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.

The Right-Wing War On Women Is Much More Real Than You Think

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Reince Priebus wants you to believe there's no right-wing war on women, at least not as far as the Republican Party is concerned. But he's not telling you the whole story.

The ugly truth is that the recent outbreak of viral misogyny among right-wingers is really only the tip of the iceberg. Underneath the unpleasant Rush Limbaugh bloviation eruptions is a massive lava bed of festering male insecurities and psychopathic hatred of women -- and it's only bubbling to the surface now in relatively watered-down forms.

To understand this, you need to look at the festering pit of pathetic maledom that the "men's rights" movement has become in recent years. A recent piece by Arthur Goldwag in the SPLC's Intelligence Report delves these depths with aplomb:

The men’s movement also includes mail-order-bride shoppers, unregenerate batterers, and wannabe pickup artists who are eager to learn the secrets of “game”—the psychological tricks that supposedly make it easy to seduce women. George Sodini, who confided his seething rage at women to his blog before shooting 12 women, three of them fatally, was one of the latter. Before his 2009 murder spree at a Pittsburgh-area gym, he was a student — though clearly not a very apt one — of R. Don Steele, the author of How to Date Young Women: For Men Over 35. “I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne — yet 30 million women rejected me over an 18 or 25-year period,” Sodini wrote with the kind of pathos presumably typical of Steele’s readers.

Other movement adherents have forsworn sex altogether, or at least romantic relationships and marriage; the acronym they use for themselves is MGTOW, for “Men Going Their Own Way.” “If you are willing to marry a woman — any woman — in the West then you must also be willing to become the next murder-suicide story when she threatens to file for divorce, steal your kids out of your life and extort you for every current and future dollar you will ever earn,” wrote one commenter at The Spearhead. “If a man kidnapped your children, stole your home, your wallet and your bank account, you’d be more than willing to kill him in self defense. Why is it any different when ex-wives do it with the full force of the law behind them?”

Some take an inordinate interest in extremely young women, or fetishize what they see as the ultra-feminine (read: docile) characteristics of South American and Asian women. Others, who have internalized Christian “headship” doctrine, are desperately seeking the “submissive” women such doctrine celebrates. Still others are simply sexually awkward, and nonplussed and befuddled by society’s changing mores. The common denominator is their resentment of feminism and of females in general.

As the piece explains, this version of manhood has irregular eruptions in a variety of locales around the country in the form of raging psychopaths who embark on murderous sprees against women:

Today, that kind of rage is often directed at all women, not only perceived feminists. “Women don’t need the powers-that-be to get them to hate and use men,” the blogger Alcuin wrote recently. “They have always used men; maybe they have always hated us too.” Added another blogger, Angry Harry: “There are now, literally, billions of dollars, numerous empires, and millions of jobs that depend on the public swallowing the idea that women need to be defended from men.”

“A word to the wise,” offered the blogger known as Rebuking Feminism. “The animals women have become want one thing, resources and genes. … See them as the animals they have become and plan … accordingly.”

And many are quick to endorse violence against women. “There are women, and plenty of them, for which [sic] a solid ass kicking would be the least they deserve,” Paul Elam wrote in an essay with the provocative title, “When is it OK to Punch Your Wife?” “The real question here is not whether these women deserve the business end of a right hook, they obviously do, and some of them deserve one hard enough to leave them in an unconscious, innocuous pile on the ground if it serves to protect the innocent from imminent harm. The real question is whether men deserve to be able to physically defend themselves from assault … from a woman.”

Yes, there really is a war against women going on out there right now. What we're seeing from the GOP birth-control caucus and the Rush Limbaugh element is only the public eruptions of a much nastier and uglier worldview -- all being fostered by our friends on the right.

Get A Grip: NRA Fearmongers Are Whipping Up A Nasty Case Of Extremism After The Election

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Hey, right-wingers: Let's have a little talk about the coming election.

We realize it's not looking so hot for your side, what with the clown-car primary season we've gotten on the Republican side and all. But really, if you lose, it's not the end of the world.

You know that, we know that. It sucks to be you, but it is what it is. And it's not the apocalypse.

So we here in the world of normal people would like to make a request: Stop telling your followers that it is.

