Threepers Creepers: On Far-Right Fringes, the Exodus to the Woods is Under Way

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Credit: Salt Lake Tribune

[Bo Gritz's Idaho survivalist community, 'Almost Heaven,' in 2004] Now that they've lost their election and are seeing their political future circling down the drain, a lot of folks on the political right are drowning in despair and retreating even further into the cocoon of non-reality they've created for themselves. And that response is especially acute on farthest fringes of the Right, where the militiamen are stocking up for the Obamacalypse.

Even among the larger population of mainstream conservatives, they're not handling the election results well. Fully 49 percent of them think Obama won with the help of ACORN-induced vote fraud -- apparently oblivious to the fact that ACORN has been defunct for the better part of two years. Then again, those same polls show their numbers overall are shrinking in a downward spiral.

The most hard-core of these among the "mainstream" Republicans just had their most recent moment of glory -- protecting America from the "threat" of a loss of sovereignty under the guise of a basic act of decency such as recognizing the rights of the disabled. As Dan Drezner observes, it's hard to tell just what these "sovereignists" are on about.

Though actually, if you've been observing the American Right for a long time, it's not hard at all to see what these folks are on about: They're succumbing to their inner John Birchers, retreating to a paranoid fantasyland in which President Obama and the Democrats are about to destroy every last vestige of freedom in America on behalf of the ever-conspiring Communists who lurk inside the New World Order.

The Right has been warming up to this for a long time, including their insane hysteria in the run-up to the election. And whenever they suffer a bad election, they go through paroxysms of discontent in which large chunks of them opt for total withdrawal from American society as preparation for the End of the World As We Know It. And some of them fantasize about how they can take on evil oppressive liberal dictatorship.

You can actually find a whole genre of books dedicated to this worldview. I call it "Patriot Porn" -- fictional books that tell the tales of brave bands of patriotic survivors who take on the powers of the evil liberal/commie/Mooslim overlords and carve out their pocket of resistance and survival. They have titles like By Force of Patriots and Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse, and Firebase Freedom (whose author, the late William W. Johnstone, appears to have been dead since 2004 but somehow seems to keep producing, zombie-like, these awful paranoid Patriot fantasy titles such as The Blood of Patriots and Phoenix Rising; Firebase Freedom is coming out this month). And yes, you can actually pick up the Johnstone books off the grocery-store paperback shelf.

So it shouldn't surprise anyone that a number of right-wing "Patriots" are deciding to live out that very fantasy. Via Digby, here's the announcement from an outfit calling itself the "III Citadel":

Patriots understand that an epic storm is coming to America.

Economic collapse is imminent. Disruptions of Just-in-Time supply lines will lead America into chaos. Violence along racial, ethnic, religious and economic class lines will bring forth famine, disease and a fundamental reset of life in America.

A group of Patriots have decided to build a community off the most likely lines of peril, a bastion of Jefferson's Rightful Liberty where we may remain safe, warm, healthy and comfortable while American society suffers the inevitable destruction that must accompany the decades of degenerating morality of our Countrymen.

The location of this compound of right-wing extremists is the deep woods of northern Idaho -- in fact, in one of my favorite, oft-visited fly-fishing areas (the St. Joe River is a balm for the soul), Benewah County. It is deeply wooded and mountainous terrain with few roads. This fourth-generation Idahoan has seen the likes of these folks before. It has pretty much never turned out well.

Right off the bat is the fact that, as the announcement explains, this "community" is going to revolve around the manufacture of weapons:

The cornerstone of the Citadel is III Arms Company, an industry to support the first wave of Patriots who will become modern American Pioneers. We will build Fighting Arms and ammunition for Patriots and around us a town will begin to grow. Other revenue streams are already in the works. Our intent is to purchase at least one thousand acres, and construct a walled town of at least one square mile to withstand any potential violence from hungry, diseased Souls. Obviously the Citadel is not being built to defy any laws of the United States or the State of Idaho, or to withstand any .gov or .mil attack. Our fortifications are merely defensive for a SHTF world.

Sure, that's what all of these right-wing extremists who set up compounds in the woods start out saying: They're just creating a retreat away from everyone else and will never bother anyone, because their position is purely defensive. That's what they said at the Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake in the 1970s. And at the Freemen compound in Montana, and at Almost Heaven in Kamiah, both in the 1990s. Then it turned out that they were magnets for violent terrorist criminals and con artists who committed strings of crimes and, in the case of the Freemen and Aryan Nations, produced armed standoffs with federal authorities.

They're planning to have "up to 5,000 households" within the compound, which should create some interesting problems in terms of sanitation and sewage. But these are hardy Patriots, no doubt.

They seem, on the other hand, to have a kind of cognitive dissonance problem. They declare themselves an "open society" with one breath and then declare that all liberals will be banned from living within their walls with the other:

The Citadel is not to be a closed society, instead a refuge for genuine Patriots who wish to live without neighbors who are Liberals and Establishment political ideologues, open for tourists who will be welcomed into our town to visit our planned Firearms Museum, shop in our Town Center, stay in a B&B or hotel while vacationing and exploring the wonderful skiing, hunting and fishing opportunities in the area, and many other attractions we will offer.

If you are a patriotic American who believes in Jefferson's Rightful Liberty, who believes in the Constitution as written, who believes in the Declaration of Independence, and who wishes to live in a beautiful, secure mountain town that bans Liberals from living among us, consider exploring the Citadel as we evolve and build.

Well, logic has never been their strong suit. And so far, it appears that all this is only a fantasy. It doesn't appear that the promoters of this scheme have yet even purchased any Benewah County property. And so far, the promoter of the scheme has not even identified himself publicly.

If you're wonder what all the "III" references are about -- besides the "III Citadel" and "III Arms", these folks identify themselves as "III Patriots" -- here's the explanation: One of the favorite statistics bandied about by the folks on the far right is the claim that only three percent of the American colonial population at the time of the Revolutionary War actually participated as soldiers in the fighting; the reasoning that follows from this is that it really only takes a dedicated band of people to bring about revolutionary change in America. This is their way of rationalizing themselves out of their extreme minorityhood.

So they call themselves "Three Percenters" or "Threepers", and they organize their militia activities accordingly. One of the leading Threepers is none other than the execrable Mike Vanderboegh, who you may remember as the charming man who fomented a spate of anti-Democratic violence after the passage of health-care reform.

However, it appears that this particular band of Threepers is a spinoff group created by some Patriots who fell out with Vanderboegh. Indeed, that's pretty much the story arc of every Patriot group that's ever existed: The come together in fear and paranoia, and pretty soon they break apart under the same forces -- with large dashes of anger issues and ego thrown into the mix. But along the way, the chemistry that results can often be lethal, usually for people who have the misfortune to cross their paths at the wrong moment.

This particular plan reminds me a great deal of another Patriot "community" that was attempted in the 1990s a few miles to the south of Benewah County, down in the Kamiah area, called "Almost Heaven." It was organized by far-right hero James "Bo" Gritz, who similarly sought out a place where Patriots could retreat and have each others' backs when the End of the World came.

However, it all came to naught. First, some of Gritz's fellow Patriots decided they needed to get involved with the Freemen standoff over in Montana, and created a stir by attempting to create a similar situation in Kamiah. Then Gritz attempted suicide when his fed-up wife up and left him. By 2004, it was pretty much over. The best thing you could say about it was that it didn't end up being a magnet for criminals and terrorists, as the Aryan Nations joint was, and that no one got into an 81-day armed standoff with the FBI, as they had in Jordan.

