Another Lethal Case Of Right-Wing Terrorism, And Media Yawn

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Ho hum. It's becoming routine now:

Police say at least two of the seven suspects arrested for the fatal shooting of two Louisiana sheriffs deputies last Thursday are connected to the anti-government “sovereign citizen” movement.

According to WBRZ-TV, 28-year-old Kyle Joekel and 44-year-old Terry Smith had identified themselves as part of the movement, which was classified as a domestic terror group last year by the FBI.

Joekel and Smith, along with several members of Smith’s family and other associates, were arrested following an ambush on authorities in LaPlace, Louisiana, about 25 miles west of New Orleans. Deputies Brandon Nielsen and Jeremy Triche were killed in the ensuing shootout. Two more deputies were wounded.

We've been writing about -- and warning about -- the sovereign citizens movement for a long time now, but now it seems it's just part of the American woodwork. ABC News picked up on this story, but so far, that's been the reach.

And Fox News? Fuggaboutit. They're too busy denouncing the lack of coverage in last week's FRC shooting -- in which no one was killed -- to pay attention to yet another case of right-wing domestic terrorism.

See Juan Williams on The O'Reilly Factor last week, hosting Rich Noyes from Brent Bozell's right-wing Media Research Center, complaining loudly about the lack of coverage:

WILLIAMS: Well, why don't they see something to follow up with. Rich, I don't care if you are a liberal or conservative. The idea of people walking in with guns to attack people that they have political differences with is outrageous.

And I just can't believe that the networks won't pay attention to the story. But it's got to be that they don't like the conservative direction of the Family Research Council and the fact that they condemn gay marriage. I mean, is that the obvious answer or am I wrong.

NOYES: I think that is absolutely obvious answer.

Yes, that obviously must be the answer, Juan, considering that we can point to more than fifty incidents in the past four years involving domestic terrorism committed by right-wing extremists (we're actually up to about 72 cases, but we'll have more on that later), and in only about a third of those cases was there any media coverage at all.

In contrast, every single case of the 30 or so so-called "Islamist" domestic terrorism has produced national media coverage, as have most cases of animal-rights, eco-terror or anarchist violence (which are significantly smaller in number).

So maybe when Fox News can actually cover incidents of right-wing terrorism AS what they are -- namely, right-wing terrorism -- instead of assiduously and loudly pronouncing that they are no such thing -- and when cases of left-wing terrorism begin to pile up the way right-wing terrorism has in recent years, well, then it might be possible to consider their complaint legitimate.

Amusingly, Bozell himself opined this weekend:

These networks are aiding and abetting liberal violence by refusing to identify it as liberal violence.

Right-wing violence? According to these great thinkers, it just doesn't exist. Even when it does.
This has profound consequences, Readers are well aware, of course, how right-wing screaming over the Department of Homeland Security's bulletin to law-enforcement about right-wing extremist terrorism resulted in the evisceration of the DHS's capabilities in that regard.

Now, Daryl Johnson -- the author of that report -- has penned a contemplative piece about this in the wake of the recent Sikh temple massacre by a white supremacist with military training:

I learned that politicians, political parties and those that support them (including the media) will go to great lengths to undermine the opposition. For this reason, everyone should take a moment to better understand how politicizing domestic intelligence impacts national security as well as the safety of our communities. Politicizing intelligence has its consequences.

Since the DHS warning concerning the resurgence of right-wing extremism, 27 law enforcement officers have been shot (16 killed) by right-wing extremists. Over a dozen mosques have been burned with firebombs – likely attributed to individuals embracing Islamaphobic beliefs. In May 2009, an abortion doctor was murdered while attending church, two other assassination plots against abortion providers were thwarted during 2011 and a half-dozen women’s health clinics were attacked with explosive and incendiary devices over the past two years.

In January 2010, a tax resister deliberately crashed his small plane filled with a 50-gallon drum of gasoline into an IRS processing center in Austin, Texas; in January 2011, three incendiary bombs were mailed to government officials in Annapolis, Md., and Washington, D.C.; also, in January 2011, a backpack bomb was placed along a Martin Luther King Day parade route in Spokane, Wash.; and, during 2010-2012, there have been multiple plots to kill ethnic minorities, police and other government officials by militia extremists and white supremacists.

The Sikh temple shooting in Oak Creek, Wis., and the shooting of four sheriff’s deputies in St. Johns Parish, La., in August are only the latest manifestations of right-wing extremist violence in the U.S. Yet, there have been no hearings on Capitol Hill about this issue. DHS still has only one analyst monitoring domestic terrorism. The federal government’s failure to recognize the domestic terrorism threat tells me there will assuredly be more attacks to come.

Spencer Ackerman at Wired has an in-depth interview with Johnson that is well worth reading.

O'Reilly Has No Problem With FRC's Perkins Blaming The SPLC For Shooting

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

It's a given, of course, that Fox News has become the greatest font of media mendacity of our times, perhaps in history. But the episodes really don't come any more dishonest than the one Bill O'Reilly featured last night with the Family Research Council's Tony Perkins, discussing the shooting in the lobby of the FRC's Washington offices two days ago.

Just as he did earlier in the day, Perkins blamed the Southern Poverty Law Center for the shooting because it has designated the FRC a hate group. It is, of course, an outrageous and absurd charge, as Mark Potok of the SPLC himself explained yesterday.

The whole episode was a bizarre exercise in un-self-consciousness, especially because O'Reilly remains upset to this day that he was quite accurately accused of bearing culpability for the death of abortion doctor George Tiller in Kansas -- a fact that he led the segment off with. And yet he was all too happy to let Perkins come on his show and make similar accusations about the SPLC, all without evincing any awareness that Perkins was indulging the very behavior O'Reilly accused his own critics of engaging.

So, it's OK to lie and demonize someone to the point that they become the targets of violence if you're a right-winger, but it's not OK to accurately call out that very behavior and hold those people up for public condemnation, especially if you're a liberal or perceived as one. Got it?

To pull that off, of course, meant that there was a full menu of outright lying -- and there was plenty of that. O'Reilly himself set the tone when he decried the accusations about Tiller:

O'REILLY: Well, I never called him a killer. I said that he was nicknamed "Tiller the Baby Killer". That man is obviously not an honest person. He's also a late-term abortionist himself. I simply reported what Tiller was doing in detail and the press hammered me for it.

That's just flatly false. Not only did O'Reilly repeatedly refer to Tiller as a "baby killer," he did so without attributing it to anyone else:

We found at least 42 instances of O'Reilly mentioning Tiller by name, going back to 2005. In 24 instances, we found that O'Reilly referred to Tiller specifically as a "baby killer."

Most of the time, O'Reilly would simply refer to the Tiller as "Tiller the baby killer" or as "Dr. George Tiller, known as Tiller the baby killer" without attributing it to anyone. We found four times when O'Reilly said that "some" called him Tiller the baby killer. We did not find any instance where O'Reilly named an individual or a particular antiabortion group that referred to Tiller that way.

As we reported at the time, O'Reilly repeatedly demonized Tiller, and at one point even suggested vigilante violence to his listeners on his radio show before backing away:

And if I could get my hands on Tiller -- well, you know. Can't be vigilantes. Can't do that. It's just a figure of speech.

O'Reilly's reportage on Tiller, in the meantime, was riddled with falsehoods, gross distortions and major inaccuracies, all with the purpose of further demonizing the man. And O'Reilly did not merely "report" on Tiller -- he repeatedly attacked him in his commentary:

"If we as a society allow an undefined mental health exception in late-term abortions, then babies can be killed for almost any reason... This is the kind of stuff that happened in Mao's China and Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union... If we allow this, America will no longer be a noble nation... If we allow Dr. George Tiller and his acolytes to continue, we can no longer pass judgment on any behavior by anybody."

Including, evidently, murderous extremists. And, as you can see in the video above (from 2006), O'Reilly similarly accused anyone who refused to buy into his accusation of coddling killers:

I don’t care what you think. We have incontrovertible evidence that this man is executing babies about to be born because the woman is depressed…if you don’t believe me, I don’t care…You are OK with Dr. Tiller executing babies about to be born because the mother says she’s depressed.

So O'Reilly made clear at the outset that this would be a "No Spin" segment in which flagrant lying would be encouraged. And sure enough, Perkins took him up on it:

PERKINS: But let me say, I believe that the Southern Poverty Law Center is responsible for creating the environment that led to this. And the same thing that you referred to just a few minutes ago. This calling, saying you are -- you were using hate speech. Well, the Southern Poverty Law Center because they disagree with our positions on marriage and certain religious issues have labeled us a hate group. And that gives license to lunatics like -- like this to come in with a gun and shoot innocent people.

