Obama's Speech: Not Transformational, But Still Powerful

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

President Obama's acceptance speech to the DNC last night was bound to be a disappointment in a lot of ways, because the buildup (especially Michelle Obama's speech, followed by Bill Clinton's) was so sensational that he had almost no chance of pulling off anything that could be spectacular. After all, we've gotten accustomed to his presence these past four years; there's little he can do now to surprise us.

Naturally, this left the Jennifer Rubins of the world gloating, as though the GOP's tawdry affair in Tampa stood up to any kind of comparison to the past week in Charlotte, enough to give Republicans like Rubin comfort. As though.

There were a lot of different reactions, making the speech something of a Rohrschach test: Kevin Drum thought the president phoned it in. Ed Kilgore thought it set just the right tone, especially for its intended audience:

The only thing I’m really confident about is that the “enthusiasm gap” we’ve been told about the entire cycle may have largely dissipated. The Democratic Convention did about as good a job as anyone could reasonably expect in highlighting both positive and negative reasons for Democrats turning out to vote. And the Democrats in the hall responded powerfully. The hatefulness they (or at least those living in battleground states) are about to see pouring from every television screen once the 504(c)(4) and Super-PAC ads let the pursestrings rip will likely reinforce that enthusiasm, regardless of their effect on the tiny band of swing voters they are aimed at.

Thereisnospoon at Hullabaloo thought likewise:

The President had a singular task tonight: take a message of hope and change, and adapt it to the reality of the struggling economy. Attack Romney while looking presidential, not punching down, and remaining statesmanlike. Show empathy without showing weakness.

And I think he accomplished those goals very well, in one of the most progressive speeches I've heard him give. It wasn't the greatest speech he's ever delivered, but that's because the message is hard and doesn't lend itself to the most soaring rhetoric.

He made it clear that the American people (and, I would argue, the citizens of the world) are in a project together, and that we can only succeed in that project if we have faith in it and in one another, without "othering" groups or allowing selfish cynicism to take hold. That's a daring message for a U.S. president.

Still, there were warning signs for Digby:

There's a lot of wriggle room in there, and quite a few straw men, but if you read it literally, he specifically promised not to slash those programs in exchange for tax cuts. What he didn't do was promise not to cut those programs in exchange for tax hikes --- which is what the Democrats are seeking.

He won't agree to tax cuts for millionaires. That's a good thing. But will he agree to cuts if the Republicans agree to raise some taxes? We don't know. But we do know that David Koch's on board with that.

I think Tom Junod at Esquire had it about right:

His speech was disappointing until, with about ten minutes to go, it acknowledged disappointment, and so began its rise. "The times have changed — and so have I," he said. "I'm no longer just a candidate. I'm the president." Of course, he was reminding us of his power; the fact of his presidency has become an argument for his presidency. But he was also reminding us that as a candidate who rose to power on the politics of pure potential, he is, as president, a fallen man. "And while I'm proud of what we've achieved together, I'm far more mindful of my own failiings, knowing exactly what Lincoln meant when he said, 'I have been driven to my knees many times by the overwhelming conviction that I had no place else to go.'"

This was where the speech turned, and became, in its statement of humility, a statement of rousing power. "I ask you for your vote," he said, and his commonplace words had a beseeching quality that put them outside the realm of political performance. He had failed to transform his office, and failed to transform our politics, but he sounded fully aware that he had been himself transformed.

He had started out as the Cassius Clay of our politics, brash and blinding, with an abilty to do things in the ring that no one else had ever thought of — with an ability to be untouchable. Now he stood inside the ring of stars on the blue carpeted stage of the Democratic National Convention as the Muhammad Ali whose greatness was proven after he returned to boxing bigger, slower, harder-hitting but also easier to hit. Oh, Ali got touched, all right, and since he lost his skill at avoiding punches he had to find the skill of taking them. He became a prodigy not of otherworldly gifts but rather of sheer will, and so it was with Obama in his speech on Thursday night. At an event that paid endless tributes to our wounded warriors, he rebranded himself as something of a wounded warrior himself; and at the very moment when those who remembered 2008 hoped he might say something that no one had ever heard before and maybe even reinvent, one more time, the possibilities of a word as hackneyed as hope itself, he instead completed his hard-won journey to convention.

The entire transcript is here, and you can watch the entire thing on YouTube here:

Elizabeth Warren's Speech: The Vital Voice Of Progressivism

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

I  know everyone was entranced by Bill Clinton's speech last night, as well they should have been. The man has more charisma in his pinkie than the biggest rock star has in their entire body. And there's no question he laid out the most compelling case possible for re-electing President Obama. But the really important speech last night in terms of raw substance, by far, was Elizabeth Warren's 15 minutes.