Because we know, with night-follows-day-certainty, that you folks have some violent and mentally unstable people lingering among your ranks. And we know with the same certainty that, after the election, these same people will begin acting out violently, usually leaving behind as victims we folks here on Planet Normal, if Obama does indeed win out, as is looking (thanks to GOP ineptitude) increasingly likely.

And it will be all because they believe the crazy-ass crap you guys spew in order to get them all whipped up and eager to vote.

The leading nutcase in this parade has been the National Rifle Association's Wayne LaPierre, who has been warning his fellow right-wingers of a massive Obama conspiracy to destroy the Second Amendment:

If you want a glimpse of a genuine nightmare for America, just look at what’s headed our way.

But unlike a nightmare, this isn’t some fantasy. It’s a very real, very dangerous conspiracy of public deception intended to destroy your Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

It’s targeted directly at you.

And it’ll succeed unless you recognize it, understand it, and take action now to stop it.

Gosh Almighty! What a nefarious scheme! And here's how it will work:

1. Neutralize gun owners and NRA voters as a political force in national elections, and thereby:

2. Win re-election to a second term in the White House, where they then will be immune to the will of voters and free to continue consolidating and misusing their ever-increasing power to:

3. Prosecute a full-scale, sustained, all-out campaign to excise the Second Amendment from our Bill of Rights through legislation, litigation, regulation, executive orders, judicial fiat, international treaties—in short, all the levers of power of all three branches of government.

Recall what he told the CPAC folks:

"[The Obama campaign] will say gun owners -- they'll say they left them alone," LaPierre told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Friday. "In public, he'll remind us that he's put off calls from his party to renew the Clinton [assault weapons] ban, he hasn't pushed for new gun control laws. ... The president will offer the Second Amendment lip service and hit the campaign trail saying he's actually been good for the Second Amendment."

"But it's a big fat stinking lie!" the NRA leader exclaimed. "It's all part of a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and destroy the Second Amendment in our country."
"Obama himself is no fool. So when he got elected, they concocted a scheme to stay away from the gun issue, lull gun owners to sleep and play us for fools in 2012. Well, gun owners are not fools and we are not fooled," La Pierre declared.

"Sotomayor, Kagan, Fast & Furious, the United Nations, executive orders. Those are the facts we face today... President Obama and his cohorts, yeah, they're going to deny their conspiracy to fool gun owners. Some in the liberal media, they are already probably blogging about it. But we don't care because the lying, conniving Obama crowd can kiss our Constitution!"

Yeah, yeah, yeah. As Matt Gertz at Media Matters observes:

NRA leaders and advocates have been so hard up for evidence that President Obama is anti-gun that they have been citing an Obama-implemented rule that requires gun dealers in some states to report multiple sales of assault weapons to the ATF. That rule would not prevent a single person from getting a firearm.

The NRA's hysterical claim that President Obama plans to repeal the Second Amendment is a natural byproduct of the Supreme Court's finding in District of Columbia v. Heller that the amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. Until then, the group could offer the similarly conspiratorial claim that gun bans and confiscation were right around the corner. With those ideas taken off the table even in theory by Heller, NRA has moved on to even more ludicrous conspiracies.

But look at what they're telling their gape-mouthed followers:

It might seem like a stretch to compare an election to one of the deadliest disasters in modern history.

This year’s election could prove the most disastrous in the history of this country. Why? Because this election will decide whether Americans remain free.


There’s no simpler, more accurate or exact way to say it—it’s all or nothing.
Either we defeat Barack Obama and retain all the benefits of our pro-gun victories over the past 30 years—from the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act and the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, to the Right-to-Carry revolution, Castle Doctrine, hunter protection and landmark victories in the U.S. Supreme Court—or we lose this election and lose it all.

Everything you and I, and gun owners across America have fought to achieve over the past three decades could be lost as a result of just one presidential election.
It’s not just firearm freedom that’s endangered—all of our freedoms are on the line.

Now, pardon me for saying so, but that's just looney-tunes ludicrous. And telling people that Obama is going to take away all of their freedoms if he wins re-election will leave a lot of people who actually believe this crap angry and frustrated beyond belief. And if they happen to have an unstable and violent disposition to boot, then they are going to cause problems.

