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Our favorite nativist nutcase in an actual position of authority, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, has been coming down off the high notes of his dramatic investigation of President Obama's birth certificate the past couple of weeks. Because he's finally on trial for his racial-profiling policies targeting Latinos in his community.

And it hasn't been much fun for him, as Ray Stern at the Phoenix New Times reports:

Under pointed questioning by Young, Arpaio denied that he equated brown-skinned people with illegal immigrants, as a press release from 2007 demonstrates he did. Young took time to go over a letter received by Arpaio from an anti-immigrant group in which Arpaio had emphasized statements about how police shouldn't be afraid to check the status of day laborers. And Young played a video from another press conference in which Arpaio said he'd have a "pure" program that went after illegal immigrants first, and their suspected crimes second.

But the sheriff made his worst impressions while answering questions about his book, Joe's Law.

Basically, anytime Arpaio was shown some of the blatant bigotry in that book, he blamed it on co-author Len Sherman. And this was despite being read back his testimony from a previous deposition in which he'd said he didn't need to read his own book because he'd written it himself.

Arpaio was forced by Young to back off from a couple of statements in the book, including one in which he wrote that Mexicans don't come to the United States with the same hopes and dreams as people from other countries.. In another part of the book, Young pointed out, Arpaio wrote that second- and third-generation Mexican-Americans were not part of the American "mainstream."

"My co-author wrote that," Arpaio blurted out.

The whole week has gone like that. If his officers were provably bigoted and indulged in nakedly racist policing, why, none of that was HIS doing. He had no knowledge of such things!

As the Arizona Republic put it in an editorial:

Apologists for Arpaio must come to terms with the person they so zealously defend. Either he is America's toughest sheriff, or America's most oblivious sheriff.

Arpaio's attorneys contend that Arpaio's hermetically sealed existence in his own office is intended to avoid micromanagement of professional police work.

"It serves as an insulation against desires and impulses that might not be in the best interest of the community," said attorney Tim Casey.

That runs exactly counter to Arpaio's assertions, repeated endlessly, that his notorious, wasteful "crime-suppression sweeps" through largely Hispanic neighborhoods were conducted precisely because he deemed them in the community's best interests. The very existence of the sweeps was a political statement.

Arpaio and his acolytes either lied to the public about the purpose of those sweeps, or they are lying to the judge now.

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[Two videos: The first, a time-lapse video of the deconstruction of the Elwha Dam on the lower Elwha River (YouTube here), the second a video of the blasting of one of the last remaining sections of concrete on the Glines Canyon Dam on the upper Elwha, shot by my brother-in-law.]

Timothy Egan had a superb contribution at the NYT's blog space the other day, describing the effects of the Elwha Ecosystem Restoration project, which is the largest dam-removal project in U.S. history:

It defies experience-hardened cynicism whenever any big public works project is under budget and ahead of schedule. But the Elwha has served up something even better: life itself, in the form of ocean-going fish answering to the imperatives of love and death. Not long ago, scientists were stunned to find wild steelhead trout scouting habitat well past the site where the Elwha Dam had stood for nearly a century. They didn’t expect fish to return this soon.

This biological boomerang is a tribute to stubborn DNA memory, and it is a precursor for what the wild Elwha will be in the not-so-distant future. Beyond that, the restoration of the Elwha, as in the revival of the much-abused southern end of the Bronx River at the other end of the country, is proof that American ingenuity is alive and well and hard at work on with the tricky task of healing parts of the natural world that we’ve trashed.

Be sure to read the whole thing, since Egan is such a fine writer. Here's more about that steelhead run, as well as further good news: the downstream flow of silt is not turning out to be nearly as noxious as originally feared.

But it's not just the Elwha where this is happening. As these structures age, removal is often the sensible solution. And it's creating opportunities for river restoration in a wide variety of places.

A recent Boston Globe piece examined the local benefits of another dam-removal project:

Tim Purinton makes the analogy that removing dams from a river is akin to getting rid of clogged arteries in the body.

"If you're interested in rivers and river ecology, there's no better thing you can do for a river than remove a dam," said Purinton, director of the Division of Ecological Restoration for the state Department of Fish and Game.

Removing the obstruction allows not just better passage for fish and other aquatic species, but also the movement of sediment and a change in water temperature, he said. "If you can clean the arteries and allow for the free flow of water, sediment, and nutrients, you bring back river health almost immediately."

