Yes, Glenn Beck, militias can be very ordinary-seeming. That's their purpose.

-- by Dave

I'll wager that Glenn Beck, like a lot of people, has heard the famous Thomas Jefferson quote:

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

Maybe he's even seen one of the T-shirts bearing that inscription.

But then, there's one of these T-shirts that's especially notable: It was the one Timothy McVeigh was wearing when he was arrested for blowing up 168 people at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City back in 1995.

Does this mean that anyone wearing one of these shirts, or expressing these sentiments, is a crazed militiaman eager and willing to blow up government workers and their children? Er, no. But at the same, the meaning of that T-shirt is actually critical to understanding what happened in Oklahoma City.

The Missouri State Patrol's information arm recently compiled a report about militias (you can read it here), largely as a way of helping to inform their officers in the field, who are the people most at risk when it comes to random encounters with armed right-wing extremists.

The report, unsurprisingly, created a firestorm among the conservatives who suddenly found they had more of a resemblance to a right-wing extremist than they thought:

A new document meant to help Missouri law enforcement agencies identify militia members or domestic terrorists has drawn criticism for some of the warning signs mentioned.

The Feb. 20 report called "The Modern Militia Movement" mentions such red flags as political bumper stickers for third-party candidates, such as U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, who ran for president last year; talk of conspiracy theories, such as the plan for a superhighway linking Canada to Mexico; and possession of subversive literature.

"It seems like they want to stifle political thought," said Roger Webb, president of the University of Missouri campus Libertarians. "There are a lot of third parties out there, and none of them express any violence. In fact, if you join the Libertarian Party, one of the things you sign in your membership application is that you don't support violence as a means to any ends."

But state law enforcement officials said the report is being misinterpreted.

Lt. John Hotz of the Missouri State Highway Patrol said the report comes from publicly available, trend data on militias. It was compiled by the Missouri Information Analysis Center, a "fusion center" in Jefferson City that combines resources from the federal Department of Homeland Security and other agencies. The center, which opened in 2005, was set up to collect local intelligence to better combat terrorism and other criminal activity, he said.

"All this is an educational thing," Hotz said of the report. "Troopers have been shot by members of groups, so it's our job to let law enforcement officers know what the trends are in the modern militia movement."

When I saw this story a few days ago, I knew that sooner or later it was going to get trotted out on Glenn Beck's Fox News show as proof of evil government perfidy. After all, it's already become an Alex Jones special -- which is to say, the air is thick with black helicopters and jetstream contrails.

Sure enough: Yesterday on his show Beck had a segment in which he and Penn Gillette discussed how crazy it was for law enforcement to be profiling people as potential domestic terrorists for behaviors that ordinary citizens like themselves indulge happily, as they should.

They noticed, at one point, that there's actually very little about Patriot movement beliefs to which they subscribe. It's just that their libertarianism might trip some of the outward indicators suggested in the report.

One of the people interviewed in the Kansas City report expressed similar views:

But Tim Neal, a military veteran and delegate to last year's state GOP convention, was shocked by the report's contents.

"I was going down the list and thinking, 'Check, that's me,'" he said. "I'm a Ron Paul supporter, check. I talk about the North American union, check. I've got the 'America: Freedom to Fascism' video loaned out to somebody right now. So that means I'm a domestic terrorist? Because I've got a video about the Federal Reserve?"

Neal, who has a Ron Paul bumper sticker on his car, said the next time he is pulled over by a police officer, he won't know whether it's because he was speeding or because of his political views.

Here's the catch: There's nothing even remotely inaccurate in the report. Every fact that it reports can be readily substantiated.

More to the point, there's nothing in the report suggesting that any of these traits taken individually is a sign of radicalism. Rather, officers are expected to be able to take in certain signals simply as warning signs and indicators, not evidence of either criminal intent or radical behavior.

What the report reflects is a reality that law enforcement trying to deal with domestic terrorism in America must confront: Their subjects are thoroughly American; many of the people drawn into these movements are, if anything, "hyper-normal." Their version of "patriotism," for instance, is so extreme that they actually hate not just their government but their fellow citizens -- in essence, their country: because, you see, it has been "perverted" from its original purposes.

The hyper-normality is a kind of intentional camouflage. The Patriot movement, and militias in particular, were a very specific and intentional strategy adopted in the 1990s by the white supremacists and radical tax protesters of the American far right -- and the whole purpose of the strategy was to mainstream their belief systems and their agendas. The tactic was to adopt the appearance of normal, "red-blooded" Americanism as a way of pushing out the idea that their radical beliefs are "normal" too.

In the process, they often adopted time-worn "patriotic" sayings and symbols, such as the "Don't Tread On Me" flag Beck wears, as their own -- though with a much more menacing meaning. If you've seen that flag at an Aryan Nations compound, as I have, you never quite look at it the same.

This is why the meaning of Thomas Jefferson's quote above is quite different for them than it is for you and me. To all outward appearances, it is just an expression of avid patriotism. But to a Patriot movement follower, it means something potentially deadly.

This is especially the case for law-enforcement officers in the field:

Any time law enforcement offices encounter people with extreme ideologies, safety issues potentially arise. However, for a variety of reasons, certain circumstances pose a heightened threat of violent confrontation. Some situations, for instance, are particularly stressful for extremists, increasing the chances that they may lash out or overreact.

... Traffic stops are potentially some of the most dangerous situations that law enforcement officers can face when dealing with extremists. Numerous officers have been killed, wounded, shot at, or attacked during traffic stop incidents involving extremists during the past twenty years.

Some of these confrontations have been well-publicized. In 1997, television audiences across the country watched a police car video of a shootout in Ohio between two white supremacists, Cheyne and Chevie Kehoe, and local police officers. Yet some of the more incredible incidents have received remarkably little publicity. In one recent case in March 2000, three anti-government extremists (Lloyd Burrus, his son Jeff Burrus, and Cheryl Kate Maarteuse) were stopped for speeding by a Nevada highway patrol officer about sixty miles north of Las Vegas. The officer spotted a shotgun in the vehicle and radioed for backup. While he waited, the extremists sped off. During the ensuing chase, they shot at police vehicles from both Nevada and California, then turned off-road, where their BMW became stuck. Burrus and his accomplices abandoned the vehicle but took their weapons and ammunition, which they used to shoot down a California Highway Patrol helicopter that had arrived on scene. Eventually, after a twelve hour standoff involving over a hundred law enforcement officers, they gave themselves up.

There's nothing in the Missouri report that suggests anyone of the Patriot persuasion be arrested or treated as a terrorist -- because it's perfectly legal, in fact, to hold as radical beliefs as one likes in this country. The report simply tries to give officers a factual overview of some of the motivations of right-wing extremists, and what kinds of things are likely to set them off.

What's not legal is to act criminally on behalf of those beliefs. Unfortunately, Patriot beliefs -- particularly the more radical beliefs about the government's legitimacy (or lack thereof) -- actually tend to help induce such behavior. The police officers whose job it is to stop such criminality need to be able to assess what they're dealing with on the ground -- whether someone they've pulled over for not having license plates on their car is likely to pull something stupid.

Law enforcement officers need complete and accurate information in order to survive in the field. Maybe Glenn Beck is more worried about the tender paranoias of your average Ron Paul supporter -- none of whom have been affected in the least by this report in any real-world way -- but I tend to stand with the men and women who keep us safe.

Especially when it comes to making sure they have complete and accurate information. The more they know, the more likely they are to both enforce the law appropriately, and to stay alive at the same time.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Real concentration camps USA: Our immigrant-detention system is spiraling out of control

-- by Dave

Jackie Mahendra points out an Associated Press story describing some of the most recent information about how we're detaining illegal immigrants -- and it's profoundly disturbing:

The U.S. detention system for immigrants has mushroomed in the past decade, creating a costly building boom in an effort to sweep up criminals and ensure that illegal immigrants are quickly deported.