Because Warren made clear, even more than Clinton, what really is at stake in this election. It's down to a simple choice for Americans: Do they want democracy, or do they want oligarchy, rule by the rich? It's really that simple, that stark, and that significant.

Here's Warren last night:

I’m here tonight to talk about hard-working people: people who get up early, stay up late, cook dinner and help out with homework; people who can be counted on to help their kids, their parents, their neighbors, and the lady down the street whose car broke down; people who work their hearts out but are up against a hard truth--the game is rigged against them.

... People feel like the system is rigged against them. And here’s the painful part: they’re right. The system is rigged. Look around. Oil companies guzzle down billions in subsidies. Billionaires pay lower tax rates than their secretaries. Wall Street CEOs--the same ones who wrecked our economy and destroyed millions of jobs--still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them.
Anyone here have a problem with that? Well I do.

... The Republican vision is clear: “I’ve got mine, the rest of you are on your own.” Republicans say they don’t believe in government. Sure they do. They believe in government to help themselves and their powerful friends. After all, Mitt Romney’s the guy who said corporations are people.

No, Governor Romney, corporations are not people. People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they cry, they dance. They live, they love, and they die. And that matters. That matters because we don’t run this country for corporations, we run it for people. And that’s why we need Barack Obama.

As D-Day puts it:

That’s simply a far more honest portrayal of the America we actually live in than anyone usually articulates on stage at a national political convention. She told the story in broad strokes, the story people feel in their core, the story that anyone paying attention since the Great Recession knows. We’re not a fairy-tale land where everyone can grow up and be whatever they want. We’re not a land of social mobility and equality of opportunity.

We’re in an economy that’s unraveled pretty badly, and over a 30-year period, that has cut off those avenues for mobility, and now has become a favor factory for the rich and powerful. People may not want to hear this; but they know it.

When Did The Associated Press Become Fox News For Print?

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Once upon a time -- back when I worked in newsrooms and edited wire copy for a living -- the Associated Press was more or less the standard for button-down, straight-down-the-middle news reportage and analysis. If anything, it erred on the bland and centrist "he-said/she said," side. But it never displayed anything remotely like a bias.

That's all changed in recent years, of course -- as we recently saw in AP's egregiously unethical reportage on Dr. Tiller, which is really only an extension of a trend toward replicating the propagandaesque nature of Fox News we've seen increasingly at AP in recent years.

But I think they were all topped, as Aviva Shen at ThinkProgress reports, by their analysis of Bill Clinton's speech that dismisses Clinton's point about the truthfulness of the Romney campaign (or lack thereof) by bringing up Monica Lewinsky -- just like any good talking head at Fox might.

As Shen observes, most media critics who delved Clinton's facts found that he was entirely accurate:

Though he frequently departed from the script, the former president correctly cited the statistics on Obama’s job growth, decreasing health costs since 2010, and the stimulus tax cuts for 95 percent of Americans.

But the anonymous analyst for the AP found a hatful of dubious "facts" to contest anyway -- and then proceeded to pull out a regurgitated series of grotesquely distorted right-wing talking points that could have been penned by Karl Rove himself.

For instance, the AP analyst disputed Clinton's contention that President Obama has tried to work across political aisles to get legislation passed:

THE FACTS: From Clinton's speech, voters would have no idea that the inflexibility of both parties is to blame for much of the gridlock. Right from the beginning Obama brought in as his first chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, a man known for his getting his way, not for getting along.

One of the more high-profile examples of a deal that fell apart was the outline of a proposed "grand bargain" budget agreement between Obama and House Speaker John Boehner in 2011.

The deal would have required compromise from both sides. It slashed domestic spending more than most Democrats wanted and would have raised some taxes, which most Republicans oppose.

Boehner couldn't sell the plan to tea party factions in the House or to other conservative activists. And Obama found himself accused of going too far by some Democratic leaders. The deal died before it ever even came up for a vote.

Here's the fact that perhaps the AP reporter conveniently forgot: It was Boehner who killed that deal, and Boehner alone. (This is has been backed up recently by the leaks from Bob Woodward's new book.) And that has been the story, time after time after time, of Obama's dealings with Republicans, both in the House and in the Senate: He reaches out his hand to them, and it comes back a bloody stump. They have been so bent on his destruction that normal legislating has been impossible. Or is the reporter utterly unaware of the obscene rate at which the GOP deployed the filibuster in the Senate during Obama's tenure?

It only goes downhill from there. The analyst similarly dismisses Clinton's perfectly accurate statistics about the growth in health-care costs with a wave of the airy brush:

That's wishful thinking at best. The nation's total health care tab has been growing at historically low rates, but most experts attribute that to continued uncertainty over the economy, not to Obama's health care law.

But neither can the analyst prove that it's an inaccurate prediction of future behavior, either -- unless, of course, he's a Foxian propagandist instead of a factual analyst.

