The Gun Magnet: Montana Awash In Far-Right Extremists, Thanks To Loose Laws

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

A number of state legislatures in the Interior West in recent years, reflecting their deeply conservative constituencies, have tried to outdo each other in promoting gun rights within their boundaries -- almost always at the behest of far-right gun factions. Leading the way, probably, has been Montana, whose legislature has passed a number of radical bills in recent years aimed at limiting federal oversight of guns in the state, including a recent bill giving sheriffs the right to arrest federal agents.

Now Montanans are learning there is a steep price to pay for endorsing gun-rights extremism: Not only does it empower some of the most extreme right-wingers operating in the realm of mainstream politics, it also attracts some of the most radical members of the far right, including committed racists who see their new Western homes as the place to try to build a white-supremacist homeland.

David Holthouse has a four-part series at Media Matters reporting on this phenomenon in detail, and it is a must-read:

In addition to calling on fellow right-wing extremists to move to the Flathead Valley, leaders of both the PLE and the Patriot movements in the region are urging followers to exploit Montana's weak firearms regulations by stocking up on guns, including .50 caliber sniper rifles and assault weapons, says Travis McAdam, executive director of the Montana Human Rights Network, which closely follows PLE and Patriot activity, including online communications.

"With the PLE, it's the coming battle with Zionist Occupied Government, with the Patriots, it's the New World Order, but again the rhetoric is similar: 'A big fight is coming, so move with us to Montana where it's easy to get a lot of serious guns, because chances are you're going to need them,'" says McAdam.

Gaede cited Montana's "pro-gun" culture in a recent PLE recruiting message posted to the major white nationalist online forum Stormfront.

"The atmosphere of the area has a distinct 'Montana' feel and attitude. That attitude is to leave others alone and allow them to have their own beliefs and choices," Gaede wrote. "There is a strong pro-gun and pro-hunting population and one of the strongest Constitution parties that I have seen yet. Our Christmas parade still goes by that name and we have a nativity scene in our public square with a Baby Jesus... Come Home!"

Yes, this is the same April Gaede who dressed up her twin daughters as a neo-Nazi pop-music act called Prussian Blue, all so that they could become the objects of creepy old Nazi fetishists' desires. (The girls recently told Montana reporters that they no longer believed in the Nazi upbringing.)

Gaede and her fellow neo-Nazis, in fact, have been intimidating their neighbors ever since they moved into the Kalispell area, and their activism has spread into larger campaigns of vicious harassment against liberals previously.

But as Holthouse explains, it isn't simply white supremacists who are changing the political landscape in Montana. They're being aided and abetted by far-right "Patriot" movement followers who are extending their power into the halls of the Montana Legislature -- particularly by trying to enact an extremist "gun rights" agenda that also reflects the longtime agenda of the racist radical right.

The Southern Poverty Law Center just released a report on this as well:

Chuck Baldwin, a Baptist preacher who ran for president under the Constitution Party banner in 2008, moved 18 members of his family to Montana’s Flathead Valley last fall after receiving what he called a divine message telling him the state was the “tip of the spear” in the fight for liberty. Stewart Rhodes, a Yale-educated lawyer, former Army paratrooper and head of the conspiracy-minded Oath Keepers, also moved here. Rhodes is laying the groundwork for a new militia and is calling for citizens to adopt a barter economy to escape the bondage of U.S. currency.

... What is happening in Montana — thanks to this newest wave of extremists — is a convergence of two “separatist” ideas that have long fermented in the brew of Pacific Northwest extremism. The antigovernment “Patriots,” the larger of the two movements, want to establish a remote base of like-minded allies as a bastion of resistance for the day when, as they believe, the government will impose martial law. White supremacists are organizing around the idea of forming a long-desired all-white homeland far away from the multicultural cities.

Significantly, as we reported last year in an investigative report for AlterNet, a majority of the Patriot movement revival is taking place under the banner of the Tea Party, which has proven a fertile recruitment ground for right-wing extremism.

Moreover, the Montana Legislature, for this past session, has been largely controlled by this same faction of Tea Partying Republicans, following the lead of these gun-rights radicals. As we reported, these radicals actually announced their agenda in the fall of 2010 in the run-up to the election that brought the Tea Partiers to power:

The evening's first speaker is a fellow Montanan and another gun-rights figure: Missoula's own Gary Marbut, president of the Montana Shooting Sports Association and a longtime fixture on Montana's far-right political scene.

Marbut enjoys an almost legendary status among Patriots and Tea Parties, one seriously burnished by his May 2009 appearance on a Glenn Beck episode on Fox News as part of a group of state-level political activists Beck had called in to discuss then-nascent efforts by legislators in a number of conservative states to declare their "sovereignty" in relation to the federal government. Just the month before, Montana legislators had passed (and the Democratic governor signed) a bill declaring that all guns manufactured in the state were exempt from federal legislation. The bill had been drafted by Marbut, who enjoys guru-like status among the state's gun-rights aficionadoes.

Marbut has never actually been elected to any office at all, though he has run numerous times, largely because he resides in liberal Missoula, where local residents are all too well aware just how radical he really is – embodied by his long history of forming alliances and dalliances with figures on the extremist right. For instance, Marbut in the 1990s tried organizing Patriot "neighborhood watches," advising Militia of Montana members not to call themselves "militias". Of course, his concept of a "neighborhood watch" was largely a survivalist one, incorporating "communications, organizations, and supply" issues.

In 1994, disgusted with the passage of the Brady Act, Marbut suggested Montana secede from the Union, and his MSSA promoted a resolution legalizing the formation of "unorganized militias." And Marbut wasn't merely involved in the militias -- he also played footsie with Christian Identity activists, running his columns in a white-supremacist "Christian Identity" newspaper, along with a related militia magazine, the Sierra Times. And he's actively promoted tax-resistance-style jury nullification in the form of the Fully Informed Jury Association, which Marbut calls "the last peaceable barrier between innocent gun owners and a tyrannous government." FIJA sells video tapes of speeches by Red Beckman, among others.

Marbut references FIJA in his talk in Hamilton this night, but mostly he wants to talk about the next session of the Montana Legislature, where he hopes to propose a new piece of "sovereignty" lawmaking. He calls it his "Sheriffs First" bill.

"That's a bill that if we get it passed -- and I think we can -- we'll make it a crime in Montana, a state crime, for a federal officer to arrest, search or seize without the advance written permission of the county sheriff," Marbut explains, to enthusiastic applause.

"And how that will work is, ah, the federal officers might come to your local sheriff and say, 'OK, here's our probable cause, we believe there's people at this location in your county who have a meth lab – they're making methamphetamine. And we wanna bust 'em.' The sheriff might look it over and say, 'Gosh, I'm glad you brought this to me, here's your advance written permission, and I will send a couple deputies to help you.'

"Or the federal officers might come to the sheriff and say, 'Here's our probable cause, it leads us to believe there's somebody in your county at this location who's manufacturing firearms without a federal license. And we want to go bust them.' The sheriff might say, 'Sorry, we have a state law in Montana that authorizes that activity, it's perfectly legal here, you may not go bust them, you do not have permission, and if you do, we can put you in Deer Lodge. We can put you behind bars in Montana for doing that.' " That brings out the whoops alongside the applause.

Indeed, this bill -- along with a slate of others promoted by Marbut and his Patriot-movement cohorts, including a law to allow a reintroduction of spear hunting in the state -- passed this past spring, prompting the state's Democratic governor to publicly veto the bills with a branding iron. The Patriots, of course, are vowing to overwhelm any resistance in the next Legislature.

The newcomers have peculiar attitudes about their new neighbors that are not likely to win them many friends in the long term, however, particularly among longtime Montanans. Chuck Baldwin expressed it in his announcement of his move to the Flathead:

Baldwin went on to state that being born in Montana does not necessarily make one a Montanan.

“There are a lot of people that were born in Montana but are not Montanans,” Baldwin said. “And there are a lot of people, like me, who were not born in Montana but we have been Montanans our whole lives.” (Baldwin arrived in the Flathead in October.)

“Real Montanans love freedom,” he said. “Real Montanans will fight and die for the principles of truth, honor and freedom.”