However, an Associated Press computer analysis of the entire detention population on a Sunday night in January found that most did not have a criminal record and many were not about to leave the country soon — voluntarily or through deportation.

A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement database, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, showed a U.S. detainee population of exactly 32,000 on the evening of Jan. 25.

Of those, 18,690 immigrants did not have a criminal conviction, including for illegal entry or low-level crimes such as trespassing. More than 400 of those with no criminal record had been incarcerated for at least a year. A dozen had been held for three years or more; one man from China had been locked up for more than five years.

Almost 10,000 had been in custody longer than 31 days, the average detention stay.

For an up-close look at what's going on at these detention centers, check out Breakthrough Media's incredibly informative site, Homeland Guantanamos, which describes the detention system we've created in response to right-wing agitation about illegal immigration. You know, the same right-wingers who are now stewing over non-existent FEMA concentration camps.

The video below also explores the subject in some depth, focusing on the situation in Illinois.

A HIDDEN SYSTEM



Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

FEMA concentration camps? The militia good times are rollin' again

-- by Dave

David Shuster was making fun of Glenn Beck's preoccupation with militia-style right-wing conspiracy theories yesterday on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and wondering why mainstream conservatives have so much trouble standing up to and denouncing this stuff.

There's actually a reason why mainstream conservatives never stand up to the far-right elements within their own coalition: they find them very useful.

It has ever been so. Harkening back to the days when Monarchists attacked the Enlightenment's pro-democracy thinkers as a plotting cabal of elites (which is where the old Illuminati conspiracy theories originate), the wealthy and those otherwise invested in maintaining the status quo in our civilization have always found these kinds of conspiracy theories a handy way of stirring up working-class resentment against progressive reformers.

That's why they'll be gaining in popularity as long as Democrats are in power: Because mainstream conservatives need them to make their wedge politics work.

So watch Beck telling folks that he "couldn't debunk" the existence of supposed concentration camps being built by FEMA:



Funny thing about "not debunking" the FEMA camps: Beck no doubt is discovering that it's not easy to "debunk" the existence of something for which there is simply no evidence of its existence in the first place.

In reality, these claims originated back in the 1990s with the far-right "Patriot"/militia movement. I first heard about them back in 1994, when I attended this militia meeting in Maltby, Wash.:

The fellow up on the stage is a guy named Bob Fletcher, who at the time was the chief spokesman for the Militia of Montana. The map he has up on the stage with him shows what he claimed was a "United Nations reserve" being created just to the east of us, in the Northern Cascades, in which the feds were busy creating concentration camps, run by FEMA, which he assured us were being built to hold gun owners after the government rounded them all up.

Of course, no such camps existed. When I tried to get Fletcher or other MOM officials to help me pinpoint their exact location so I could go check them out, they never were able to get back to me on that.

I described these characters in my first book, In God's Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest,:

Fletcher is a self-described ``congressional researcher’’ who came to work for the Militia of Montana in the fall of 1994. Within a short span of time, Fletcher became the prime speaker at MOM events, delivering the militia message with a little more deftness than the often-erratic [John] Trochmann [the founder of the Militia of Montana].

For the better part of the next year, especially during the uproar that followed Oklahoma City, Fletcher was the point man for the militia movement. When there was a televised Town Hall meeting on the militias in Seattle, Fletcher -- backed by an audience stacked with Patriots -- was the spokesman. When informal congressional hearings were held on the militias, Fletcher and Trochmann sat together and answered questions.

... Fletcher also ran the militia meetings very smoothly. He was adept at saying things that were simultaneously pessimistic and empowering:
``My personal feeling is that it's too late to stop this,'' he would tell crowds. As for surviving, he’d say, ``I recommend a year's worth of food and plenty of ammo.''

John Trochmann either originated or became the chief promoter of many of these conspiracy theories:

The New World Order, he says, is a shadowy one-world-government group that conspires to put an end to the U.S. Constitution by subsuming it under the "Communist" United Nations. Conspirators include the President, the Speaker of the House, and most financial and political leaders around the world.

The new world government Trochmann envisions would be a population-controlling totalitarian regime. Guns will be confiscated. Urban gangs like the Bloods and the Crips will be deployed to conduct house-to-house searches and round up resisters. Thousands of citizens will be shipped off to concentration camps and liquidated, all in the name of reducing the population.

... Trochmann told me that Ruby Ridge and Waco were mere harbingers, test runs for what they intended to start doing to average citizens. Street-gang members from the Bloods and Crips, he said, were being trained in Spokane right then for house-to-house-search-and-seizure techniques. When the big crackdown came, they’d round people up, ship them off to concentration camps (which he said were already being built), and then ``liquidate’’ them until the population was stabilized.

The pretext, he said, would be ``most likely a food shortage.’’ And they would start with urban dwellers.

``Look at the cities,’’ he said. ``Look at them. They're totally captive. Somebody supplies their heat, somebody supplies their light, their transportation, their water, their communications, food. Look how vulnerable they are. They'll obey to the letter, or they'll die, because they're not ready for what's going to happen.’’

From there, the theories filtered out to a variety of like-minded "Patriots" who then held their own militia meetings. Locally, it was a Monroe, WA, landscape contractor named Don Kehoe:

[Kehoe] suggests that ecosystem-management efforts, like the international plan proposed by local environmental groups for the North Cascades extending into Canada, are part of a government plan to drive people out of those areas altogether. The New World Order, Kehoe says, plans to install concentration camps in the Cascades to house and liquidate the masses needed to implement population control.

The flyer below was a popular handout at MOM meetings:


While its "documentation" books included such entries as the one below:



Now, only a couple of years back, progressives had a similar wave of paranoia hit them about concentration camps being built in the heartland by the Bush Administration. It didn't go very far, because it quickly became clear that there was no there there. No one was actually building any new camps; all that had happened was that a Halliburton subsidiary had been given a contract to build them in the event of an emergency, but the contracts had never been activated.

But the list of camps being touted by Glenn Beck's friends is identical to the list I examined in 2006, and here's what I reported then:

The [FEMA] concentration-camp claims have continued to enjoy a kind of half-life as well. You can still find them on the Web at sites like this one, which offers the standard number of "over 800 camps" that we now see floating around the current claims.

Note some of the camp descriptions:

IDAHO

Minidoka/Jerome Counties - WWII Japanese-American internment facility possibly under renovation. Clearwater National Forest - Near Lolo Pass - Just miles from the Montana state line near Moose Creek, this unmanned facility is reported to have a nearby airfield. Wilderness areas - Possible location. No data.

[The renovations at the Minidoka camp are strictly for purposes of making it into a national monument in commemoration of the internment. The Lolo Pass facility is a Forest Service work camp. As for the wilderness area sites, well ...]

MONTANA

Malmstrom AFB - UN aircraft groups stationed here, and possibly a detention facility.

[There is no detention facility at Malmstrom.]

WASHINGTON

Seattle/Tacoma - SeaTac Airport: fully operational federal transfer center

Okanogan County - Borders Canada and is a site for a massive concentration camp capable of holding hundreds of thousands of people for slave labor. This is probably one of the locations that will be used to hold hard core patriots who will be held captive for the rest of their lives.

Sand Point Naval Station - Seattle - FEMA detention center used actively during the 1999 WTO protests to classify prisoners.

Ft. Lewis / McChord AFB - near Tacoma - This is one of several sites that may be used to ship prisoners overseas for slave labor.

[The three known facilities listed here all have legitimate purposes as part of the law enforcement or military systems. But the "concentration camp" in Okanogan County is entirely fanciful and does not exist. Nor is there any known project to hold or transport people for slave labor.]

Anyway, you get the idea. None of the so-called detention centers were designed or constructed for that purpose. Certainly there was never any publicly acknowledged program to build them during the Clinton years.