Why else would you dismiss Clinton by then blaming him for the economic downturn of 2008 -- without any mention of the far more dominant role played by the Republican policies of George W. Bush in creating that disaster?

Clinton is counting on voters to recall the 1990s wistfully and to cast a vote for Obama in hopes of replicating those days in a second term. But Clinton leaves out the abrupt downward turn the economy took near the end of his own second term and the role his policies played in the setting the stage for the historic financial meltdown of 2008.

Then the analyst makes his descent into Foxhood complete by again dismissing Clinton's point about the Romney campaign's flagrant use of falsehoods by pointing to his own scandal -- a classic ad hominem, complete with a side of nasty:

THE FACTS: Clinton, who famously finger-wagged a denial on national television about his sexual relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky and was subsequently impeached in the House on a perjury charge, has had his own uncomfortable moments over telling the truth. "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky," Clinton told television viewers. Later, after he was forced to testify to a grand jury, Clinton said his statements were "legally accurate" but also allowed that he "misled people, including even my wife."

As Aviva Shen observes:

During its fact-check of this claim, the AP article had to ignore the Romney campaign’s dishonest attack on Obama’s welfare work requirements, which even Republican governors have questioned. It also fails to consider the campaign’s habit of deliberately editing Obama out of context, as they did in Romney’s first ad, which attributed the line, “If we talk about the economy, we’re going to lose,” to Obama when he was actually mimicking the McCain campaign in 2008. Also missing is the fact that the Republican National Convention last week was based on a distortion of Obama’s “you didn’t build that” quote. ThinkProgress has compiled a comprehensive catalog of Romney’s lies on virtually every issue he’s had to discuss.

Rather than attempt to debunk Clinton’s attack on the campaign’s dishonesty, the AP could only imply that Clinton cannot criticize any false claims because of his past scandal.

And then media folks wonder why no one take print media seriously anymore. Time to call for another blogger ethics panel!

Lyin' Dick Morris Slimes Clinton, Obama In One Swell Foop

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

[H/t Media Matters]
I love it when Dick Morris gets on TV and begins making dire pronouncements about Democrats. Because it always means things are actually going well.

Morris, after all, is famous for making hilariously bad predictions (got to wonder how that right-wing remake of the education system is going, not to mention those Obama impeachment proceedings) and offering even worse political advice -- when he isn't also just blathering right-wing zombie lies. Most of all, he loves casting his former bosses, the Clintons, in as depraved and bleak a light as possible.

He's just always wrong -- something Jon Stewart points out with some zest. He's a perfect reverse barometer for what's happening in reality.

Last night, during Fox's coverage of the Democratic National Convention, Morris held forth on the actual corruption and depravity of the Clintons, "guaranteeing" that Bill Clinton wants to see Barack Obama defeated, but he was being held back "because his wife is a hostage," Morris told a credulous Bill O'Reilly. "They'll kill her if he loses."

He went on to predict that Clinton would heap praise on Democrats generally and then get around to saying, "And oh, by the way, we support Obama" near the end. Which worked out to be as accurate as all of his previous predictions.

I can hardly wait for Morris's black-helicopter conspiracy theory book to hit the stands.

The Two-Sided 'Race Card': Why We Need A Frank Discussion -- And Why We Won't Get One

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

As a lot of people have been noticing recently, it's past time we had an honest conversation about race in this country. The problem is what happens to the conversation as soon as conservatives get involved.

Of course, the real problem with race in America originates with conservatives, so perhaps that's not surprising. This is a historic problem. After all, it is conservatives who resisted the end of slavery. It is conservatives who instituted, and then protected with a fifty-year campaign of terrorism known as lynching, Jim Crow laws and segregation in the South. It is conservatives who resisted the Civil Rights Movement with every ounce of their energy. And it is conservatives today who resist any kind of advancement in civil rights for minorities.

As we've explained previously, their favorite rhetorical technique in pursuing this anti-rational course is what we call "the bloody shirt gambit": Converting perpetrators into victims and victims into perpetrators by claiming that the very discussion of the atrocities committed by violent right-wingers is an act of demagoguery and thus more vile than the original act in question itself. They scream, "You're waving the bloody shirt!" any time someone talks about the realities of their racial bigotry -- or, in more recent vintage, "You're playing the race card!" -- and suddenly the very discussion of the matter is placed off-limits.

A good example of this happened recently, when Time's Joe Klein appeared on Chris Matthews' Sunday news show on NBC, and the discussion of how President Obama was discussed by the panel, including Klein and Helene Cooper. At one point, the discussion ran like this:

Cooper: Four years of covering Barack Obama, he does not play the race card. Not in a negative way. He does not do that.

Klein: He hates it. He hates it. He probably should, though -- he probably should address it because the bitterness out there is really becoming marked.

