Talking about hate crimes

Well, as promised, I appeared this afternoon on Michael Medved's radio show on KTTH-AM in Seattle to talk about hate crimes. We used my book Death on the Fourth of July: The Story of a Killing, a Trial, and Hate Crime in America as a jumping-off point.

I was treated courteously throughout (Medved did have to prod me at one point when I was trying not altogether successfully to come up with a succinct way to make a point) and I thought the hour was well spent. Obviously, I didn't make a convert out of Medved, but I think I managed to clear up a lot of the myths about hate crimes that permeate the discussion.

The rush of a radio talk show often sweeps away more detailed points, and there was one case of this I thought I'd explain a little more here. I mentioned, during the show, that there was a recent story in the Philly Inquirer about a significant upsurge in white-supremacist activity in New Jersey. Many of the hate crimes being perpetrated as result of this trend were anti-Semitic crimes, ranging from assaults to vandalism. But there was another component: immigrants were probably being attacked in significant numbers, but were not reporting the crimes:

Jews are hardly the only group that has felt the press of hate groups, many of which have been motivated by an influx of immigrants, experts say.

Last year, a pack of teens and young men called the East Coast Hate Crew attacked at least 10 Mexican men in Ocean County over a four-month period, investigators said. The beatings and robberies typically took place on streets late at night as the Mexicans were heading home from work.

Eight people were charged with the crimes. Officials suspected more attacks, said Christensen, the state investigator, but it was difficult to find victims because many would have been illegal immigrants.

"They were just getting beaten and walking home with their friends and not reporting this to the police," he said.

This points to one of the most significant reasons that hate crimes are underreported substantially in this country (as I said on the air, the Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that, in contrast to the 9,000 or so reported to the FBI annually, the actual figure is likely close to 40,000): a major portion of the unreported hate crimes involve attacks on immigrants. This trend has been increasing rapidly in the past year or two.

I explained some of this on pp. 168-169 of Death on the Fourth of July:

Of all the factors that cause law-enforcement officers to fail to identify and investigate bias crimes, the most significant, the DOJ study's authors found, was the gap between the victims and the police. The less trust that exists between minorities and their local law enforcement, the greater the likelihood that hate crimes will go unresolved.

The Filipino family that encountered Chris Kinison and his friends in Ocean Shores was a textbook example of how hate crimes can go unresolved this way. Many of the victims spoke poor English and had difficulty communicating with the police officers who came to their rescue; even though some of them later reported that they had wanted to pursue harassment charges against the men, the officers either failed or refused to register this. And the officers, little trained in dealing with hate crimes, clearly did not recognize that they had come upon the scene of a felony, which in most other such cases would require a careful and serious investigation and specialized handling of the victims.

By seeming eager to simply break up the potential violence and send everyone on their respective ways—and particularly by escorting the family to the town's borders—the officers communicated to the victims the message that the harassment they had endured was insignificant. This in turn feeds the distrust that any outsider (particularly a minority) in a strange town is likely to feel.

Moreover, the incident vividly illustrates that the problem of letting hate crimes go unresolved extends well beyond the mere statistical issues, and that the stakes can be very high indeed, especially for small towns. The result, as it was in Ocean Shores, was that these crimes can escalate from simple harassment to outright violence. Perpetrators, as some studies have observed, see their escape from the arm of the law almost as an invitation to step things up.

Other studies have likewise observed that the most common cause of this cascade of crime is the failure of police to proactively bridge the gap between themselves and the victims. The JRSA's Joan Weiss, in earlier research, found that the reluctance of victims to report crimes was significantly higher for hate crimes than for other crimes. The DOJ study reiterates this point: "For a multitude of reasons, hate crime victims are a population that is leery of reporting crimes—bias or otherwise—to law enforcement agencies."

Most hate-crime victims are minorities in the communities where the crimes occur. In many cases, they have poor English skills and have difficulty asking for assistance; in others, they may simply be unaware that what has happened to them is a serious crime. This is particularly true for immigrants, who may be reluctant to even contact police because of their experience with law enforcement in their homelands, where corruption and indifference to such crimes are not uncommon. Likewise, hate-crime victims may be confused about or unaware of the bias motivation involved, interpreting a threat or assault as a random act when other evidence suggests it was not. At other times, they may be reluctant to tell police about the bias aspects of the acts against them, fearing the police won't believe them or that they simply won't do anything about it anyway. And in the case of gays and lesbians, many are reluctant to report the crimes out of fear they will be forced to reveal their own identities as homosexuals; many more fear (sometimes with good reason) that they will wind up being humiliated and victimized further by police.

Likewise, many minorities in certain communities—blacks in the South or Hispanics in the Southwest, for example—have long histories of built-up distrust of law enforcement in their communities, and may simply refuse to participate in an investigation without proactive efforts on the part of police to bridge that gap. Indeed, this level of involvement was almost unanimously the chief factor reported by advocacy groups when queried by the authors of the DOJ study about what most affected hate-crime victims' decision to call or cooperate with police.

Of course, I was going to explain all that in a sentence or two. Really.

I do like blogs better than talk shows, because, you know, if I stammer behind the keyboard, I can just erase it. But thanks to Medved for the courteous and rational conversation.

[I don't think either an archive or transcript of the conversation exists, sorry to report.]

Bush World: Where science is fungible

Fresh on the heels of news storiesthat Bush administration officials tampered with government climate reports, this story in the Los Angeles Times just left me shaking my head:

Land Study on Grazing Denounced
Two retired specialists say Interior excised their warnings on the effects on wildlife and water

It describes how Bush administration officials completely reversed the scientific findings of veteran experts en route to turning public lands into open range for ranchers:

The Bush administration altered critical portions of a scientific analysis of the environmental impact of cattle grazing on public lands before announcing Thursday that it would relax regulations limiting grazing on those lands, according to scientists involved in the study.

A government biologist and a hydrologist, who both retired this year from the Bureau of Land Management, said their conclusions that the proposed new rules might adversely affect water quality and wildlife, including endangered species, were excised and replaced with language justifying less stringent regulations favored by cattle ranchers.

... The original draft of the environmental analysis warned that the new rules would have a "significant adverse impact" on wildlife, but that phrase was removed. The bureau now concludes that the grazing regulations are "beneficial to animals."

Eliminated from the final draft was another conclusion that read: "The Proposed Action will have a slow, long-term adverse impact on wildlife and biological diversity in general."

Also removed was language saying how a number of the rule changes could adversely affect endangered species.

"This is a whitewash. They took all of our science and reversed it 180 degrees," said Erick Campbell, a former BLM state biologist in Nevada and a 30-year bureau employee who retired this year. He was the author of sections of the report pertaining to the effect on wildlife and threatened and endangered species.

"They rewrote everything," Campbell said in an interview this week. "It's a crime."

You've just gotta love what those new regulations will do, too:

The new rules, published Friday by the BLM, a division of the Department of Interior, ensures ranchers expanded access to public land and requires federal land managers to conduct protracted studies before taking action to limit that access.

The rules reverse a long-standing agency policy that gave BLM experts the authority to quickly determine whether livestock grazing was inflicting damage.

The regulations also eliminate the agency's obligation to seek public input on some grazing decisions. Public comment will be allowed but not required.

OK, a quick tally: negating scientific review, forcing public lands to accommodate private industry, reducing the ability of land managers to respond to land degradation, and then cutting out public participation. Could this possibly be any worse for the public?

Well, yes, because the rules reverse some real gains made in recent years in bringing public land use -- including that by ranchers -- to sustainable levels:

In recent years, concerns about the condition of much Western grazing land has been heightened by drought, which has denuded pastures in the most arid areas, causing bureau managers to close some pastures and prompting ranchers to sell their herds.

The new rules mark a departure from grazing regulations adopted in 1995 under President Clinton and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. Those regulations reflected the view of range scientists that a legacy of overgrazing in the West had degraded scarce water resources, damaged native plant communities and imperiled wildlife.

Babbitt ordered the bureau to establish standards that spelled out when public lands were open for grazing, and for the first time required range specialists to assess each pasture to ensure it held enough vegetation to support wildlife and livestock. It was the first time in about 50 years that the federal government had tried sweeping overhauls of how Western ranchers operated on public lands.

It would be like spitting into the wind, I suppose, to ask these ranchers where they think their grazing lands are going to come from when they've all been destroyed. But hey, that's someone else's long-term problem, isn't it?

It's certainly not the Bush administration's.

I come from ranching country and have written more range-management stories than I care to recall (it's not what you'd call glamor reporting). I thought I'd seen it all during the James Watt/Anne Gorsuch years, but the Bush gang really take the In Your Face Audacity prize. They're rewriting the management of public lands so that they are now no longer really belong to the public.

Just as disturbing is the consistency in the outright of abuse of scientific review for predetermined ends. At some point, you'd think people would figure out that our government is now in the hands of religious ideologues and corporate profiteers who see science as the enemy. As a nation whose superiority is built on technology that is built on science, that should trouble even conservatives.

