Why Did The Seattle Times Endorse A Right-Wing Extremist?

A 1995 militia meeting in Maltby, Wash., organized by the SnoCoPRA.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Our "liberal media" here in Seattle is something else -- particularly the Republican-owned Seattle Times, which is astute enough to include a few liberal voices on its editorial page and among its columnists. Our TV stations are pure mush. And don't get me started on the subject of local talk radio.

The worst, though, has to be the Times. Because, those handful of liberals notwithstanding, its editorial content (especially its editorials) is relentlessly right-wing. This was embodied in their endorsement yesterday of Republican John Koster in Washington's new 1st Congressional District.
Indeed, their rationale was enough to make you laugh out loud:

We disagree with Koster on social issues, but in Congress right now, his fiscal viewpoint and elected experience are what’s needed.

Koster’s reputation and performance as the practical conservative who can articulate and act on those views and find common ground is needed and welcome.

Actually, Koster's "reputation and performance" make irrevocably clear that he is a Tea Party fanatic, a fiscal extremist who, in his six years in the state's Legislature, voted against five of six budgets. It's entirely predictable what he'll do if elected to the House: Sign up with the Tea Party caucus and immediately link arms with the bloc that has refused to pass any kind of jobs bill or face up to the problem of unemployment, simply because doing so would ensure a difficult re-election for President Obama, and who already tried to drive the American economy over the cliff with their brinkmanship on the debt ceiling.

And that's just on the fiscal side of things. Koster is so extreme on so many other issues -- particularly on abortion and education -- that the notion of him "finding common ground" with Democrats on anything is endlessly risible.

What the Times didn't tell its readers, though, is that Koster has a long history of far-right extremism -- not merely with the Tea Party, but back in the 1990s, with the far-right Patriot/militia movement.

The Times' softball profile of Koster made an oblique mention of this fact -- so we know that they have to be perfectly aware of all this:

His record also shows a steady streak of conservatism: He voted against five of six budgets and introduced legislation to allow a group of people in northern Snohomish County to secede and form a new county, "Freedom County."

Actually, it runs much, much deeper than that.

John Koster played a significant role in helping promote far-right "Patriot" movement property-rights organizing in the Puget Sound region in the 1990s – organizing that in many cases involved recruiting militias, extremist "sovereign citizen" schemes, and efforts at secession. Koster's role was important: As a state legislator, he introduced bills that promoted and legitimized the far-right agenda of these groups, particularly their efforts at forming new counties, carved out by "secession" from larger urban counties in western Washington.

Beginning in 1990, the Puget Sound region saw the sudden creation of a well-organized network of Wise Use "property rights" front groups. The majority of this activity revolved around opposition to the Growth Management Act, passed by the Washington Legislature that year. Accordingly, many of the groups behind this network were business interests opposed to the act, but who were willing to have their money help fund far-right organizing.

A classic front group in this case was the Snohomish County Property Rights Alliance (SNOCO PRA). Like all front groups, it faced both ways: on one side, it was funded by the Building Industry Association of Washington (in Whatcom County, the Chamber of Commerce joined in, too) and a collection of timber and developer interests. On the other side were the far-right Christian Patriots, conspiracy-prone extremists, often with John Birch Society backgrounds, who rapidly infiltrated the key groups in Snohomish and Whatcom counties, including the SNOCO PRA. In the middle were mostly retired property owners with "nest-egg" investments.

In 1991, the key regional "property rights" organizer and BIAW official, Jim Klauser, discovered previous abortive attempts by far-right/JBS "property rights" activists ("Liberty County") in Pierce County to exploit a technicality in the Washington Constitution: the formation of new counties is sketched out, but the Legislature has never passed clarifying laws spelling out the procedures. Klauser, with the help of Wise Use guru Ron Arnold, began helping organize localized secession efforts.

By 1992, numerous property rights front groups had set up county secession front groups and were using the secession petitions for illegally pre-qualifying new voter registrations and collecting voter lists, which were used by property-rights candidates in local elections. In 1993, they were able to influence county government elections in King, Snohomish, Thurston, and Whatcom counties. (More here and .)

In King, Ted Cowan was a leading spokesman for the Cedar County Committee. Up in Snohomish, two proposed counties were being formed. The Skykomish County Committee was represented by Arne Hansen, while the north half of the county was rallying around the flamboyant John Stokes and his Freedom County Committee.

The Snohomish County Property Rights Alliance (SNOCO PRA) began running a savage campaign against the critical areas ordinance, the county and particularly two county councilmen, Peter Hurley and Ross Kane. Their referendum on the land use ordinance had been the object of lengthy litigation and still hadn't made it to the polls. Using colorful single sheet tabloids, SNOCO PRA warned "NOW URBAN AND SUBURBAN DWELLERS ARE UNDER ATTACK!", "TAXPAYER RAPE!" and "YOUR PROPERTY RIGHTS ARE AN ENDANGERED SPECIES."

By 1994, SNOCO PRA organizers like Ben Sams were holding Christian Patriot meetings in places like Maltby and Snohomish, all of which were focused on organizing militias. Militia-movement leaders like John Trochmann and Bob Fletcher appeared at these meetings and ran through their lengthy conspiracy theories, including the claim that environmentalists' efforts to create a North Cascades Biosystem was actually part of a covert United Nations plot to round up gun owners and place them in concentration camps.

In the intervening time, many of the developers who originally financed these groups peeled away,
and the remaining Christian Patriot elements took them over wholly, notably in Snohomish/"Freedom
County" and Clark/"River County". They continued to focus their efforts on forming militias and creating new counties by secession; all of these new counties, in the organizers' plans, were predicated around far-right "Posse Comitatus" principles in which the county sheriff becomes the law of the land and the federal and state governments are powerless entities.

By 1996, the leaders of the would-be counties of Cedar, Skykomish, Freedom and Pioneer together had collected 44,650 valid signatures. At that time, they thought the state constitution required the Legislature to create a new county if petitions were signed by half the number of voters who went to the polls the previous November. All four groups achieved that goal. When nothing happened, Cedar County proponents headed to the Supreme Court.

This is where John Koster came in. As a Republican state representative from the Sultan/Monroe area, Koster in 1997 introduced bills to create Skykomish, Freedom and Pioneer counties. The Freedom and Pioneer County bills died in committee.

Koster was more successful with his Skykomish County bill, House Bill 1660. It provided for the process to create Skykomish County pending a ballot question for the affected area. The proposal set forth that the existing superior court of Snohomish County would also serve Skykomish County. Opponents of the bill (and the new county) attempted to amend the bill to require a vote from the entirety of the counties affected (Snohomish and King Counties). The bill passed the House, but failed to emerge from committee in the state Senate.

The Freedom County secessionists were led primarily by three people: David Guadalupe, who had previously been involved with the far-right American Land Rights Association; Thom Satterlee, a "sovereign citizen" and Christian Patriot whose writings at times indicated he subscribed to racist "Christian Identity" beliefs; and John Stokes of Camano Island, a onetime real-estate agent who had run afoul of state wetlands laws.

Satterlee and Stokes in April 1997 filed a complaint with the United Nations against Washington for violating the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights because the state would not create Freedom County: "the right of self-determination and self-government ... are being denied by the state of Washington," the complaint alleged. However, the U.N. informed them that it could not help.

Stokes later moved to Montana and began making problems there, again of the far-right-wing variety, much of it militia-oriented. (See here for more on this.)

A Superior Court decision ruled that Freedom County did not exist. When Guadalupe and Satterlee appealed to the State Supreme Court, the court commissoner wrote: "Having studied the pleadings filed by Mr. Guadualupe and Mr. Satterlee, which are in the main legally incoherent despite a heavy
larding of pseudo-legal rhetoric, I find no basis to grant a stay."

In February 1998, the state Supreme Court ruled that signatures from half the registered voters of the affected area are required to propose a new county, shelving many county secession movements in the state. Prior to the ruling, Washington county secession movements had interpreted the law to require signatures from only half of those who voted in the most recent election. Arguing that voter registration rolls are always out of date, Skykomish County movement leaders attacked the court's ruling as creating an "unreachable standard".

Koster was quoted in the press expressing his disappointment with the ruling, adding that it was time for the Legislature to step in and clarify exactly how new counties can form. "It isn't going to happen this year, not in a short session, but it needs to happen,'' he said.

By the fall of 1998, Freedom County seemed to be the only secession movement county to still be active. Satterlee told a reporter that he didn't want to be portrayed as "whacked out, anti-govenment extremists. We could make a mistake and try to create anarchy, and throw the Sheriff's Office out. But that's not going to benefit the residents of Freedom County, or Snohomish County."

