A Vigil For Brisenia: Snohomish County Remembers Arizona Girl Slain By One Of Their Own

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

On Wednesday, some people in Everett -- the hometown of Shawna Forde -- held a vigil in memory of Brisenia Flores, Forde's 9-year-old victim from Arivaca, Arizona. My friend Scott North was there to cover the event:

EVERETT -- They mourned the death of a little girl Wednesday; a child whose life ended three years ago in a robbery orchestrated by an Everett woman she'd never met.
Brisenia Flores was 9. She'd just completed third grade. The principal at her school in Arivaca, Ariz., remembers her smile, her enthusiasm and love for animals.

She died along with her father, Raul "Junior" Flores, because of hateful ideas that took root here, more than 1,600 miles away, a crowd of about 80 human rights activists, elected officials and others were told.

"We stand here as a community to say 'Never again,'" said Meg Winch, who heads the Snohomish County Commission on Human Rights.

This sort of observance is a little unusual, given that Brisenia lived hundreds of miles and several states away. But it was put together by some thoughtful advocates here who recognize that Shawna Forde's career began here, not there:

State Rep. Luis Moscoso, D-Mountlake Terrace, was among the handful of people who confronted Forde in 2007 at an Everett gathering that was billed as a summit to combat illegal immigration. Forde found plenty of support for racism and ideas that divided communities, he said.

"We wonder now what we might have done to prevent this from happening," he said.
Respect for civil rights and human decency need to be the values embraced here, County Council Chairman Brian Sullivan said. He recalled how his mother lit candles and prayed for the nation the day in 1968 when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.

"This little girl is no less important," Sullivan said.

Everett High School senior Leobardo Carmona said that when he first heard about Forde and her crimes, he figured the woman had to be out of her mind.

Then he learned that she had received nearly 6,000 votes when she ran for Everett City Council in 2007, campaigning largely on a platform that argued not enough was being done in Everett to confront illegal immigration.

"I was mad, surprised and really disappointed," he said.

There is another important subtext to the vigil as well: Shawna Forde left behind victims here, too. Before her career in criminality blossomed into child murder, she also attempted to have her then-husband murdered. And the subsequent slipshod investigation by Everett Police essentially freed her to move her act down to Arizona.

I discussed this in a Herald piece that ran Saturday:

In the course of conducting interviews, people inevitably like to ask the interviewer questions. And I was asked repeatedly by nearly everyone in Arivaca some version of the following question: "How could you people in western Washington have allowed this woman to get away with crimes up there and then come down here and kill a little girl and her father?"

... For what it's worth, I was never able to adequately answer these questions from people in Arivaca. Why this case was so poorly investigated by the Everett Police Department is anybody's guess. But it is an inescapable fact that their laxity in pursuing the murder attempt on John Forde freed Shawna Forde to plan and commit her nefarious deed in Arivaca.

Of course, all this is removed from the immediate purview of Snohomish County and its officials, since this is officially an Everett matter. But as we contemplate "preventing such hate-based crimes in the future," it's essential to recognize that the failure to vigorously pursue prosecution of these kinds of criminals in the early stages of their development is going to undermine any such preventative effort.

We'll see what comes of the vigil. The early signs are hopeful: Everett Police are now at least acknowledging that the case is unsolved but active. Now it remains to be seen if they will do their jobs and solve it.

Dispatch From Seattle: A Deadly Siege Emanating From Right-Wing Values

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]


We've had an unusual spike in gun fatalities here in Peacenik Seattle this spring -- twenty-one since January, compared to only three such deaths at the same time a year ago. Everyone is trying to figure out why. And after yesterday, it's not just a rhetorical question.

Because this one was a real wake-up call:

A man described by his family as "angry toward everything" went on a deadly shooting rampage in Seattle on Wednesday, killing five people and critically wounding another before turning a gun on himself hours later as police closed in.

Ian L. Stawicki, 40, was identified by family and law-enforcement officials as the man who shot five people just before 11 a.m. at Cafe Racer Espresso in the University District — a hangout for a tight community of artists and musicians.

Four of the cafe shooting victims died. A fifth victim was fatally shot near Town Hall in downtown Seattle.

This happened not very far from where I live. At the park where my daughter's classmates were playing at their recess, the police came and told everyone to go back to their school and stay inside. Schools closer to the crime scenes were locked down entirely.

Everyone wants to know why this is happening. It isn't hard to figure out a couple of things that were clearly at play here: We're now a society awash in guns at unprecedented levels. And we're also awash in an increasingly untreated population of mentally ill people.

Over at Slog, Jonathan Golob explains:

In Washington State, it is exceedingly difficult to involuntarily commit mentally ill individuals—particularly for extended periods of time—unless someone is an imminent threat to themselves or others. Individuals with illness severe enough to be committed to a mental health facility in other communities are—by plan—allowed to try to integrate into the community.

In place of (costly and arguably inhumane) warehousing of the mentally ill, the plan for decades in Washington state has been to provide aggressive outpatient case management. Psychosis, bipolar disease, depression, anxiety and others are all treatable diseases. The notion—and it's not a bad idea at its core—is to use an army of social workers (state employees) to keep mentally ill people in the community engaged with treatment and the community safe.

Over the same decades, our investment in social services has dwindled. Right-wing propagandists like the Seattle Time's editorial board, Tim Eyman, and everyone you know who has uttered the phrase 'a more efficient state government' are directly responsible for our social service network being gutted, the many safety nets being left tattered and unmanned.

The reign of radical right wing financial policy in Washington State has left (the richest of) us with some of the lowest tax burdens of any community in the United States. The cost is a day like today.

But we haven't only government-gutting conservatives to thank for this problem. Because we can also thank the far-right paranoid gun nuts who run large national "gun rights" organizations for having gutted any kind of reasonable restraints on the public's access to guns.

As Goldy says, nearly all of the shooting cases in Seattle this past year have been evidence of the pervasive presence of guns in our urban culture, and that's due in no small part to organizations like the NRA and their many wannabee cohorts:

So just once, instead of incredibly denying that guns have much of anything to do with gun violence, I would like to hear opponents of sensible gun control regulation (say, closing Washington's gun show loophole for starts) explain to the children, spouses, friends and other loved ones of the victims that our freedom comes at a cost.

Because honestly, deep down, you gun control opponents know that's what you believe—that tragedies like today are a small price to pay for the privilege of being an American. You just don't have the balls to admit it.

This is particularly worth noting in a year in which the NRA is making increasingly paranoid appeals, claiming an insidious Obama-led "conspiracy" to destroy America. That is, the NRA is openly feeding the irrationality of paranoid, gun-toting and often angry people.

Anthony Robinson at Crosscut observes:

Beneath all the numbers there has also been a deeper change in American culture. Where many Americans once owned guns as part of a rural or small town lifestyle that including hunting, a nationwide shift toward more urban and suburban lifestyles has changed that.

Now gun ownership for other reasons — as an expression of a person’s political commitments and rights — has increased. It’s less about a way of life that includes duck hunting and more about a way of life in which, at least for many, being a citizen means being armed.

What has produced this change, as Robinson observes, is a well-financed (by arms manufacturers) right-wing lobbying organization that now wallows in disreputable conspiracy theories, as well as alternate theories about the meaning of the Second Amendment that in turn have fueled real social and cultural changes:

The result is the most heavily armed civilian population in the world. When guns are a part of the mix, what might, without them, have been a fist fight and a bloody nose becomes a shooting and a fatality.

Lepore sums up the implications of this politicized re-interpretation of the Second Amendment and the consequent erosion of most efforts to regulate either gun ownership or the carrying of concealed weapons.

“When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.”

Even in Seattle, where we pride ourselves on a civil society, its institutions and behaviors, this shift is now evident. Increasingly, it seems that citizenship is defined not by the community we are and which together we build, but by our right to own and carry a gun.

Here in my neighborhood -- a classic liberal Seattle area, full of young professionals and their young families -- people just have a sick feeling in their stomachs. We know something isn't right. And we have the values of right-wing nutcases who hate us anyway -- because we're, you know, librul scum who want gun control and enough social workers to manage the state's population of mentally ill people -- to thank for it. Strange how that works.