[Via Thoughts From Kansas, which has a nice roundup of other atrocities on the endangered-species front as well.]

Radio Free Orcinus

I'm venturing into hostile territory today, at the studios of the local right-wing talk-show station KTTH-AM in Seattle, where I'll be the guest on the Michael Medved show, which is nationally syndicated. If you have Medved on a local station, you should be able to catch it.

We'll be debating hate-crime laws and whether we should have them or not. We'll discuss my book Death on the Fourth of July: The Story of a Killing, a Trial, and Hate Crime in America, which is due out in paperback next month. (More on that later.)

Medved is opposed to the concept of hate crimes, so I'll be discussing that with him. This doesn't surprise me, incidentally; he's also made clear that he thinks anti-discrimination laws are wrong-headed (and, apparently, unconstitutional) as well. The constitutionality of bias-crime laws, as it happens, is predicated in several important regards on the precedent of those rulings that upheld anti-discrimination laws.

I typically avoid right-wing talk shows, especially in situations where the host is obviously hostile. Usually such appearances are simple muggings in which the guest is set up, ambushed, incessantly interrupted, and then browbeaten in the closing segment without any chance of rebuttal. It's not a fair game, and I'm not interested in playing.

But I listen to Medved's show irregularly, and my impression is that, though I may disagree with him, he avoids that kind of ugly setup for the most part. I say "for the most part" because I know that Mark Crispin Miller, in his appearance on Medved's show last summer, had exactly the kind of experience I describe as typical for other shows.

So I'll be reporting back here with my impressions.

Incidentally, you can listen to my interview with KDVS's Richard Estes and Ron Glick by going to his program's Web site and clicking on the link. It will, however, be available only for a week. That interview was about my most recent book, Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community.

The real Minutemen

The media keep sending love letters to the Minutemen, this time in the form of a remarkably nearsighted Monterey Weekly piece that offered the following assessment:

Indeed, it soon seemed that the hysteria over the armed and dangerous Minutemen was much ado about nothing. Retired men and women sitting on the backs of pickup trucks in six-hour shifts, concentrated along a two-mile stretch of border fence eyeing the vacant desert, appeared more like a group on a bird watching excursion than a paramilitary force.

The author of the piece, Andy Isaacson, thus blithely ignores one of the realities about dealing with organizations like the Minutemen: when they're posing in front of the cameras, they're very careful about what they say and how they appear. It's what they're doing and saying when no one is looking that is the problem.

I had a little experience with this in my dealings with a previous permutation of the militia movement -- from which, in fact, the border "patriots" are directly derived. The Washington State Militia, for instance, held public rallies and talked before the cameras about how they were just trying to be a "neighborhood watch" out to protect their fellow citizens. Behind closed doors, as we later learned, they were building pipe bombs and talking about blowing up railroad tunnels as well as their fellow citizens. (See In God's Country for more on this.)

The Minutemen's public face works exactly the same: Have your spokesmen work hard to present a sincere and concerned image of ordinary citizens who are just "fed up," while behind closed doors they let their hair down. The core of the Minutemen comprises a corps of True Believers from the extremist right. The leaders spout talk about the "war on terror" in public, but the followers mostly (in private, of course) spout talk about their neighborhoods and homes being "invaded" by criminal brown people.

A good example of this popped up in a recent story out of Tennessee involving a formative Minuteman operation there. Tennessee, of course, has no international border; and so its Minutemen, unsurprisingly, are focused on the "invasion" of Latinos from elsewhere:

Before a meeting in Hamblen County Tuesday night, 6 News asked meeting leader Carl Whitaker if he's operating a hate group, like some people say.

"We're not a hate group. We're a concerned group. We're concerned what's happening," Whitaker says. "If people are here illegally and they want to get legal, we would be glad to try to help them follow through the process. We don't hate anybody."

He says the Tennessee Volunteer Minutemen are working to expose companies that hire illegal aliens and take jobs away from taxpaying Americans. "We've turned in five different places of employment here that are hiring illegals."

But another supporter told a different story. Off-camera, James Drinnon says there are more Mexicans than African-Americans in Hamblen County. But he didn't really say African-American. He used the "N" word.

On camera, Drinnon says, "I think they ought to get them all out. Most of them in here. That's where all the dope's coming from. Most of them's Hispanic."

That's pretty consonant with the expressions of support from the Minutemen we've seen in the comments section of this blog, isn't it?

It also resonates with a quote from another Minuteman I posted earlier:

"We understand why Gilchrist and [project co-organizer Chris] Simcox have to talk all this P.C., crap," said one. "It's all about playing to the media. That's fine. While we're here, it's their game and we'll play by their rules. Once Minuteman's over, though, we might just have to come back and do our own thing."

The Minutemen keep promising us that they're just ordinary folks. Of, course, so do Ku Klux Klan members. And there's little mistaking the real presence of exactly the same kind of "citizens" throughout this merry band, forming its real, activist core.

Daryle Jenkins of One People's Project recently found a historical reason for that: Neo-Nazis have been talking about forming precisely this kind of "citizen's border patrol" for many years now. He has the video to prove it:

Almost thirty years ago there was another group that basically our current vigilante xenophobes pattern themselves after. They weren't called the Minuteman Project then. They were the Klan Border Patrol, and it was what gave David Duke his first big break. This is an excerpt from a 1989 video titled The History of W.A.R., Pt. 1. For those who forgotten about this crew, W.A.R. stands for White Aryan Resistance, the group that Tom Metzger runs when he isn't going around California doing blues karaoke. He talks about the formation of the Klan Border Patrol back in Oct. 1977 and what it entailed.

They may hide behind masks -- whether made of white sheets or soothing PR. But we can see who they are well enough anyway.

'A chance to invade'

Everyone is taking a stab at answering the question, "Why did we invade Iraq?" See, especially, Matt Yglesias' take, which points out that one of the real outrages in the memo is the utter lack of postwar planning it depicts.

Today, Russ Baker points out in Tom Paine.com that he reported back in October, in interviews with a former Bush speechwriter, that Bush actually had envsioned invading Iraq well before 9/11:

"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said to me: 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He said, 'If I have a chance to invade . . . .if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency."

The mainstream press dismissed the stories and essentially ignored them. However, the Downing Street Memo only confirmed what Herskowitz was describing.

At times, I think even the talk about PNAC and the Bush Doctrine is something of a smokescreen when it comes to explaining why we invaded Iraq. It is clear, after years of observing him in action, that George W. Bush's style of leadership consists of finding data and evidence to confirm his preconceived notions. He adopted the PNAC and Iraqi National Congress folks because they were saying what he wanted to hear.

And invading Iraq was what he wanted to hear because that was his vision for his presidency from the get-go. Of course, it is a vision drenched in Oedipal rivalry and crude power-mongering, using war as a pretense for a broader political agenda.

Which is, of course, exactly what we got.

Eliminate them

This man is simply a piece of excrement, a piece of waste that needs to be scraped off the sidewalk and eliminated.

-- KVI's John Carlson, discussing Sen. Dick Durbin, on his Seattle-based talk show Thursday

The right is in full froth over Sen. Dick Durbin's remarks comparing the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay to the way other regimes -- including the Nazis, the Soviets, Pol Pot, and other dictators -- treated their prisoners.

The frenzy is reaching ugly proportions very rapidly. And don't think for a minute that they'll stop with Durbin.

Spin and distortion are, as always, playing a critical role in the brouhaha. The key is that conservatives are deliberately misrepresenting what Durbin said, and twisting his words into a campaign to paint liberals as treasonous vermin worthy of extermination.

Here are those words:

When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred here -- I almost hesitate to put them in the record, and yet they have to be added to this debate. Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report:

"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold....On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor."

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

It's quite clear, especially in full context, what Durbin was saying: That torturers who violate basic human rights and standards of decency are the antithesis of everything this country, at its best, is supposed to stand for; it is the domain of history's most horrid monsters.

But that's not how the right is describing it. According to them, Durbin was claiming that all our soldiers are Nazis. Perhaps typical of this was the nakedly false Washington Times headline, "Gitmo called death camp."

The leading torchbearer in this particular twilight parade is, unsurprisingly, Rush Limbaugh, who on his show today ran a snippet of Durbin's remarks -- omitting the first two sentences of the FBI agent's remarks, a patently dishonest edit that masked the clear abuse of the prisoner described therein. He also sneered at Durbin's fairly clear defense of his remarks by insisting that Durbin had compared Gitmo to death camps.