Many of the county-secession organizers had Patriot movement backgrounds. Thom Satterlee is a "common law" proponent who tries to give "legal advice" to similarly ideologically inclined people. For instance, he repeatedly tried to give advice to a tax protester named Floyd Ryan at a hearing in July 1997, prompting the judge to order him to sit down. In a 1995 election he was involved in, he identified himself as 46 years of age, but gave his only occupation as "consultant." Satterlee at one point tried to pay his taxes with checks backed by pseudo-legal "liens" filed against a federal judge in Seattle over his handling of a conspiracy and weapons case against a group of western Washington militiamen.

Sharon Pietila, a general promoter of "county secession," spoke at a Washington State Militia meeting in 1995; coincidentally, she was a neighbor of since-jailed militiaman John I. Pitner, involved in various bombmaking activities.

Other attempts at forming counties during the period 1993-98 in Washington state include "Cedar County" from King County (Ted Cowan, a longtime Wise Use advocate and leader of the Washington Property Rights Alliance; Lois Gustafson, Gordon Cox, Warren Iverson, Ted Callas); "River County" from Clark County (David Darby, former head of the Clark County chapter of the United States Militia Association, Joe Ahrend, head of the Clark County Militia [who blamed the OK city bombing on the US govt], Ed Uselmann, a tree farmer, Robert Skip Leuschner, a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral, Rudy Ebert, Peter Brennan, Richard Van Lieu, Marshall Adams); Pioneer County from Whatcom County; Skykomish County from Snohomish County (Arnie Hansen, a real estate broker); "Pioneer County" from Skagit County; "Independence County" from Whatcom County (Doug Howard, Sharon Pietala); and "Liberty County" from Grant County (also, reportedly, "Puget Sound," "West Seattle," and "Vashon" for Vashon Island).

Typical ideas of the groups may be seen from the proposal for River County, which claimed that no outside law enforcement would be allowed to talk to a county citizen without the sheriff's permission and similar Posse Comitatus/militia/common law court ideas.

The secessionists continued to lose their fights in court as well. On Jan. 28, 2000, Supreme Court Commissioner Geoff Crooks tossed out their last effort: "Once again, David Peter Guadalupe and Thom Satterlee invite this court to step through the looking glass into the strange world of Freedom County. On behalf of the court, I decline," Crooks wrote.

In 2000, the secessionists had their last gasp. On Oct. 23, Satterlee and Guadalupe gathered a group of followers and announced they were swearing in a new sheriff, a coroner, and an auditor for Freedom County, claiming that the signatures they had gathered were enough to create the county.

The sheriff gave his name as "Fnu Lnu," which is law-enforcement lingo for "first name unknown, last name unknown." His real name was Robert Victor Bender, a 57-year-old former FBI agent from the Seattle area who was hired by organizers to provide law enforcement for the would-be county, such as it is. When he tried to introduce himself to then-Snohomish County Sheriff Rick Bart, he was tossed out of the sheriff's office.

"Without a doubt, most of the people in this county think Mr. Satterlee and his group are a bunch of
wackos," says Sheriff Bart. "They have no credibility."

Afterward, the secessionists faded away due to a lack of interest and the fact that their neighbors had largely grown to fear them. There were no further activities in Snohomish County of any note.

However, Koster remained active. He was elected a commissioner to the very Snohomish County he had worked to help his constituents secede from in 2001. But he evidently remained fond of the Patriot movement, which by 2009 re-emerged, particularly in rural areas where it had flourished in the 1990s, as the Tea Party movement. He told a group of Tea Partiers: "The Tea Party Movement, the Patriot Movement to me is one of the most exciting things to happen to this country for a long time."

__

Here is a useful timeline of the secession movement, compiled by the Everett Herald staff.

History of 'Freedom County'

Here are some of the significant events in the history of the proposed Freedom County:
1993 -- Backers begin circulating petitions to carve out a new county from most of north Snohomish County.
1994 -- Supporters announce in January that they have collected more than 12,000 signatures, sufficient, they claim, to form Freedom County.
1995 -- Freedom County presents the signatures to the Legislature in April. Thom Satterlee and David Guadalupe later claim they were "elected" Freedom County commissioners on the bus trip to Olympia .
September 1995 -- Thom Satterlee runs for the Snohomish County charter review commission. He also mounts a referendum challenge to a newly enacted county ethics ordinance, an action that goes nowhere but puts the law on hold during much of the election season.
December 1995 -- Satterlee loses his charter commission bid. He joins other disgruntled candidates in a lawsuit alleging that Snohomish County elections officials used computers to manipulate vote results. A Snohomish County judge tosses out the complaint.
January 1996 -- Satterlee claims the Snohomish County auditor mishandled petitions from Freedom County after being asked by the state to check the validity of the signatures. The auditor found more than 2,400 signatures were from people who weren't registered to vote, or had signed twice, or did not live within the boundaries of the proposed new county.
May 1996 -- David Guadalupe writes Snohomish County officials, challenging the display of gold-fringed U.S. flags in county courtrooms. Guadalupe says he believes the country is under martial law and that fringe flags are symbols of tyranny. Guadalupe's letter to county officials warns they must address him as "David Peter, Guadalupe," because to do otherwise is to use his "nom de guerre (war name)" and "that is grounds for an action for slander."
June 1996 -- State officials and Satterlee spar over whether the people who signed the Freedom County petitions should be counted even if they are not registered to vote. Satterlee maintains the state Constitution places no voter registration requirement on "electors." Auditors admit they overlooked about 900 signatures that should have been counted, but not for the reason raised by Satterlee.
April 1997 -- Satterlee and another Freedom County backer asks the United Nations to launch an investigation, alleging backers of the proposed new county have had their rights trampled upon by state and federal officials who refuse to assist them in creating their secessionist county. They allege violation of international treaties, and want the U.N. to impose sanctions, including a possible economic boycott.
June 1997 -- U.S. Secret Service agents confiscate "public wealth rebate notes" that Satterlee attempted to redeem at a local bank, in part to fund Freedom County. The notes, which have a purported face value of $38 million, supposedly get their value from liens filed by anti-government activists against federal officials.
July 1997 -- Satterlee comes to the aid of a critic of the Internal Revenue Service who has barraged Sheriff Rick Bart and others with self-generated criminal complaints and arrest warrants. He joins the man in court hearings, and also affixes his personal seal on documents the man has filed, calling for a grand jury investigation. Satterlee's seal features his name under the words "Bishop of the Way" And "Yoshua's Talmadin." Satterlee declines to explain the seal, except to say that he is a bishop in a Judeo-Christian religion, which he wouldn't further identify.
November 1997 -- A Snohomish County judge dismisses a lawsuit brought on behalf of Freedom County by Satterlee and Guadalupe. The pair claimed Snohomish County owed them $125,000 for work they'd done representing constituents in their breakaway group. They also sought a legal claim to all public and private property in Snohomish County. The judge rules that Freedom County does not exist.
December 1997 -- The state Supreme Court refuses to hear a lawsuit brought by Satterlee and Guadalupe attempting to overturn the Snohomish County judge's ruling. "Having studied the pleadings field by Mr. Guadalupe and Mr. Satterlee, which are in the main legally incoherent despite a heavy larding of pseudo-legal rhetoric, I find no basis to grant a stay," a Supreme Court commissioner wrote. A federal case brought by the pair also is tossed out.
February 1998 -- The state Supreme Court rules in the case of Cedar County, a secessionist government proposed for King County. The state's highest court holds that simply gathering signatures and presenting them to legislators does not bring a county into existence. The court also finds that only the signatures of registered voters can be counted when reviewing petitions to form a new county. The ruling means that Freedom County not only doesn't exist, but backers were roughly 5,700 signatures short of the required number when they presented them to lawmakers in 1995.
April 1999 -- The state Court of Appeals rules that Freedom County does not exist.
September 1999 -- Satterlee sends warning notices to Gov. Gary Locke, Snohomish County Executive Bob Drewel and others, threatening a forceful attempt to seize their homes if they don't recognize Freedom County. The state attorney general warns him in writing that threats against public officials could result in felony charges.
January 2000 -- The state Supreme Court dismisses another case brought by Satterlee and Guadalupe. "Once again, David Peter Guadalupe and Thom Satterlee invite this court to step through the looking glass into the strange world of Freedom County. On behalf of the court, I decline," a commissioner writes. Justice Richard Sanders, however, files a dissenting opinion saying that the case should be heard because legal questions remain to be resolved in creating new counties.
August 2000 -- Freedom County backers begin holding public meetings, asserting that the time has come for them to begin taking action as a government. Satterlee sends letters to Snohomish County, claiming that it no longer has authority over land-use, planning and building issues in much of its north end. Satterlee says Freedom County is taking applications to fill the offices of sheriff, auditor, etc.
Oct. 23, 2000 -- A King County man who calls himself Fnu Lnu takes an oath to serve as Freedom County sheriff. Two other Snohomish County men take similar oaths to serve as coroner and auditor.
Oct. 24, 2000 -- Fnu Lnu meets with Sheriff Rick Bart and presents him with a notice asserting his authority. He says federal agents are no longer allowed to seize property for back taxes within Freedom County's alleged boundaries. Bart tells Lnu that Freedom County doesn't exist, Lnu has no authority, and that he will arrest him if he attempts to act as a law officer.