This is, of course, simply a blatant and malicious lie: The SPLC, as Potok explained, listed the FRC as a hate group not because of its policies or its positions, but "because has knowingly spread false and denigrating propaganda about LGBT people".

Moreover, this point is particularly noteworthy:

The FRC and its allies on the religious right are saying, in effect, that offering legitimate and fact-based criticism in a democratic society is tantamount to suggesting that the objects of criticism should be the targets of criminal violence.

Indeed, as we observed yesterday:

It's important to remember that calling out organizations and people for their hatemongering is not itself hatemongering. It is its antithesis. And yesterday's horror notwithstanding, it must remain that way.

Unless Bill O'Reilly and Tony Perkins have their way.

A Hate Group By Any Other Name: Assessing The FRC Shootings

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Let's be clear: Yesterday's shooting of a security guard at the Family Research Council's offices in Washington, D.C., evidently motivated by the shooter's anger over the FRC's ongoing campaign against the LGBT community, was an atrocity that harmed the cause the shooter espoused. After all, the chief reason groups are called out as "hate groups" is that the rhetoric they purvey is so toxic that often it justifies and inspires acts of violence against vulnerable minorities. To respond to that with an equally insane act of violence is a betrayal.

Moreover, if the motives as reported so far are accurate, it was clearly an act of domestic terrorism, one of an increasingly small species of such acts: left-wing domestic terrorism. It may be helpful here to remember that since 2008, there have been more than fifty incidents of domestic terrorism committed by right wing-extremists and directed at "liberal" targets.

The horrified finger pointing that has erupted among right-wingers, however, is nothing if not obscene, particularly when it involves hatemongers like Michelle Malkin and Bryan Fischer. Malkin's hypocrisy in particular would be hilarious were it not so noxious: Only a few weeks ago, she was reiterating her longtime claim that the Holocaust Museum shooter wasn't a right-wing extremist, along with a dozen other incidents involving similar extremists.

Indeed, right-wingers (particularly those at Fox News and the Malkin contingent) have long been eager to whitewash away the political orientation of right-wing terrorists and deny any culpability for their acts, even when -- as in the case of the Malkin fan who terrorized abortion clinics with fake anthrax attacks, or the rampaging shooter who claimed inspiration from Fox News figures -- those connections are painfully obvious.

Yesterday, Malkin's "Twitchy" site was eagerly blaming the Southern Poverty Law Center for the FRC shooting.

And she wasn't alone. As The Hill reports, there were lots of people -- including Fischer, a noted hatemonger himself -- blaming the SPLC, because it dares to call out hate groups for what they are:

The shooting of a security guard Wednesday at the Family Research Council (FRC) has spurred a torrent of heated accusations from both sides of the gay rights debate about claims that the conservative organization is a “hate group.”

The National Organization for Marriage (NOM), one of the nation’s leading opponents of same-sex marriage, told The Hill the shooting was a direct result of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s decision in 2010 to place the FRC on its list of hate groups for its rhetoric on gays.

Brian Brown, the president of NOM, pointed to a recent blog post by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), one of the largest gay-rights groups in the country. The post, “Paul Ryan Speaking at Hate Group’s Annual Conference,” called attention to the vice presidential candidate’s scheduled appearance at the FRC’s national summit next month.

“Today’s attack is the clearest sign we’ve seen that labeling pro-marriage groups as ‘hateful’ must end,” Brown said in a statement issued following the shooting.

“For too long national gay rights groups have intentionally marginalized and ostracized pro-marriage groups and individuals by labeling them as ‘hateful’ and ‘bigoted.’”

Neither the FBI nor the D.C. police have released any information about what motivated the shooter, who they placed in custody shortly after 11 a.m. near the FRC’s headquarters after he wounded a security guard in the arm.

The HRC’s vice president for communications and marketing, Fred Sainz, called the accusations “irresponsible” and “spurious” and said NOM is trying to capitalize on an atrocious attack to further its agenda of blocking gay rights.

“That’s about as irresponsible as anything I’ve ever heard in Washington,” Sainz said in an interview. “They have zero facts to go on. They have no idea who this individual is, what his motivation is, or where he’s coming from ideologically.”

“The National Organization for Marriage will stop at absolutely nothing in order to try and win a war that they are losing. The have beyond zero ethical boundaries,” Sainz said. “They are the lowest of the bottom fishers.”

It's important to understand, first of all, that the SPLC does not hand out the designation "hate group" willy-nilly; the organization has always been clear that such a designation is only handed out to select organizations who meet exacting criteria.

It's also important to understand why the the SPLC designated the Family Research Council a "hate group" in the first place -- namely, because their vicious demonization of gays and lesbians is the kind of rhetoric that regularly and frequently inspires all kinds of violence directed at those folks, particularly in the form of hate crimes:

The Family Research Council (FRC) bills itself as “the leading voice for the family in our nation’s halls of power,” but its real specialty is defaming gays and lesbians. The FRC often makes false claims about the LGBT community based on discredited research and junk science. The intention is to denigrate LGBT people in its battles against same-sex marriage, hate crimes laws, anti-bullying programs and the repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

To make the case that the LGBT community is a threat to American society, the FRC employs a number of “policy experts” whose “research” has allowed the FRC to be extremely active politically in shaping public debate. Its research fellows and leaders often testify before Congress and appear in the mainstream media. It also works at the grassroots level, conducting outreach to pastors in an effort to “transform the culture.”

In Its Own Words

“Gaining access to children has been a long-term goal of the homosexual movement.”
— Robert Knight, FRC director of cultural studies, and Frank York, 1999

“[Homosexuality] … embodies a deep-seated hatred against true religion.”
— Steven Schwalm, FRC senior writer and analyst, in “Desecrating Corpus Christi,” 1999

“One of the primary goals of the homosexual rights movement is to abolish all age of consent laws and to eventually recognize pedophiles as the ‘prophets' of a new sexual order.”
-1999 FRC pamphlet, Homosexual Activists Work to Normalize Sex with Boys.

“[T]he evidence indicates that disproportionate numbers of gay men seek adolescent males or boys as sexual partners.”
— Timothy Dailey, senior research fellow, “Homosexuality and Child Sexual Abuse,” 2002

“While activists like to claim that pedophilia is a completely distinct orientation from homosexuality, evidence shows a disproportionate overlap between the two. … It is a homosexual problem.”
— FRC President Tony Perkins, FRC website, 2010

And it's important to remember that the FRC's chief, Tony Perkins, has a long history of playing footsie with racists and other right-wing extremists:

In 1996, while managing the U.S. Senate campaign of Woody Jenkins against Mary Landrieu, Perkins paid $82,500 to use the mailing list of former Klan chieftain David Duke. The campaign was fined $3,000 (reduced from $82,500) after Perkins and Jenkins filed false disclosure forms in a bid to hide their link to Duke. Five years later, on May 17, 2001, Perkins gave a speech to the Louisiana chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a white supremacist group that has described black people as a “retrograde species of humanity.” Perkins claimed not to know the group’s ideology at the time, but it had been widely publicized in Louisiana and the nation, because in 1999 — two years before Perkins’ speech to the CCC — Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott had been embroiled in a national scandal over his ties to the group. GOP chairman Jim Nicholson then urged Republicans to avoid the CCC because of its “racist views.”

The Duke incident surfaced again in the local press in 2002, when Perkins ran for the Republican nomination for the Senate, dooming his campaign to a fourth-place finish in the primaries.

It's important to remember that calling out organizations and people for their hatemongering is not itself hatemongering. It is its antithesis. And yesterday's horror notwithstanding, it must remain that way.

Study Demonstrates How Right-Wing Media Act As A Hate Speech Echo Chamber

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

We've been saying for a long time that the right-wing media machine, led particularly by Fox News, has become an echo chamber for hate speech from the far right. At places like Fox, the virulent language found on the racist and extremist right has been largely toned down, but the underlying sentiments, not to mention the larger meta-narrative about politics remains intact. And this has been acutely the case in recent years regarding Latinos and Muslims.