But more important was his larger thrust:

Dick Durbin has just identified who the Democrats are in the year 2005, particularly when it comes to American national security and when it comes to the US military. These are the same people they say they support the troops. This is how they do it, huh? They give aid and comfort to the enemy. They make it possible for Mullah Omar and bin Laden, whoever else is out there still alive, to laugh themselves silly at us. Mogadishu all over. Remember what bin Laden said after we cut and run out of Mogadishu? "That's when I knew the US was a paper tiger, that's when I knew they didn't have the guts, that's when I knew they couldn't take casualties," and that's what fueled his planning for 9/11. He has said so. So, bammo! Here you go, Dick Durbin. Thanks once again for telling our enemies just what a bunch of soft patty cakes we are and how we'll back away from our own treatment of people much less back away from dishing it out to people like our enemies.

Ah yes, the long-festering "treasonous Democrats" meme, which has been bubbling along steadily ever since Sept. 11.

Of course, the rest of the conservative chorus, particularly in the blogosphere, immediately chimed in. These ranged from Michelle Malkin, who called the remarks "treachery," to PowerLine's Paul Mirengoff calls it a "big lie" that "slanders his own country. Normally that kind of slander is uttered only by revolutionaries seeking the violent overthrow of the government. Yet Durbin purports to be part of a loyal opposition."

And, of course, it was all over talk radio too. Following the Oxycon Artist's lead, it was the leading topic on nearly every right-wing show I tuned in to today. Michael Savage, as always, was particularly vicious.

But I was a little stunned to hear nearly the same kind of talk emanating from none other than KVI's John Carlson, who certainly has shown no compunction in embracing the right-wing talking point du jour in the past, but has always maintained at least a facade of civility and rationality. He was, after all, the GOP nominee for governor in Washington state in 2000 (he lost handily). I've been on John's show, some years ago, and thought he was a model of thoughtful conservatism.

Today, he took all of the conservative talking points that had been bubbling up through folks like Limbaugh and Malkin and Powerline -- liberals hate the military, liberals hate America, they'd love to see us lose just to spite Bush, they're worthless scum -- and boiled them down into a few moments of unadulterated eliminationism. He described Durbin not merely as vermin or disease (a typical eliminationist mode) but as outright waste -- to be, explicitly, eliminated.

Taken in combination with Limbaugh's insistence that Durbin was perfectly representative of mainstream liberalism, the inference from Carlson's assertion becomes even more disturbing: Are liberals mere excrement too, fit only for scraping from the walkways?

You could tell that Carlson was teeing off of the points raised by others, particularly Limbaugh, by repeating Limbaugh's claim that the push to shut down Gitmo originated with the since-discredited Newsweek story about Koran abuse there. Here's how Limbaugh described it (and Carlson nearly perfectly reiterated):

Look at what one erroneous story from Newsweek has led us to. One error in Newsweek about what they were supposedly doing to the Koran is what's led us to this, close down G'itmo.

Limbaugh proceeded to engage in a bit of projection: "This is precisely how the left-wing propaganda mill works."

This characterization of the Gitmo stories and concern about what's been occurring there is similar to the right-wing tactic with the story surrounding Bush's military records: Create a media "scandal" over an apparent journalistic failure that kills the underlying story, and thereafter treat any discussion of that underlying story as having been dismissed along with the "scandal."

In reality, of course, much of the discussion about Gitmo was fueled by a number of other reports, most famously the Amnesty International report that compared Guantanamo to the Soviet gulag.

The concerns about American interrogation practices have been on the front burner for many human-rights groups since even before the revelations of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, including reports that arose immediately after the invasion of Afghanistan. As I remarked when Abu Ghraib became public knowledge, there is considerable evidence that the problems are systemic and may indeed originate at the highest echelons of the Bush administration.

Back when the Afghanistan deaths were reported, I ran a letter from Joan Kirkpatrick, the renowned (and, sadly, late) international-law expert who was early in the forefront in decrying the Bush administration's interrogation practices. It contained, I think, the definitive response to all those, like Limbaugh, who dismiss torture as mere fraternity pranks or a matter of mere discomfort for the prisoners:

These practices also violate human rights treaties to which the United States is a party, specifically the prohibitions on torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. The United States may not transfer Al Qaeda suspects to other states to facilitate their torture; that too is a violation. Moreover, there is no state on earth "that does not have legal restrictions against torture" ("Questioning of Accused Expected to Be Human, Legal and Aggressive", March 4, 2003, A13). The prohibition on torture is a peremptory norm of customary international law binding on all nations. The torturer is the enemy of all mankind.

Dick Durbin was right. The practices at Gitmo, as well as everywhere else in the American "war on terror" detention system, as Amnesty International is insisting, need to be shut down and investigated, precisely because the torture techniques that Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin are so quick to defend are practiced only by inhuman monsters: Nazis, Stalinists, tinpot dictators. In defending them, they only reveal their own inhumanity, and the depths to which they have fallen.

They constantly refer to the events of Sept. 11, or the horrors of Saddam Hussein's regime, as justification. But the comparative standard for our behavior is not Saddam. Monstrous acts do not justify further monstrousness. And it is no victory for America if, along the way, we lose our soul -- as does any person, let alone nation, who condones torture.

This is why their attacks on Durbin are so vicious. They are so intent on taking America with them over the cliff and into this moral abyss that they will destroy anyone who dares remind them of their own moral vacuousness. Not only do they intend to silence dissenters, they intend to eliminate them. John Carlson, in the end, was only giving final voice to the entire thrust of the "Durbin scandal."

Radio Free Orcinus

I'm going to be interviewed tomorrow by Richard Estes, host of Speaking in Tongues, on KDVS 90.3 FM in Davis, Calif. The interview is scheduled to be aired from 5 to 6 p.m. PDT.

We'll be discussing my new book, Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community. I gather, from our pre-interview conversations, that we'll also bring in some of the subjects discussed on this blog.

If you click on the KDVS link above, you'll be able to listen to it live on the Web. KDVS archives its shows, so I hope to provide a link afterward to the interview.

Also coming up: A discussion of hate crimes with Michael Medved on his radio show Tuesday at 1 p.m. PDT. I'll have more on that this weekend.

Burning crosses

[An unsigned painting, originating in Kansas, from the 1920s.]

Those three burned crosses in North Carolina of a couple weeks ago sure got everyone stirred up. Including, it seems, the Ku Klux Klan:

The national director of the Ku Klux Klan on Tuesday denied any involvement in the recent burning of crosses in Durham and offered to add to the reward fund for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the case.

"Anybody with a copy machine or a computer can make a flier and incriminate the Klan," said Thomas Robb during a telephone interview Tuesday afternoon. "I'm confident that is what they will find this time."

Heaven forfend that anyone should suspect the Klan of burning crosses, for goodness's sake. When have they ever done anything like that?

And they're, you know, just folks, too:

In a news release faxed Tuesday to The Herald-Sun, Rachel Pendergraft, the Klan's membership coordinator, said she was concerned that fliers left behind at one of the sites attributed the acts to the Klan.

"Our members are busy raising families, taking part in the business community and volunteering for community programs," Pendergraft said in the release. "Your child's teacher may be a member or perhaps your den's Girl Scout leader is a member.

"I also find it strange that no one would see a group of white people in mostly black areas carrying and mounting 7-foot-tall crosses," the statement says.

But then, as the editors of the Herald-Sun adroitly noted, "wouldn't a group of people of any race seem out of place anywhere if they were carrying and mounting 7-foot crosses?"

It's a typical lame Klan maneuver to try to blame black "agitators" for acts committed by their own members -- or at least their sympathizers. But it may not have been one of Robb's followers, and it still might have been a Klansman. Remember, there are about 110 different Klan organizations (or Klaverns) and four well-known "national" organizations (Robb's Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Kamelia and the Imperial Klans of America) as well as some lesser groups that aspire to those heights. Finally, there are many thousands of people who probably subscribe to white-supremacist beliefs but do not belong to any organization, and when these folks act, they show no hesitation in adopting traditional racist symbology and rhetoric.

Now, there are indeed false reports of racist violence that turn out to be a hoax or wrong conclusion. But endemic to the hoax cases is a general half-heartedness on the part of perpetrators; the pattern and spread of these burnings suggests a far more serious intent.

However, as with some of these other cases (notably the Lefkow murders), the reaction of the extremist right to the reportage of these incidents is in some ways more noteworthy than the originating incident. And the indignation of these good, upstanding Klan members is worth more than a mere chortle.

Remember, if you will, that at one time the Klan was widely perceived as exactly the kind of good, upstanding Americans and neighbors that Mrs. Pendergraft described it as being even today. The rider in the Klan painting at the top of this post was meant to be seen as heroic, not nightmarish.

The Klan wasn't just a popular civic organization that existed in all 48 states. It was a real political power.