Their solution, apparently, is to attempt to frighten and intimidate the "not real Montanans", such as the folks at the Montana Human Rights Network (founded by a sixth-generation Montanan), who comprise much of the state's tolerant, common-sensical longtime residents. They're now being subjected to the usual barrage of death threats and other forms of intimidation.

And make no mistake: They intend to intimidate with their superior arsenals. As Holthouse reports in the last installment:

At least five PLE members appear on videos from the expo. One of them, posting on Stormfront as "White Wolf," declared Weaver's presentation "amazing." Also in attendance was Scott Ernest, a white supremacist from southern Florida who, according to a travelogue he posted to Stormfront, a major white supremacist web forum, took Amtrak to Kalispell in order to visit the Flathead Valley for the first time and meet with Gaede and two other PLE leaders to discuss moving there.

Ernest has since relocated to Kalispell, where, according to his Stormfront posts, he's living in an RV. He's become a huge booster for PLE online, regularly updating his Stormfront thread, which has more than 21,000 views.

"It's paradise here," he gushes in one of more than 400 posts. "I open carry [a handgun] every day. If you can, you should too."

Those of us who endured a similar campaign in Idaho in the 1980s and '90s will be forgiven if they feel a little shudder of recognition.

Just Another 'Isolated Incident:' Georgia Militiamen Arrested For Plotting Ricin Attack

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.] 

We know that right-wing thinkers like Peter King and Bill O'Reilly believe the only serious domestic-terrorism threat Americans face is from "radical Islam" and its adherents. So no doubt they will again turn a blind eye to the most recent case of right-wing domestic terrorism, this time involving a plan involving one of the most toxic biological agents -- ricin, which is lethal in small doses -- and explosives.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports:

Four North Georgia men accused of being members of a fringe militia group were arrested Tuesday by federal authorities for planning to make the deadly toxin ricin and obtain explosives, federal authorities said.

Authorities said that, beginning in March, the men held clandestine militia meetings and discussed using toxic agents and assassinations in an effort to undermine federal and state government and advance their interests.

The four men taken into federal custody are: Frederick Thomas, 73, of Cleveland, and Toccoa residents Dan Roberts, 67; Ray H. Adams, 65; and Samuel J. Crump, 68.
"These defendants, who are alleged to be part of a fringe militia group, are charged with planning attacks against their own fellow citizens and government," U.S. Attorney Sally Yates said. "To carry out their agenda, two of the defendants allegedly purchased purported explosives and a silencer, while the other two defendants took steps to attempt to produce a deadly biological toxin."

AP's Greg Bluestein has more details:

They have been talking about "covert" operations since at least March 2011, according to court records, discussing murder, theft and using toxic agents and assassinations to undermine the state and federal government.

At one meeting, investigators say, Thomas openly discussed creating a "bucket list" of government employees, politicians, corporate leaders and members of the media he felt needed to be "taken out."

"I've been to war, and I've taken life before, and I can do it again," he told an undercover investigator, according to the records.

Thomas' wife, Charlotte, called the charges "baloney."

"He spent 30 years in the U.S. Navy. He would not do anything against his country," she said in a phone interview with The Associated Press.

Thomas and Roberts are accused of buying what they believed was a silencer and an unregistered explosive from an undercover informant in May and June 2011. Prosecutors say he discussed using the weapons in attacks against federal buildings.

Prosecutors say Crump also discussed making 10 pounds of ricin and dispersing it in Atlanta and various cities across the nation. Adams, meanwhile, is accused of showing Crump the formula to make ricin and identifying the ways to obtain the ingredients.

Of course, we've been reporting for some time that militias have been quietly resurgent across the rural landscape since about 2008, which was confirmed by the Southern Poverty Law Center in its 2009 investigative report on the subject. And as we noted then, this resurgence will be accompanied by the inevitable wave of domestic-terrorist attacks and attempts.

Most recently we had the would-be bomber of the Spokane Martin Luther King Day parade, as well as the rampaging militiaman still hiding out somewhere in the Montana woods. It's all added to the growing list of right-wing violence since 2008.

Which again begs the question: If we need to hold hearings on the threat of domestic terrorism, why doesn't that include our most prolific domestic terrorists, both historically and currently -- right-wing extremists?

This post is written as part of the Media Matters Gun Facts fellowship. The purpose of the fellowship is to further Media Matters' mission to comprehensively monitor, analyze, and correct conservative misinformation in the U.S. media. Some of the worst misinformation occurs around the issue of guns, gun violence, and extremism; the fellowship program is designed to fight this misinformation with facts.

Opportunistic Neo-Nazi Claims To Support #OccupyPhoenix...Asked To Leave

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Our favorite Arizona Nazi border watcher, J.T. Ready, recently reached new opportunistic depths by showing up and pretending to support Occupy Phoenix -- even though he was apparently confronted by other participants, who made it clear he wasn't welcome.

Let's be clear: J.T. Ready is a neo-Nazi, a classic totalitarian/authoritarian, someone who despises and loathes and sneers at the kind of democracy-in-action that the Occupy movement represents. He likes chaos, though, and he sees the movement's unsettling effect as something he can use. And showing up at protests always is good for a little attention. That's why he did this.

Predictably, as Matt Gertz at Media Matters reports, the same right-wing bloggers who have been trying to smear the Occupiers as anti-Semites picked this up and ran with it:

For some time, the right-wing media has been attempting to brand Occupy Wall Street and related protests as anti-Semitic. In the latest example, conservative blogger Jim Hoft is pointing to video of heavily armed Neo-Nazi J.T. Ready patrolling the Occupy Phoenix protest and saying nice things about the movement.

Hoft sarcastically concludes, "Yup. They're just like the tea party."

It's worth pointing out that much of the rhetoric Ready spouts during the video -- decrying fiat money, saying that he and others were "exercising our Second Amendment right so that everybody can have a First Amendment right," claiming that Operation Fast and Furious was intended to "take away our rights" and the perpetrators are traitors who should be put to death -- sounds much more like the rhetoric of a conservative protestor than an OWS supporter.

And indeed, that's the problem for Hoft: Ready previously attended and reportedly spoke at Tea Party rallies ...

Gertz then details all the times Ready has appeared in support of tea party events.



And who can forget Ready's recent excursion into the world of vigilante border watches? That, as it happens, is also the territory embraced by tea partiers, not Occupy.

Along the same lines, Ready has a history of associating with -- and being empowered by -- major tea party figures in Arizona, most notably Senate President Russell Pearce, the author of SB1070, and Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the publicity-hound sheriff of Maricopa County.

Indeed, Ready has been working tirelessly at making himself a familiar presence on the Arizona landscape. This is just the latest desperate bid for attention.

Andrew Breitbart, just as predictably, resorted to the same technique in his ongoing effort to smear Occupy as anti-Semitic. published a list detailing "#Occupy Wall Street's Supporters, Sponsors, and Sympathizers" that included a handful of neo-Nazi organizations.

Of course, this is an old technique of the racist far right: Embrace a mainstream entity as an entry point for legitimizing your agenda. It was perfected by David Duke during his political career as a Republican, and has been replicated ever since by the many racists seeking to mainstream themselves -- most recently, as the NAACP's 2010 report laid bare, through the auspices of the tea party.

You'd think conservatives would be a little sensitive to this issue. After all, they complain bitterly whenever someone points out that their side of the aisle attracts all kinds of racists and domestic terrorists.

That Fake Latina Candidate Drops Out When Russell Pearce's Nieces Are Subpoenaed

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

So it seems that the fake Hispanic candidate propped up by the corrupt author of SB1070, Russell Pearce, in his recall election in Mesa has suddenly dropped out:

Candidate Olivia Cortes on Thursday withdrew from the Legislative District 18 recall election of Senate President Russell Pearce amid ongoing allegations that her campaign was a sham set up by Pearce supporters to pull votes away from opponent Jerry Lewis.
Pearce will now face only fellow Republican Lewis in the first recall election of a sitting legislator in state history.

Cortes said in a statement that the "constant intimidation and harassment" led to her withdrawal. And her attorney said that the move was the condition of a deal to stop a court hearing scheduled for today.

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Edward Burke had agreed to hear additional testimony in a lawsuit challenging Cortes' candidacy, despite ruling earlier this week that she could remain on the ballot. Burke ruled that Pearce supporters put Cortes on the ballot, but he found no fault with Cortes herself.

