Democrats. They’re not on our side. And many of the protests are of the right-wing fringe variety.

But that would ruin their neat little storyline about how Denver is full of fringe cases this week because Democrats just naturally attract them. Yeah, they’re here — and most of them are on Malkin’s side of the aisle. Some of them are even packing around guns.

No doubt, when these same fringe cases show up in St. Paul for the GOP Convention, that storyline will flip to where just the protesters themselves are to blame. Because in the right-wing Bizzarro Universe, that’s how it always works.

Dan Rather: ‘Straight With No Chaser’

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

Dan Rather gave a talk today at the Big Tent, and it was an impressive and genuinely important one. When the video is available I’ll put it up here so you can watch the entire thing.

Much of it was a critique of modern mainstream media, as well as the business of conventions. This in particular stood out for me:

I’m sure the broadcast and cable-news outlets will do a couple of short pieces here and there about how the real story of these conventions is the vast sums of money being raised at private parties all around town. But aside from, in most cases, simply mentioning this fact, they don’t follow up on just what that money is going to do to our political system now.

As one reporter, I think the best story here is who gives the big money to whom, expecting to get what. Now maybe the coverage does not for the most part center on this, because the larger news organizations — of which I was part for a long time, it’s important for you to understand that I do not except myself from the criticism inherent in some of the things I’m going to say today — it may be, in terms of the larger news organizations, that they don’t cover stories such as who gives the big money, to whom, expecting to get what, because after all they are part of the system. The money raised by the parties and the campaigns for advertising doesn’t go to charity.

And that’s why I’m glad to see all of you here today. Those of you in the new media are afforded a great opportunity to tell the story straight with no chaser. Because your bottom line is not tied to the status quo in ways you won’t see with those running the evening news. I hope you take advantage of the freedom this gives you to report news that is worthy of the name.

There is nothing more important, more vital, to the democratic process than an independent — a truly independent press.

 Dang, you’d think the guy was reading Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald or something.

user The Crazies Start Coming Out Of The Woodwork

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

I got back to our hotel late last night and put on CNN as I was getting ready to fall over into my bed, when the report came on about the three men arrested in the Denver area for suspicion in a plot to assassinate Barack Obama:

The action started around 1:30 a.m. Sunday when police in the eastern suburb of Aurora stopped a truck that was swerving erratically. The driver, 28-year-old Tharin Gartrell, had a suspended driver’s license, and the truck was rented in the name of another person, said Aurora police Detective Marcus Dudley.

In the truck, officers found two rifles, including one with a scope; a bulletproof vest; boxes of ammunition; walkie-talkies; and suspected narcotics, Dudley said.
Aurora police, on edge because of heightened security surrounding the Democratic
convention in Denver, alerted federal authorities.

Three hours later, at 4:30 a.m. Sunday, federal agents arrested Johnson, 32, at a hotel in Denver. He was being held on drug charges, Dudley said.

A half-hour after that, 33-year-old Shawn Robert Adolf jumped from a sixth-story window when authorities tried to arrest him at a hotel in suburban Glendale, police said.

Adolf was hospitalized and was being held on $1 million bond for several outstanding warrants involving drug charges.

Dudley didn’t say what tied the men together but said more arrests were possible. One of the rifles was stolen, and authorities had traced it to Kansas, Dudley said.

We’ve already discussed here the likelihood that a looming Obama presidency would drive the far-right wingnuts completely over the edge and back into the realm of violence. Fortunately, these men — if they really were plotting to kill Obama — were neither very competent nor much of a serious threat to Obama, though I would wager they’d have wound up hurting someone had they not been caught.

The report on CNN occurred during the Larry King Live convention wrapup. Immediately after the report, who should show up on the screen but Michael Reagan, as part of King’s show, which featured a regular phalanx of right-wingers who then got their shot at telling viewers why the Democratic convention sucked. (Side note: Gotta wonder if King will do the converse for the Republican convention.)

Yes, that Michael Reagan. The one who on his radio talk show two months ago attacked the "9/11 troofers" by telling his listeners repeatedly that someone should "take them out and shoot them." This is the kind of speech that, if spoken by a liberal, would earn them permanent banishment from the ranks of pundithood. But Reagan’s hate speech made barely a ripple — and there he is on CNN.

Obviously, the 9/11 troofers have nothing to do with Obama. But violent speech like this raises the cultural temperature enough that people start believing that shooting the people they disagree with is a legitimate expression. Especially when the people telling them it’s OK to shoot the people they hate are showing up on CNN.

And then when the violence breaks out, of course, the Larry Kings of the world host programs wondering why things like this could happen.

An Open Letter To The Associated Press

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

Before I joined the ranks of dirty foulmouthed hippie bloggers, I was your basic mainstream journalist. I started in newspapers in 1978 at small towns in the Northwest, where the rule of thumb is that most everyone in the newsroom is a jack of all trades. I was a news reporter, a photographer, a music and movie critic — but more than any other job, I was a news editor.

I started out ripping newswires back when it was fed to us by ticker tape, and by the early ’80s was pulling news from the wires by computers. In those days, there were two competing news  services — United Press International and the Associated Press. But about the same time UPI was in serious decline, and most of the newsrooms where I worked did not carry their services. By the 1990s UPI for all intents and purposes was nearly dead (and when Rev. Sun Myung Moon bought them up in 2000, it was a fait accompli) leaving the field to the AP.

In all those years ripping wires, I and the editors I worked with operated with at least a modicum of confidence that the AP was providing them with balanced, evenhanded and reasonably accurate news. Sure, it was bland work, and far too often relied on simplistic "he said/she said" journalism as a means of achieving a facsimile of balance. There wasn’t a lot of great investigative work, but there was some. Mostly, we counted on AP to provide us with the news like a basic meat-and-potatoes diet.

Which is why Ron Fournier’s unimstakable bias in his reportage on the 2008 presidential campaign is such a profound betrayal of the AP’s mission. As a monopoly — every single daily newspaper in the country now relies on the AP for its basic news services — the AP has a profound and unmistakable duty to avoid even the appearance of bias. Fournier’s reportage some time ago began reeking of bias, made worse by his dalliance with the McCain campaign last year and his footsie-playing with Karl Rove. And his recent work attacking Barack Obama makes the stink worse than meth lab’s.

Our protest of Fournier’s work, and our demand that he be removed from the presidential campaign, isn’t simply a matter of crying because our ox has been gored. Rather, it’s about recognizing the profound impact that biased reporting like Fournier’s has on the nation’s political discourse — and how seriously it damages the AP’s reputation as a reliable source of solid reportage.

Every one of those little papers I used to work at runs Fournier’s work. Indeed, every paper in the country, from the New York Times to the Sandpoint Daily Bee, runs it. The editors, the reporters, the publishers, and especially the readers of those papers can no longer rely on AP to be fair in its handling of the news — and because AP is a virtual monopoly, that is a serious problem.

It’s not, as some have suggested, that we want Fournier fired. But the conflict of interest his reporting represents is unacceptable. Every other news operation in the country, faced with such a conflict, typically will keep reporters with such conflicts from reporting on stories related to it. And that is what AP clearly must do in this case.

Perhaps AP doesn’t care enough about those editors who use their product each day with almost blind reliance on their journalistic standards. But it ought to care about its own reputation and standing in the news business to act now, and act decisively.