Obviously, dams remain extremely useful things, especially in places like the Northwest, where they provide most of our carbon-neutral energy (though at the expense of salmon runs). But when they outlive their usefulness, it's a wonderful thing to watch Mother Nature come rushing back to her domain.

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[H/t Dave]

I got to thinking about Justice Antontin Scalia's train of logic on the Second Amendment, at least as he explained it to the talking heads yesterday:

"We'll see," Scalia replied. "Obviously the amendment does not apply to arms that cannot be carried. It's to 'keep and bear' so it doesn't apply to cannons."

"But I suppose there are handheld rocket launchers that can bring down airplanes that will have to -- it's will have to be decided," he added.

That's it? That's the criteria as to whether or not the right exists to keep and bear a weapon of any kind -- its portability?

Wow. Or as my redneck friends back in Idaho who like to blow shit up would put it: Yeeeeeeeehaw!!!!

Scalia seems to be opening the door not just for legalizing fully automatic guns, but all kinds of weapons. I mean, hell, pipe bombs -- which, let's be honest, really aren't quite up there in the rocket-launcher category in terms of lethality -- are currently illegal as hell and tightly regulated by the ATF and various other federal agencies right now.

So, for that matter, are all various kinds of portable bombs, particularly those made with C-4. They pack quite a kick, too.

And I guess if we continue to follow the impeccable logic of District of Columbia v. Heller, as Scalia is doing here, then we'll soon loose the dogs on a whole range of weapons that are currently regulated -- because they certainly can be carried.

But hell, why stop there? Go all the way: Let's establish the right to keep and bear a suitcase nuke, since obviously, it's a kind of arms and you can bear it, too.

In fact, I think every American ought to have a suitcase nuke for their personal use. That way if some nutcase comes into a theater and tries to blow everyone up with a suitcase nuke, the entire audience can set off their own nukes. God Bless Murka!

Thanks, your honor. We owe you one.

Following a tip, I began looking around recently for the federal Financial Disclosure Statements for the Democratic candidates involved in Washington's 1st Congressional District primary race, the election for which will be next week (but for which mail-in voting is currently under way).

But when I contacted the office the Clerk of the U.S. House, where these statements are filed, I was told that DelBene had not filed any Financial Disclosure Statement for 2011.

This is most peculiar. These statements are in fact required by law -- the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, which clearly states:

Title I of the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, as amended (5 U.S.C. app. 4 §§ 101-111) (EIGA) requires Members, officers, certain employees of the U.S. House of Representatives and related offices, and candidates for the House of Representatives to file Financial Disclosure Statements with the Clerk of the House of Representatives.

…

Individuals are required to file a Financial Disclosure Statement once they qualify as a candidate by raising or spending more than $5,000 in a campaign for election to the House of Representatives.

It is, in fact, a federal felony to fail to meet these requirements, punishable by heavy fines of up to $50,000 and, in the case of falsification, jail time. (See Page 9.)

Yet we know, from the forms that she filed with the Federal Elections Commission, that Suzan DelBene spent well over $5,000 in 2011 on her campaign for Congress in 2012.

We also know, from looking at the first quarter 2011 report, that she was designating these expenditures as going toward the 2012 primary (see the check boxes on the individual listings beginning on Page 6), as they were indeed for all the subsequent FEC filings for 2011.

We also know that, beginning in the fall of 2011, she began paying a salary to her campaign's finance chief (see Page 6).

It was kind of a startling and disturbing discovery. Why would a major candidate for federal office even run the risk of being investigated for this?

So I wrote to the DelBene campaign last Thursday and asked them to explain it. Here's my letter:

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I mentioned the other day that Minuteman movement cofounder Jim Gilchrist has been adamantly denying to everyone in sight the truth of what I reported about him earlier this week -- namely, that not only was he tightly associated with child killer Shawna Forde right up to the moment of her arrest, but he was aware of the crazy schemes she had in mind well before she tried enacting them.

It seems that yesterday, he posted in the comments of the AlterNet piece where I reported all this -- and I guess we can call this definitive:

Dear Readers,

David Neiwert's attempt to glorify the murder of a nine-year-old girl and her father for the purpose of bogus journalistic acclaim and the financial gain he anticipates from selling books represents perhaps the lowest form of "dirty" journalism.

I just got off the phone with private investigator Mike Carlucci and we both agree that David Neiwert has made up most of the so-called facts in his article. I, nor Mr. Carlucci ever had any discussion with Shawna Forde about her agenda to rob drug dealers.

