Just wondering: Is there any blogger out there more brazenly dishonest than Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit?

I know we have plenty of Malkins and Instahacks and nutbar Pammies to go around on the wingnutosphere. But it's hard to think of any blogger who more openly and remorselessly attempts to tell his readers that up is down, black is white, and that no, he doesn't have his head up his ass while speaking through his belly button.

I know a lot of people had chalked all this up to stupidity on Hoft's part. I don't know if he's stupid. I do know he is just flatly dishonest, a purveyor of brazenly false information.

For instance, in response to neo-Nazi J.T. Ready's massacre of his family earlier this week, Hoft posted this:

Horror!… Neo-Nazi #Occupy Phoenix Protester Goes On Shooting Rampage – 5 Dead"

Neo-Nazi Jason Todd (J.T.) Ready pictured on left patrolling the Occupy Phoenix protest and on right at Southern Poverty Law Center website.

Of course, since this was not a Tea Party rally the story was never picked up by the liberal media.

The problem with this? J.T. Ready was a regular fixture at Arizona Tea Party events. Indeed, as Matt Gertz at Media Matters reported back when Hoft first trotted out this nonsense, Ready not only regularly appeared at such events, he was regularly given a speaker's platform and even organized one such event featuring J.D. Hayworth.

That's in stark contrast to his single Occupy appearance, where he was confronted by other protesters and asked to leave, and he was not permitted to speak. He was there, as we explained, purely as an opportunist:

Let's be clear: J.T. Ready is a neo-Nazi, a classic totalitarian/authoritarian, someone who despises and loathes and sneers at the kind of democracy-in-action that the Occupy movement represents. He likes chaos, though, and he sees the movement's unsettling effect as something he can use. And showing up at protests always is good for a little attention. That's why he did this.

At least Russell Pearce was more honest and forthcoming in discussing his past associations with Ready:

After resisting for hours, Pearce relented late in the day and released a lengthy statement detailing how he came to know JT Ready and what eventually led to their falling out. Multiple media outlets in Arizona posted the statement in whole.

Pearce said he, like others in the Phoenix suburb of Mesa, got to know Ready for his interest in Republican politics.

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We've been saying for a long time that ardent neo-Nazis like J.T. Ready of Arizona are ticking time bombs, walking violent atrocities waiting to happen. Yesterday, he proved the point in a horrifying way:

A border militia leader on Wednesday shot and killed four people at a Gilbert home, including a toddler, before committing suicide, sources said.

Sources identified the shooter as Jason "J.T." Ready, a reputed neo-Nazi who made headlines when he launched a militia movement to patrol the Arizona desert to hunt for illegal immigrants and drug smugglers.

Authorities have not identified the other victims, but reached by phone Wednesday afternoon, Hugo Mederos said the victims were his ex-wife, Lisa; their daughter, Amber; Amber's boyfriend, whose name The Republic is withholding until his next of kin could be notified, and Amber's 18-month-old baby, Lilly.

Mederos, who lives in Tampa, said Ready lived at the home with his girlfriend, Lisa.

Ready was a former Marine who headed the U.S. Border Guard, a militia-style group that routinely performed armed patrols in the southern Arizona desert. Early this year, Ready had formed an exploratory committee for a run as Pinal County sheriff.

In recent years, Ready has been grabbing headlines by organzing vigilante border patrols. Ready's onetime political ally, Russell Pearce, was just chased out of public office by Mesa's voters.

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Here's a disturbing story, one with even more horrifying potential, out of the Arizona borderlands:

Authorities in southern Arizona say two men in a pickup truck carrying illegal immigrants have been fatally shot near Eloy.

Pima County Sheriff's officials say it appears the truck was ambushed by an unknown number of people dressed in camouflage and armed with rifles late Sunday night.

Border Patrol agents and police officers from Eloy and Coolidge responded to a report of shots fired about 10:30 p.m. in a wash known for human smuggling activity.

Authorities say one man was found dead inside the bed of the truck and another victim was located in a wash near the vehicle. Their identities haven't been released.

Detectives say it appears shot were fired at the truck by the ambush group.

At this point, the motive isn't clear, according to the Arizona Republic:

Five immigrants among the group later told investigators that as they were driving Sunday night, two or more camouflage-clad gunmen appeared and yelled "Alto!" Spanish for "Stop," fired at them and ran away, Barkman said.

She declined to say whether the truck stopped or its driver tried to flee, or how long the gunmen fired on the immigrants.

Of the 20 to 30 immigrants in the truck at the time of the shooting, most fled into the desert and got away from authorities.

The five immigrants who were found hiding in nearby brush, who are all from Mexico, described the ambush but couldn't say exactly how many shooters there were.

Barkman said it was too dark for them to see the race of their attackers. They were turned over to the Border Patrol.

There have been similar shootings, as the story notes, that were related to drug-cartel rip-offs:

The shooting is similar to a handful of fatal shootings in 2007, including one in March of that year in which a woman and her brother-in-law were found dead by Pima County sheriff's deputies after men with high-powered weapons opened fire on a truck loaded with 21 other immigrants about 25 miles south of Tucson. The men were part of a so-called "rip" crew looking to rob other smugglers of drug loads.

In a similar attack in February 2007, gunmen believed to be rival smugglers opened fire on a truck carrying around 20 immigrants, killing two men and a suspected smuggler who was driving a vehicle was killed and a 12-year-old boy was wounded when four men wearing camouflage uniforms and berets and armed with at least one assault weapon stopped the vehicle in a farm field.

