A Dallas rookie police officer erred when he cited a woman earlier this month for being a non-English speaking driver, police said.
Officer Gary Bromley issued a citation Oct. 2 to 48-year-old Ernestina Mondragon after stopping her for making an illegal U-turn in the 500 block of Easton Road, near East Northwest Highway, according to a copy of the citation.
"That's a charge that does not exist here in the city of Dallas," said department spokesman Sgt. Warren Mitchell. "Although we believe it was a sincere mistake ... there's no excuse for it."
He said that charge and a charge of failure to present a driver's license were dropped.
Bromley, 33, is a trainee officer in the Northeast Patrol division. His trainer on the date the ticket was issued was Senior Cpl. Daniel Larkin, 53, said Deputy Chief Tom Lawrence, Northeast Patrol commander.
Under the Dallas City Code, taxi drivers must be able to communicate in English. Mitchell said there is also a federal statute that says commercial drivers must speak English, but it would not have applied in this case.
Seems to me the problem is not merely with Officer Bromley's assumptions about Driving While Mexican, but those of his training officer, who presumably oversaw the citations as Bromley was writing them up.
Of course, if Officer Bromley winds up washing out in Dallas because of this, he needn't worry. He would probably be welcomed at the Maricopa County Sheriff's Department with open arms.
Dallas Police Chief David Kunkle said this afternoon that his officers have written at least 39 citations to people over the past three years for not speaking English.
Apologizing publicly to the city's Spanish-speaking community, the chief said all officers and supervisors involved will be investigated for dereliction of duty. All pending citations will be dismissed, and people who paid fines will be reimbursed.
Juan Williams, filling in for Bill O'Reilly last Friday on The O'Reilly Factor, had on my friend Kyle de Beausset (who blogs as Kyledeb at Citizen Orange) to discuss Kyle's role in Harvard University's decision to rescind a speaking invitation to Minuteman leader Jim Gilchrist. As you can see, Williams was perplexed by what should be an obvious matter: While Harvard is well served by hearing all sides of a debate, it serves neither the university nor the public to legitimize the rantings of a hatemonger whose rhetoric inspires violence.
At least the Harvard Crimson got it straight:
The movement to ban Gilchrist from the conference was largely initiated by Kyle A. de Beausset ’11, who in early October began using different university mailing lists to build support for uninviting Gilchrist due to his involvement in the Minuteman Project, which organizes civilians to patrol the border for illegal immigrants and to report crossings to the Border Patrol.
“It might be an interesting intellectual exercise for Harvard students to hear extremist views,” de Beausset wrote in one of these e-mails, but he added that the “broader implications of legitimizing these extremist views with the Harvard name” were more important.
“Jim Gilchrist’s willingness to spout falsehoods shows that he shouldn’t be given the legitimacy of open and free academic debate...His irresponsible rhetoric has led to violence,” de Beausset told The Crimson in an interview.
In a statement released on the conference Web site, the Undergraduate Legal Committee said that Gilchrist’s presence would detract from the conference because his attitude and views were inconsistent with the conference’s mission of promoting law and public service to foster social justice.
“Unfortunately, Mr. Gilchrist’s participation in the conference on the behalf of the Minuteman Project was not compatible with providing an environment for civil, educational, and productive discourse on immigration, and we cannot host him at this time,” it said.
What may have been the deciding factor, it turns out, may have been Jim Gilchrist's history of bad judgment catching up to him -- namely, his long association with Shawna Forde, the leader of a gang of "tacital" Minutemen who, in a failed effort to finance their activities through robbery, shot and killed a 9-year-old girl and her father late at night in their home in cold blood.
Kyle de Beausset, an undergraduate student and migrant advocate, who was one of the original Harvard protesters, said yesterday that Gilchrist’s removal will allow discussions to move toward policy, rather than animosity.
“It’s a victory for people who are trying to get hate out of the immigration debate,’’ he said. “There’s a difference between having views, and hate speech.’’
Beausset said more students have been alerted to the group’s stance since the arrest in June of a woman with ties to the Minuteman Project.
Shawna Ford and two others allegedly shot and killed a father and son, and wounded the mother in a robbery that Beausset said was to “finance her nativist activism.’’
He said the episode showed the extremes to which some members of the movement will go.
“I’m concerned about the broader national implications of legitimizing these extremist views with the Harvard name,’’ he said in a letter to fellow students.
[Note: The Globe story has its facts slightly mangled; the Minuteman gang's young victim was a girl.]
Clearing the Propaganda and Educating the Uninformed:
Neither I nor the MInuteman Project ever had an “extensive” association with Shawna Forde. I met her in person briefly only three times over a four year period. The last time was in early 2008 as she sat in an audience listening to me and a retired career DEA agent speak. A phone call was made to her when I received an email that law enforcement was supposedly looking for her in June 2009. She denied any wrongdoing when confronted over the phone about that “inquiry.” That is essentially all the so-called “association” Minuteman Project had with Forde.
Propaganda may bode well for Kyle de Beausset and his egomaniacal demand for attention, but the price paid by Harvard’s loss of stature as a beacon of free thhought and free speech is irreparable.
Read my essay on immigration published by Georgetown U Law School. It is at my web site. It that essay represents hate speech, then so does Mary Poppins. I rest my case.
In an earlier report, moreover, Steller pointed out that Gilchrist was up to his ankles in communicating with Forde right up to the point of her arrest -- and in fact appears to have tried to tip her off that federal authorities were looking for her:
Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project and an early leader of the movement, said last week that he donated $200 to a member of Forde's group, that he called Forde a few days after the murders as investigators closed in, and that his group removed postings by and about Forde from its Web site after the arrests. But he called Forde and her associates "rogues," and denied that he or his group had a formal relationship with her.
"They happened to use the Minuteman movement as a guise, as a mask," he said.
... On June 2, three days after the murders, Gilchrist received an e-mail from a Southern Arizona associate who had been visited by investigators looking for Forde. Gilchrist forwarded the e-mail to Forde, he said.
He said he called her and asked if there was a warrant for her arrest. She said no.
According to rival Minutemen, Jim Gilchrist's Minuteman Project listed Shawna Forde as a leader of the so-called "mainstream" group for more than a year. Forde was recently charged in the politically motivated killing of two Latinos.
... Jeff Schwilk, a California Minuteman leader, said he tried to warn other Minutemen that "she was a danger to our movement”, but, he said, nationally known Minuteman co-founder Jim Gilchrist wouldn't listen.
Schwilk told a reporter that Forde "was (listed as) his [Gilchrists] official border operations director on his Web site for more than a year (in 2008 and 2009)...He used her and she used him to promote each other.” And while Gilchrist's aides have claimed that he had no close connection to Forde, Gilchrist participated in a rally she organized in 2007.