Immediately, the headlines on Drudge followed those that appeared at Dan Riehl's wingnutofastic joint, to wit, that Klein was urging Obama to "play the race card" -- even though what Klein clearly said was that what Obama needs to do is address the rising tide of racial animus that's being whipped up out there by the right-wingers playing the race card.

Such nuance, of course, was well over the heads of the folks at Fox News, who followed the Drudge lead and featured a segment on The Five discussing Klein's alleged faux pas as having urged Obama "play the race card". They all agreed that it would be a bad idea for Obama to "play the race card" by discussing racial tensions.

So Klein posted this response:

According to Mr. Drudge and Real Clear Politics, I’ve advised the President to play the race card on the Chris Matthews Sunday show. I didn’t, of course. The question to the panel was whether the President was going to have to address what appears to be a growing racial bitterness in the country. My response was that he should. That’s different from “playing the race card,” which is a term I’ve never used–it’s a cliche and a bad one, implying a political gambit or stunt. Political stunts that involve race are obnoxious. But race and ethnicity are issues that the President has addressed with intelligence in the past and, if the current Republican dog-whistling continues, may be something he might want to address in the future.

I don't normally defend Joe Klein -- the classic Beltway Villager -- but this was a sterling response that addressed the core issue: namely, the Republican campaign to clearly stir up racial resentment against Obama among working-class white voters, which even the most "centrist" observers can see is occurring.

Nonetheless, it naturally drew the ire of the natterers at The Five the next day:


You see, according to Dana Perino, Klein erred in having the audacity to bring up the cold reality that the Romney campaign is using dog-whistle politics in order to appeal to working-class white voters.

You know that this is reality when even a well-noted Beltway "centrist" like Ron Fournier -- remembered here for his GOP-friendly hit pieces and rambling false-equivalency analyses -- writes an exhaustive piece for National Journal explaining just how the Romney dog-whistle campaign actually works:

At Linda’s Place at 9 Mile Road and Harper, where $2.99 gets you two eggs, hash browns, bacon, and an honest conversation about racial politics, I chatted with Detroit firefighter Dave Miller and his pal, contractor Benson Brundage. As it turned out, that breakfast-table conversation helps explain why (and how) Mitt Romney is playing the race card with his patently false welfare ad.

“Let’s talk about your polling,” Benson said. He grabbed from my hand an Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor survey showing that middle-class blacks and Hispanics are far more optimistic about their children’s future than are whites of the same economic status. “What do you think the unemployment rate is among blacks? In Detroit, it’s probably 40 percent. If the unemployment rate is that high, why is it that they are so optimistic about their future and the future of their children?”

Benson paused, heard no reply, and answered his own question.

“Subsidization.”

There it is. The Macomb County buzz word for welfare, a synonym that rests on the tongues of the white middle class like sour milk. Men like Miller and Benson don’t use the N-word and they don’t hate (disclosure: I grew up with Miller, who now lives in Macomb County): For a five-figure salary and overtime, Miller risks his life fighting fires in a black neighborhood just south of 8 Mile Road. But Benson casually overestimated the black unemployment rate in Detroit by more than 10 percentage points, and both he and Miller will talk your ear off about welfare cheats.

“It’s a generational apathy,” Miller said, “and they keep getting more and more (apathetic) because they don’t have to work. If they sleep all day and free money …”

“ … Comes in the mail,” Benson said.

“… not in the mail anymore,” Miller said, “It’s in a magic card they can swipe.”

They poked at their egg yolks until Miller broke the silence. “I feel like a fool for not jumping on that shit and getting some (welfare) myself,” Miller said. “But I couldn’t sleep at night.”

I share this story to crack the code – the subtle language of distrust and prejudice that whites use to communicate deep-set fears, and that cynical politicians translate into votes. Translating Miller and Benson:

“Subsidization” = Welfare

“Generational Apathy” = Lazy

“They Slept All Day” = Blacks Sleep All Day

“I Feel Like a Fool” = I’m Mad As Hell

Please understand that Miller and working-class whites like him have reason to be angry and cynical. First, life is tough and getting tougher for the shrinking middle class, regardless of race. Second, as the National Journal reported in the story involving Miller a year ago, minorities are steadily pushing their way into the middle class, which was once the province of whites.

The most illustrative part of the piece, however, came when Fournier tried to have an honest conversation about the strategy with the Republican operatives behind it. What he got, of course, was the usual blunt denial -- then twisted, a la the "bloody shirt gambit," into an accusation that transforms the person seeking to have that honest conversation into the evil demagogue:

A remarkable piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates in my sister publication, The Atlantic, cites several studies linking negative racial attitudes to voting behavior. Coates writes: “The irony of Barack Obama is this: he has become the most successful black politician in American history by avoiding the radioactive racial issues of yesteryear, by being “clean” (as Joe Biden once labeled him) – and yet indelible blackness irradiates everything he touches.”