A Lewis campaign spokesman said Cortes' decision further proves her sham candidacy but said the damage already has been done.

"From the Cortes/Pearce camp, it's mission accomplished. Their goal was to have the ballot printed with other names on it to confuse people, and that's been done," Lewis co-chairman John Giles said. "Voters are sometimes surprisingly uninformed, especially people who are voting absentee."

The New York Times has more:

But Ms. Cortes’s candidacy fell apart after Mr. Lewis’s allies said they had uncovered evidence of even more links between Ms. Cortes and Mr. Pearce, noting for instance that Mr. Pearce’s nieces had helped collect signatures to get Ms. Cortes on the ballot and that one of Mr. Pearce’s brothers, Lester, who is a justice of the peace and is prohibited from campaigning, accompanied them.

Instead of facing another court hearing on Friday, in which Mr. Pearce’s relatives were subpoenaed, Ms. Cortes agreed through her lawyer to pull out of the race.

Pearce was asked about it at the debate this weekend, too:

Ms. Cortes’s candidacy was not debated, but afterward Mr. Pearce was called by reporters, who grilled him on the issue. He denied being behind Ms. Cortes’s candidacy and said he had spoken to his nieces about their involvement. “I wouldn’t have done it,” he said. “I wish they hadn’t done it.”

If I were a Mesa voter, I would want to toss out Russell Pearce just for making it so obvious he thinks they're all stupid.

Meanwhile, they get to look forward to the next natural iteration of Russell Pearce's politics: an open white supremacist running for city council.

Alabama Harvests The Bitter Fruit Of Its Harsh New Immigration Laws: Tomatoes Dying On The Vine

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

 [Video via WJHG]

It's not like they weren't warned. There was already the example of Arizona, whose wrecked economy lies in ruins in the wake of SB1070 and the wave of anti-immigrant sentiment that came with its passage.

People warned Alabamans that if they went ahead and passed their own version of anti-immigrant legislation, they would suffer similar economic consequences. But they did it anyway. Now, the state's anti-immigration laws -- which involve using schoolchildren as proxies for enforcement -- are easily the most draconian and vicious anti-immigrant laws in the country.

And guess what? They are now paying the price. Not only are the schools suddenly emptying of Latino children, more tellingly, the state's tomato farmers are in crisis because there's no one available to harvest the fruit. And the authors of the legislation are just telling them, "tough luck":

STEELE, Ala. -- A sponsor of Alabama's tough new immigration law told desperate tomato farmers Monday that he won't change the law, even though they told him that their crops are rotting in the field and they are at risk of losing their farms.

Republican state Sen. Scott Beason of Gardendale met with about 50 growers, workers, brokers and business people Monday at a tomato packing shed on Chandler Mountain in northeast Alabama. They complained that the new law, which went into effect Thursday, scared off many of their migrant workers at harvest time.

"The tomatoes are rotting on the vine, and there is very little we can do," said Chad Smith, who farms tomatoes with his uncle, father and brother.

"My position is to stay with the law as it is," Beason told the farmers.

Beason helped write and sponsor a law the Legislature enacted in June to crack down on illegal immigration. It copied portions of laws enacted in Arizona, Georgia and other states, including allowing police to detain people indefinitely if they don't have legal status. Beason and other proponents said the law would help free up jobs for Alabamians in a state suffering through 9.9 percent unemployment.

The farmers said the some of their workers may have been in the country illegally, but they were the only ones willing to do the work.

"This law will be in effect this entire growing season," Beason told the farmers. He said he would talk to his congressman about the need for a federal temporary worker program that would help the farmers next season.

"There won't be no next growing season," farmer Wayne Smith said.

"Does America know how much this is going to affect them? They'll find out when they go to the grocery store. Prices on produce will double," he said.

Good question. No doubt these good Republicans will find a way to blame it on President Obama.

This is where the rubber hits the road when it comes to conservative ideology, just as it does when Randian fantasy meets reality -- which is to say, it quickly comes apart. The right-wing nativists want to pretend that undocumented immigrants are taking away jobs that Americans want to be doing, but the reality is they are largely filling unskilled-labor positions that involve back-breaking work -- the kind of work Americans simply are incapable of performing nowadays, regardless of pay.

Another report on the crisis in Alabama delves this point:



From 11Alive in Atlanta:

CHANDLER MOUNTAIN, Ala.-- Chad Smith's family grows tomatoes on a mountaintop in rural northeast Alabama, and ships them from to Canada.

The summer's crop has been good. But Smith sees thousands of overripe tomatoes rotting alongside his vines, and sees only trouble.

"As of right now, we could lose probably fifty percent of what we have left for the year," Smith said.

That, said Smith, is because of a stiff shortage of field hands, traditionally Hispanic migrant workers. And Smith doesn't sugar-coat their status.

"Farmers across the whole country and every state (rely) on illegal immigration workers to do this kind of work," Smith said, "because that's the only people that's willing to do it."

Like Georgia, this year Alabama enacted a tough new immigration law designed to squeeze out people working and living illegally in the US. By the time Smith's crop started ripening in July, he says most of his usual workers had disappeared.

Chad Smith says he's tried local workers.

"It ain't about the money, it's about the work physically. If a person can't do the work, they can't do it no matter how much you pay them," Smith said.

"As of next year, if nothing changes, there won't be a tomato grown here."

It appears that many of the Alabama workers are fleeing to Florida, which has more sane immigration statutes on the books.



Meanwhile, the farmers have been trying to talk sense into state officials, but to no avail:

"Give us hope, give us something," said farmer Jeremy Calvert, who served as moderator at the meeting. "We feed more people than ever before. We have to have a labor force. There are no machines to pick fresh tomatoes or cucumbers. We use Hispanic labor because we have to. We're caught between a rock and a hard place."

Calvert's words were repeated often concerning the largely Hispanic workforce that harvests the state's and nation's crops.

Keith Smith, a Gold Ridge area farmer who helped organize the event, said the labor issue extends beyond the agriculture community. He said other industries rely heavily on Hispanic labor because of necessity.

As the farmer in the video above observes:

FARMER: I was at a meeting at the Greenbriar restaurant in Huntsville several weeks ago, and there were several senators and legislators there ... Some of them spoke and said where were we at when this law was being debated. They heard from 80 percent of the people that said they were in favor of this law. Well, there's a fundamental problem with that. Eighty percent of the people that's for this law doesn't understand that the 1 percent of us feeds the United States. Our voice is small because we are small. ,,, But we have to have a labor force.

This is all very reminiscent of what's happened when there have been previous outbreaks of xenophobic hysteria. One prime example of this occurred during World War II, when an even more intense outbreak of hysteria in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor led Americans to incarcerate 120,000 Japanese Americans in various internment camps.

As it happened, Japanese Americans provided a substantial portion of the nation's fresh produce supply, particularly on the West Coast, but also in the Midwest. And when we shipped them off to concentration camps, we lost all that production -- even though the nativists who ardently pushed for the evacuation had dismissed this concern beforehand.

I explored this in some detail in my book Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community. The question first was raised when the idea of removing all Japanese Americans to the interior was being debated by the public:

The removal would not be without problems, warned some. “Approximately 95 percent of the vegetables grown here are raised by the Japanese,” noted J.R. Davidson, market master for the Pike Place Public Market in Seattle, where Eastside Japanese sold many of their goods. “About 35 percent of the sellers in the market are Japanese. Many white persons are leaving the produce business to take defense jobs, which are not open to the Japanese.” Letter writers to the local newspapers raised the same concern.

Their fears were quickly derided. Wrote Charlotte Drysdale of Seattle in a letter to the Post-Intelligencer:

It has been interesting to note how many contributors have been afraid we would have no garden truck if the Japs are sent to concentration areas. We had gardens long before the Japs were imported about the turn of the century, to work for a very low wage (a move for which we are still paying dearly) and we can still have them after we have no Japs.
Isn’t that discounting American ability just a little too low?