As the Wikipedia entry on the Klan explains:

The second Ku Klux Klan rose to great prominence and spread from the South into the Midwest and Northern states and even into Canada. At its peak, most of the membership resided in Midwestern states. Through sympathetic elected officials, the KKK controlled the governments of Tennessee, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Oregon in addition to those of the Southern Democratic legislatures. It even claimed to have inducted Republican President Warren Harding at the White House. Klan delegates played a significant role at the 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York City, often called the "Klanbake Convention" as a result. The convention initially pitted Klan-backed candidate William McAdoo against New York Governor Al Smith, who drew the opposition of the group because of his Catholic faith. After days of stalemates and rioting, both candidates withdrew in favor of a compromise. Klan delegates defeated a Democratic Party platform plank that would have condemned their organization. On July 4, 1924 thousands of Klansmen converged on a nearby field in New Jersey where they participated in cross burnings, burned effigies of Smith, and celebrated their defeat of the platform plank.

You can read more about the Klan's brief reign in the 1920s here.

And yes, they had a fairly substantial female contingent, mostly a kind of ladies' auxiliary. Here's a shot of them marching on the Capitol (along with thousands of regular Klansmen) in 1928:



The Klan and its members have always seen themselves as the red-blooded proponents of "100 percent Americanism." That's why they've been working so hard at mainstreaming themselves. They see the post-9/11 environment as a ripe one for their agenda -- and, given the success of right-wing extremists like the Minutemen, they seem to be right so far.

Failing in the present

There are hollow gestures, and then there are appallingly hollow gestures that only highlight the grotesque incompetence of our nation's political leadership.

Today the Senate managed the latter, when it voted to apologize for its manifest failure in never having passed an anti-lynching bill.

Having done so, the question immediately becomes: Just when do you think you'll get around to passing one?

The gesture, such as it is, is actually rather laudable. Indeed, I've noted many times that the demise of an anti-lynching law, in the eyes of history, is one of the more notable moral failures on the part of Congress; it's abundantly clear now that this failure was a horrendous misjudgment. As the story noted, during the height of the "Lynching Era," several thousand black men were summarily murdered, often with outright official sanction:

During that time, nearly 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress, and three passed the House. Seven presidents between 1890 and 1952 petitioned Congress to pass a federal law.

But the Senate, with Southern conservatives wielding their filibuster powers, refused to act. With the enactment of civil rights laws in the 1960s and changes in national attitudes, the issue faded away.

The story goes on to explain what motivated this outburst of civic-mindedness, other than recent Republican agitation denouncing the filibuster as the root of evil itself (and rest assured that the next time the filibuster is on the line, this resolution will get trotted out by the GOP):

The sponsors of the resolution, Landrieu and George Allen, R-Va., said they were motivated in part by a recent book, Without Sanctuary, Lynching Photography in America, in which author James Allen collected lynch pictures, mostly taken by those participating in the killings.

"More than a half-century ago, mere feet from where we sit ... the Senate failed you and your ancestors and our nation," Landrieu told descendants at a lunch in the Capitol.

... The nonbinding resolution apologizes to the victims for the Senate's failure to act and "expresses the deepest sympathies and most solemn regrets of the Senate to the descendants of victims of lynching, the ancestors of whom were deprived of life, human dignity and the constitutional protections accorded all citizens of the United States."

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said President Bush talked about slavery and the travails of American democracy in a meeting Monday with five African leaders.

The Senate, McClellan said, "has taken a step that they feel they need to take, given their own past inaction on what were great injustices."

Gosh, it almost makes your heart swell with civic pride to read such uplifting thoughts.

At least, until you realize that these same Republicans just last October managed to kill, yet again, the most recent iteration in the ongoing effort to pass a genuine federal hate-crime statute.

Hate crimes, it should be clear, are the direct descendants of lynching. Lynching always was about "keeping the niggers down": its purpose was to enforce official and unofficial racial segregation, to terrorize minorities into abject subjugation. Even as lynching -- which in its heyday was a mass community celebration involving thousands of upstanding citizens -- became increasingly stigmatized and the practice relegated to smaller handfuls of extremists, the objects of this kind of hatred have grown in number, now including not just blacks and Jews but Asians, Muslims, and gays and lesbians. But the purpose of the crimes -- whether mere cross burnings or horrendous murders -- has always been to terrorize minority communities into subjugation and, ultimately, elimination.

Congress never passed an anti-lynching law. The closest thing to it on the books can be found in the criminal provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, which largely limit federal investigations to cases involving violations of federal laws or crimes occurring on federal property.

To date, there are no federal hate-crimes laws on the books that either have any teeth or are otherwise ever used by federal prosecutors. There was the 1990 Hate Crimes Statistics Act, which ordered the FBI to keep track of hate crimes in order for law enforcement to get a better handle on the phenomenon. The Hate Crime Sentencing Enhancement Act passed in 1994 at first glance appeared to be an effort to finally create a real federal anti-hate-crime law. But HCSEA was notable as well for the shortness of its scope; the law, contingent as it was on existing federal law, only considered violent crimes committed on federal property or in the pursuit of a federal activity (such as voting in an election) as potential hate crimes. As such, it continues to be only rarely prosecuted.

There have since been two serious efforts to pass a federal hate-crime law: The Hate Crimes Prevention Act, and the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act. Both passed the Senate. Both were killed -- the LLEEA twice now -- by Republican House leaders through backroom maneuvers. The most recent demise of the LLEEA, last October in the midst of the election (when it was rather nakedly killed so that it didn't have to cross Bush's desk), went completely unnoticed by both the press and by progressives in general.

I'd like to repeat some of the observations I made back in October when the bill was killed:

This was a bill that had been approved overwhelmingly by the Senate in June by a 65-33 vote. The House itself passed a resolution 213-186 instructing the House leaders -- namely, Tom DeLay and Dennis Hastert -- to pass the bill through the House Conference Committee.

They ignored it, and last week stripped it out of the Defense Appropriations Bill to which it had been attached, effectively killing it.

This is now the third time DeLay and Co. have pulled this stunt and gotten away with it. They used precisely the same tactic to kill the Hate Crimes Prevention Act in 1999, and to kill its successor, the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act, in 2000.

As the Human Rights Campaign explained in its press release:

The measure enjoys strong bipartisan support and is endorsed by more than 175 law enforcement, civil rights, civic and religious organizations, including: the National Sheriffs' Association, International Association of Chiefs of Police, U.S. Conference of Mayors, Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association and many others.

That didn't matter. What mattered to Republicans was the freedom to bash gays.

Oh, we know they hide behind phony and nonsensical arguments like "all crimes are hate crimes" and "these laws create thought crimes." But let's get real about what's really happening here: These laws are not being passed because the Republican leadership -- including George W. Bush -- is determined not to allow any improvement in the laws for gays and lesbians.

The reality is that Republicans have established credibility with their base -- especially fundamentalist Christians -- by making emotional appeals to their "values"; this is, as many observers have noted, an essential element of their ability to persuade working-class people to vote for an agenda clearly at odds with their own self-interest. And, after abortion, attacking the "homosexual agenda" is easily the most prominent and flagrant of these "values."

Republicans also like to talk about the need to live up to the consequences of their actions. And one of the real consequences of the House's refusal to pass this legislation is that more hate crimes will occur.

Here's a reality check for Republicans:

-- We know, from FBI statistics, there are at least 8-9,000 hate crimes committed in this country every year.

-- We also know, however, from Justice Department studies, that these statistics are horribly unreliable because hate crimes are egregiously underreported every year.

-- The magnitude of the underreporting is substantial. The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that the number of hate crimes in this country annually approaches closer to 40,000. That means roughly 30,000 hate crimes are going uninvestigated and unprosecuted every year.

-- What all of this underscores is the fact that, even though we passed a law in 1989 ordering the collection of hate-crime data, we still don't have firm handle on the scope and depth of the hate-crime problem nationally. And we won't until law enforcement at all levels -- particularly on the local level -- are adequately trained at identifying and investigating hate crimes.

-- The LLEA's main provisions, as its name suggests, are devoted to enhancing the ability of local police and prosecutors to obtain training in hate crimes.

-- However, it also expanded the federal categories of hate crimes to include a bias against gays and lesbians. For that reason alone, it was killed by the House leadership despite its broad support.

The end result: Tens of thousands of hate crimes that go unreported and uninvestigated, and no end in sight. This problem is especially acute among gays and lesbians, most particularly in rural areas, where their quite reasonable fears of being outed often prevent them from even reporting such crimes. And of course, those same rural areas are nearly uniformly Republican; the coalescence of attitudes with top-down political leadership is hardly accidental.

In other words, Republicans' actions directly make lives more miserable for gays and lesbians and their families, all of whom have to deal with the trauma and tragedy that inevitably results from the violence and intimidation that is the essence of hate crimes.

Likewise, those pious Republicans who now look to the sky and wish the Senate had passed an anti-lynching law all those years ago would make a much more meaningful gesture in that regard by resurrecting the LLEEA, passing it out of the Senate and House, and sending it along to President Bush for his signature.

But then, as Shrek puts it: "Yeah, right, like that's ever gonna happen!"

Minutemen: Not welcome

At least one authority has decided to say no to the Minutemen. Sure, it may just be a Native American tribe -- but it's a start.