Newt's Dog Whistle: Obama Is 'Not A Real President'

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Look, we knew even before he won election in 2008 that Republicans were going to spend the next four years delegitimizing Barack Obama. After all, that was what the whole Birther thing was about, right?

Since then, of course, we've had a steady drumbeat of extremists parading various anti-Obama theories as a way to inject memes that further delegitimize Obama into the public bloodstream.

One of the points of this behavior is to assure "patriotic" right-wingers that they really aren't disrespecting the office of the presidency, and by extension the American people, in the process, because, you see, Obama isn't a "real" president. He's another fake president. You don't have to respect him. You can hate him all you like.

Of course, you would not be wrong to suspect that, for these folks, the only "legitimate" president is a Republican president. That's part of the game.

These sentiments are particularly pronounced in the South, and what you'll notice is that the memes delegitimizing Obama have a distinctly Southern flavor to them, especially when they come out of the mouths of Southerners like Newt Gingrich.

That is, they are rich with dog whistles, and they're all tailored to support a caricature of Obama as the reincarnation of the caricatures of black Southern politicians that was fabricated during the Reconstruction period and afterwards by apologists for the Klan and white supremacy: namely that of a cartoonishly lazy, grinning, chicken-eating, quarrelsome pack of crass opportunists.

Recall that Gingrich has a long record of this kind of garbage, including his suggestion that Obama is an "uppity" guy.

He built further on that suggestion the other night on Greta Van Susteren's Fox News show:

GINGRICH: [Obama] really is like the substitute [National Football League] referees in the sense that he’s not a real president. He doesn’t do anything that presidents do, he doesn’t worry about any of the things the presidents do, but he has the White House, he has enormous power, and he’ll go down in history as the president, and I suspect that he’s pretty contemptuous of the rest of us.

... You have to wonder what he’s doing. I’m assuming that there’s some rhythm to Barack Obama that the rest of us don’t understand. Whether he needs large amounts of rest, whether he needs to go play basketball for a while or watch ESPN, I mean, I don’t quite know what his rhythm is, but this is a guy that is a brilliant performer as an orator, who may very well get reelected at the present date, and who, frankly, he happens to be a partial, part-time president.

... This is a man who in an age of false celebrity-hood is sort of the perfect president, because he’s a false president. He’s a guy that doesn’t do the president’s job.

Gingrich makes all the haters feel better. It's what good Southern propagandists do: Provide a nice soothing false patina for their seething racism.

I'm reminded of the scene depicting black legislators playing with the seat of power in South Carolina after the Civil War that appeared in D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation:




This scene has been effectively endorsed by high-school history courses ever since, and to this day it remains widely believed -- thanks also to descendants of Birth of a Nation such as Gone With the Wind -- that white Southerners overthrew the "black rule" imposed by Reconstruction due to its self-evident malfeasance and incompetence.

It's also a lie. As Stephen Budiansky once explained:

A bald fact: Generations would hear how the South suffered “tyranny” under Reconstruction. Conveniently forgotten was the way that word was universally defined by white Southerners at the time: as a synonym for letting black men vote at all. A “remonstrance” issued by South Carolina’s Democratic Central Committee in 1868, personally signed by the leading native white political figures of the state, declared that there was no greater outrage, no greater despotism, than the provision for universal male suffrage just enacted in the state’s new constitution. There was but one possible consequence: “A superior race is put under the rule of an inferior race.” They offered a stark warning: “We do not mean to threaten resistance by arms. But the white people of our State will never quietly submit to negro rule. This is a duty we owe to the proud Caucasian race, whose sovereignty on earth God has ordained.”

“No free people, ever,” declared a speaker at a convention of the state’s white establishment a few years later, had been subjected to the “domination of their own slaves,” and the applause was thunderous. “This is a white man’s government,” was the phrase echoed over and over in the prints of the Democratic press and the orations of politicians denouncing the “tyranny” to which the “oppressed” South was being subjected.

A bald fact: more than three thousand freedmen and their white Republican allies were murdered in the campaign of terrorist violence that overthrew the only representatively elected governments the Southern states would know for a hundred years to come. Among the dead were more than sixty state senators, judges, legislators, sheriffs, constables, mayors, county commissioners, and other officeholders whose only crime was to have been elected. They were lynched by bands of disguised men who dragged them from cabins by night, or fired on from ambushes on lonely roadsides, or lured into a barroom by a false friend and on a prearranged signal shot so many times that the corpse was nothing but shreds, or pulled off a train in broad daylight by a body of heavily-armed men resembling nothing so much as a Confederate cavalry company and forced to kneel in the stubble of an October field and shot in the head over and over again, at point blank.

So saturated is our collective memory with Gone With the Wind stock characters of thieving carpetbaggers, ignorant Negroes, and low scalawags, that it comes as a shock not so much to discover that there were men and women of courage, idealism, rectitude, and vision who risked everything to try to build a new society of equality and justice on the ruins of the Civil War, who fought to give lasting meaning to the sacrifices of that terrible struggle, who gave their fortunes, careers, happiness, and lives to make real the simple and long-delayed American promise that all men were created equal—it comes as a shock not so much to be confronted by their idealism and courage and uprightness as by the realization that they were convinced, up to the very last, that they would succeed. Confident in the rightness of their cause, backed by the military might of the United States government, secure in the ringing declarations, now the supreme law of the land embodied in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments of the Constitution, that slavery was not only dead but that equality and the right to vote were the patrimony now of all Americans, they could not imagine that their nation could win such a terrible war and lose the ensuing peace.

Lose, the nation undeniably did. In 1879, an exhausted Albion Tourgée, an Ohio-born man who as a state judge in North Carolina had fearlessly defended the rights of the common man, colored and white; who had defied Ku Klux threats and the sneers of the conservative bar when he empanelled African Americans on juries and fined lawyers for saying “nigger” in his courtroom, gave a rueful and weary interview to the New York Tribune:

In all except the actual results of the physical struggle, I consider the South to have been the real victors in the war. I am filled with admiration and amazement at the masterly way in which they have brought about these results. The way in which they have neutralized the results of the war and reversed the verdict of Appomattox is the grandest thing in American politics.

Amazement: because such an outcome was not inevitable or foreordained; because, in the end, Reconstruction did not fail, but was overthrown, with impunity and audacity, in one of the bloodiest, darkest, and still least known chapters of American history.

Guys like Gingrich love to feed these old racist myths with dog whistles like this, cloaking it all in language seemingly devoid of racism -- but soaked throughout with exactly the kind of code words that old racists lap right up like PBR in a trough.

Eastern Washington's Republican Voters Reveal Their Racism

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]
Most folks think of Washington as a solidly "blue" state full of Seattle-esque progressives, but unfortunately, that's really not the case. It's largely (though not entirely) true of the western side of the state, which is geographically and culturally divided by the Cascade Range. On the eastern side of the divide, as we saw during the outbreak of right-wing ugliness during the 2010 elections, things are decidedly very different.

The Tea Party rules there. Most of the radios, it seems, are tuned to Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News plays in all the public spaces.

And it's white. Very, very white. It's that way throughout the interior Northwest. This whiteness was one of the reasons the Aryan Nations chose northern Idaho -- and by extension, eastern Washington -- for relocation from southern California in the 1970s.

Of course, eastern Washingtonians heatedly deny that there is any racism inherent in their cultural conservatism, that the violent activities and the ongoing presence of white racists in the region is purely accidental.

Now, the evidence provided by the results from the August 7 primary election in Washington have established, definitively, that anti-Latino racism is rampant in central and eastern Washington.

The evidence is apparent in a single peculiar race, that for the state's Supreme Court, Position 8. The only serious candidate, a fellow named Steve Gonzalez, wound up winning because he easily took the massive vote of western Washingtonians. His opponent, a fellow named Bruce Danielson, had not campaigned at all, had raised exactly $0 for his election, and was described as having "zero
qualifications to be on the bench" by the head of his local bar association.

But in eastern Washington, Danielson won handily in every county, taking 29 in all. The obvious answer lay in the two men's names.