These concerns were raised during the congressional hearings that preceded the internment episode too:

Floyd Oles, a spokesman for the Washington Produce Shippers’ Association, warned the committee that the state’s vegetable and fruit production would suffer if the Japanese were evacuated and urged the members to reconsider. He was told that plans were already being formed for replacement farmers to take over the operation of the Japanese farms. And he was questioned about his business connections with Japanese produce cooperatives, including Bellevue’s.

The result was anything but pretty:

The day after Bellevue’s Japanese residents were loaded aboard the train for evacuation, the May 21 edition of the local weekly, the Bellevue American, noted their departure with a front-page story headlined, “Bellevue Japanese are Evacuated Wednesday -- Sent to California.”

On the same page was a smaller item headlined, “No Strawberry Festival This Year.” The story put a wartime face on the reasons presented for ending the city’s main summer attraction, a 16-year tradition: “With the rationing of gasoline, all agreed that the Festival would have to be abandoned this year. Other reasons given were: the shortage of sugar, conservation of tires, avoidance of large crowds and the war effort that is keeping so many busy.”

A simpler explanation, of course, was that 90 percent of Bellevue’s agricultural workforce -- the people who provided the Strawberry Festival with strawberries -- was riding a train to Pinedale, Calif. That loss became painfully obvious in the next week’s paper. A front-page headline read: “200 Workers Needed Now to Care for Crops in Overlake Area.”

The Japanese farmers, under threat of law, had maintained their crops through the spring. At the time they were evacuated, the lettuce crop was ready for harvest, peas were a week or two away, and strawberries were red and ready for plucking. Tomatoes and the second crop of lettuce were due for harvest by the end of July.

Western Farm and Produce Inc., which had stepped in as the wartime substitute for the Japanese, received a Farm Service Administration loan the day of the evacuation for $32,107, mostly to cover the costs it incurred in purchasing the remaining crops, and equipment to grow and harvest them, from the 33 lease farmers who had signed agreements. The company also set up operations at the Midlake warehouse the Japanese growers owned.

But it quickly became apparent that the company was going to have trouble raising enough labor to work the fields. H.C. Van Valkenburgh, the lawyer who formed the company and managed it, pleaded for help through the story in the American. “Labor is the biggest immediate problem because of the highly perishable nature of these crops, which are maturing rapidly,” the story reported. “The pay is much higher than in normal times, and many of the good people who are helping with such fine spirit, consider the money as secondary to the national need of preserving these foods.

“Most of these foods are going to the armed forces, according to Van Valkenburgh, who pointed out that a carload of cauliflower has just been shipped to men in Alaska, and another carload of lettuce has just been shipped to Chicago for the armed forces.” Van Valkenburgh told the reporter he needed 100 workers immediately for picking strawberries and another 100 to care for other crops.

A week later, Van Valkenburgh still needed 100 workers for the strawberry harvest. The following week’s story in the American made no mention of the other crops, but simply appealed for labor. “ ‘We much prefer to employ local help,’ said Mr. Van Valkenburgh Wednesday night. ‘Local help proves more reliable, transportation difficulties are avoided, the number of workers can be regulated, there is more interest aiding a local industry, workers can be trained into steady year-around jobs -- and, of course, we would much prefer to keep the money here.’

“ ‘Consequently, we are making an urgent appeal to all who want to aid in harvesting and caring for these crops to notify us at once, so that we can organize our labor. If insufficient local labor is available, we can get the workers from Seattle, but we want to know how many to send for.’ ”

Actually, the ready labor pool in Seattle was not merely short; it was practically nonexistent. Local Filipinos were already in place on Bainbridge Island farms, and the larger White River land tracts were also sapping the usual workforce. Few white farmers would touch the small Japanese tracts, and other laborers were signing up to join the war effort, which had the advantages of better pay and considerably greater glory.

Berry pickers were paid by the carry -- a wooden tray that held a large number of smaller berry crates, which meant that the fastest pickers were paid the most. The company also hired tomato planters and weeders, who were paid 50 cents an hour. Truck drivers to haul the goods were paid the best: $1 an hour.

But Western Farm and Produce lost a large portion of the strawberry crop to wet weather conditions, so returns on its first harvest were a considerable disappointment. Soon, it was cutting back its operations.

Confusion soon set in, especially as the Japanese leasees began to settle into the camps. In most cases, the farmers had reached agreement with Western Farm to continue paying them through the harvest, so they could in turn make their lease payments to the landowners. A few had been released of their lease obligations altogether, and so the company itself became responsible for paying the rent.

But Western Farm fell down on both accounts. First, it began receiving letters of complaint from the landowners who had released the Japanese from their leases, demanding rent for the land the company was working. The company paid up for a few months in some cases -- it contested others -- and then quit paying altogether after the summer.

Then the Japanese internees, with War Relocation Authority officials backing them, began demanding their unpaid rent. In some cases, the company made partial payments, but even those ended after 1942.

And, with only a handful of workers available for the harvest, it became clear that Van Valkenburgh’s grand scheme to become “the successor to the Bellevue Vegetable Growers Association,” as Western Farm and Produce Inc.’s letterhead suggested, was a money-losing proposition, and the operation quickly dried up.

The crops were abandoned. The company kept hiring tomato planters and weeders through July, but there is no indication that either the tomatoes or the second lettuce crop were ever harvested.

When the Nisei came back three and four years later, it was obvious that only a fraction of the crops they had planted were harvested. The farms had lain fallow since they had left.

And the Strawberry Festival, that great gathering in tiny Bellevue of thousands of people from all walks of life and from all around the Puget Sound, was gone forever.

Similarly, you have to wonder what will happen now to Alabama's tomato-farming industry. Once it gets blown away like this, it may take years to recover -- if it ever does.

Tea Partiers In Arizona Prop Up Fake Latina Candidate In Hopes Of Saving Russell Pearce From Recall

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

I guess we already knew that Russell Pearce -- author of SB1070 and our favorite Nazi-coddling nativist politician -- has nothing but contempt for Latino voters. Now he's demonstrating the same contempt for every voter in his Arizona legislative district.

Pearce, of course, is facing a recall election because voters in his district finally got tired of his anti-immigrant extremism -- not to mention his coarse, embarrassing corruption.

So how does Pearce go about convincing voters that now he's a trustworthy public servant? Why, by indulging in a scam that colorfully demonstrates both his base bigotry and his utter lack of ethics, of course.

It seems that Pearce's operatives -- notably, a local tea-party leader -- went out and recruited a hapless conservative Latino lady named Olivia Cortes to run a sham candidacy in the upcoming recall election -- the idea being that if enough Latinos vote for Cortes it will drain support away from his actual opponent, Jerry Lewis.

Phoenix's ABC 15 has more, including a revealing interview with Cortes herself, who demonstrates clearly on camera that she's utterly clueless, a front for the tea partiers who support Pearce ardently:

For the first time, could there be evidence Cortes is a sham candidate? It was presented in Maricopa County Superior Court during Thursday's hearing.

An audio recording could help in the case to block the senate candidacy of Cortes.
In the recording, you hear Suzanne Dreher’s voice. She says she was paid to circulate petitions to get Olivia Cortes' name on the ballot.

A voter can be heard in the recording saying, “Oh, well, I don't think I want to sign because I support Russell Pearce.”

Dreher can reportedly be heard saying, “Well, then you want to sign.”

Under oath, she testified to a hidden agenda to get Sen. Russell Pearce re-elected.

“I was told if people were supporters of Pearce to go ahead and sign this and it would help his chances,” Dreher said in court.

“So the idea was to dilute or divert the vote?” asked Tom Ryan, the plaintiff’s attorney.
Dreher responded, “Yeah.”

Ryan asked Dreher, “Did anyone talk to you prior to you doing this advise you that by running a diversionary or sham candidate that might run afoul of Arizona election laws?

Dreher responded, “I had no idea.”

Here's Cortes' full interview with ABC 15. As you can see, she's being coached off-camera by the tea-partying Pearce operative -- a guy named Greg Western -- who created this fraud:



On Monday, the court ruled that Cortes can keep running, but it castigated Greg Western for playing games with the election:

In his ruling, Burke did skewer East Valley Tea Party chairman Greg Western, a Pearce supporter who has been helping Cortes with her campaign.