UPDATE: SPD Blotter has a dramatic account from a heroic survivor of the shootings:

Amidst a hail of gunfire, a longtime patron of Cafe Racer bravely fought to save his friends from a gunman, who went on a violent rampage Wednesday.

Today, that patron—who we’re identifying by his first name, Lawrence—offered up a chilling account of the violence he witnessed inside the cafe yesterday, and explained how another tragic loss in his life led him to fight the gunman.

Lawrence, who says he’s been getting his morning coffee at Café Racer for “the last few years,” was sitting in the cafe when Ian Stawicki walked through the door just before 11 am.

“Just before it happened, I was looking at [Stawicki] He’d just been told he was 86’d [from the café] in a very polite manner.”

Lawrence says he looked down at his phone for a moment, and then, he says, “I hear the pop, pop, and people scrambling. I couldn’t make sense of it. I didn’t expect the gun to be that quiet. I thought ‘this is really happening.’As Stawicki opened fire in the café, Lawrence, grabbed a bar stool and used it to try to fight off Stawicki and defend his friends.

“I just threw the frigging stool at him, legs first,” he says. “My brother died in the World Trade Center. I promised myself,” if something like this ever happened, “I would never hide under a table.”

Stawicki, Lawrence says, “looked at me like he didn’t [care] at all. He just moved towards the rear of the bar instead of dealing with me at all, and I just brushed past him. He was on a mission to kill my friends.”

“I wasn’t a hero,” Lawrence says, pointing out that a café employee, who was wounded in the shooting, was able to call 911 and “lucidly” give police information about the shooting. “He’s the hero,” Lawrence says.

Now, Lawrence is trying to recover from Wednesday’s tragic events. “Yesterday I was all adrenaline,” he says. “Today, My friends are dead. I’m just grieving right now.”
Lawrence agreed to release a statement through SPD, but says he’s not ready to do interviews with the press, and asks for privacy as he grieves for his friends.

Steve King Reminds Latino Voters That Republicans Love To Compare Them To Dogs, Cattle, Beans And Corn

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

[H/t scarce]

I get the low mordant chuckles whenever I hear Republican strategists complaining that [sniffle] it's so unfair that Democrats enjoy a significant advantage among Latino voters right now. Especially because I know that nativist wingnuts like Rep. Steve King will always be around to remind those voters exactly why they would never want to vote Republican, as he did yesterday:

Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, compared immigrants to dogs at a town hall meeting yesterday, telling constituents that the U.S. should pick only the best immigrants the way one chooses the “pick of the litter.”

King told the crowd in Pocahontas, Iowa, that he’s owned lots of bird dogs over the years and advised, “You want a good bird dog? You want one that’s going to be aggressive? Pick the one that’s the friskiest … not the one that’s over there sleeping in the corner.”

King suggested lazy immigrants should be avoided as well. “You get the pick of the litter and you got yourself a pretty good bird dog. Well, we’ve got the pick of every donor civilization on the planet,” King said. “We’ve got the vigor from the planet to come to America.”

This is nothing new for King. He's previously compared Latino immigrants to cattle, as well as farming commodities like beans and corn. It's all part of his longtime record of mainstreaming hateful rhetoric and demeaning falsehoods when discussing Latino immigrants.

Of course, Mitt Romney is out there trying to mend fences with Latino voters right now, in the vain hope that they'll forget he used vicious anti-Latino rhetoric during the GOP primaries. Indeed, the whole GOP outreach to Latino voters is not going very well right now.

And it just got measurably worse.

Besides the noxious dehumanization of Steve King's rhetoric -- which is bad enough -- I'd also like to address the contents of King's smear, particularly his clear characterization of Latino immigrants as lazy.

I and many other people know from long experience that not only is this a profound and vicious lie, it's about 180 degrees removed from the truth. Latino immigrants are, in fact, some of the hardest-working and most capable people we've added to the national gene pool in many generations.

Two experiences I had some forty years ago formed the basis for the high esteem in which I hold Latino workers.

One of the summer jobs I worked in high school in Idaho Falls, Idaho, entailed hauling irrigation pipe for a potato farm near the town of Shelley. It was brutally hard work and paid poorly, but it was a decent way to make some summer savings working outdoors in the sun. It also required a good work ethic, and frankly, most of us on the crew didn't have it. Though some of us tried to be the exceptions, most of the crew was unreliable, they did lousy work, and they complained incessantly.

A couple years after I graduated I stopped out to see my old boss on the farm. He had replaced his old crew of high-schoolers with an all-immigrant crew, and he couldn't have been happier. They were reliable, they laid their lines perfectly, and they not only never complained, they eagerly volunteered to help out around the farm in whatever other capacities the boss might need.

At first I thought it was a sad development, but the more I thought about it, the more I understood it was not just the right thing, but the best thing.

The summer before I visited him, I had come back to Idaho Falls from college to find summer work, and out of desperation took a labor job in a potato warehouse. This job entailed hauling around fifty-pound sacks of spuds on dollies and loading them into rail cars in stacks. This wasn't really a problem as long as the stack was relatively low, but once it got to above chest level, tossing these fifty-pound gunny sacks up into position became increasingly challenging.

Nearly all of my co-workers were Latino, and they were all short guys. I towered over most of them at six feet. But these guys could stack spuds all day and barely break a sweat, niftily tossing them up with a throwing technique that had been honed over long weeks and months and even years. I struggled to make it to lunch break, and I was in terrific shape at the time.

I wound up only lasting two weeks in that job. But I did make some good friends there.

So when I hear blithering morons like Steve King opining, a la racist caricatures about Mexicans from the 1920s, that Latino immigrants are lazy and disinclined to work, it's enough to make me laugh out loud. Or cry.

When Cops Turn Killer: Death Of Latino Man At Hands Of Border Patrol Cries For Full Investigation

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

[YouTube here.]

I think it's safe to say that a law enforcement agency has grown dangerously out of control comes when its officers begin using their powers to silence anyone who questions them or their authority.

The tasing-and-beating death in 2010 of an illegal border crosser named Anastasio Hernandez Rojas near San Diego is a powerful sign that the U.S. Border Patrol has crossed that line.

Recently released footage of the man's beating makes clear that the Border Patrol's own accounts and explanations for the death are baldfaced fabrications.

Even more chilling are the revelations about how Hernandez Rojas came to be singled out by officers for a beating. It's readily apparent that he was beaten to death because he asked to file a complaint against an agent.

The beating did not occur when Hernandez Rojas was caught and arrested. When that happened, he was kicked repeatedly in a part of his ankle by an agent that had been surgically repaired, and the man had kicked him there even after being told that. As a result, once at the holding facility after the arrest, Hernandez Rojas made a request to file a complaint against that agent.

Then, as all the men with whom he was being held at the facility were taken to the border release point where they were to be returned to Mexico, Hernandez Rojas was separated out from the rest of the group and taken by himself to another gate -- surrounded by a full phalanx of Border Patrolmen armed with nightsticks and Tasers, including the agent against whom he had asked to file a complaint.

It was there that, according to the Border Patrol, the man became "violent" and had to be subdued -- even though several eyewitnesses confirm that in fact Hernandez Rojas did nothing before the beating commenced.

The story was the work of reporters from the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute, who found that this was anything but an isolated incident:

Eight people have been killed along the border in the past two years. One man died a short time after being beaten and tased, an event recorded by two eyewitnesses whose video is the centerpiece of the report. Both eyewitnesses say the man offered little or no resistance. One told Need to Know that she felt like she watched someone being "murdered," and the San Diego coroner's office classified the death as a “homicide.” The report raises questions about accountability. Because border agents are part of the Department of Homeland Security, they are not subjected to the same public scrutiny as police officers who use their weapons. It also questions whether, in the rush to secure the border, agents are being adequately trained. And it raises the question: why aren't these cases being prosecuted?

Watch Crossing the line at the border on PBS. See more from Need To Know.

Sixteen members of Congress are demanding an investigation.

You can too. Presente.org is organizing a petition demanding an investigation by the Justice Department. As Anastasio's widow explains:

Over the last two years, Border Patrol has refused to release the names of the agents responsible or to reveal whether those involved have been disciplined. Anastasio was not their only victim. Since the year Anastasio was killed, Border Patrol agents have killed or seriously injured at least 9 people from San Diego to Texas.