And Steven Eichler, the current executive director of the Minutemen Project, admits that he periodically posted communications from Forde on the organization's web site. As I noted last week, most references to Shawna Forde on the network of Minuteman websites have been scrubbed this week to avoid the obvious connection to the killing of Latinos. But the Green Valley News was able to obtain and preserve some postings before the cover-up began. Here is what that newspaper uncovered:
One link that was active Saturday afternoon but removed later in the day included a September 2008 message from Gilchrist stating, “I salute all the brave Minutemen and Minutewomen of the Minutemen American Defense [Forde's supposedly "marginal" outfit]. Their bravery and dedication is a sterling example of true patriotism. The members of the Minutemen American Defense are a positive example for all Americans to follow.”
Another “Message from Forde,” since removed, was posted eight days after the May 30 murders of Flores and his 9-year-old daughter, Brisenia, but several days before Forde, Jason Eugene “Gunny” Bush and Albert Gaxiola were arrested in the case. It introduced Bush as MAD’s new operations director and stated, “We are in full operation we have people coming from Florida and other parts of the country to assist in gathering exclusive footage of drug cartel drug smuggling and humane (sic) trafficking.”
Forde sent the article to Gilchrist and Eichler on June 6 via an e-mail obtained by the Green Valley News.
Eichler responded in the e-mail the next day, writing, “Do you want a large volumne (sic) of volunteers to go to the border under your watch? If you are going to expand, then you will get all the way from lawn chair lookie lous to hard core combat ready Minutemen.”
In an interview, Eichler said he remembered the correspondence, but had no idea then that Forde might have been involved in the murders. Hindsight is 20-20, he said, but nothing tipped him off to Forde’s potential for violence.
“We facilitated the publicizing of her organization like we’ve facilitated many others,” he said. “We want to work with as many people as we can. But in doing so, there is still that risk.”
So the Executive Director of the Minuteman Project contacts Shawna Forde on June 7, 2009, not a year ago, but right before she is arrested, and offers to place a large number of his armed troops "under your [Forde's] watch". Some of these volunteers he refers to as "hard core combat ready Minutemen".
In other words, in spite of the warnings of a few Minutemen, there is ample reason to think that Forde was considered "part of the movement" right up until the minute she was arrested. And far from being the "neighborhood watch" group that Lou Dobbs likes to depict the Minutemen as, their own leader calls them "combat ready".
Yep, that's Jim Gilchrist, all right.
The ironic thing is that, as I noted in my investigative report on the Minutemen for The American Prospect, Gilchrist even last year was already ruing the violent turn the movement had taken, in part because it attracted people like ... Shawna Forde, as it turned out:
The Minuteman movement has fallen on such hard times that even Gilchrist has publicly admitted that he regrets the "Saddam Hussein mentality" within its ranks, particularly some of its smaller, independent offshoots. "Am I happy at the outcome of this whole movement? I am very, very sad, very disappointed," Gilchrist told The Orange County Register in June. His concern may have been disingenuous, but it was far from groundless. Over the past year, several incidents of violence have been associated with various subfactions of the Minutemen. Last summer, a couple of Minutemen created a video portraying the shooting of border-crossers--which they later admitted was a hoax but decidedly a reflection of their real attitudes. The men were in a group that had spun off from the San Diego Minutemen, itself an independent offshoot of the movement.
But then, the fact that the Minutemen were a giant magnet for the worst kinds of violent extremists was obvious to many observers right from the start.
Rep. Gregg Harper, a Mississippi Republican, had a jocular interview with Politico's Anne Schroeder Mullins and popped out this little knee-slapper:
Mullins: What in the world does the Congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus do?
Harper: We hunt liberal, tree-hugging Democrats, although it does seem like a waste of good ammunition.
Coming from a congressman from a state still renowned for its lynchings and murders not just of black people but white civil-rights workers -- in an era many of us can still remember clearly -- this kind of "humor" is anything but funny.
However, it is the kind of thing we've come to expect to today's Republicans, isn't it?
Not that makes any difference to Blue Dog Democrats like Ben Nelson. As Media Matters notes:
Ironically, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), a co-chair of the caucus, has praised the group for being bipartisan. "Unlike some of the other activities in Washington, Republicans and Democrats reach across the aisle and join hands to work together, not as Republican or Democrat, but as sportsmen and women," he wrote.
Someone should ask Ben Nelson if he enjoys hunting liberal Democrats too, since that's what his caucus is apparently viewed as a venue for.
(Addendum: Somehow I'm not surprised that Harper is a Mississippian who thinks John Grisham is a "literary great" who surpasses Faulkner and Welty. Gad.)
My book The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right continues to attract a lot of interest, partly because it so clearly anticipated the current descent into madness of mainstream conservatives, currently drowning in a lake of right-wing extremism. I didn't predict tea parties, but I did warn that '90s-style militia wingnuttery was about to swamp the Republican Party, and I do explain how this is happening.
So this week I was the featured interview at Amanda Marcotte's podcast at RH Reality Check. We specifically focused on the way right-wing domestic terrorists have had a profound impact on women's reproductive rights. This is a brief interview; it starts at about the 8-minute mark and continues to the 24-minute mark.
And I was also featured as the live guest on Second Life for this week's episode of Virtually Speaking on BlogTalkRadio.
This is an hourlong session and fairly broad-ranging. It was fun for me because I've known Jay Ackroyd for over 10 years -- online (we useta post at the old Slate forum The Fray back in the day), but we only finally met in person this summer at Netroots Nation. We talk about posting at Crooks and Liars, among other things. I also get to talk about my favorite moment of the past year: Having been the guy who made Sarah Palin crazy enough to try to have McCain lie, thereby cementing her rep as a diva among the McCain campaign.
Rep. Luis Gutierrez, the Illinois Democrat, kick-started the coming immigration debate this week by delivering a 10-point plan for immigration reform that looks like a solid progressive start:
Pathway to legalization for undocumented workers
Professional and effective border enforcement
Smart and humane interior enforcement
Protecting workers
Verification systems
Family unity as a cornerstone of our immigration system
In the process, he makes clear just what the primary cry of the nativists in the upcoming debate will be: "Amnesty!"
DOBBS: Fundamental to the question becomes, is it every illegal immigrant, is it unconditional amnesty, and what will be the impact of that? And those are issues. Think about it, we're here in 2009, some left wing ethnocentric interest groups are calling for my firing from CNN because I'm quote unquote a racist. I could obtain purity in a moment if I would just simply embrace open borders and sponsor illegal immigration. That's the kind of distortion that is not helpful. The reality is, we have some basic questions that people are avoiding asking. And if I may, let me ask a couple and see how we go and go forward. One, should every illegal immigrant in this country receive amnesty?
