'Far better reporting'

I dunno about you, but I was really taken with Lou Dobbs' defense of the bogus leprosy numbers he has been broadcasting -- besides just the charming combination of self-absorbed cluelessness and sheer arrogance, there was this:

"And the fact that it [the number of leprosy cases] rose was because -- one assumes, because we don't know for sure -- but two basic influences: unscreened illegal immigrants coming into this country primarily from South Asia, and secondly, far better reporting."

Now, Dobbs is obviously trying to suggest that a sudden improvement in medical reporting of these cases will transform the 296 actual cases of leprosy on record at the Center for Disease Control over the most recent three-year period on record into some 7,000 cases. This would be a remarkable feat indeed, especially considering that there is no particular reason that medical reporting on leprosy or immigrant diseases in general would be significantly improved in recent years, particularly not by a factor of 200.

But then, in the defense he later erected on CNN, it became clear that he and Christine Romans, the reporter upon whom he depends for this information, have one single source for their claim: the late Madeleine Cosman. That's right: someone whose figures for the questionable (and non-peer-reviewed) journal article that Dobbs and Romans cite appear to have been made out of whole cloth, considering the scope of the actual statistics.

It's not enough to call Cosman a nutcase, though clearly that particular shoe fits like Cinderella's slipper. It's helpful, perhaps, to sample a full dose of the paranoiac fantasizing of which she was capable. Here's a sound bite from one of Cosman's speeches, this one on the sexual proclivities of male Mexican immigrants:



A transcript:

Recognize that most of these bastards molest girls under age 12, some as young as age 5, others age 3, although of course some specialize in boys, some specialize in nuns, some are exceedingly versatile, and rape little girls age 11, and women up to age 79. What is important here is the psychiatric defenses. Why do they do what they do? [Mockingly] They do not need a jail, they need a hospital. They are depraved because they were deprived in their home country. But more important is the cultural defense: they suffer from psychiatric cognitive disjuncture, for what does a poor man do if in his home country of Mexico, in his jurisdiction, if rape is ranked lower than cow-stealing? Of course he will not know how to behave here in strange America. This is thoroughly reprehensible.

This is the woman who is not just the primary but apparently the sole source of Dobbs' claim. Whatever "better reporting" she found appears to have been cooked up by her attempts to wade into medical statistics -- something inadvisable for PhD. in English.

In any event, it's hard to get across the full flavor of this rant without listening to it. Because there's something oddly ... familiar about all this.

The grotesque distortion. The obscene fantasization. The sneering mockery of the straw-man liberal she creates and immolates. The brittle, twitchy delivery. Where have we seen that before?

But of course:



We recall that Ann also enjoys a special place in the heart of Lou Dobbs and Christine Romans, who have similarly helped broadcast Ann's afactual fantasies.

Must be that "far better reporting."

Lou Dobbs: Making up racist shit

The eliminationist meme connecting immigrants to disease leapt forward about five quanta this week thanks to CNN's Lou Dobbs.

The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that Dobbs is spreading the tale that immigrants are bringing leprosy to America, and concocting numbers out of whole cloth in the process:

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) today urged CNN to acknowledge that anchor Lou Dobbs has been spreading false information about the prevalence of leprosy and its supposed links to undocumented immigrants.

"We're not talking about a newscaster who simply made a mistake — we're talking about someone with a national platform who cites wildly inaccurate data to demean an entire group of people and who, when confronted with the truth, simply repeats the lie," said SPLC President Richard Cohen. "It's outrageous, and CNN should do something about it immediately."

In a letter sent today, Cohen asked CNN/U.S. President Jonathan Klein to take prompt action to correct the misinformation.

On "Lou Dobbs Tonight" this past Monday, Dobbs said he stands "100 percent behind" his show's claim that there had been 7,000 new cases of leprosy in the United States over a recent three-year period, and he further suggested that an increase in leprosy was due in part to "unscreened illegal immigrants coming into this country."

Dobbs' endorsement of the claim came after CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl challenged the leprosy figure during a profile of Dobbs on "60 Minutes" this past Sunday. Stahl cited a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services document that reported 7,029 cases over the past 30 years -- not three.

... The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that the number of leprosy cases diagnosed in the United States peaked at 361 in 1985. The figure reported on Dobbs' show is easily refuted with just a few minutes of research on the Internet.

Where did Dobbs get his numbers? Unsurprisingly, from a far-right nutcase named Madeleine Cosman:

In addition to writing about the prevalence of leprosy, Cosman, who died in March 2006, told an anti-immigrant conference in 2005 that "most" Latino immigrant men "molest girls under 12, although some specialize in boys, and some in nuns," a variation on a speech she has given elsewhere. The Winter 2005 issue of the SPLC's quarterly magazine Intelligence Report also contained a profile of Cosman, a lawyer who advised wealthy doctors on how to sell their medical practices and a member of the far-right Jews for the Preservation of Firearms. The piece pointed out that Cosman had lied about having a 1976 book she wrote nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

... Madeleine Cosman's false claim that there were 7,000 cases of leprosy diagnosed in the United States from 2001 to 2004 was included in her article, "Illegal Aliens and American Medicine." More than once, "Lou Dobbs Tonight" reporter Romans repeated Cosman's statistic, saying, "Suddenly, in the past three years, America has more than 7,000 cases of leprosy."

Cosman's piece was published in the Spring 2005 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, published by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, which represents private practice doctors. The journal is known as a right-wing periodical whose science has been the subject of harsh criticism.

Though the article notes her Ph.D., it does not say that the degree is in English and comparative literature. Cosman had no medical training other than as a medical lawyer.

In the article, Cosman provides no source for her claim of 7,000 cases of leprosy, also known as Hansen's Disease, in three years — presumably 2001 to 2004, given the article's publication date.

The claim has no basis in fact.

But is Dobbs at all apologetic about being called on his journalistic malfeasance? Um, no:

On Dobbs' show Monday, during a conversation with Romans, Dobbs said: "Following one of your reports, I told Lesley Stahl, we don't make up numbers, and I will tell everybody here again tonight, I stand 100 percent behind what you said." He later added, "And the fact that it [the number of leprosy cases] rose was because -- one assumes, because we don't know for sure -- but two basic influences: unscreened illegal immigrants coming into this country primarily from South Asia, and secondly, far better reporting."

... In the "60 Minutes" piece, Dobbs told Stahl, "Well, I can tell you this. If we report it, it's a fact."

"How can you guarantee that to me?" Stahl asked.

"Because I'm the managing editor, and that's the way we do business," Dobbs replied. "We don't make up numbers, Lesley. Do we?"

When it comes to Lou Dobbs -- yes, he does.

Not only does he make up numbers and "facts," he obtains those "facts" from extremist sources whose far-right agenda his "reporting" propagandizes. That is, in fact, his established track record.

The most infamous instance of this came when Dobbs ran a graphic about "Aztlan" that not only was pure fantasy, it was taken from the white-supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens' Web site. And then there has been his ongoing promotion of the Minutemen, which has similarly indulged afactual bashing of immigrants.

Dobbs, in fact, is beginning to make Don Imus look positively benign. Unfortunately, it's increasingly clear that CNN is running hard right in the cable-news wars, so it's unlikely that Dobbs will be affected unless, once again, CNN is hurt where it counts: with the advertisers.

UPDATE: Video added atop post.

UPDATE II: Phoenix Woman points out that Dobbs is only one of many media fabricators.

UPDATE III: Media Matters has more.

That law-enforcement approach

The jihad-mongers of the right blogosphere have been so busy congratulating themselves for finally having proof -- proof, dammit! -- of their long-running thesis that Muslims are secretly plotting everywhere in America to engage in terrorist attacks, namely, the Fort Dix gang that purportedly was planning to attack an Army base.

The claims about the actual threat these fellows posed have reached quite a fever pitch, as have the claims about the role of citizen "John Does" -- heavily touted by Michelle Malkin -- in the arrests. Suffice to say that the evidence so far does not suggest that this gang was any more likely to actually succeed than the Tri States Militia, which planned a similar attack on Fort Hood, Texas, back in 1997.

But what does stand out about the case is that it was in fact predicated on a long and careful investigation by the FBI -- one that took, in fact, 16 months to put together.

That is to say: These arrests were based upon the law-enforcement approach to terrorism.

Funny that the chief cheerleaders for declaring this case a model of the Future of Terra in America haven't acknowledged that fact.