"His testimony that he has no idea who designed, posted, and paid for campaign signs supporting Cortes or who paid the professional circulators is too improbable to be believed," he said. "The court finds that Pearce supporters recruited Cortes, a political neophyte, to run in the recall election to siphon Hispanic votes from Lewis to advance Pearce's recall election bid."

Burke said without the support of Pearce supporters, Cortes would have had no chance of qualifying as a candidate or running any sort of political campaign, but reiterated that the court found no wrongdoing by Cortes herself. He said the courts should not, in most cases, be the final arbiter of the motives political candidates have for running for election.

"Divining candidates' motives and acting on them is more properly the role of the voters," Burke said. "Plaintiff's remedy is through the ballot box and not the courts."

He said the fact that many petition gatherers honestly told signers that signing Cortes' petition would help Pearce makes it additionally difficult for him to find fraud.

Meanwhile, an investigation has been launched into the question of who is paying for Cortes' campaign, including the signs that are popping up all over Mesa.

Amusingly enough, Pearce -- who adamantly denies having anything to do with Cortes candidacy -- tried playing the race card when he was called out on this:

PEARCE: Where's Gloria Allred when you need her? You know, this Hispanic woman doesn't have a right to run? Is this a white male Mormon race only? Shame on them. Shame on them.

Obviously, Pearce and his operatives think we're all stupid. Or at least, that the voters of Mesa are.

An Undercurrent of Extremism Runs Through the NRA's Board of Directors

Those of us who grew up around the NRA are all too familiar with one of the more striking facets of the organization's relentless fearmongering, its paranoid style: namely, it not only traffics in wild and groundless conspiracy theories about "gun grabbers" and Bircherite "New World Order" takeover schemes, but it forms deep associations with the very extremists whose far-right worldview fosters such paranoia.

The most recent example of this has been the way the NRA's fearmongering about President Obama has fostered real violence from right-wing extremists.

The reason for this kind of extremism is in fact a top-down phenomenon: increasingly, the people running the NRA are themselves deeply extremist.

The folks at the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence have put together a directory of the NRA's board titled Meet the NRA Directors. It's a fascinating site, one that well rewards scrolling through and reading.

In addition to what you'd expect -- a lot of ties to the arms manufacturers who funnel much of the money that is the NRA's lifeblood -- there is also, predictably, a deep undercurrent of right-wing extremism.

The most striking example of this is Robert K. Brown, the longtime publisher of Soldier of Fortune magazine. As David Holthouse has explored in some detail already, Brown's magazine was for years the monthly Bible of the "militia" movement in the 1990s, one of the movement's more prominent promoters. The magazine not only promoted the concept of militias but offered advice on how to form them and urged participants to prepare for persecution from the New World Order.

The ties to violent extremists run deeper, in fact:

Soldier of Fortune distributed copies of a newsletter called The Resister during the 1990s. The Resister was published by Steven Barry, then a member of the Army’s Special Forces and leader of the unsanctioned Special Forces Underground organization. The newsletter initially drew inspiration from the controversial siege at Ruby Ridge. The content of the newsletter evidenced a “white Christian militia mentality,” according to Michael Reynolds from the Southern Poverty Law Center, containing racist and anti-Semitic content while also exploring “New World Order” conspiracy theories. When Timothy McVeigh was arrested for the Oklahoma City Bombing, in his possession was a Soldier of Fortune-distributed copy of The Resister.

Also on Brown's record: an array of crimes (largely would-be contract killers) associated with the magazine, as well Brown's associations with right-wing death squads operating in Central America in the 1980s.

As it happens, one of the writers for Brown's magazine -- indeed, he penned one of the first Soldier of Fortune pieces promoting militias in 1994, titled "Join A Militia -- Break The Law?" -- was yet another NRA board member, a fellow named Wayne Anthony Ross. Over the years, Ross has maintained his associations with the far-right Patriot movement, including his more recent involvement in the case of the Alaska militiamen arrested for an assassination plot:

In March 2011, five members of the Alaska Peacemakers Militia, including leader Francis Cox, were arrested for planning to kill Alaska State Troopers and a federal judge. The group -- which had stockpiled firearms and explosives—advocated the violent secession of Alaska from the United States. Five days after Cox and his co-conspirators were arrested, Alaska Citizens Militia "supply sergeant" William Fulton disappeared—but not before signing over his two houses to Ross, who in 2009 shared the stage with Cox at a Peacemakers meeting. In July 2011, it was reported that authorities were looking for Fulton, who they believe supplied weapons to Cox’s militia.

One of Ross's close associates -- Alaska Rep. Don Young -- is likewise an NRA board member -- and was similarly caught up in the Peacemakers brouhaha:

The Peacemakers had earlier distributed a “Letter of Declaration” which called for armed insurrection in response to the federal government’s enactment of gun control laws. Representative Young signed the letter at a Peacemakers “Open Carry” event in a Fairbanks restaurant. When asked during the event, “If any government should decide that we have to register certain of our arms or turn them in, what would your recommendation be?” Young replied, “Don't do it...I sincerely mean that. Don't turn them in.”

Holthouse reported on this incident at the time, which led us to wonder: Does Young need to reaffirm his oath to the Constitution?

We've been wondering because Young actually signed a revolutionary oath concocted by militia organizer Schaeffer Cox -- the Alaska militiaman arrested last week for plotting to kill cops and a couple of judges -- declaring that the signers would refuse to recognize any new federal taxes or gun laws: "[T]he duty of us good and faithful people will not be to obey them but to alter or abolish them and institute new government laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to us shall seem most likely to effect our safety and happiness."

Then there's Jim Gilmore, who took over the reins at Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation in 2009. The FCF likewise has a substantial history of promoting right-wing extremism (it too was a great promoter of the militia concept in the 1990s) and has more recently been closely linked to one of the most heinous acts of right-wing violence -- namely, Ander Breivik's horrific terrorist attack in Norway in which 93 people were killed:

The Free Congress Foundation (FCF), a think tank that promotes the far-right’s viewpoint in the “Culture War,” has courted a great deal of controversy. Gilmore effectively succeeded FCF President & CEO Paul Weyrich in 2009. On replacing Weyrich, Gilmore said, “Paul Weyrich blazed the trail for many conservative themes and I want to continue that leadership.” The “themes” advocated by FCF have included the following:
In his manifesto, Anders Behring Breivik, the perpetrator of a July 2011 terrorist attack in Norway that left 77 dead, quoted extensively and at length from a FCF-published book about “Cultural Marxism” entitled “Political Correctness: A Short History of Ideology.” The book was written by the former head of the FCF’s Center for Cultural Conservatism William Lind. According to investigative journalist Chip Berlet, “Breivik's core thesis is borrowed from William S. Lind's antisemitic conspiracy theory about 'Cultural Marxism'.” The Southern Poverty Law Center has described Lind as “a key popularizer of the idea of cultural Marxism.”

One of the more colorful NRA board members if rock guitarist Ted Nugent, whose fondness for saying outrageous things is accompanied by a willingness to embrace ethnic, racial and sexual hatemongering and their associated far-right conspiracy theories. The Educational Fund's site has a pretty good array, including this nugget:

Among "What I said is, 'If you can't speak English, get the fuck out of America.' Spurred by a first-person, hands-on, eyewitness experience in America, where I've gone to enough fuckin' convenience stores where the cocksucker behind the counter can't translate 'doughnut' for me. I never mentioned the word 'Hispanics.' I never mentioned the word 'Mexicans.' I never mentioned the word 'Latinos.' I never mentioned the words 'Spanish language.' I merely said, 'If you can't speak English, get the fuck out of America.”

Of course, we also recall how Nugent issued threats to both Obama and Hillary Clinton onstage in 2007:

Nugent: I was in Chicago last week I said---Hey Obama, you might want to suck on one of these you punk? Obama, he's a piece of shit and I told him to suck on one of my machine guns...Let's hear it for them. I was in NY and I said hey Hillary---you might want to ride one of these into the sunset you worthless bitch...Since I'm in California, I'm gonna find-- she might wanna suck on my machine gun! Hey, Dianne Feinstein, ride one of these you worthless whore. Any questions? Freeeeedom!

Once Obama was elected, Nugent just ratcheted it up, including his violent talk on Neil Cavuto's Fox News show in 2010:

I’m the expert on the health care bill because I kill pigs. And it’s the communist, Mao, Che agenda of the communist, Mao, Che fans in the White House. They’re pigs, Neil! We gotta kill the pig.