Gutierrez, however, is up to the job, and gives a clear and sensible answer:
GUTIERREZ: I believe that every undocumented worker in this country who can come forward and show that they've violated no other law except the immigration law, which they used breaking the immigration law to arrive in this country, that's it. No other felony, no other criminal record. That they are sustentative, they got family, they've got a job, they've been working, and they're ready to prove that by bringing forward and going through a very rigorous background check, we should give them an opportunity. Does that mean they go directly to permanent residency and directly to citizenship? No, we have to earn that too. But I think we can give them a program of five, six years which they continue to work, pay taxes, learn English, civics, become fully incorporated and at the end, if they fill the test, then we'll let them stay. But I want them to earn because in the interim period, many Americans say they're here and they're not paying their fair share. My program says, let them pay their fair share. Because we don't have political will, we don't have the programs to deport them, why don't we integrate them? There will be undesirable immigrants to this country, which we can weed out of the program very easily. We can have a set of rules.
It was a good start, if the objective is to make this a rational debate. And certainly, that's what progressives will want to do, because they have the facts and hard realities on their side.
Not that it means we'll actually get a rational debate. The Dobbses seem intent on ignoring the facts and whipping up people's fears, and we can expect that's what we'll get from the Fox crew as well.
Still, anticipating that, progressives need to find a common set of principles for advancing real immigration reform that works and makes valued citizens out of marginalized immigrants, brings them into the labor force (especially as union members) and taxpayers. Because there is going to be a lot of divisive crap thrown up in this debate, and lot of different and competing legislative plans. It will be important to keep our eyes on the prize.
To that end, Duke1676 at MigraMatters has put together a list of 25 principles for progressives in the immigration debate, including:
-- End policies that rely only on enforcement and deterrence as the sole means of regulating migration.
-- Address the root causes of immigration, and change US policy so that it doesn't foster and produce conditions that force hundreds of thousands of people each year to leave their countries of origin in order to simply survive.
-- Tie all current and future trade, military, and foreign aid agreements to not only worker protections both here and abroad, but also to their ability to foster economic progress and social justice for the working class and poor in sender nations.
-- Formulate a reasonable, humane, fair and practical method for determining the levels of immigration going forward. Establish an independent commission free from the pressures of political expediency and business interests to review all the pertinent data and set admission numbers based on labor, economic, social, and humanitarian needs.
-- Provide a path to legalization for all current undocumented immigrants living and working in the US, free of restrictions based on country of origin, economic status, education, length of residency, or any other “merit based” criteria.
-- Secure the borders by first ensuring that the vast majority of new immigrants have the ability and opportunity to legally enter the country through legal ports of entry by increasing the availability and equitable distribution of green cards. This would curtail the flow of migration through illegal channels. Only after that, should enforcement begin to ensure compliance, or any work to physically secure the border take place.
And finally, the bottom line:
Recognize that immigration is a vital part of maintaining a healthy and vibrant America. It is what has set this nation apart from all others since its inception. To close our borders to new immigrants is to cut off the lifeblood that has always made this nation grow and prosper.
These are good starts. Progressives are setting the table for a rational debate on immigration. We're inviting conservatives to join us. But we're not holding our breaths.
Below: Another video of Rep. Gutierrez outlining his plan.
This week's is pretty special: An online game at which you can actually earn money by defending America in the year 2011 against the evil forces of the fallen Obama administration. The game is called "2011: Obama Coup Fails". [Only go to the site if you don't mind giving them the hits. Otherwise, you can get the idea here.]
They've created a whole future history, written from the perspective of people in the year 2011. And as you can see, it's militia-movement material from the '90s updated for the Glenn Beck generation. For instance, here's the history:
As far back as the 1950s there were many who would talk of the N.W.O., or New World Order, behind closed doors--and the plan to implement it. Rumors of this clandestine planning were scoffed at by the media and political elite, and the majority of people were in the dark concerning the true nature of the processes and policies unfolding before their eyes. By 2007 the N.W.O was being spoken about freely in the media. By 2009, the President of the United States and world leaders openly discussed how to achieve this New World Order, and how to ensure the permanency of a regime that would represent the successful culmination of the Marxist experiments of the 20th century. Back in 2007, one brave newscaster was the first in what used to be called the 'mainstream media' to ring the alarm bell. That man was Lou Dobbs of CNN. Click to see video. Lou Dobbs was reported missing during the media purges of January and February 2011, when Mark Lloyd and the FCC, on Obama's orders, cracked down on all dissent in broadcasting. Glen Beck, another broadcast media personality who rang the alarm bell before the coup, was found dead of an 'aspirin overdose' in late 2010, after the devastating elections in November.
Other broadcasters and 'new media leaders' Neil Boortz, Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, Bill O'Reilly, and Sean Hannity, among the hundreds of others who dared to speak against what was going on, were rounded up shortly before the newly elected Congresspeople and Senators were to be seated. This event is now referred to as the Great Media Purge of 2011. President Obama and the Draconian FCC, now filled with his appointed Marxists including Mark Lloyd (Click to watch video), were quick to abolish FOX news, talk radio and all other dissent. The elite media, formerly called the mainstream media, were ecstatic as their audience had been declining week after week beginning in 2008. Unable to face a real media that investigated and reported news, they acted in self-interest in hope of getting government bailout money promised to them by officials in the Obama administration. This was the first step in the nationalization of all media in America, which officially began in 2010, a move that Americans would not welcome and helped spur the Second American Revolution. It all seemed to be coming to a head by late 2009. With over a million (by some estimates) people gathering in Washington D.C. for the anti-tax rally on 9/12, spurred on by Americans from all parties, the media's complicit bend toward dictatorship showed itself for the world to see.
Yahoo News, NY Times, and most other media outlets simply ignored the rallies. Rather than cover the news as news outlets used to do before journalism died in 2008, they preferred to tar the attendees as "racists" and "extremists." It now seemed as if all of middle America were being called racists and extremists. Even the Department of Homeland Security put all Patriots on a watch list for daring to want smaller government or less taxes. They dared even to classify our returning vets as security risks to be watched, which helped to add to the military's disgust with the Obama Administration and media. The proverbial straw that broke the camel's back for most Americans came when Obama appointed avowed communists and ex-felons such as Van Jones to White House positions "advising" Obama. No one to this day knows how such people could pass the formerly required background checks of the F.B.I. The NY Times, oozing bias, formerly the newspaper of record, didn't even mention most of these Czars' names until the bloggers and FOX investigative reporting outed them as the crazed radicals that they were.