Malkin provides a nice, clear example. In previous posts, she has complained about "the limitations of the law enforcement approach to terrorism", and sneered at Democrats for supposedly adopting "the Clinton law enforcement approach to terrorism" (a sneer repeated here). She also has approvingly cited NRO's Andrew McCarthy saying that

the law enforcement approach to terrorism, where terrorists get the advantage of our generous due process standards (including discovery about informants), is nuts -- we have to tell the bad guys too much.

Well, we've said it many times:

The Bush approach has been to treat terrorism as though it were a phenomenon mostly related to unrest in the Middle East, the product of brown-skinned fanatics for whom the only adequate response is the full force of American military might. This approach largely treats terrorism as though it exists only in conjunction with a handful of states -- the "Axis of Evil" -- that support it, and containing it means bombing and killing its supporters out of existence.

This was, in essence, the rationale for invading both Afghanistan and Iraq. In the case of Afghanistan, certainly a military response is fully justified, since the state connection to terrorism is clear and unmistakable. In the case of Iraq, however, that connection remains far from clear; though at one time I thought evidence existed to suggest such a connection, it has become painfully clear since that any Iraqi sponsorship of terrorism, particularly al Qaeda, was thin at best.

More to the point, however, is the fact that by making the "War on Terror" primarily a military operation and only secondarily (at best) a matter for law enforcement and intelligence, the Bush administration is focusing on only a rather narrow part of the terrorism spectrum. (Even on those terms, as Matt Yglesias has ably demonstrated, Bush's execution of the "war on terror" has in fact largely consisted of smoke, mirrors, shock and awe.)

The reality: Terrorism is a global phenomenon. It takes the shape not of a singular or even related ideology, but the idiosyncratic form of whatever extremism gives it birth. It is amorphous, and highly corpuscular, sometimes effectively emanating from extremely small groups or even individuals. And it is every bit as alive and well in America as it is in the Middle East.

This has many ramifications, not the least of which is that emphasizing the military component to any effective assault on terrorism -- and there are instances, such as Afghanistan, when a military solution indeed is required -- has an extraordinarily negative effect, particularly if military operations are undertaken through fraudulent circumstances, as in the invasion of Iraq. ...

Any kind of serious War on Terror needs to have the flexibility to respond proportionately and nimbly to various terrorist threats as they manifest themselves, and in this respect a military emphasis is simply too musclebound to be effective. A comprehensive approach will emphasize intelligence and law enforcement -- especially global law enforcement, the very concept of which is anathema to the Bush administration -- while reserving its military options, fraught as they are with multiple collateral hazards, solely for the rare circumstances that warrant them.

You'd like to think the right-wing bloggers might at some point develop enough self-awareness to recognize this. But since we're talking about a right wing that is single-mindedly predicated around naming the Enemy and then scapegoating it, that doesn't seem likely.

A journalist in Kafka's court

The case of Bilal Hussein, the Iraqi photographer for the Associated Press who has been detained by military authorities -- whose captivity has been ardently promoted by Michelle Malkin as part of her ongoing campaign against reporters she suspects (on notably thin grounds) of being in cahoots with the insurgents -- is back in the news:

WASHINGTON -- Representatives of two journalists detained by the U.S. military said Tuesday the government should charge them or set them free.

The U.S. has been holding Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein in Iraq for a year. Sami al-Hajj, a cameraman for the Mideast news network Al-Jazeera, has been detained since late 2001 and is currently at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

While U.S. officials allege that Hussein took photographs synchronized with explosions, indicating he was at a location ahead of time, Kathleen Carroll, executive editor of the AP, said he was "simply the unlucky fellow who happened to be the photographer for the world's largest newsgathering organization in a difficult province."

Carroll said the AP had examined 900 of Hussein's photographs and there was no indication he was on the scene before attacks occurred.

Well, so much for Malkin's chief claim against Hussein -- that his photos indicated he was at the scene in advance of insurgent attacks, and that they displayed a general "coziness" with the terrorists. As I noted at the time, all they really indicated was that Hussein was very good at his job.

But note the Kafkaesque quality of the system into which he has become enmeshed:

Paul Gardephe, the lawyer handling the case for the AP, said the military recently acknowledged to him that it has no evidence to support earlier allegations that Hussein was involved in a plot to kidnap two other journalists.

Carroll said, "The sort of rolling set of allegations that arise and then disappear without the benefit of a trial ... or any kind of an official court proceeding is what is distressing to all of us here." She spoke during a panel discussion in connection with World Press Freedom Day.

Officials have what they believe to be information that links Hussein to insurgent activity, but most of the evidence is classified and cannot be released publicly, said Col. Gary Keck, a Pentagon spokesman.

Imagine being caught a system of justice in which you can be detained by the government on accusations of plotting against it, but they don't have to produce any evidence of that because it's secret. That's what has befallen Bilal Hussein.

Journalists -- real journalists -- everywhere should stand against this obscenity and raise a stink about it. As for Michelle Malkin, well ...

Domestic terror all around

The right-wing blogosphere needs to take a shower or something. They've been positively creaming their jeans over the arrest of five suspected Islamist terrorists who are charged with plotting to attack soldiers at Fort Dix. Malkin, of course, is leading the pack, but it's seen as Vindication Day throughout the whole "John Doe"/Jihad Watch right, including Little Green Footballs and Der Perfesser.

Funny how little attention any of them have paid to the mirror-image case down in Alabama involving the militiamen who were reportedly plotting to bomb and gun down Mexicans in a nearby town. In fact, the only place I could find mention of it was at Outside the Beltway, and that was a post questioning the need for the arrests.

Well, since they don't seem to be so interested, I'll try to keep you all up to date. Chellen Stevens at the Huntsville Times has a fascinating profile of the five suspects. Raymond Dillard, the apparent ringleader, is a classic case in which extremist beliefs spiral out of control along with their lives, as we see in his interactions with a neighbor:

Gunnin felt sorry for him.

"He was hungry a lot," Gunnin recalled. She began to feed him.

But a few months ago, when Dillard attempted to appoint Gunnin as the nurse for his militia, she had ceased feeling sorry for him. Gunnin grew annoyed when he dropped off medical manuals: She had been the director of nursing at Huntsville Hospital in the 1970s and didn't need his textbooks.

"I tried to get him to tell me the name of his organization. He said, 'We're just a group that will be here after the government falls apart,' " she said.

Eventually, Gunnin grew wary. Dillard often carried an old Army-issue 9 mm pistol. He could be persuasive, and she had heard him talk vaguely of weapons and organizing.

Then, a couple of months ago, he began speaking against Mexican immigrants. Gunnin banned him from her home. She wanted him off her property but didn't know what to do.

All along, the racial resentment played a central role in the simmering anger:

Things grew tense a couple months ago over a game of soccer.

Joanne Gunnin had given a group of Guatemalans permission to play soccer on an unused field she owned across from Dillard's camper. They began to tend the field.

According to neighbors, James McElroy, alleged to be a private in the militia, yanked a Hispanic man from a mower there. The player ran away.

Wayne Dunn, who lives behind the field, said his nephew called police. McElroy gave the lawn mower back to the soccer players before police arrived, according to Dunn and another neighbor.

But Dillard later delivered a message to Dunn's 16-year-old nephew.

"He needed to make up his mind whose side he wanted be on, the Mexicans or Americans," Dunn said. "The main thing (Dillard) always told me was there was going to a war between the Mexicans and whites."

What's disturbing about this group -- unlike, say, the militiamen who plotted to blow up a propane facility near Sacramento, who almost certainly were not competent enough to pull off the job -- is that their plan was easily within their rather limited reach: basically just mayhem and violence not far afield from what we saw recently at Virginia Tech.

But it's at least worth noting that the evidence of the alleged plot has so far been pretty thin:

The sergeant major turned out to be a government informant.

And the informant reported to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that the Free Militia was making and stockpiling grenades.

The indictment lists numerous other charges, including possession of a machine gun, a homemade silencer, a short-barreled shotgun, 68 homemade explosive projectiles and about 100 marijuana plants.

... The informant reported that Dillard tried to sell him some of the homemade hand grenades. He also reported that he and Dillard went to a military surplus store in Bynum to buy 12 grenade hulls and later packed them with powder and hid them under rocks by a dead tree in the woods.

The informant's affidavit does not mention plans to attack Hispanic groups.

But at a bail hearing Tuesday, ATF agent Adam Nesmith introduced the idea that the Free Militia was planning to gun down Mexicans in the small town of Remlap northeast of Birmingham.

All this will be played out in court, of course, as will the charges against the five alleged terrorists at Fort Dix. The veracity of the accusations remains an open question until then, though you will be hard-pressed to persuade any of the amateur sleuths of the right blogosphere of that in the latter case.