Knowing all this, and with deep personal roots in Detroit’s racial maw, I felt on firm ground Tuesday asking Ron Kaufman, a Romney adviser, why the campaign was playing the race card in places like Macomb County.

“I couldn’t disagree more,” Kaufman replied.

“You know an ad like that touches a racial button,” I said.

“No it doesn’t,” Kaufman replied. “I don’t agree with you at all.”

Kaufman who I’ve known and respected for years, accused me of playing the race card – a fair point, strictly speaking, because I raised the question in a public setting: a joint interview with CBS’ John Dickerson before a large audience and live-streamed.

Still, Romney and his advisors stand by an ad they know is wrong – or, at the very least, they are carelessly ignoring the facts. That ad is exploiting the worst instincts of white voters – as predicted and substantiated by the Republican Party’s own polling.

Not only do they stand by such ads, but any effort to point out that Romney and Co. are in fact playing the race card with their invidious racial appeal to the lowest common denominator in politics is itself proclaimed "playing the race card".

This is why we can't have an honest discussion about race in America: Conservatives will not let us -- because in the end, they are the problem.

There really is a growing race problem in this country, and it has everything to do with the American Right -- the way they are encouraging white Americans to blame minorities for their economic displacement, a problem in fact disproportionately caused by conservative misgovernance, followed by conservative intransigence. Blaming brown people is a convenient way of scapegoating others for your own malfeasance.

This behavior announces itself in ways large and small -- from the continued prejudice that young black men face in getting jobs, to the rise in right-wing domestic terrorism we've seen in recent months.

Mostly, we know about it because it's everywhere among working-class Americans -- the wingnutty belief that Obama is a Muslim bent on imposing socialism and destroying our freedom. You can't turn a corner in the South, or the rural Midwest, or the interior West, without encountering people who believe this stuff as fact. And the GOP infrastructure, most notably Fox News, actively encourages these beliefs without actually endorsing them.

So it's time to begin having that conversation without conservatives, even if it is about them. One other thing has also become clear: The extensive appearance of the "bloody shirt gambit" has also made it nearly impossible for anyone of color -- most particularly the president -- to initiate and (at least initially) lead this discussion, because it has become pro forma to dismiss their contributions as merely arising from self-interest.

Frankly, I believe the initial push is going to have to come from honest white Americans willing to examine the problems unflinchingly -- people of good will who cannot be tainted by the "race card" accusation. Unfortunately, thanks to right-wing intransigence and centrist "but they all do it" false equivalence, they are becoming fewer and farther between.

Chuck Norris Warns Of Doom To Follow Obama's Re-election

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

I know everyone got a kick out of seeing Clint Eastwood up there onstage last week, aptly representing the doddering, wheezing get-off-my-lawn mentality of today's Republican Party.

But in a lot of ways, I think the not-aging-so-gracefully movie star they should have picked to introduce Mitt Romney was Chuck Norris, since he so perfectly represents the nutty Tea Party element that remains the GOP's base -- beyond, that is, the 1 percent that is their deep base.

But Chuck wasn't invited. So here he is on YouTube, via Stephen C. Webster at Raw Story:

A video released this weekend by action movie hero Chuck Norris claims that America faces “1,000 years of darkness” if President Barack Obama is reelected.

“If we look to history, our great country and freedom are under attack,” Norris warns, standing next to his wife. “We’re at a tipping point and, quite possibly, our country as we know it may be lost forever if we don’t change the course in which our country is headed.”

The pair go on to explain that Obama won in 2008 because more than 30 million evangelical Christians stayed home on Election Day. “We know you love your family and your freedom as much as Gena and I do, and it is because of that we can no longer sit quietly or stand on the sidelines and watch our country go the way of socialism or something much worse,” Norris explains.

Norris’s wife Gina adds that defeating Obama “will preserve for our children this last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into 1,000 years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.”

This is how right-wingers are working themselves up into a frenzied froth for this fall election. It's part of the same hyper-hysterical fearmongering garbage the NRA is whipping up as well.

I think we have some legitimate cause for concern about what these people will do if/when they lose.

Georgia Militia Terrorists Fit DHS Bulletin Profile Perfectly

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

It's emblematic of just how cowed our federal authorities have been by the right-wing blowback against calling right-wing domestic terrorists what they actually are that the prosecutors in Georgia who recently charged a group of far-right militiamen with plotting carry out a series of attacks in Washington state and to assassinate President Obama took to calling them, in their press announcements, "anarchists" -- which meant, of course, that the media promptly followed suit.

Let's be perfectly clear: The only thing in the profiles of these men that suggests anything remotely "anarchist" in their politics is the fact that, according to the AP, they "aggressively recruited" other members of the military with a symbol that resembled the classic anarchist symbol, an "A" inside a circle (even though there are a number of far-right symbols that could fit this description as well).