We'll be watching to see if the "III Citadel" moves from the fantasy stage to reality. Increasingly, these Patriots and their "Prepper" contingent -- the folks storing away canned foods in their basements and guns in their attics -- are being treated as sorta mainstream by the mainstream press, who are readily gulled by the protestations of non-extremism by these extremists. And you never know how fundraising schemes like the gun sales will succeed.

Sure, they may be making things better in the short run by just going away. But these paranoid fantasies about Obama are going to be festering for a good long while, and that never produces anything but tragic misery.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

McCain Won't Let Actual Security Threats Distract Him From His Susan Rice Jihad, By Gum

A reporter at a press conference in D.C. with Grumpy John McCain, who still wants to rant about Benghazi even after it's become clear there's nobody out there on that lawn, asked a perfectly sensible question yesterday:

Q: Do you think there was potentially a greater national-security threat in apparently thousands of pages of classified documents ending up on the personal computer of a Tampa socialite who may have been a friend of the head of the CIA, of secret covert e-mail accounts involving the head of the CIA, and a top general in Afghanistan, and the fact that the FBI agent who was complained to stepped out of the chain of command and apparently went to a House Republican leader, rather than anybody upstairs. Do you think that there's potential -- you put all that together -- do you think that's a greater potential national security threat than what you're talking about?

You could watch the veins begin to bulge on Grumpy's neck and forehead as this question went along, and so naturally he burst like a festering pustule when it was done:

MCCAIN: Well, I say with great respect, that’s one of the dumbest questions I’ve ever heard. -- I’m answering your question. Do you want me to answer your question or do you want to interrupt? Which do you want? -- There are four dead Americans. The lives of other Americans were put in jeopardy.

This is a matter of four dead Americans. I think that the other issue raised is very serious, and I think it deserves a thorough and complete investigation — but it does not rise to the level of an attack on an American consulate that took four American lives.

OK, just so we're clear: Potential security threat created that exposes possible Republican chicanery? Never an issue. Tragic incident in which intelligence details remain unclear, so it can be endlessly exploited? Yeh, that's what gets Grumpy's attention.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Poland Narrowly Averts Its Own Right-Wing Terrorist Bloodbath

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Dr. Brunon Kwiecień

We all remember Anders Breivik, the right-wing extremist who massacred dozens of (mostly) young Norwegians in the summer of 2011, right? Well, now it seems that people in Poland have narrowly escaped having their own version of such a terrorism-induced bloodbath, at the hands of an admirer of Breivik:

Last week the Polish government announced the thwarting of a terrorism plot that is worrisome in its audacity and in who was behind it. In a country with minimal experience of terrorism, the discovery of a sophisticated homegrown bomber seeking to decapitate the government by blowing up the parliament and the president has caused shockwaves and introspection.

The would-be bomber, Dr. Brunon Kwiecień, a forty-five year old research scientist at Krakow’s Agricultural University, fits few currently fashionable profiles. Neither a jihadist nor marginally employed or socially bereft, Kwiecień is married with two children, has a respectable income, and is reported to have been exceptionally interested in explosives since his youth. A skilled chemist popular with his students and considered unremarkable by his university colleagues, he came up with a truly audacious plot to blow up the Sejm, the Polish parliament in Warsaw, during a joint session where both houses, the president and the full cabinet would be present. As Kwiecień is reported to have conducted visits to Warsaw to select his targets, this appears to be more than the figment of a demented imagination.

The seriousness of the bomber’s intent was evidenced by the astonishing haul made by Polish police after Kwiecień’s arrest on November 9. Among the items seized were a dozen illegal firearms, some 1,100 rounds of ammunition, body armor of various types, several detonators (including cell phones triggers) and an amazing four tons of high-grade explosives—more than enough to flatten several city blocks—which the bomber had access to due to his job. There seems to be little doubt that Kwiecień had the technical competence to build the bomb, but his efforts to find collaborators fell short.

As Stratfor explains, this was an attack for which Kwiecień was well suited, requiring a skillset well within his range of competence:

Kwiecien is also a self-proclaimed supporter of Norwegian ultranationalist terrorist Anders Breivik, who conducted a successful lone wolf attack in Oslo in 2011. Indeed, tactically Kwiecien's plot against the Polish government resembled Breivik's in many ways. But his was only the latest, certainly not the last, thwarted terrorist attack in Europe, where similar plots can be expected as the economic and political situation continues to worsen.

Kwiecien allegedly considered Breivik's vehicle-borne improvised explosive device attack on Norway's parliament building a failure -- Breivik's killed only eight people and failed to inflict catastrophic structural damage on the building. Breivik used 1 metric ton of ammonium nitrate-based explosives, commonly called ANFO, or ammonium nitrate fuel oil, and parked his vehicle on the street, putting some distance between the VBIED and the building. Kwiecien intended to construct an explosive device using 4 metric tons of ANFO inside a tanker truck, crash through the gates of the parliament building and detonate the VBIED within the courtyard. Investigators believe that it would have been a suicide mission. Had he executed his attack successfully, he likely would have created a blast big enough to cause significant structural damage and loss of life, resulting in more damage and more deaths than Breivik's explosive device.

According to authorities, Kwiecien began planning for the attack between July and September. He apparently had traveled to Warsaw to surveil the area surrounding the building. The fact that there is fairly light security at the entrance to the parliament building may have encouraged Kwiecien to go forward with his plot.

Europeans have been having a problem with a surge in right-wing-extremist violence generally. But then, so has the USA -- to little notice in the media.

It's enough to make one wonder if there are Breivik admirers in the USA working along similar lines. And whether our law-enforcement apparatus would be able to catch them in time.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Right-Wingers File Suit to Delist Endangered Orcas

When the resident orcas in the Puget Sound were listed as an endangered species back in 2005, it seemed inevitable that business interests -- who hate being restricted in their ability to ruin the environment at whim, including destroying the salmon runs on which the orcas' survival depends -- would try to overturn the ruling. And sure enough, within the year, the Building Industry Association of Washington filed a suit to try to delist them. It was thrown out in a matter of months.

Now comes yet another attempt, courtesy of a right-wing legal foundation filing another delisting attempt on behalf of a handful of California farmers, unhappy that they've lost irrigation water to salmon restoration:

NOAA Fisheries will begin a review of the status of a population of killer whales that is currently listed under the Endangered Species Act. This review is prompted by a petition from the California-based Pacific Legal Foundation to remove existing protection for these whales.

NOAA said the petition presents new information from scientific journal articles about killer whale genetics, addressing issues such as how closely related this small population is to other populations, and meets the agency's standard for accepting a petition to review.

During the status review, the agency will seek public input and gather all relevant information to determine if NOAA should propose to remove this distinct population of killer whales from the federal species-protection list. The agency cautioned that acceptance of this petition does not suggest that a proposal to delist will follow.

These fish-eating marine mammals, sometimes called orcas and officially known as Southern Resident killer whales, were listed as endangered in 2005, when there were 89 of them in the population.

Southern Resident killer whales spend time in Washington's Puget Sound and nearby waters. They generally leave for the open ocean in the winter. Scientists say that there are now 86 killer whales in the population. The petition asserts that the Southern Resident killer whales are actually part of a much larger population and are, therefore, not in danger of extinction.

NOAA insists that accepting the petition does not mean it is necessarily inclined to delist:

We'll begin a review to determine the population's ESA status, and are soliciting scientific and commercial information about these whales to ensure that the status review is comprehensive. Acceptance of this petition doesn't presuppose any particular outcome. We'll consider and address all substantive information received by Jan. 28, 2013.

What's especially specious are the arugments being raised by the Pacific Legal Foundation:

The decision comes after the Pacific Legal Foundation filed a petition in August asserting that the whale, which swims in the marine waters of the Pacific Northwest, is not biologically different from other orcas found in oceans all over the world.