Establishment Dems Proving Themselves Clueless In Washington's 1st District Race

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]


If you want a classic example of the way Establishment Democrats are perfectly tone-deaf when it comes to the concerns of the working families they like to flatter themselves as representing, take a look at how the race in Washington's brand-spanking-new First District is shaping up, particularly on the Democratic side.

Because instead of backing Darcy Burner, the progressive candidate with far and away the greatest name recognition and a record of working for working-class families and their interests -- particularly when it comes to things like protecting Medicare and Social Security, and getting their children out of war zones -- the state's establishment Dems seem to be lining up behind Susan DelBene, a pro-business faux-progressive Dem with little popular support but very deep pockets.

Evidently, it's all about the money. In a year when Democrats should be listening to the anger of their constituents at the failure of Washington politicians to take care of the interests of ordinary people, these dimbulbs are going back to politics as usual and backing the candidate with the deepest pockets, not the deepest support among voters.

On the Republican side, Tea Party nutter John Koster is running largely unopposed and leads in early polling -- largely because it's a six-way race on the Democratic side right now. Things will be different in the fall, when his far-right record and rhetoric will come front and center.

A weekend Seattle Times story laid out the contours:

The Democratic establishment is coalescing behind Suzan DelBene, a former Microsoft vice president who largely self-funded her losing 2010 campaign against U.S. Rep. Dave Reichert, R-Auburn, who represents the 8th District.

But in this year of economic anxiety and the noise surrounding the Occupy movement, DelBene's opponents are taking jabs at her wealth, to appeal to struggling families.
As Darcy Burner, a progressive activist who twice lost to Reichert, says: "There's already an overrepresentation of the 1 percent in Washington, D.C."

You may notice something important missing from this story. There's plenty here touting DelBene's candidacy, for instance, but nothing telling readers how the candidates actually stack up in terms of support:

DelBene's résumé looms largest. She was appointed Gov. Chris Gregoire's Department of Revenue director after an executive career at Microsoft and Drugstore.com, among others. She and her husband, Kurt, a Microsoft president, live in a $4.8 million Lake Washington waterfront home and said she would, like last time, put her own money into her campaign.

"We talk about the American dream, yet we're in a place where we're making it harder and harder. I don't know if I would be able to tell my same story if I were growing up today," she said.

In an apparent effort to trim the field, Gregoire and Larsen endorsed DelBene, as did the state Washington State Labor Council.

What the story neglects to mention is that despite all this Establishment support -- including, amazingly, the support of labor unions, despite the fact that they have been struggling with (and loudly complaining about) a Congress full of Blue Dog Democrats who always fail somehow to actually come to the defense of working families -- there is hardly any popular support for DelBene, who wasn't even a Democrat until a few years ago, and who tells interviewers that she became a Democrat because she thought the party needed to be more friendly to business interests. That is, DelBene is a classic Blue Dog in the making, and her progressive positions have no action behind them to suggest she would carry through with them once in Congress.

Rather the contrary -- it's clear that DelBene instead intends to attack Burner for having fought for progressive positions. If you keep reading the Times story, you'll discover the scandalous thing that Darcy tweeted that the DelBene campaign used to scare off her supporters in King County:

But King County Democrats struggled with their pick.

A subcommittee recommended DelBene and Burner, but then backed away from Burner when a Twitter message she sent in August 2011, while at Progressive Congress, became public. In it, she criticized President Obama during the debt-ceiling debate, writing, "Barack Obama isn't a bad Democrat — because he's not a Democrat. He's a Republican."

Burner's tweet, it should be understood, came just as word had circulated on Capitol Hill that Obama intended to put Social Security and Medicare on the table as negotiating chips during the debt-ceiling showdown that was occurring then -- and she was properly criticizing the President, as should have any progressive worth their salt, for making these items negotiable. Pressure from people like Burner helped persuade the President to change course, which (thank God) he did.

If it had been up to Susan DelBene or the King County Democrats, apparently, that wouldn't have been the case.

Here's what else the Times story didn't tell you: What the actual polls show.

Polls taken in March, for instance, clearly demonstrated Burner's big lead among actual Democratic voters in the new first District: nearly half the total vote, 45 percent, went to Burner, and some 54 percent of them have a favorable impression of her. DelBene, in contrast, comes in fourth with only 12 percent support, and only 21 percent of Democratic voters have a favorable impression of her. (The other progressive in the race, Laura Ruderman, comes in a consistent second with 15 percent support and a 17 percent favorability rating.)

In other words, it's clear that the voters want a real progressive to vote for, not a fake one. But the Establishment Dems are so enamored with DelBene's deep pockets that they are willing to risk running a candidate who inspires no actual support just because she can finance enough ads to sell her way into the seat.

I have a hunch the voters will have other ideas come August, when the primary is actually held.
As the story notes:

Steve Zemke, chair of the King County Democrats, said the party likely won't endorse a single candidate because Burner, Ruderman and DelBene each have fans and are running vigorous campaigns. "I'll say this, they're not easily scared out of the race," he said.

Not by deep-pocket money, at least.

If you want to help make the point that there are other ways to finance a political campaign than with the pocket money of the 1 percent, you should go to Darcy's Blue America page and chip in some nickels. (Here's Darcy's campaign site.)

Gun Sales Go Boom, Thanks To NRA's Paranoid Fearmongering About Obama

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

The National Rifle Association and the assorted far-right gun nuts who make up the gun lobby, as we recently pointed out, really are creating an extremely problematic environment for any post-election America in which Barack Obama has won re-election -- because, thanks to their fact-free and irresponsibly inflammatory attacks on Obama, they've once again convinced a significant segment of the American populace that Obama is secretly plotting to take their guns and their freedoms away.

On the ground, this is playing out in predictably unhealthy ways too -- namely, as the SPLC's Hatewatch recently noted, through skyrocketing weapons and ammo sales:

A hard-hitting propaganda campaign unleashed this year by Wayne LaPierre, executive director of the National Rifle Association, may be convincing Americans that President Obama will crack down on gun ownership if he’s re-elected and becomes a lame duck.

Skyrocketing sales of guns and ammunition, along with some shortages due to stockpiling, are reported by many U.S. shops.

“People are worried about a second Obama presidency,” Simon Wallace, sales manager at Merchant Firearms in Phoenix told Hatewatch. Merchant is one of many gun shops that started seeing demand increase around the first of the year. There are shortages of all types of weapons and ammunition, Wallace said.

One sign of the current panic is the number of FBI background checks for prospective gun owners. The background checks hit an all-time high in 2011 – about 16.5 million. In the first four months of this year, according to the FBI, there were about 6.3 million checks – on track to shatter last year’s record.

... “There’s a lot of free-floating fear,” Molchan said in an interview with Hatewatch. “At one end of the spectrum, you have the survivalists and the stockpiling.”

The problem is particularly acute in places like Texas and Arizona, but it's happening nationally. Naturally, this is cause for celebration by the folks at Fox:

“It’s definitely the election year," Jason Hanson, a former CIA officer and personal security specialist, told FoxNews.com. "People feel that Obama will serve second term and with it their gun rights with taken away, so they are stocking up.

“They’re also worried that the economy is not getting any better and that they need to protect themselves,” Hanson added.

What's also striking is the lengths to which these Obama haters will go to rationalize their obvious paranoia, built on the comical argument that the very fact that Obama hasn't done anything even remotely gun-related in his first term is certain proof that he's secretly conspiring to lower the boom on unsuspecting Americans in a second term, as in this ABC News report:

"He's never been pro-gun," says Cris Parsons of President Obama. Parsons, 31, owns a Texas gun purveyor called the Houston Armory. So far, Parsons insists, Obama has been "pretty coy" about his antipathy toward guns--and he likely will remain so during the campaign. To do otherwise would "upset a lot of people."

But if Obama wins a second term, he'll have "nothing to lose," says Parsons.

Alan Korwin, author of nine books on gun laws, including "Gun Laws of America," says gun owners are worried that the president, as a lame duck, will clamp down as never before on gun ownership.

Parsons says about 40 percent of Armory customers cite this fear as their reason for stocking up on guns and ammo now, before the election.

The soaring guns-sale figures are being bolstered by the gun lobby's remarkable success in passing a succession of laws in a variety of states loosening the ability to obtain to a concealed-carry permit, so now a buttload of people are loading up on weapons:

Conceal-carry permits are now allowed in 49 states (Illinois and Washington D.C. do not have conceal-carry laws), and “Stand Your Ground” laws are on the books in 21 states.