In the Alabama case, well, that appears to be a different story. It's evidently not even worth acknowledging. After all, we all know what real terrorists look like, right?

As for someone planning to shoot people who look like that, and who according to leading right-wing pundits might be terrorists -- well hell, that's a hero.

The immigrant plague

vpltz at DKos brings us the hair-raising account of a fine Texas Republican legislator who wants to blame illegal immigrants for everything from cancer to his bad hair day:

A Texas State Representative called for a "challenge" to the 14th Amendment and blamed illegal immigrants for increases in communicable diseases following debate on a border security bill in the Texas House of Representatives Monday night.

State Rep. Leo Berman (R-Tyler), who made national news late last year for introducing a slew of anti-immigrant legislation — including one bill which would strip legally born children of immigrants of rights to state services including public education — made the comments during a point of personal privilege following the passage of House Bill 13, a border security bill which passed to engrossment 140-5.

"This is probably the only time you are going to hear anyone talk about illegal aliens on the floor of the House of Representatives because we've been shut out of this bill at every turn," Berman said.

During his remarks, Berman railed against Rep. David Swinford (R-Dumas), chair of the House State Affairs Committee, and said that Swinford "unilaterally decided no illegal alien legislation would be heard on the floor of the House this year."

... Berman also waxed nostalgic about the olden days of immigration in America.

"In the early part of the century when my parents came through Ellis Island, they were given a physical examination. If anything wasn't right, they were put on the boat and sent back. Note I say 'immigrant,' because they are the people who...assimilate into our culture and pay their taxes and eventually raise their hands and become citizens."

Berman then proceeded to claim that illegal immigrants were bringing Polio, the plague, leprosy, tuberculosis, malaria, Chagas Disease and Dengue Fever to the United States in alarming numbers.

Well, it's not like we haven't heard that before. You may recall that the Washington Times and Michelle Malkin both propagated the notion that immigrants were responsible for bringing disease to America, as did anti-immigrant activists in Colorado a short while later.

It is, of course, a classic eliminationist gambit: link your target to disease and vermin and filth, thus rendering them ripe for elimination. As I noted at the time:

All this has a familiar ring to students of American history. The very same kind of associations -- equating immigrants with pestilence -- were part and parcel of previous nativist outbreaks in the United States, particularly those in which the targets were Asians. ... The same kind of charges of being spreaders of disease appeared early in the campaign against Japanese immigrants, at the turn of the century ...

In any event, Berman predictably proceeded to spout more eminently debunkable nonsense about the costs of immigration, with again a predictably eliminationist solution:

Berman also claimed that the El Paso Independent School District was being forced to hold a $290 million bond election all as a result of an influx in illegal aliens to the school district.

Berman also alluded to his bill which would have denied legally born children of illegal aliens any state benefits including education saying that the original legislative intent of the 14th Amendment was that it would not apply to "foreigners."

"I thought it was time for us to challenge the 14th amendment because we are creating more than 350,000 new U.S. Citizens a year and I believe they are being created erroneously."

Ah yes -- the nonexistent anchor baby problem, for which the nativists of the right want to amend the Constitution -- not to mention blame them for abortion. Nothing like scapegoating children for your lousy immigration policies.

But then, that's par for the course from this crowd.

Hiding our shame

While the creation of a concentration camp by the government to detain illegal immigrants -- a program already rife with consequences for immigrant families -- has resulted in very little fuss in either the media or the halls of officialdom, it has at least raised some eyebrows on the international level:

(AP) DALLAS -- A planned United Nations visit to a highly criticized central Texas center for detaining immigrant families was never approved by federal immigration officials, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman said Thursday.

ICE didn't immediately respond to questions of why the visit by Jorge Bustamante, the Human Rights Council's independent expert on migrant rights, wasn't approved.

Bustamante had been expected to tour the T. Don Hutto facility on Monday. The U.N. human rights office in Geneva announced late last month that he was going to tour the former prison in Taylor, as well as two border areas where U.S. officials say they will crack down on people illegally crossing the border.

ICE spokeswoman Ernestine Fobbs said no tours of Hutto are scheduled.

Bustamante still plans to discuss migrant issues with government officials, campaign groups and immigrants during a mission this month that includes stops in Tucson, Ariz.; Austin, Texas; Fort Myers, Fla.; New York; and Washington, D.C.

Bustamante, who is from Mexico, is expected to present his findings to the 47-nation rights council at its next session in June.

Civil liberties and immigration advocates sued federal officials in March on behalf of several children detained at Hutto, which typically houses about 400 non-criminal immigrants awaiting deportation or other outcomes to their immigration cases.

The groups contend families at Hutto are subjected to psychologically abusive guards, inadequate medical care and inhumane conditions in a facility run like a prison.

What, we have to ask, does the ICE have to hide?

If a preplanned visit by international migrant-rights experts is not permissible, why not? Doesn't the public have a right to know how this "detention center" is being run? Do they really expect us to take them at their word that everything is on the up and up?

The problem with centers like the Hutto facility, as I've explained previously, is that they remain ripe for all kinds of abuses. And their existence and expansion are almost guaranteed by the course we're taking:

So it seems almost inevitable that we will be seeing more of these mass detention centers, particularly as Bush's announced plan to arrest more illegal immigrants takes full effect. The almost certain byproduct will be that we will see more and more of them designed to accommodate whole families, including citizen children, and the record so far indicates that the conditions will once again be those of a concentration camp.

The law of unintended consequences is arising here. In their determination to arrest illegal immigrants, the government -- acting, in the end, at the behest of nativist agitators -- is potentially putting itself in the business of splitting up families, since many of these illegal immigrants are the parents of citizen children. So to avoid that outcome, the only solution available is to incarcerate those children alongside their parents. The end result: concentration camps -- euphemistically designated "family detention centers" as part of an effort to "secure our borders."

At some point, the public is going to have to start paying attention to what's going on in Texas. A travesty is in the making, and we're asleep at the switch.

[Hat tip to Jesse.]

Facing the shadows

Alex Spillius at the Telegraph has become the first mainstream journalist to raise the question (already raised here) about the role that white supremacists may play regarding Barack Obama's campaign for the presidency:

Barack Obama has been placed under round-the-clock protection at his own request, raising fears of a white supremacist plot to halt his bid to become America's first black head of state.

It is the earliest that the US secret service, which safeguards the president, vice-president and other dignitaries, has provided protection to a presidential candidate.

Usually guards are only allocated after the parties have selected their contenders, which will be early next year for the Nov 2008 election.

While Spilius couldn't confirm that such a threat existed, it's clear that something has been afoot:

It is not clear if a direct threat has been made to the charismatic 45-year-old Illinois senator, who has electrified the race for the Democrat party's nomination and is closing in on the favourite Hillary Clinton.

According to a senior law enforcement official, the extra security was prompted by general concerns about the safety of a prominent black candidate. Several factors raised concerns, including some racist talk on white supremacist web sites.

The New York Daily News quoted a contributor to a white power website: "Our world will become unbearable with him as President. Maybe there will be someone who would take [a] chance and do a Lincoln on him? Is that our only hope?"

Abraham Lincoln was shot in 1865 by John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate spy outraged at the president's plan to give blacks the vote.

Race remains an extremely divisive issue in America, and the Right-wing Insight magazine criticised the senator last week for his lack of security, accusing him of "almost courting this tragic and historically predictable result".

Yes, especially when that "result" is almost being invited by magazine articles emphasizing the lack of security around Obama.

I wouldn't be too fast to assume that a "conspiracy" exists against Obama, though if any sector of American society is likely to engage in one it would be the extremist right. What is far more likely is that some "lone wolf" will attempt to act out the murderous fantasies imbued in him by others.

In either event, Americans do need to be vigilant about the existence of this kind of lurking rage, especially given the levels of rhetorical bile that have been at flood stage in recent years. And not merely Obama may be affected, but probably every candidate, particularly those on the left side of the ledger.

The other kind of terror

Last week I discussed the case of the Alabama militiamen who were arrested on a variety of weapons charges, and suggested at the time that perhaps it wasn't that serious a case, since there was no indication at the time the men were planning anything amiss.

That all changed in the week since, as subsequent news reports made clear that not only were they planning a lethal attack, the intended victims were Mexican immigrants:

Five members of a self-styled militia were denied bail Tuesday after a federal agent testified they planned a machine gun attack on Mexicans, but a judge approved bail for a sixth man.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert Armstrong said at a hearing in Birmingham federal court he could not grant bail to the five because of the agent's testimony and the amount of weapons - including about 200 homemade hand grenades - that were seized in raids Friday in DeKalb County.