The PLF argues the whale's continued listing puts farmers at risk because salmon and steelhead found in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta are part of the orca's food supply.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a news release that the PLF's petition presents new information from scientific journal articles about killer whale genetics. The articles address issues such as how closely related this small population is to other groups of orcas, meeting the agency's standard for accepting a petition for review.

In reality, the newest orca research actually establishes the unique qualities of resident populations. Because they are social animals, they live in fairly large groups which move about to various locales, depending on where fish runs are most abundant. At the same time, genetically distinct populations of so-called "transient" orcas, or Bigg's killer whales -- which eat marine mammals as opposed to fish -- also move through these same waters.


Orcas are not like other species in their portability: If these resident orcas become extinct, they will not be replaced in the ecosystem by other orcas. They will simply be gone.

This would be not just a devastating outcome for people who care about the health of our waters here on Puget Sound. It would also have a devastating economic effect: It's estimated that over a million travelers come to Washington state each year with the purpose of seeing our killer whales, who are indeed among the world's most easily observed whale populations.

A number of observers are questioning NOAA's motives as well:

Fred Felleman, of Seattle, who in 2001 advocated for the original petition for listing, said the petition now to delist the orcas is a distraction from the necessary work of rebuilding orca populations.

"Oh great, here is a chance to biopsy them and tag them and chase them all over town until we don't have to worry about them any more," Felleman said.

To him, the distinct behavior of the southern residents sets them clearly apart from other orcas. They eat only fish, while other orcas eat seals and other mammals. They have distinct family groups, dialects, greeting ceremonies and migratory patterns.

"If there was ever a poster child for this type of subspecies, it's the killer whales," he said. "It's not just their genetics, it's culture. These clearly are the tribes of the sea, and if you extirpate that population not only do you lose the genetic code, you lose a unique brain trust."

If you want to make your voice heard on this issue, there are two organizations to whom you should write:

NOAA/NMFS
Northwest Region
Protected Resources Division
7600 Sand Point Way NE
Seattle, WA 98115-0070
Attention—Donna Darm, Assistant Regional Adminstrator

And then you can write our friends at the Pacific Legal Foundation, which has a history of advocating for tobacco and nuclear interests and other "business" causes inimical to the human population. Now they're moving to hurt wildlife too -- which also hurts humans.

Pacific Legal Foundation
3900 Lennane Drive, Suite 200
Sacramento, CA 95834
Phone: (916) 419 7111
Fax: (916) 419 7747
Email: plf AT pacificlegal.org
Web: http://www.pacificlegal.org/

Notably, PLF has offices in Washington state, where the businesses who would be harmed by orca extinction operate:

10940 NE 33rd Pl # 210
Bellevue, WA
(425) 576-0484

Be polite and respectful -- but let them know what you think.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Navarette Spins a Big Immigration Lie Out of a Bushel of Little Lies

Ruben Navarrette, the conservative Latino columnist who has been struggling for some time with the nature of the beast with which he finds himself in bed, was pondering the other day how -- after 71 percent of the Latino vote in the USA went for Barack Obama and other Democrats -- Republicans might possibly turn around their image problem with Hispanic voters. They are, after all the demographic time bomb that just went off in the GOP's face.

In his newest column, he appears to have hit upon the solution: Lie like a dog about Democrats, pretend that the raging nativism in the Republican Party doesn't exist, and in general invert reality by introducing a new viral right-wing Planet Bizarro meme -- to wit, that Democrats are the reason comprehensive immigration reform will run aground in the coming sessions of Congress.

That's right: In Navarrette's up-is-down recasting of the immigration universe, the Republican hysterics -- led by Rush Limbaugh and the Minuteman faction, who nowadays fancy themselves the Tea Party -- who were responsible for shooting down the 2007 immigration-reform bill, having declared it "dead on arrival" at the moment of its introduction -- have been airbrushed entirely out of the picture.

But in order to paint a picture of venal Democrats secretly conspiring to keep Latinos in thrall by only pretending to support comprehensive immigration reform, Navarette has to lie. A lot. And indeed he does:

When the media talk about the imminent arrival of comprehensive-immigration reform, this is what is generally assumed: Supposedly, the tuneup to our immigration system that President George W. Bush first talked about at the White House with Mexican President Vicente Fox in September 2001 is a done deal. We’re told: Democrats want it, and Republicans need it.

The assessment is half right. The Republicans need it. But the Democrats don’t really want it. They’ve never really wanted it. They only say they want it to trick Latinos and immigration-reform advocates into voting for them again and again.

Which is why reform probably won’t happen. We’ll have a debate but no solution will emerge from it.

So why don’t Democrats want comprehensive-immigration reform? For the same five reasons that Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid teamed up in 2006 and 2007 with the nativist wing of the Republican Party to kill bipartisan bills and, in 2010, helped scuttle the DREAM Act — a mini-legalization program for college students and military.

This is just blatantly, egregiously false -- and the nakedness of these assertions is a clear signal that Navarrette is not simply mistaken on the facts, but actively knows they are false and is lying.

For instance: Harry Reid was the sole sponsor of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007. He did not "team up" with nativist Republicans to kill his own bill: He fought them tooth and nail.

Likewise, Reid has always supported the DREAM Act, and was one of its sponsors in 2009 and 2010. When it was reintroduced during the 2010 lame-duck session, it was Harry Reid leading the charge. The measure failed because Democrats couldn't overcome the Republican-imposed and -supported filibuster.

Navarrette tells a number of other little lies too, including claiming that labor "opposes any stab at immigration reform that includes mention of guest workers" (false: unions are fine with guest-worker programs that ensure normal constitutional rights, guaranteed under the 14th Amendment, for such workers, including labor and civil rights) and that Democrats are afraid of pitting Latinos against labor unions (new flash for Navarrette: Labor unions loudly support comprehensive reform; indeed, one of the largest unions, SEIU, counts Latinos as a significant bloc of their base).

But the Big Lie all this is intended to promote is the notion that it's not Republican nativists -- you know, the folks who would rather die than allow anything remotely like Navarrette's own "common sense" proposal to craft a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already here (not to mention for new arrivals as well), which are immediately and loudly denounced as "amnesty" -- who are preventing immigration reform from moving forward. Nope. It's venal conniving Democrats.

Certainly it's true that there are parts of comprehensive reform that are hard for progressive reformers to swallow as well (including, most likely, penalties and fines for immigrants who are found to have violated existing law), especially for labor unions, many of whose members may also view the new arrivals with some anxiety. But that is not a serious obstacle, nor are those currents strong enough to inspire the kind of nefarious "keep them on the plantation" conspiracy that Navarrette has fabricated here.

What's most self-evident, though, is that Ruben Navarrette has not single shred of credibility remaining.

 Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Tea Party Path to Victory: Go After Moderate Republicans in 2014

I say the Tea Partiers should go for it:

The tea-party movement is trying to regroup after taking some licks in this month's elections. Several groups already are setting their sights on 2014 congressional races, in which they plan to promote their preferred candidates and hope to weed out Republicans they consider insufficiently conservative.

Yeah, that's the ticket! You know, if we get enough Tea Partiers as the GOP nominees, as BooMan notes, Democrats may be able to take back the House and keep the Senate.

You know they make ideal opponents, because they have such a fine grasp of reality ... the reality on Planet Bizarro, that is:

Tea-party activist Greg Fettig, a founder of Hoosiers for a Conservative Senate and a backer of Mr. Mourdock, said the main lesson from the loss is that activists need to be sure the campaigns they support are well-run.

If by "well run" he means "not prone to saying insane things that make voters flee them in droves," he might have a point. But that would not describe any known or likely Tea Party candidate.