Of course, using recent video tape of the Marxists talking of either overthrowing America or of their love of Castro, Chavez and other Marxists, was enough for the NY Times to claim a 'hatchet job' had been performed on the Czars. This was a laughable matter for any American who knew how Obama was filling all posts with real Marxists and revolutionaries who hated the United States and freedom. The fallen Glenn Beck put it all together for us and the question was asked "Could a coup ever take place in America?" Andrew Breitbart led the way in exposing the communists in ACORN and their massive voter fraud schemes. The elite media turned a blind eye as usual. The bloggers came out over and over again exposing the entire collapse of our financial system and how it was executed via the CRA or Community Reinvestment Act. Even Obama's past was well-hidden, with the help of the elite media. In fact, his entire past was shielded from the public. These facts further incensed the public. The Revolution brewed and brewed and nothing had stopped it by early 2010.
The powderkeg had a short fuse, which Obama was more than happy to light. American citizens were not sheep like the citizens of Britain, who allowed their government to take away their right to bear arms, and Americans would not go quietly into the night. Even before Barack Obama was elected, the destruction of America was well-planned by the global Marxists and N.W.O. proponents. American citizens were also well-prepared and the Revolution turned out to be one of the bloodiest any nation would ever see. With literally millions of Americans taking to the streets and even facing down Federal troops in Michigan, New York, California, Texas, and Illinois, Obama knew his days were numbered. Admiral Mullen of the Joint Chiefs finally recalled all Federal troops from their remaining posts in American cities after 4,000 soldiers in Michigan, most of them Oathkeepers, turned on and killed the commander Obama had hand-picked for them. This was the 8th incident across America where American Soldiers or Marines dared to follow the Constitution and not obey the Un-Constitutional orders given to them by Obama's appointed commanders. The Joint Chiefs decided not to be on the wrong side of history and declared that the military would stand aside and guard against any foreign threats during the remaining days of the crisis.
March 2011 - Sarah Palin found fighting in a militia in Virginia. She was helping to attack a convoy of C.O.R.N.Y. (Congress of Rejected and Neglected Youth) fighters. Sarah is still a candidate for that high office once Obama and his forces are neutralized. When asked for a comment by a local reporter she said " The time for talk is well past us. Don't ask me anything about any elections until we free this country completely from Obama, Hamas, and Obama's police force. We will put a complete end to Marxism once and for all right here in Virgina, God help us!" Sarah is well remembered for the constant attacks on her by the 'elite media'. The very same reporters and supposed news outlets such as the now defunct NY Times, that hid the news and played the most massive propaganda game on any free people in the history of mankind. With the Marxist elite media now a thing of the past, Freedom is surely rising. Sarah will make a fine President and has promised to do all in her power to put us back on the right path.
Of course, all the other prominent right-wing pundits -- even RedEye's Greg Gutfeld -- eventually have headline roles as future heroes, too.
Not everything is set in 2011, though. Their blog currently leads with the headline:
Obama and the Coming Marxist Coup?
October 15, 2009 - Obama has now put in place a machine to take over via Marxist Coup. Is it all by accident? Do we continue to catch Marxist after Marxist with insane ideas? All of his advisers are Marxists who love Chavez, Mao and Castro and hate America. We are in trouble America. Click More below and link 1 after that. Get informed before it is too late. The crisis in Mortgages is getting worse not better (link 3) and inflation is here now. See link 3. This is the crisis that Obama has in the bag to try to exploit if he chose to. Do you trust him? Tell everyone you know the time of reckoning seems to be almost here. What other crisis can Obama pull out of his hat? Does he need any other to announce a new glorious age of Marxism in 2010?
What is the content that you get when you click on this post? Why, all Glenn Beck videos, of course.
And just so you understand how the "defensive" mindset of the militia movement works, you can check out the game itself. Here's a tutorial:
How's it work? Well, basically, you get ahead in this game by invading and conquering your neighbors in adjacent counties. Preferably, you go after territories occupied by the forces of C.O.R.N.Y. (Gee, I wonder what ethnicity those forces are, don't you?)
Sure enough, just as Nicole wondered, Juan Williams was pretty bent out of shape over Warren Ballentine's calling him out -- using black cultural lingo -- for being such a willing supplicant to the "Limbaugh is being oppressed by mean black people" meme currently popular in right-wing circles.
So who does he bring on to buttress his claim that liberals are being bigots? Why, none other than Tammy Bruce and ... the Rev. Ken Hutcherson!
Folks outside the Seattle area may not know a lot about Hutcherson, so they just see him as a black conservative. Which is common enough, especially on Fox. It's more genuine than being a fake liberal like Williams, at least.
But he's also one of the most prominent anti-gay bigots in the state, and for that matter on the West Coast.
Hutcherson's talk was similarly soothing, following the "hate the sin but love the sinner" reasoning common among fundamentalists, but clearly belying his own war-oriented rhetoric and the talk of gay "abomination" pervasive among the Watchmen.
"I don't believe all discrimination is wrong," he said. "I discriminate based on what is right. God discriminates too.
"Today, disagreement means hate. If I disagree with you, I hate you. Evidently, God is the biggest hater in the world. The first thing we Christians need to take back is the right to disagree."
Of course, if it were only disagreement -- and not condemnation and eliminationism -- that Hutcherson and the Watchmen on the Walls were proffering this weekend, no one would have minded. But it wasn't.
The odd thing about hearing this kind of lame rationale from Hutcherson is that he is an African American man. As it happens, I've listened to a sermon that used nearly identical logic -- that discrimination isn't about hate if God commands it in the Bible -- at least once before. It was delivered by the late Rev. Richard Butler at an annual Aryan Nations Congress in Hayden Lake, Idaho. And he was talking about black people.
Hutcherson also believes that laws against anti-gay discrimination are different than those against racial discrimination because the latter is "an immutable characteristic" while the former is "a chosen behavior." (The problem with that rationale, of course, is that those same laws cover anti-religious discrimination. Is religion an "immutable characteristic", or a "chosen behavior"?)
In any event, Hutcherson is scorned not because he's a conservative, but because he is a bigot himself. Which is bad enough in any American, but incredibly obtuse for an African American.
Which makes him a perfect complement to Juan Williams.
Bill O'Reilly held an extended whinefest on The O'Reilly Factor Thursday night about how poor Rush Limbaugh was the victim of a "witch hunt" by racial political-correctness police. For a bunch of people of pooh-pooh the "victimology" of minorities, it would be hard to find a bigger bunch of crybabies than American right-wingers these days.
Indeed, that's a key part of what's going on here: In addition to Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity later that evening, O'Reilly -- with Juan Williams chiming in with his usual sycophancy, agreeing wholeheartedly that Limbaugh is being victimized by the conservative Republicans who run the NFL -- is basically claiming that blacks and liberals who are bringing up Limbaugh's long history of racially incendiary rhetoric are "waving the bloody shirt" -- "the demagogic practice of politicians referencing the blood of martyrs or heroes to inspire support or avoid criticism."
Watch how O'Reilly and Williams focus on three apparently bogus quotes attributed to Limbaugh -- while ignoring a mountain of genuine quotes that make the point irrevocable: Limbaugh does like to play the race card with divisive and false claims, and he does it with great frequency.