In Florida, police have cited the state’s seven-year-old “Stand your Ground” law in deciding not to charge George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain who shot and killed Trayvon Martin, 17, last month. The law says citizens do not have to retreat before using deadly force against attackers. The Justice Department and FBI now are investigating the killing, and a state grand jury is being convened.

However, the real driver has been the Rabid Right's unceasing demonization of Obama. As a result, the gun nuts at Ammo.Netnow gloatingly call him "the Greatest Gun Salesman in America". Chiming in with his own brand of hearty agreement is that voice of moderation, Ted Nugent:

President Obama is single handedly responsible for the ongoing record setting avalanche of gun and ammunition sales all across America. This is because rank and file Americans do not trust the president and his clear and present anti-gun team.

Nugent concludes that he can predict Obama's lame-duck agenda because he, like all Democrats, just hates America:

The bottom line is simply this: Americans know that most Democrats despise guns almost as much as they despise wealthy people, success, small government, low taxes, and lunches made by moms for their school-age kids.

Did we happen to mention that these people are insane? Maybe we should mention it again.

Like Ted, I happen to be an experienced gun owner. Unlike Ted, guns are not a stand-in for my penis. My sexual identity is not bound up with my shotgun. The way I was raised in a gun-owning family was that guns are tools to be used at the appropriate times, not toys to be played with. I don't think Ted and his NRA buddies got that memo.

More to the point, I think we all dread the day that guys like Nugent and the rapidly growing nutty conspiracy contingent of the American Right obtain more and more weapons and ammo and then decide they need to use it. Anyone experienced with guns knows that not only do they possess the ultimate power -- the power to end another person's life -- but also guns invite you to wield that power, if only as a means of intimidation. In the hands of wise and thoughtful people, that is not a problem.

But these are anything but wise or thoughtful people.

Climate-Change Deniers Smear Their Foes With A Groundless Terrorism Link. Here's One That's Not So Groundless

A little turnabout for the Heartland Institute.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

[Note to the satirically impaired: That's a Photoshop, courtesy of the inimitable Blue Gal.]

Right-wingers never seem to understand why people get perturbed when they helpfully compare whatever liberal cause they oppose to Nazis, Hitler, Communists, and that ol' standby, Satan. This evidently is what passes for an intellectual exchange for these folks. And they especially never understand that precisely the same argument can be applied to them as well -- in spades.

Most recently, the Heartland Institute, the noted corporate-backed deniers of climate science, decided that was the kind of discourse they wanted to engage in:

The Heartland Institute has launched one of the most offensive billboard campaigns in U.S. history. The Chicago-based anti-science think tank is comparing all those who accept climate science — and the journalists who report on it accurately — to Charles Manson, the Unabomber, and Osama Bin Laden.

The Institute, after being panned by everyone in sight, eventually took down the billboards. But not before they made it perfectly clear that this was a campaign approved by -- and indeed, seemingly the brainchild of -- their leadership. See, for instance, the statement that they posted on their website defending the campaign:

Billboards in Chicago paid for by The Heartland Institute point out that some of the world’s most notorious criminals say they “still believe in global warming” – and ask viewers if they do, too…

The billboard series features Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber; Charles Manson, a mass murderer; and Fidel Castro, a tyrant. Other global warming alarmists who may appear on future billboards include Osama bin Laden and James J. Lee (who took hostages inside the headquarters of the Discovery Channel in 2010).

These rogues and villains were chosen because they made public statements about how man-made global warming is a crisis and how mankind must take immediate and drastic actions to stop it.

Why did Heartland choose to feature these people on its billboards?

Because what these murderers and madmen have said differs very little from what spokespersons for the United Nations, journalists for the “mainstream” media, and liberal politicians say about global warming….

The point is that believing in global warming is not “mainstream,” smart, or sophisticated. In fact, it is just the opposite of those things. Still believing in man-made global warming – after all the scientific discoveries and revelations that point against this theory – is more than a little nutty. In fact, some really crazy people use it to justify immoral and frightening behavior.

The best part was the lame disclaimer near the end:

Of course, not all global warming alarmists are murderers or tyrants.

The people who still believe in man-made global warming are mostly on the radical fringe of society. This is why the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.

This is pretty funny, considering that the vast majority of professional climate scientists are just that -- scientists. The notion that they are somehow the moral equivalent of mass murderers and tyrants is absurd, far-fetched, and obscene.

But if the Heartland Institute wants to play that game, it's an easy one for the other side to join in on. And they'll lose. Because the worst mass killer of the recent past also happens to be a climate-change denier: Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian anti-immigrant far-right nutcase who murdered 77 people less than a year ago. Here's what Breivik wrote about climate change in his nutty "manifesto":

You might know them as environmentalists, enviro-communists, ecoMarxists, neo-Communists or eco-fanatics. They all claim they want to save the world from global warming but their true agenda is to contribute to create a world government lead by the UN or in other ways increase the transfer of resources (redistribute resources) from the developed Western world to the third world. They hope to accomplish this through the distribution of misinformation (propaganda) which they hope will lead to increased taxation of already excessively taxed Europeans and US citizens. The neo-communist agenda uses politicised science to propagate the global warming scam in order to implement their true agenda; global Marxism. Marxism’s ultimate goal is to redistribute wealth from successful nations to failed nations, instead of actually trying to fix these broken nations. Politicised science is being used by the cultural Marxist hegemony to manipulate the unsuspecting masses. They are using our trust and faith in science to spread lies and hysteria that will allow Marxists to implement socialist “solutions” to a problem that never actually existed.

<..>

That's exactly what is happening with the Anthropogenic Global Warming scam; too many people are too demoralised to assess true information about Socialism, Communism, and climate change to allow its use for other agendas on the hands of the useful idiots “the leftists” as former KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov calls them. Enviro-communism is a new twisted idea of redistribution of wealth through “environmental” policies and the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference 2009 is the perfect manifestation of it. Environmental Justice is the new Social Justice; Climate Debt is the new Redistribution of Wealth, Anthropogenic Global Warming scam is the Communism.

Crap like this is common among climate-change deniers. Breivik also ardently believed in the fake "Climategate" scandal, which he described as "exposing the eco-Marxist scam":

On Thursday 19th November 2009 news began to circulate that hacked documents and communications from the University of East Anglia’s Hadley Climate Research Unit (aka CRU) had been published to the internet. The information revealed how top scientists conspired to falsify data in the face of declining global temperatures in order to prop up the premise that man-made factors are driving climate change. The documents and emails illustrated how prominent climatologists, affiliated with the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change, embarked on a venomous and coordinated campaign to ostracise climate skeptics and use their influence to keep dissenting reports from appearing in peer-reviewed journals, as well as using cronyism to avoid compliance with Freedom of Information Act requests.

Who else promoted the "Climatechange" fakery? Why, the Heartland Institute, of course. Along with the same "cultural Marxism" garbage that Breivik lapped up.

Now, ahem, not all climate-change deniers are crazed mass killers. At least not yet. But it's worth pointing out that, while climate change or a belief therein played no discernible role whatsoever in motivating any of the icons of evil that the Heartland folks trotted out (except perhaps the planned appearance of killer James Lee, the Discovery Channel shooter who in fact was motivated by a paranoid nativist fear of anchor babies, but whose image never made it up onto the billboards in any event), the same could not be said of Anders Breivik: He vehemently denied the reality of climate change and insisted it was all part of a Marxist plot. Immigration was Breivik's focus, but denying climate change was a potent part of the toxic brew of right-wing extremism that made Breivik the madman he was.

Let's just say that one can make a much more reasonable argument that rhetoric and beliefs such as people like the Heartland Institute promote -- especially since these beliefs and arguments are profoundly irrational, anti-scientific, and ultimately have an unhinging effect on mentally unstable people whose contact with reality is already distorted -- can have a powerful effect in fueling psychopaths in their violent acts.

One can argue this point, of course. But when the argument is as profoundly stupid as "This madman agrees with you, therefore your belief is that of a madman," there is no point in discussing it any further. Especially when putting the same shoe on their other foot is so easy and obvious.