Furthermore, the Minuteman Movement was not seriously interfered with by whatever Shawna Forde and her two accomplices did. The Minuteman Movement was put into a temporary tailspin by some selfish opportunists posing as immigration law enforcement advocates whose true interest was in hijacking the movement for their own financial and egotistical interests, in my opinion.

David Neiwert is a fiction writer who should be forthright with his readership and disclose that his selfish agenda is to sell books and be falsely heralded as "one of the great thinkers of our time."

Shawna Forde and her two thugs were lone wolves who operated their own organization distinct and separate from other immigration activist groups. She also regularly communicated with many of the hundred or so similar groups established around the country. Simply, the murderous trio used a feigned participation in the immigration law enforcement movement as a convenient veil to cloak some sinister plans to rob drug dealers and coyotes.

David Neiwert knows this, yet he revels in the opportunity to hang as many innocent persons as possible...all the while salivating at the glossy-eyed, delusional thought that such unprofessional behavior will somehow bring him recognition and money.

Not so.

There are professional journalists, and there are "dirty" journalists. David Neiwert, and his counterparts in the Southern Poverty Law Center who cooperated with him in his propaganda efforts, are dirty journalists. The veracity of their writings should be accorded the appropriate skepticism due a propaganda mill.

Sincerely,

Jim Gilchrist, Founder and President, The Minuteman Project
--a multiethnic immigration law enforcement advocacy group--

I'm not going to bother responding to much of this, other than to say I've conversed with Carlucci after his conversation with Gilchrist, and I'm quite certain Gilchrist is lying through his teeth about Mike's views of my reportage. But that should not surprise anyone here.

If Gilchrist were so confident that I reported even a single false fact, he and his attorneys would be lining up the libel suit as we speak. But he's not, because I didn't, and therefore he can't. He's stuck, he knows it, and is now relegated to blowing off steam in my general direction. Which bothers me not even the slightest.

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I am soooooo disappointed. I can't tell you how disappointed. Because, alas and alack, I'm going to have to miss next week's gathering of tea-partying wingnuts down in Oregon, aka the "Gathering of Eagles".

My friend Carla at Blue Oregon tipped me off about this shindig. Seems they held the GOE last year at the same rural ranch outside of Turner, and everyone had such a grand time they decided to hold it there again.

You remember the "Gathering of Eagles." These were the pre-Tea Party Cro-Magnons who organized back in 2008 to create a right-wing counter-protest intended to "protect" the Vietnam Veterans memorial in D.C. One of their Fearless Leaders raised eyebrows a couple of years back by telling Chris Dodd to go kill himself.

Just for fun, you can go read belief system, which really can just be summed up with the penultimate entry:

Together we will fight liberalism, socialism, progressivism, and communism and bring back our individual freedoms to choose our own destiny.

Here's the PDF. I dunno about you, but I'm just all verklempt to miss out on this prime opportunity to hobnob with both Tom DeLay and John Fund. The conversations we could have!

FWIW, the host is a genial fellow who sells roofing compound and ran for Oregon governor back in 2010 (not so successfully).

Among the guests, besides DeLay and Fund, will be Bob Basso, who got famous pretending to be Thomas Paine on a few episodes of the Glenn Beck show, which he then parlayed into a swinging career on the right-wing chicken-dinner (or eagle-gathering, or what have you) circuit. You can tell that none of these morons ever bothered to actually read Paine, especially not "Agrarian Justice" -- else they would know that "income redistribution" not only well preceded Karl Marx, it was adamantly advocated by their hero!

We especially recall the time Basso called for an armed "Second Revolution" to take back the country from the evil Obamaites:

Basso: Join the grassroots movement of the Second American Revolution -- not of guns and violence, but of pressure, pressure, pressure. ...

Take back America now! Choose to be part of the Second American Revolution! Pressure, pressure, pressure! No presidential candidate, no political party can save you now. Only an aroused citizenry will turn this uncommon sense around. And he or she who does nothing now is helping them to destroy America!

One can hardly wait to see the eagles soaring. Darn.

I have to be off camping and watching whales again. What a bummer.

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Don't you just love living in post-racial America? You know, that country where, according to our conservative and centrist friends, all the racial, ethnic and religious divisions of the past have been buried in the avalanche of the election of our first African-American president?

I'm sure these folks down in Mississippi just love it:

CRYSTAL SPRINGS, MS (WLBT) - It was to be their big day, but a Jackson couple says the church where they were planning to wed turned them away because of race.