And it wasn't an ideological, Republican thing, either. A couple of University of Washington researchers delved the actual numbers from the election and reached the clear conclusion that race played a significant role in the voting patterns.

Paul Wissell at KPLU reports:

Racial bias did play a role in the primary election battle between Washington State Supreme Court Justice Steve Gonzalez and his challenger Bruce Danielson.

That’s the conclusion of research conducted by Matt Barreto, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington.

In the August primary, Justice Gonzalez was re-elected to the court by an overwhelming margin. But in some areas of the state, Danielson, who didn’t even campaign, drew a surprisingly high number of votes.

The suspicion has been that race played a factor, that many voters passed over the Hispanic name of Gonzalez to choose Danielson because he was white.

Barreto, who reviewed voting patterns in every precinct in the state, says the evidence proves that was true.

“What we found was that in central and eastern Washington, in particularly in Yakima and Grant counties, that there was a very high degree of racial bloc voting. That meant that in very heavily white precincts Danielson did exceptionally well winning as much as 75 percent of the vote," Barreto said.

And Barreto says it wasn’t just whites who voted in a bloc. In heavily Hispanic precincts in Yakima, Gonzalez garnered as much as 70 percent of the vote.

Eli Sanders at The Stranger has more:

Barreto's findings show, for example, that in Eastern Washington's Yakima County, Danielson drew a full 75 percent of the non-Latino vote (helping Danielson receive 64 percent of the vote overall in that county to Gonzalez's 36 percent). In fact, non-Latino voters flocked so decisively to Danielson in Yakima County that he outperformed fellow conservative Rob McKenna there by 14 points. "Danielson should not have outperformed anyone," Barreto says, "because he had no name recognition and no money."

Same story in neighboring Grant County: Danielson won the county 67 percent to 33 percent, outperformed McKenna by 7 points, and pulled in 70 percent of the non-Latino vote.

Contrast those results with the results in Western Washington's Snohomish County, where Gonzalez won. In Snohomish, Danielson polled roughly even with McKenna, which makes sense, and is a sign that voters there were making choices based on ideology rather than on a candidate's last name. This allowed the non-Latino vote in Snohomish to be more evenly distributed: 44 percent of non-Latino voters there went for Danielson, while 56 percent went for Gonzalez.

Baretto and David Perez published an op-ed this morning explaining why these results underscore the need for the state to pass its own voting rights law:

Our data proves what many have suspected for a long time: Race still matters. That’s why we need the Washington Voting Rights Act to provide an equal opportunity for minority candidates. Equality has eluded Latino candidates for too long in Washington. It’s time to pass the Washington Voting Rights Act.

Perez wrote a piece for The Stranger last month with an explanation of the law:

After encountering similar problems in their state, California legislators adopted the California Voting Rights Act of 2002. The Washington Voting Rights Act is modeled after the California version.

Some say that the legislature ought to leave it to the local governments to decide for themselves how to conduct their elections. But these advocates of “local control” are missing the point. A system that gives 49.2% of one county’s population less than 3% of its elected offices is not local control (see: Franklin County). A system that silences 41% of Yakima City is not local control. Using at-large elections to circumvent our democratic principles is not local control.

True local control would empower the people by making sure local government represents local constituencies. Under the Washington Voting Rights Act, local control would flourish once again.

The González race is a sobering reminder that our country’s first principle—that all persons are created equal—may be self-evident, but it certainly isn’t self-enforcing. We have yet to reconcile the values of the American Republic with the hopes of the American people.

As Arizona's SB1070 Becomes Law, 'Dark Chapter' Of History Looms, Author Warns

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

We knew this was coming, so it didn't raise many heads last week when a federal judge cleared the way for Arizona to begin enforcing its "papers please" provisions in the anti-immigrant law, SB1070, it passed two years ago:

U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton ruled Tuesday afternoon that police officers can begin enforcing SB 1070’s provision that mandates officers, while enforcing other laws, to question the immigration status of those they suspect are in the country illegally.

Gov. Jan Brewer has repeatedly said she’s confident SB 1070 will not lead to racial profiling but immigrant rights advocates disagree and are teaching undocumented immigrants how to defend themselves during encounters with police.

“We still see people who think that because they don’t have papers, they don’t have rights, but they do and we’re educating them about those rights,” Dulce Juarez, a member of the civil rights group Respect-Respeto, told VOXXI.

Amy Goodman at Democracy Now, bless her heart, was paying attention, and so on Monday she invited author Jeff Biggers -- whose new book, State Out of the Union, tackles the underlying issues at stake in Arizona -- on to talk about this quiet sea change:

BIGGERS: You know, I think, in effect, Amy, we’re talking about one of the—a new chapter and one of the darkest chapters in civil rights violations that we’re going to be facing in the future, because this goes beyond just looking at immigration policy. This now affects all Americans who are reasonably suspicious. And, of course, I think many think tanks and many investigations have looked at—this is not only going to open up a state of confusion, we’re talking about all levels of local law enforcements who have to make this call as, you know, who is a person who’s reasonably suspicious to be a so-called undocumented alien. I think we’re really looking at potentially some of the worst racial profiling in American history.

This is especially the case, as we've explained previously, for drivers from out of state who do not have Arizona drivers' licenses -- and especially for drivers from states such as Washington that do not require proof of citizenship or residency. That's why the ACLU issued that travel warning about Arizona.

As Biggers explained to Goodman, this fiasco is the kind of thing that always happens when right-wing extremists obtain political power and begin enacting their agendas:

When the former governor of Arizona, Janet Napolitano, went off to Washington to become head of Homeland Security in 2009, Jan Brewer, our governor, took power. Jan Brewer was someone who was navigating the politics and really was not part of this anti-immigrant fervor. There was this fringe movement, led by this state senator named Russell Pearce, part of this 10th Amendment movement who believe they’re not citizens of the United States but citizens the sovereign states of the United States, that really believes to the core of states’ rights, going all the way back to folks like in the 1950s.

And it’s that small fringe that managed to take power and ram through this very anti-immigrant, extremist agenda that went beyond immigration policy. It went to all levels of government, be in healthcare, in guns, in education and, of course, down to the fact of banning Mexican-American studies.

Goodman also played a lesser-aired segment of the secret Mitt Romney videotapes -- a segment in which Romney muses about his own family history in Mexico, and makes a backhanded reflection on how lousy his Latino outreach program is going:

AMY GOODMAN: Mitt Romney, you mentioned. I want to talk about this notorious video of Mitt Romney telling a crowd of wealthy donors in Florida he doesn’t worry about the 47 percent of Americans who are, quote, "dependent" on government and see themselves as, quote, "victims." In comments that have received less attention, Romney is also heard on the original tape joking to his audience that he would have a better chance this election had he been born a Latino.

MITT ROMNEY: My heritage, my dad, as you probably know, was the governor of Michigan and was the head of a car company, but he was born in Mexico. And had he been born of Mexican parents, I’d have a better shot at winning this. But he was unfortunately born to Americans living in Mexico. And he lived there for a number of years. And, I mean, I say that jokingly, but it would be helpful to be Latino.

AMY GOODMAN: The significance of this secret tape that was made of Mitt Romney speaking to these wealthy donors in Florida, Jeff Biggers?

JEFF BIGGERS: You know, once again, here’s the true Romney coming out, a man who is open—openly, he was the first presidential candidate in the Republican Party to embrace 1070, the attrition through enforcement policy. His informal adviser was Kris Kobach, of course, the secretary of state from Kansas, who actually shaped the bill with Russell Pearce in Arizona. Romney has been lockstep with Arizona every step of the way from the beginning. At the same time, they do realize that in 15 states of the swing states you have the vote hinging on about 3 percent in these same states where you’re going to have an increase of 6 to 8 percent of Latino voters. And so they know the Latino voter is going to be the most important vote in this election, and they want to try to coddle it sometime, but at the same time they have completely rejected and dismissed the Latinos and their needs and their rights.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, you have Mitt Romney pushing self-deportation.

JEFF BIGGERS: Right, self-deportation. And the irony, of course, is that Romney likes to invoke his family history. And so, as a historian, let’s look at his family history. In a nutshell, Romney’s family did not simply go to Mexico as polygamists, as Mormons. They fled the country on the lam in a perjury charge. They were complete outlaws. And he has completely misrepresented that in his memoir.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, explain.

JEFF BIGGERS: Well, his great-grandfather—in fact, there were a number of Mormon leaders, like the Udall family and the Flake family, who actually had to go to prison for polygamy charges. But at the same time, there was encroachment in land deals, and the Romney family was being persecuted for perjury over a land deal. They went—he revoked—he gave up his bond. He went on the lam. A community was left in the lurch, according to the historical documents, the diaries of the Udalls. And they actually ran off to Arizona as outlaws. And, of course, a few years later, they come creeping back to America as refugees when the Mexican Revolution—

AMY GOODMAN: When they went to Mexico.