Right-Wingers' Desperation To Disclaim J.T. Ready Hits New Depths After Massacre

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Just wondering: Is there any blogger out there more brazenly dishonest than Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit?

I know we have plenty of Malkins and Instahacks and nutbar Pammies to go around on the wingnutosphere. But it's hard to think of any blogger who more openly and remorselessly attempts to tell his readers that up is down, black is white, and that no, he doesn't have his head up his ass while speaking through his belly button.

I know a lot of people had chalked all this up to stupidity on Hoft's part. I don't know if he's stupid. I do know he is just flatly dishonest, a purveyor of brazenly false information.

For instance, in response to neo-Nazi J.T. Ready's massacre of his family earlier this week, Hoft posted this:

Horror!… Neo-Nazi #Occupy Phoenix Protester Goes On Shooting Rampage – 5 Dead"
Neo-Nazi Jason Todd (J.T.) Ready pictured on left patrolling the Occupy Phoenix protest and on right at Southern Poverty Law Center website.

Of course, since this was not a Tea Party rally the story was never picked up by the liberal media.

The problem with this? J.T. Ready was a regular fixture at Arizona Tea Party events. Indeed, as Matt Gertz at Media Matters reported back when Hoft first trotted out this nonsense, Ready not only regularly appeared at such events, he was regularly given a speaker's platform and even organized one such event featuring J.D. Hayworth.

That's in stark contrast to his single Occupy appearance, where he was confronted by other protesters and asked to leave, and he was not permitted to speak. He was there, as we explained, purely as an opportunist:

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

At least Russell Pearce was more honest and forthcoming in discussing his past associations with Ready:

After resisting for hours, Pearce relented late in the day and released a lengthy statement detailing how he came to know JT Ready and what eventually led to their falling out. Multiple media outlets in Arizona posted the statement in whole.

Pearce said he, like others in the Phoenix suburb of Mesa, got to know Ready for his interest in Republican politics.

“When we first met JT he was fresh out of the Marine Corp and seemed like a decent person,” Pearce wrote. “He worked as a telephone fundraiser for Christian and pro-life groups, he dated the daughter of one of our District 18 members, and his attitudes and spoken opinions were good and decent.”

According to the Phoenix New Times, Pearce became a mentor to Ready. The powerful lawmaker helped the young man convert to the Mormon religion and he was there for Ready’s first baptism.

But Pearce said Ready’s demeanor changed somewhere along the way. Pearce described it as a “darkness.” Ready began spending time with hate groups, including the National Socialist Movement, which is the largest neo Nazi organization in the U.S.. After pressure from fellow Republicans, Pearce eventually disavowed the friendship.

“He was angry with me and stayed angry with me, and it has been several years since I have had reason to speak with JT,” Pearce said in the statement.

Over at Phoenix's Fox 13, Pearce gave a relatively forthcoming interview:

Russell Pearce: Pioneer Against Illegal Immigration or Racist?: MyFoxPHOENIX.com
Hilariously, even after all this was pointed out by Charles Johnson of LGF, Hoft just doubled down:

As Jim Treacher says, “The Occupy Camp is a great incubator for domestic terrorism.”
That’s an understatement!

More… It looks like poor unhinged Charles Johnson jumped the gun on this one. JT wasn’t a rightwinger after all, huh Chuck? Hopefully Mr. Johnson will be honest enough to post an update with corrections.

Yeah, because Jim Hoft knows all about honesty.

Pretty soon he'll start regurgitating the claim being spread by J.T. Ready's supporters that the massacre was actually carried out by Mexican drug cartels in order to frame Ready. (Kind of like Laine Lawless's defense of another Arizona child killer, Shawna Forde.) Go for it, dude.

UPDATE: Cerberus at Sadly, No! has a must-read take on this.

Ticking Time Bomb Goes Off: Neo-Nazi J.T. Ready Massacres His Own Family In Arizona

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

We've been saying for a long time that ardent neo-Nazis like J.T. Ready of Arizona are ticking time bombs, walking violent atrocities waiting to happen. Yesterday, he proved the point in a horrifying way:

A border militia leader on Wednesday shot and killed four people at a Gilbert home, including a toddler, before committing suicide, sources said.

Sources identified the shooter as Jason "J.T." Ready, a reputed neo-Nazi who made headlines when he launched a militia movement to patrol the Arizona desert to hunt for illegal immigrants and drug smugglers.

Authorities have not identified the other victims, but reached by phone Wednesday afternoon, Hugo Mederos said the victims were his ex-wife, Lisa; their daughter, Amber; Amber's boyfriend, whose name The Republic is withholding until his next of kin could be notified, and Amber's 18-month-old baby, Lilly.

Mederos, who lives in Tampa, said Ready lived at the home with his girlfriend, Lisa.
Ready was a former Marine who headed the U.S. Border Guard, a militia-style group that routinely performed armed patrols in the southern Arizona desert. Early this year, Ready had formed an exploratory committee for a run as Pinal County sheriff.

In recent years, Ready has been grabbing headlines by organzing vigilante border patrols. Ready's onetime political ally, Russell Pearce, was just chased out of public office by Mesa's voters.

J.T. Ready (left) with former state Sen. Russell Pearce

What's striking about the saga of J.T. Ready is how he represents the most telling feature of right-wing extremist movements: like Shawna Forde, Jason Bush, Tim McVeigh, Scott Roeder and Jim David Adkisson before him, he has proven to be a violent and unstable personality capable of inhuman atrocities.

These kinds of movements attract these kinds of personalities because so many of their leaders are also unstable and violent personalities, and the rhetoric their movements employ to attract followers so closely replicates the impoverished interior life of the psychopath, one in which any kind of rationale works to justify naked bigotry.

I was reminded of this watching old video of Ready complaining that calling National Socialists like himself "Nazis" is an unkind smear:



I'm also reminded, once again, that perhaps Arizonans ought to pay a little more attention to the problems caused by the white supremacists in their midst instead of fretting about brown people.

Hannity Hijacked As Angry Kirsten Powers Confronts Jesse Lee Peterson's 'Little Whores' Misogyny

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

You have to wonder when people will begin to notice that Sean Hannity's incessant attempts to paint Barack Obama as a flaming radical by associating him with various supposed extremists is actually a classic case of projection.

After all, there's no one in the mainstream media who has quite the array of running associations with far-right nutcases that Sean Hannity has—going back to the days when he palled around with white supremacist Hal Turner, and continuing through his ongoing sponsorship of wackos like Birther extraordinaire Jerome Corsi. Most notably, Hannity continues to promote and support another WorldNetDaily nutcase, Jesse Lee Peterson.

Last night, however, even a Fox Democrat like Kirsten Powers found it too hard to contain herself when seated next to Peterson. As Ellen at NewsHounds points out, Powers completely derailed Hannity's planned Obama-bashing segment by turning to Peterson and demanding he explain himself for his recent declaration that most women are "little whores".

KIRSTEN POWERS: There is a little dispute over what you are saying whether or not the intelligence was necessary. But I do agree that what he is doing isn't right. However, I don't normally do this. I don't normally hijack you --

HANNITY: You are going to hijack me.

POWERS: But I didn't know I was going to be sitting here with Reverend Peterson tonight who I have been very serious issues with in terms -- some of the misogynist things have you said about how women in your sermon about how women have created a shameless society.

And most women are littler whores and that it was OK to call Sandra Fluke a slut and that should you put women in powerful businesses and then you leave women alone in the family, they destroy the family --

PETERSON: I don't know if you have noticed or not, but the liberal Democrat women are calling themselves whores. There is a so-called group of women within the Democratic Party and they are -- admitting -- they are admitting that they are whores --

HANNITY: Are you talking about that group --

POWERS: That's a completely different thing.

PETERSON: I am OK with that. I just don't want to pay for it. If the liberal women want to have sex out of wedlock --

POWERS: You say that women are creating a shameless society and they are destroying the family and they shouldn't be put in powerful positions - - address that. Women shouldn't be in powerful businesses.

PETERSON: Most Americans know that liberal women are destroying the family. They hate men. They hate society --

POWERS: That is absolutely false. Sean, do I hate men?

HANNITY: I hope not. You started this.

PETERSON: -- public school system --

POWERS: You are not addressing what you said. You are a pastor, distorting God's word for misogyny. What do you mean -- when you say women -- you leave a woman alone in charge of a family and she destroys the family?