Well, thanks to a scientific study from UCLA's Chicano Research Center, there's now some specific evidence that substantiates all this:

This study analyzes how social networks that form around the hosts of commercial talk radio shows can propagate messages targeting vulnerable groups. Working with recorded broadcasts from five shows gathered over a six-week period, involving 102 scheduled guests and covering 88 topics, researchers determined hosts’ and guests’ ideological alignment on the topics discussed most frequently—including immigration and terrorism—through a content analysis of on-air statements and website content. The findings reveal that the hosts promoted an insular discourse that focused on, for example, anti-immigration, anti-Islam, and pro-Tea Party positions and that this discourse found repetition and amplification through social media. Of the 21 guests who appeared more than once, media personalities (57 percent) and political figures (19 percent) accounted for 76 percent. Fox News accounted for nearly one-fourth (24 percent) of appearances by guests representing an organization. Political figures accounted for 27 percent of all guests, and the Republican Party and the Tea Party accounted for 93 percent and 89 percent, respectively, of all political figures appearing on the shows. Eighty-nine percent of the scheduled guests were white, and 81 percent were male.

The study's conclusions make the key point:

The data demonstrate the mutual referencing among a relatively small cluster of nodes that include hosts, guests, and other affiliated individuals and groups. The findings reveal that these individuals and groups were connected by certain ideological sentiments targeting vulnerable groups. For example, discussions around immigration and Islam were framed in oppositional and absolutist terms: immigrants as “illegal” and law breaking, and Islam as the context of terrorism.

If talk radio and social media sustain a social network, they do so within a narrow range of ideological positions reflected by the hosts and guests. What’s more, the predominance of guests that represent media organizations not only minimizes alternate voices but also facilitates the mass broadcast and echoing of the shared ideologies that are discussed on the air. What emerges is a discourse that remains insular rather than open and that finds alignment, repetition, and amplification through social media.

As Salvatore Colleluori at Media Matters observes:

These viewpoints have far reaching consequences. NHMC President and CEO Alex Nogales told Fox News Latino that the social network surrounding conservative talk radio and Fox News has spread to social media websites resulting in "an echo-chamber of voices, both online and off, that promotes hatred against ethnic, racial and religious groups and the LGBT community on social media web sites."

Using hateful rhetoric, these hosts have cast immigrants as disease ridden, equated pro-immigrant organizations with neo-Nazis, called Islam an "evil religion," claimed the Obama administration is promoting "race riots" and made fun of the ethnicity of Asian-American politicians.

This is what we've called "eliminationist rhetoric" for a long time. And the problem hasn't been getting better. Indeed, as this campaign season has progressed, it's gotten increasingly worse.

Why Romney And The Rich Will Never Really Get It

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

 [H/t Diane]

You know, we all get the chuckles while watching Mitt Romney and his Republican cohorts grapple with trying to explain to all of us little people just why it's essential -- it's the natural order of things, you know -- for the people who own the world to be the ones who run it.

It goes along with the heavy dressage fandom and weird bits of behavior from Romney, like the time he he gave his hot chocolate back to a barista after stiffing the guy for a tip. Or walk away from a terminally man asking him to rethink his position on medical marijuana.

Mind you, the two Bush regimes were full of this kind of behavior: rich guys who like to pretend they're normal dudes displaying utter perplexity at the norms of the "little people".

But you know what? It seems that perhaps they just can't help themselves. At least, that's what some scientists have reported at Scientific American:

Berkeley psychologists Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner ran several studies looking at whether social class (as measured by wealth, occupational prestige, and education) influences how much we care about the feelings of others. In one study, Piff and his colleagues discreetly observed the behavior of drivers at a busy four-way intersection.

They found that luxury car drivers were more likely to cut off other motorists instead of waiting for their turn at the intersection. This was true for both men and women upper-class drivers, regardless of the time of day or the amount of traffic at the intersection. In a different study they found that luxury car drivers were also more likely to speed past a pedestrian trying to use a crosswalk, even after making eye contact with the pedestrian.

In order to figure out whether selfishness leads to wealth (rather than vice versa), Piff and his colleagues ran a study where they manipulated people’s class feelings. The researchers asked participants to spend a few minutes comparing themselves either to people better off or worse off than themselves financially. Afterwards, participants were shown a jar of candy and told that they could take home as much as they wanted. They were also told that the leftover candy would be given to children in a nearby laboratory.

Those participants who had spent time thinking about how much better off they were compared to others ended up taking significantly more candy for themselves--leaving less behind for the children.

A related set of studies published by Keltner and his colleagues last year looked at how social class influences feelings of compassion towards people who are suffering. In one study, they found that less affluent individuals are more likely to report feeling compassion towards others on a regular basis. For example, they are more likely to agree with statements such as, “I often notice people who need help,” and “It’s important to take care of people who are vulnerable.” This was true even after controlling for other factors that we know affect compassionate feelings, such as gender, ethnicity, and spiritual beliefs.

In a second study, participants were asked to watch two videos while having their heart rate monitored. One video showed somebody explaining how to build a patio. The other showed children who were suffering from cancer. After watching the videos, participants indicated how much compassion they felt while watching either video. Social class was measured by asking participants questions about their family’s level of income and education. The results of the study showed that participants on the lower end of the spectrum, with less income and education, were more likely to report feeling compassion while watching the video of the cancer patients. In addition, their heart rates slowed down while watching the cancer video—a response that is associated with paying greater attention to the feelings and motivations of others.

These findings build upon previous research showing how upper class individuals are worse at recognizing the emotions of others and less likely to pay attention to people they are interacting with (e.g. by checking their cell phones or doodling).

But why would wealth and status decrease our feelings of compassion for others? After all, it seems more likely that having few resources would lead to selfishness. Piff and his colleagues suspect that the answer may have something to do with how wealth and abundance give us a sense of freedom and independence from others. The less we have to rely on others, the less we may care about their feelings.

In other words, "job creators" like Romney and his fellow plutocratic Republicans are most likely to be people with personality disorders, often straight-on psychopaths utterly lacking in empathy.

This explains a lot, don't you think?

Funny How Intolerant Right-Wingers Leap To Decry Intolerance

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

[H/t Heather]

The ever-clueless Steve Doocy this morning, talking about the Chick-Fil-A controversy:

DOOCY: Remember, it wasn't just people supporting Dan Cathy for his Christian values. ... People not only supporting his Christian values, and they are closed on Sundays. But also just the CEO's right to say what he thinks. You know, a lot of people wound up going -- I was reading in the New York Post today about how a lot of people went over to New Jersey to a Chick-Fil-A, and it wasn't to support the family-values thing, but to support his right to say something, because so many people on the left are so intolerant -- you gotta be able to say in this country what you think!

Of course, it never appeared to occur to Doocy that what the people who are raising an outcry about Dan Cathy's remarks are protesting is Dan Cathy's blatant and blind intolerance.

This is an old conundrum, or at least it appears to be one, raised time and again during the civil-rights struggles of the 1950s and beyond: Should the tolerant tolerate intolerance?

It's not really a conundrum, though, because the answer is a simple one: No. Tolerance and intolerance are diametrically opposed principles, like matter and anti-matter. One cannot exist in the presence of the other. People who are dedicated to the principles of tolerance have no place for intolerance: It is what they are fighting.

The people like Doocy who are on the historically wrong side of the Chick-Fil-A controversy should think back to the civil-rights era, when people voiced outrage at the intolerance of famous bigots like George Wallace and Lester Maddox and Orval Faubus. The people who organized boycotts of these bigots and the places they represented back then were similarly accused of "intolerance" at the time.

The lesson of that history remains a simple and clear one: One cannot end racial, ethnic, religious, or sexual intolerance by "tolerating" the people who practice it. They will only change when they are faced with becoming pariahs. It is no different today than it was fifty years ago.

Not that we could expect a dim bulb like Doocy to figure that out, either.

Sheriff Joe On Trial: 'Tough' Guy Is Looking Pretty Pathetic

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Our favorite nativist nutcase in an actual position of authority, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, has been coming down off the high notes of his dramatic investigation of President Obama's birth certificate the past couple of weeks. Because he's finally on trial for his racial-profiling policies targeting Latinos in his community.

And it hasn't been much fun for him, as Ray Stern at the Phoenix New Times reports:

Under pointed questioning by Young, Arpaio denied that he equated brown-skinned people with illegal immigrants, as a press release from 2007 demonstrates he did. Young took time to go over a letter received by Arpaio from an anti-immigrant group in which Arpaio had emphasized statements about how police shouldn't be afraid to check the status of day laborers. And Young played a video from another press conference in which Arpaio said he'd have a "pure" program that went after illegal immigrants first, and their suspected crimes second.