As Jeffrey Feldman observes, the idea of FEMA being involved in concentration camps came gurgling up into popular media through X-Files scripts:

Rumors that FEMA has set up 'concentration camps' as part of a plot to take over America and the world flourished after the X-Files film, died down, and then resurfaced as the video site YouTube became more popular in 2006.

One video expounding on the X-Files theory of FEMA concentration camps, which was posted to YouTube in mid-2006, has been watched almost one million times. The theory Glenn Beck is pushing is a version of the X-Files plot adapted to support Beck's argument against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed recently by the Obama administration.

And now, thanks to Glenn Beck, they're receiving mainstream media play by Fox News people who say they "can't debunk" their existence.

How much longer before Beck just organizes his own militia group? Is that what the "912 Movement" is going to evolve into? Stay tuned ...

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Closer to Home

-- by Sara

Last summer's church shooting in Knoxville, TN hit close to home for me. As a Unitarian Universalist -- and a liberal -- the idea that the right wing's eliminationist rage toward the left would end up in the death of two members of my own tribe wasn't unexpected; but it was a gutpunch, and a moment of awakening.

But, for other reasons entirely, last Sunday's shooting in a Baptist chuch in Maryville, IL hits even closer to home.

The shooter, Terry Sedlacek, had struggled for years with long-term, chronic Lyme disease, contracted after being bitten by a tick some years ago. Though this description of his symptoms seems extreme even among Lyme patients, his struggle to get treatment is an infuriatingly common one. The media debate over the role this disease may have played in the shooting has tapped into one of the most furious and tragic medical debates in modern medicine. On one hand: there are doctors on TV claiming that it's entirely possible that Lyme can create the kind of psychiatric problems that would lead to this kind of catastrophe. On the other are doctors saying that it's impossible -- Lyme is a relatively benign bacterial infection that's easily treated with a few weeks of antibiotics.

What you're seeing here is the public version of a medical furor that's been raging more privately for over 20 years, with a million or two patients caught in between. The stakes are incredibly high. Doctors caught on the wrong side commonly lose their licenses. Patients caught in the crossfire commonly lose their lives.

Lyme and Me
I came by my own ringside seat at these festivities courtesy of a tick bite incurred, probably on a hiking trail somewhere in the Sierra, in the late summer of 1984. I don't remember the bite. I never saw the tell-tale bulls-eye rash (I'm a country kid -- I got bit all the time by one noxious thing or another) that one of the warring camps insists must be present for a Lyme diagnosis to be accurate. But I do know that I went to bed one day in October of that year, and was never the same afterward -- and that I've been struggling with devastating bouts of exhaustion, body pain, and brain fog ever since.

Over the years, various doctors pinned assorted diagnoses on these symptoms, all of which promised exactly zero hope for a cure. Occasionally, one would recommend a symptomatic treatment that would alleviate some of the pain, or forestall at least some of the damage; and through the years, these little wins added up to a decade of gradual recovery that allowed me to reclaim at least some of my life. It wasn't enough to keep me from having to abandon my career; but at least the pain wasn't constant, and the neuropathies weren't crippling -- which is more than many Lymies can say. Eventually, in 2005, I lucked into an experimental pilot study for a treatment that alleviated the neurological and cognitive issues to the point where I could actually go to grad school. And blog. And, at least virtually, begin to rejoin the human race. It wasn't a cure; but it was something much more like a life, and I took it for all it was worth.

But it wasn't until a year ago this past week -- nearly 24 years and a dozen or so doctors after my first collapse -- that I finally got a firm diagnosis of Lyme disease. Last August, after returning home from the convention in Denver, I started the difficult and demanding high-dose multi-layered antibiotic treatment. The average case of chronic Lyme takes two to five years of treatment to cure. At this late date, though, the odds are only about 70% that I'll ever be able to shake it. Still, six months in, my joints work again. I can exercise and travel without having to pay it back with weeks in bed. And my mind grows sharper by the day. The drugs are working -- and every day I'm better is a day of grace I never thought I'd see.

Two Definitions of Lyme
The treatment takes so long because Lyme is the most cunningly persistent bacterium known to science. In its native state, it's a spirochete -- a cousin to syphilis. But if you hit it with penicillin, it will convert in a matter of minutes into an intracellular form that's more like a mycoplasma, which will only respond to a macrolide antibiotic like azithromiycin or Biaxin. Or, just for fun, it will roll up into a hard cyst form that can hide, dormant, in the macrophages of cells, and then emerge to re-infect the host years on down the road. This well-armored third form responds -- only very reluctantly -- to Flagyl and a couple of the TB drugs. Curing the disease means taking large doses of several classes of antibiotics together for months at a time -- either orally, or through an IV -- so the germ will have nowhere to hide. And all the while, we also need to be carefully watching for and mitigating the drugs' own very real consequences to the body.

To complicate matters further, the ticks that deliver Lyme usually deliver other diseases, too: babesiosis (a form of malaria), ehrlichiosis, mycoplasma, and others that also must be found and treated for a full cure to happen. Though these are nominally "deer ticks," entomologists have found Lyme-bearing ticks on birds, dogs, rodents, horses, and many other animals. Last week's chimp attack is also being blamed on a form of Lyme psychosis. It's probably true that veterinarians have a better handle on this disease than the doctors who treat humans do.

And here's where the medical battle rages. Infectious disease specialists-- represented by the Infectious Disease Society of American (ISDA) -- have for decades held to the firm position that Lyme is a spirochete that can be killed with a 28-day course of doxycycline. If you're still sick when the month is over, whatever you have isn't Lyme (and, in practice, is generally assumed to be psychosomatic). And this is true, as far as it goes: if you're lucky enough to catch the disease in the first few months after you're bit -- or you've got one of the many strains that's amenable to this treatment -- a short course of doxy usually does do the trick.



However, once some strains of Lyme get dispersed and embedded in the body's tissues, the standard treatment won't touch them. Worse: the standard Lyme tests won't, either, so the results will likely come back negative. The shady politics of how the approved Lyme tests were developed would take a whole separate post to explain; but suffice to say that they're only 70% accurate on their best day, which would make them patently unacceptable as a diagnostic tool were it any other disease. Far more accurate and sensitive tests are available, but insurance companies won't cover the $400 fee.

That's because the IDSA panel doesn't approve of these tests (even though the "controversial" proteins it tests for -- the only ones common to all Lyme strains -- are the same proteins some of these same doctors once tried to build a Lyme vaccine on). It also doesn't accept Lyme's shapeshifting nature; the existence of a chronic form of resistant Lyme that requires long-term treatment; the importance of seeking out and treating co-infections; or the neurological and cognitive issues it can cause. All of these facts are well-documented by the peer-reviewed science; but IDSA's Lyme panel has actually purged new members who brought these studies up for consideration. 

All this is part of the background for the dueling doctor interviews we're seeing on TV this week.

The Great Divide
Why would ostensibly caring doctors be so resistant to accepting new and better data? As always, follow the money. The IDSA's minimalist view of Lyme is greatly favored by insurance companies, who really don't want to be on the hook for expensive testing or more than a month of treatment. On a broader note: they're absolutely terrified (with good reason) that Lyme could turn out to be another huge budget-busting epidemic like AIDS, and want to do everything they can to make sure they're not stuck with the bills for it. To that end, they've made sure that the ISDA's Lyme experts have been richly rewarded with grants, consulting fees, and so on for aggressively defending the narrowest possible case definition and the most limited treatment standards. For their part, IDSA's Lyme group has held up their end of the deal so reliably that last May, they became the first medical standards board in the history of American medicine to be successfully sued (by the attorney general of Connecticut, no less) for corruption.