According to the Yuma Sun report by Jeffrey Gautreaux, a group of militiamen tried bullying their way onto the Cocopah Indian Reservation, which is bordered by the U.S.-Mexico line, last week and were turned away:

The Yuma Patriots were turned back by the Cocopah Tribal Police as they were trying to begin their patrols Wednesday night. The border watch group said it would be back and planned to call in more help.

The Patriots ran into a blockade of vehicles when they attempted to get onto the Levee Road at County 14th Street at about 6:45 p.m. They were told they were on reservation land and were not allowed. The patrol area was scheduled to be the Levee Road from County 14th Street to County 18th Street.

CTP officers went down the line of Patriots' vehicles and told each one to turn around.

After about 15 minutes of discussion, the Patriots left and drove over to the Levee Road on County 10th Street, off of reservation land. The group stayed there until about 8:30 p.m. and then returned to Yuma.

During the discussions at County 14th Street, the CTP officers simply told the Patriots that "the levee was closed" and that "they had already entered Cocopah Indian Reservation and they should turn around."

There were no threats of arrest made by Cocopah officers. There was discussion that at times came close to heated.

One Patriot repeatedly asked for the probable cause for what CTP was doing. An officer who identified himself only as Sgt. Wessels said, "The levee is shut down. You can deal with the tribal administrator (today) during business hours. I'm not going to debate this with you."

When asked a question by The Sun, Wessels said he had no comment. He said that all questions should go to the tribal administrator today.

Patriots founder Flash Sharrar of Yuma said the Patriots plan to be out patrolling -- on the Cocopah Indian Reservation -- Saturday morning, starting at 4:30 a.m. He also said he planned to call for reinforcements.

"I'm going to call my buddies at the Minuteman Project and let them come down and help us," Sharrar said.

That sounds like a real recipe for ugliness. But keep in mind that these fellows are mostly experts at producing large volumes of hot air.

Sure enough, the Patriots showed up on Saturday, according to the Sun's followup report, and managed to make it appear as though the tribe had backed down and was supporting them:

The Yuma Patriots carried out a planned patrol of the levee near the Cocopah Indian Reservation on Saturday morning without interference from the tribe.

According to Patriots organizer Flash Sharrar, a group of at least 14 volunteers went to the levee at 4:30 a.m. Saturday for about three hours and had no trouble getting onto reservation land.

"(We went) exactly where I told the Border Patrol we would go, between (County) 8 and 12 (streets)," Sharrar said.

During the three-hour period, the Patriots observed a group of five illegal immigrants, four males and one female, and called the U.S. Border Patrol, who arrived at the scene and took the illegals into custody.

"I would like to thank the Cocopah Indian Tribe for the wonderful job they did securing the Cocopah Nation and assisting the Yuma Patriots and the U.S. Border Patrol in securing the other end of the levee," Sharrar said, adding that Cocopah Police patrolled one section of the levee while the Patriots watched another. "They did a fantastic job this morning."

Actually, that's a little bit of Patriot-style spin -- which is to say, it turns reality on its head.

In fact, the tribe did not back down, and remains adamant that the border watchers do their thing on someone else's land.

I contacted the Cocopah tribal administrator on Monday, and he patiently explained that the update was "not entirely factual", adding that the tribe would be issuing its own correction soon.

"What happened is that our land starts at County 12 1/2 and goes to County 18," the administrator said. "They patrolled from County 12 back to County 8."

In other words, if any tribal police were securing the levee, it was against any incursions by the Patriots. And the Patriots may have been patrolling in the area, but it wasn't on tribal land.

The tribe remains opposed to Patriot patrols on their land, and that policy will remain in effect for the foreseeable future, the administrator said.

Of course, the irony of all this no doubt eludes the Patriots: While protesting the border crossings by illegal immigrants into U.S. territory, they're threatening to cross reservation borders, come onto tribal lands unauthorized, without permits, without the proper protocol, and refusing to respect the tribe's decision to exclude their patrols.

But then, grotesque hypocrisy tends to be their strong suit anway.

Kookoo for Cocoa Puffs

One of the more fortunate generic personality traits of right-wing extremists is that they are all so ego-driven, power-hungry, and insecure that eventually, they turn on each other. Far-right movements are most noteworthy, I think, for their constant fracturing, largely because of the fractious nature of the people who join them and lead them.

The same is true of the Minutemen, whose rising acceptance in the mainstream is a real cause for concern, as I've been saying. This fact was underscored by Brock Meeks' appallingly thin coverage for MSNBC, which seemed to view this increased influence rather approvingly.

But, as Meeks' report suggests, the Minutemen are looking like they may come apart because of internal squabbling. A recent Associated Press report provides more detail on this:

The groups' leaders accused each other during interviews Friday of being aggressive and extreme in their desire to stop illegal immigration.

Clifford Alford, leader of a group called the New Mexico Minutemen, claims that members of the Minuteman Project -- a group that drew international attention in April when volunteers showed up in Arizona to patrol the border -- like to run around in paramilitary uniforms and carry assault weapons.

"They really don't give a rip about anyone's civil rights," he said. "We want our effort to be more humanitarian."

Mike Gaddy, who is leading the Minuteman Project in New Mexico, said Alford wasn't part of the group's monitoring project in Arizona.

"Alford hasn't been a Minuteman for a minute," Gaddy said. "He is part of a renegade organization that has absolutely nothing to do with the Minutemen whatsoever."

Alford was appointed to his new post last week by James Chase, a California man and a member of the Minuteman Project who was ousted from the group because leaders accused him of behaving like Rambo.

Chase, on the other hand, said he's a Minuteman in good standing who helped the group plan patrol tactics in Arizona. He said the schism started because he and a leader in Arizona disagreed on the firing of certain volunteers and the group's use of fundraising to pay salaries.

Ah, but that's really just the start. Right-wing extremists also have a track record of gallivanting off into conspiracy-land, thereby revealing themselves as the addled crackpots that they really are.

See, for instance, the latest campaign a-brewing at Chris Simcox's Minuteman Project site, something titled "Operation Spotlight":

THE MINUTEMAN PROJECT "OPERATION SPOTLIGHT" IS ASSEMBLING A NETWORK OF FORMER AND RETIRED SPECIALISTS FROM THE AMERICAN JUDICIARY SYSTEM FOR THE PURPOSE OF LEGALLY PROVIDING TO LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES INCRIMINATING EVIDENCE RELATIVE TO DELIBERATE VIOLATIONS OF STATE OR FEDERAL IMMIGRATION, TAX OR EMPLOYMENT LAWS.

Wow! That sounds really interesting, you think. So what exactly are they talking about. Well, scroll down, dear reader:

OPERATION SPOTLIGHT

THE MINUTEMAN PROJECT IS LOOKING FOR A FEW GOOD VOLUNTEERS FROM THE FOLLOWING VOCATIONS:

PROSECUTING ATTORNEYS (OR JUDGES)

RETIRED OR FORMER MEMBERS OF THE JUDICIARY FROM ANY LEGAL DISCIPLINE, ESPECIALLY THOSE WITH SUBSTANTIAL PROSECUTORIAL EXPERIENCE IN:

-- IMMIGRATION LAW

-- TAX EVASION

-- CIVIL RIGHTS*

CRIMINAL INVESTIGATORS

RETIRED OR FORMER INVESTIGATORS WITH SUBSTANTIAL EXPERIENCE IN THE CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION DIVISIONS OF ANY OF THE FOLLOWING, OR SIMILAR, AGENCIES:

-- BUREAU OF IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT (ICE)

-- UNITED STATES TREASURY - INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE (IRS)

-- ATTORNEY GENERAL

INFORMANTS

INFORMANTS ARE WANTED WHO HAVE LEGALLY OBTAINED PRECISE INFORMATION LEADING TO THE INDICTMENT, ARREST AND CONVICTION OF ANY PERSON OR BUSINESS ENGAGED IN THE ILLEGAL ALIEN SLAVE LABOR TRADE, INCLUDING THE SMUGGLING, HARBORING, OR HIRING OF ILLEGAL ALIENS, OR THE EVASION OF EMPLOYMENT TAXES OR REQUIRED WORKER'S COMP INSURANCE ON SUCH EMPLOYEES.

ALSO, THE PROJECT IS INTERESTED IN INFORMATION CONCERNING FRAUD COMMITTED BY ELECTED OR APPOINTED PUBLIC OFFICIALS, OR THEIR EMPLOYEES.

FOR EXAMPLE:

-- VOTER FRAUD

-- FRAUDULENT QUALIFICATION FOR ANY TYPE OF PUBLIC ASSISTANCE

-- IDENTIFICATION FRAUD (DRIVER'S LICENSE, SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER, ETC.)