Now, the couple wants answers, and the church's pastor is questioning the mindset of some of members of his congregation who caused the problem in the first place.

They had set the date and printed and mailed out all the invitations, but the day before wedding bells were to ring for Charles and Te'Andrea Wilson, they say they got some bad news from the pastor.

"The church congregation had decided no black could be married at that church, and that if he went on to marry her, then they would vote him out the church," said Charles Wilson.

The Wilsons were trying to get married at the predominantly white First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs -- a church they attend regularly, but are not members of.

"He had people in the sanctuary that were pitching a fit about us being a black couple," said Te'Andrea Wilson. "I didn't like it at all, because I wasn't brought up to be racist. I was brought up to love and care for everybody."

You may say, "Aw, that's the South." But how about these innocent Jewish kids in Pennsylvania?

Five people face charges for allegedly terrorizing a Jewish summer camp in Pennsylvania.

In three separate episodes earlier this month, three adults and two juveniles caused property damage as they sped dangerously through Camp Bonim in Wayne County in a pickup truck, shouting anti-Semitic epithets and firing paintball guns at campers and staff, District Attorney Janine Edwards said in a press release. The three adults were arrested Wednesday morning and face felony and misdemeanor charges, including ethnic intimidation, terroristic threats and assault.

"These children were terrorized and in fear for their lives by the actions of this group," Edwards said in the release. "The vicious, cruel and obscene nature of the language hurled at the campers is unspeakable. Luckily none of the children suffered any serious physical injury, however, the emotional damage is immeasurable."

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I don't know if any of you caught this little tidbit the other day over at the SPLC's Hatewatch, who got ahold of Minuteman movement cofounder Jim Gilchrist the day after my AlterNet expose on the Minutemen and Shawna Forde was published. It seems that Gilchrist adamantly denies that he had the conversation with Forde that I reported him having regarding her plans to rip off drug dealers:

Reached by Hatewatch yesterday, Gilchrist flatly denied that he had ever talked to Forde about robbing drug dealers and said she was not even in the car on the way to CWU. “This is bullshit,” Gilchrist said, adding that Forde “was just part of the audience” at the CWU talk. He also said he did not remember Carlucci driving to CWU.

So I guess it comes down to Mike Carlucci's word against Jim Gilchrist's. You probably wouldn't be surprised if I told you that not only does Carlucci have the ability to back up every word, he's only revealed the tip of the iceberg in terms of the depth of the Minutemen's relationship with Forde.

Moreover, it's a Minuteman's word against that of a respected private eye. Considering what we've been learning of late about the fine, upstanding character of the people the nativist border-watch movement attracted -- even beyond Shawna Forde -- that's not a hard choice to make.

First there was Forde. Then there was J.T. Ready, the neo-Nazi border watcher who ended his career by shooting up his girlfriend and her family and then shooting himself.

Now we have Todd Hezlitt, erstwhile companion of Shawna Forde and now a fugitive on the lam with someone's 15-year-old daughter:

You could chalk up some of border militiaman Todd Hezlitt's troubles to bad luck - who knew when he associated with Shawna Forde in 2008 that she would end up killing people the next year and drag his name into the mud?

But his most recent trouble - deputies say the 38-year-old Hezlitt ran away with a 15-year-old girlfriend - seems to be of his own doing.

Hezlitt was arrested in April and accused of two counts of sexual conduct with a minor, a student in the Flowing Wells Unified School District. Then on June 1, the Pima County Sheriff's Department reported that Hezlitt and the girl had both disappeared, apparently together.

He's facing felony charges of sexual conduct with a minor and has violated the terms of his release from jail by contacting the girl, causing an arrest warrant to be issued, Sheriff's Department spokeswoman Sgt. Dawn Barkman said.

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[Above: Sebastien Wielemans' superb documentary on Shawna Forde, A Cycle of Fences.]

As many of you know, I've spent the past couple of years immersing myself in the saga of Brisenia Flores, Shawna Forde, and the Minutemen, largely with the help of the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute. The end result will be my sixth book, The Last Minutemen, which is due out from NationBooks in April 2013.