Talk like that earned Nugent inclusion on a list detailing "Hate in the Mainstream" compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Nugent also ardently promoted the theory that Obama planned to grab Americans' guns:

Meanwhile, in order to stop the drowning and murders, I will work on banning water, Obama can try to ban guns. Good luck. Save an innocent life, join the NRA and celebrate 138 years of keeping and bearing. Drive a bad guys nuts. Then shoot him while he’s committing a violent crime.

Some NRA board members, like Sandra Froman, don't have any associations with right-wing extremists in their backgrounds -- they just ardently promote their conspiracy theories:

In the August 2006 edition of America’s 1st Freedom, Froman claimed, “The United Nations is engaged in a global gun ban-scheme. It is well-organized and well funded by eccentric anti-gun billionaires. The goal of this movement is to get every nation to sign a treaty banning the private ownership of firearms worldwide and giving U.N. troops authority to enforce the treaty.” She was referring to a United Nations treaty dealing with small arms trafficking. The treaty’s actual goal is to reduce the illicit international trade in small arms—it does not address the issue of private firearms ownership. In any case, foreign treaties require approval by two-thirds of the members of the U.S. Senate in order to be ratified.

This undercurrent is nothing particularly new for the NRA -- it has a long history of these kinds of dalliances with the far right. But it appears to be growing stronger and louder and more radical than at any time since the militia-loving heyday of the 1990s.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Whoda Thunk? Michele Bachmann Is A Big Fan Of The 1924 Asian Exclusion Act

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Among many other lunacies from last night's tea party debate, Michele Bachmann uttered this:

The immigration system in the United States worked very, very well up until the mid-1960s when liberal members of Congress changed the immigration laws. What works is to have people come into the United States with a little bit of money in their pocket, legally, with sponsors so that if anything happens to them they don’t fall back on the taxpayers to take care of them.

Ian Milhiser at ThinkProgress explains:

In 1924, Congress passed a package of immigration laws — including the National Origins Act and the Asian Exclusion Act — establishing a quota system giving preferential treatment to European immigrants. Under these laws, the number of immigrants who could be admitted from a given country was capped at a percentage of the number of people from that nation who were living in the United States in 1890. Because Americans were overwhelming of European descent in 1890, the practical effect of these laws was an enormous thumb on the scale encouraging white immigration.
These quotas were eliminated by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, an act which is widely credited for opening up our nation to new Americans of Asian and Central and South American descent.

As Milhiser explains, these laws were notorious for singling out Japanese immigrants -- and all other Asians as well -- for exclusion from immigration, which had the effect of reinforcing existing laws that prohibited Asians from even becoming naturalized citizens:

It’s worth noting that the 1924 laws that Bachmann believes to have worked so very well singled out certain people for particularly harsh treatment. As immigration scholar Roger Daniels explains:

1924 law also barred “aliens ineligible to citizenship” – reflecting the fact that American law had, since 1870, permitted only “white persons” and those “of African descent” to become naturalized citizens. The purpose of this specific clause was to keep out Japanese, as other Asians had been barred already.

The prohibition against naturalization embedded in these laws was slowly eradicated by the effects of World War II. Chinese -- who had been prohibited from emigration to the U.S. since 1884 -- were permitted to become naturalized American citizens in 1944 as a result of China's alliance with the U.S. Meanwhile, Japanese immigrants were finally permitted to become naturalized American citizens with passage in 1952 of the McCarran-Walter Act. But the race-based system of quotas persisted, and Asian immigration remained at a trickle as a result during those years.

This is the system that Bachmann thinks is just hunky-dory. Which is even more appalling when you consider its origins.

As I explained in my book Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community, the 1924 Immigration Act was passed at the height of racist anti-Japanese xenophobia, the culmination of a long campaign to exclude Asian immigrants of all stripes. It began on the local level in Pacific Coast states like Washington and California, and eventually became a national phenomenon -- one that had powerful consequences 17 years later:

Politicians like Albert Johnson [a congressman from Hoquiam, Washington] in particular were prone to picking up the anti-Japanese cause, since the agitating factions represented several key voting blocs, while the Japanese themselves were excluded from voting and thus had no political clout whatsoever. Various officeholders, especially rural legislators, found that attacking the Japanese threat, and piously talking about saving American civilization, went over well with the voters. But even on a statewide level, the issue received prominent play; Governor Hart, a Republican, campaigned for his ultimately successful re-election on a promise to outlaw the leasing of any property by the Issei, while one of his GOP primary opponents, John Stringer, took it a step further: “It is our duty to take every acre of land on Puget Sound away from the Japs and place it in the hands of our ex-soldiers.”

The Japanese and their few allies, which included the produce and agricultural associations that helped distribute their goods, were poorly organized compared to their opponents. They offered token protest of the proposed laws, but found themselves out-manned. When the legislature convened early in 1921, a flood of anti-Japanese bills awaited. The first proposal would have made it mandatory to post American citizens as guards at any Japanese-owned hotel. Another called for an official investigation of the Japanese immigrants. A third prohibited any “aliens and disloyal persons” from teaching in any public or private schools. All these faltered in the legislative process. But the fourth and centerpiece bill—a land law that forbade ownership of land by all “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” and making it a criminal offense to sell or lease land to any such alien—flew through both houses nearly unimpeded, passing the House 71-19 and the Senate 36-2. Governor Hart, freshly re-elected, signed the bill in short order.

Flush with political victory, Miller Freeman [leader of the anti-Japanese campaign in Washington] had the final say on the matter. In an article addressed to the Japanese community, he minced no words: “The people of this country never invited you here. You came into this country of your own responsibility, large numbers after our citizens supposed that Japanese immigration had been suppressed. You came notwithstanding you knew you were not welcome. You have created an abnormal situation in our midst for which you are to blame.”

The storm of venom against Japanese immigrants kept raining down for the next three years, often with an official imprimatur. New Mexico passed an alien land law in 1922, and Oregon, Montana, and Idaho all followed suit in 1923. Washington’s legislature tightened its own alien land law in 1923 by empowering the attorney general to seize the property of anyone who leased or sold to ineligible aliens.

The United States Supreme Court weighed in as well. Its 1922 ruling in Ozawa v. United States officially sanctioned the exclusion of all Asian races. A Japanese immigrant named Takao Ozawa—arguing that he had been almost entirely raised and educated in the United States, was a product of its universities, and was a Christian who spoke English in his home—sought to overturn a district court ruling that denied him the right to seek citizenship. And though the court agreed that he was “well qualified by character and education for citizenship,” it denied his appeal on the grounds that immigration laws limited naturalization to “free white persons and aliens of African nativity.” Then, in 1923, the court upheld the constitutionality of Washington’s alien land law with its Terrace v. Thompson ruling (in a case involving a King County landowner named Terrace who openly declared his wish to lease his land to an Issei farmer, and sued the state's attorney general over efforts to enforce the alien land law) which found that an alien ineligible for citizenship did not enjoy equal protection under the law.

The final blow came in 1924, when Albert Johnson, using his offices as chair of the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee, introduced a bill that would limit immigration to a 2 percent quota for each nationality, but further prohibiting the admission of any “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” The bill easily passed the House, but once in the Senate, the provisions were altered to allow for a Japanese quota as well.

However, Republican Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts then stood up in the Senate and denounced a letter from the Japanese ambassador—which had warned of “grave consequences” for relations between the two nations if the measure were to pass—as a “veiled threat” against the United States. Lodge led a stampede of support for the House version of the bill, and the era of the Gentlemen’s Agreement was over.

Signed shortly afterward by President Calvin Coolidge, complete Japanese exclusion was now the law. Officially called the Immigration Act of 1924, it became known popularly as the Asian Exclusion Act. (Its final clause: “The terms ‘wife’ and ‘husband’ do not include a wife husband by reason of a proxy or picture marriage.”)