MISSION OBJECTIVE

SEEK CRIMINAL CONVICTIONS AND CIVIL PENALTIES UNDER EXISTING FEDERAL AND STATE LAWS AGAINST:

--- EMPLOYERS (OR THEIR AGENTS) WHO HAVE WILLFULLY EXPLOITED THE ILLEGAL ALIEN SLAVE LABOR MARKET IN VIOLATION OF LONG-STANDING IMMIGRATION, TAX AND LABOR LAWS.

--- OPERATORS OF SO-CALLED "SAFE HOUSES" WHO HARBOR ILLEGAL ALIENS SMUGGLED INTO THE UNITED STATES.

--- PERSONS CONDUCTING ILLEGAL HUMAN SMUGGLING OPERATIONS, ESPECIALLY THE SMUGGLING OF CHILDREN FOR SEXUAL EXPLOITATION.

--- PERSONS ENGAGED IN DOCUMENT FRAUD RELATIVE TO ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION.

THE WEB OF VOLUNTEER ATTORNEYS AND INVESTIGATORS WILL COMPILE AND REVIEW EVIDENCE LEGALLY PROVIDED BY RELIABLE INFORMANTS AND DETERMINE THE LIKLIHOOD OF SUCH EVIDENCE RESULTING IN CONVICTIONS OF VIOLATORS UNDER EXISTING STATUTES. THAT INFORMATION WILL BE PRESENTED TO THE LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCY CHARGED WITH THE INDICTMENT, ARREST AND/OR PROSECUTION FOR SUCH CRIMES.

TARGET VIOLATORS AND GEOGRAPHICAL AREAS

ANY VIOLATOR IN ANY OF THE 50 UNITED STATES.

VOLUNTEERISM

THE MMProject "OPERATION SPOTLIGHT" IS AN EXPERIMENT IN VOLUNTEERISM AND, LIKE THE ORIGINAL MINUTEMAN PROJECT OF APRIL 2005, CURRENTLY OFFERS NO SUBSIDIES OR COMPENSATION FOR PARTICIPANTS.

THE TASKS AT HAND ARE NOT FOR THE MEEK, THE WEAK, OR THE SELFISH OPPORTUNIST. IT WILL TAKE PATIENCE, STOIC DETERMINATION, INTEGRITY, AN UNDYING SPIRIT FOR TRUTH AND JUSTICE…AND A FIRM BELIEF THAT THE CORNERSTONE OF THIS GREAT NATION, THE FIRST AMENDMENT OF THE U.S. CONSTITUTION, IS THE LODESTAR TO A POSITIVE AND RESPECTABLE RESOLUTION TO THE ILLS OF A NATION VEERING TOWARD LAWLESSNESS, SOCIAL MAYHEM, AND A SHRINKING MIDDLE ECONOMIC CLASS.

Note how this campaign folds a couple of mainstream conservative memes -- attacking the judiciary and "voter fraud" concerns -- into a quasi-conspiratorial "investigation". Just who might those elected officials be who are falling under the sway of these slave-labor smugglers?

Anyway, this strikes me as yet another iteration of the classic Weekly Militia Crusade. During the heyday of Militia of Montana, founder John Trochmann ceaselessly would find a fresh new route for uncovering the New World Order -- each week, it seemed -- and announce it to his easily led flock. It was a good way to keep the interest up and the money flowing. Which I assume is what Simcox is doing here as well.

Just try not to notice the way those eyeballs rattle around in his skull.

Canning our salmon

A few years ago, then-Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth (R-Idaho) made headlines when she dismissed salmon-recovery efforts by saying: "How can salmon be endangered when you can buy them in cans in supermarkets?"

The Bush administration, it appears, is intent on making just that kind of wingnut vision into our all-too-stark reality.

The P-I's sterling environment reporter, Robert McClure, reported the other day that the Bush administration plans to massively expand salmon farming in offshore waters of the Pacific:

Calling fish farming a potential boon for consumers and the economy, the Bush administration yesterday proposed to massively expand the practice to waters as far as 200 miles offshore.

Supporters in Washington, including a state senator who advocates for fish farmers, urged Congress to bless the idea. They said a likely result -- if fish-culturing methods can be perfected -- would be a cheap source of ocean-grown delights, such as black cod, in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Critics answered that the aquaculture build-up is a get-rich-quick scheme destined to leave taxpayers subsidizing an industry that would pollute the ocean, serve up substandard fish and, ultimately, center its economic activity in Third World nations.

It's important to take note of what environmentalists are saying, because it's entirely accurate -- and, if anything, understated:

Environmentalists and commercial fishermen say the legislation is too broad and gives the Department of Commerce, the parent agency of the Fisheries Service, total discretion on environmental regulations.

"Any time you have a confined feedlot operation, you're going to have disease and pathogens and parasites, so you're always medicating for your weakest animal -- whereas in nature, that animal would die and become part of the food chain," said Anne Mosness, a Bellingham-based crusader for the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a national research and advocacy group.

"It's the equivalent of having a hog farm in a city park flushing its wastes into the street," she said.

Mosness, who fished for salmon in Alaska for 28 years, worries that producing enough salmon in fish farms will give politicians an excuse to discontinue environmental-protection efforts designed to make Northwest rivers more welcoming to salmon.

In essence, the presence of gigantic fish farms will supposedly relieve pressure to ensure the survival of wild salmon stocks, as a federal judge just ordered the administration to do. (No doubt he was merely an "activist" judge.)

So now Americans won't have to worry about endangered salmon. Hey, they can get it right from the can!

Er, well, and pay no mind to what you're getting in that can.

Most of you probably already know that when you buy farmed salmon, that nice "pink" color is faked. It would be naturally grey except for the dye they feed the fish:

Another difference in farmed salmon: their flesh would be light grey if they weren't fed ad additive to give them their salmon colour. Farmers can pick the colour they want their fish to be from a 'SalmoFan,' something that resemble a collection of paint chips.

And, when it comes to eating them, farmed salmon have notably higher levels of toxins contained in their meat. Oh, and did we mention that they're high in delicious and nutritious PCBs too? In addition, the live fish are constantly fed a chemical diet of antibiotics (more per pound, in fact, than any other kind of livestock).

As it happens, those antibiotics are spread openly to the open sea, since some 75 percent of it, spread into the pens, actually escapes. This introduces into the wild marine environment new strains of resistant diseases that can devastate whole populations, both farmed and wild.

That's not all they're spreading into the wild. The salmon pens are also spreading sea lice and other diseases to wild salmon.

And then there are the farmed salmon themselves, which often escape, usually in larger numbers than the industry will admit. These are Atlantic salmon, an alien species. They are also notoriously aggressive toward the salmonids of other species -- that is, they selectively pursue and eat them. (This is probably why, in the Atlantic, there is only one species of salmon, compared to the five species that naturally prowl the Pacific.) And, in the wild, these Atlantic salmon have begun to breed and displace the wild Pacific salmon stocks.

Worst of all, the salmon farms are driving traditional fishermen out of business -- and destroying native salmon stocks.

It's looking as if it's only a matter of time before you won't be able to buy wild salmon in the stores anymore, for anything other than exorbitant prices (see, for a preview of this, the ridiculous gouging that now occurs for Copper River salmon). And all those jobs that used to hum out of the Fishermen's Terminal just a couple of miles from my home -- especially the North Pacific fleet -- will be gone, replaced by a relative handful of jobs running the cages at offshore farms.

Once upon a time, conservatives were supposed to be about preserving our traditions. The bottom line now is profits, at the expense of everything else. Not least, at the expense of our natural environment and our health.

Orcinus on tour

I've finished arranging the first round of bookstore appearances in association with the recent release of Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community:

July 8: Village Books, Bellingham, 7:30 p.m.

July 12: University Book Store, Seattle, 7 p.m.

July 15: Ravenna Third Place Books, Seattle, 7:30 p.m.

July 19: Elliott Bay Book Co., Seattle, 7:30 p.m.

These comprise just the first round in western Washington; I'm arranging appearances at others in the area as well. I'm also hoping to do a West Coast tour late in August, taking in Portland, Eugene, San Francisco/Oakland, Los Angeles and San Diego. I'm still arranging those. Readers in those cities should drop in to their local bookshops and tell them you'd support an appearance (and refer them to this site if they're interested further).

I'm also planning a relatively short tour to the inland Northwest (Boise, Missoula, Helena, Bozeman, Spokane) later on.

If there are other towns (especially in California) and bookstores that you think would be receptive or good bets, please drop me an e-mail (dneiwert@hotmail.com) and I'll see what I can work in.

If any of you happen to be in the vicinity when I'm in town, you should drop by and say hi.

Friday whale blogging

This is a female orca and a calf (likely mother and child) I shot last Thursday (June 2) in Haro Strait, part of a spectacular appearance by the J and K pods that morning, complete with lots of breaches and tail lobs. Unfortunately, I was slow hitting the water, and this was the only decent shot I got. Not quite sure who these two individuals were.