PETERSON: We allowed the National Organization of Women who hate men -- the women in their group. We left them alone -- we left them alone -- there it is. We left them alone. Look at the condition we are in today, out of wedlock -- abortion.

HANNITY: All right, I have to step in --

PETERSON: I'm telling the truth.

HANNITY: I gave you -- this is not one of the topics that I planned on. You are hijacking the show.

POWERS: I didn't know I was going to be on with him.

HANNITY: Why did you come in --

(CROSSTALK)

PETERSON: If you believe what you believe --

POWERS: I saw him on --

HANNITY: We have another guest, to be fair. Let me ask you --

PETERSON: Why are you upset at me? I am not upset at you --

POWERS: You are a pastor using God's word to teach misogyny.

PETERSON: No. I have a responsibility to tell the truth. You are on the side of lies. Why should I not be on the side of truth? The truth is going to make us free. Somebody got to tell the truth. I tell the truth. There is an order to life -- liberal women policies are bad for family, bad for the country.

HANNITY: I have to take a break.

In case you're wondering, here's the video of the sermon that Rev. Peterson recently gave:



This version has been heavily edited, so that the most offensive remarks have been removed. Ellen at NewsHounds managed to transcribe most of them while they were still available:

Not all, not all, not all, but most (women) turned into little whores. (He cited Sandra Fluke as an example).

Who in the world is having that much sex? …What are these women doing having that much sex? …She had no shame.

Rush Limbaugh called her a slut and she didn’t realize that she looked like a slut sitting there making that type of confession…

How did we get to a point where women think we should pay for them to have sex?
They want to force us to buy them birth control.

No one’s saying, ‘Where’s your shame, woman?’

Rush Limbaugh called her… “a whore and a slut” and I agree with him.

And yes, Hannity not only brings Peterson onto his show as a regular guest. He also sits on the board of directors of Peterson's nonprofit organization.

Since Hannity obviously thinks it's a big deal to associate with radicals, perhaps he ought to explain his own associations.

Paul Ryan Tries Keeping Up With Etch-a-Sketch Mitt By Pretending His Ayn Rand Fandom Is An 'Urban Legend'

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Paul Ryan is trying out for the job of being Mitt Romney's running mate by completely rewriting his own history. Which would make him a nice match with Romney. Guess he's trying to prove that he can keep up with the boss's Etch-a-Sketch approach to history.

We saw last week that Ryan now wants to pretend that he never really was a big Ayn Rand fanboy, since he figured out that Rand doesn't go down very well with the Bible thumpers who comprise the GOP's most reliable base. But even after he was called out as a liar, he's still trying to run away from his Randbot past -- most recently in Jonathan Weisman's profile of Ryan for the New York Times:

Ryan likes to dispel two "urban legends" around him. First, he said, he is not a disciple of Rand, the strident libertarian. Second, he never drove the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile.

In fact, there is some truth to both. In a 2009 Facebook video, Ryan said the "kind of thinking" in the Rand epics "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" was "sorely needed right now."

As for the Wienermobile, one summer as he was pressing Oscar Mayer Lunchables and turkey bacon on meat buyers in rural Minnesota, two "very nice young ladies" who were driving the hot-dog-shaped vehicle did let him "take it for a spin," he confessed.

This is classic NYT Beltway-style soft-pedaling: Ryan didn't merely say a few nice things about Rand in that 2009 video, which you can watch above. Here's the whole transcript:

RYAN: You know, it doesn't surprise me that sales of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged have surged lately with the Obama administration coming in, because it's that kind of thinking, that kind of writing, that is sorely needed right now. And I think a lot of people would observe that we are living right in an Ayn Rand novel, metaphorically speaking.

But more to the point is this: The issue that is under assault, the attack on democratic capitalism, on individualism and freedom in America, is an attack on the moral foundation of America. And Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism, and this to me is what matters most. It is not enough to say that President Obama's taxes are too big, the health-care plan doesn't work for this or that policy reason, it is the morality of what is occurring right now and how it offends the morality of individuals working toward their own free will, to produce, to achieve, to succeed, that is under attack. And it is that what I think Ayn Rand would be commenting on, and we need that kind of comment more and more than ever.

Contrast that with what he tried to claim last week:

“I reject her philosophy,” Ryan says firmly. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas,” who believed that man needs divine help in the pursuit of knowledge. “Don’t give me Ayn Rand,” he says.

As Blue Texan noted, Ryan spoke at a big event honoring Rand back in 2008:

"The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand," Ryan said at a D.C. gathering four years ago honoring the author of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead."

And in 2003, he was chirpily describing for the Weekly Standard how he forced Rand's turgid prose upon his benighted employees:

“I give out ‘Atlas Shrugged’ as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it. Well… I try to make my interns read it.”

Of course, as Scott Keyes at ThinkProgress observes, there are plenty of reasons why someone with Republican presidential aspirations might want to rethink their love of Ayn Rand, considering that she was a flaming atheist who despised Christians.



Mike Lux has more.

Is Climate Change Behind Those Killer Storms? Foxheads Eagerly Denounce Such Notions

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Hey, folks in the South -- you'll be happy to know those unusually nasty tornadoes that just blew through your towns and killed hundreds of your neighbors aren't any kind of serious long-term problem. At least not according to Fox News.

Because to think so would be to perhaps admit that climate scientists might be onto something to suspect that climate change might have had a hand in these extreme storms. Perish the thought!
Filling in for Neil Cavuto yesterday on Fox, Connell McShane invited on Marc Morano of ClimateDepot, fondly remembered by some of us as wingnut Republican Sen. James Inhofe's ex-communications chief. (I'm sure you'll be shocked to learn that his outfit is primarily funded by money from corporate sources like ExxonMobil and Richard Mellon Scaife.)

Morano was appalled that environmentalists might connect this week's devastating tornadoes to scientists' warnings of climate change and global warming:

MORANO: Well, this is following them blaming the tsunami on climate change, the record cold on climate change, the blizzards and record snow on climate change. This is them blaming record ice in Antarctica on climate change. This is them blaming any weather event on climate change. It's the latest incarnation. The problem is, this time it's even more absurd than the previous times.

Actually, Fox News probably isn't the place you want to be making this charge, considering that Fox anchors have a long and colorful history of using extreme winter storms to claim that it's evidence global warming is, in Sean Hannity's words, "the biggest scientific fraud in our lifetimes". Indeed, one of the more notable such cases involved Neil Cavuto.

And of course, Morano also repeats previously debunked falsehoods about the weather. For instance, it is a a lie that Antarctica as a whole is getting record ice: "Antarctica is losing land ice as a whole, and these losses are accelerating quickly."

To claim that the tornadoes had nothing, nussink! to do with climate change, Morano cited previous tornado data and claimed they showed "absolutely no trend" to increasing tornadoes. So don't worry about it, folks! Nothing to see here! And anyone who thinks so is just like those primitive Aztecs who cut out people's hearts to make it rain:

MORANO: So any way you cut it, tornadoes are not a crisis. For them now to use this is yet another example of climate astrology. They're trying to peddle the idea that our SUVs are causing severe tornadoes and our light bulbs and our industry and our way of life. It's no better than in 1450 when Aztec priests encouraged people to sacrifice to the gods to end a drought. We actually are going back to a primitive culture where we actually think that we can affect the weather to this level, like a tornado is caused by our cars.

Yes, because being encouraged to drive a hybrid car in place of your gas-hogging SUV is just like having your heart cut out and sacrificed to the gods.

Morano then wrapped up by attacking discussions of the tornadoes in the context of climate change as "purely a propaganda tool" without even a hint of irony.

In reality, the trends aren't clear, as Bryan Walsh at Time explains, but there is unquestionably change in the patterns afoot:

And the answer is... Scientists really don't know. It's true that the average number of April tornadoes has steadily increased from 74 a year in the 1950s to 163 a year in the 2000s. But most of that increase, as A.G. Sulzberger reports in the New York Times, comes from the least powerful tornadoes, the ones that touch down briefly without causing much damage. Those are exactly the kind of tornadoes that would have been missed by meteorologists in the days before the Weather Channel and Doppler radar—scientists today would almost never miss an actual tornado touchdown, no matter how brief or weak. That makes it very difficult for researchers to even be sure that the actual number of tornadoes is on the rise, let alone, if they are, what might be causing it. The number of severe tornadoes per year has actually been dropping over time.