This is just classic Bad Speech: profoundly irresponsible, cancerous and toxic, inevitably tragic. It's not just the NRA, either. It's pervasive on the right these days. And we know that when the inevitable violent acts happen, you all will run away and claim you have no responsibility for them.

Well, this is Good Speech. We're calling you out on this. We're begging you to stop. Because rest assured: We will be holding you to account.

The Feds Are Circling Around White-Supremacist Godfather Tom Metzger

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

You may remember those arrests back in 2009 of three leading white supremacists — Robert Joos, and Dennis and Daniel Mahon — for the 2004 bombing of the racial-diversity office of Scottsdale, Arizona, that seriously injured the office's director and inflicted wounds on two other people. Even though the trail had seemingly gone cold, dogged investigators finally ran these domestic terrorists to ground.

Now it appears that the investigators' relentlessness is about to bring down one of the nation's most prominent white supremacists, according to the SPLC's Bill Morlin:

Tom Metzger — a wily, iconic racist ideologue who has for years espoused “lone-wolf” terrorism — could soon find himself facing criminal charges filed by the federal government he’s excoriated for decades.

Federal investigators, fresh off a related mail-bombing conviction in Arizona, may be pressing for what could develop into a major Justice Department criminal case against “Terrible Tommy” Metzger, as he likes to call himself. Court records filed in three states show the investigators strongly suspect Metzger provided the Arizona bomber with explosive-making instructions, knowing they would be used in the commission of a crime of violence.

At 74, Metzger, who now lives in Warsaw, Ind., has “celebrity status” as the founder of White Aryan Resistance (WAR), court documents say, and is a dean of white supremacists. He’s the last vestige of a generation of revolutionary racist leaders in the United States that included the late Richard G. Butler of Aryan Nations and the late Robert Miles, a one-time Michigan Klan leader and convicted bomber. While those two and many other racist leaders were charged in various criminal cases over the past three decades, Metzger has managed to avoid any serious criminal charges in his 40-plus years of activism.

That may be about to change.

The documents Morlin has dug up make clear that the feds are poised to file indictments against Metzger in short order — because what's become apparent through their investigation is that the Scottsdale bombers were acting at Metzger's behest.

It's a great piece of reporting, so be sure to read it all. I particularly noted this tidbit:

On May 22, 2008, after finding partial DNA profiles on some of the Scottsdale bomb components, ATF agents with a court warrant swabbed the mouths of the Mahon brothers to see if they could obtain a match. Ultimately, they couldn’t make the match, but their visit raised alarms. Two days later, testimony at the later Mahon trial would reveal, Dennis Mahon called his mentor, Metzger.

“I won’t betray you, Tom,” Mahon said over the tapped phone.

“I didn’t think you would,” Metzger replied

Metzger, as Morlin explains, has a long and deep lineage in the white-supremacist movement, and a remarkably broad influence: In many regards, the Minuteman movement of 2005-2010 was Metzger's brainchild. It was Metzger, after all, who in 1978 came up with idea (reportedly inspired by Robert DePugh's radical-right 1960s militia organization that called itself the Minutemen) of a vigilante border watch as part of David Duke's Klan organization, and the first Klan Border Watch soon followed.

Here in the Northwest, Metzger is widely remembered as the neo-Nazi godfather who directed skinheads to assault blacks, leading to the beating death of a Nigerian exchange student named Mulugeta Seraw in Portland in 1988. That wound up putting Metzger out of business for a long while. But like all good zombie haters, he has never completely gone away.

A few years back he finally left southern California, where he had been a resident plague for years, and returned to his hometown of Warsaw, Indiana. He was most recently spotted running for Congress in Indiana in 2010.

Metzger's lifelong project has been to find ways to mainstream white supremacy. He may find that much harder to achieve soon.

Wow, That Was A Big Show Of Tea Party Force In D.C.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

As you can imagine, Fox News was all over the massive Tea Party rally on Capitol Hill today:

A small but vocal group of Tea Party activists gathered outside the Capitol on Thursday to urge House Republican leaders to hold the line and push for deeper spending cuts in the federal budget.