"I'm going to be worried if I let these individuals go at this time," he said.

Adam Nesmith, an agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, testified that the five - Raymond Kirk Dillard, 46; Adam Lynn Cunningham, 41; Bonnell Hughes, 57; Randall Garrett Cole, 22; and James Ray McElroy, 20 - planned a machine-gun attack on Mexicans in Remlap, a town just north of Birmingham, and went there on a reconnaissance mission April 20. The agent provided no further details.

During the raids last week, agents recovered 130 homemade hand grenades, a grenade launcher, about 70 hand grenades rigged to be fired from a rifle, a machine gun, a short-barrel shotgun and 2,500 rounds of ammunition, authorities said.

According to at least one of their neighbors, they'd been feeding on a steady diet of immigrant-bashing that they readily regurgitated to everyone in sight:

James Craig, 63, of Collinsville, said Dillard visited him and his wife, Shelia, a few weeks ago and talked to them about how the Hispanics were taking over the country.

"I told him I didn't want to hear it, and I asked to leave and not to come back," he said. "He just respected me and walked off. If I had known he had all those explosives around his house, I might have been nicer to him. You never know who your neighbors are."

For the time being, it's probably best to be circumspect about this case; it'll be necessary to assess the FBI's evidence at trial and see to what extent these men had proceeded in their plans, and what the likelihood of their actually having pulled it off would have been, and whether the evidence in fact substantiates the FBI's claims. However, from outward appearances, the likelihood appears high that the case is solid.

If it does all pan out, then this case could prove to be a significant warning sign that the agitation against immigrants of the past several years, particularly the emphasis on vigilante action embodied by the Minutemen, is metastasizing into actual brownshirt thuggery to which the label "fascist" fully applies.

As I noted awhile back:

You see, vigilantism always claims to be about law and order and preserving "traditional values." And yet historically, real extremism has always expressed itself thus. This is because vigilantism is always, in the end, about the brutal imposition of mob rule without regard to the humanity of its targets. The proof, in the end, lies in the strange fruit it inevitably produces.

Fortunately, the authorities were able to nip this act of domestic terrorism in the bud, before anyone was harmed. The next time we may not be so lucky.

Obama and the Race Zombies

-- by Dave

It really shouldn't be a surprise, I suppose, that Barack Obama's run for the presidency is bringing out innate racism of so many right-wingers these days. After all, so many of them have had to suppress their Inner Theodore Bilbo for so many years now, it's bound to come squirming out when given the opportunity -- and nothing draws them out like liberal blacks running for political office. Making it the presidency drives them into another sphere altogether.

So far, we have been regaled with the oft-repeated "Hussein" note, the Fox smear of Obama's Muslim background, followed by Limbaugh's astonishing riff on "Barack the Magic Negro". That these reflect a barely concealed racial animus mixed with general white xenophobia should be obvious, and notably, these are all occurring on a national scale, within ostensibly mainstream media sources.

For right-wing audiences, cues like this signal just how far they can take things themselves. So on the public level, the result of this kind of talk is a regular outpouring of old-fashioned racist bile, permission having been granted by leading right-wing voices.

That may be why CBS has had to disallow comments on any of its Web stories about Obama:

Today CBSNews.com informed its staff via email that they should no longer enable comments on stories about presidential candidate Barack Obama. The reason for the new policy, according to the email, is that stories about Obama have been attracting too many racist comments.

"It's very simple," Mike Sims, director of News and Operations for CBSNews.com, told me. "We have our Rules of Engagement. They prohibit personal attacks, especially racist attacks. Stories about Obama have been problematic, and we won't tolerate it."

CBSNews.com does sometimes delete comments on an individual basis, but Sims said that was not sufficient in the case of Obama stories due to "the volume and the persistence" of the objectionable comments.

You also have to wonder if a similar problem was afoot with the recent announcement that the Secret Service was now protecting Obama.

This trend is what I've been calling the "new racism", which is all about

staking out positions that, if not overtly racist, at least seek to resurrect some of the hoary mythology of the era of white supremacy. As with most of right-wing race rhetoric of the past twenty years, it's all done with a certain level of plausible deniability, couched in "jokes" or abstrations that let the speakers feign indignation when the racism is pointed out; the current trend is only slightly more overt in its racism, but the underlying sentiments aren't hard to read.

It's a step beyond wink-and-nudge racism -- or, perhaps, more like that point in the winking and nudging when the winker begins nudging harder and harder.

We get it, we get it.

A lot of it is building off memes that have been floating about the right for some time now: racism is a dead letter and doesn't really exist anymore, multiculturalism is a travesty, and efforts to defeat racism are racist themselves.

This resurgent racism likes to cloak itself in the pretense of rebellious individualism standing up to the oppression of overbearing "political correctness," or else in academic-sounding terms that fling about misinformation regarding the sciences and sociology to construct a pseudo-rationale for what they euphemistically like to call "race realism."

But pull the cloak aside, and the same old, decrepit racism of a century ago is there, festering like a decaying zombie who refuses to die.

And as the summer goes on, and the presidential campaign picks up steam, and Obama solidifies his already formidable position as a front runner ... well, expect to see a lot more of those zombies crawling the streets of our public discourse.

Irrationales

-- by Dave

If George W. Bush vetoes the just-passed hate-crimes law approved by the House, as expected, it will be only the third such veto he's issued since becoming president. The first two were the stem-cell research bill and the Iraq appropriations bill. It gives us, if nothing else, a clear window into his priorities: feeding the base comes first.

In any event, I've been trying to figure out exactly what the White House's rationale for opposing the legislation really is. According to the Los Angeles Times report on the vote, the rationale for the veto is described thus:

In its veto threat, the White House said that state and local laws already addressed hate crime and that the bill would treat crime victims differently from others.

"The administration believes that all violent crimes are unacceptable, regardless of the victims, and should be punished firmly," the administration said. The White House contended the bill also raised constitutional concerns.

All of these claims are demonstrably false.

-- There are, as I noted previously, seven states without any hate-crimes laws at all, and others are dubiously written and even more dubiously enforced. Only a little over half the states include provisions for sentence enhancement for bias-motivated crimes involving sexual preference, and fewer still include provisions for gender or disability. The reality is that hate-crimes laws on the state level are a hodge-podge that are erratically enforced at best and widely varying from one state to the next.

-- There is nothing in this legislation, or in any extant hate-crimes law, that would treat one class of victims differently from another; everyone, after all, has a race, a gender, an ethnicity, beliefs regarding religion, a sexual preference, and they are all protected equally under these laws. What determines whether a crime is motivated by bias is the presence of a group animus and the selection of a victim based on that animus. What does occur under the law is that some perpetrators are treated differently -- but then, that is a normative aspect of criminal law. The criminals who cause greater harm are punished accordingly, and it is fairly easy to demonstrate that hate crimes indeed inflict such greater harm.

-- Many hate crimes (nearly a third of those reported to the FBI) are in fact not violent but are property crimes or threats and intimidation; the White House's attempt to frame the issue as one involving simply violent crime again runs aground on the reefs of reality.

-- Finally, there are no known constitutional concerns with this legislation. It fits well within the framework provided by the Supreme Court over the years regarding bias crimes, from Wisconsin v. Mitchell to Virginia v. Black, which have consistently found that the sentence-enhancement framework of bias-crime laws fits well within established criminal law in this country. No one in the House debate, that I'm aware of, raised constitutional issues. So what are these unnamed "constitutional concerns"?

Well, c'mon: We know what the real concern is. The Washington Times headline spelled it out for us: "House approves gay hate-crime law". The faggots are coming! The faggots are coming!

Now, Andrew Sullivan, as I mentioned in the previous post, is saying that the White House's rationale is different than the one we've been given publicly so far, namely: "But the one truly incoherent position is that hate crimes laws are fine for all targeted groups except gays." While I think you can find this position on the right (particularly among certain fundamentalists), I haven't found any evidence yet that Team Bush is actually arguing it -- though it must be said that what has emanated from the White House so far is every bit as incoherent.

But then, Sullivan's own argument regarding bias crimes is not exactly a model of thorough reasoning either:

There are, I think, two coherent positions on hate crime laws. The first is opposition to the entire concept, its chilling effect on free speech, its undermining of the notion of equality under the law, and so on. That's my position. I oppose all hate crimes laws, regardless of the categories of individuals they purport to protect.