JEFF BIGGERS: Mexico, right. And then, once again, they come creeping back as refugees looking for sanctuary when the Mexican Revolution comes by. There’s all sorts of historical contradictions with Romney’s whole relationship with Arizona.

Right-Wing Obama Lynching Advocates Take Cue From Eastwood

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

You may recall that there were a couple of nooses displayed as protests of Barack Obama in right-wing precincts the night he was elected in 2008, and there have been effigy hangings of the president here and there since. They quickly were swept under the rug, everyone moved along, and that was that. But obviously, those sentiments among racist rednecks have, if anything, intensified in recent years.

And now that it's clear he is about to win re-election, it's coming back out -- with clear references to Clint Eastwood's speech at the GOP convention included.

First there was the cretin who hung an empty chair labeled "Nobama" in close proximity to a George Allen sign at festival in Virginia this weekend. No one evidently was able to track down the culprit.

As we say, effigy hangings aren't particularly new, though they do serve as a nice barometer of the anger levels of the expressly racist faction out there. What made this noteworthy was the clear reference to Eastwood's use of an empty chair as a proxy for President Obama.

Then an angry Republican in Austin, Texas, did it in his front yard:

Today, Burnt Orange Report received the photo at right, taken in front of a home in Northwest Austin. The resident, a Republican, lynched an empty chair from a tree in his yard, which one can easily interpret to represent a racially motivated act of violence against the President.

When confronted, the man doubled down:

I called the homeowner to ask about his display, citing my concerns as a fellow Austinite. He replied, and I quote, "I don't really give a damn whether it disturbs you or not. You can take [your concerns] and go straight to hell and take Obama with you. I don't give a shit. If you don't like it, don't come down my street."

Ironically, the homeowner in question, Bud Johnson, won "Yard of the Month" in August 2010 from his Homeowners Association. I guess his display was a little different that month?

The next day, the man added an American flag and a guard to his display.

I wonder how Clint Eastwood feels about having his piece of impromptu acting serve as grist for a lynch mob.

Domestic Terrorism: Senate Hears Testimony About The Rise Of The Right-Wing Threat

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

While much of the media attention, driven by congressional hearings, on terrorism issues focused this week on events in Libya, there was another Senate hearing that took a good look at terrorism on our own shores.

Chaired by Sen. Dick Durbin, it was titled "Hate Crimes and the Threat of Domestic Extremism," and much of it was focused on last month's horrific shooting rampage at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, as well it should.

But the most riveting testimony was provided by a former Department of Homeland Security analyst named Daryl Johnson, who had this to say:

The threat of domestic terrorism motivated by extremist ideologies is often dismissed and overlooked in the national media and within the U.S. government. Yet we are currently seeing an upsurge in domestic non-Islamic extremist activity, specifically from violent right-wing extremists. While violent left-wing attacks were more prevalent in the 1970s, today the bulk of violent domestic activity emanates from the right wing.

Of course, we've been writing about this for some time now, particularly in light of the fact that Johnson was driven out of the DHS by the witch hunt that ensued after he authored that bulletin on right-wing extremism that has turned out to be all too prescient.

We have seen the results, as dozens of police officers have died in the line of duty while confronting right-wing extremists for whom they were largely unprepared.

Johnson was the focus of a Washington Post piece examining how the DHS eviscerated its capacity for adequately analyzing the threat of right-wing extremism, and Johnson recently provided more details for Spencer Ackerman. After the mess in Wisconsin, all Johnson could say was that he had tried to warn them.

Johnson explored a sampling of the record in his testimony:

Since the 2008 presidential election, domestic non-Islamic extremists have shot 27 law enforcement officers, killing 16 of them. Over a dozen mosques have been burned with firebombs – likely attributed to individuals embracing Islamaphobic beliefs. In May 2009, an abortion doctor was murdered while attending church. Two other assassination plots against abortion providers were thwarted during 2011 and six women’s health clinics were attacked with explosive and incendiary devices within the past two years.

Further, in January 2010, a tax resister deliberately crashed his small plane filled with a 50-gallon drum of gasoline into an IRS processing center in Austin, Texas. In January 2011, three incendiary bombs were mailed to government officials in Annapolis, Md., and Washington, D.C. Also, in January 2011, a backpack bomb was placed along a Martin Luther King Day parade route in Spokane, Wash. Finally since 2010, there have been multiple plots to kill ethnic minorities, police and other government officials by militia extremists and white supremacists.

In August 2012 alone, a white supremacist killed six worshipers at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis. Sovereign citizens shot four sheriff’s deputies, killing two, in St. Johns Parish, La. And, four active-duty Army soldiers, who had formed an anti-government militia group and were hoarding weapons and ammunition in an alleged plot to overthrow the government, were charged in the deaths of two associates who, they worried, might tip law enforcement to their clandestine activities.

And as I say, that's just a sampling. The bigger picture is even more disturbing: In reality, right-wing domestic terrorism is occurring at a remarkable rate, more than twice that of the "Islamist" domestic terrorism that has so preoccupied people like Rep. Peter King and the House Homeland Security Committee in the past couple of years.

It's not just Congress. As Johnson's example shows, it's also true of the official response. See, for instance, the testimony in the same hearing of DHS spokesman Scott McAllister and the FBI's Michael Clancy:



McAllister touted the work of their intelligence analysts:

MCALLISTER: The Department's efforts to counter violent extremism are threefold. We are working to better understand the phenomenon of violent extremism through extensive analysis and research on the behaviors and indicators of violent extremism. We are bolstering efforts to address the dynamics of violent extremism by strengthening partnerships with local, state, and international partners. And, we are expanding support for information-driven, community-oriented policing efforts through training and grants.

The DHS is claiming that its analysts are working hard to examine the problem of this violence, but the reality is that it has been eviscerating its ability to do so for any kind of extremism except Islamist.

And when McAllister was confronted by Durbin about this, he simply evaded by saying that the number of analysts it employed in such given endeavors was "sensitive". Yes, we can imagine it is.
Not much better was the overview from the FBI's Clancy:

CLANCY: On September 10, 2012, the FBI disseminated its National Terrorism Assessment on Domestic Terrorism. In the formulation of this assessment, the overall threat ranking considers intent, capability, and posture in its determination of the threat domestic extremist movements pose in the United States. The FBI assesses that economic and political events – foremost among them the coming Presidential election – are likely to provoke domestic extremists into a more active state, although this is unlikely to drive an increase in large-scale violence. Smaller, localized acts of violence committed by domestic extremists, however, cannot be dismissed. The FBI further assesses that domestic extremist movements pose a medium-to-low terrorism threat. Specific political and economic events scheduled in 2012 create the potential for greater volatility within domestic extremism than existed in the previous year.

The FBI may want to reassess this conclusion, given that we have in fact had fifteen cases of domestic terrorism in the United States over the eight months since December of 2011, with three significant cases in the month of August alone.

Meanwhile, Johnson responded to the DHS's vague answers sharply:

JOHNSON: Well, you've already outlined in your testimony that when I was the team leader at the Department of Homeland Security, we had five analysts directly under my supervision. But we also had additional analysts that supplemented us. So we had as many as eight analysts looking at this issue. Today, there's one. And that's a fact.

The problem isn't going away. Crooks and Liars readers will recall that we were trying to track these kinds of cases for awhile, but the numbers have become large enough that we've taken this to another level of reportage. We'll have more information on this soon, but take our word for it: Johnson's warning that we are seeing a significant increase is not exaggerated in the least.

'Noble' O'Reilly: Fox Couldn't Succeed If It Was Dishonest

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

 Bill O'Reilly tried to make a "liberal media" punching bag out of Ted Koppel last night on his Fox News show, and found out that sometimes the punching bag can punch back hard.

O'REILLY: You think that we have corrupted the sanctity of fair news coverage.

KOPPEL: I think --

O'REILLY: That's what I think.

KOPPEL: I think that ideological coverage of the news, be it of the right or be it of the left, has created a political reality in this country which is bad for America. I think it's made it difficult if not impossible for decent men and women in Congress, on Capitol Hill to reach across the aisle and find compromise.

And if we can't -- and if we can't do that, Bill, we're going to be in -- and -- and we have been, I think, for the last few years, in a terrible situation in this country where politically we can't make deals anymore.