On the other side of this preposterous debate are the Lyme patients and the clinicians who are successfully treating them -- and that large and growing body of peer-reviewed research (much of it published in major journals) that the IDSA stubbornly refuses to even consider. This side is also being joined by psychiatrists, rheumatologists, and neurologists who have tended to patients ravaged by Lyme; a new generation of genetics researchers who are getting a handle how Lyme does those Houdini-like invisibility and shapeshifting tricks; and the aforementioned veterinarians, whose experience with Lyme doesn't correlate at all with the ISDA's picture of the disease. Doctors in this camp are gathered under the banner of the Infectious Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS).



The doctors who join this side of the battle do so knowing their licenses are on the line. Testing for and treating long-term Lyme is a risky business: scores of them have been put out of business by either IDSA or the insurance companies, and the rate of attack is accelerating. As a result, people with chronic Lyme are losing what few options they do have, and end up traveling hundreds or even thousands of miles for treatment. (I was diagnosed by Canada's leading Lyme expert -- who gave me the news on a Tuesday, and retired that same Friday because the provincial medical board was coming after him. My successful treatment is being managed by a doctor in Seattle who protects himself in part by refusing to take insurance.) While the doctors, researchers, and insurers rage, upwards of two million Americans with Lyme are going largely undiagnosed and untreated -- unless they can pony up the six-figure sums needed to find a doctor willing to treat them, and then finance their own cures. 

In the meantime, there are gathering bits of early research to suggest that Lyme may also play a role in triggering other illnesses as diverse as autism, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and ALS. If any of this proves true, the results of our crippled management of Lyme may ultimately touch many, many more of us.

Blame it on The Gipper
As you can tell by now, this issue is a political and medical snake pit. But the thing that I've found most striking about it is that Lyme patients aren't the only ones caught in it. You can find almost identical battles raging -- with insurers and "official" medical groups lined up on one side, and persecuted heretic doctors and their grateful patients lined up on the other -- among the MS, autism, chronic fatigue syndrome, and Gulf War syndrome communities. In fact, almost every chronic disease that's emerged or spread since the early 80s has ended up re-creating this exact split. You have to wonder: Why? What's going on here?

A few perspicacious science journalists think they've got an answer. The problem, they say, started back in 1980, when Ronald Reagan changed the rules governing how scientists (and the entities they work for) profit from their work. Where scientists used to gain fame and fortune by publishing and sharing their work in conferences and journals -- and were thus rewarded for furthering general knowledge -- the new rules encouraged them to hoard their discoveries as trade secrets; and then leverage their patents and their seats on medical boards to write the disease definitions, mandate approved treatments, and completely control the scientific discourse in order to maximize the profits they made.



The upshot -- in all these cases -- is that when a new disease is discovered, a small cadre of researchers rushes in to lock down the disease's definition, patent its treatment, and control the flow of information around it as soon as they can manage it. From that point, any further discussion of the issue is off-limits; and any new discoveries or treatments not controlled by this cadre are discouraged by means both subtle and brutal. So instead of ongoing scientific give-and-take that leads to increasingly better information and treatment over time, the entire research conversation stalls at a very early stage -- and can stay stalled for decades. In the meantime, patients and clinicians are shut out of the discussion and left to work out practical treatments and new theories on their own, often in defiance of well-funded opposition that's staked its careers and fortunes on preventing any challenges to their established theory.

Horror and Hope
The Lyme community is watching this week's events with an odd mixture of horror and hope. On one hand, the last thing we need is for America to think that the very real neurologicial problems that come with the Lyme package make us a danger to society. It's important to understand that there are over 100 strains of Lyme in the US, only a few of which lead to chronic Lyme and even fewer of which create anything like the kind of psychosis that afflicted Terry Sedlacek. (One of the reasons diagnosis and treatment are so hard is that the various strains all manifest and respond to the drugs differently.) It's even more important that people realize that Sedlacek might never have gotten to this place if the American medical system were structurally capable of integrating and deploying everything we know now about Lyme, instead of staying willfully stuck in the definitions first laid down in the late 1980s.

He deserved better diagnosis, better treatment, better doctors, better information. So do I. So does everyone infected with Lyme. The fact that we can't get it is just one more national failure that can be laid directly at the feet of short-sighted conservative policies, and the belief that an unfettered market can never do harm.

On the other hand, we're beyond grateful that public awareness of the Lyme debacle has been growing. Over the past year, we've seen the publication of noted science writer Pamela Weintraub's excellent Cure Unknown, the definitive book to date on the Lyme epidemic and political travesty surrounding it; the release of Under Our Skin, an award-winning documentary on Lyme that's being shown to full houses around the country (the film clips above are excerpts from this movie); and serious interest from Oprah's Dr. Oz and other media celebrities in doing shows on Lyme.

Given all this, there's hope we're finally beginning the long-deferred conversation about how America deals with its gathering epidemic of emergent chronic illnesses, and give the victims of Lyme and other orphaned diseases the treatment and research attention they deserve. In the face of a precipitous environmental decline that seems likely to make emergent chronic illnesses one of the biggest dangers to American health and security in the coming century, our very survival may someday come down to how effectively we can fix what's broken here.

It's tragic -- but, unfortunately, very typically American -- that it took another church shooting to get us here. But now that we're here, let's not let the chance to have a serious discussion about our deranged medical research system -- perverted, as everything else was, by the right wing's euphoria for free-market fundamentalism -- get away from us. There are tens of millions of chronically ill Americans who are counting on us to get it right this time -- and it shouldn't take the death of innocent people to make us aware of the shameful way they're living, and dying, in our midst.

Update: Can Lyme really make someone homicidal? Pam Weintraub gives a great summary of Lyme's potential psychiatric and neurological effects here.

Maddow wonders if we have been overlooking our home-grown terrorists

-- by Dave

Rachel Maddow last night caught up with that strange domestic terrorism case out of Maine that we reported on awhile back as part of a larger trend we're seeing of ratcheted-up rhetoric and increasingly violent expressions coming from the American far right since Barack Obama's election.

Maddow: But should this guy have been found out -- I dunno, before he died? And, post-9/11, have we focused too much on stopping Bin Laden again at the expense of potentially stopping the next Timothy McVeigh?

Good question. And the answer is clearly yes. The Maine incident is only the latest in a long string of cases of serious domestic terrorism emerging from the extremist Right since 9/11. Some of the others include:

-- The anthrax killer.

-- The far-right "Patriot" who constructed a sodium cyanide bomb capable of killing hundreds.

-- The Alabama militiamen who plotted to go on an anti-Latino killing rampage.

-- The ex-Army Ranger who planned an anti-abortion killing spree.

-- The young skinheads who wanted to kill 107 black people and cap it off with Barack Obama.

There has also been outright malfeasance on the part of the FBI when it came to investigating far-right extremists in the past eight years.

That appears to be changing -- the FBI has been public about its concerns regarding the resurgence in white-supremacist hate groups and their activities and recruitment since Obama's election. We'll have to see if that translates into tackling the problem seriously.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Glenn Beck thinks 'political correctness' is driving people to shooting rampages

-- by Dave

In conversation with Bill O'Reilly yesterday on his Fox News show, Glenn Beck speculated that the cause of that murderous shooting rampage in Alabama might have been the shooter's frustration with "political correctness":

BECK: But as I’m listening to him. I’m thinking about the American people that feel disenfranchised right now. That feel like nobody’s hearing their voice. The government isn’t hearing their voice. Even if you call, they don’t listen to you on both sides. If you’re a conservative, you’re called a racist. You want to starve children.

O’REILLY: Sure.

BECK: Yada yada yada. And every time they do speak out, they’re shut down by political correctness. How do you not have those people turn into that guy?

O’REILLY: Well, look, nobody, even if they’re frustrated, is going to hurt another human being unless they’re mentally ill. I think.

BECK: I think pushed to the wall, you don’t think people get pushed to the wall?