But the sheriff made his worst impressions while answering questions about his book, Joe's Law.

Basically, anytime Arpaio was shown some of the blatant bigotry in that book, he blamed it on co-author Len Sherman. And this was despite being read back his testimony from a previous deposition in which he'd said he didn't need to read his own book because he'd written it himself.

Arpaio was forced by Young to back off from a couple of statements in the book, including one in which he wrote that Mexicans don't come to the United States with the same hopes and dreams as people from other countries.. In another part of the book, Young pointed out, Arpaio wrote that second- and third-generation Mexican-Americans were not part of the American "mainstream."

"My co-author wrote that," Arpaio blurted out.

The whole week has gone like that. If his officers were provably bigoted and indulged in nakedly racist policing, why, none of that was HIS doing. He had no knowledge of such things!
As the Arizona Republic put it in an editorial:

Apologists for Arpaio must come to terms with the person they so zealously defend. Either he is America's toughest sheriff, or America's most oblivious sheriff.

Arpaio's attorneys contend that Arpaio's hermetically sealed existence in his own office is intended to avoid micromanagement of professional police work.

"It serves as an insulation against desires and impulses that might not be in the best interest of the community," said attorney Tim Casey.

That runs exactly counter to Arpaio's assertions, repeated endlessly, that his notorious, wasteful "crime-suppression sweeps" through largely Hispanic neighborhoods were conducted precisely because he deemed them in the community's best interests. The very existence of the sweeps was a political statement.

Arpaio and his acolytes either lied to the public about the purpose of those sweeps, or they are lying to the judge now.

 Meanwhile, there have been some lively protests and counter-protests.

-- A group of young immigrants was arrested outside the trial after publicly revealing their undocumented status.

-- Some protesters have been outside Arpaio's church, urging the bishop to denounce Arpaio's malfeasance. That in turn has attracted counter-protesters, not to mention disgusted looks from parishioners.

-- The plaintiffs rested yesterday. Now we get to see Arpaio's defense. If it's anything like his birth-certificate investigation, this could get deeply amusing.

The Elwha Dams And The Future Of Our Rivers: Hope Runs Free

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

[Two videos: The first, a time-lapse video of the deconstruction of the Elwha Dam on the lower Elwha River (YouTube here), the second a video of the blasting of one of the last remaining sections of concrete on the Glines Canyon Dam on the upper Elwha, shot by my brother-in-law.]

Timothy Egan had a superb contribution at the NYT's blog space the other day, describing the effects of the Elwha Ecosystem Restoration project, which is the largest dam-removal project in U.S. history:

It defies experience-hardened cynicism whenever any big public works project is under budget and ahead of schedule. But the Elwha has served up something even better: life itself, in the form of ocean-going fish answering to the imperatives of love and death.

Not long ago, scientists were stunned to find wild steelhead trout scouting habitat well past the site where the Elwha Dam had stood for nearly a century. They didn’t expect fish to return this soon.

This biological boomerang is a tribute to stubborn DNA memory, and it is a precursor for what the wild Elwha will be in the not-so-distant future. Beyond that, the restoration of the Elwha, as in the revival of the much-abused southern end of the Bronx River at the other end of the country, is proof that American ingenuity is alive and well and hard at work on with the tricky task of healing parts of the natural world that we’ve trashed.

Be sure to read the whole thing, since Egan is such a fine writer. Here's more about that steelhead run, as well as further good news: the downstream flow of silt is not turning out to be nearly as noxious as originally feared.

But it's not just the Elwha where this is happening. As these structures age, removal is often the sensible solution. And it's creating opportunities for river restoration in a wide variety of places.

A recent Boston Globe piece examined the local benefits of another dam-removal project:

Tim Purinton makes the analogy that removing dams from a river is akin to getting rid of clogged arteries in the body.

"If you're interested in rivers and river ecology, there's no better thing you can do for a river than remove a dam," said Purinton, director of the Division of Ecological Restoration for the state Department of Fish and Game.

Removing the obstruction allows not just better passage for fish and other aquatic species, but also the movement of sediment and a change in water temperature, he said. "If you can clean the arteries and allow for the free flow of water, sediment, and nutrients, you bring back river health almost immediately."

Obviously, dams remain extremely useful things, especially in places like the Northwest, where they provide most of our carbon-neutral energy (though at the expense of salmon runs). But when they outlive their usefulness, it's a wonderful thing to watch Mother Nature come rushing back to her domain.

Would Scalia Protect My Right To Bear A Suitcase Nuke?

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

[H/t Dave]

I got to thinking about Justice Antontin Scalia's train of logic on the Second Amendment, at least as he explained it to the talking heads yesterday:

"We'll see," Scalia replied. "Obviously the amendment does not apply to arms that cannot be carried. It's to 'keep and bear' so it doesn't apply to cannons."

"But I suppose there are handheld rocket launchers that can bring down airplanes that will have to -- it's will have to be decided," he added.

That's it? That's the criteria as to whether or not the right exists to keep and bear a weapon of any kind -- its portability?

Wow. Or as my redneck friends back in Idaho who like to blow shit up would put it: Yeeeeeeeehaw!!!!

Scalia seems to be opening the door not just for legalizing fully automatic guns, but all kinds of weapons. I mean, hell, pipe bombs -- which, let's be honest, really aren't quite up there in the rocket-launcher category in terms of lethality -- are currently illegal as hell and tightly regulated by the ATF and various other federal agencies right now.

So, for that matter, are all various kinds of portable bombs, particularly those made with C-4. They pack quite a kick, too.

And I guess if we continue to follow the impeccable logic of District of Columbia v. Heller, as Scalia is doing here, then we'll soon loose the dogs on a whole range of weapons that are currently regulated -- because they certainly can be carried.

But hell, why stop there? Go all the way: Let's establish the right to keep and bear a suitcase nuke, since obviously, it's a kind of arms and you can bear it, too.

In fact, I think every American ought to have a suitcase nuke for their personal use. That way if some nutcase comes into a theater and tries to blow everyone up with a suitcase nuke, the entire audience can set off their own nukes. God Bless Murka!

Thanks, your honor. We owe you one.

Tea-Party Hearts Soar In Oregon For Another 'Gathering Of Eagles'

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

I am soooooo disappointed. I can't tell you how disappointed. Because, alas and alack, I'm going to have to miss next week's gathering of tea-partying wingnuts down in Oregon, aka the "Gathering of Eagles".

My friend Carla at Blue Oregon tipped me off about this shindig. Seems they held the GOE last year at the same rural ranch outside of Turner, and everyone had such a grand time they decided to hold it there again.

You remember the "Gathering of Eagles." These were the pre-Tea Party Cro-Magnons who organized back in 2008 to create a right-wing counter-protest intended to "protect" the Vietnam Veterans memorial in D.C. One of their Fearless Leaders raised eyebrows a couple of years back by telling Chris Dodd to go kill himself.

Just for fun, you can go read belief system, which really can just be summed up with the penultimate entry:

Together we will fight liberalism, socialism, progressivism, and communism and bring back our individual freedoms to choose our own destiny.

Here's the PDF. I dunno about you, but I'm just all verklempt to miss out on this prime opportunity to hobnob with both Tom DeLay and John Fund. The conversations we could have!

FWIW, the host is a genial fellow who sells roofing compound and ran for Oregon governor back in 2010 (not so successfully).

Among the guests, besides DeLay and Fund, will be Bob Basso, who got famous pretending to be Thomas Paine on a few episodes of the Glenn Beck show, which he then parlayed into a swinging career on the right-wing chicken-dinner (or eagle-gathering, or what have you) circuit. You can tell that none of these morons ever bothered to actually read Paine, especially not "Agrarian Justice" -- else they would know that "income redistribution" not only well preceded Karl Marx, it was adamantly advocated by their hero!

We especially recall the time Basso called for an armed "Second Revolution" to take back the country from the evil Obamaites:

Basso: Join the grassroots movement of the Second American Revolution -- not of guns and violence, but of pressure, pressure, pressure. ...

Take back America now! Choose to be part of the Second American Revolution! Pressure, pressure, pressure! No presidential candidate, no political party can save you now. Only an aroused citizenry will turn this uncommon sense around. And he or she who does nothing now is helping them to destroy America!

One can hardly wait to see the eagles soaring. Darn.

I have to be off camping and watching whales again. What a bummer.