Chanting, “Cut it or shut it” and “We want less,” the activists directed their ire at Senate Democrats, arguing that the cuts they have demanded are not “extreme,” but necessary to right the nation’s fiscal ship.

As you can see, there were at least 8 million people there! Give or take about 7.9998 million.

Dave Weigel reports that there were about 200 in attendance, though he tartly adds: "If there's much media focus on how small the rally was, I think that would miss the point. There was a total sense of victory on display."

Yeah, not to mention a total sense of having a strangely mixed message. The Tea Partiers wanted to blame the Democrats for shutting down the government -- while simultaneously demanding a shutdown!

But some Senate Democrats have suggested those Tea Party principles are to blame for the current budget stalemate, saying they have led to infighting among House Republicans that is complicating negotiations. Republicans at the rally laid the blame for a potential shutdown square at the feet of Democratic leaders in the Senate.

"House Republicans have run headlong in to Harry Reid. Harry Reid actually took to the floor of the senate and said that our modest down payment on fiscal discipline was reckless, irresponsible, mean-spirited," Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., told the boisterous crowd. "If liberals in the Senate would rather play political games and shut down the government instead of making a small down payment on fiscal discipline and reform, I say shut it down."

Not to mention the total sense of victory Tea Partiers are enjoying with the general public:

The public's approval of the conservative Tea Party has reached a new low, according to a poll released Wednesday.

A CNN/Opinion Research survey showed that only 32 percent have a favorable view of the Tea Party, while 47 percent view it unfavorably. Seven percent said they have not heard of the Tea Party, and 14 percent said they have no opinion.

No doubt this has nothing to do with the fact that Tea Partiers are increasingly over-the-cliff-batshit-crazy -- to the point that longtime mainstream conservatives are distancing themselves from them:

The Tea Party movement is brewing up a far different ideology that the country’s traditional, so-called “mainstream” conservatives, according to a new multi-state survey conducted by University of Washington political scientists.

The UW survey found Tea Party activists more likely to believe President Obama is a Muslim, less likely to believe he is American born, and far more likely to want the 44th president to fail.

The survey found that just 6 percent of mainstream conservatives believe President Obama is “destroying the country: 71 percent of Tea Party conservatives believe this to be true.’

Would-be Republican presidential candidates have “good reason” to court them, because people who support the Tea Party are “incredibly more political active than those who don’t,” said Christopher Parker, a UW associate professor of political science who led the survey.

“It will be hard to mollify them,” said Parker, adding in an interview: “We are seeing a split in the Republican Party right now.”

Among the differences between mainstream conservatives and Tea Partiers the survey found:

–Sixteen percent of mainstream conservatives believe that President Obama is a practicing Muslin: 27 percent of Tea Party conservatives believe that;

–Forty-six percent of mainstream conservatives believe Obama is a practicing Christian; but just 27 percent of Tea Party conservatives believe that;

–Fifty-five percent of mainstream conservatives believe Obama was born in the United States, compared to just 40 percent of Tea Party conservatives;

–Forty percent of mainstream conservatives believe Obama’s policies are pushing America toward socialism, but 75 percent of Tea Party conservatives say he is;

–Thirty two percent of mainstream conservatives want Obama’s policies to fail, but 76 percent of Tea Party conservatives want this to happen.

Of course, Fox's Megyn Kelly featured an interview with a Tea Partier making exalted claims on behalf of the movement -- in this case, Kitchen Table Patriots' Ana Puig, claiming that "the Tea Party movement is strengthening in numbers."

Sure they are. At least 8 million of them today, right?

Where Did Sara Go?

by Sara

Greetings, everybody. It's been a long while since I posted. I spent 2011 on a year-long sabbatical from writing, and taking care of family business. We moved back from Vancouver, BC to the US, buying a new house in Seattle (I'm less than two miles from Neiwert as the crow flies now). I finished my MS. And my last baby launched himself into the world. Along the way, I did a lot of reading and a little consulting, and basically regrouped for the next stage of the long, strange trip that's life.

But now I'm back. Starting last week, I've got my own page at Alternet.org. I've taken over the Visions page, where I'm putting my shiny new futures degree to work pulling together big-think stories about where we're going as a nation, and how we can realistically set about bringing the progressive vision for America into being.