But hate crimes have no known "chilling" effect on free speech any more than our current and longstanding laws against threatening and intimidating speech do generally; nor do they undermine the notion of equality under the law any more than the normative application of varying punishments according to the egregiousness of the crime, a standard aspect of all criminal law, does generally.

Sullivan's reasons for opposing hate-crime laws are based on assumptions that are almost as airless as Bush's. Meanwhile, he describes the other side of the equation thus:

The other coherent position is the view that hate crimes somehow impact the community more than just regular crimes and that the victims of such crimes therefore deserve some sort of extra protection under the law. The criteria for inclusion in such laws is any common prejudice against a recognizable and despised minority.

Sullivan simply has this part wrong. The laws are not constructed to give the victims "extra protection under the law" -- though that may well be one of its effects -- but rather are written to give the perpetrators extra punishment under the law. Hate crimes do not just "somehow" impact the community more than just regular crimes -- they quite reasonably have been demonstrated to in fact harm the community to a greater extent than the ordinary crimes they resemble (see here for more on that).

These laws don't exist simply because of agitation by victim-oriented civil rights groups; they exist because the crimes and their poisonous effects on communities are real, because communities and their law-enforcement apparatuses must deal with them, and because the laws were intended to help them do so.

So the criteria for creating categories of bias crimes isn't simply "any common prejudice against a recognizable and despised minority," but rather is the hard fact that this prejudice is motivating various criminal acts intended to terrorize those minority communities. That is, the mere existence of the prejudice is insufficient; the reason to pass a law such as this is that the prejudice is manifesting itself in the form of various criminal acts.

The theory behind all bias-crimes law is grounded in the hard reality of their existence; they represent a normative social response to a serious problem that, left unconfronted, can inflict real long-term harm, in this case in the form of the massive dead-weight loss of freedom that bias crimes inflict on millions of Americans. Frederick Lawrence, the eminent hate-crimes expert and author of Punishing Hate: Bias Crimes in American Law, testified before the House back in 1999 describing the core of this theory:

A bias crime is a crime committed as an act of prejudice. Prejudice, in this context, is not strictly a personal predilection of the perpetrator. A prejudiced person usually exhibits antipathy towards members of a group based on false stereotypical views of that group. But in order for this to be the kind of prejudice of which we speak here, this antipathy must exist in a social context, that is, it must be an animus that is shared by others in the culture and that is a recognizable social pathology within the culture.

Hate crimes are just such a social pathology, one that only a society intent on defending its ancient prejudices can ignore, and it would do as at considerable expense to its social fabric and general well-being. As Lawrence has explained elsewhere, it is normal for the law to attempt to address these pathologies, and as such the logic of bias-crime laws can be applied even to very localized pathologies, e.g., the kinds of simmering group feuds that occur within any community. If the local community chooses to pass its own bias-crime law creating a category designed to address that pathology, it should be well within its rights to do so.

On a national scale, there is a moral and ethical imperative to do so. And there is no question that the House's bias-crime law in fact addresses pathologies that have been well identified. Crimes motivated by racial, religious, ethnic, and sexual hatred have been well documented as a serious and systemic problem, and the laws punishing them harshly are also well within the normal purview of criminal law (especially since crimes are never a form of protected free speech).

This is why one of the White House's other dodges on its opposition to the bill is also quite groundless -- namely, their claim that "the bill leaves other classes, such as the elderly, the military and police officers, without similar special status." But crimes motivated by bias against the elderly, the military, or police have not been reported to occur on any kind of large scale; there is no data indicating such a trend, and there is no identifiable social pathology resulting, either. Why pass a law to combat a problem that doesn't exist?

On the other hand, it is unquestionable that the need for a federal hate-crimes bill, particularly one like this designed to emphasize federal support for local and state law enforcement, has been building for a long time. The most obvious problem, as I've detailed here and in my book Death on the Fourth of July, is the horrendous record of underenforcement of the hate crimes laws we do have on the books.

A Bureau of Justice Statistics report back in 2005 laid this out in stark terms:

The real number of hate crimes in the United States is more than 15 times higher than FBI statistics reflect, according to a stunning new government report.

Hate crime statistics published by the FBI since 1992, based on voluntary reports from law enforcement agencies around the country, have shown annual totals of about 6,000 to 10,000, depending on the year. But the new report, "Hate Crimes Reported by Victims and Police," found an average annual total of 191,000 hate crimes. That means the real level of hate crime runs between 19 and 31 times higher than the numbers that have been officially reported for almost 15 years.

"It's an astounding report," said Jack Levin, a leading hate crime expert at Northeastern University. "It's not necessarily completely accurate, but I would trust these data before I trusted the voluntary law enforcement reports to the FBI."

... The report, which inferred hate motivation from the words and symbols used by the offender, found that just 44 percent of hate crimes are reported to police. Other hate crimes don't make it into FBI statistics for an array of reasons: police may fail to record some as hate crimes; their departments may not report hate crime statistics to state officials; and those officials may not accurately report to the FBI.

According to the new report, hate crimes involve violence far more often than other crimes. The data showed 84 percent of hate crimes were violent, meaning they involved a sexual attack, robbery, assault or murder. By contrast, just 23 percent of non-hate crimes involved violence. Other studies have suggested that hate-motivated violence, especially against homosexuals, is more extreme than other violence.

The report also showed that 56 percent of hate crime victims identified race as the primary factor in the crimes they reported. Ethnicity accounted for another 29 percent of the total. Hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation were 18 percent of the total. Given that the best studies indicate about 3 percent of the American population is homosexual, this means that gays and lesbians are victimized at six times the overall rate.

The dirty secret about hate crimes is that they're part of the way we've always done things in this country. When whites wanted to engage in a campaign of racial eliminationism, it always began with crimes: a beating here, a lynching there, a church arson over there. Pretty soon the target community got the message and moved out; and if they didn't, well, then they would be driven out, and the "sundown" signs went up on the town borders.

Naturally, though, we don't talk about these things when it comes to discussing hate crimes in America today. We don't want to talk about the reality of the violence and terror that these crimes inflict on their targets and pretend that the need for the laws is built out of the same ephemera as the arguments against them. No. It's much easier to throw up paper-thin rationales and then pretend that they make sense, even as they peel and crumble.

UPDATE: TRex at Firedoglake has more.

Hate crimes: Progress, perhaps

-- by Dave

The course of the campaign to effect a federal hate-crimes law has, to date, followed the nearly identical path of the anti-lynching laws that Congress failed to pass in the early 20th century (a failure for which the Senate a couple of years ago apologized): At every crucial moment, right-wing conservatives have risen up to block its passage, despite the legislation's overwhelming favor with both the public and the rest of Congress.

Recall how, the last three times out, Republican leaders in the House used parliamentary maneuvers to kill a Senate-approved version. In that last case (in 2004), it was clear that their intent was to keep any hate-crime bill from crossing President Bush's desk, because he was certain to veto it -- a politically risky move in an election year.

Well, the House today passed the Hate Crimes Prevenation Act, whose details are nearly identical to the legislation killed the last two times in the House. It is almost certain to pass the Senate -- which means that Bush is going veto it, which he has vowed to do:

Just hours after the White House issued a veto threat Thursday, the House voted to add gender and sexual orientation to the categories covered by federal hate crimes law.

The House legislation, passed 237-180, also makes it easier for federal law enforcement to take part in or assist local prosecutions involving bias-motivated attacks. Similar legislation is also moving through the Senate, setting the stage for another veto showdown with President Bush.

... The White House, in a statement warning of a veto, said state and local criminal laws already cover the new crimes defined under the bill, and there was "no persuasive demonstration of any need to federalize such a potentially large range of violent crime enforcement."

This is, in fact, a distortion of the reality to the point of falsehood. Some seven states have no hate-crimes law at all, and others (such as Alabama and Hawaii) make a point of refusing to enforce the laws they do have. Others do not include gender, disability, or most particularly sexual orientation -- and it is the inclusion of this last category that of course is the source for the White House's opposition. That's because the religious right has staked out this position, and Bush is heeding their call:

... But Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, warned that the true intent of the bill was "to muzzle people of faith who dare to express their moral and biblical concerns about homosexuality." If you read the Bible in a certain way, he told his broadcast listeners, "you may be guilty of committing a 'thought crime.'"

"It does not impinge on public speech or writing in any way," countered Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., pointing out that the bill explicitly reaffirms First Amendment and free speech rights.