Evidently, Minutemen Founder Gilchrist Doesn't Like Us

Jim Gilchrist and Shawna Forde patrolling the Arizona desert together

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

I mentioned the other day that Minuteman movement cofounder Jim Gilchrist has been adamantly denying to everyone in sight the truth of what I reported about him earlier this week -- namely, that not only was he tightly associated with child killer Shawna Forde right up to the moment of her arrest, but he was aware of the crazy schemes she had in mind well before she tried enacting them.

It seems that yesterday, he posted in the comments of the AlterNet piece where I reported all this -- and I guess we can call this definitive:

Dear Readers,

David Neiwert's attempt to glorify the murder of a nine-year-old girl and her father for the purpose of bogus journalistic acclaim and the financial gain he anticipates from
selling books represents perhaps the lowest form of "dirty" journalism.

I just got off the phone with private investigator Mike Carlucci and we both agree that David Neiwert has made up most of the so-called facts in his article. I, nor Mr. Carlucci ever had any discussion with Shawna Forde about her agenda to rob drug dealers.

Furthermore, the Minuteman Movement was not seriously interfered with by whatever Shawna Forde and her two accomplices did. The Minuteman Movement was put into a temporary tailspin by some selfish opportunists posing as immigration law enforcement advocates whose true interest was in hijacking the movement for their own financial and egotistical interests, in my opinion.

David Neiwert is a fiction writer who should be forthright with his readership and disclose that his selfish agenda is to sell books and be falsely heralded as "one of the great thinkers of our time."

Shawna Forde and her two thugs were lone wolves who operated their own organization distinct and separate from other immigration activist groups. She also regularly communicated with many of the hundred or so similar groups established around the country. Simply, the murderous trio used a feigned participation in the immigration law enforcement movement as a convenient veil to cloak some sinister plans to rob drug dealers and coyotes.

David Neiwert knows this, yet he revels in the opportunity to hang as many innocent persons as possible...all the while salivating at the glossy-eyed, delusional thought that such unprofessional behavior will somehow bring him recognition and money.

Not so.

There are professional journalists, and there are "dirty" journalists. David Neiwert, and his counterparts in the Southern Poverty Law Center who cooperated with him in his propaganda efforts, are dirty journalists. The veracity of their writings should be accorded the appropriate skepticism due a propaganda mill.

Sincerely,
Jim Gilchrist, Founder and President, The Minuteman Project
--a multiethnic immigration law enforcement advocacy group--

I'm not going to bother responding to much of this, other than to say I've conversed with Carlucci after his conversation with Gilchrist, and I'm quite certain Gilchrist is lying through his teeth about Mike's views of my reportage. But that should not surprise anyone here.

If Gilchrist were so confident that I reported even a single false fact, he and his attorneys would be lining up the libel suit as we speak. But he's not, because I didn't, and therefore he can't. He's stuck, he knows it, and is now relegated to blowing off steam in my general direction. Which bothers me not even the slightest.

Another AZ Minuteman's Twisted Character Manifests Itself

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

I don't know if any of you caught this little tidbit the other day over at the SPLC's Hatewatch, who got ahold of Minuteman movement cofounder Jim Gilchrist the day after my AlterNet expose on the Minutemen and Shawna Forde was published. It seems that Gilchrist adamantly denies that he had the conversation with Forde that I reported him having regarding her plans to rip off drug dealers:

Reached by Hatewatch yesterday, Gilchrist flatly denied that he had ever talked to Forde about robbing drug dealers and said she was not even in the car on the way to CWU.

“This is bullshit,” Gilchrist said, adding that Forde “was just part of the audience” at the CWU talk. He also said he did not remember Carlucci driving to CWU.

So I guess it comes down to Mike Carlucci's word against Jim Gilchrist's. You probably wouldn't be surprised if I told you that not only does Carlucci have the ability to back up every word, he's only revealed the tip of the iceberg in terms of the depth of the Minutemen's relationship with Forde.

Moreover, it's a Minuteman's word against that of a respected private eye. Considering what we've been learning of late about the fine, upstanding character of the people the nativist border-watch movement attracted -- even beyond Shawna Forde -- that's not a hard choice to make.

First there was Forde. Then there was J.T. Ready, the neo-Nazi border watcher who ended his career by shooting up his girlfriend and her family and then shooting himself.

Now we have Todd Hezlitt, erstwhile companion of Shawna Forde and now a fugitive on the lam with someone's 15-year-old daughter:

You could chalk up some of border militiaman Todd Hezlitt's troubles to bad luck - who knew when he associated with Shawna Forde in 2008 that she would end up killing people the next year and drag his name into the mud?

But his most recent trouble - deputies say the 38-year-old Hezlitt ran away with a 15-year-old girlfriend - seems to be of his own doing.

Hezlitt was arrested in April and accused of two counts of sexual conduct with a minor, a student in the Flowing Wells Unified School District. Then on June 1, the Pima County Sheriff's Department reported that Hezlitt and the girl had both disappeared, apparently together.

He's facing felony charges of sexual conduct with a minor and has violated the terms of his release from jail by contacting the girl, causing an arrest warrant to be issued, Sheriff's Department spokeswoman Sgt. Dawn Barkman said.

You can see Hezlitt in this video of Forde's border-watch operation, taken by a Norwegian film crew in 2008. Hezlitt is the guy emerging from the tent at about the 1:45 mark and strapping on body armor:


As Tim Steller of the Arizona Daily Star observed:

There are other, more borderline cases of criminality, bad acts, or overt racism associated with people connected to this border movement. Jeffrey Harbin, for example, was convicted this year of making improvised explosive devices for use on the border, but I've not been able to find evidence he actually participated in border patrols. And of course, the inspiration for the citizen-border-patrol movement, Roger Barnett, was successfully sued for kidnapping and allegedly striking illegal immigrants.

In any case, this list is long and could be longer, but I think it explains why the citizen border patrollers continue to be viewed in the news media and some parts of the public with skepticism.

It's Morning In Post-Racial America, People! Geez!

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Don't you just love living in post-racial America? You know, that country where, according to our conservative and centrist friends, all the racial, ethnic and religious divisions of the past have been buried in the avalanche of the election of our first African-American president?

I'm sure these folks down in Mississippi just love it:

CRYSTAL SPRINGS, MS (WLBT) - It was to be their big day, but a Jackson couple says the church where they were planning to wed turned them away because of race.

Now, the couple wants answers, and the church's pastor is questioning the mindset of some of members of his congregation who caused the problem in the first place.

They had set the date and printed and mailed out all the invitations, but the day before wedding bells were to ring for Charles and Te'Andrea Wilson, they say they got some bad news from the pastor.

"The church congregation had decided no black could be married at that church, and that if he went on to marry her, then they would vote him out the church," said Charles Wilson.

The Wilsons were trying to get married at the predominantly white First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs -- a church they attend regularly, but are not members of.

"He had people in the sanctuary that were pitching a fit about us being a black couple," said Te'Andrea Wilson. "I didn't like it at all, because I wasn't brought up to be racist. I was brought up to love and care for everybody."

You may say, "Aw, that's the South." But how about these innocent Jewish kids in Pennsylvania?

Five people face charges for allegedly terrorizing a Jewish summer camp in Pennsylvania.

In three separate episodes earlier this month, three adults and two juveniles caused property damage as they sped dangerously through Camp Bonim in Wayne County in a pickup truck, shouting anti-Semitic epithets and firing paintball guns at campers and staff, District Attorney Janine Edwards said in a press release. The three adults were arrested Wednesday morning and face felony and misdemeanor charges, including ethnic intimidation, terroristic threats and assault.

"These children were terrorized and in fear for their lives by the actions of this group," Edwards said in the release. "The vicious, cruel and obscene nature of the language hurled at the campers is unspeakable. Luckily none of the children suffered any serious physical injury, however, the emotional damage is immeasurable."

A judge arraigned Tyler Spencer, an 18-year-old from Linden, Tenn., and set his bail at $200,000. Spencer is accused of attempting to hit campers as he drove the Ford-350 pickup truck carrying the group. Spencer's alleged accomplices, Mark Trail, 21, and Cassandra Robertson, 18, both of Wayne County, were held on $20,000 bail. A 17-year-old and a 16-year-old face juvenile court cases.

In the first episode on July 14, Spencer told police that he drove in circles at a high speed to damage several fields on the Bonim campus, according to a police affidavit obtained by ABC News. When he returned with the same group of passengers the next day, Spencer said they ripped the camp's mailbox out of the ground before driving into the camp.