Now, you know that one hurt, because O'Reilly really can't deny that what Fox does is propaganda (well, he can try, and does, but it's empty blather) -- and that is has effectively altered the fabric of reality for a whole nation of right-wingers. And that the public discourse is worse off for it, because so much of it is now predicated on Fox-generated falsehoods.

After all, it's difficult to have a reasonable discourse when one side insists on believing laughable fabrications and clings to them as the starting point of the conversation.

So instead he resorted to pointing to Fox's popularity as proof of its worthiness:

O'REILLY: So you're blaming me and the Fox News Channel for the deterioration of Congress. If they don't have enough guts to do what's best for the country by compromising, all right, they don't deserve to be there. You can't be on top for as long as the Fox News Channel has been on top and sell a product that's inferior or dishonest. It's impossible in this country.

Comedy gold. As though Fox News weren't living proof that you can lie through your teeth 24/7 and make a killing from it, so long as you market everything you do to resentful and angry white people. P.T. Barnum's theorem and all that.

But that wasn't the end of it. Near the end of the conversation, O'Reilly turned pious on us:

KOPPEL: The millions -- the millions of people are watching those of you with a particular point of view.

O'REILLY: That's the way the country works. That's the free marketplace.

KOPPEL: That's the free marketplace and I'm perfectly content to leave it on that -- on that note. It's a business. And it's operating as a business. And once upon a time, you and I actually thought journalism was a calling.

O'REILLY: But I still think that I'm doing something noble.

Yeah, destroying public discourse in America -- how noble. It's as noble as Mitt Romney.

[H/t Media Matters]

Romney's '47 Percent' Rant Reveals A Right Wing Voting Bloc Built On Lies

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

There's always that moment of total cognitive dissonance that happens when people who happen to live in the real world, and not that right-wing ideological bubble we sometime call Planet Bizarro, listen in on the conversation as conservative True Believers like Mitt Romney babble their Fox-brewed talking points among each other. That's the component that makes Mitt's revealed videos of his "47 percent" rant to fellow Republicans so special.

The dissonance is different for different people. For me, it lay in this: I pay federal taxes. Lots of them. I have every year of my adult life. Moreover, I have never taken a dime of government largesse and am not in any sense dependent on it. And I would never vote for Mitt Romney or the Republicans or their whole every-dog-for-himself philosophy. Nor am I alone. Like millions of other smart Americans, I want a strong and complete social safety net, because I'm smart enough to understand that making sure everyone is cared for appropriately makes the whole of society better for everyone, me included. I might add, for the privileged particularly -- even though they're too stupid and selfish to get that.

But that's only a small component of the bigger picture here, which is pretty stark when viewed in perspective, namely: The conservative worldview is increasingly built on a foundation of complete and utter falsehoods, laughably provable, and irredeemably vicious in nature.

The Foxheads and their right-wing enablers have now closed ranks to proclaim, once again, that "Romney was right!" Which is pretty funny, when you think about it: After all, it was clearly Romney regurgitating an oft-repeated Fox News falsehood, as Media Matters lays out in detail, that we saw on that video.

You can see the epistemological loop closing in on itself, so that they now are just talking among themselves on their own planet, believing only their own lies as a bizarre version of fabricated reality.

And it creates a quasi-eliminationist mentality among these True Believers. Romney and his fellow Republicans not only really believe that these people's views should be dismissed, but that their views should not count at all.

My favorite iteration came when Steve Doocy not only claimed that 47 percent of the American public pays no taxes at all, but suggested that this status might be reasonable cause for them to lose the right to vote.

I'm sure, however, that Doocy would make an exception for the 7,000 millionaires who paid no taxes at all.

The best part of all this, though, is that the whole "47 percent pay no taxes" meme is a lie. David Leonhardt at the New York Times demolished it two yeas ago:

The 47 percent number is not wrong. The stimulus programs of the last two years — the first one signed by President George W. Bush, the second and larger one by President Obama — have increased the number of households that receive enough of a tax credit to wipe out their federal income tax liability.

But the modifiers here — federal and income — are important. Income taxes aren’t the only kind of federal taxes that people pay. There are also payroll taxes and investment taxes, among others. And, of course, people pay state and local taxes, too.

Even if the discussion is restricted to federal taxes (for which the statistics are better), a vast majority of households end up paying federal taxes. Congressional Budget Office data suggests that, at most, about 10 percent of all households pay no net federal taxes. The number 10 is obviously a lot smaller than 47.

Moreover, that doesn't even include the bigger picture, which includes a wide range of non-federal taxes:

State and local taxes, meanwhile, may actually be regressive. That is, middle-class and poor families may face higher tax rates than the wealthy. As Kim Rueben of the Tax Policy Center notes, state and local income taxes and property taxes are less progressive than federal taxes, while sales taxes end up being regressive. The typical family pays a lot of state and local taxes, too — almost half as much as in federal taxes.

There is no question that the wealthy pay a higher overall tax rate than any other group. That is an American tradition. But there is also no question that their tax rates have fallen more than any other group’s over the last three decades. The only reason they are paying more taxes than in the past is that their pretax incomes have risen so rapidly — which hardly seems a great rationale for a further tax cut.

As Annie Lowrey explained at the NYT recently:

The nonpartisan and highly respected Tax Policy Center derived the 47 percent number – it is actually 46 percent, as of 2011 – and published an excellent analysis of it last summer.

It found that about half of the households that do not pay federal income tax do not pay it because they are simply too poor. The Tax Policy Center gives as an example a couple with two children earning less than $26,400 a year: The household would pay no federal income tax because its standard deduction and other exemptions would simply erase its liability.

The other half, the Tax Policy Center found, consists of households taking advantage of tax credits and other provisions, mostly support for senior citizens and low-income working families.

Put bluntly, these are not households shirking their tax liabilities. The pool consists mostly of the poor, of relatively low-income working families and of old people. The tax code is specifically designed to reduce the burden on them.

Indeed, the recession and its aftermath have left tens of millions of workers out of a job or underemployed, removing more households from payment of federal income taxes. Moreover, the Bush tax cuts – the signature Republican economic policy of the 2000s, which doubled the child tax credit, increased a number of other deductions and exemptions, and lowered marginal tax rates – erased millions of families’ federal income tax liabilities.

It is also worth noting that though tens of millions of families do not pay federal income taxes, there are virtually no families that do not pay any taxes – between payroll taxes, sales taxes, state and local taxes, and on and on.

Perhaps even more amusing is that, if reality were known to Mitt Romney, then he would know that he's actually attacking his own base, since the states where 47 percent of the population pay no federal income taxes are deep red states, mostly in the South, and its Northwestern counterpart, Idaho:

But as Derek Thompson observed in delving these numbers deeper:

The 47% aren't lucky ducks cheating the system. They're mostly poor working families getting pilloried by the political party that wrote the rules they're following. If the 47% are the monster here, then Republicans helped play the role of Dr. Frankenstein. "Non-payers" have grown in the last 30 years because of marginal tax rate cuts and credits like the EITC passed under Republican presidents and continued by both parties in Congress.

And what's truly sad is that many of those people will actually be gulled into voting for Mitt Romney, because Fox News tells them he's on their side.

Born Every Minute: 'Values Voters' Lap Up Fake 'Ex-Terrorist'

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Ever notice how right-wingers aren't particularly picky about where they get their information? Oh, sure, that guy on the teevee may look like some leaf blower got ahold of his toupee out on the used-car saleslot, but if he says something nasty about Barack Obama, then his word is gold!

Brian Tashman at RightWingWatch happened to catch one such character, speaking before the awestruck crowd at last week's "Values Voters Summit 2012", a self-proclaimed "former terrorist" who has renounced Islam and the evil ways of the Islamist conspiracy against America because he found The Love of JeHaySus. (Heather discussed him earlier.)

Here "Saleem" regales the slack-jawed VVS audience with his new Obama conspiracy tale:

SALEEM: And when we surrender to them authority, and we apologize to everybody over there, in Islam that is a victory, and that is the start of the march now somewhere to take over the land, take over your country and fulfill your purpose and become united Islamic nations!

This is what happened. Egypt is the capital of the OIC -- the OIC meeting here in America with Hillary and her staff! You are about to introduce U.N. Resolution 1618, the hate crime bill, which will subjugate American people to be arrested and put to jail, and the churches and synagogues shut down and go underground. And if they still go they will be put in jail and be fined big time. Which will break the First Amendment and Second Amendment.

This is about to be put as early as January. As early maybe as March, at most. Right now, it is on the table to be put together. We got something to fight for, and that fight is for our children, for our grandchildren, for our liberty! For our freedom! For the future! For the nations!

Yyyyyyyeah. OK. Whatever you say, dude.