The one sane commentator O'Reilly brings on -- talk-show host Warren Ballentine -- manages to make this point with a handful of counter-examples, but even that is not really representative.
But this is an old tactic of American conservatives: Turn their own foul behavior on its head, and accuse those who would hold them accountable for it. That's what "waving the bloody shirt" has always been about, since the phrase was first coined.
... In American history, it gained popularity with an incident in which Benjamin Franklin Butler of Massachusetts, when making a speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, allegedly held up the shirt of a carpetbagger whipped by the Ku Klux Klan.
The sequel was this—or at least this was the story everyone in Monroe County believed, and in time everyone in Mississippi and the whole South had heard it, too. That a U.S. Army lieutenant who was stationed nearby recovered the bloody night-shirt that Huggins had worn that night, and he carried it to Washington, D.C., and there he presented it to congressman Benjamin F. Butler, and in a fiery speech on the floor of the United States Congress a few weeks later in which he denounced Southern outrages and called for passage of a bill to give the federal government the power to break the Ku Klux terror, Butler had literally waved this blood-stained token of a Northern man’s suffering at the hand of the Ku Klux. And so was born the memorable phrase, “waving the bloody shirt.”
Waving the bloody shirt: it would become the standard retort, the standard expression of dismissive Southern contempt whenever a Northern politician mentioned any of the thousands upon thousands of murders, whippings, mutilations, and rapes that were perpetrated against freedmen and women and white Republicans in the South in those years. The phrase was used over and over during the Reconstruction era. It was a staple of the furious and sarcastic editorials that filled Southern newspapers in those days, of the indignant orations by Southern white political leaders who protested that no people had suffered more, been humiliated more, been punished more than they had. The phrase has since entered the standard American political lexicon, a synonym for any rabble-rousing demagoguery, any below-the-belt appeal aimed at stirring old enmities.
That the Southerners who uttered this phrase were so unconcerned about the obvious implications it carried for their own criminality, however, seems remarkable; for whoever was waving the shirt, there was unavoidably, or so one would think, the matter of just whose blood it was, and how it had got there. That white Southerners would unabashedly trace the origin of this metaphor to a real incident involving an unprovoked attack of savage barbarity carried out by their own most respectable members of Southern white society makes it all the more astonishing.
Most astonishing of all was the fact that the whole business about Allen Huggins’s bloody shirt being carried to Washington and waved on the House floor by Benjamin Butler was a fiction.
The story about Huggins being whipped by the Ku Klux was true enough. Huggins was whipped on that bright moonlit night so ferociously that he could barely walk for a week or two afterward, so ferociously that in a burning anger that overcame any fear of his own death he traveled to Washington to testify before Congress and then returned to Monroe County with a deputy U.S. marshal’s badge and a determination to arrest every man he could lay his hands on who had been a part of the reign of Ku Klux murder and terror in those parts. And Benjamin Butler—“Beast Butler,” as he was invariably called in the Southern press, the man who had committed the unpardonable insult against Southern womanhood as the Union occupation commander in New Orleans during the war with his order that the next Southern woman who insulted his troops on the street would be “regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation”— this nemesis of the South, now a congressman from Massachusetts, did indeed make a long, impassioned speech about the Ku Klux outrages on the House floor that April, and did tell the story of Huggins’s brutal beating in the course of it.
But nowhere in the Congressional Globe’s transcripts of every word that was uttered on the House floor is there any allusion to a bloody shirt; nowhere in the press accounts of the leading papers of the time is there any mention of a crazed congressman waving a blood-stained garment, on the floor or off; nowhere in any reports of Huggins’s appearances before Congress does such a story appear. That part never happened.
What was more, this was not the first time that Southerners had invented the fiction that Northerners were given to making fetishes of blood-stained tokens of their victimhood at Southern hands. The same story had cropped up fifteen years earlier in connection with another Massachusetts politician equally reviled in the South, Senator Charles Sumner.
Once again the beating was a fact, the alleged Northern reaction to it a fantasy. Furious at the insult to Southern honor Sumner had committed in a speech attacking slavery and the morality of the slave owner, South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks had approached Sumner in the Senate chamber, stood over his desk, and beat him on the head thirty times with his gold-headed cane until Sumner crumpled to the floor in a pool of his own blood.
And sure enough, Southerners were soon saying that Sumner’s bloody coat had become a revered “holy relic” in Yankee and abolitionist circles. Sumner, they said, had carried his own blood-encrusted garment to England to show the Duchess of Argyle, when she invited him to dinner; had placed it in the hands of an awe-struck John Brown, before his fateful raid on Harper’s Ferry; had put it on public display in Exeter Hall. “All the abject whines of Mr. Sumner, for being well whipped,” wrote one Southerner in 1856, a few months after the event, “all the exhibitions of his bloody shirt to stale Boston virgins who, in vexation of having failed to secure a man, would now wed a Sumner, have proved futile.” Years later, years after the Civil War, scornful stories about Northerners exhibiting Sumner’s bloody shirt were still being circulated in the South. Not a scrap of it was true.
A footnote, but a telling one: To white conservative Southerners, the outrage was never the acts they committed, only the effrontery of having those acts held against them. The outrage was never the “manly” inflicting of “well-deserved” punishment on poltroons, only the craven and sniveling whines of the recipients of their wrath. And the outrage was never the violent defense of “honor” by the aristocrat, only the vulgar rabble-rousing by his social inferior. “The only article the North can retain for herself is that white feather which she has won in every skirmish,” declared one Southerner, speaking of the Sumner–Brooks affair. Only a coward would revel in a token of his own defeat.
The bloody shirt captured the inversion of truth that would characterize the distorted memories of Reconstruction that the nation would hold for generations after. The way it made a victim of the bully and a bully of the victim, turned the very blood of their African American victims into an affront against Southern white decency, turned the very act of Southern white violence into wounded Southern innocence; the way it suggested that the real story was never the atrocities white Southerners committed but only the attempt by their political enemies to make political hay out of it. The mere suggestion that a partisan motive was behind the telling of these tales was enough to satisfy most white Southerners that the events never happened, or were exaggerated, or even that they had been conspiratorially engineered by the victims themselves to gain sympathy or political advantage.
To Bill O'Reilly and Juan Williams and the rest of the Fox crew, the outrage is never the atrocities they actually uttered, only the effrontery of having those atrocities held against them. They all want to make a victim of the bully and a bully of the victim. Their narrative is that the real story is not the atrocities that Rush Limbaugh utters but only the attempt by his political enemies to make political hay out of it.
But then, they're working out of a long and storied tradition when they do.
Glenn Beck ended his show with another his patented weepfests yesterday. It was special. And not just because it was about as sincere as the last time we saw Beck cry.