Police said Mark Trail then yelled racial slurs such as "You f***ing Jews go back where you came from" and "I'm gonna kill you, you f***ing Jews." During that episode, 18-year-old camper Alan Rosen was struck in the leg by a shot from a paintball gun while walking near the camp's synagogue, according to the affidavit, filed by Pennsylvania State Trooper John Decker.

And hey, let's not forget: Now that our post-racial president has also blessed gay marriage, we have also buried all that old anti-gay bigotry of the past. Why, no one believes that stuff anymore, do they?

Let's ask this woman in Omaha, Nebraska:

Raymond Strozier heard sirens outside his house early Sunday and looked outside to see his neighbor bleeding in the street, the victim of a reported hate crime in which her attackers carved anti-gay slurs into her skin and tried to light her house on fire.

Strozier said he ran to her just before paramedics pulled her away.

“She had blood streaming down her body,” he said. “She was crying. She was shaking. She was terrified.”

The 33-year-old woman said she was attacked early Sunday by three masked men who barged into her house, bound her wrists and ankles with zip ties and cut her all over her body before dumping gasoline on her floor and lighting it with a match, said a friend who spoke to the Journal Star.

The victim’s friend said the woman crawled from her house, naked and bleeding and screaming for help, before reaching the doorstep of a neighbor's home.

The woman told police three masked men came in but gave no further description, Lincoln Police Officer Katie Flood said. Investigators have no suspects.

Right-wingers like to accuse people who work to address systemic and institutionalized bigotry of just dwelling in the past, because "racism is a dead letter," dontcha know, and there's nothing particularly "right wing" about racism or ethnic or religious or sexual bias, dontcha know.

Right.

The Extremists' Demise: Minutemen, Neo-Nazis Down In Flames

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

[Above: Sebastien Wielemans' superb documentary on Shawna Forde, A Cycle of Fences.]

As many of you know, I've spent the past couple of years immersing myself in the saga of Brisenia Flores, Shawna Forde, and the Minutemen, largely with the help of the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute. The end result will be my sixth book, The Last Minutemen, which is due out from NationBooks in April 2013.

I also put together an investigative piece on the demise of the Minutemen and Forde's role in that, which will be included in the book. AlterNet has it, and as you can see, it really is just a preview:

How the Brutal Murders of a Little Girl and Her Father Doomed the Xenophobic Minuteman Movement

I expect the most interesting revelations will involve the conversations that various Minutemen leaders -- who all ran as fast and far away from Shawna Forde as they could, after she was arrested -- had with Forde over the years:

Not only did both Simcox and Gilchrist have extensive dealings with Forde over the years, both repeatedly courted her work and her organization. Simcox didn’t chase Forde out of the MCDC: he begged Forde not to leave his fold. In the case of Gilchrist, one witness to the conversation says that, in 2008, he and Forde discussed her plan to finance the movement by ripping off drug dealers — and that he was enthusiastic about it. Forde not only was fully empowered by Minuteman movement leadership, she was enacting a violent scheme with what she believed was their tacit approval.

Enjoy!

And while you're at it, go read Mark Potok's powerful piece on the demise of the National Alliance over at The Intelligence Report:

Ten years after founder's death, key neo-Nazi movement 'a joke'

Ten years ago, the Alliance had 1,400 carefully selected and clean-cut members, a paid national staff of 17, and great respect in radical-right circles in America and abroad. Its publications, including a newsletter and a journal, set the standard on the extreme right, and its leaders regularly met with their counterparts in Europe. In Florida, it bought radio time and billboard ads. Between dues and income from its white-power music label, it was bringing in almost $1 million a year.

Today, the National Alliance is widely viewed as a joke.

Go read it all.

And yes: The good news is that both of these extremist organizations have completely fallen apart.

The bad news is that, like zombies and vampires, they just keep coming back from the dead, usually in mutated forms like the Tea Party.

The Aurora Rampage: Facing The Real Consequences

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Following up on our discussion yesterday about the underlying issues raised by the horrifying murders in Aurora, there are several excellent and insightful pieces floating about that deserve to be well read.

One of the more interesting is Chip Berlet's piece at AlterNet:

Understanding the Colorado Shooting: Terrorism, Politics, Mental Illness and the Superhero Complex

Older models of psychological interpretation often dismissed the violent actors as dysfunctional or mentally ill and left it at that. Contemporary approaches factor in psychological considerations, but also consider the role of demonization and scapegoating in creating perceptual frames. Within sociology, the study of how the construction of frames and narratives assists ideological goals and attracts and retains recruits is well developed. In several disciplines there are studies of apocalyptic narrative storylines that cast the perpetrator in the role of hero for saving society from a mortal threat.

For some terrorists who are not clinically mentally ill, the act of violence has a clear goal of sending a message they hope will be understood and acted upon. They are seldom correct in their idea that their “propaganda of the deed” will have the desired outcome.

For the tiny handful of those who struggle with serious mental illness and turn to violence, outside factors in the society play a role in writing the script they are following to justify their actions. This script is internally generated and generally incomprehensible to other people, however, it can be internally consistent and understandable to the perpetrator. So outside societal factors can be involved, even if they are greatly misinterpreted through the darkened glasses of psychosis.

Dan Froomkin has a great piece at HuffPo describing how the NRA will predictably kill any and all discussion of gun-law changes as a possible response:

Opponents of gun control have a powerful rhetorical argument in their arsenal. "The gun lobby is very effective at saying that 'Now is not the time to exploit these events for political purposes,'" Rand said. "Their goal is to delay so that the pressure comes off of policy makers, the immediacy fades and everyone turns their attention to something else."

Gross agreed. "That's the arc that these things always take and they know it," he said.
But, Gross said, the "now is not the time" argument would only be genuine "if history showed that there ever is a time to discuss the role of gun policy in preventing these tragedies."

And Rand said it's appropriate to start talking about solutions right away. "It's not politics, it's public health," she said. "You have an industry that manufactures a product that is completely unregulated from a health and safety standpoint."

As Digby says, the only real taboo among the Beltway pundit class is against examining the causes of these tragedies.

Also, be sure to read Roger Ebert at the NYT.

It's All About The 'Other': Romney's Dog-Whistle Attack Ad

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

If there was any lingering doubt about whether Mitt Romney intended to run a campaign that resorted to all the usual right-wing racial dog whistles -- almost fully settled, really, by the way he handled his NAACP speech and afterward, nattering on about how you black people Obama voters just want "free stuff" -- then his most recent attack should lay any doubts to rest.

It's kind of peculiar, because it actually shows the president to some advantage: Not only can he sing pretty well, but the song he's singing is an old-fashioned soul homage to monogamy, Al Green's "Let's Stay Together." (Full disclosure: "Let's Stay Together" is "our song" for my wife and I, performed on demand by the band at our wedding in 1989. It worked!)

But that's not how the Romney people see it. Gary Silverman at Financial Times thought it was all very peculiar too, so he sniffed around a little to find out what they were thinking:

One of the better answers I have found comes from a well-known supporter of Mr Romney – Suzy Welch, former editor in chief of the Harvard Business Review, and wife of Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric. In an appearance on CNN with her husband, Mrs Welch suggested that Mr Obama’s personal style and choice of musical material define him as a member of a “different America”. I would imagine this is why Mr Romney’s campaign included the snippet of Mr Obama singing “Let’s Stay Together” at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. They hoped it would convey his otherness.

“It’s the difference between the songs that they’re singing,” Mrs Welch said. “Mitt Romney didn’t exactly do a beautiful job on that song, but think about what he’s singing, OK? I mean it’s that patriotic song and he goes all the way through it. Then you’ve got the very cool Barack Obama singing Al Green. That is the two different Americas. Isn’t it?”

Yeah, evidently, there are two Americas:

• Cloistered white people who are so fearful of all things nonwhite that they find something ominous and threatening and Other-ly in an old R&B song.
• And the rest of us.

As Paul Krugman suggests, who'd have ever thought Al Green would be viewed as a threat to the American way of life?

Calling Out The Gun Nuts: Bill Moyers Takes A Stand

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Bill Moyers offers his cogent thoughts on the role of gun-rights outfits like the NRA (and its many, often more rabid, imitators), all of whom in the end are really the well-financed arm of weapons manufacturers, and how they have polluted not just American discourse, but our very way of life itself.