But of course it can't be them. It can't be that their gravitational pull forced every GOP candidate, including Mitt Romney, into such extreme far-right positions that they couldn't appeal to the broader American electorate. Heavens no. It was the fact that Romney tried to appear sane nonetheless:

In their post mortems of the 2012 election, activists put much of the blame for Mr. Romney's defeat squarely on the candidate.

"If we choose someone who runs a content-free campaign and is left of center, at least within the Republican Party, we will get our butts kicked," said Judson Phillips, founder of Tea Party Nation.

These folks deserve our encouragement.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Can We Help the Would-Be Secessionists Pack?

The Tea Party folks -- to no one's great surprise -- are not taking their electoral defeat at the hands of a black man lying down. They're threatening to pack up their soccer ball and take it home.

Of course, where they'll go once they're packed up is an open question. But by God, they are NOT gonna put up living around a bunch of libruls any longer. Matthew Feldman and Leonard Weinberg at TruthOut round up some of the far-right reaction.

It was particularly chortle-inducing to read the reaction in the Seattle Times of Keli Carender, the Seattle woman credited with providing the initial spark for the whole Tea Party shebang back in 2009:

"It's getting harder and harder for me. I was at Trader Joe's, and I was glaring at everyone around me," says Keli Carender, 33, co-organizer of the local group.

Carender's glaring took place at the Trader Joe's in the University District, a neighborhood that, for sure, is a bastion of libs.

"I kept thinking I was surrounded by people who are destroying freedom,"says Carender. "It's starting to make me angry, not wanting to be around these people."

Trust me, honey, no one wants to be around you, either. Especially as you glare psychotically at them for having the audacity to think differently than you and the voices in your head. Most of us, when we encounter folks like you, run the other direction before you can pull out your sniper rifle and begin firing.

But this was especially hilarious to read in Seattle of all places. Hello, Keli: The voters in Washington state had just voted to legalize marijuana and gay marriage both in the same election -- one of the most massive expansions in individual freedom in any election in recent memory.

The only "freedoms" they turned their backs on, as it were, by rejecting Republican rule were the "freedom" to not pay taxes and the "freedom" not to have a non-right-wing president. At least, those seem to be the freedoms that Tea Partiers are most focused upon. (Yes, we know they're extremely paranoid about their gun rights being taken away, based on their readings of vapor trails, as far as we can tell. Indeed, here in Seattle, we'd be delighted -- for obvious reasons -- if the Obama administration actually were to take up the problem of gun proliferation and its attendant violence. But we're not holding our breaths.)

Of course, if Keli really can't stand to be around those steenking libruls, all she really has to do is move across the lake to Bellevue, where Republicans are still mostly dominant. Though that is waning, too, as more and more people figure out that the GOP is controlled by nutbars.

Carender's reaction is fairly typical of the Tea Party crowd in general after the election. Indeed, a number of folks in red states are flocking to see if they can secede from the union.

Even as Americans flock to theaters to see a film about a revered historical figure that reunified the nation after a bloody Civil War, there’s a fresh movement among some political factions to have their states secede from the United States.

In the wake of President Obama’s re-election earlier this month, a flood of petitions has filled the White House’s “We The People” website, seeking federal permission for states to “peacefully” withdraw from the nation and “create [their] own new government.”

Although the petitions are largely a symbolic gesture meant to express some people’s dislike of election results, residents of all 50 states have now filed them. More than 675,000 digital signatures have been collected so far.

Of course, anyone can create a petition on the White House site; under the site’s guidelines, White House staff only will review a petition and issue a response if one garners at least 25,000 signatures.

(For context, other recent petitions have called for nationalizing the production of Twinkies, to ensure their continued existence; and pardoning the Ohio State Buckeyes from “unjust NCAA sanctions” that prevents the team’s “rightful access to a BCS bowl game.”)

Thus far, only secession petitions from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas have reached the 25,000-signature threshold. Not surprisingly, all of those states – except Florida – went for Republican Mitt Romney in the election.

This secession movement has been all the talk at Tea Party sites, though of course official Republican figures are trying to knock it down.

But as for me, I'm with Hunter at DKos:

This notion of conservative secession has its merits. Of course, as "True America" we'd want to attach some constraints to the separatists: no nuclear weapons, get your own damn military, and we'll be carving out territory for you that consists entirely of places close to sea level, so that you can ignore climate change from the best possible vantage point. But this sounds pretty doable, once the logistics get worked out. So what are you going to call yourselves? United Galts of America? New Jesusland? That's great, we'll send you a card.

Especially when you consider that dumping these morons from the union will save us not just headaches, but a buttload of the money with which we Blue staters subsidize them:

This gap between political perception and fiscal reality is also reflected in the distribution of tax dollars at the state level: Most politically "red" states are financially in the red when it comes to how much money they receive from Washington compared with what their residents pay in taxes.

Of course, most of these halfwits believe that their tax dollars actually subsidize the welfare parasites who live in the Blue states, when the reality is that it's the other way around.

FWIW, I just watched Lincoln the other night. And while contemplating the subsequent reality -- that the South effectively overturned all of Lincoln's careful work (not to mention the verdict of the war itself) in the years following, all under the bellicose banner of the Bloody Shirt -- I was struck by the thought that we all might have been better off if we had just let the South go fester in its own moral and economic rot. We might still be.

Because what's clear about these folks, beyond their delusions about a decline in our freedoms, is that they do not believe in democracy. That's clear not just in their threats but in their daily actions and their constant contempt for democratic institutions, not to mention their overwhelmingly clear preference for right-wing authoritarian rule and an oligarchical society. Well, mebbe we should let them have it.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Outrage in Arizona: Most Uncounted Ballots Cast by Latinos

Something is rotten in the state of Arizona. And it stinks of a festering campaign to suppress the growing political power of the state's Latino population.

Because they're still counting nearly 200,000 "provisional" ballots that were handed out in massive numbers because of the large number of first-time voters whose mail-in ballots were not delivered, and others who did not receive their sample ballots, showing up on Election Day with only hats in hand -- even though they had legally registered. From the WSJ:

Arizona elections officials continued chipping away at a mountain of uncounted ballots from the Nov. 6 election, but more than 192,000 uncounted ballots remained Wednesday night, leaving results up in the air and prompting protests from the Latino community.

At least one high-profile contest remains in the balance: the closely watched congressional race between incumbent Democrat Ron Barber—the chosen successor to former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords—and Republican Martha McSally. As of Wednesday evening, 943 votes separated the candidates, with Mr. Barber ahead.

Many candidates with large leads—such as Republican U.S. Senate candidate Jeff Flake and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio—have declared victory while their opponents conceded.
But state election officials cautioned that with so many uncounted ballots they couldn't confirm the outcome of any races. The state plans to release its official results Dec. 3, but "that doesn't stop candidates from declaring victory or conceding defeat," said Matthew Roberts, spokesman for the Arizona Secretary of State's office, which oversees elections.

More than 163,700 uncounted ballots are provisional ballots—meaning ballots that need to be checked for missing information, such as the voter's identity or to ensure the voter hadn't filled out two ballots, or voted at the wrong polling place. The remaining 28,550 uncounted ballots are early mail ballots.

Voters who couldn't provide identification at their polling place had until the end of Wednesday to provide it so their ballots would be counted. But groups that worked to register Latino voters in the state said they feared that some provisional ballots might not be counted if those voters weren't aware of the requirement.

You read that right: If you were handed one of these provisional ballots, you had until yesterday to get back to the courthouse and prove that you voted legitimately. If not, your vote gets tossed.