Terror at home

Well, we can now add the New York Times editorial page to the list of people who are gradually recognizing that the Bush administration's handling of domestic terrorism is increasingly leaving Americans vulnerable to very real violence:

A draft planning document from Homeland Security obtained by Congressional Quarterly includes a survey of domestic threats notable for an excessive focus on extremist groups on the political left -- miscreants committing crimes in the name of the environment or animal rights. It specifies the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front as potentially violent activists, along with the familiar array of Islamist militant groups. Glaringly omitted are the militia fanatics, white supremacists and other violent groups at the other end of the spectrum -- antigovernment groups like Aryan Nation and anti-abortion extremists with a proven appetite for murderous violence.

... Homeland Security officials say their planning document was not intended to be inclusive and that right-wing militants will never be neglected. A scarred nation can only hope so.

The source of their concern, a Congressional Quarterly report, has actually been around a few months. I blogged about it back in March. But give the NYT credit for at least recognizing that there is a problem afoot.

A former FBI agent named Mike German, quoted in the CQ report, has been active in trying to create public awareness of the problem. I've discussed German previously, including his rather impressive field work in busting the Washington State Militia, and his later efforts in raising concerns about how the FBI handles domestic terrorism.

German recently had an excellent op-ed piece in the Washington Post explaining that one of the real problems with the way we treat domestic terrorists is by dismissing them as "isolated incidents," when in fact the underlying ideology and its spread plays a decisive role in these acts:

The fact that these individuals, after being exposed to extremist ideology, each committed violent acts might lead a reasonable person to suspect the existence of a wider conspiracy. Imagine a very smart leader of an extremist movement, one who understands the First Amendment and criminal conspiracy laws, telling his followers not to depend on specific instructions.

He might tell them to divorce themselves from the group before they commit a violent act; to act individually or in small groups so that others in the movement could avoid criminal liability. This methodology creates a win-win situation for the extremist leader -- the violent goals of the group are met without the legal consequences.

Actually, there's no need to imagine this. Extremist group leaders produce a tremendous amount of literature, including training manuals on "leaderless resistance" and lone wolf terrorism techniques. These manuals have been around for years and now they're even available online.

"Lone extremism" is not a phenomenon; it's a technique, a ruse designed to subvert the criminal justice system. McVeigh did act as a lone extremist, as the FBI says. He was trained to do it this way. But his act of lone extremism was part of an ongoing conspiracy that continues to inspire violent attacks to this day, and to close our eyes to this conspiracy is to deny reality. It's a matter of connecting the dots.

Subsequently, German led an e-mail discussion at the Post Web site in which he discussed the issue in greater detail, particularly with the helpful perspective of a longtime insider:

I think the problem is a lack of institutional knowledge about how these groups operate, and too much routine turnover in FBI Headquarters to build it. Heaquarters supervisors turn over after about only 15 months in a particular job. That's not long enough to learn about the terrorism problem- domestic or international- and develop effective strategies to counter it.

... Domestic terrorism investigations are regulated by Attorney General Guidelines meant to prevent abusive investigations into unpopular groups. The AG Guidelines required the FBI to initiate investigations of domestic groups only when there is a reasonable indication of criminality. As a criminal investigator this was my focus anyway, but FBI management often overstated the amount of evidence needed to find a "reasonable indication" of criminality and stymied investigations unnecessarily.

Domestic Terrorists are also often underestimated. Their beliefs are so unusual and abhorrent that people mistakenly believe they are stupid, which they are not. They are very organized and very dangerous. Besides, it doesn't take a genius to make a bomb. Again, there's a lack of good intelligence about what these groups are all about.

... Numbers are hard to come by because these are clandestine groups, so most of what they do is secretive. Many people in the movement have military training, and there are a lot of publicly available training materials for terrorists. Especially online. A large part of what these groups do on a day-to-day basis is to train each other, either based on their own experience or these materials. I don't believe the government needs to be spying on these groups. The FBI should be conducting well predicated, proactive criminal investigations like mine. The focus needs to be on the real criminals, not just people whose message we don't like.

... I think it's important to keep the focus on criminality rather than ideology. We all have a first amendment right to speak out, but we don't have a right to force people to listen. Terrorism, whatever the ideology, is about forcing people to listen to your message. There are plenty of legitimate ways for people in this country to get their message out, but violence- for whatever cause- is not one of them.

And I found this inquiry (and response) spot-on:

Chesapeake Beach, Md.: Freedom Fighter, Terrorist, Tree hugger, Environmentalist....yada yada...

Has the FBI a specific working definition that they use that "elevates" a potential threat into the sphere of "counter terrorism"? Or is it only when violence ensues (or is likely to ensue) that someone becomes a terrorist?

Mike German: I think you point out a real problem that clouds every discussion of terrorism. "Terrorist" is always what we call the other guy. The FBI definition of terrorism refers to the "criminal" use of violence or threat of violence, and I think that's an effective definition for the FBI because it is essentially a crime-fighting organization. But when we start calling all of our enemies "terrorists" and granting our government special powers to go after "terrorists" we are on a slippery slope(especially if the government is allowed to exercise these powers in secret).

This kind of thoughtfulness can save both lives and forestall totalitarian abuses. But someone has to be listening for that to happen.

Bush in a China shop

I've been remiss in failing to post my friend T.M. Sell's recent op-ed in the Seattle Times:

Keeping the train rolling in China's Kaching! Dynasty

Terry is a former colleague from the old Valley Daily News who wrote the definitive text on Boeing a few years back titled Wings of Power, which happened also to be his PhD thesis. We last happened to work together during the 1993 APEC conference in Seattle, when we were both working as Asian economic beat writers. After the doctorate, he got himself a nice teaching gig down in Des Moines (the Seattle suburb) and has been spending the past few months as a visiting prof at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

As he explains, we've been hearing a lot of tough talk out of Republicans over the years regarding China, who seems to be the scapegoat du jour for the increasing economic mess wrought by those record deficits. And it's been intensifying recently:

Congress has its knickers in a twist because the home folks are losing manufacturing jobs to cheap imports from China (Wal-Mart gets 80 percent of its goods from China), and is threatening tariffs on Chinese goods if something isn't done.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration dithers because China isn't Iraq so its "straighten up or we'll bomb you" approach to foreign policy is rendered inoperative. That leaves the occasional tragic but loyal soldier, such as Treasury Secretary John Snow, in the unenviable position of trying to simultaneously stall Congress and the legions of yes men who people the current administration.

But even Snow is now saying China must do something "significant" about exchange rates, or else.

However, even if we could get China to raise the value of the yuan relative to the dollar, it wouldn't bail out our economy. The change would be marginal at best, as 70 to 80 percent of our economy is not trade-related and China represents only 10 percent of our trade deficit.

The rest of the piece offers sound advice for the Bush administration for handling the Chinese. Not that they're likely to listen. As he puts it:

The list of economic steps we might take is long; doing something about the budget deficit and something meaningful for displaced workers would only start the list. And how about making it easier for all the Chinese scientists and engineers who want to come to America to get visas?

But what we have, at the moment, is a Bush in a China shop, and what he breaks, we get to pay for.

And pay for. And pay for.

How exactly did these people get to call themselves conservatives?

Harassing the harassers

I've been contemplating the activities of the folks organizing the SWARM the Minutemen campaign, which is essentially a legal harassment campaign against the Minutemen. It poses something of a thorny ethical issue.

I briefly mentioned the campaign awhile back without endorsing it, noting that tactics like these seem somewhat questionable when it comes to effective change. Among them, as you can see from perusing the suggestions for action section of their site, are such tactics as bombarding them with faxes, e-mails, letters, and phone calls, as well as showing up at border-patrol sites and making lots of noise.

Now, some of my commenters have called this "terrorism," which reveals how little they understand that phenomenon: terrorism always involves crimes committed with a terrorist intent, and these are neither crimes nor are they terroristic. Every individual has the right to place such faxes, phone calls, e-mails, and letters, so long as they are not threatening in nature.

Still, I've always been an advocate of constructive engagement and more positive approaches to dealing with these problem. Harassment campaigns seem not only futile in the long run, but counterproductive in terms of holding the moral high ground. I've never approved of shouting down or interrupting and heckling haters, and I strongly disapprove of pie-throwing (I think it's battery).

However, I was struck by a couple of statements on their Website, including a spot-on description of the nature of the Minutemen:

The MinuteMen are a non-governmental group of people vowing to patrol the US/Mexico border with guns in order to stop migrant people from crossing the border. They represent an intensification of the trend of violence towards migrant people and people of color that has increased since 9/11/2001. While they claim that they are not violent, their very use and display of deadly weapons is a violent act in itself. How can guns be used to detain people without being violent? Already there have been numerous reports of people being forced to lie on the ground by the MinuteMen and being forced to have their pictures taken with MinuteMen volunteers, recalling Abu Ghraib style dehumanization.