They have done this by several means. One, as Moyers notes, is the legal fraud they have foisted onto the public (and now the courts) with their insistent claim that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to own any weapon a person likes. But the other, perhaps more significant, and decidedly more toxic, pollution of American life has been the gun fetishists' violent worldview, manifested in the permeation of guns into all corners of our modern culture -- particularly those where males are involved.

We've written previously about the paranoid fantasizing that is a product of this worldview, and how it translates into cockamamie conspiracy theories that the black President of the USA is secretly plotting to take away all Americans' guns. And we've talked about the deadly consequences of the NRA's incessant weapons-mongering. Obviously, after yesterday's rampage in Aurora, it's even more germane.

One of the more important pieces in this discussion came several months back in the pages of the New Yorker, from Jill Lepore, who explored the history of this gun madness in a piece titled"Battleground America: One nation, under the gun":

In 1986, the N.R.A.’s interpretation of the Second Amendment achieved new legal authority with the passage of the Firearms Owners Protection Act, which repealed parts of the 1968 Gun Control Act by invoking “the rights of citizens . . . to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment.” This interpretation was supported by a growing body of scholarship, much of it funded by the N.R.A. According to the constitutional-law scholar Carl Bogus, at least sixteen of the twenty-seven law-review articles published between 1970 and 1989 that were favorable to the N.R.A.’s interpretation of the Second Amendment were “written by lawyers who had been directly employed by or represented the N.R.A. or other gun-rights organizations.” In an interview, former Chief Justice Warren Burger said that the new interpretation of the Second Amendment was “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special-interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

The debate narrowed, and degraded. Political candidates who supported gun control faced opponents whose campaigns were funded by the N.R.A. In 1991, a poll found that Americans were more familiar with the Second Amendment than they were with the First: the right to speak and to believe, and to write and to publish, freely.

“If you had asked, in 1968, will we have the right to do with guns in 2012 what we can do now, no one, on either side, would have believed you,” David Keene said.

Between 1968 and 2012, the idea that owning and carrying a gun is both a fundamental American freedom and an act of citizenship gained wide acceptance and, along with it, the principle that this right is absolute and cannot be compromised; gun-control legislation was diluted, defeated, overturned, or allowed to expire; the right to carry a concealed handgun became nearly ubiquitous; Stand Your Ground legislation passed in half the states; and, in 2008, in District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court ruled, in a 5–4 decision, that the District’s 1975 Firearms Control Regulations Act was unconstitutional. Justice Scalia wrote, “The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia.” Two years later, in another 5–4 ruling, McDonald v. Chicago, the Court extended Heller to the states.

I think Lepore's succinct conclusion is almost irrefutable:

When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.

As Anthony Robinson put it:

Increasingly, it seems that citizenship is defined not by the community we are and which together we build, but by our right to own and carry a gun. To call this an impoverished notion of citizenship is an understatement. It is an outrage.

Psychopaths And Mass Violence: The Ideological Component

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

There's going to be a lot of finger-pointing and hand-wringing in the coming days as we begin to process the awful tragedy that unfolded early this morning in Aurora, Colorado. In particular, it seems that right-wingers are eager to point fingers and are being hypersensitive about any suggestion of right-wing politics being even remotely involved in this case.

Of course, one of the foremost facets of events like these is that premature speculation is almost always wrong. It's wisest to let the facts emerge first, at which time we can begin making a rational appraisal of the event and its underlying causes. (We will, of course, be keeping a close eye on just what is in those "items of interest" found in the home of the suspect, James Eagan Holmes, since that will tell us a great deal.)

Unlike a lot of the talking heads out there, though, it seems silly to run and hide from the political dimensions of these kinds of tragedies, especially when it comes some of the broader social ramifications, most notably the role of the mass proliferation of handguns in American society that's occurred in recent years. Just ask folks in Seattle if that conversation isn't already under way here.

As Michael Grunwald says, there are always political dimensions to cases like this, and it's absurd not to deal with them forthrightly -- once, at least, the dust begins to settle and the facts begin to emerge.

Still, there are things that are clear even at the outset. Regardless of any ideological affiliation the Aurora gunman may have had (and I will at least observe that stockpiling armaments and bomb-making materiel is not usually the provenance of liberals, but is very common indeed among NRA-ginned-up gun nuts), one thing we can almost say definitively, given the cold brutality of the rampage, is that it seems highly likely that Holmes is either mentally ill or a psychopath.

Of course, mental illness has been cropping up as a factor in these tragic rampages, most notably in the Tucson rampage of Jared Loughner. Unfortunately, this seems to stop any and all further conversation of the subject, as though insanity is some kind of random X-factor that renders the acts of the insane utterly meaningless. This is, of course, an obscene cop-out.

However, given the skill and care with which Holmes clearly planned out this rampage and its aftermath (particularly in booby-trapping his own apartment), it seems far more likely that what we're dealing with here is a psychopath.

It's important to keep in mind that psychopaths are not mentally ill in any clinical sense. They are distinctly twisted individuals, but their warped personalities do not incapacitate them or render them incapable of comprehending reality.

What we're talking about here is known clinically is an "antisocial personality disorder," which, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, is the category that earns one the label of "psychopath" or "sociopath" (the distinction between these two lying in whether the symptoms originate from the subject's innate nature or with his environment, or some combination of both). Its symptoms include "a longstanding pattern … of disregard for the rights of others. There is a failure to conform to society's norms and expectations that often results in numerous arrests or legal involvement as well as a history of deceitfulness where the individual attempts to con people or use trickery for personal profit. Impulsiveness is often present, including angry outbursts, failure to consider consequences of behaviors, irritability, and/or physical assaults."

Dr. Robert Hare, a University of British Columbia psychologist, compiled a checklist of the major traits of psychopathy in the 1990s (since revised modestly) that has become a major tool for clinicians and law-enforcement officers in dealing with the depredations of psychopaths in the past decade and longer. Hare's checklist has played a major role in investigations into such noteworthy crimes as the Columbine High School massacre and the Green River Killer case.

He cites two key factors: a personality built on "aggressive narcissism," and a "socially deviant lifestyle". The traits of the first factor include a glibness and superficial charm; a grandiose sense of self-worth; pathological lying; cunning and manipulative behavior; a lack of remorse or guilt; shallow affect in their interpersonal relations, in which genuine emotion is short-lived and egocentric; a callousness and lack of empathy; and a failure to accept responsibility for one's own actions.

A psychopath's case history manifests a "socially deviant lifestyle" if it demonstrates a need for stimulation and a proneness to boredom; a parasitic lifestyle, sponging off the work of others; poor behavioral control; a lack of realistic long-term goals; impulsivity; irresponsibility; juvenile delinquency; and early behavior problems. Other traits, uncorrelated to either of the two chief factors, include promiscuous sexuality; many short-term marital relationships; and criminal versatility.

The likely presence of a central psychopathic player in this case brings to mind another great national tragedy that occurred in Colorado: the 1999 killing rampage of two teenage boys, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, at Columbine High School, in which 13 people died and another 21 were injured. As Dave Cullen explored at length in his remarkable study of the incident, Columbine, the conclusion of investigators was that Eric Harris was a cold-blooded psychopath, while Dylan Klebold likely suffered from a personality disorder, but he played a key role in enabling Harris's massacre plans.

There was no obvious ideological component in that rampage, either -- Harris was a psychopath who just hated the world and wanted to go out in a blaze of glory, and Klebold was his willing enabler. And that may well turn out to be the case here.

But that does not mean that there is never an ideological component when a psychopath perpetrates some horrendous tragedy, either. Indeed, certain right-wing movements are highly prone to attracting psychopaths and mentally ill, unstable personalities, because their rhetoric and appeals so closely replicate the discontents of these people's interior lives.

The classic case of this is nativist border-watch movement, which crumbled under its own weight with the unholy host of angry, dysfunctional personalities that were naturally attracted to its ranks -- embodied, ultimately, by the convicted child killer Shawna Forde.