Actually, Tim Murphy of Mother Jones ran into Saleem at the VVC and tried to get him to answer some of the questions he's been asking about Saleem and his story for a long time:

But as I reported in a piece for the magazine last spring, much of Saleem's story doesn't add up. California police have no record of an incident he describes vividly in the first chapter of his book; the FBI says it has no record of meeting with him. And those who knew him before he began traveling the country under a stage name say they have serious doubts about huge portions of his narrative. Wally Winter, a former roommate during the period Saleem purports to have been grooming terrorists, told me, "He could sell swampland in Louisiana. I really do not believe the story about the terrorism."

Gotta love Saleem's brass, though. And guess where he picked up all that evangelical style: Straight out of Pat Robertson, his former employer:

Doug Howard, a professor of Middle Eastern history at Michigan's Calvin College, first encountered Saleem in 2007, when he was invited to speak at the school. Howard quickly became suspicious: For starters, Saleem claimed to be a descendant of the "Grand Wazir of Islam," a position that doesn't exist. Howard dug deeper and discovered that Saleem's original name was Khodor Shami—and that for more than a decade before outing himself as a former terrorist he had worked for Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network and James Dobson's Focus on the Family. (CBN declined to comment. Focus on the Family confirmed Saleem was an employee but would not comment further.)

Though I have to say: At least Saleem is more credible than Paul Ryan.

Watters And O'Reilly Ask Questions They Won't Answer Themselves

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]


Look, it's not as though we didn't already know that Fox News ambush specialist Jesse Watters is a major-league wanker. I mean, c'mon: Stalking bloggers on their vacations? Really?

But this takes the cake.

Priscilla at Newshounds digs up a clip from last week's O'Reilly Factor on Fox in which Watters shows off his right-wing brand of humor [hint: Mallard Fillmore is funnier] with clips he brought back from the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, where he obviously was stalking the hallways in search of liberal celebrities to harass.

But his key clip moment in Charlotte came when he decided to harass the mayor of Boston, Thomas Menino, about Menino's opposition to allowing a Chick-fil-A in Boston because of its owners' anti-gay politics -- linking it, a la Tony Perkins, to the attempted shootings at the Family Research Council offices in Washington.

Here's how Watters put it:

“Do you feel bad about the fact that you've created all this controversy that this crazed gunman went up and shot up this conservative outfit?”

Just roll that one around and enjoy the delicious, though bizarre, hypocrisy of it all.
First of all, as Priscilla observes:

Mayor Menino did not engage in incendiary rhetoric which would have, in any way, motivated the shooter. He said that he would block the chicken franchise, Chick fil-A from coming to Boston because he objected to what he felt were intolerant views against gays by the president of Chick fil-A. It does not appear that Menino ever mentioned the Family Research Council.

Nor, might we add, is there even a whiff of evidence that the FRC shooter was inspired to act by anything that Mayor Menino said. Nothing, except the conjecture of right-wing jackasses like Jesse Watters and Bill O'Reilly.

Now let's compare and contrast that to a case in which someone actually was murdered: the assassination of Dr. George Tiller. And in that case, there is a mountain of evidence connecting the incendiary eliminationist rhetoric of Bill O'Reilly, fueled by the grotesquely afactual "reporting" of Jesse Watters, to that killing.

Three years ago, O'Reilly and his ambush-crew specialist, Jesse Watters, went hard after Tiller, accusing him of wantonly murdering babies because he performs late-term abortions:

Bill summarized in a heartfelt Talking Points Memo on Friday, November 10th: "If we as a society allow an undefined mental health exception in late-term abortions, then babies can be killed for almost any reason... This is the kind of stuff that happened in Mao's China and Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union... If we allow this, America will no longer be a noble nation... If we allow Dr. George Tiller and his acolytes to continue, we can no longer pass judgment on any behavior by anybody."

Including, evidently, murderous extremists. And, as you can see in the video above (from 2006), O'Reilly similarly accused anyone who refused to buy into his accusation of coddling killers:

I don’t care what you think. We have incontrovertible evidence that this man is executing babies about to be born because the woman is depressed…if you don’t believe me, I don’t care…You are OK with Dr. Tiller executing babies about to be born because the mother says she’s depressed.

And then there was O'Reilly's notorious radio attack on Tiller:

And if I could get my hands on Tiller -- well, you know. Can't be vigilantes. Can't do that. It's just a figure of speech.

But despicable? Oh, my God. Oh, it doesn't get worse. Does it get worse? No.

Moreover, the killer, Scott Roeder was heavily involved in the radical anti-abortion group Operation Rescue (whose propaganda was promoted regularly and featured prominently as "factual" on O'Reilly's show) and avidly read its newsletters -- which featured weekly pieces from Bill O'Reilly, including several attacking Tiller as a "baby killer" -- and its website, which liked to feature O'Reilly videos attacking Dr. Tiller. Indeed, O'Reilly had indulged a high-profile and unusually obsessive (not to mention vicious) jihad against Tiller, resulting in 42 such attacks on Tiller, 24 of which referred to him generically as a "baby killer."

Even to this day, O'Reilly insists he did nothing wrong: after all, sure, it was wrong to shoot the guy, but "what Tiller was doing was murder."

And who was O'Reilly's chief facilitator in this lethal media attack? Why, Jesse Watters, of course; here's his notorious "confrontation" with Tiller's attorney.

Of course, Tiller was hardly alone. Watters has made a career out of harassing liberals. ThinkProgress has a list.

And he's obviously proud of it, too. His breathless account of his and O'Reilly's attacks on Tiller are still available at the Fox website.

A word to the wise to gross hypocrites like Jesse Watters: Karma is a bitch.

Far-Right Extremists Tried Pinning Blame For Anti-Islam Film On Jews

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

It turns out now that the amateurish hate film that sparked the lethal riots in Egypt, Libya, and Yemen -- or at least, in the case of the Libya murders, provided a pretext -- is a product of the fetid, far-right underbelly of American politics. And it seems that not only did the Islamophobic far-right militiamen behind the movie make it with the explicit intent of sparking riots abroad, but they even attempted to pin the blame for its production on Israeli Jews.

The Associated Press reports on the identity of the filmmakers:

The person who identified himself as Bacile and described himself as the film's writer and director told the AP on Tuesday that he had gone into hiding. But doubts rose about the man's identity amid a flurry of false claims about his background and role in the purported film.

Bacile told the AP he was an Israeli-born, 56-year-old Jewish writer and director. But a Christian activist involved in the film project, Steve Klein, told the AP on Wednesday that Bacile was a pseudonym and that he was Christian.

Klein had told the AP on Tuesday that the filmmaker was an Israeli Jew who was concerned for family members who live in Egypt.

CBS' Bill Whitaker has more.

But who is Steve Klein? Max Blumenthal tells us:

While Bacile claims to be in hiding, and his identity remains murky, another character who has been publicly listed as a consultant on the film is a known anti-Muslim activist with ties to the extreme Christian right and the militia movement. He is Steve Klein, a Hemet, California based insurance salesman who claims to have led a “hunter-killer team” in Vietnam.”

Klein is a right-wing extremist who emerged from the same axis of Islamophobia that produced Anders Behring Breivik and which takes inspiration from the writings of Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, and Daniel Pipes.

It appears Klein (or someone who shares his name and views) is an enthusiastic commenter on Geller’s website, Atlas Shrugged, where he recently complained about Mitt Romney’s “support for a Muslim state in Israel’s Heartland.” In July 2011, Spencer’s website, Jihad Watch, promoted a rally Klein organized alongside the anti-Muslim Coptic extremist Joseph Nasrallah to demand the firing of LA County Sheriff Lee Baca, whom they painted as a dupe for Hamas.

Indeed, Klein's activities as a "Christian militiaman" were the focus of an astonishing SPLC report filed this spring by C&L's own Leah Nelson:

In a 22-acre compound at the southern edge of Sequoia National Park in California, a secretive cohort of militant Christian fundamentalists is preparing for war. One of the men helping train the flock in the art of combat, a former Marine named Steve Klein, believes that California is riddled with Muslim Brotherhood sleeper cells “who are awaiting the trigger date and will begin randomly killing as many of us as they can.”

“I know I’m getting prepared to shoot back,” Klein says.

At the head of the Church at Kaweah is Pastor Warren Mark Campbell, who sees yet another enemy on the horizon: the “New World Order,” that chimera of the conspiracists who populate the resurgent, antigovernment “Patriot” movement.

The tiny church has been well outside the mainstream since the early 1990s, when founding pastor Warren Lee Campbell (father of the current pastor) bought into the notion that churches should shun all government regulation and answer solely to God. Since then, the church has become increasingly radical, ramping up its paramilitary activities and forging alliances with an array of figures revered on the radical right — among them, militia and Patriot leaders, white supremacists, neo-Confederates, border vigilantes and Christian Reconstructionists, whose goal is to turn America into a theocracy based on the Old Testament. In the meantime, the church’s militia has gone from patrolling the banks of the Kaweah River to conducting joint exercises with Minuteman groups along the Mexican border.