O’REILLY: Nah, I don’t believe in this snap thing. I think that that kind of violence is inside you and it’s a personality disorder.

As Melissa McEwan puts it over at Shakesville:

So, according to Glenn Beck, murderous rampages are the inevitable consequence of conservatives not getting what they want. Never mind that we've no idea whether the man in question was a conservative; it's easy enough to presume a white man from Alabama is a conservative just to make the point that his killing spree is all liberals' fault.

Steve Benen notes that there's a history to this kind of logical leap:

One of the right's more disgusting habits is exploiting violent tragedies for ideological gain. After the shootings at Virginia Tech, Newt Gingrich blamed liberals' "situation ethics" for the tragedy. After the shootings in Arvada, Colo., the Family Research Council blamed the "secular media" for the rampage. After Columbine, then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay took to the floor to blame public school science classes for teaching young people that "they are nothing but glorified apes who are evolutionized [sic] out of some primordial soup." Just 48 hours after 9/11, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell blamed liberals for "helping this happen."

Matt Yglesias notes:

Thankfully Bill O’Reilly (!) was around to act as the voice of reason (!) and observe that spree killing seem more related to mental illness than to political disagreement.

Actually, the dynamic is more complicated than such simplistic formulas. Spree killings often do have a political motive, even when they clearly involve mental illness (and there's no immediate evidence of that here, though it likely will emerge; the Alabama shooter does not appear ever to have been treated for mental illness).

Moreover, as I discussed in some detail recently, there is often an element of pre-event scapegoating, often in the form of overtly eliminationist rhetoric:

Part of the problem is that we actually have seen this happen time after time after time: A mentally unstable person is inspired by hateful right-wing rhetoric to act out violently -- and yet because of that mental state, the matter is dismissed as idiosyncratic, just another "isolated incident." And over the months and years, these "isolated incidents" mount one after another.

But simply ascribing these acts to mental illness is a cop-out. It fails to account for the gross irresponsibility of the people who employed rhetoric that inspired the violent action in the first place, and their resulting moral culpability.

The most notable recent case of this was the church shooter in Knoxville, who wrote out a detailed manifesto explaining why he went on his rampage:

This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book. I'd like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I know those people were inaccessible to me. I couldn't get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It's the only way we can rid America of this cancerous pestilence.

The same is true of people like Tim McVeigh and Eric Rudolph: They may indeed be mentally unstable, but the trigger that makes them kill is always scapegoating, eliminationist rhetoric that inflames their hatred of other people.

This doesn't appear to have been the case in Alabama; the man mostly killed family members and people he thought had "wronged" him. There's no evidence whatsoever of a political motive. Indeed, there isn't a scintilla of evidence for Glenn Beck's thesis except his idle speculation.

But what we can say is that rhetoric like Beck's -- the overt fearmongering, the scapegoating, the paranoid conspiracy theories, the overheated demonization of his opponents -- helps contribute mightily to people's irrational fears of being oppressed, of being under siege, and of feeling the need to lash out.

In other words, if a killing rampage is indeed motivated by "PC backlash," then the far more serious problem is the nonstop rhetoric from the right that tells people that "liberal political correctness", or that various kinds liberal perfidy -- their "treasonous" approach to the war, or the "socialism" or "communism" they are bringing to our economic system -- is the root cause of ordinary people's problems and is destroying the American fabric. In other words, people like Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

DOJ coming down to check out Sheriff Joe Arpaio's racial-profiling operations

-- by Dave

Now, I know that Sheriff Joe told Glenn Beck he "welcomes" any investigation into his bordering-on-fascist rule in Arizona's Maricopa County. But I bet that nonetheless, he wasn't smiling yesterday:

The U.S. Justice Department has launched a civil-rights investigation of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office after months of mounting complaints that deputies are discriminating in their enforcement of federal immigration laws.

Officials from the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division notified Sheriff Joe Arpaio on Tuesday that they had begun the investigation, which will focus on whether deputies are engaging in "patterns or practices of discriminatory police practices and unconstitutional searches and seizures."

An expert said it is the department's first civil-rights probe related to immigration enforcement.

... The Justice Department frequently receives racial-profiling complaints against police departments, but investigations are rare, said David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor and racial-profiling expert.

"The fact that this has come to their attention and they have announced their intent to investigate is highly significant," Harris said. "It says there is enough there to be investigated. It's not an iffy case that (can be ignored)."

Harris said this is the first civil-rights investigation stemming from immigration enforcement. The probe could last several months.

You can read the notice here. [PDF file]

Maybe the DOJ can take inspiration from Arpaio's Brazil-esque reality-TV show on Fox, in which unsuspecting schlub criminals are duped into being busted on TV. They could build a reality show around investigating Arpaio, including footage of interviews with his victims.

Of course, in the past, Arpaio hasn't been very tolerant of people who criticize him. If you got caught applauding anti-Arpaio comments at county meetings, for instance, you might be arrested by Arpaio's deputies. But I suspect that won't work too well with DOJ investigators, especially the FBI.

This is a hopeful step forward in dealing with the mess Arpaio has made in Maricopa County, and will help make clear to the right-wing nativists out there that scapegoating Latinos is not the way to deal with whatever issues they have with immigration. It makes a mess not just in Arizona, but the whole country.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Chuck Norris and Glenn Beck tout that ol' militia favorite: Texas secession

[Video here]

-- by Dave

A little while back Chuck Norris showed up on Glenn Beck's program and mostly bantered right-wing populist talking points, but they focused especially on the Second Amendment and gun rights, with Beck playing up the possibility of new gun laws under an Obama administration:

NORRIS: Well, yes. The whole thing is that's the Second Amendment — the Second Amendment. The final line in the Second Amendment says, "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

That means not by the president, not by Congress. They are not allowed to take our rights away with this because of the Second Amendment, Glenn. And the thing is, I have a 700-acre ranch in Texas. And I have a lot of guns on my ranch.

I don't use them for hunting. I'm not a hunter. But the thing is, it's for protection. And the Second Amendment was designed for tyranny against the government. If the government decides to become a tyrannical government, our guns are to protect us against that. And that's really what the Second Amendment is all about, Glenn.

BECK: So you know, here is the thing, Chuck. You know, the government doesn't want us to have weapons and yet, they have weapons. I think the biggest weapon they have is the IRS. Nobody even understands. I just — I read a letter from ...

NORRIS: You're hitting a real sore point with me right there.

BECK: They can use taxes as a weapon, and the IRS code that that you can't even figure out — am I wrong on that?

The combined tax-bashing and gun paranoia is classic "Patriot" movement chatter, though neither started spinning off into far-right governmental theories and talk about secession.

No, they saved that for last Tuesday, when Norris went on Beck's radio show:

GLENN: Chuck, you live in Texas.

NORRIS: Yes, I do.

GLENN: Somebody asked me this morning, they said, you really believe that there's going to be trouble in the future. And I said, if this country starts to spiral out of control and, you know, and Mexico melts down or whatever, if it really starts to spiral out of control, before America allows a country to become a totalitarian country, which it would have under I think the Republicans as well in this situation; they were taking us to the same place, just slower.

NORRIS: It was slower, yeah.

GLENN: Americans will, they just, they won't stand for it. There will be parts of the country that will rise up. And they said, where's that going to come from? And I said Texas, it's going to come from Texas. Do you agree with that, Chuck, or not?

NORRIS: Oh, yeah. You know, Texas is a republic, you know. We could actually --

GLENN: It was a country before it was a state.

NORRIS: Yeah, we could break off from the union if we wanted to.

GLENN: You do, you call me.

NORRIS: Oh, yeah.

Yesterday, Norris published a piece at the Patriot-friendly WorldNetDaily, which took it even farther, openly calling for Texans to prepare themselves for secession:

On Glenn Beck's radio show last week, I quipped in response to our wayward federal government, "I may run for president of Texas."