Indeed, as I recently observed, the "rights" that these religious leaders claim to be defending are simply the right to commit an act that is already a crime, as are all hate crimes -- and there is no such right. Nor is a crime a form of permissible free speech.

In any event, Bush is also following his own stated ideology; back in 1999, he remarked: "I've always said all crime is hate crime. People, when they commit a crime, have hate in their heart. And it's hard to distinguish between one degree of hate and another."

This is, of course, blithering nonsense:

This meme -- favored by everyone on the right from Bush to Dick Armey to Jerry Falwell -- is partially a product of the confusion that arises from calling these crimes "hate crimes" (they are in reality "bias-motivated" crimes; "hate" quite literally has nothing to do with them, in the eyes of the law). But even without that misunderstanding, this notion is transparently baseless.

Only a little reflection, after all, can produce a long list of crimes that lack anything resembling a hateful element -- embezzlement or securities fraud, say, or drunken driving, or insider trading. I'm willing to wager that abandoning your Texas Air National Guard unit is a crime, and the only hateful elements I can see in that are an abiding contempt for your fellow servicemen and their willingness to live up to their commitments.

More to the point, the recognition that not all crimes are alike is a basic tenet of law. Bias-crimes statutes recognize, like a myriad criminal laws, that motive and intent can and should affect the kind of sentence needed to protect society adequately -- that is, after all, the difference between first-degree murder and manslaughter. Intent and motive can be the difference between a five-year sentence and the electric chair.

Attempting a sort of zero-sum analysis that makes the outcome (in the case of homicide, a dead person) the only significant issue in what kind of sentence a perpetrator should face (the death sentence vs. a prison term) would overthrow longstanding legal traditions of proportionality in setting punishment, effectively eliminating the role of culpability -- or mens rea, the mental state of the actor -- as a major factor. Or, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously put it: "Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked."

Does anyone remember, by the way, how Republicans tried to make a martyr out of Bush for the NAACP's ad campaign in 2000. The NAACP highlighted Bush's callousness in dealing with the family of James Byrd even as he vetoed a hate-crime bill in Texas:

Reality notwithstanding, Republicans in short order turned the NAACP's attack ads into a liability for Democrats, accusing the civil-rights group of "reprehensible" behavior for linking Bush to the Byrd killing. By the time the election rolled around in early November, it had become conventional wisdom in the press that the ads "implied that George W. Bush killed James Byrd." Right-wing pundit Ann Coulter featured the meme in her later book, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, suggesting that Bush's support for the penalty should have mollified his critics, but instead, "they would not rest until the killers were found guilty of 'hate' and forced to attend anger-management classes."

The harsh truth is this: Bush and his cohort on the religious and mainstream right, for all their oft-espoused love of "freedom" and "liberty," simply don't care about the very real freedoms of millions of Americans -- not just gays and lesbians, but people of color, of foreign extraction, of varying faiths, of the "weaker sex," and people with disabilities. Because these are the people whose freedoms are systematically and violently harmed by haters and the violent thugs who feed off their bile.

Hate crimes, as I have often remarked, are one of the important ways our freedoms can be taken away by our fellow citizens rather than the government. Laws against them are designed to defend those freedoms while keeping our other cherished freedoms -- notably freedom of speech -- fully intact.

We should have learned this lesson over the failure of the anti-lynching laws -- which were defeated under the cover of nearly identical arguments, all similarly specious. As with the current crop, these arguments really are just cardboard facades that cover the real reason for the opposition -- namely, plain old-fashioned bigotry.

The White House's position, moreover, is simply incoherent -- it's no longer opposed to hate-crime laws in general, but just doesn't think they should cover gays and lesbians. As Andrew Sullivan (with whom I generally disagree on this subject) observes, that's simply noxious: "[T]he one truly incoherent position is that hate crimes laws are fine for all targeted groups except gays."

This is what's remarkable about the looming defeat of this legislation (it seems unlikely the House Democrats can muster enough votes to override a veto): Bush and his fellow conservatives like to portray themselves as tough on crime, but they get all mushy-headed and soft on crime when it comes to certain kinds.

If this is how Bush panders to his base, then I guess we've got a much clearer picture of just who that base is.

___

Bradford Plumer at The Plank has more, as does John at Americablog.

For the text of the HCPA, see here. More videos from the House can be found here.

Here's House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's statement:

Hate crimes have no place in America and all Americans have a right to feel safe in their community. Though there has been a federal hate crimes law since 1968, hate crimes continue to be widespread and persistent - more than 113,000 hate crimes have been documented by the FBI since 1991. In 2005 alone, there were 7,163 reported hate crimes.

H.R. 1592 is focused on enhancing the resources of state and local law enforcement to prevent and prosecute hate crimes. All too often, state and local law enforcement alone are unable to meet the challenge of hate crime prevention and prosecution. Underfunded and understaffed, state and local law enforcement desperately require federal assistance to address this challenge. That is why this bill authorizes the Department of Justice to provide state and local law enforcement agencies technical, forensic, prosecutorial and other forms of assistance in the investigation and prosecution of hate crimes. It also authorizes the Department of Justice to provide grants to state and local law enforcement agencies that are investigating hate crimes. The bill closes gaps in federal law to help combat hate crimes committed against persons because of their race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability. The bill only applies to bias-motivated crimes of violence and does not impinge freedom of speech or religious expression in any way.

Hits all the high notes.
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Note: Once again, I've noticed the debate at the above-linked sites regarding hate crimes has invariably wandering into the standard disinformation being peddled. As something of an antidote, I'd like to offer these links for deeper background on hate crimes, the laws against them, and the rationale for those laws.

Letter to the L.A. Times

When hate hits home

Bigotry and freedom

Hate crimes: The big picture

Failing in the present

Should we repeal hate-crimes laws?

The GOP, gays, and hate crimes

Hate crimes, democracy, and freedom

Hate crimes: A response

Who needs hate-crime laws?

The newest J Pod baby

-- by Dave

I was out on San Juan Island on Wednesday, conducting interviews for an upcoming feature story on whale watching for Seattle magazine. I happened to drop by at Lime Kiln State Park, where the watching can be spectacular in the summer but is much more sporadic the rest of the year. It was very quiet, but the rainy skies cleared out and those few of us there were just enjoying the sunshine.

All of a sudden, who should drop by but our old friends the J Pod, led by Ruffles and Granny. And who should be tagging along but the pod's newest member, a calf designated J42.

Its first official sighting: Wednesday at Lime Kiln. It was hanging with a female presumed to be its mother.

So here are a couple more shots of the little one:





There were several juveniles with the pod, including one who breached repeatedly near one of the whale-watching boats:



All in all, a very rewarding day. Welcome, J42: May you ply these waters for many more years.

UPDATE: Kari Koski of Soundwatch informs me that the calf's mother is J16, aka "Slick." This is Slick's fourth calf, which indicates a reasonably good likelihood of survival for J42 (firstborn calves are particularly susceptible to toxin transferrals from the mother's body fat). The Center for Whale Research has more.

The New World Order redux

-- by Dave

We already knew that Glenn Beck was a real piece of work, but his latest outburst wades directly into extremist waters:

"Al Gore's not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however. The goal is different. The goal is globalization. The goal is global carbon tax. The goal is the United Nations running the world. That is the goal. Back in the 1930s, the goal was get rid of all of the Jews and have one global government." He continued: "You got to have an enemy to fight. And when you have an enemy to fight, then you can unite the entire world behind you, and you seize power. That was Hitler's plan. His enemy: the Jew. Al Gore's enemy, the U.N.'s enemy: global warming." Beck added: "Then you get the scientists -- eugenics. You get the scientists -- global warming. Then you have to discredit the scientists who say, 'That's not right.' And you must silence all dissenting voices. That's what Hitler did."

Hoo boy. Where to start?

It might be helpful first to observe that Beck's analogy -- asserting some kind of equivalence between Nazi eugenics and the campaign to confront global warming -- is not only laughably absurd, it is a mind-numbingly vicious smear that makes Rush Limbaugh's demonization of environmentalists look positively civil by comparison. Which may have been Beck's intent here: the farther he pushes the envelope of the discourse, the farther right the "center" moves.

It must also be pointed out that Beck's comparison grotesquely minimizes the suffering of the Nazi regime's millions of victims, who were the subjects not merely of a eugenics that deemed them fit for elimination but also a nonstop campaign of demonization (rather similar in nature to Beck's own attacks on the left). No environmentalist has attempted to scapegoat any group of people or argue for their extermination. To date, there has been no proposal to criminalize anyone -- rather, the campaign against global warming has been about trying to find ways to simply modify the way we act (particularly the way we consume the planet's resources). Fabricating an analogy between these actions and the street thuggery, concentration camps, and mass murder perpetrated by the Nazis pretends that the discomfort some people may feel at being reminded that they are harming the planet is just the same as the horror that faced the victims of the Holocaust.