Taken in isolation, these little acts of racial mean spiritedness may have seemed of little moment. But in fact they had consequences that eventually exploded into the history books. In Japan, the public had been closely watching the passage of the alien land laws with mounting outrage. And when news of the passage of the Asian Exclusion Act was announced, mass riots broke out in Tokyo and other cities. As Pearl Buck would later observe, the then-nascent movement for American-style democracy, which had been slowly gaining momentum in Japan, was effectively wiped out overnight. The military authoritarians who would control the nation for the next 20 years gained complete political mastery, and one of the cornerstones of their rule was a bellicose anti-Americanism that would finally reach fruition in late 1941.

Moreover, the groundwork laid by the success of the nativist campaign led to one of the nation's great historical atrocities -- namely, the incarceration of 110,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II.

And we all remember how Michele Bachmann deplored that episode -- when it suited her own fearmongering purposes. Guess it's another story when it comes to immigration, eh?

This Isn't About Debt Or Deficits -- Republicans Just Want A Reason To Impeach Obama

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Not very many people seem to have caught the drift of this recent Glenn Beck rant, which was noted at Media Matters for its classic Beckian illogic, with the Mad Hatter declaring that if we can't use Hitler analogies in "logical conversation," then "We are going to be a society of gas chambers!"

What he and his sidekick were talking about, though, was comparing the Obama administration to Hitler and the Nazis in the event the president decides to simply invoke the 14th Amendment and raise the debt ceiling by executive order. Because then, you see, he would just be a dictator.

This is the narrative that's gradually building on the Right as a counter-narrative to the obvious point that if Obama uses the 14th Amendment to raise the debt ceiling, it will be because Republicans in Congress failed to act. No, instead, it will be because he is intent on seizing dictatorial powers.

And for that, they will then argue, he must be impeached.

Andrew Sullivan lays it out:

Here's the scenario. The House GOP pushes for completely unserious Boehner plan (including a balanced budget amendment) that they know will be vetoed; they then filibuster the Reid plan in the Senate, forcing Obama to invoke a 14th Amendment executive prerogative, which they will then turn around and impeach him for.

Far-fetched? I hope so. But every time you think you have reached the end of Republican extremism, they manage to move further out of the solar system.

It's not really that far-fetched, considering that Republicans have been mouthing the I-word with great lust for some time now. Last we heard, they wanted to impeach him over Libya.

If he resorts to the 14th Amendment, they are already lining up to impeach him. Right-wing talk-show host Mark Levin said it explicitly two weeks ago:

If Barack Obama attempts to destroy the Separation of Powers doctrine, if he intends to seize Congressional power when it comes to borrowing and spending despite the plain wording of Article 1 Section 8 Clause 2. In other words if he’s going to violate his oath of office…then he needs to be impeached.

…

Should he attempt to seize explicit Congressional power, we’ve got to make a case that we don’t like dictators in this country and that we will not accept dictators in this country. There’s not even a colorable argument that can be made that justifies the President of the United States seizing for himself the authority to “borrow money on the credit of the United States.” And should Chuck Schumer continue to urge this and should the President do it, then Chuck Schumer should be expelled from the United States Senate when the Republicans take it back over as they will.

We already know that Republicans believe it's smart political strategy to destroy the economy so that it can be blamed on Obama. They're willing to throw the country into economic ruin just in the hopes that it will work to their political advantage.

And if the president stops them? They will make him pay.

'Special Report' 'Straight News' Segment Features Groundless Gun Story Concocted By Militiaman

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

We talk a lot here about how right-wing mainstream media act as "transmitters" for right-wing extremism, legitimizing radical ideas from the most violent and racist elements of the Right by repackaging them for general consumption. The inevitable outcome of this kind of transmission is what Anders Breivik, the Norwegian right-wing terrorist, represented in many ways -- but it's something that occurs far more often in the USA, and most frequently in recent years on Fox News.

David Holthouse at Media Matters has the most recent example: Fox's recent coverage of an ATF sting operation called "Operation Castaway," which Fox has been trying to depict as yet another rogue gun operation gone awry -- except that it's not:

Nothing in the more than 500 pages of Operation Castaway court documents, which are public records, indicate anything other than a textbook operation culminating in the interdiction of a large shipment of firearms bound for Honduras. Eight traffickers including Crumpler were convicted and sentenced to between two and a half and seven years in federal prison.

Despite this winning outcome, Operation Castaway is under attack from right-wing bloggers and Fox. These critics are disregarding basic standards of fact checking in their rush to link the Tampa investigation to Operation Fast and Furious, the failed ATF initiative in which agents knowingly allowed firearms to be trafficked across the border into Mexico.

In one typical example, Fox Business host Lou Dobbs branded Operation Castaway "a second version of the botched operation Fast and Furious" during his July 11 broadcast.

And who was their source for this information? Why, the far-right wingnutosphere's nastiest and nuttiest elements, of course -- a militiaman straight out of a 1990s caricature:

There is no evidence in the court files to support Dobbs' claims and he offered no original reporting to back them up. Instead, he relied on references to "new reports" and "allegations" without revealing their dubious origin--anonymously sourced blog items on conspiratorial websites.

The first of these posts appeared July 6. It was headlined "Breaking News: Source claims ATF's Tampa SAC walked guns to HONDURAS! Part of Operation Castaway?" [SAC is an acronym for Special Agent in Charge.] Citing "private correspondence from a proven credible source," the blog item reported that Tampa ATF deliberately facilitated the smuggling of firearms to Honduras "using the techniques and tactics identical to Fast and Furious."

The July 6 blog item was republished with no additional reporting by dozens of pro-militia and other right-wing websites. It jumped to Fox News in the July 8 broadcast of Special Report with Bret Baier, which featured an interview with "online journalist" Mike Vanderboegh, one of the bloggers who posted the original item. Vanderboegh was a leading figure in the 1990s militia movement who more recently led the Alabama Minuteman Support Team, a border vigilante group, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Vanderboegh was also one of the first to report on the failed Fast and Furious investigation.

"Mike Vanderboegh communicates with a host of ATF agents daily on his web site," said Fox News reporter William La Jeunesse. "Agents told him Wednesday Operation Castaway out of the Tampa office, also knowingly sold guns to criminals, in this case, 1,000 to buyers for the violent drug gang, MS-13. Those guns to Honduras."

La Jeunesse gave no indication that he'd made any attempt to confirm Vanderboegh's story. He simply gave the blogger a national platform.

Some of you may remember Vanderboegh from the health-care debate: he's the fellow who urged his readers to throw bricks through Democrats' windows, and they in fact did so. One of his victims was Gabrielle Giffords, who had a brick thrown through an office window -- well before she was shot. (Wonder if they've checked that brick for Jared Loughner's DNA.)

And of course, being the sensitive and thoughtful fellow he is, Vanderboegh escalated the rhetoric when he was called on it:

May I tell you my personal motive for doing this? I’m trying to save the lives of Nancy Pelosi, and every one of these people who do not understand the unintended consequences of their actions. [...] Because they are not paying attention to the million of people across this deepening divide that politics no longer avails them. [...] We refuse to participate in the system, and we refuse to pay the fines, and we refuse arrest. Now where do you suppose that’s going but a thousand little Waco’s.

This is almost identical to the phony rationale that Vanderboegh has trotted out for publicly fantasizing about my violent death: he's just trying to wake me up to the consequences of my work, you see. As you can imagine, I'm deeply touched.

Here's Vanderboegh leading one of those open-carry "Second Amendment" rallies in the Washington area last year:



I guess it should no longer be a surprise that Fox News would treat this kind of character as a credible information source. But that's because being a right-wing propaganda channel means you don't have to actually tend to the truth, fact, or reality.

O'Reilly Slams National Council Of La Raza As 'A Pretty Radicalized Group' That 'Opposes Any Kind Of Border Security'

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Bill O'Reilly cooked up another way to attack President Obama this week -- by suggesting that he was associating with racial radicals again, namely, the National Council of La Raza:

O'REILLY: But the president spoke to La Raza this week. La Raza, a pretty radicalized group. I think they're further left than you are. I mean, they don't like any kind of border security, they want amnesty for all the people here. They object to almost every kind of measure to control illegal immigration. And yet the president feels comfortable there. Do you think he's just posturing?

This is why O'Reilly enjoys about as much credibility among Latino viewers as Lou Dobbs -- which is to say, nearly zero. Because everyone who knows their way around the immigration scene is perfectly aware that NCLR is a very temperate, middle-of-the-road organization -- and in fact is frequently criticized by other Latino groups for being too safe and cautious, and for being corporate sellouts. (Your mileage may vary.)