That need may be a reality sooner than we think. If not me, someone someday may again be running for president of the Lone Star state, if the state of the union continues to turn into the enemy of the state.

From the East Coast to the "Left Coast," America seems to be moving further and further from its founders' vision and government. ...

... When I appeared on Glenn Beck's radio show, he told me that someone had asked him, "Do you really believe that there is going to be trouble in the future?" And he answered, "If this country starts to spiral out of control and Mexico melts down or whatever, if it really starts to spiral out of control, before America allows a country to become a totalitarian country (which it would have under I think the Republicans as well in this situation; they were taking us to the same place, just slower), Americans won't stand for it. There will be parts of the country that will rise up." Then Glenn asked me and his listening audience, "And where's that going to come from?" He answered his own question, "Texas, it's going to come from Texas. Do you agree with that Chuck?" I replied, "Oh yeah!" Definitely.

It was these types of thoughts that led me to utter the tongue-n-cheek frustration on Glenn Beck's radio show, "I may run for president of Texas!"

I'm not saying that other states won't muster the gumption to stand and secede, but Texas has the history to prove it. As most know, Texas was its own country before it joined the Union as its 28th state. From 1836 to 1846, Texas was its own Republic. Washington-on-the-Brazos (river) served as our Philadelphia, Pa. It was there, on March 2, 1836, where a band of patriots forged the Texas Declaration of Independence. (We just celebrated these dates last week.)


... For those losing hope, and others wanting to rekindle the patriotic fires of early America, I encourage you to join Fox News' Glenn Beck, me and millions of people across the country in the live telecast, "We Surround Them," on Friday afternoon (March 13 at 5 p.m. ET, 4 p.m. CT and 2 p.m. PST). Thousands of cell groups will be united around the country in solidarity over the concerns for our nation. You can host or attend a viewing party by going to Glenn's website. My wife Gena and I will be hosting one from our Texas ranch, in which we've invited many family members, friends and law enforcement to join us. It's our way of saying "We're united, we're tired of the corruption, and we're not going to take it anymore!"

Just to jog people's memories, the most recent organized effort to declare Texas an independent republic was the "Republic of Texas" outfit that built itself around Patriot conspiracy theories and engaged law enforcement in a week-long armed standoff:

The movement split into three factions in 1996, one led by McLaren, one by David Johnson and Jesse Enloe, and the third by Archie Lowe and Daniel Miller. In 1997, McLaren and his followers kidnapped Joe and Margaret Ann Rowe, held them hostage at the Fort Davis Resort, and demanded the release of two movement members in exchange for the Rowes. McLaren's wife, Evelyn, convinced him to surrender peacefully after a week-long standoff with police and Texas Rangers. The McLarens and four other Republic of Texas members were sent to prison. This effectively destroyed the McLaren faction, and the Johnson-Enloe faction was discredited after two of its members, Jack Abbot Grebe Jr. and Johnie Wise, were convicted in 1998 of threatening to assassinate several government officials, including President Bill Clinton.

Rick Ross has a complete library of articles about the RoT, which remains active in a mildly mutated form to this day. Also, Slate's Franklin Foer wrote a pretty comprehensive piece about them in 1997.

We've been saying for awhile that right-wing populism tends, in America at least, to lead down the path of far-right extremism. Glenn Beck and Chuck Norris seem to be taking off at a brisk jog.

Dana Houle has more.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

The Right's biggest nightmare: What if Obama fixes the economy?

-- by Dave

The wingnuts have been exploring nonstop all kinds of gloom-and-doom scenarios that apparently are certain to envelop the American economy under President Obama's guidance. Some of them -- particularly Glenn Beck's -- are wildly over the top, but every one of them believes we truly are headed for the great national crapper.

So if you want to see wingnut heads explode like so much Scanners Popcorn, watch what happens when someone proposes the possibility that Obama's programs might actually work.

Take, for instance, Wayne "Trapper John" Rogers this weekend on Fox's Cashin' In segment with Terry Keenan. When one of the guests wondered if Rogers would subsequently approve of a government bailout of GM should it turn out to actually help the economy improve, he went ballistic:

Rogers: No, but you don't know that, and they don't know that. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold on! We've got proof that this doesn't work! All you've got to do is, everybody invokes the Depression. Go back and look at the lessons of the Depression! This does not work! And everybody knows that! So this is a stupid plan, and it's something that you're speculating about, that, 'Oh, this may work.'

Sure. 'Everybody knows that' FDR failed. Uh-huh.

Well, as Stephen Colbert put it the other night:

Colbert: Last scenario. Mr. Moore -- scariest one yet. The year is 2012. President Obama's policies have worked. Pulling out of the Iraq War was the right thing to do. The stimulus plan has the Dow rebounding to somewhere in the 12,000 area. People's faith in the government is restored. Stephen Moore, if this happens, what are you doing? It's gun-in-the-mouth time for you, isn't it?

Moore: Wait. You mean, socialism actually works?

Colbert: Socialism worked. Obama was right. The government can actually solve some problems. Is that gonna happen?

Moore: I'd have to rethink everything I believe in.

My prediction: Even if this scenario becomes reality -- and conservative dogma is proven finally for the dog-something it actually is -- these people will never rethink what they believe in. They won't credit Barack Obama. And they'll try to claim somehow that it proves they were right after all.

It's what they do.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Will ex-military 'Patriots' form a more dangerous kind of militias?

[H/t Sara for the video.]

-- by Dave

One of the more disturbing trends we've been observing is the return of far-right "Patriot" rhetoric about government oppression with the election of President Obama. Fueled in no small part by mainstream right-wing talkers proclaiming we're headed into "socialism" -- not to mention a "radical communist" who must be "stopped" or else America will "cease to exist" -- the overheated rhetoric has been gradually getting higher in volume, intensity, and frequency with each passing week.

The initial concern that this raises is the possibility of a new wave of citizen militias, particularly when you have mainstream pundits like Glenn Beck out there helping to promote the concept. As Glenn Greenwald observed, the "Patriots" are back with a vengeance.

At least for the time being, however, there isn't any evidence of new militias forming, though we may see numbers growing within the coming months within existing units, particularly as Fox News and radio pundits start fueling right-wing anxieties.

However, we are starting to see a trend that's even more disturbing: Military veterans voicing Patriot-movement beliefs, including threats of violent resistance to the Obama administration.

One of them made the news recently:

A federal grand jury indicted a former Camp Lejeune Marine on Wednesday on charges that he threatened the life of Barack Obama, the U.S. Attorney's Office confirmed today.

Kody Brittingham, 20, formerly a lance corporal with 2nd Tank Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, was accused of making threats against Obama while he was president-elect, said Robin Zier, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's office for the eastern district of North Carolina.

Brittingham was arrested by the Jacksonville Police Department on breaking and entering charges in mid-December 2008.

Naval investigators discovered a journal allegedly written by Brittingham in his barracks after his arrest by civilian authorities in December. The journal contained plans on how to kill the president, as well as white supremacist material, a federal law enforcement official said.

This is an example of why I've called the Iraq War "the Timothy McVeigh Finishing School": Inevitably, there are going to be competent killers either joining the far right from our military ranks -- especially if they've been recruited into those beliefs either before or during their service -- or enacting far-right "lone wolf scenarios," and they are going to have the ability to wreak a great deal of havoc.

Another vivid example is the above video, in which an anonymous "Marine" not only urges that citizen militias form to resist any new gun laws and possibly taxation, but also promises them that "there is a resistance" within the military as well.