And even if you do show up and prove your vote legitimate, there's the nagging suspicion it will end up uncounted anyway:

"I think a lot of Latino votes were left out on purpose," said 18-year-old Nicolas Botello, protesting outside the Maricopa County Recorder's office Thursday night. Mr. Botello said he voted, but said he fears other voters won't be counted because they received provisional ballots that may be disqualified.

Some protesters left hand-written notes on a large cork board propped up on the sidewalk behind a statue of the Virgin Mary. One such note read: "I registered to vote but they made me cast a provisional ballot. Did it count?"

So far, Senate Democratic candidate Richard Carmona has not unconceded his race, though he is being urged to do so, since the heavy Latino count inherent in these ballots could change the outcome of his race as well.

But the Barber-McSally race is attracting the usual Republican vote-suppression tactics, as AlterNet's Laura Gottesdiener reports:

Democratic congressman Ron Barber is locked in a tight battle against Republican challenger Martha McSally for a congressional seat in a district of Southern Arizona that includes the city of Tucson. The seat was once held by Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, and the race is now gaining national attention as voter disenfranchisement threatens to tip the balance in favor of the Republican challenger.

As of Tuesday, Barber had a 829-vote lead , but McSally is using every dirty trick in the book to try to cut into Barber’s lead by attempting to disqualify votes cast in predominately Latino districts, where voters went heavily for Democrat Barber.

Tuesday, the Republican’s attorneys filed a court motion seeking a temporary restraining order to stop Cochise County from counting the ballots, alleging that 130 votes should be disqualified because they “have been spoiled because they were not sealed, as required, when they were transported from the Castro Park, Ramsey and Hopi Precinct polling locations to the Cochise County Elections Department and Recorder’s Office.”

Mario Solis-Marich observes:

Koss had noticed a trend as she called voters to remind them to head to the polls. Repeatedly she found that voters that registered for the first time had not received their sample ballots and did not know where their polls were. Many of the first time voters also had requested mail in ballots that never arrived. “Something here is not right,” she had told MarioWire during a phone call the Monday before the November 6th election. On election day she told Mariowire.com about the stated election results in Maricopa “these numbers do not add up”. As a numbers prone economist Ellee Koss should know.

“This is a sad commentary on democracy in Arizona” said Randy Parraz who leads Citizens for a Better Arizona. What we are seeing in Maricopa County is a systemic breakdown of the election process”.

The tactics are hitting home especially for new citizens, such as this Iranian man who was voting for the first time:

As the video's description explains:

When he received his voter registration card he was very happy because he could vote in a free and fair election for the first time in his life! When he got to the polls they told him that his name was not on the list and he would have to cast a provisional ballot. He asked if they would count them and they told him yes 100% but with 500,000 votes uncounted he is now less sure. This is very disappointing to him personally because he left his country and came here because he thought this was going to be a new place he could have rights. In Iran he says they had no freedom, no democracy. And he feels like the five years he worked to become a citizen was for nothing.

Heckuva job there, Arizona. As Rachel Maddow says in the video atop this post, this is a matter of deliberately making it hard for minorities to vote.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Uncovered at Last: Lee Atwater's Infamous 'Southern Strategy' Colloquy

Over the years, we've written a lot at this site about Lee Atwater, the erstwhile godfather of Republican dog-whistle attack politics -- Amato in particular has often discussed Atwater's central role in transforming the GOP into the Party of the Old South it has become today.

In our book Over the Cliff,, we cited an infamous interview with Atwater in which he explained how the Southern Strategy worked:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

However, a number of conservatives have over the years disputed the veracity of that interview and that quote, or have claimed it wasn't really Atwater. You know, the denial thing.

Now James Carter IV -- the same researcher who dug up Mitt Romney's "47 percent" remarks on video has unearthed the entire 42-minute interview. Rick Perlstein has the entire thing over at The Nation:

In the lead-up to the infamous remarks, it is fascinating to witness the confidence with which Atwater believes himself to be establishing the racial innocence of latter-day Republican campaigning: “My generation,” he insists, “will be the first generation of Southerners that won’t be prejudiced.” He proceeds to develop the argument that by dropping talk about civil rights gains like the Voting Rights Act and sticking to the now-mainstream tropes of fiscal conservatism and national defense, consultants like him were proving “people in the South are just like any people in the history of the world.”

It is only upon Professor Lamis’s gently Socratic follow-ups, and those of a co-interviewer named “Saul” (Carter hasn't been able to confirm his identity, but suspects it was the late White House correspondent Saul Friedman), that Atwater begins to loosen up—prefacing his reflections, with a plainly guilty conscience, “Now, y’all aren't quoting me on this?” (Apparently , this is the reason why Atwater’s name wasn’t published in 1984 but was in 1999, after his death).

He then utters his infamous words. The interlocutors go on to kibitz about Huey Long and barbecue. Then Atwater, apparently satisfied that he'd absolved the Southern Republican Party of racism once and for all, follows up with a prediction based on a study he claims demonstrates that Strom Thurmond won 38 percent of South Carolina’s middle-class black vote in his 1978 Senate campaign (run by Atwater).

“That voter, in my judgment,” he claims, “will be more likely to vote his economic interests than he will anything else. And that is the voter that I think through a fairly slow but very steady process, will go Republican.” Because race no longer matters: “In my judgment Karl Marx [is right]... the real issues ultimately will be the economic issues.” He continues, in words that uncannily echo the “47 percent tape” (nothing new under the wingnut sun), that “statistically, as the number of non-producers in the system moves toward fifty percent,” the conservative coalition cannot but expand. Voila: a new Republican majority. Racism won't have anything to do with it.

So they claim, to this very day.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Clueless Racist Tweeters Reveal the Degraded State of Right-Wing Discourse

As Karoli and Blue Texan have been observing today, the fever swamps of the American Right are, predictably, coming completely unhinged over the re-election of President Obama. This is especially true the farther you move from right-wing pundits out to the conservative base -- where the hatred of Obama is bubbling up a fresh heaping helping of steaming racism.

See, for instance, the gallery of racist tweets put together by Jezebel this week. Go ahead, spend a little time there. Then come on back, get a shower, and let's talk about it.

Megan Garber at the Atlantic reports on the provenance of these tweets:

Floating Sheep, a group of geography academics, took advantage of that fact to turn hatred -- and, just as often, stupidity -- into information. The team searched Twitter for racism-revealing terms that appeared in the context of tweets that mentioned "Obama," "re-elected," or "won." That search resulted in (a shockingly high and surprisingly low) 395 tweets.

The leading states from which these tweets emanate are Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, North Dakota, and Utah. Now there's a big surprise.

What's shocking and disturbing about these tweets is just how many people out there reflexively and thoughtlessly indulge in outright and outrageous racism -- and then express surprise that they're accused of being racists!

Indeed, the pervasiveness of this response indicates just how degraded Americans' understanding of racism has become -- mainly because, whenever it raises its head now, the right-wing media shouts down and belittles anyone who calls it out. So now there are millions of people out there who think that there's nothing particularly racist about using racist slurs.

For example, there's this young woman from Turlock, CA, who tweeted the following:

enlarge

As the Modesto Bee story explains, Helms was shocked when the Secret Service came knocking on her door:

She told the Fox 40 reporter: "I didn't think it would be that big of a deal. … The assassination part is kind of harsh. I'm not saying like I would go do that or anything like that, by any means, but if it was to happen, I don't think I'd care one bit."

Helms has since deleted the post and posted again about the incident. It reads: "So apparently my post last night about Obama got onto Twitter and Fox 40 came and interviewed me cause apparently a lot of people in Sacramento think I'm crazy and racist. WOW is all I got to say!! I'm not racist and I'm not crazy. just simply stating my opinion.!!!"