In every other regard, however, these men were indisputably classic right-wing extremists:

-- One of the leaders of the plot, Joseph Aguigui, was a page at the Republican National Convention in 2008.

-- All of the plotters were members of the military and espoused a far-right philosophy, including targeting President Obama for assassination. "I did think that the government needed to change, and I thought that we were the people to be able to change it," one of the plotters told the judge in pleading guilty.

-- The targets of their terrorist acts were generally "liberal" government entities -- poisoning the Washington apple crop, for instance, likely targeted the liberal Seattle consumer market, the main consumers of those crops -- although no one can quite figure out why they targeted Savannah's Forsyth Park.

What's most disturbing about this case is that these men were obtaining their arms and combat training from the U.S. military and were aggressively recruiting other members from within their ranks.

As it happens, this sort of thing -- as well as last month's murderous rampage by an ex-soldier/white supremacist at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin -- is exactly what that Department of Homeland Security bulletin on right-wing domestic terrorism of 2009 warned about:

U//FOUO) Returning veterans possess combat skills and experience that are attractive to rightwing extremists. DHS/I&A is concerned that rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to boost their violent capabilities.

Of course, the DHS wasn't alone in sounding this warning. The year before, in 2008, the FBI issued a similar warning:

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.

... New groups led or significantly populated by military veterans could very likely pursue more operationally minded agendas with greater tactical confidence. In addition, the military training veterans bring to the movement and their potential to pass this training on to others can increase the ability of lone offenders to carry out violence from the movement’s fringes.

But then, we remember what happened next: right-wing hysterics took to the airwaves and the blogosphere to denounce the report as somehow a kind of "smear" of mainstream conservatives, which really was only a kind of unconscious self-indictment. Nonetheless, the Beltway media played along willingly, the result being that the DHS ultimately apologized for the report, and then proceeded to completely gut its unit devoted to monitoring right-wing extremist terrorism.

We've been paying for it ever since, most notably with the lives of law-enforcement officers killed by these nutcases. We've also been paying for it in the form of a sharp increase in right-wing domestic terrorism across the country (I'll have a lot more on that soon, I hope).

Meanwhile, even though the report's prescience and accuracy was almost immediately manifested, and has been substantiated multiple times since -- most notably by the two cases of military-trained terrorist plots in August -- the deniers on the right keep denying that they were wrong.

As James Raimey in the LA Times observed:

There has been no mass outcry for more preventive measures in the face of a gruesome display of domestic terrorism. But the 3-year-old backlash that prevented tracking of home-grown crackpots has gradually quieted and there is room for reasonable vigilance again.

Yet there was Michelle Malkin penning an entire column in response, insisting (in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary) that she was still right.

The shouting and hysterics worked then, and they're still affecting how we talk about this. Time for that to come to an end.

UPDATE: I meant to include this article about the problem the military is facing with racists lurking within their own ranks. There's a lot of denial still going on, and not just in the wingnutosphere.

Kris Kobach's Doing His Part For Romney's Latino Outreach

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Hey, I was wondering the other day how the Republicans' outreach efforts to Latinos were going. So who should pop back up in the news but our old nativist guru, the author of SB1070 himself, Kris Kobach. Seems he's having an outsize role on the shape of the Republican platform -- and not only is he reliably nativist, but he's also anti-black and a paleo-wingnut on abortion, too. A perfect Republican.

Most of all, he's pushing the Republican immigration platform as far to the right as possible (without hitting Joe the Dumber Plumber territory). As Elise Foley reports:

During a meeting of the GOP platform committee in Tampa, Fla., Kobach called for the party to officially back increased border fencing and the E-Verify employment verification system, and to go after two immigrant-friendly initiatives: in-state tuition for some undocumented young people and so-called sanctuary cities. Those measures were in the 2008 Republican platform but had been dropped from the draft this year, Politico reported.

"These positions are consistent with the Romney campaign," Kobach said. "As you all remember, one of the primary reasons that Governor Romney rose past Governor Perry when Mr. Perry was achieving first place in the polls was because of his opposition to in-state tuition for illegal aliens."

Now, why exactly would the GOP be taking Kobach's advice? Especially considering that he just lost another big round in the federal courts regarding the SB1070 clones he had successfully promoted in Georgia and Alabama:

An appeals court on Monday sided with the federal government in blocking several provisions in Alabama and Georgia's controversial anti-illegal immigration laws, while allowing other key parts of those laws to stand.

Advocacy groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Poverty Law Center applauded the decisions, with National Immigration Law Center executive director Marielena Hincapie saying in a statement they "should send a strong message that state attempts to criminalize immigrants and their loved ones will not be tolerated."

Still, while three judges from the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did strike down more challenged provisions than they allowed in a pair of rulings, officials from both Alabama and Georgia pointed out that the vast majority of their states' immigration laws remain valid.