Note also that the video opens with a quote from Thomas Jefferson: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

Of course, this was the inscription on the T-shirt worn by Timothy McVeigh (picture here) at the time of his arrest for the April 19, 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Remember, too, that there have already been concerns raised about the infiltration of neo-Nazis into the ranks of the military. If Patriot-movement beliefs -- which are only a few degrees removed from neo-Nazi beliefs anyway -- have become somewhat common in the ranks of the military, then the concerns raised then by the FBI hold true in this situation as well:

Military experience—ranging from failure at basic training to success in special operations forces—is found throughout the white supremacist extremist movement. FBI reporting indicates extremist leaders have historically favored recruiting active and former military personnel for their knowledge of firearms, explosives, and tactical skills and their access to weapons and intelligence in preparation for an anticipated war against the federal government, Jews, and people of color.

... The prestige which the extremist movement bestows upon members with military experience grants them the potential for influence beyond their numbers. Most extremist groups have some members with military experience, and those with military experience often hold positions of authority within the groups to which they belong.

... Military experience—often regardless of its length or type—distinguishes one within the extremist movement. While those with military backgrounds constitute a small percentage of white supremacist extremists, FBI investigations indicate they frequently have higher profiles within the movement, including recruitment and leadership roles.

Reading the comments to the above Marine's video, you can see that he's not an isolated case:

This Marine is right on. Those now in power in Washington are hell-bent on destroying America and The Constitution. The Marine is right, America is a Republic, NOT a democracy, and what he says about laws that infringe on the 2nd Amendment is right. Any law that 'infringes' on the right to keep and bear arms is unconstitutional. This Marine is a patriot. Those that disagree with him, you know where the border is.

You only wish that's what he was. Everything he said int hat video is true. And if you weren't so blind to what is going on right now, ie. the government wanting to nationalize the banking systems, wanting to increase gun laws...not that there aren't over 20k already on the books, I could continue. The American people aren't free anymore, they just have a false sense of freedom, given to them to keep them complacent and happy as they go about their daily lives...but soon that will end.

I believe there is a mountain of truth to this video. Everyone I know is stocking up on guns/ammo/food. I was in the military and I think most servicemembers feel the same as him. They took the oath to protect and defend the constituion against all enemies foreign and domestic. Most military members are very patriotic and attuned to what is going on. When I was in, most everyone hated Clinton. I can only imagine what they feel toward Obama and the Congress.

The context in which this is bubbling up is perhaps the most troubling. We're seeing an increase in hate-group activity nationally. Much of the animus is directed at President Obama (see, for instance the "Birthers" -- led by Alan Keyes and his compatriots), and much of it is more generically directed at liberals and immigrants.

In any event, it isn't long after right-wingers name their "enemies" that we start seeing violence directed their way. And the most dangerous potential for this lies with the young men we've just spent years training how to kill.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

What motivated a Florida gunman to open fire on Latino exchange students?

-- by Dave

It's fairly astonishing, really, how little coverage the horrendous shooting rampage in Florida earlier this week has gotten in the American press: Someone walks up to a townhouse meeting room full of Chilean college students and opens fire on them -- after having warned neighbors earlier not to have any immigrants in her home, and asking one of them if they wanted to join him in his "revolution."

Two kids (including Racine Balbontin, 22, left) dead, five hospitalized. This is just a mundane story? Well, it's a major, front-page news story in Chile, at least, and in much of the rest of Latin America.

Northwest Florida Daily News reports:

Cooperative Radio reporter Stephanie Hunt spoke to the Daily News via phone from Santiago, Chile, Friday morning. She said Chilean Government Minister Francisco Vidal called the crime "macabre" and "brutal."

Hunt said Chile's Deputy Consul General is working to get family members to the United States so they can be with the injured students and bring back the bodies of those who didn't survive. Families traveled from all over Chile Thursday to Santiago to meet with officials in an attempt to expedite the process of getting passports and visas.

Although the case is sensitive because it involves foreign nationals and 14 victims total, The Walton County Sheriff's Office released some new information.

"It was a tremendously horrific scene," said Sheriff Mike Adkinson. "Even the survivors are victims."

Adkinson said the shooting happened about 1:45 a.m. when Dannie Baker, 60, approached Unit 12 in the Summer Lakes townhome complex and opened fire through a window. When he was done, Adkinson said, he went back to his home at Unit 25.

We're gradually learning more about the shooter, Dannie Baker -- but a heap of questions remain unanswered. It appears that he used to campaign for Republicans, but they dropped him when he sent some e-mails in 2007 that apparently frightened them.

According to one news story:

Not much is known about Baker or his lifestyle yet, according to the Sheriff's Office.

He was a volunteer at the Walton County Republican Headquarters during the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign in 2004.

"He volunteered the same time I did," said Pat Magee, a member of the Walton County Republican Executive Committee. "I was shocked. The person I knew would have never done anything bad to anyone."

Magee said Baker answered phones and did general office work during the campaign. Although she didn't remember much about his personal life, she said he had mentioned he was from Alabama and had attended Auburn University.

Jim Anders, another member of the Republican Executive Committee, said Baker was very active during the 2004 election but added that he was very eccentric. He said Baker traveled to Atlanta once a year to assist in some sort of music ministry there.

Baker did not volunteer during last year's election, but local Republicans said they began to receive disturbing e-mails from him about national political issues, said Anders.

"Dannie had some emotional problems, it seemed," said Anders, who added that that many e-mails were "radical" and "inappropriate."

The e-mails were so disturbing they were reported to the Sheriff's Office, the Republican volunteers said.

The Sheriff's Office said the e-mails did not target any individuals, but would not reveal any more details about them.

A followup profile sheds some more light:

Meanwhile, Baker remains a mystery to those who have met him locally.

He has a registered nonprofit organization in Florida called Perfect Heart Ministry. The mission statement in the articles of incorporation filed in 2000 say the corporation is "organized for church ministry of promoting the Gospel through Christian music in the State of Florida."

Baker is listed as the incorporator. Two others, Trina and Jason Myers, formerly of Freeport, are listed as being on the board of directors. Calls to more recent phone numbers for the couple have gone unreturned.

Attorney Bart Fleet said he didn't realize he'd met Baker until the Daily News called him recently to ask about the corporation. Fleet's office is listed as the registered agent for the ministry and had helped Baker file documents with the state.

Fleet said he hasn't spoken to Baker since the fall of 2001.

"I'm probably a registered agent for thousands of corporations that we have set up over the past years," Fleet explained. "I don't remember anything about him other than this. We basically set up his corporation and filed his paperwork with the Internal Revenue Service."

When Baker volunteered with the local Republican Party headquarters during the 2004 election campaign, other volunteers remembered that he traveled to Atlanta once a year to help with the Atlanta Fest Christian music festival. But festival organizers said there are so many volunteers that no one remembered Baker specifically.

One person who met Baker on several occasions said she didn't know much about his past, but that he made her feel "cautious and uneasy."

Cheryl Rhoads cleans the town home directly across from where Baker lived at Summer Lake in Miramar Beach.

"He must have been sitting at his window, looking out all the time," Rhoads said.

She said it didn't matter if it was 6 a.m. or 2:30 p.m., Baker would ring the doorbell after she arrived at her job.

"He wouldn't wait to be invited in," Rhoads said. "He would just come in when you opened the door."

Rhoads said sometimes Baker would ask her how much she would charge to clean his home and sometimes he only wanted to talk about religion. He even gave her a copy of his book "Man's Perfection before God."

A Miami Herald writer also profiled the case. A local blogger, the Keyboard Detective dug up plenty more on Baker, including some input from someone who claims to have known him:

In general, Dannie has been a mentally ill person for a long time (it's not important for how long). His health has been deteriorating dramatically since 2003 I would say. While in 2003 he was still quite OK although I have seen dramatic mood swings and outbursts of agression mainly against weaker persons, usually girls in his house who were also WAT students.

It's also apparent his attorneys fully intend to explore the mental-illness component of the shootings.