The rhetoric of the Minutemen and their related nativist organizations – including, nowadays, the Tea Party – appealed to psychopaths like Shawna Forde and Jason Bush because it reflected so much of their interior psyches, and moreover provided an irresistible opportunity for grandiose self-inflation and validation. Minuteman rhetoric often reflected the very traits of personality disorders, particularly in its political mindset, which sought to blame weak and helpless (contemptibly so, from the nativist view) Others for their own, often self-inflicted, national problems. It was frequently grandiose, particularly in its claims to be preventing terrorist attacks and its larger claims to be in the act of "saving America"; it indulged a marked propensity to lie and dispense false information, ranging from Glenn Spencer's "Ebola" rumor and "Reconquista" claims to Chris Simcox's bogus "border fence" scam to Jim Gilchrist's bathetic, and ultimately futile, attempts to distance himself from Shawna Forde. The Minutemen also frequently distorted facts, if it did not falsify them, in order to manipulate public sentiment, and they did so remorselessly. Most of all, despite occasional lip service to the plight of immigrants, the Minutemen's rhetoric was profoundly lacking in empathy for the targets of their ire; indeed, the more callous and cold-hearted the remark, the more widely it was circulated. If ever there was a movement tailored to recruit and promote psychopaths, it was the Minutemen.

We'll have to wait and see what motivated James Holmes to open fire on a theater full of innocent moviegoers. But if he turns out to be a psychopath with an unholy attachment to some right-wing ideology, it will not really be surprising. Indeed, it will be all too familiar, all too predictable.

Iowa Republican Candidate Goes 'Sovereign', Declares Self A Senator

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Color us surprised: Another Ron Paulite Republican succumbing to the "sovereign citizenship" extremist scam:

The Republican candidate for a state Senate seat in eastern Iowa has ended her campaign and instead declared herself a U.S. Senator for the state of Iowa.

In a letter dated July 4, the candidate, Randi Shannon of Coralville, argued that the legitimate federal government of the United States was replaced by illegitimate “corporate” government in 1871 and has been operating since then in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

She learned this fact just recently, she said, and has come to believe it after months of research.

Dropping her bid for state office was a rejection of that illegitimate government. Now, she said she has been appointed to serve as a U.S. senator in the recently revived and constitutionally legitimate Republic of the United States of America. She was placed in the office, she said, by Iowa’s four U.S. House members in the “Republic” government.

Jonathan Terbush at Raw Story has more details:

In a letter fittingly posted to her campaign’s Facebook page on July 4, Shannon wrote that the country was founded as the Republic for The United States for America in 1787, and that it remained as such until the 1860s, when it was abandoned during the Civil War. Once the war ended, she wrote, the government was replaced by the, “UNITED STATES CORPORATION,” [sic] which has endured to this day as the nation’s farcical governing body.

In a statement riddled with curious capitalization meant to emphasize the government’s foibles, Shannon derides the federal government for, she claims, stomping out entrepreneurship, infringing on personal liberties, and just generally being an unconstitutional entity. Perhaps worst, she says, are the elected lawmakers who have perpetuated this system and in doing so have, “committed the most egregious acts against ‘We the People.’”

“Therefore, in order to affect the most good on behalf of The People of Iowa’s 34th District and in keeping with my conscience, I have accepted the position of U.S. Senator in The Republic of The United States of America, where I may better serve You and All of The People of Iowa,” Shannon wrote. “I want you to know I have taken an Oath to Uphold, Support and Defend The Constitution of The United States of America. This I will do to the best of my ability, So Help Me God.”

Shannon, who describes herself as a Ron Paul supporter, backs many of the same policy positions famously espoused by the Libertarian-leaning Texas congressman. She advocates eliminating the Department of Education (following its transfer to the Republic of the United States) and drastically cutting taxes while ending foreign occupations and stopping the Affordable Care Act. And, since she believes the government has been a false one for a century and a half, she considers all amendments to the Bill of Rights from the 14th on to be invalid.

“Again, Remember, where the de jure Republic of The United States of America exists the de facto UNITED STATES CORPORATION, having no standing, must go away!,” Shannon wrote.

It's also no surprise that this is coming from the Ron Paul wing of the GOP, since Paul has a long history of promoting "sovereign citizen" schemes, along with the usual accompanying right-wing extremist beliefs, such as a fetish about the gold standard and fringes on flags and the "New World Order".

I've been reporting on the sovereign citizens for a long time, including a number of posts here at C&L. Most of you are well familiar with this particular form of extremism, especially because it produces so much senseless and wanton violence, largely a product of the mentally and emotionally unstable personality types the movement naturally attracts.

Watch the above video and you can see that, before her sovcit epiphany, Shannon was a typical, bland, "I'm a fighter!" kind of Paulite Republican -- but also a painfully naive and clueless sort of candidate as well. No doubt that had a role in her descent.

Lilburn Patch had an interesting and revealing interview with a former leader in the "Republic" organization:

Ron Hawkins, a Georgia resident who works in new home construction, served as the Republic's senator and ambassador until recently, when the group kicked him out.

“There's a lot of double talk [in the Republic],” Hawkins said in a conversation with Patch, “a lot of patriot mythology.”

Hawkins was already having doubts about the organization when the Georgia branch met at a Ryan's in Norcross with Tim Turner, the “president” of the Republic.

Turner asked everyone present to sign a document and leave their thumbprint. If they didn't sign, according to Hawkins, they were out. The document outlined what the Republic stood for and what members should do or not do.

“He was really overstepping his bounds,” he said. “That put it over the edge for me.”
Hawkins is no longer in contact with anyone from the organization, after serving for two years as ambassador, representative and senator.

The Republic for the United States is the largest sovereign citizen movement in the U.S. The basic philosophy is that our current government is a de facto government, and that the Republic's version is the legitimate one.

Of course, Hawkins is still a True Believer -- but as always happens with far-right scam operations, the egos and the control freaks drove him away from the operation, which he also now recognizes is a scam.

Why We Can't Have Nice Things: WA Unions Turn Their Backs On Progressive Friends

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

See, this is why we can't have nice things.

If you want a nice, crystal-clear example of why it's so hard to elect strong, pro-labor progressives to Congress who fight for working families, look no further than the race in Washington's new 1st congressional district. It's a crowded field, and among them you can identify three strong, pro-labor progressives who have excellent track records when it comes to working families: Laura Ruderman, Steve Hobbs, and our own favorite, Darcy Burner.

So who have the local unions (including the Washington State Labor Council, the Machinists, and the Teamsters) in Washington, following the lead of the state's hapless Establishment Democrats, decided to back?

Turns out the answer is a strange one: The 1 percenter who won't take a stand on Social Security or Medicare. The classic Blue Dog in the making who trails in all the polls. But because she's got deep pockets, they're lining up behind her.

The final straw came this week when the local SEIU, of all organizations, decided to turn its back on their hard-working allies and support the candidate who thinks our best strategy should be to compromise with Republicans more.

I have some questions for the nice folks who run these unions:

• What was the thinking behind choosing DelBene out of the field of Democratic candidates? Out of all of them, she has the least impressive record of standing up and fighting for working families. So far, she won’t even commit to defending Social Security and Medicaid. And she has talked endlessly about how Democrats need to be friendlier to business interests, and that we need to compromise more with Republicans. In other words, you’ve endorsed a classic Blue Dog in the making.
• At least two candidates in the race – Laura Ruderman and Darcy Burner – have significantly better track records when it comes to standing up for working families. And Burner is polling significantly better than DelBene, including in a matchup with John Koster. Why turn your backs on obvious allies who could use the support?
• Did DelBene’s deep pockets – that is, her ability to self-finance her campaign – play any role in your decision? And if so, when did that become a consideration for endorsement by a labor union?

Look, we get what's happening: The local unions are hedging their bets. They know that that if Ruderman or Hobbs or Burner win this race, those folks will still be voting their way. This way, there's a chance they'll at least get DelBene to listen.

I wonder if they'll give me any comment the day after DelBene screws them over (should she get the chance), as all Blue Dogs eventually do.

The strategy is obvious, and it's stupid and wrong-headed. Rather than helping ensure a strong advocate of working families gets elected, these Nine-Dimensional Chess Players are once again stranding their own best allies, thereby helping ensure we continue these cycles of weak support for labor and its issues in Congress. Nice going, guys!

It's systemic. This week we learned that the DCCC (which has a long and unfortunate history when it comes to electing Blue Dogs) has been sending millions in campaign to the same 17 Democratic bozos who voted to hold Eric Holder in contempt in the face of the GOP's latest fake scandal, the "Fast and Furious" scam. And they're going to keep doing so. Because there really is no such thing as party discipline among Democrats. Thanks to outfits like the DCCC.

However, the next time you hear labor leaders bemoaning the lack of leadership in Congress, just point out this race to them. When the unions act like the DCCC, they have no one to blame but themselves.