"The essence of Alabama's immigration law has been upheld by today's ruling," Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley said in a statement. "The core of (the) law remains if you live or work in the state, you should do so legally."

Ah, but those states are grasping at straws, because, as Amanda Peterson Beadle at ThinkProgress explains, these rulings almost completely gutted these laws:

But in the first ruling on a state immigration law following the Supreme Court’s SB 1070 decision, the 11th Circuit federal appeals court struck down most of Alabama’s HB 56, including the worst provisions like the state’s attack on school children:

– School officials cannot ask about students’ immigration status: Under HB 56, schools were required to determine the immigration status of every newly enrolled student. As a result, students stayed home from school once the provision went into effect in late September out of confusion over the law and fear that they or their parents could be deported. By February, 13 percent of Latino students dropped out by February as families fled Alabama because of the immigration policy.

– Alabama cannot ban contracts between lawful and unlawful residents.: Alabama’s HB 56 included an unprecedented ban against contracting with undocumented immigrants. No other state or nation has such a measure, which, for example, could have made it illegal for a landlord to rent an apartment to someone who is not a legal resident.

Politicians readily admitted that the goal of HB 56 was to make Alabama a hostile place for undocumented immigrants, and in blocking the contracts provision, the court recognized that the point of the contracts section was “forcing undocumented individuals out of Alabama.”

Additionally, the 11th Circuit stopped Alabama and Georgia from making it a crime to transport or harbor an undocumented immigrant in those states. Both states included these provisions in their similar anti-immigrant laws approved by state legislators more than a year ago. Arizona’s SB 1070 also makes its a crime to harbor or transport someone who is not a legal resident, but the Supreme Court did not rule on it. Today, a civil rights coalition is asking a federal judge in Arizona to block this section of SB 1070 especially now that it has been struck down in Alabama and Georgia.

... In all, the 11th Circuit’s ruling is a victory for immigrant advocates and a significant — if not total — loss for proponents of extreme “self-deportation” immigration policies.

Well, hey, let's check in and see how the Romney campaign is handling all this. Here's a recent soft-pedal piece from USA Today that, um, puts it rather delicately:

The issue of illegal immigration also becomes complicated for Romney.
GOP officials are quick to point out that immigration is not the main priority for Hispanics when casting their vote. Polls back that up: The economy is their No. 1 priority, as it is for the country as a whole. And Romney volunteers say voters want to talk more about the economy than anything else.

"They don't really bring it up, and neither do I," Saltus said.

Barreto calls immigration a "gateway issue" for Hispanic voters — if a candidate is wrong on the issue, it's hard to listen to anything else.

"It makes it hard for the candidates to even get in the door," he said.

Romney took a hard stance on illegal immigration during the GOP primary. He called for more funding to secure the border with Mexico, pushed identity-verification laws to keep illegal immigrants out of American jobs and endorsed the idea of "self-deportation," where laws make life so hard for illegal immigrants that they choose to return to their home countries.

The issue becomes more prominent for voters who know, or are related to, an illegal immigrant. About a quarter of Hispanic voters know someone, or are related to, someone facing deportation, and more than half know an illegal immigrant, according to a Latino Decisions poll conducted last year.

Despite those numbers, Romney volunteers said the issue rarely comes up when talking with voters.

Matthew Mirliani, a 19-year-old volunteer who will start studying at Dartmouth College this fall, has been knocking on doors, making phone calls and writing op-eds on behalf of Republican candidates for months. When asked how voters respond to Romney's immigration record, the Mount Vernon teen spoke quickly.

"No one's talking about that," Mirliani said. "That's not the topic."

That's right! Not the topic! We don't wanna talk about immigration reform here! Because that would derail the nice, immigration-free reality they want to construct.

These guys are whistling past the graveyard if they are telling themselves that Latino voters don't care about immigration. Sure, it's not the No. 1 subject -- that would be JOBS, a subject that Republicans aren't so good at talking about either, but what the hey, it beats talking about Romney's plan to have all 12 million undocumented immigrants "self-deport".

Mebbe that's why Obama won that poll on their own Latino outreach website. And why that same website used stock photos of Asian children to illustrate their Latino outreach.

Yeah, I would say that outreach is going just swimmingly. As in Obama is maintaining that massive lead among Latino voters, 63 to 28 percent.

Mike Huckabee: Chief Enabler For The Religious Kook Bloc

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

[H/t Heather]

What is it about Mike Huckabee that brings out the worst in his religious-right interview subjects?

Mebbe it's the likelihood that Huckabee himself holds all these views while managing to project an image of avuncular amiability that belies his underlying nastiness.