The new page will include interviews with some of our best and brightest thinkers; articles on people who are figuring out solutions and getting things right; and continued coverage of the conflicts that always ensue when one exhausted worldview starts passing away, and another new one emerges to take it's place. (I think that's what's going on now, and everything we've always done here was, in some way, coverage of that basic conflict.)

If you'd like to keep up with what I'm doing now, your best bet is to subscribe to Alternet's weekly Visions newsletter, which will hit your mailbox with the best of my new page every Thursday. (The link is here -- scroll down to the "Media" section and click on the Visions button to subscribe.)

It's a bigger soapbox, with room for all of us and plenty of new friends. Come on by when you get the chance. I've missed you.

Ron Paul Set To Speak To 'Sovereign Citizens'—Just As FBI Issues Warning About Them

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

[H/t Heather]

We've been writing here at C&L about the danger to law-enforcement officers (not to mention civil society) posed by the far-right "sovereign citizens" movement for some time. So naturally we were pleased to see the FBI weighed in on the subject this week:

Anti-government extremists opposed to taxes and regulations pose a growing threat to local law enforcement officers in the United States, the FBI warned on Monday.

These extremists, sometimes known as "sovereign citizens," believe they can live outside any type of government authority, FBI agents said at a news conference.

The extremists may refuse to pay taxes, defy government environmental regulations and believe the United States went bankrupt by going off the gold standard.

Routine encounters with police can turn violent "at the drop of a hat," said Stuart McArthur, deputy assistant director in the FBI's counter-terrorism division.

"We thought it was important to increase the visibility of the threat with state and local law enforcement," he said.

And as it so happens, there's going to be a big gathering of "sovereign citizens" coming up soon in Irvine, California, calling itself the Freedom Law Conference, and devoted to teaching you how to free yourself from the tyranny of the federal government:

This 4-day event includes an in-depth class on Avoiding and Defeating IRS Criminal Charges, two keynote banquet speakers, 14 of the most exciting Freedom speakers in the country, and a seminar on Stopping Mortgage Fraud.

Oh, and look who they have lined up to be their keynote speaker:

Yep, the same guy who's out there collecting all those votes for the Republican nomination—not to mention also being the new darling of a clutch of extremely confused (or are they just pseudo-?) progressives.

And in case there was any confusion about the political orientation of the gathering, they announce up front that this is a Patriot Movement event:

Here at Freedom Law School we want to connect Patriots. If you want to attend, but are worried about the cost of a room, no worries! Freedom Law School will get you in contact with other Patriots attending so you can work out splitting the cost of a room.

And yes -- as you can see from pieces like this, Freedom Law School and its scam-artist founder, Peymon Mottahedeh, are very much "sovereign citizenship" promoters.

Among the people Paul will be sharing the stage with is Floyd Banister, an ex-FBI agent who now makes a very profitable living on the Patriot chicken-dinner circuit.

Banister says that he investigated radical tax protesters' claims about the IRS for two years. He concluded they were right, and told his IRS supervisors so. He was placed on leave, then resigned in 1999 to "comply with my oath to support and defend the U.S. Constitution."

The following year, he and Bob Schulz, founder of a leading anti-government Patriot tax-protest group known as the We the People, hand delivered grievances signed by supporters to federal officials in Washington stating that the 16th Amendment that allowed a federal income tax was illegally ratified, and that no law or regulation requires most citizens to pay income taxes or have taxes withheld.

Banister was indicted in 2004 in California for preparing false income tax returns and conspiring to defraud the federal government stemming from his work on behalf of a businessman client. The client went to prison, but Banister was acquitted.

Yep, that's pretty much par for the course for the suckers who sign on to this crap and then try to make it happen.

I also love this quote from Bannister:

"There's definitely a propaganda campaign out there to make us look like a problem to law enforcement," he told his audience at a Patriot conference last year.

Yeah, who knows where people in law enforcement would get that idea? I'm sure it couldn't come from the trail of slain cops and threats to cops and plots to kill cops popping up all over the countryside.

