The violent history of a Pensacola, Fla., abortion clinic may be repeating itself in a new terrorist act: Anti-choice zealots are suspected of setting a blaze Sunday that gutted the American Family Planning clinic, which was Ground Zero for murders and bombings by vigilantes in the 1980s and 1990s.

A sniffing dog helped investigators at the scene gather samples Tuesday to be tested for fire accelerants, Deborah Cox of the Florida State Fire Marshal’s office told Hatewatch. Investigators already have determined that the blaze started outside the building, she added. Calling the fire suspicious “would be an understatement,” Pensacola Police Chief Chip Simmons told the Pensacola News-Journal. ( continue to full post… )

Between refining his farcical anti-Obama “birther” conspiracy theory, fear-mongering about a nonexistent planned merger between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, and groundlessly declaring that oil is not derived from living things and is therefore an infinite resource, right-wing attack dog Jerome Corsi is one busy dude.

The weight of these responsibilities seems to have become too much for the poor dear, who has reportedly compromised his normally impeccable ethics with a bit of plagiarism. On Dec. 19, Corsi published in WorldNetDaily (WND) an “exclusive” article titled “Obama’s legacy of broken promises – in Kenya.” Purportedly based on the results of a long-term research project headed by an unnamed former member of the Kenyan parliament, the article details Obama’s failure to come through on financial promises the president allegedly made to the Kenyan government, including the donation of money to improve the village in which his Kenyan relatives live. ( continue to full post… )

An antigovernment “sovereign citizen” indicted nearly three years ago in a money laundering case is back in custody and being returned this week to U.S. District Court in Nevada.

Shawn Talbot Rice surrendered and was arrested on Dec. 22 after a day-long standoff with FBI agents and local police in Seligman, Ariz. ( continue to full post… )

Saying Kevin W. Harpham hasn’t accepted responsibility for planting a potentially deadly bomb along the route of a Martin Luther King Jr. Day unity march in Spokane, Wash., a federal judge on Tuesday sentenced the white supremacist to 32 years in prison.

“I’m distressed that you’re not the least bit apologetic or accepted responsibility,” U.S. District Judge Justin Quackenbush told the 37-year-old racist bomb builder. “Kevin Harpham,” the judge continued, “you’ve made a terrible mistake by letting your racist prejudices control your actions.”

The federal judge handed down the 32-year prison term after Harpham attempted to withdraw two guilty pleas he entered in September as part of a plea deal to avoid spending his entire life in prison. Under the deal, he faced a sentencing range of 27 to 32 years, and the judge gave him the maximum. ( continue to full post… )

Another year, another horror. As we close out another 12 months of mayhem, criminal violence and just plain stupidity on the radical right, it’s time, once again, to compile our annual year-end roster of winners of Hatewatch’s Smackdown Awards. And this year’s been a doozy — from neo-Nazis trying to hide their past to irrepressible birthers and on to all manner of other hypocrites of the extreme right. So, without further ado and with apologies to Keith Olbermann, here are the awards as picked out by Hatewatch’s 5^th Annual Smackdown Awards Committee. ( continue to full post… )

If you Google the phrase “FEMA camps,” the first several links that come up will be websites like far-right conspiracist Alex Jones’ InfoWars (“Because there is a war on for your mind”) and the United American Freedom Foundation (“Providing International News From An Extreme Right Viewpoint”). Click around a bit and you’ll find a bevy of far-right outfits fretting that, any day now, federal agents will start hauling off law-abiding, God-fearing Americans to secret “concentration camps” run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

But if you search long enough, you may notice something strange: The theory – which began almost three decades ago with a warning from the extreme-right, anti-Semitic Posse Comitatus that “hardcore Patriots” would be imprisoned in FEMA detention camps – is no longer solely the province of the radical right. ( continue to full post… )

The suspect who shot and killed a Pennsylvania police officer and wounded a second policeman over the weekend died himself Monday in a gunfight with lawmen who surrounded his house in Webster, Pa.

Eli Franklin Myers III, 58, died in a hail of gunfire after he exited his home on Logan Street, firing a large-caliber handgun at Special Response Team officers who had identified him as the suspect in the deadly police shooting the previous night. ( continue to full post… )

The latest round of legal problems for August B. Kreis III, the self-appointed director of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations, is over now that a judge in South Carolina handed down a six-month sentence for his efforts to defraud the federal government.

Kreis was sentenced yesterday to six months in jail –– time he has already served –– in addition to six months of house arrest and two years of probation. But ever defiant, despite pleading guilty in August, Kreis remained unapologetic for his actions and the life he has led. “I don’t preach to hurt anybody, except the Jews, and I’ll keep doing that,” he said. “But that’s my First Amendment rights. As long as I obey God’s laws, I don’t care about anything else.”
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Avoiding controversy was the stated aim when Lowe’s, the home improvement giant, bowed to pressure from a Florida evangelical group by pulling its ads from a TV reality show that makes Muslims look like ordinary Americans rather than terrorists.

But now the chain’s act of enabling bigots has boomeranged into a black-eye controversy, a PR nightmare: The company faces an accelerating deluge of attacks in social and traditional media, outrage from political and religious leaders, and on-site protests scheduled for at least one of its stores in a heavily Muslim community. ( continue to full post… )

A 22-year-old man who shouted slurs at a lesbian couple before breaking the windshield of their car soon found himself in a vulnerable position – pinned to the ground by one of the targets of his vitriol.

According to police, William Adam Lane confronted two women after seeing them embracing romantically outside a bar early Sunday, yelling “Fucking faggots. You fucking lesbians.” He then smashed the rear window of their car, according to the arrest report.

That’s when one of the women jumped into action. She went after Lane and held him down, while a bouncer from a nearby bar came to help until police arrived. But Mark Young, a spokesman for the Bellingham Police Department, said it wasn’t quite as simple as keeping the man from running. ( continue to full post… )