Even more striking to me was their "Group Statement":

While the MinuteMen publicly claim to be non-violent, we here at SWARM know a different face of the MinuteMen. We've received numerous death threats and threats of violence filled with racial slurs. We plan to publicly release these soon to let everyone know the exact kind of hatred the MinuteMen are acting as a lightning rod for, attracting it and focusing it towards migrant people.

Just as important though, the MinuteMen are a clear result of the violent, us-versus-them mentality promoted by the Bush administration.

We are intervening into and dancing with the communication systems of the MinuteMen because along with the physical violence they are creating, they are extremely conscious of the violent power their messages have and they had any measure of success thanks to the complicity [of] the corporate media. Their communications are a critical part of their mission to send a message to legislators that more militarization of the border is necessary. Their images and words can't be separated from the violence of their guns, and both must be stopped.

I've been saying all along that the Minutemen represent a kind of right-wing extremism whose purpose is not, as Lou Dobbs and Michelle Malkin have asserted, to give voice to legitimate concerns about immigration, but rather to harass and intimidate Latino immigrants, legal and illegal. Their innate nature is violent, not civic, and their successful adoption of the mantle of mainstream media and governmental approval has presented the white supremacists who form the core of their support their first real foothold of official support in years.

It is not an exaggeration, either, to claim that racists and other extremists indeed are the core of the Minutemen's support. While the project no doubt has attracted some people of good will with genuine concerns about immigration -- and not just about filthy Latinos bringing crime to their fair havens -- the activist, working ranks of footsoldiers are riddled throughout with Aryan Nations members, supporters of the Klan, and vicious anti-Semites.

If you're looking for evidence of this, you need look no further than the comments on the boards for this blog. We've been infested lately with a regular hodgepodge of extremists, particularly those writing in defense of the Minutemen -- outright white supremacists whose response has not been to deny their presence or the fact that the project is a full manifestation of their agenda. To the contrary; they have argued, essentially: "Yeah? So what?"

The most verbose and straightforward of these commenters has been a fellow calling himself Border Ruffian, who has identified himself as a participant of Billy Roper's anti-immigrant White Revolution work in the South. (Roper is a former National Alliance leader, and Border Ruffian has exhibited a thorough acquaintance with and affinity for that group's ideology.)

One of his earliest posts came, predictably, in defense of the Minutemen:

The US Government is Overthrowing the People and Electing a new one through Immigration.

Illegal immigrants aren't "ordinary citizens" by any definition.

Californians voted Si to Prop 209 and Prop 187, and they will vote for border control every time.

In an avalanche, every beautiful snowflake pleads not guilty.

The only solution to hunger is birth control.

He then followed that up by declaring:

Good riddance to the Republican Party. There is no more Right Wing or Left Wing, but only the Jew-Wing of Amerikwa.

And then topped it off with this:

I am opposed to the Iraq war too, but no amount of protesting in front of the White House is going to stop that.

However, the Minutemen have lit a fire under the politicians.

I remember when it was possible to make a decent living in America. No more, thanks to the match made in Hell between the multiculists Left and the plutocratic Right.

There's plenty of 401c tax exempt organizations representing Asian, Latino, African American and Jewish people.

But what organizations represent the interests of White Gentiles? Dr. William Pierce tried to found a Church of Cosmotheism, but it was denied 401c status. Matt Hales Church of the Creator was sued out of existence on a ridiculous "trademark" case -- the Te Ta Ma foundation is an ADL connected fraud that trademarked the name for the sole purpose of attacking Hale's organization. This happens to no other church in the world.

But Whites are in fact waking up, and realizing that in a multicultural, multiracial nation, they better get organized to fight for THEIR INTERESTS, because everyone else is feeding off of the dying carcass of White America. Whites are demonized as the villains of history, while every other race is made out to be a bunch of noble, angelic victims.

Had enough, Whitey? What if America was controlled by Americans instead of by Jews?

Then he was joined by a fellow named Observer, who apparently is a young Seattleite living in the Capitol Hill area, who first wrote in to spew anti-gay hatred when I posted on the demise of a bill to include gays and lesbians in an anti-discrimination bill in the Washington Legislature. Over many subsequent posts, Observer has made clear his antipathy to multiculturalism as well as a certain affinity for anti-Semitic and racist beliefs, not to mention a predilection for crude stereotypes.

This was on display again when Observer chimed in to support Border Ruffian by proceeding to blame a recent local murder (committed by an apparent illegal alien) on illegal immigration. (Funny, that: Didja ever notice how guys like Observer never seem to want to blame serial killers like Gary Ridgway on the presence of white factory workers?)

Border Ruffian chimed in with numerous other racist rants, including one in which he insisted that he and his compatriots were fighting for a "white living space". ("And we are going to get it, whether you like it or not.") His terminology, it should be noted, replicates Hitler's demands for "Lebensraum."

Observer caps it off with this rejoinder to one of my Jewish readers:

I am loyal to my people, just like you. The only difference is that you, evidently, would resent me for that, and I would admire loyalty (also known as patriotism) in another people. That is a serious character flaw on your part, and it shows a deficit of tolerance. Or perhaps it is simply an ethno-cultural distinction, which from my ethno-cultural perspective shows your culture to be flawed, and morally lacking.

Please inform me whether we Christians of European descent, from your Jewish perspective, are entitled to the same feelings of loyalty toward our own people that Jews are. I would ask you to be honest; would that be a futile request?

As for your assumption that I live in a "white-trash hell," that is a reflection of your own prejudice, hatred and intolerance for my people. I am happiest amongst my people. I love them just as they are. My anger is not that I must live with my people, but that they are treated poorly and spat upon by the likes of you and Neiwert.

Rather than wanting to leave them and ridicule them as your wife does, I want their condition to be bettered. You people, on the other hand, have nothing but hatred and blackness in your hearts when you think of us. You prove it over and over again. That is why my people are beginning to see what you call "liberalism" as a hate-cult dedicated to our destruction. Neiwert, that morally flawless individual, is doing his best to further this perception.

The funny thing about this is, I think "my people" are pretty much the same people as Observer's version. I come from a lower middle class family, and we had more than our share of immediate family who were classic white-trash trailer-park dwellers. I worked my way through college by hauling irrigation pipe on farms, working as a welder in a farm-machinery plant, and doing road construction (mostly chip-seal operations), which was the line of work my mother's family was in. As you can imagine, I tend to view "go back to your trailer park" responses rather dimly.

Still, nothing makes me angrier than seeing working-class people suffer, as they seem to do in places like Idaho, where the right has been in control for decades now. The most disturbing feature of this is the way it is self-inflicted; conservatives wrap themselves in these people's "values" in a way that convinces them they're operating on behalf of their best interests, when policy after policy demonstrates exactly the opposite.

To me, the real slap in the face is seeing the good will of working-class people being used, manipulated cynically for alterior purposes: for profit, for political gain, for spreading divisiveness and ill will. Xenophobia (racial, religious, and otherwise) has been fanned for generations to make scapegoats to cover the real root of the problems that plague the working class -- namely, economics and class.

Working-class whites are in this fight not against other races, but with working-class blacks and Asians and Latinos. Jews, Muslims, and gay people aren't their enemies. Their real enemies are the snakes who come hissing lies into their ears to make them blame their black and Jewish and gay neighbors for what's wrong with the world. I've seen the havoc these snakes can wreak among families and communities, and it can be devastating.

The right of the past two decades, as a clear tool of the wealthy class, has been about widening those divisions, in a kind of divide-and-conquer strategy that, sadly, has succeeded too well. And now the real extremists of the right are pouncing, eager to take the reins as so-called "mainstream conservatives" relinquish them.

We're being warned that immigration is going to be Republicans' big re-election issue in 2006, which means we're going to be seeing a lot more of this. A lot more Nazis coming out of the woodwork, emboldened by the realization of their longtime hopes and dreams. They see the political momentum heading their way -- and so far, they may be right.

Which makes me wonder how liberals are going to respond, particularly on immigration and the way the right seems intent on linking immigration to crime. So far, I haven't detected much of a glimmer.

At some point, progressives need to stand up to the Minutemen and what they represent, recognizing them for the potent threat they are about to become. It can't be nicey-nice, either; take a gander through Border Ruffian's ruminations here and it becomes clear what we're dealing with.

These aren't people you can negotiate with or engage constructively (though people like Observer, it should be noted, are not as far gone as dedicated racists like Ruffian); they only view your decency as a kind of weakness. The best you can do, really, is shove their fists back in their faces. It's the only language they understand or respect.

So, you folks at SWARM: Go get 'em. Do your best, as long as you keep it legal. Swamp their operations. It may not be effective in terms of stopping them, but it at least reminds them that there are many thousands of their fellow citizens who do not support or approve of their "project."

Because you're right. There's no point in playing nice with Nazis. And someone needs to start shoving back on those fists somewhere.