However, it's a cop-out to simply ascribe this to his illness and let it go at that. Because there is a pattern of "isolated incidents" in which mentally ill people select their victims based on eliminationist scapegoating rhetoric from right-wing ideologues.

I've written about this previously:

Part of the problem is that we actually have seen this happen time after time after time: A mentally unstable person is inspired by hateful right-wing rhetoric to act out violently -- and yet because of that mental state, the matter is dismissed as idiosyncratic, just another "isolated incident." And over the months and years, these "isolated incidents" mount one after another.

But simply ascribing these acts to mental illness is a cop-out. It fails to account for the gross irresponsibility of the people who employed the rhetoric that inspired the violent action in the first place, and their resulting moral culpability.

The clearest illustration of this is a case that occurred here in Seattle in the mid-1980s:

People who study the far right have known many of these people over the years: Gordon Kahl. Robert Matthews. Tim McVeigh.

One of the most memorable of these, for me, was a man named David Lewis Rice.

On Christmas Eve 1985, Charles and Annie Goldmark were at home with their sons Derek, 12, and Colin, 10, preparing for a holiday dinner when the doorbell rang. It was Rice, a 27-year-old unemployed transient, posing as a taxicab driver delivering a package. He brandished a toy gun and forced his way into their home, then set about using chloroform to render all four Goldmarks unconscious. He then proceeded to kill them slowly, using a steam iron and a knife that he used to insert into at least one of the victim's brains. Annie was pronounced dead on the spot, Colin pronounced dead on arrival, while Charles died there a short while later; Derek finally succumbed 37 days later.

But Rice wasn't just a deranged loony -- though he probably fit that description too. He also was a deranged loony who had been set into action by the malicious lies of a group of right-wing haters, whose venom became his inspiration, as the HistoryLink piece explains:

David Rice, a former steel worker from Colorado, joined an extremist group in Washington called the Duck Club. Although the Duck Club was almost defunct, the Seattle chapter still functioned. The group convinced Rice that Charles Goldmark was Jewish and a Communist. (Charles Goldmark's parents, John and Sally Goldmark, had won a highly publicized libel case in 1964 when they were accused of being Communists.)

The Goldmark case is a centerpiece of James Aho's study of the far right, This Thing of Darkness: A Sociology of the Enemy (which I've discussed previously). Aho goes into more detail about what drove Rice, as well as the circumstances surrounding his decision to kill:

Conversion (resocialization) ... occurs not through brainwashing of passive victims or through obsessive self-conversion. It takes place through active efforts of the disciple, sometimes indifferent to ideology or theology as such, to solidify and preserve social ties with his mentors.

... Ed Fasel [fictitious name] was head of the local Duck Club chapter. It was from Ed that Rice received the tragic misinformation that Charles and Annie Goldmark were leading Seattle Communists. In the course of discussions concerning local subversives and crooks who were presumably frustrating Rice's efforts to secure a job, Fasel, mistaking Charles for his father John, related to Rice that the Goldmarks had been investigated and that Charles was "regional director of the American Communist Party." Rice took this to mean that Charles was the "highest obtainable target I could reach, the greatest value informationally." After handcuffing the Goldmarks, Rice intended to interrogate them about the next person in the conspiratorial hierarchy, possibly to preempt at the last moment the impending invasion of alien troops [a conspiracy theory to which Rice subscribed].

What occasioned Fasel to dredge up a name associated with an event that had occurred two decades previously in another part of the state? In a Seattle Port Commission election during the summer of 1985, one of the candidates was Jim Wright, a Republican. Wright's campaign manager was none other than Ashley Holden, a defendant in the Goldmark trial. [Holden had been a leading torchbearer in the McCarthyite "Red fever" that swept Washington state in the late 1940s and '50s, and had been one of the people who falsely accused the Goldmarks in print of being part of the Communist Party.] Upon discovering this unusual link, the Seattle media jumped on it, and the name "Goldmark," with its unfortunate connotations, "got out again," to use one informant's phrase.

In my interview with him, Holden convincingly insisted that he knew nothing of the Duck Club nor any of its members. "I deplored the murder," he said. "There is no question," he went on, parroting local wisdom, "Rice was demented."

I have met some of the old leaders of the Duck Club, including "Fasel" -- whose real name was Homer Brand. They reminded me of Richard Butler: they had a moral stench about them like rotting corpses. Of course, they never faced legal liability for their role in the murders. But they had blood on their hands, just as surely as does the "Libertarian National Socialist Green Party" and whoever else gave Jeff Weise his inspiration.

The problem is that this has happened more than "on occasion" -- rather, there is a history of this kind of violence, and there's a consistent pattern to it. What's most noteworthy is that the violence expands with the increasing use of eliminationist rhetoric. When people look at Dannie Baker's rampage and ask "Why?" -- as so many are -- that history and that pattern are a good place to start looking.

Anyone want to wager that Dannie Baker is not a Lou Dobbs fan?

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Ann Coulter soft-pedals white supremacists in her new book

-- by Dave

Most of the discussion of Ann Coulter's most recent wretched contribution to the national discourse -- her book Guilty -- has focused on her attacks on single motherhood.

But Mark Potok at the SPLC noticed that there were some other problems with it -- namely, her vociferous defense of the Council of Conservative Citizens:

In her latest foaming-mouth tome — Guilty: Liberal “Victims” and Their Assault on America, released on Jan. 6 — Coulter spends the better part of three pages defending a group called the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), which The New York Times had described as a “thinly veiled white supremacist organization.” Coulter begs to differ. The CCC, Coulter opines, is “a conservative group” that has unfairly been branded as racist “because some of the directors of the CCC had, decades earlier, been leaders of a segregationist group.” “There is no evidence on its Web page that the modern incarnation of the CCC supports segregation,” she says. “Apart from some aggressive reporting on black-on-white crimes — the very crimes that are aggressively hidden by the establishment media — there is little on the CCC website suggesting” that the group is racist. Indeed, its main failing is “containing members who had belonged to a segregationist group thirty years earlier.”

Contrary to Coulter's assertion, there is more than abundant evidence beyond their origins that the CofCC is a profoundly racist organization dedicated to white supremacy. For example:

The CCC’s columnists have written that black people are “a retrograde species of humanity,” and that non-white immigration is turning the U.S. population into a “slimy brown mass of glop.” Its website has run photographic comparisons of pop singer Michael Jackson and a chimpanzee. It opposes “forced integration” and decries racial intermarriage. It has lambasted black people as “genetically inferior,” complained about “Jewish power brokers,” called gay people “perverted sodomites,” and even named the late Lester Maddox, the baseball bat-wielding, arch-segregationist former governor of Georgia, “Patriot of the Century.”

One day, the CCC ran photos on its home page of accused Beltway snipers John Muhammad and John Malvo, 9/11 conspirator Zacharias Moussaoui and accused shoe-bomber Richard Reed. “Notice a Pattern Here?” asked a caption underneath the four photos. “Is the face of death black after all?” On another occasion, its website featured a photo of Daniel Pearl, the “Jewish Wall Street Journal reporter” who had just been decapitated by Islamic terrorists. In the photo, Pearl was shown with his “mixed-race wife, Marianne.” The headline above the couple’s picture was stunning even for the CCC: “Death by Multiculturalism?” The CCC Arkansas chapter ran an essay waxing nostalgic for the days “when racial separation was the norm.”

But to Ann Coulter, there is “no evidence” on its website that the CCC “supports segregation.” Mostly, she says, the group — which was formed from the debris of the White Citizens Councils that Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall once called “the uptown Klan” — is about “a strong national defense, the right to keep and bear arms, the traditional family, and an ‘America First’ trade policy.” Indeed, she says, The New York Times and other critics of the CCC are simply liberals “who have no principles.”

Of course, Ann Coulter has lots of principles. They're just not principles any decent human being would adopt.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.