Almost secondarily, the comparison of the science of global warming with eugenics reveals just how poorly Beck understands science. Eugenics was always considered a "soft" social science, and the underlying data used to support it was always thin, narrowly obtained, and, at base, spurious. In contrast, the multitude of disciplines with evidence supporting the reality of global warming (from biology to meteorology to hydrology, and everything in between), as well as the massive amounts of hard data supporting the science, make it clear to anyone who understands science just how serious the problem really is.

Finally, there's the underlying story that Beck is weaving here: "The goal is the United Nations running the world." Gee, where have we heard that before? Ah, that's right: the American far right -- specifically, the John Birch Society and the militia/Patriot movement. The whole "New World Order" conspiracy theory was predicated on the risible claim that the United Nations was intended to create a One World Government (or, in the neo-Nazi version, Zionist Occupied Government).

And as anyone with a knowledge of the history of these conspiracy theories knows, they are deeply rooted in the very same "Jewish conspiracy" theory promoted by a number of anti-Semites in the early half of the 20th century -- most notoriously by Hitler, but also by such American figures as Henry Ford and Father Charles Coughlin. Indeed, the anti-Semitic tendencies of both the Birchers and the militiamen has also been well-documented.

So Beck is attempting a neat trick here -- broadcasting and mainstreaming the far-right belief in a sinister U.N. conspiracy to enslave mankind, while simultaneously casting that supposed conspiracy as identical to the very forces that historically have persecuted the people scapegoated by such theories. It's Newspeak, of course: Beck is at once nullifying our understanding of the Holocaust and its meaning and the nature of the effort to confront global warming, muting the reality of mass murder even as he twists science to mean something it never did.

How, exactly, does CNN justify broadcasting this crap? Or are guys like Beck meant to outflank Fox on the right? If so, they need a reminder of just how far right that means.

Why Global Sovereignty Matters

-- by Sara

Dave's discussion of the Utah Republican Party's resolution "warning that Satan's minions want to eliminate national borders and do away with sovereignty" brings up a perennial right-wing boogeyman that hasn't seen a lot of time out of the barn lately. But, since we're likely to hear more wingnut railing against "one world government," let me explain why that idea deserves a strong liberal counter.

One of the principles of systems theory is that we should avoid the tragedy of the commons. Wherever you have a resource that's unregulated by either a market or a government, people will inevitably wander into it and start taking as much of it as they can physically carry away. Eventually, the resource -- a pastureland, a forest, a watershed, whatever -- will be depleted to the point where the use of it is lost to everyone. The only solution to the commons tragedy, in all times and places and at whatever scale, is to set up some kind of regulatory boundary around the resource that limits and allocates shares, controls access, and manages it with an eye toward future sustainability.

All of us -- even conservatives -- are pretty clear on this concept where small, localized resources are concerned. Though we may have philosophical disagreements over whether the county government or a private company will do a better job of maintaining the common roads and water reservoir, most of us recognize that there needs to be an authority in charge -- one with boundaries of influence large enough to fully control and sustain the domain, and sufficient clout to enforce its will in the face of powerful people who may want game the rules and take more than their fair share.

Looking back over the course of US history, one lasting mark left on our body politic by WWII was that the scale of our commons management domains took a quantum leap. Before the war, "state's rights" had been an article of faith, because most of our common wealth was managed at the state level (as it still is in Canada). The Roaring 20s happened in no small part because the newly-emerging corporate order could profit handsomely by taking undue advantage of a virtually unregulated interstate commons. It had gotten to the point where the largest corporations were rich enough to bully state governments into giving them whatever they wanted, or threaten to go elsewhere -- a clear sign that business was now operating at a scale where state government wasn't big enough, strong enough, or organized to put a meaningful boundary around corporate behavior. Structurally, this was an underlying cause of the "tragedy of the commons" we now recall as the Great Depression.

FDR put an end to that, through policies and programs that transferred important state business-regulation functions into federal hands -- first in the name of ending the Depression, and then in the name of ending the war. This new regulatory infrastructure, designed specifically to create a government power boundary big and strong enough to manage and control the newly-expanded business commons, is the main reason that conservatives despise Roosevelt to this day. (Whenever you hear a conservative hollering about "small government," odds are good that they're really advocating the disregulation of a commons so they can exploit it for personal profit.)

Over the past four decades, we've begun to struggle with another quantum shift in scale. We've come to realize that oceans, arable land, aquifers and watersheds, and the entire atmosphere represent a global commons that every one of us depends on. At the same time, business roams the planet taking what it wants -- just as it roamed America in the 20s -- making unimaginable profits and creating irreversible damage (global warming, anyone?) because there's no one entity big and powerful enough to put a boundary around its activities and regulate its behavior.

National governments, like the state governments before them, are now simply too small and too corruptible to effectively manage the problems that we're facing. Which means that, in the decades ahead, our survival will almost certainly depend on creating global authorities to oversee the commons at a global scale -- in other words, the conservatives' dreaded "one world government."

One of the (often legitimate) complaints against FDR's government was that it was often very hierarchical and hence heavy-handed in implementing its edicts. Back in that generation, people still had very Victorian ideas of how power flowed; and military-style hierarchy was all they really knew. And because the anti-one-world-government grognards still understand power and hierarchy this way, it's fair to guess that much of their fear stems from the thought that they'll be subordinated to leaders who don't meet their specific criteria for legitimacy -- always a hot-button issue for authoritarians. For ideological conservatives, the only way to have a world government is to subjugate nations (and nationalism, which is the right-wing religion) to a world dictator -- an anti-Christ who will present a clear and present danger to their sense of freedom. For economic conservatives, a world government will once again restrict their "right" to make profit whenever and wherever they will.

In moving toward global governance, we need to be aware of these fears -- and resist the vision that they represent. All of us should be concerned about the potential loss of local sovereignty -- democracy depends on us being able to choose who leads us, and where -- but we shouldn't buy into the conservative vision that this will be inevitable.

Liberals, after all, know better. Since the Sixties, we've come to a more organic understanding of how things in the world are naturally organized. We understand that power can be decentralized in webs and networks; and that people can be effective in loosely-organized, self-determining cells; and that these cells, in turn, can be integrated into much larger and more effective systems than anything a hierarchy can handle. Organizationally, what works for bacteria colonies also works for Al-Qaeda -- and will almost certainly work as a system for managing our global commons as well.

Some kind of global network government is coming. It is as inevitable as global warming, the loss of the fisheries, and the destruction of the topsoil -- the problems it will first be organized to put boundaries around and manage for the common good of all humanity. It does not have to involve pushing all authority for everything up to the highest levels -- just the tasks that are required to sustain the things we truly hold in common. The right wing will resist it mightly (those who derive emotional or financial sustenance from the status quo will always resist the future); though there's also no shortage of people who also want to explode the national boundaries around these commons so they can profit off of them in private markets (a bad idea, but a post for another day). But we on the progressive side need to understand exactly what's at stake, and why -- and refuse to join them in their fear.

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Oh, and by the way: I'm back.

Those satanic liberals

-- by Dave

One of the exigencies of eliminationist rhetoric is that ineluctably, by its nature, it is woven out of whole cloth -- it is almost purely fantasy, though sometimes it is wrapped around tiny grains of "fact" that, on closer examination, are mostly perceptions rather than truths.

Witness, for instance, the case of the Utah Republican Party poobah who wentr for the Grand Twofer: casting both illegal immigrants and liberals as the veritable Spawn of Satan his own bad self:

Utah County Republicans ended their convention on Saturday by debating Satan's influence on illegal immigrants.

The group was unable to take official action because not enough members stuck around long enough to vote, despite the pleadings of party officials. The convention was held at Canyon View Junior High School.

Don Larsen, chairman of legislative District 65 for the Utah County Republican Party, had submitted a resolution warning that Satan's minions want to eliminate national borders and do away with sovereignty.

In a speech at the convention, Larsen told those gathered that illegal immigrants "hate American people" and "are determined to destroy this country, and there is nothing they won't do."

Illegal aliens are in control of the media, and working in tandem with Democrats, are trying to "destroy Christian America" and replace it with "a godless new world order -- and that is not extremism, that is fact," Larsen said.