After all, as Ellen at Newshounds observes, there was Huckabee last weekend, hosting Tony Perkins of the Family Research Center, invidiously trying to blame the Southern Poverty Law Center for the shooting at his offices, just as he had been doing all week:

Last Saturday, Huckabee began by citing the "huge pile of money" held by the SPLC. He didn't mention the FRC's assets which are listed as $12,516,000. He noted that the SPLC spends "a lot of time" accusing family values organizations of being hate groups and that Perkins was "bold" in speaking out about the "atmosphere" which contributed to the shooting. In response to Huckabee's question about the reason for the classification, Perkins insulted the SPLC's lack of "integrity" and accused them of "making money off of the spreading of hostility." (on Fox, oh, the irony!) The chyron stated, as Fox Fact, that the "FRC Promotes Faith, Freedom, and Family." Perkins claimed that they are being attacked for the policy on marriage and their "religious position on homosexuality."

(Right, gays are going to hell, badda boom) He then made his patented claim that this is fostering a hostile environment. After citing the Chick-fil-A sandwich bags that the shooter possessed, he dismissed the connections between the food chain and the FRC. And while he didn't have the details, he accused the media of constantly mentioning the FRC, in their Chick fil-A coverage, as a hate group and that, according to Perkins, gave the shooter "a license to shoot."

Using data from the right wing shill, Brent Bozell, Huckabee then attacked the media for not sufficiently covering the shooting and not exposing the shooters "connections to a gay rights group" and if that happened at Planned Parenthood, the coverage would have been different. To Huck's question about media coverage, Perkins admitted that he hadn't tracked it, although he praised Fox for its coverage. He then proceeded to trash the SPLC for "creating this atmosphere of hostility." He asked gay groups, who expressed their condolences to the FRC, to urge the SPLC to "stop the labelling" (On Fox! Oh, the irony!) of groups that stand for "traditional moral values." He claimed (again, the irony) that "there's no place for this in a constitutional republic." He whined about freedom of speech. Huck said he brought "light to the story." (Oh, no he didn't!)

Then, Huckabee followed that up a couple of days later by letting Todd Akin feebly rationalize his bizarre abortion remarks by himself feebly rationalizing the underlying prohibition against victims of rape obtaining an abortion.


As Patricia at Newshounds observes:

Akin apologized (?!) for his bizarre and offensive comment about "legitimate" rape with this statement, to Huckabee: "I was talking about forcible rape, and that was absolutely the wrong word." (So, uh "forcible rape" is different from "legitimate" rape, how?) Huckabee, BTW, endorsed and supported Akin's candidacy and for that Akin is grateful.

During the warm Christian brotherizing that went on during the interview, Huckabee seemed to validate the Sharon Angle philosophy that being forced to give birth, after a rape, is making lemonade out of lemons (Be happy ladies, you're gonna be a mommy). Huckabee noted that horrible rapes have created "wonderful human beings."

Words fail...

Huckabee hides his extremism well. But every now and then the mask slips.

Rep. Steve King, R-Moron: I Never Heard Of Anyone Getting Pregnant From Statutory Rape Or Incest

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Via KMEG-TV,, here's the noted Congressman From the Planet Moron, Republican Steve King, weighing in on the controversy swirling around his friend and fellow paleo-conservative on abortion, Todd Akin:

King supports the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act." It would ban Federal funding of abortions except in cases of forcible rape. Right now, Medicaid also covers abortions for victims of statutory rape or incest - for example, a 12 year old who gets pregnant.

Congressman King says he's not aware of any young victims like that.

"Well I just haven't heard of that being a circumstance that's been brought to me in any personal way, and I'd be open to discussion about that subject matter," he said.

Evan McMorris-Santoro at TPM observes:

A Democratic source flagged King’s praise of Akin in the KMEG interview to TPM. But potentially more controversial for King is his suggestion that pregnancies from statutory rape or incest don’t exist or happen rarely. A 1996 review by the Guttmacher Institute found “at least half of all babies born to minor women are fathered by adult men.”

Let's dig that Republican hole a little deeper, shall we?

Of course, none of this is exactly a surprise for anyone who's been paying attention to Republican wisdom on Women's Parts. Nor is it a surprise coming from a guy who likes to compare immigrants to cattle and dogs, and who recently defended dog fighting. Dehumanization is becoming a Republican specialty, and Steve King is their ace.

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

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Ho hum. It's becoming routine now:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOYES: I think that is absolutely obvious answer.

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

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

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

Amusingly, Bozell himself opined this weekend:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moreover, this point is particularly noteworthy:

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

Indeed, as we observed yesterday:

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

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

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

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Its Own Words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

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

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

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

The study's conclusions make the key point:

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

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

As Salvatore Colleluori at Media Matters observes:

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

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

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

Why Romney And The Rich Will Never Really Get It

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

 [H/t Diane]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This explains a lot, don't you think?

Funny How Intolerant Right-Wingers Leap To Decry Intolerance

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

[H/t Heather]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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