So Much For 'Freedom': Tea Partiers' Embrace Of Gingrich Reveals Their Inner Authoritarian

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Remember when the tea partiers were flush with the fresh face they had managed to put on their regurgitated conservatism, shouting out their battle cry at town hall meetings on health-care reform, angrily denouncing the evil socialist Obama administration's attempts to impose a dictatorial state on the unsuspecting public? It was all under the banner of one word. Say it with me! Freeeeeeeeeedom!
It was almost enough to make you wanna paint your face blue and don a kilt. Almost.

Now look who has become the tea partiers' standard-bearer: The most openly right-wing authoritarian Republican in the field, Newt Gingrich.

Just how authoritarian is Gingrich? Well, here he is on Bill O'Reilly's show in 2009, arguing that what we really need are Singapore-style drug laws:

O'REILLY: I don't know whether you know this, but I did one of my papers at Harvard on this -- on how to reduce demand for drugs. But the United States has never figured it out. You can't lock up drug users, I mean, that doesn't work. And you can't force them into rehab, you have to want rehab, and even if you want it, it's very hard to get off hard drugs and alcohol. Very hard.

What you can do, though, is sanction people along the way. And this is what they do in Singapore. If you're caught possessing drugs -- and that means drugs in your bloodstream, they have a little hair thing, and they put it in there -- then you have to go to mandatory rehab. And they have centers where you go.

Now, they have no drug problem in Singapore at all, number one, because they hang drug dealers -- they execute them. And number two, the market is very thin, because when they catch you using, you go away with a mandatory rehab. You go to some rehab center, which they have, which the government has built.

The United States does not have the stomach for that. We don't have the stomach for that, Mr. Speaker.

GINGRICH: Well, I think it's time we get the stomach for that, Bill. And I think we need a program -- I would dramatically expand testing. I think we have -- and I agree with you. I would try to use rehabilitation, I'd make it mandatory. And I think we have every right as a country to demand of our citizens that they quit doing illegal things which are funding, both in Afghanistan and in Mexico and in Colombia, people who are destroying civilization.

In case you wondering, here's a rundown on the wonderful drug laws in Singapore:

Mandatory Death Penalty for Many Narcotics Offenses: Singapore police have the authority to compel both residents and non-residents to submit to random drug analysis. They do not distinguish between drugs consumed before or after entering Singapore in applying local laws. In Singapore, detained U.S. citizens have been surprised that they had been arrested for violations that would not have resulted in arrest in the United States.

There are no jury trials in Singapore. Judges hear cases and decide sentencing. The Government of Singapore does not provide legal assistance except in capital cases; legal assistance may be available in some other cases through the Law Society.

This wasn't just a fluke from three years ago. Here's Gingrich less than two months ago saying exactly the same thing:

GINGRICH: I don't have a comprehensive view. My general belief is that we ought to be much more aggressive about drug policy. And that we should recognize that the Mexican cartels are funded by Americans.

Q: Expand on what you mean by "aggressive."

GINGRICH: In my mind it means having steeper economic penalties and it means having a willingness to do more drug testing.

Q: In 1996, you introduced a bill that would have given the death penalty to drug smugglers. Do you still stand by that?

GINGRICH: I think if you are, for example, the leader of a cartel, sure. Look at the level of violence they've done to society. You can either be in the Ron Paul tradition and say there's nothing wrong with heroin and cocaine or you can be in the tradition that says, 'These kind of addictive drugs are terrible, they deprive you of full citizenship and they lead you to a dependency which is antithetical to being an American.' If you're serious about the latter view, then we need to think through a strategy that makes it radically less likely that we're going to have drugs in this country.

Places like Singapore have been the most successful at doing that. They've been very draconian. And they have communicated with great intention that they intend to stop drugs from coming into their country.

Well, there's a reason the libertarians hate Gingrich.

And that's not even the most insidious of Gingrich's authortiarian proposals. We all remember how he gave a speech proposing a presidency that would ignore court rulings, and how he threatened to have Capitol police arrest judges who issued rulings he didn't like. This was, of course, a profoundly authoritarian proposal, one that immediately invited his fellow conservatives to concoct other uses for such a policy, such as overturning abortion rights and gay marriage laws.

Just goes to show: These tea partiers were never about freedom -- except maybe the freedom to screw over everyone else.