Also unsurprisingly, the ice-cream parlor where the woman worked decided it could not afford to employ her any longer:

But the incident and surrounding outrage caused her to lose her job at Cold Stone Creamery, where she had worked for less than a year. Turlock Cold Stone Creamery store director Chris Kegle said he was shocked to read her racist slur and see her accompanying interview.

"We found her comments to be very disgusting, and they do not reflect our opinions here," Kegle said. "We never saw anything from her at work like those comments."

When he arrived Thursday at the store on Monte Vista Avenue, he said, there were more than 20 angry voice mails about Helms.

"We made the decision because of her comments, but also the community feedback," he said. "We are very into working with the community and doing community service. So when your community does not like you because of an employee, that's bad. We have a business to run."

But the bottom line in this incident was the woman's complete cluelessness:

"OK, but what did I do wrong? That's fine if they want to," she told the reporter. "But I don't understand what I did wrong."

What kind of world do we live in when you have to actually explain to people that (A) wishing aloud for the president's assassination is the same thing as publicly advocating it, and (B) the use of the 'N word' or any other racial slur-- especially by a white person flinging it in a manner intended to degrade not just any singular target but any member of that race -- is an act of racism in itself?

Answer: The world made for us by right-wing media and assorted right-wing pundits, who adamantly insist that racism is a dead letter, that it really doesn't exist, and that their political campaigns don't exploit and foment racist attitudes -- when all the evidence to the contrary stares us daily in the face.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

For Whom the Bell Polls: Karl Rove's Jig is Up

Karl Rove has always been a con artist. This year, it seems to have finally caught up to him.

We all saw it on election night, when Rove tried to pull a Florida in Ohio on the air on Fox News. As we also noted, you could see the sweat on Rove's brow and upper lip -- in part, doubtlessly, because his predictions of an easy win for Romney were beginning to reveal his actual incompetence.

Now the performance is raising all kinds of ethical and other questions about Rove's role and his behavior. Imagine our surprise.

But even more noteworthy is that the billions of dollars spent by his plutocratic "job creator" donors on the election was washed down the drain in the night's results:

A study Wednesday by the Sunlight Foundation, which tracks political spending, concluded that Rove's super PAC, American Crossroads, had a success rate of just 1 percent on $103 million in attack ads -- one of the lowest "returns on investment" (ROIs) of any outside spending group in this year's elections.

American Crossroads spent heavily, not just on Romney, but on attack ads on behalf of GOP Senate candidates in eight states -- thanks to mega contributions from conservative donors like metals magnate Harold Simmons ($19.5 million), Texas homebuilder Bob Perry ($7.5 million) and Omni hotel chief Robert Rowling ($5 million.)

The super donors didn't get much for their money. Six of the eight GOP Senate candidates that American Crossroads spent money to try to elect – Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin, George Allen in Virginia, Josh Mandel in Ohio, Richard Mourdock in Indiana, Denny Rehberg in Montana and Todd Akin in Missouri – lost their races, along with Romney. The group did, on the other hand, help to elect Deb Fischer in Nebraska and Dean Heller in Nevada.

(The Sunlight Foundation calculation of "return on investment" was based on the percentage of money it spent on individual races-- and since Crossroads spent the most on the races it lost on, the group earned its low 1 percent "return on investment" or ROI. A sister group, Crossroads GPS, which operates out of the same offices as American Crossroads but does not disclose its donors, fared little better, netting a return on investment of only 13 percent, according to the Sunlight Foundation report.)

In some ways, it makes you wish this level of incompetence would stick around for a few more years and waste billions more dollars on going-nowhere-fast right-wing campaigns. Which, no doubt, it will.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Your Morning Schadenfreude: About Those Pundits Who Predicted a Big Romney Win ...

I love the smell of schadenfreude in the morning. It smells like ... victory.

Especially when it's victory over some of the most loathsome reptilian figures lurking on the modern American political scene, notably, the maroons who tried selling the world on the notion of "Romentum" going into yesterday's election.

Guys like Michael Barone, who predicted 315 Electoral College votes for Romney. Or Karl Rove, who predicted 285 victorious votes for the Mittster.

For some reason last night, they remained in deep denial while poring over the results on Fox. And of course, no mention of their own towering incompetence was made. Instead, they spent the segment calling each other "brilliant".

Though you couldn't help notice the sweat on the brow and upper lip of Rove. Bet he's thinking about all those rich clients who paid gazillions of dollars for his American Crossroads Super PAC to take down not just Obama but a bunch of Democrats ... all for naught.

We also look forward to hearing from George Will, who predicted 321 votes for Romney, and from Dick Morris, who predicted a massive Willard landslide (and a Republican Senate to boot).

Roy Edroso has a rundown of all the right-wing pundits predicting a Romney runaway.

My favorite of the pre-election pundits had to be Michael Walsh at NRO, with his charmingly titled thinkpiece, "Crush Them":

Mitt Romney is an imperfect standard bearer, but tomorrow he is the army we have. Elsewhere, I’ve predicted a Romney victory and even a retake of the Senate, despite the breathtaking tactical stupidity of Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, both of whom needlessly wandered into the mine field of social issues (where the media is guaranteed 100 percent arrayed against them) and blew their own feet off. But, should Romney win, he can’t simply assume the vote was a mandate for putting America back to work, and then do his corporate-turnaround thing. If he wins, if his victory is beyond the margin of David Axelrod’s ability to cheat, Mitt needs to understand that a considerable portion of his vote was not only anti-Obama but anti-Obamaism, that it was a repudiation of everything the Marxist Left and its bien-pensant fellow travelers in the media stand for. And, most important, that going forward, it’s a call to substantially reduce their influence on the body politic.

Sorry about that, comrade. We look forward to shuffling your paranoid ass off to a Commie re-education camp soon.

This stuff has been floating about for awhile now, actually. A couple of weeks ago, the Instawanker penned a piece for USA Today musing -- with nary a shred of self-awareness -- about the "bubble" within which liberals had supposedly cocooned themselves:

Now, despite being told by the press -- and quite a few Republican pundits -- that Mitt Romney didn't have a chance, since his performance in the presidential debates things seem to be turning around. Reports of early voting and absentee ballots suggest that Republican voters are a lot more energized than we'd been led to believe. The polls are looking good for Romney, and he's picking up all sorts of endorsements all of a sudden.

This has caused some Republican enthusiasts to suggest that what we're seeing is a "preference cascade," and they may be right.

What's a "preference cascade?" In his book, Private Truths, Public Lies, economist Timur Kuran looked at the way "preference falsification" can distort societies, and then collapse suddenly.

The classic example is in a totalitarian society, where everyone has to pretend to love the Great Leader on pain of death. If the authorities manage it right, 99% of the populace can be ready to revolt -- but won't, because each individual thinks he or she is the only one who feels that way.

This works until some event suddenly shocks the system, and people realize that they're not alone. When that happens, things can go south in a hurry. That's a "preference cascade."

The United States isn't a totalitarian society, but media bias has the same sort of effect: By privileging some views and suppressing others, the media give Americans, and itself, a distorted idea of reality. Then, when things crack, it's a big surprise.

That may be what's happening here. Obama was presented as unbeatable, and a lot of people believed it -- until, suddenly, he looked kind of beatable after all. Once that happened, everything was different.

That bit about "a distorted idea of reality", Perfesser? You might want to look into that.

And unquestionably my favorite reaction this morning from this faction is that from noted white nationalist Robert Stacy McCain over at American Spectator:

At the moment, I am convinced America is doomed beyond all hope of redemption, and any talk of the future fills me with dread and horror.