Campbell's church, as Nelson details painstakingly, has a long history of connections to the far right, particularly the Patriot/militia movement in the 1990s, and its descendants in the years since. One of those descendants is Klein:

Over the past year, Johnson and the church militia have developed a relationship with Steve Klein, a longtime religious-right activist who brags about having led a “hunter killer” team as a Marine in Vietnam. Klein, who calls Islam a “penis-driven religion” and thinks Los Angeles Sheriff Lee Baca is a Muslim Brotherhood patsy, is allied with Christian activist groups across California. In 2011, as head of the Concerned Citizens for the First Amendment, he worked with the Vista, Calif.-based Christian Anti-Defamation Commission on a campaign to “arm” students with the “truth about Islam and Muhammad” — mainly by leafleting high schools with literature depicting the Prophet Mohammed as a sex-crazed pedophile.

Klein, based in Hemet, Calif., has been active in extremist movements for decades. In 1977, he founded Courageous Christians United, which now conducts “respectful confrontations” outside of abortion clinics, Mormon temples and mosques. Klein also has ties to the Minuteman movement. In 2007, he sued the city of San Clemente for ordering him to stop leafleting cars with pamphlets opposing illegal immigration.

In addition to working with Johnson and the Church at Kaweah’s militia, Klein conducts drills with the Christian Guardians, a San Francisco-based group headed by Andrew Saqib James, an American-born Pakistani Christian who calls Islam “a giant crime syndicate” and hopes his group will become “the most feared militia in the world.” For the past year, the Church at Kaweah’s website has advertised joint trainings with the Christian Guardians and other likeminded groups. Based at the church’s sprawling grounds, the series of trainings is described as a “unique system of learning how to survive the Muslim Brotherhood as we teach the Christian Morality of Biblical Warfare.”

Meanwhile, the Daily Beast reports that "Bacile" is really a fellow named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, and he has a long criminal record:

The man behind the incendiary film, Innocence of Muslims, has a criminal record that includes a narcotics conviction. According to a source close to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula was arrested by the L.A. Country Sheriff's Department on March 27, 1997 and charged with intent to manufacture methamphetamine. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced on Nov. 3, 1997 to one year in county jail and three years probation. The D.A.’s office said he violated probation on April 8, 2002, and was re-sentenced to another year in county jail.

Nakoula had been registered to vote as a Democrat from 2002-2008, according to the L.A. County Registrar Recorder’s office. In April of 2008, he changed his political affiliation to American Independent.

Nakoula’s identity and involvement in the film was confirmed to the Associated Press by federal law-enforcement officials. Nakoula, who lives near Los Angeles, had claimed to numerous media outlets that the man who created and directed the film was an Israeli real estate developer named Sam Bacile. The Associated Press reported yesterday that Nakoula was a Coptic Christian convicted of federal bank fraud charges in 2010.

Meanwhile, Klein is perfectly content with the outcome of his intentional incendiarism:

"I could not have done a better job than what I have done to point out to the people of the world, and the vast majority of Muslims, just how dangerous these people are," he said.

He has no regrets for the violence it triggered. "People have asked me, 'Do I have blood on my hands?' No I don't. The blood's on their hands, not mine. "

Indeed, according to the AP report, this is exactly what they had hoped for:

Klein told the AP he vowed to help make the movie but warned the filmmaker that "you're going to be the next Theo van Gogh." Van Gogh was a Dutch filmmaker killed by a Muslim extremist in 2004 after making a film that was perceived as insulting to Islam.

"We went into this knowing this was probably going to happen," Klein said.

So let's see ... you make an intentionally incendiary piece of propaganda knowing perfectly well that you're probably going to cost Americans their lives in so doing ... but you don't have their blood on your hands?

You may not think so, Mr. Klein, but the rest of the world does.

Hannity Guest Obenshain Rants: Obama 'Promotes Islam,' 'Attacks' Christians

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

In case you were wondering if the dog-whistles you've been hearing at Fox suggesting that President Obama is a secret Muslim who wants to destroy America might get a little louder, Obama-hating author Kate Obenshain gave an answer last night on Sean Hannity's show, with Juan Williams providing the straight-man routine.

The occasion was a discussion of the embassy protest in Cairo:

HANNITY: He gave 1.5 billion taxpayer dollars to the Muslim Brotherhood -- Islamists hit our embassy and took our flag down, and put an Al Qaeda flag up there! Where is he? Where is Mr. President leadership?

WILLIAMS: Excuse me, but I believe the Bush administration and the Obama administration have supported a freedom agenda in the Middle East -- pro-democracy, and people vote in a way we don't like.

HANNITY: This was never pro-democracy, Juan! This was always the Muslim Brotherhood was going to be in power!

WILLIAMS: It is pro-democracy! They elected the guy from the Muslim Brotherhood!

OBENSHAIN: This president has been steadfast in supporting -- promoting Islam. He does not defend religious -- he does not -- he is not standing -- he never promotes Christians or -- in fact, in fact, attacks them!

WILLIAMS: Oh, stop. Come on Kate. He is not promoting Islam.

OBENSHAIN: Absolutely he is, Juan. Again and again, he puts down Christians, he puts down the Israelis, he goes after them.

WILLIAMS: He is promoting America's national interests and trying to find peace.

OBENSHAIN: He is not promoting religious freedom for anybody except Islam.

Obviously, dog whistles are no longer in vogue at Fox. Now they're just being bigots in plain sight.

Romney's Debacle: Smirking Attacks Make Unfitness Clear

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Well, as Josh Marshall says, "this is when you learn they're not ready." Or at least when your suspicions become manifest.

The roof has caved in on Mitt Romney, beyond even Chuck Todd and Peggy Noonan's criticism of his mishandling of his response to the murders of American diplomats in Libya and Cairo. Now it seems that everyone involved in the diplomacy business are pronouncing him unfit:

"They were just trying to score a cheap news cycle hit based on the embassy statement and now it’s just completely blown up," said a very senior Republican foreign policy hand, who called the statement an "utter disaster" and a "Lehman moment" — a parallel to the moment when John McCain, amid the 2008 financial crisis, failed to come across as a steady leader.

He and other members of both parties cited the Romney campaign's recent dismissals of foreign policy's relevance. One adviser dismissed the subject to BuzzFeed as a "shiny object," while another told Politico that the subject was the "president's turf," drawing a rebuke from Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol.

"I guess we see now that it is because they’re incompetent at talking effectively about foreign policy," said the Republican. "This is just unbelievable — when they decide to play on it they completely bungle it."

And that's just the Republicans.

So he went before the press this morning and basically doubled down -- smirking, as he had the night before, all the way through. If those performances didn't convince anyone that this is not the man you want handling a difficult national crisis, nothing will.

As Greg Sargent observed about Romney's "opportunistic, incoherent" response:

But this press conference looks to me like a serious mistake on Romney’s part. The whole thing reeked of political opportunism and didn’t convey any sense of leadership or reassurance amid a crisis. It was also somewhat incoherent. At one point, Romney defended his reaction by noting that the White House, too, had also condemned the U.S embassy’s statement, claiming: “I had the exact same reaction.” Okay, so Romney is criticizing the Obama administration while simultaneously agreeing with it?

Romney is arguing that the administration at first took an objectionable stance. But the statement in question was put out by the U.S. embassy in Cairo, at a moment when it was bracing for trouble. No one except for confirmed Obama haters will buy the notion that the Obama administration sympathized with the attacks. And yet here Romney is at a hastily convened press conference, at a time when four Americans were murdered, doubling down on that exact charge.

This kind of thing will thrill the base, but will it really resonate with undecided and persuadable voters? The new Washington Post poll finds Obama holds an overwhelming 51-38 advantage over Romney on who is more trusted to handle international affairs. Does the Romney camp really think that raising the “apology” canard yet again in this context is a good strategy? Tellingly, no other GOP leaders criticized the Obama administration today, leaving Romney isolated.

But Romney appears to be heeding the advice of people like Alex Castellanos, who sees the embassy attacks as a prime political opportunity:

But other Republican strategists felt emboldened by Romney's swift and severe condemnation of how the administration's handling of the crisis.

"This could be a game changer," GOP strategist and CNN contributor Alex Castellanos said. "Romney has to go at this and make it clear that he is doing it not for political gain but because weak, apologetic leadership is dangerous for the country."

If that's the advice he's following, he deserves the polls that will follow.