It is true, however, that as the climate warms, more moisture will evaporate into the atmosphere. Warmer temperatures and more moisture will give storm systems that much more energy to play with, like adding nitroglycerin to the atmosphere. This month's possibly record-breaking tornadoes are due in part to an unusually warm Gulf of Mexico, where as Freedman reports, water surface temperatures are 1 to 2.5 C above the norm. The Gulf feeds moisture northward to storm systems as they move across the country, and that warm moist air from the south meeting cool, dry air from the Plains often results in some powerful weather. But at the same time, other studies have forecast that warmer temperatures will reduce the wind shear necessary to turn a routine thunderstorm into a powerful system that can give birth to tornadoes. So in a hotter world we could see more frequent destructive thunderstorms, but fewer tornadoes—although some researchers think we could still end up with both.

Moreover, as at ThinkProgress reports, a number of scientists think that climate change is obviously part of the picture here, and ignoring it not only won't make it go away, it's profoundly irresponsible:

In an email interview with ThinkProgress, Dr. Kevin Trenberth, one of the world’s top climate scientists, who has been exploring for years how greenhouse pollution influences extreme weather, said he believes that it is “irresponsible not to mention climate change” in the context of these extreme tornadoes. Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, added that the scientific understanding of how polluting our atmosphere with billions of tons of greenhouse gases affects tornadic activity is still ongoing:

It is irresponsible not to mention climate change. … The environment in which all of these storms and the tornadoes are occurring has changed from human influences (global warming). Tornadoes come from thunderstorms in a wind shear environment. This occurs east of the Rockies more than anywhere else in the world. The wind shear is from southerly (SE, S or SW) flow from the Gulf overlaid by westerlies aloft that have come over the Rockies. That wind shear can be converted to rotation. The basic driver of thunderstorms is the instability in the atmosphere: warm moist air at low levels with drier air aloft. With global warming the low level air is warm and moister and there is more energy available to fuel all of these storms and increase the buoyancy of the air so that thunderstorms are strong. There is no clear research on changes in shear related to global warming. On average the low level air is 1 deg F and 4 percent moister than in the 1970s.

Climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, explains further that “climate change is present in every single meteorological event”:

The fact remains that there is 4 percent more water vapor–and associated additional moist energy–available both to power individual storms and to produce intense rainfall from them. Climate change is present in every single meteorological event, in that these events are occurring within a baseline atmospheric environment that has shifted in favor of more intense weather events.

But then, at Fox News "profoundly irresponsible" isn't anything unusual. It's part of their business model.

Okay If You're A Fox Anchor: How The Propaganda Network Rigs The Debate

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]


One of the techniques the propagandists at Fox News have mastered over the years marking their toxic rise in the media landscape has been to hold its competitors to standards that Fox itself has no intention of ever meeting. There's nothing Fox talkers love to attack other networks for more than their supposed journalistic sins -- while Fox itself has proven itself time and again as a relentless font of false "facts" and disinformation.

A recent example was the piece by the New York Times' David Carr castigating NBC for failing to correct a misleading audio edit on the air, even though the network did fire the producer responsible.

After broadcasting an audio clip on the “Today” show about George Zimmerman last month that hit the trifecta of being misleading, incendiary and dead-bang wrong, NBC News management took serious action: it fired the producer in charge and issued a statement apologizing for making it appear as if Mr. Zimmerman had made overtly racist statements.

The only thing NBC didn’t do was correct the report on the “Today” show.

What got everyone's panties in a knot? It was an edit that made Zimmerman appear worse than the full recording:

Here is how NBC edited the clip of Mr. Zimmerman, who is now charged with second-degree murder in the Trayvon Martin case:

“This guy looks like he’s up to no good. ... he looks black.”

Here is what Mr. Zimmerman actually said:

“This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.” The dispatcher then asks, “O.K., and this guy — is he white, black or Hispanic?” Mr. Zimmerman pauses and replies, “He looks black.”

The clip was first broadcast on March 22, but no one noticed until it was rebroadcast on March 27. Later, when word of the misleading edit got out, everyone from Sean Hannity to Jon Stewart reacted with disbelief, with good reason.

Got that? It was Fox News -- and Sean Hannity in particular -- who complained loudly about it. And indeed, the Carr piece is accompanied by a "Fox News Watch" graphic from a segment attacking NBC for the edit.

Which is funny, because we remember when it was Fox News doing the deceptive-editing schtick,. They didn't just do it once -- they did it repeatedly:

Hannity, for instance, has repeatedly run a deceptively edited video of Obama speaking abroad in order to smear him as being a president who presents a weak American face. It's almost a nightly feature of Beck's show, who uses selective edits to smear everyone from Van Jones to Jim Wallis to President Obama.

Indeed, selectively cropped video has been a specialty of Fox News generally for some time now, and it has been long remarked.

And here's the best part: Fox News never issued a correction, let alone an apology, for any one of these misleading edits. As far as we know, no producer has ever been fired for it. The best evidence that there have been no repercussions within Fox for these acts of journalistic malfeasance is the fact that these misleading edits have been used repeatedly and remorselessly.

They don't need to. Because they know the New York Times and Washington Posts of the world -- the supposed media watchdogs -- will never hold them responsible. But they will eagerly prove their Me-I'm-Not-Liberal-Media-Really credentials by lapping up any instance of misfeasance by the established, non-propagandistic journalistic efforts of the traditional networks and trumpeting it, giving the Foxites and their followers further proof of the Liberal Media Conspiracy at work.

This isn't to defend NBC's edit. But you have to wonder when our so-called watchdogs are going to start copping to the reality that Fox News violates basic standards of journalism on an hourly basis, if not more frequently. As yet, nobody but the dirty hippies has been willing to come out and say that the king of the parade is wearing no ethics. Instead, we get a steady diet of false-equivalency crap.

Camo-Clad Gunmen Shoot At Pickup Full Of Immigrants, Leaving Two Dead

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Here's a disturbing story, one with even more horrifying potential, out of the Arizona borderlands:

Authorities in southern Arizona say two men in a pickup truck carrying illegal immigrants have been fatally shot near Eloy.

Pima County Sheriff's officials say it appears the truck was ambushed by an unknown number of people dressed in camouflage and armed with rifles late Sunday night.
Border Patrol agents and police officers from Eloy and Coolidge responded to a report of shots fired about 10:30 p.m. in a wash known for human smuggling activity.

Authorities say one man was found dead inside the bed of the truck and another victim was located in a wash near the vehicle. Their identities haven't been released.
Detectives say it appears shot were fired at the truck by the ambush group.

At this point, the motive isn't clear, according to the Arizona Republic:

Five immigrants among the group later told investigators that as they were driving Sunday night, two or more camouflage-clad gunmen appeared and yelled "Alto!" Spanish for "Stop," fired at them and ran away, Barkman said.

She declined to say whether the truck stopped or its driver tried to flee, or how long the gunmen fired on the immigrants.

Of the 20 to 30 immigrants in the truck at the time of the shooting, most fled into the desert and got away from authorities.

The five immigrants who were found hiding in nearby brush, who are all from Mexico, described the ambush but couldn't say exactly how many shooters there were.
Barkman said it was too dark for them to see the race of their attackers. They were turned over to the Border Patrol.

There have been similar shootings, as the story notes, that were related to drug-cartel rip-offs:

The shooting is similar to a handful of fatal shootings in 2007, including one in March of that year in which a woman and her brother-in-law were found dead by Pima County sheriff's deputies after men with high-powered weapons opened fire on a truck loaded with 21 other immigrants about 25 miles south of Tucson. The men were part of a so-called "rip" crew looking to rob other smugglers of drug loads.

In a similar attack in February 2007, gunmen believed to be rival smugglers opened fire on a truck carrying around 20 immigrants, killing two men and a suspected smuggler who was driving a vehicle was killed and a 12-year-old boy was wounded when four men wearing camouflage uniforms and berets and armed with at least one assault weapon stopped the vehicle in a farm field.

On the other hand, there have been other shootings near the border where it's not at all clear that cartels were involved at all, including one near Rio Rico in which other skeletal remains were found nearby. These happened more recently, too -- in 2010.