Indeed, all O'Reilly and his crack staff would have had to do is visit NCLR's website to read this:

Unfortunately, NCLR has been called an “open-borders advocate” and the “illegal alien lobby” numerous times. NCLR has repeatedly recognized the right of the United States, as a sovereign nation, to control its borders. Moreover, NCLR has supported numerous specific measures to strengthen border enforcement, provided that such enforcement is conducted fairly, humanely, and in a nondiscriminatory fashion.

There are a whole bunch of falsehoods about NCLR -- beginning with their name -- that endure as right-wing myths. I bet O'Reilly has pretty much swallowed those whole, too.

The 'Job Creators' Myth: Our Corporate Masters Are Aiming For The Latin American Model Of Oligarchy

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Anyone remember what it was like to work in the late 1990s? The memories are fading fast as the years of persistent joblessness pile up -- years that began well before the big crash in 2008, when it was already self-evident that the Bush administration's claims that massive tax cuts for the wealthy were the sure route to full employment were an epochal load of hooey. Now even that seems like a quaint and distant memory.

In 1998, it was a workers' market: Everyone I know had a good job, and a lot of them were in the tech sector. Good benefits were a given, as were good salaries. If the working conditions sucked, there was always someone else who offered a better environment and maybe better pay too.

That was before the tech bubble burst in 2001. I spent that year working in investment journalism in a newsroom that primarily revolved around the stock market.

I remember remarking on a number of articles we published in which corporate honchos bitched bitterly about the fact that they had lost the ability to control their workers, to ignore their workplace demands, and to short-change their benefits, or whatever other steps they might take to shore up their corporate bottom lines and make their shareholders happier. I remember thinking at the time that the economic tides would inevitably turn, and the next time these folks wound up on top and it became, once again, an employer's market, they would make certain that they never found themselves in that position again.

We used to joke, back in the '90s, that a recession was the Republican way of shortening the lift lines. It's a truism that the wealthy despise having to share too much of their space with too many other people. And in the late '90s, they were having to share their space with a whole lot of freshly well-to-do people.

Well, that isn't an issue now. Problem solved. I imagine the wintertime lift lines at Sun Valley are pretty wide open these days.

Because the reality, of course, is that while the average CEO now makes (as of 2009) only 263 times what his average worker makes (down from a high of 525 times in 2000), they almost never in fact take the windfalls they reap from those huge tax breaks and actually invest the money in employing people. Instead, they ratchet up their bonuses and salaries another notch or two, buy another yacht or another condo in the Bahamas, and tuck the rest away in a tax-free account in the Caymans.

They're currently proving, by sidelining all this cash, that giving them tax breaks doesn't do a damned thing for job creation -- perhaps it does exactly the opposite.

Moreover, they continue reaping large salaries while worker payrolls are slashed. Now people just cling to whatever jobs they can, keep their heads down, and count their lucky stars if they still have work. Either that, or they join the ranks of the eternal jobless.

A year ago, the conventional wisdom was that the ongoing hoarding of large sums of cash by corporate CEOs was "not sustainable". But instead, not only have they sustained it, the hoarding and resulting joblessness have soured whatever faint signs of a recovery we saw in 2000-2010.

Another bit of conventional wisdom we keep hearing is that 9 percent unemployment may be with us for quite awhile. They seem to be institutionalizing the joblessness -- and are quite content to do so.

This was what my late friend Frank Church used to tell me:

One comment in particular, however, stands out in my mind these days. We were talking about America's future, and where the conservative cadre that was then taking over the Republican Party intended to take us. His expression darkened, and it was clear that he had a good deal of foreboding in this regard. "What I fear most," he said, "is the Latin Americanization of America."

He wasn't concerned, of course, with the arrival of Latinos on American soil (or what Pat Buchanan calls "Meximerica") except insofar as that could be manipulated to achieve this end. What he feared was that corporatist conservatives, if given free rein, would turn our standard of living into what you find in Latin America. That working Americans would one day be reduced to the level of near-serfdom that is the common way of life for millions of Latinos.

During the Clinton years, of course, this fear looked farther and farther remote -- everyone's wages were rising, jobs were being created by the millions, and our standard of living was never healthier. I began to think that we had staved off Church's specter, perhaps forever.

But then, I never imagined the Bush years, either.

The Latin American landscape is largely an oligarchy: a land ruled by the wealthy, for the wealthy, and at the expense of ordinary working people, who are left to fend for themselves for whatever scraps the ruling elite deigns to toss them.

The ruling elite in the United States like that model. That's how America used to be, after all, a century ago: eighty-hour work weeks were the norm, there were no vacations or weekends or health benefits, no workers' organizing rights. Child labor was common. There was no Great American Middle Class then, no consumer society. It was an oligarchy then.

They've even been explicit about wanting America to be driven to second-class status. Take Paul Broun the other day:

Well, Andrea, the thing is when someone is overextended and broke they don't continue paying for expensive automobiles. They sell the expensive automobiles and buy a cheaper one. They don't continue paying for country club dues. They drop out of the country club. We need to pay down the debt.

That's why they're perfectly happy to wreck the economy in the hopes it will be blamed on President Obama: It suits their ends anyway. If the oligarchy has its way, the lift lines are going to be getting very short indeed.

House Republicans Are Not Just Do-nothings -- They're Spinning Their Wheels Furiously

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Tina Dupuy has an excellent piece in The Atlantic examining how this Republican Congress is on pace to set a modern record for non-accomplishment -- while expending endless energy passing bills that have no chance of passing the Senate:

One quarter into the 112th Congress's two-year term, only 14 pieces of legislation originating in the House have become laws (12 bills and two house joint resolutions). Fourteen. Compare that with the House in the 111th, which claimed 254 laws (plus 11 house joint resolutions) over two years. The 110th had 308 (plus 10 house joint resolutions). Even the often-derided do-nothing 109th Congress's House controlled by the GOP passed 316 (with 16 house joint resolutions).

If the current House continues with this trend it will have produced a mere 48 laws by the end of the chamber's full term.

Quick math: The last three Houses have by this time in their tenure produced an average of 76 laws each.

But when House Republicans are actually in session, it's not exactly like they're doing nothing. They've made a point of passing bills that "send a message." Over and over, they've brought legislation to the floor that was doomed to die in the Democrat-controlled Senate. Why? To put taxpayer money where Republican congresspersons' mouths (and votes) are. Yes, the House Republicans of 112th Congress are having a love affair with the symbolic vote.

Dupuy compiled a list of the many bills that have passed the House with no chance of passage in the Senate, including the health-care repealers, defunding Planned Parenthood and NPR, ending the oil-drilling moratorium in the Gulf, and gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Of course, these are the same people demanding that President Obama devise a debt-ceiling plan ... even though that's a responsibility clearly in Congress' hands.

Piers Morgan Appears To Have Known All About Phone Hacking At Murdoch Rags

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Piers Morgan has been ardently defending Rupert Murdoch as the whole ugly Rupertgate scandal has unfolded, calling him the innocent victim of a witch hunt.

It seems maybe there's a reason for that:

Former tabloid editor Piers Morgan accused media and bloggers of being "lying smearers" Wednesday after a 2009 interview surfaced in which he appeared to admit that hacking phones for reporting purposes was tolerated on his watch.

Morgan, who edited Rupert Murdoch's now-defunct News of the World in the mid-1990s and went on to edit rival The Daily Mirror, was asked by the BBC's Kirsty Young how he felt about "dealing with people who rake through bins for a living, people who tap people's phones, people who take secret photographs."

Morgan, who replaced interviewer Larry King on CNN this past January, began his answer by saying that "not a lot of that went on," but then acknowledged that newspapers he worked for used information obtained by these methods.

"A lot of it was done by third parties rather than the staff themselves. That's not to defend it because obviously you were running the results of their work," he said in an excerpt of the 2009 interview posted on the BBC's website on Wednesday.

"I'm quite happy to be parked in the corner of the tabloid beast and to have to sit here defending all these things I used to get up to. I make no pretense about the stuff we used to do," he said.

My, what a tangled web we weave.