Sweeeeeeeet.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Good Omen For Obama: Dick Morris Predicts Romney Landslide

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

If there's anything we've learned over the years of watching Fox News, it's that Dick Morris is the perfect reverse barometer: Anything he predicts will turn out to be not just wrong, but laughably, head-shakingly so, whether it's his advice on handling the democracy uprising in Egypt, his prediction of impeachment hearings for Obama, his claims Obamacare would bring about "euthanasia," or whether Bill Clinton should have negotiated the release of two hostages in North Korea, or his forecast of sweeping Republican wins in 2010 far beyond anyone's predictions (not to mention eventual reality).

If Dick Morris says it, you can count on it being wrong.

Which is why his recent prediction of a Mitt Romney landslide -- which he explained for Bill O'Reilly last night -- has largely been greeted with broad smiles from the Democratic camp. As Zandar at Balloon Juice put it, "So yes, now that Toesucker here has called it for Romney, President Obama is spiking that there football."

Ed Kilgore observes:

You might wonder if this sort of crap might run the risk of convincing some happy conservatives that they need not bother to vote, or can afford to indulge their resentment of Romney’s refusal (on occasion, at least) to back a Personhood Amendment or spend the remaining days of the campaign “vetting” the president’s background. But just as they did with the Iraq War, a lot of Republicans seem to think it is psychologically critical to protect Total Success in all their endeavors.

And just to underscore how wrong Morris is about everything he touches, Markos points out (via a commenter):

Morris says Michigan has 15 electoral votes. It has 16

He says Minnesota has 16 electoral votes. It has 10.

He says Colorado has 10 electoral votes. It has 9.

He says Nevada has nine electoral votes. It has 6.

Obama, Romney, And The Electoral College: The Beltway's One-Sided Hand-Wringing, Just Like 2000

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

[H/t Heather]

It's deja vu all over again.

Thanks to a spate of polls indicating that the presidential race is tightening, the prospect of a repeat of the results of the 2000 election -- with one candidate winning the Electoral College and the other one the popular vote -- has the folks inside the Beltway all in a tizzy of speculation. And wouldn't you know it, the shape of that speculation is just as absurdly biased as it was in 2000.

Karen Tumulty at the Washington Post is the classic Beltway poobah, and her piece this weekend was a classic of Beltway poobahism:

That kind of split decision between the electorate and the electoral college would mark the fifth time in American history — and the second time in a dozen years — that the person who occupies the White House was not the one who got the most votes on Election Day.

No incumbent president seeking a second term has ever won the electoral college and lost the popular vote.

Every modern president to be reelected — Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush — has gotten a bigger share of the vote in their second bid for office than their first, and with it, a chance to claim a mandate. (Though Clinton got more votes than his first race and won in the electoral college, he was re-elected in 1996 without winning a majority in a three-way race against Republican Bob Dole and independent Ross Perot.)

A win in the electoral college that is not accompanied by one in the popular vote casts a shadow over the president and his ability to govern.

Even more absurdly, Tumulty then goes on to cite the Bush administration that followed in the wake of the 2000 travesty as somehow laboring under this "shadow" -- even though, in real time, the WaPo and every other outlet of Beltway punditry studiously ignored that "shadow" for the entirety of Bush's tenure, beginning with the outrageous failure to cover the massive protests that accompanied his inauguration.

Perhaps more importantly, the Bush administration did not even bother to appear constrained by this "shadow" for the entirety of its tenure. As a skeptical Josh Marshall observed:

This happened no more than twelve years ago for the first time in a century. Democrats were crushed and outraged. And in response to various suggestions that newly-inaugurated President George W. Bush would need to govern in a form of national unity government Bush responded by pursuing one of the most maximalist and aggressive agendas in recent American history.


The difference between a non-incumbent and an incumbent winning this way is no more than some sort of pseudo-fact. It quite simply is what it is. And having been perfectly happy with it twelve years ago Republicans would have no grounds for complaining now.

Now, would they have grounds to be upset? Sure. Would this lead to “more hyperpartisanship”? Please. No greater ‘hyperpartisanship’ is possible than the scorched earth, 100% ‘No’ policy we’ve seen over the last four years, which frankly is little different from the scorched earth, 100% ‘No’ policy of 1993-2001. Remember, Bill Clinton was illegitimate because he was a plurality not a majority president.

Nonetheless, we can rest assured that should there be a electoral-popular vote split favoring Obama, as Cenk Uygur says, Republican heads will be exploding all over the place. Or at least they'll be twisting themselves into knots trying to figure out how to attack the president as illegitimate.

This is especially so if you recall the shape of the pre-electoral speculation in 2000, when it appeared, in the days leading up to the election, possible that Al Gore would win the Electoral College but lose the popular vote. This set off howls of outrage from right-wing media folk such as Fox News and the Washington Times, which were then dutifully reflected in the hand-wringing from the Beltway pundits.

Recall, for instance, the Moonie Times report on the subject:

Vice President Al Gore's strategy to go after states rich with electoral votes raises a remote possibility that has not occurred in presidential politics since 1888.

There is a chance he could capture 270 electoral votes and win the presidency even if he loses the popular vote to Texas Gov. George W. Bush....

Mrs. Jeffe, the analyst from California...says a split decision between the popular vote and the electoral vote would make it hard for the next president to lead.

A presidential election "is about credibility — it's about legitimacy," she said. "It's not about words on paper."

Of course, these concerns vanished from the pages of the Times once the results came in.

Likewise, the New York Daily News reported that the Bush team was planning to hit the ground running with attacks on Al Gore as an illegitimate president if he won the EC but not the popular vote:

They're not only thinking the unthinkable, they're planning for it.

Quietly, some of George W. Bush's advisers are preparing for the ultimate "what if" scenario: What happens if Bush wins the popular vote for President, but loses the White House because Al Gore's won the majority of electoral votes?...

"The one thing we don't do is roll over," says a Bush aide. "We fight."

How? The core of the emerging Bush strategy assumes a popular uprising, stoked by the Bushies themselves, of course.

In league with the campaign — which is preparing talking points about the Electoral College's essential unfairness — a massive talk-radio operation would be encouraged.

"We'd have ads, too," says a Bush aide, "and I think you can count on the media to fuel the thing big-time. Even papers that supported Gore might turn against him because the will of the people will have been thwarted."

Local business leaders will be urged to lobby their customers, the clergy will be asked to speak up for the popular will and Team Bush will enlist as many Democrats as possible to scream as loud as they can. "You think 'Democrats for Democracy' would be a catchy term for them?" asks a Bush adviser....

And what would happen if the "what if" scenario came out the other way? "Then we'd be doing the same thing Bush is apparently getting ready for," says a Gore campaign official. "They're just further along in their contingency thinking than we are. But we wouldn't lie down without a fight, either."

And then there was Chris Matthews. This was his column the day before the election:

Al Gore, knowing him as we do, may have no problem taking the presidential oath after losing the popular vote to George W. Bush. He's lost popularity contests before. But how will the country take it?

How will a populace already turned off to politics react to the news that the guy who's gotten the most votes isn't getting the job?

Matthews, of course, voiced no such concerns after the election. Because that would have entailed greater self-examination than is ever permitted inside the Beltway.

These people are never, ever, ever right. Considering their record, it wouldn't surprise me if it turned out that Obama wins the popular vote but not the EC. But then, no one from inside the Beltway will bother -- or dare -- suggesting to Mitt Romney that he's not a legitimate president.