And indeed, the Pima County investigators are not ruling out the possibility that these were border vigilantes, as Mike Ludwig at TruthOut reports:

When asked if investigators suspect the attack was orchestrated by a militia, sheriff's department spokesperson Deputy Dawn Barkman said investigators are "looking into every possibility but nothing is conclusive."

We'll be watching this investigation closely.

Arpaio Ally Andrew Thomas Makes Himself Out To Be An MLK-like Martyr, While The Sheriff Quietly Sweats

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

It was pretty comical yesterday watching Andrew Thomas, the former DA in Arizona's Maricopa County and Joe Arpaio's right-hand man in their corrupt attempts to intimidate county officials, hold his press conference denouncing the fact that he had just been disbarred for his behavior.

You see, it's all the fault of his enemies, and he's a martyr:

"I did my job. A lot of powerful people didn't like that," he said.

An Arizona ethics board disbarred Thomas Tuesday for failed corruption investigations that he and America's self-proclaimed toughest sheriff launched against officials with whom they were having political and legal disputes.

"We now have a constitutional crisis in which prosecutors and members of the executive branch are being targeted by the judiciary for blowing the whistle on misconduct in the judiciary," he said.

He compared the figures behind his disbarring to corrupt Mexican officials.

"Arizona, after what happened yesterday, has become Mexico," Thomas said.

The best part, as Stephen Lemons observes:

"Other men, far greater than I, have gone to jail in defense of principles they believed in and so they would not kowtow to a corrupt ruler," Thomas said at one point. "People like Gandhi, people like Dr. King, people like Solzhenitsyn, people like Thomas More, people who stood for something....and I'm going to stand firm."

"Gandhi?" wondered one onlooker in amazement.

Yep, I could hardly believe my ears, too, as Thomas blamed his current situation on others -- a corrupt judiciary, powerful politicians, insiders who knew "how to work the system," Presiding Disciplinary Judge William O'Neil, his fellow lawyers, you name it.

Anyone but himself.

Meanwhile, Joe Arpaio was whistling past Thomas' political graveyard in his noncommital remarks. Mainly because his head is next on the block:

And despite Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s efforts to distance himself from cases at the center of a legal ethics panel inquiry that cost a pair of former county prosecutors their careers — the fallout has moved closer.

“Sheriff Arpaio is the next big step,’’ said Mary Rose Wilcox, a Maricopa County official who has been at odds with the sheriff and his allies. “He will fall.’’

Arpaio has denied wrongdoing, but the three-member disciplinary panel of the Arizona courts said Tuesday that evidence suggests the sheriff conspired with Maricopa County’s former top prosecutor to intimidate a judge with unfounded criminal charges.

The ethics board’s sweeping ruling against former Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas and one of his assistant prosecutors says they wrongfully brought criminal charges against a pair of county officials, including Wilcox, in December 2009.

The panel said the charges were brought to embarrass the county officials and the judge who had been at odds with Arpaio and Thomas.

Arpaio and Thomas have defended their actions, saying they were working to root out corruption in county government.

As Lemons observes, the panel recommending Thomas' disbarment perfectly described the pathology of these people -- not just Thomas and his minions, but their whole nutty nativist contingent in Arizona:

"Behind the flimsy fabric of their rationalizations raged apparent unfettered passions that were fueled by a darkness of purpose, blessed by a self-righteous self-centeredness and draped in a disguise of hypocritical indignation. They used a deadly combination of trusting in their ability to sell the vividness of their own imaginations combined with a resolute refusal to look a fact in the face."

That about covers it.

Coulter Claims Only 'Liberal' Media Are Promoting The Trump 'Birther' Story. Then Van Susteren Lets Trump Do His Thing

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Ann Coulter had an interesting theory about Donald Trump's Birtherism, which she explained last night to Sean Hannity. It seems that it's all a plot by the liberal media to discredit conservatives:

COULTER: Well, I think maybe I've been watching too much Charlie Sheen, because Donald Trump seems perfectly sane to me. Um, I don't know where he gets this two million dollars Obama has spent to keep his birth certificate quiet -- he posted his birth certificate on his Web page.

I am glad that Donald Trump is bringing it up, so that people who haven't really been paying attention and don't know that the American Spectator, Human Events, Fox News, ummm -- you know, every conservative outlet has already shot down this rumor -- which, by the way, was started by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Now they will have a chance to find out this is Donald Trump's Pierre Salinger moment -- you can't believe everything you read on the Internet, Obama has produced his birth certificate, there were announcements that ran in two contemporaneous Hawaiian newspapers at the time, the head of the Hawaiian medical records has announced, 'I have seen the long form you all want,' um -- I don't know why the long form is considered more credible than the short form, they're both from the same office.

The State Department accepts the short form -- or as we call it, the birth certificate. Hawaii accepts the birth certificate, short form -- so it is a conspiracy theory that won't die on the Internet, but every responsible conservative organization to look at it has shot it down. Which is why you normally hear it being talked about exclusively on the liberal cable stations.

HANNITY: Well, it's an interesting point, and one of the main people demanding it be released is, interestingly, thrill-up-our leg Chris Matthews ... why don't they just release it? It does raise a question. But you bring up good points, not the least of which -- we're going to talk to Donald Trump on this show later this week, we'll ask him -- I think a broader, bigger issue here is that, all of a sudden an issue that was on the periphery a little bit, he hits it, hits it hard, and people take note. So what is it about him that, you know, when he speaks, people listen -- and you know, those issues resonate.

COULTER: Well, two things. I think the main thing is, no conservative who talks on TV or has a column or has a magazine has mentioned the birth certificate, because we've looked at it and have discounted it. You have people who want to get hits to their Website or want to get listeners to their radio show will keep ginning people up about this. But it is one of the rare conservative con -- well, I suppose it's more conservative than liberal, only because it's anti-Obama, but I don't even know that these are conservatives promoting it. As I say, this came out of the Hillary Clinton campaign.

So Donald Trump is the only person who would be invited on a TV show who is pushing the Birther thing. That's why it's getting attention and of course, liberals are delighted. I know Obama is delighted.

...

No, you'll notice who's asking him about it -- it's the liberal media. They want to keep talking about it because it helps discredit all opposition to Obama. There are a lot of reasons to think Obama is a very bad president who is doing very bad things to this country. The idea that he was born in Kenya is not one of them. But it allows liberals, the mainstream media, the White House itself to go, well, the opposition is these crazy birthers.

Well, no it isn't. You haven't heard that on Fox News. You haven't heard it in Human Events and National Review or American Spectator -- all of which have shot it down.

Too bad that the right-wing media themselves kinda shoot down Coulter's theory.

You'll notice, for instance, that Coulter conspicuously omits from her list of "responsible" right-wing news organs WorldNutDaily, the center of the Birther Universe and -- last we checked -- a self-proclaimed "conservative" outlet. Indeed, its writers regularly appear on, you guessed it, Sean Hannity's show.

Oh, and they also publish Coulter's syndicated column.

Indeed, all this rant really proves is that Coulter doesn't watch Fox. Because if she did, she would know that Trump has been given free rein to spout his theories on Fox.

And as if to drive that point home, who should appear on Fox the very next hour? Donald Trump, phoning in to Greta Van Susteren's show and trumpeting his Birther theories yet again -- with only murmurs of contradiction from Van Susteren.

Of course, this isn't the only time Trump has been on Fox News promoting these theories with only the slightest hint of pushback, and certainly no tough questions. He had another phone-in with Van Susteren that produced more of the same nonsense. When he went on Bill O'Reilly's show, the pushback was almost unnoticeable, especially by O'Reilly standards.

And it isn't relegated to just Trump appearances. When Sarah Palin went on Jeanine Pirro's show this weekend, both she and the host thought Trump's Birtherism was just peachy -- giving it a Fox News endorsement, not the debunking that Coulter claims is the standard at Fox.

For that matter, the most avid defender of Trump's Birtherism at Fox has been -- you guessed it -- Sean Hannity himself. For three nights running one week, Trump's Birther theories got big boosts from Hannity and his guests:



Guess he must have forgotten about that when Coulter tried to claim you "never hear that" on Fox News. And obviously, Coulter herself hasn't been watching Fox.