No, this one was special because it was accompanied by a loopy rant about how "life was simple" in the Golden Days of America, and then rambled into a weird metaphor comparing the nation to teenagers who innocently get stuck at a party and have to come home to mom and dad and face the music.
No, really. I'm not exaggerating.
Apparently the straying behavior for which we have to face the consequences now has something to do with having elected Barack Obama as President. Because the entire preceding show was a rant attacking the White House as riddled with "radical Marxists" who want to transform America into a communist state.
What got him especially worked up was this video featuring White House Communication Director, Anita Dunn:
[media=10347 embeddl]
Well, Beck will somewhat rightly get to claim this as a coup -- Dunn reportedly is on her way out anyway, but Beck will get to claim he helped push her -- because it's frankly a pretty dumb statement to say that Mao and Mother Teresa are two of your favorite political philosophers. (Both leave a lot to be desired, frankly.) Per "Revolution," "When you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao ..."
Now, I always thought people who rejected Marxist thought out of hand were playing into their hands, so I have read Mao's "Little Red Book." And there is wisdom to be found there, along with a tyrant's blindness. Still, the line from Mao that Dunn quoted was not only innocuous, it is -- like much of Mao's "philosophy" -- rather generic in nature. Who, after all, can really object to the admonition to persevere in the face of being told to give up? Certainly not Glenn Beck.
No, he just objects because the person who said it was Mao.
Look, Anita Dunn never said she subscribed to Communist ideology; she just said she admired Mao's writings. (At times, even ardent anti-Communists like George W. Bush admitted to being fascinated by Mao.) There is, in fact, a substantial difference.
Still, Beck is all worked up because he thinks radical Marxists have taken over the White House -- even though the best he can come up with is McCarthyite smears like this. We've been bad teenagers, letting these evil radicals into the government.
You have to wonder what he thinks the consequences of that ought to be.
Watching Glenn Beck descend into yet another of his bizarre chalkboard rants earlier this week, it occurred to me I had heard a similar theory once: Miss Anne Elk's Theory on Brontosauruses.
The Wikipedia entry observes:
The skit coined the concept of "Elk Theories" to describe scientific observations that are not theories but merely minimal accounts.
I've also heard the term "Elk Theories" used to describe hypotheses that mean nothing and prove nothing.
Which, you know, is what Beck's bizarre "six degrees" guilt-by-association "theory" comes down to. One can play this game with anyone. It wouldn't take six degrees to connect Glenn Beck to Adolf Hitler or Osama bin Laden or Timoth McVeigh, if he wants to play that game. But it wouldn't prove anything, would it?
Except, of course, that Glenn Beck is becoming so detached from reality that his programs are now unintentional comedy skits. And no, Glenn, we're not laughing with you. We're laughing at you.
Enjoy the mashup.
___
For the Python fans who find it sacrilegious to run the "Miss Anne Elk" skit alongside Glenn Beck, here's the original version from Monty Python's Flying Circus, Episode 31 (1972):
And for the true aficionados, here's the audio file of the original version of the skit, which first appeared on Monty Python's Previous Record (1972). It's actually much, much funnier:
Sean Hannity hosted not one but two whole segments last night devoted promoting the new book by Jerome Corsi -- godfather of the Swift-Boating of John Kerry -- titled America For Sale, which is basically an extended black-helicopter-style conspiracy tome straight out of the Patriot movement of the 1990s, updated for the new century.
This is a classic case of conservatives mainstreaming extremist ideas. I haven't read all of Corsi's book yet, but it differs very little in ideas and content and overall thesis from the kinds of books you could buy at militia-meeting tables in the '90s.
The proposed bill, which has received little mainstream media attention, appears designed to create the type of detention center that those concerned about use of the military in domestic affairs fear could be used as concentration camps for political dissidents, such as occurred in Nazi Germany.
Funny, I still have a Militia of Montana book that outlines this very same nefarious plot being concocted by Bill Clinton.
In truth, Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., has proposed a bill that would order the Homeland Security Department to prepare national emergency centers — to provide temporary housing and medical facilities in national emergencies such as hurricanes. The bill also would allow the centers to be used to train first responders, and for "other appropriate needs, as determined by the Secretary of Homeland Security."
Of course, Corsi and Hannity aren't the only ostensibly mainstream conservatives peddling this paranoiac fearmongering: So is Michelle Bachmann, among others:
"There is a very strong chance that we will see that young people will be put into mandatory service," Bachmann told a Minnesota radio station.
"And the real concern is that there are provisions for what I would call re-education camps for young people, where young people have to go and get trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward and then they have to go to work in some of these politically correct forums."
It's also cropping up quite a bit at Tea Party gatherings. That's where you find outfits like the "Oath Keepers," whose organization is built around resisting citizen roundups.
Why, exactly, does Sean Hannity so avidly promote Jerome Corsi and his conspiracy theories anyway? Look at his record:
Corsi is also a frequent participant in FreeRepublic.com's online forums, posting under the pseudonym "jrlc" since 2001. (Click here to read a full set of Corsi's posts; click here to read the post in which "jrlc" admits to being Jerome Corsi.)
On FreeRepublic.com, Corsi has, among other things, said that "ragheads" are "boy buggers"; referred to "John F*ing Kerry"; called Senator Hillary Clinton a "Fat Hog"; referred to her daughter as "Chubby Chelsie" Clinton; referred to Janet Reno as "Janet Rhino"; called Katie Couric "Little Katie Communist"; suggested Kerry was "practicing Judaism"; and expressed the wish that a small plane that had crashed into a building in Los Angeles had instead crashed into the set of NBC'S The West Wing, thereby killing actor Martin Sheen.
Then he wrote his first outright conspiracy tome: The Late Great USA: The Coming Merger With Mexico and Canada which ostensibly exposed secret plans to form a "North American Union" by combining the three countries into one. He evidently folds that theory into his latest book.
You like to regularly tell your audience -- often during one of those faux-humility schticks -- that you only report the truth, that your credibility is "everything" to you, and that your material is rigorously fact-checked, and by golly that if you get something wrong, folks just have to let you know and you'll correct it right there on that program.
Thing is, you produce such a torrent of falsehoods it's hard to keep up. And you routinely ignore it when it's pointed out to you.
Apparently the only time you'll acknowledge a factual falsehood is when it's pointed out by the White House. Yesterday, responding Anita Dunn's criticisms of Fox -- which included some specifics about your various errors of fact -- you finally admitted to a correction:
Beck: They are more worried about the war on Fox than the actual war in Afghanistan. And boy, there are some zingers. They say that we are completely irresponsible. Like when I said -- this is one they pointed out -- when I said that Major Garrett was never called on. Let me -- let me just correct that huge error right up front. He has been called on. Yeah.