As Steve Kornacki at Salon puts it:

Of course, that obstruction will probably persist even if Obama wins the popular vote. If modern political history has taught us anything, it’s that the Republican base doesn’t believe any Democratic victory is legitimate, and always finds a way to treat a Democratic president as a usurper. A favorite GOP talking point during Bill Clinton’s first term was that he’d only been elected by 43 percent of the country. The implication was that Clinton wouldn’t have won in 1992 without the presence of independent Ross Perot – a complete and total misreading of the ’92 election. In his first two years as president, Clinton faced the same unanimous opposition that Obama has dealt with. And even when Clinton was reelected in 1996, Republicans delighted in pointing out that he’d done so without breaking 50 percent of the national popular vote (even though their own candidate barely cracked 40). Or consider Obama’s ’08 victory, won with a higher share of the popular vote by any Democrat since LBJ. It meant little to the right, which fixated on trumped-up claims of mass voter fraud.

Problems Keep Cropping Up With Maricopa Misinformation

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Remember how, last week, we reported that Maricopa County, Arizona, had handed out voter ID cards in Spanish with the wrong date on them -- but were assured that the problem was limited to only fifty or so people.

Now a second incident makes clear that the problem may be more widespread than at first glance:

Last week, the department made the same mistake on a Spanish-language voter registration card it issued to a Hispanic woman. Yesterday it was on a bookmark the department distributed to Spanish-speaking voters.

Maricopa County’s latest error angered many leaders from various Latino organizations across the state, including members from two large organizations that have registered thousands of Latinos to vote.

As Stephen Lemons notes, the elections office, led by a Republican named Helen Purcell, has come under siege for these and other misinformation problems, which included a false media report by a local CBS station that may well have harmed the work of local GOTV volunteers.

In response, Purcell has promised a public-relations campaign to try to dispel any misinformation that it may have inadvertently issued.

An investigation, frankly, would be more reassuring.

Todd Akin's Militia Past Exposes His Profound Radicalism

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

It seems Washington's John Koster isn't the only Republican Tea Party candidate who has ties to old far-right "Patriot"/militia organizations. Thanks to superb reporting by Josh Glastetter at RightWingWatch and Alex Seitz-Wald at Salon, we now know that Rep. Todd Akin, the GOP nominee for the Senate seat in Missouri, also has some old and deep militia connections -- mostly on behalf of some violent anti-abortion radicals with whom he was once arrested.

Akin, you see, was invited to speak at a militia gathering in 1995, and instead sent a laudatory letter that was read at the gathering. When Buzzfeed first reported this in August, Akin claimed he barely knew these people and that it was all a mishap. But Seitz-Wald dug into it further:

The full Post-Dispatch story, which was not included in the BuzzFeed story, also reported that “a flier promoting the 1995 event billed Akin as speaker.” Salon obtained the flier (view it here); it advertises a regional conference to teach participants “how to organize Missouri militias.” Akin is listed among the “special guest speakers.” How did Akin end up on the flier for the event and why did he write a gushing letter to a group he wanted nothing to do with? Further undermining his account: The only contemporaneous news report, a 1995 article not available online from The Springfield News-Leader, reported that Akin canceled because of “scheduling conflicts,” not discomfort with the militia’s leaders.

Akin’s account that he “didn’t know who they were” becomes even harder to believe in light of the news of his arrest. First, the commander of the now-defunct militia, John Moore, told Salon in August that he had known Akin long before the rally. Moore said the two had met to discuss gun-rights legislation Moore was pushing when Akin was a state representative in the later 1980s: “I’ve known Todd a long time,” he said.

Then there’s Tim Dreste, the milita’s chaplain and captain, whom Akin worked with in the pro-life movement and who, as it turns out, may even have been arrested along with him.

As Ed Kilgore says:

Now it’s not like Akin was some “idealistic” college student getting caught up in some ideological hijinks: he was in his late 30s, and was soon (in 1988) to be elected to the Missouri legislature. He was, and is, a stone fanatic on the subject, and his famous views on rape and abortion are entirely within the mainstream of “thinking” among the kind of antichoice activists who represent his political base. I’d even admire him a bit if he just came out loud ‘n’ proud right now and admitted a principal reason he’s in politics is to impose God’s Law on all the slatternly women who keep “killing their babies” by taking The Pill or using an IUD or having clinical abortions.

Truth is, the GOP’s longstanding compact with anti-choice activists and other elements of the Christian Right has politically legitimized folks who are much better suited to be marching in front of abortion clinics waving bloody fetus posters and screaming obscenities at women, than to be strolling the aisles of state legislatures or the U.S. Senate.

Dickhead Willard: Romney's Worst Persona Reveals A Smug, Self-Important Jerk

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

"You'll get your chance in a moment. I'm still speaking."
-- Willard "Mitt" Romney, to President Obama in the Oct. 16 debate

I'm with Charles Pierce on this:

Wow. To me, this was a revelatory, epochal moment. It was a look at the real Willard Romney, the Bain cutthroat who could get rich ruining lives and not lose a moment's sleep. But those people are merely the anonymous Help. The guy he was speaking to on Tuesday night is a man of considerable international influence. Outside of street protestors, and that Iraqi guy who threw a shoe at George W. Bush, I have never seen a more lucid example of manifest public disrespect for a sitting president than the hair-curling contempt with which Romney invested those words. (I've certainly never seen one from another candidate.) He's lucky Barack Obama prizes cool over everything else. LBJ would have taken out his heart with a pair of salad tongs and Harry Truman would have bitten off his nose.

And Romney bitched endlessly — endlessly — about the rules, and why this uppity fellow on the other stool was allowed to speak before he was spoken to, and why he didn't get to speak at length on whatever he wanted to speak on because, after all, he is the CEO of the stage. Jesus Christ, I'd hate to play golf with the man. He's the guy who counts to make sure you don't have too many wedges in your bag. He knows every cheap subsection of every cheap ground rule, and he'll call you on every one of them. You couldn't get a free drop out of him with thumbscrews, and forget about conceding any putt outside two inches. And then, on the 18th hole, with all the money on the line, he kicks his ball out of the rough and denies up and down to the rules committee that he did it. Then he goes into the clubhouse bar and nobody sits with him.

This, as Pierce explains, is the "Dickhead Willard" who periodically pops up among Romney's known public personae -- toppling over from "Snippy Willard", who sometimes is just an exchange away from "Lofty Willard," the schmoozy salesman who has suckered every Republican in the country and a few independents too.

Dickhead Willard has a habit of showing up whenever some plebeian has the audacity to challenge him or put him on the spot. He appeared twice during Tuesday's debate -- first during the whole snide attack by Romney that led up to the "You'll get your chance" moment, then later, when Romney began haranguing Obama about his pension, before the president's snappy retort ("I don't look at my pension. It's not as big as yours") shut him up.

The last was Romney kicking his ball out of the rough: The rules of the debate stipulated that the candidates would not direct questions at each other, and yet there Romney was, haranguing the president of the United States like a petulant child about to roll on the floor in a tantrum. But then, we already know that for guys like Romney, the rules are for everyone else.

I dunno about you, but as bad as Romney's politics and policies are, the worst aspect of his prospective presidency might be having to put up with this guy on my TV for the next four years.

Dickhead Willard has been around a long time. We've seen him many times before: Back when Ted Kennedy dubbed him "Multiple Choice" in 1994; when a reporter in 2008 challenged him on his "lobbyist free" baloney; when audience members in Iowa laughed at his claim that "corporations are people"; when he explained how he liked to fire people.

So I made a mashup of all those great Dickhead Willard moments, punctuated by the now-definitive "You'll get your chance" moment.

And let's hope we see more of Dickhead Willard tonight. Because he makes it obvious that the whole "Lofty Willard" persona is as much a lie as his claim to not want to overturn Roe v. Wade.