At the end of his speech, Larsen began to cry, saying illegal immigrants were trying to bring about the destruction of the U.S. "by self invasion."

Republican officials then allowed speakers to defend and refute the resolution. One speaker, who was identified as "Joe," said illegal immigrants were Marxist and under the influence of the devil. Another, who declined to give her name to the Daily Herald, said illegal immigrants should not be allowed because "they are not going to become Republicans and stop flying the flag upside down. ... If they want to be Americans, they should learn to speak English and fly their flag like we do."

Senator Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, spoke against the resolution, saying Larsen, whom he called a "true patriot and a close friend," was embarrassing the Republican Party.

"I agree with 95 percent of this resolution but it has some language that is divisive and not inspiring other people to its vision," he said. "This only gives fodder to the liberal media to give negative attention to the Republican Party."

... Larsen was allowed to finish the debate with a one-minute speech.

"If the Democrats take over the country, we will be dead, and we will have abortion and partial-birth abortion and the Republican Party will go into extinction," he said. "Nancy Pelosi and the ACLU would oppose this (resolution)."

As we saw in Montana last week, the spread of vile, hateful rhetoric specifically intended to dehumanize liberals, illegal immigrants and Muslims is hardly relegated to the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. That's just where it starts.

[Hat tip to Hartmut in comments.]

The other kind of terror

-- by Dave

An arrest was made yesterday in the apparent attempt by an Austin man to terrorize a local abortion clinic by placing a nearly complete bomb outside its doors earlier this week:

A 27-year-old Austin man was arrested on Friday and charged with placing an unexploded bomb containing some 2,000 nails outside an abortion clinic in the state's capital.

The explosive device also included a propane tank and a mechanism "akin to a rocket," Austin Police Commander David Carter said.

The device was discovered on Wednesday in the parking lot of the Austin Women's Health Center, police said.

The Texas Joint Terrorism Task Force -- made up of federal, state and local law enforcement authorities -- arrested Paul Ross Evans, who authorities said was on parole for an unspecified crime.

As both zuzu at Feministe and Carpetbagger Report observe, this is a fairly clear-cut case of domestic terrorism. (Kevins Woodshed also has more.) Certainly, it's well within the tradition of domestic terrorists like Eric Rudolph and various other abortion-clinic bombers.

But remember: The FBI has de-emphasized right-wing extremist crimes and displaced them with an emphasis on "eco terror" as far as its chief domestic-terror concern. This is in no small part because this administration is being run by people who don't consider bombings and arson against abortion clinics to be terrorism.

Because of the nature of the ordnance in this case, there's also a connection to previous acts of terrorism -- particularly the appearance both of a nail bomb and a propane-tank device. These same devices appeared in the case of the Spokane-based "Phineas Priests" who believed they were avengers of God who engaged in a six-month spree of bank robberies in the Northwest in 1996.

I describe this gang in some detail in Chapter 6 of my book In God's Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest, and was struck by the similarity of the devices in the Austin case to those used by this gang, particularly in their second attack:

The bomb went off again in Spokane, just a little more than a hundred days after the first explosion: on July 12. It was a duplicate of the first crime: set off a pipe bomb, then rob a bank. In fact, it was even the same bank.

The bomb went off at a new target this time, one nearly as logical as the newspaper: the Planned Parenthood clinic out in the Spokane Valley. What didn't make it quite logical is that, unlike other PP facilities, only birth control and advice are dispensed there -- no abortions are performed. And the clinic was closed at the time.

Still, two men wearing black ski masks and camouflage ponchos drove up in a white Chevy van at about 1:30 in the afternoon, broke out a glass door, tossed in a pipe bomb, ran to the van and screeched away. A witness saw a driver with a white beard, as in the first attack. Moments later, the blast rocked the neighborhood. It blew out the clinic’s windows and ripped up its interior. A piece of the pipe from the device flew out of the clinic, over a two-story building and four busy lanes of traffic, and finally landed harmlessly in a restaurant parking lot.

Within minutes the bombers were in familiar territory: back at the U.S. Bank on East Sprague Street, a few miles away from the clinic. This time, three men with masks and ponchos walked in with automatic weapons raised and demanded money. One of them carried what appeared to be a propane tank with some wires rigged to its top, perhaps a large bomb, and set it down on the floor while the other two collected cash.

Bank employees knew the drill. They kept their hands up and handed over the money. Even the customers were familiar with the scene. One of them, Dale McElliott, had been at the bank when it was robbed the first time, and when he pulled into the space at the drive-up window and looked inside and saw arms raised in the air, he knew what was up again. He crept out of his car on his hands and knees and up the line to the other drivers waiting behind him, asking them for a cellular phone to call the police with. One of them did. Another witness, meanwhile, dialed 911 from a nearby pay phone.

It was too late. The bandits shortly emerged from the bank, cool as cucumbers, with the propane tank-bomb and jumped into the car. One witness saw a second car pull up behind the van and follow it away down the arterial, its driver speaking into a cellular phone. The van was found later, abandoned this time in the parking garage of a mall. Again, it was loaded with a device that appeared to be meant to detonate and destroy the van, but which the Spokane bomb squad, thanks to a robot, soon found was not functioning. When police moved inside, they found the other propane device the men had carried into the bank as well.

The target, a women's clinic the bombers apparently believed was committing abortion, was a new twist. There were other differences: Three men instead of two rushed the bank. There was no bomb set off at the bank this time. And, it appeared, there was no note left behind at either location.

Or so it seemed. As they scoured through the rubble of the Planned Parenthood clinic's doorway, where a two-foot crater had been blasted into the concrete and sheetrock was scattered like paper and beebees from the bomb itself rolled around on the floor, investigators found a matchbook with some words scrawled on it in pen, adapted from Psalms 139: "Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God: depart from me therefore, ye bloody men. For they speak against thee wickedly, and thine enemies take thy name in vain. Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee? And am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee?"

One of this gang's other bomb devices featured nails rather than beebees as the intended shrapnel material. They were eventually busted outside of Yakima after attempting to rob a Portland bank.

You have to be struck by the recent reappearance of the Phineas myth [Phineas was an Old Testament figure who slew an intertribal couple, an example cited by white supremacists as evidence of God's disapproval of race-mixing] in a speech by Tony Perkins of the Family Resource Council, a thinly disguised Reconstructionist operation opposed to abortion, and wonder about its influence in the recent Austin case. It's not terribly likely that Paul Ross Evans was acting on Perkins' signal, but the resemblance may prove more than coincidental.

But even more disturbing is how the case has been treated in the media -- which is to say, it's essentially been buried. Moreover, as zuzu notes, no one is calling it what it clearly is: domestic terrorism.

That similarly was the case with the recent arrests of six militiamen in Alabama for building an armament of pipe bombs and other devices:

Federal and state agents arrested six men and seized an arsenal of homemade hand grenades and firearms in raids Thursday, including one that forced the shutdown of a school.

The men, members of the self-styled "Alabama Free Militia," had no apparent plans to use the weapons, but the leader was described as a federal fugitive, federal authorities said.

"They just have a beef with the government, and they stockpile munitions," U.S. Attorney Alice Martin said at a news conference in Fort Payne.

Agents recovered 130 hand grenades, a grenade launcher, about 70 hand grenades rigged to be fired from a rifle, a machine gun, a short-barrel shotgun, 2,500 rounds of ammunition, explosives components, stolen fireworks and other items, said Jim Cavanaugh, regional head of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Charged in federal court with conspiracy to make a firearm were Raymond Kirk Dillard, 46; believed to be the group's leader; Adam Lynn Cunningham, 41; Bonnell Hughes, 57; Randall Garrett Cole, 22; and James Ray McElroy, 20. Michael Wayne Bobo, 30, was charged with being a drug user in possession of a firearm.

I might have some sympathy for the defense attorneys' contention that these arrests were overblown, given that there is no clear evidence that they actually had formulated any kind of plan to use them.

But the evidence is pretty unassailable that these men, at least some of them, were building bombs. It's difficult to believe that one would build such a device without the intent of eventually putting it to some kind of use. That's why there's a federal law against building them.

It's not as egregious a case as the Austin bomber, but what both of them suggest is a trend toward more domestic terrorism. And despite the misguided rantings of the Debbie Schlussels and Michelle Malkins of the world, the hard reality is that you are far more likely to be blown up by a homegrown terrorist than one from the Middle East.

Of course, acknowledging that this is the case would require a major readjustment of the media's constructed narrative about the "war on terror." So it continues to turn a blind eye, and in the process it profoundly misinforms the public.