Another one they point out is when I called Van Jones a radical, communist, anarchist czar. The White House would like me to remind you that, uh, he wasn't really a czar. ... I didn't think that was really the problem with that, but maybe I don't understand how this game works anymore.
I am so busted! I'm glad the White House has cleared up that very, very important fact for the future of America.
That's good, Glenn. Now maybe you can issue some corrections on other things -- including, the other things you called Van Jones (since calling him a "radical communist anarchist" is so self-evidently nonsensical, not to mention a McCarthyite smear, it's likely the White House chose not to debunk that because it's not worth dignifying). For starters, how about the time you falsely called Van Jones a "convicted felon"?
BECK: We've spent some time over here. There is so much more to cover, but I want to talk to you about the green movement root. I couldn't figure out why the green movement -- here is Van Jones. This is a convicted felon, a guy who spent, I think, six months in prison after the Rodney King beating.
And while you're at it, here are some other corrections you need to make for your audience:
-- Those "bombs" being set off by nefarious eco-terrorists? There were no bombs -- just a land excavator.
-- That nefarious Diego Rivera painting in the Rockefeller Center? It was removed on Rockefeller's orders. (Heck, just watch Cradle Will Rock sometime; the painting figures prominently in the plot.)
-- Unions do not, as you've claimed, need only 30 percent approval from employees in order to be established. It's still the usual 51 percent.
-- Those "doors replaced with stimulus funds? They were hangar doors. And they didn't cost "$1.4 million." More like $256,100. Again, bitta difference.
-- Contrary to your claim that "only 3 percent" of the stimulus plan would be spent in its first year, the actual plan calls for closer to 21 percent of the plan spent in the first seven-and-a-half months alone.
-- Just because we can breathe it doesn't disqualify carbon dioxide from consideration as a pollutant -- particularly at high levels. You breathe carbon monoxide in nontoxic quantities all the time, too.
-- Contrary to your sneering claim, Paul Krugman not only didn't miss the housing bubble, he was one of the few to be warning about it long in advance.
Those are just some of the more recent falsehoods you've broadcast, entirely since you've come aboard at Fox.
But somehow -- considering how non-seriously you took your obligations to correct the false facts already pointed out to you -- we really don't expect you to actually correct them. Because it would take a long time and would be really embarrassing, and you don't do embarrassing -- except when it's time to spring a gusher.
No, it's much easier to rant that the White House -- in calling you out for your relentless, paranoid, fact-deprived attacks on the Obama administration as an enclave of scary militant black radicals who want to remake the USA into a communist/anarchist/fascist/whatever state -- is "trying to shut this network down." Surround Fox headquarters on a map with toy tanks. Whatever.
Of course, no one's trying to shut Fox down. That would be absurd and futile. But it would be nice if, eventually, you all would live up to the claim to be a "news" operation instead of the vicious propaganda machine you have become -- especially with the likes of you aboard.
As we mentioned elsewhere, the folks at Fox News were all up in arms Monday about Anita Dunn's scathing commentary in which she pointed out the cold truth: Fox News has become a propaganda arm of the Republican Party. In fact, the outraged howls could be heard on every Fox program yesterday (except Shep Smith's).
Fox's chief defense is that the White House is confusing its opinion shows with its news coverage. It ran one such "news story" outlining the "attacks" by the White House on Fox, which included the following fine whine from Fox News Senior Vice President Michael Clemente:
"It's astounding the White House cannot distinguish between news and opinion programming. It seems self-serving on their part."
Actually, the White House is not alone. Indeed, anyone watching Fox News throughout the day will suffer much of the same confusion.
Fox is trying to pretend that only on its "opinion shows" such as Glenn Beck, The O'Reilly Factor, and Hannity is there free-ranging criticism of President Obama and his administration. But that's a load of hooey.
If you watch Fox's daytime "news" programs -- from Fox & Friends to Happening Now to Special Report with Bret Baier (where this report aired) -- you'll find that, while they lack the viciousness of the "opinion" programs, they nonetheless are heavily slanted with an anti-administration bias. "Reporters" like Carl Cameron and James Rosen constantly bring on Republican spokespeople and reliably transmit GOP talking points as though they represent fact (when in reality they usually have an estranged relationship with the truth). Anchors like Gretchen Carlson and Trace Gallagher regularly comment on the news they're reporting with an unmistakable right-wing slant.
A classic case, in fact, is this very "news" story that ran both on Baier's segment and earlier on Happening Now: It is wholly a defensive piece of propaganda that reliably gives the Fox News line -- comparing Obama's recognition of cold reality with Richard Nixon's paranoid "enemies list" -- with no attempt whatsoever to explain the White House's point of view.
If you wanted to see why the White House might confuse Fox's "news" programming with its "opinion" shows, one need look no further than this "news report" itself. Speaking of "self-serving."
It advises President Obama and other prominent people (“Our Dear Leader and co.”) to “leave now and give us our country back” and to do so by next week.
“If you stay,” the silent video message continues, “ ‘We, The People’ will systematically dismantle you, destroy you and reclaim what is rightfully ours. …
“We are angry and we are ready to take back the rights of the people. We will fight and We will win. …
“Dead line [sic] for your national response: October 15, 2009
“Thank you to all patriots who support our cause. … Be prepared for when the fateful day of the declaration of war is nationally announced.”
As the post notes in an update, the video was taken down shortly after it appeared on the SPLC site with no explanation. However, we managed to capture it before then and have reproduced it here in its original form, with a C&L tag at the end.
The "National Militia, Soldiers of Freedom" is not a known organization of any kind. Most likely it is some guy sitting in his basement.
This is about 99.99999999 percent certain to be just so much hot air from the "Patriot" movement and its attendant lunatic fringe. It reminds me of the threat to organize a "Million Man Militia" march back in July that never came close to materializing.
These kinds of delusions of grandeur are endemic to the Patriot movement, and are part and parcel of the grand paranoia about a looming New World Order planning to imprison conservatives and the radical communist regime of Barack Obama. That is, not only do they wildly imagine the nefarious conspiracy out to destroy America, but their imaginations similarly run riot when assessing their own breadth and strength -- not mention their abilities to act on their fantasies.
Still, the spread of this kind of rhetoric underscores the violent mindset of the militia units we now see forming at various locales around the country. Eventually, someone competent is going to act on it. And it's clearly being abetted by the wild fearmongering being promulgated by the likes of Glenn Beck and other right-wing pundits.
"I fear a Reichstag moment," he said, referring to the 1933 burning of Germany's parliament building in Berlin that the Nazis blamed on communists and Hitler used as an excuse to suspend constitutional liberties and consolidate power.
"God forbid, another 9/11. Something that will turn this machine on, and power will be seized and voices will be silenced."
Of course, I think we can predict now that if there is another Oklahoma City -- rather than a 9/11 -- Glenn Beck will also be calling it a "Reichstag moment" and claiming it's the product of a government conspiracy to clamp down on civil rights.