I also put together an investigative piece on the demise of the Minutemen and Forde's role in that, which will be included in the book. AlterNet has it, and as you can see, it really is just a preview:

How the Brutal Murders of a Little Girl and Her Father Doomed the Xenophobic Minuteman Movement

I expect the most interesting revelations will involve the conversations that various Minutemen leaders -- who all ran as fast and far away from Shawna Forde as they could, after she was arrested -- had with Forde over the years:

Not only did both Simcox and Gilchrist have extensive dealings with Forde over the years, both repeatedly courted her work and her organization. Simcox didn’t chase Forde out of the MCDC: he begged Forde not to leave his fold. In the case of Gilchrist, one witness to the conversation says that, in 2008, he and Forde discussed her plan to finance the movement by ripping off drug dealers — and that he was enthusiastic about it. Forde not only was fully empowered by Minuteman movement leadership, she was enacting a violent scheme with what she believed was their tacit approval.

Enjoy!

And while you're at it, go read Mark Potok's powerful piece on the demise of the National Alliance over at The Intelligence Report:

Ten years after founder's death, key neo-Nazi movement 'a joke'

Ten years ago, the Alliance had 1,400 carefully selected and clean-cut members, a paid national staff of 17, and great respect in radical-right circles in America and abroad. Its publications, including a newsletter and a journal, set the standard on the extreme right, and its leaders regularly met with their counterparts in Europe. In Florida, it bought radio time and billboard ads. Between dues and income from its white-power music label, it was bringing in almost $1 million a year.

Today, the National Alliance is widely viewed as a joke.

Go read it all.

And yes: The good news is that both of these extremist organizations have completely fallen apart. The bad news is that, like zombies and vampires, they just keep coming back from the dead, usually in mutated forms like the Tea Party.

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Bill Moyers offers his cogent thoughts on the role of gun-rights outfits like the NRA (and its many, often more rabid, imitators), all of whom in the end are really the well-financed arm of weapons manufacturers, and how they have polluted not just American discourse, but our very way of life itself.

They have done this by several means. One, as Moyers notes, is the legal fraud they have foisted onto the public (and now the courts) with their insistent claim that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to own any weapon a person likes. But the other, perhaps more significant, and decidedly more toxic, pollution of American life has been the gun fetishists' violent worldview, manifested in the permeation of guns into all corners of our modern culture -- particularly those where males are involved.

We've written previously about the paranoid fantasizing that is a product of this worldview, and how it translates into cockamamie conspiracy theories that the black President of the USA is secretly plotting to take away all Americans' guns. And we've talked about the deadly consequences of the NRA's incessant weapons-mongering. Obviously, after yesterday's rampage in Aurora, it's even more germane.

One of the more important pieces in this discussion came several months back in the pages of the New Yorker, from Jill Lepore, who explored the history of this gun madness in a piece titled"Battleground America: One nation, under the gun":

In 1986, the N.R.A.’s interpretation of the Second Amendment achieved new legal authority with the passage of the Firearms Owners Protection Act, which repealed parts of the 1968 Gun Control Act by invoking “the rights of citizens . . . to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment.” This interpretation was supported by a growing body of scholarship, much of it funded by the N.R.A. According to the constitutional-law scholar Carl Bogus, at least sixteen of the twenty-seven law-review articles published between 1970 and 1989 that were favorable to the N.R.A.’s interpretation of the Second Amendment were “written by lawyers who had been directly employed by or represented the N.R.A. or other gun-rights organizations.” In an interview, former Chief Justice Warren Burger said that the new interpretation of the Second Amendment was “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special-interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

The debate narrowed, and degraded. Political candidates who supported gun control faced opponents whose campaigns were funded by the N.R.A. In 1991, a poll found that Americans were more familiar with the Second Amendment than they were with the First: the right to speak and to believe, and to write and to publish, freely.

“If you had asked, in 1968, will we have the right to do with guns in 2012 what we can do now, no one, on either side, would have believed you,” David Keene said.

Between 1968 and 2012, the idea that owning and carrying a gun is both a fundamental American freedom and an act of citizenship gained wide acceptance and, along with it, the principle that this right is absolute and cannot be compromised; gun-control legislation was diluted, defeated, overturned, or allowed to expire; the right to carry a concealed handgun became nearly ubiquitous; Stand Your Ground legislation passed in half the states; and, in 2008, in District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court ruled, in a 5–4 decision, that the District’s 1975 Firearms Control Regulations Act was unconstitutional. Justice Scalia wrote, “The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia.” Two years later, in another 5–4 ruling, McDonald v. Chicago, the Court extended Heller to the states.

I think Lepore's succinct conclusion is almost irrefutable:

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

As Anthony Robinson put it:

Increasingly, it seems that citizenship is defined not by the community we are and which together we build, but by our right to own and carry a gun. To call this an impoverished notion of citizenship is an understatement. It is an outrage.