If you want a sampling of how bad it's getting, check out the video below, which I captured from the same YouTube site as the one that hosted the "warning" video. The owner stocks it up with Alex Jones conspiracy videos, but this profile of the militias caught my eye:
The main militiaman featured in this is a fellow, evidently from Oklahoma, who calls himself "July4Patriot" and is one of the key players in an outfit of veterans who call themselves the "Oath Keepers". They're organized around a batch of wild conspiracy theories involving supposed plans to use the military to begin rounding up American citizens and placing them in concentration camps.
Indeed, you can see "July4Patriot" -- whose real name is Marine Sgt. Charles Dyer -- in action at a July 4 "Tea Party" in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, in the video we snagged earlier this summer. At that event, Dyer ranted at length about the supposed roundup conspiracy.
There's a growing contingent of people out there on the fringes who not only really believe Glenn Beck when he warns that the government wants to destroy America, but think he's being too tame. And of course, the crazier his claims become, the farther out to sea they all go.
Glenn Beck devoted a long rant last night to his contention that the U.S. Census Bureau shouldn't be counting what he blithely calls "illegal aliens" -- i.e., undocumented immigrants.
But his argument -- that we shouldn't be counting people who can't vote -- doesn't merely cut against the undocumented. It cuts against all immigrants -- who, by definition, are also already non-citizens.
Moreover, the Census Bureau isn't charged with accurately counting the number of citizens living within the United States -- it's charged with counting the entire population.
What Beck wants Census to do -- that is, to exclude non-citizens from its count -- is in direct violation of its charter, which is to count the population whole:
The Census Bureau does not ask about legal (migrant) status of respondents in any of its survey and census programs. As examples, in the decennial census, the American Community Survey, and Current Population Survey as there is no legislative mandate to collect this information. Given the success of Census 2000 in counting nearly every person residing in the United States, we expect that unauthorized migrants were included among people who indicated that the United States was their usual place of residence on the survey date. The foreign-born population includes naturalized U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, temporary migrants (e.g., foreign students), humanitarian migrants (e.g., refugees), and unauthorized migrants (people illegally present in the United States).
Beck would have the Census omit not just unauthorized migrants, but also lawful permanent residents, humanitarian migrants, and foreign-born residents here legally.
Of course, he's arguing for this because he believes counting the undocumented will give the eeeeevil SEIU more power in its quest for total global domination or something like that. You have to watch the video to get it all, and even then it never quite holds together, much less make sense.
Someone really should have thought twice before letting Sean Hannity embarrass himself with the failed stunt he tried in his interview with Michael Moore, the second half of which aired last night on Fox.
Hannity wanted to make a point about how health care in Cuba is so much worse than it is in the YooEssAy -- in contradistinction to Moore's own reportage -- so he offered what he called special video footage he had been provided of a "hospital" in Cuba.
What we then see is a rattletrap mess with old beds and rotting toilets, etc. But Moore notices what should be obvious: There are no patients, either.
Ah, but wait! We shortly see footage of patients in a hospital. But they're in an obviously different building (or at least wing), because this room is clean and the beds and equipment sanitary and well-tended. But we only get to see them for a few seconds before -- swoop! -- off we go back to the rat's nest.
Which is obviously an abandoned hospital or wing, which is certainly not unheard of, even in the YooEssAy.
Moore, of course, laughs at all of this with glee. Hannity quickly changes the subject, since his oh-so-convincing video evidence just makes him look as bad as he has recently in his Jennings Jihad.
You'd think Hannity & Co. would know better than to try to run such hamhandedly edited footage past an experienced filmmaker like Moore. This was so amateurish that they all should just be embarrassed.
Fox News' Trace Gallagher got all excited Thursday reporting some news out of California:
Gallagher: We're told that a man has been injured in an explosion. Reportedly he injured his hand. Now here's the key: You'd think a guy injuring his hand in an explosion -- this is in Lake Elsinore, which is about 45 miles northeast of San Diego -- the man apparently was handling explosives including, ah, triacetone triperoxide. The FBI is now involved in this. This is the same type of explosive that Najibulah Zazi is accused of trying to build. It is highly unstable and highly powerful. And remember those chemicals that Najibulah Zazi is accused of having? They're still missing. So now in San Diego, or just north of San Diego, someone blows up his hand, using similar chemicals in a powerful, highly unstable bomb. The FBI is now on it. We'll bring you more information on that as it comes in here to the Live Desk. This could be key.
Yep, they were hoping it would be part of their favorite new storyline about radical Islamists hiding out in American suburbs and preparing to strike with a fresh round of terrorist acts.
But then the next day, Jane Skinner had the follow-up on Happening Now: It had nothing to do with Najibullah Zazi or his terrorist cells. This was a project undertaken by a young white man, working out of the garage of his mother's place there in Lake Elsinore.
Oh, and his mother's place was a licensed day-care facility. So while Mom was taking care of a houseful of kids, Junior was in the garage whipping up a fresh batch of bombs. From the L.A. Times:
Benjamin Kuzelka allegedly was making an explosive device when it accidentally detonated about 11:30 p.m. Wednesday, deputies said. He suffered an injury to one hand. About 20 minutes later, deputies said, he showed up at a local hospital saying that he had accidentally shot himself with a gun.
"His injuries were inconsistent with a gunshot wound and doctors called the police," said Deputy Melissa Nieburger, a Sheriff's Department spokeswoman.
Deputies went to the Kuzelka home on a cul-de-sac in the 30500 block of Audelo Street. Property records list Rebecca Kuzelka as the sole owner of the house, which was built in 1983.
Inside the home, Nieburger said, deputies found materials used to make explosives, as well as a sophisticated indoor marijuana growing room.
Authorities did not say how many marijuana plants allegedly were found in the home or disclose the type of explosive materials that were uncovered. A law enforcement source told The Times that substances found at the home were similar to acetone peroxide, or TATP, the same type of powerful explosive used in the 2007 London subway terrorist bombings. There was no evidence that the Lake Elsinore incident was related to terrorism, the source said.
Nieburger said deputies had not determined how many children Rebecca Kuzelka cared for at her home. No children were present at the time of the explosion, authorities said.
Everyone's mum about the possibility that the explosives were connected to terrorist activity. But with that kind of background and given the nature of TATP manufacture -- it tends to be a project only for people serious about blowing things up -- that shouldn't be ruled out.
All of which puts some perspective on Gallagher's speculation of the day before. Yes, it was connected to terrorism -- just not the kind of terrorism he was thinking about.
Which likewise underscores the nature of the terrorist beast: He's not always a brown-skinned guy from another country. Sometimes he's the strange right-wing white family that lives next door. But then, Fox never concerns itself with that kind of terrorism.
Then he wrote last year's