On the other hand, there have been other shootings near the border where it's not at all clear that cartels were involved at all, including one near Rio Rico in which other skeletal remains were found nearby. These happened more recently, too -- in 2010.

And indeed, the Pima County investigators are not ruling out the possibility that these were border vigilantes, as Mike Ludwig at TruthOut reports:

When asked if investigators suspect the attack was orchestrated by a militia, sheriff's department spokesperson Deputy Dawn Barkman said investigators are "looking into every possibility but nothing is conclusive."

We'll be watching this investigation closely.

It was pretty comical yesterday watching Andrew Thomas, the former DA in Arizona's Maricopa County and Joe Arpaio's right-hand man in their corrupt attempts to intimidate county officials, hold his press conference denouncing the fact that he had just been disbarred for his behavior.

You see, it's all the fault of his enemies, and he's a martyr:

"I did my job. A lot of powerful people didn't like that," he said.

An Arizona ethics board disbarred Thomas Tuesday for failed corruption investigations that he and America's self-proclaimed toughest sheriff launched against officials with whom they were having political and legal disputes.

"We now have a constitutional crisis in which prosecutors and members of the executive branch are being targeted by the judiciary for blowing the whistle on misconduct in the judiciary," he said.

He compared the figures behind his disbarring to corrupt Mexican officials.

"Arizona, after what happened yesterday, has become Mexico," Thomas said.

The best part, as Stephen Lemons observes:

"Other men, far greater than I, have gone to jail in defense of principles they believed in and so they would not kowtow to a corrupt ruler," Thomas said at one point. "People like Gandhi, people like Dr. King, people like Solzhenitsyn, people like Thomas More, people who stood for something....and I'm going to stand firm."

"Gandhi?" wondered one onlooker in amazement.

Yep, I could hardly believe my ears, too, as Thomas blamed his current situation on others -- a corrupt judiciary, powerful politicians, insiders who knew "how to work the system," Presiding Disciplinary Judge William O'Neil, his fellow lawyers, you name it. Anyone but himself.

Meanwhile, Joe Arpaio was whistling past Thomas' political graveyard in his noncommital remarks. Mainly because his head is next on the block:

And despite Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s efforts to distance himself from cases at the center of a legal ethics panel inquiry that cost a pair of former county prosecutors their careers — the fallout has moved closer.

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What does a government bureaucrat being between you and your doctor look like? That was the go-to canard to scare Americans away from the health care reform bill (or single payer for that matter). So, imagine your doctor decides he or she doesn’t want you to get a procedure. They don’t agree with it for whatever reason. Your doctor happily lies to you. Tells you – you don’t need it – everything is fine. You find out later your doctor, with political motivations, omitted facts from you, and your decisions based on what you thought was full information, later caused problems with your health. What precipitated your doctor's reckless and unethical behavior? A group of lawmakers decided you don’t have a right to know the truth about your medical condition so therefore a doctor’s fabrications cannot be grounds for a lawsuit.

Your doctors and those lawmakers have decided they know what’s best for you. And you have no recourse whatsoever.

Would you feel conspired against by your state legislature and your health care provider? Yes. And this is exactly what women of child bearing age are facing on a state level: making it okay to lie to pregnant women if it potentially avoids an abortion.

Both Arizona and Kansas are considering bills giving your doctor the legal authority to withhold potentially crucial information about your health and in this case your child’s.

This idea of lying to women has been in the quiver of the our-choice-for-you movement since before Roe v. Wade when abortion was legal only at the state level. In 1967, the first of what are now known as crisis pregnancy centers or fake abortion clinics was opened by a man named Robert Pearson in Hawaii. The blueprint for these ruses is still The Pearson Foundation’s manual, “How to Start and Operate Your Own Pro-Life Outreach Crisis Pregnancy Center,” published in 1984. Pearson writes, “Obviously, we’re fighting Satan. A killer, who in this case is the girl who wants to kill her baby, has no right to information that will help her kill her baby.”

In this case, Satan is a girl.

And Satan, being the father of all lies and all – doesn’t have the right to the truth when he gets knocked up.

In the right-wing-maligned health care reform bill were strides for women’s health, equality and autonomy. The buried lede about Obamacare is it forced insurance companies not to treat a womb as a preexisting condition. Recently it came to focus (while being declared a war on religion) that birth control must be covered by insurance even if the employer is a religious institution (the exception being an actual church). For the last decade, Viagra was covered by insurance, no problem, and the pill was not. A dysfunction for men was covered and a function for women was out-of-pocket. The Affordable Care Act changed that.

And the right-wing opposes this as a “government takeover of health care.” But when they want to endow your doctor with the ability to dictate their values in the form of dishonesty – health care (specifically women’s) needs to be taken over by government. Stat!

As a culture, would we tolerate this if it were any other medical condition besides pregnancy? What if your doctor was being paid by the soft drink industry to tell you your obesity isn’t from your 5-liter a day habit? What if your doctor didn’t approve of vaccinations and you actually get Meningitis? What if your doctor thought it wasn’t right to tell you about your cancer screening results while in its operable window? And what if some yahoo state lawmakers decided - against all ethics and medical research - to agree with your quack doctor?

If those things seem outrageous then lying to pregnant women has to be too. If we want to live in a society where women have the same rights as men, being of child-bearing ability can’t be a caveat to equality.

Either women have equal rights under the law or they’re public incubators. And according to these attempted laws in Arizona and Kansas – we’re not equal.

Cross posted at TinaDupuy.com

If enough people just stand up to these unfair and bigoted laws, maybe we can make a difference. But then again, the school district that did this is in Arizona, a place which seems to want to compete with Mississippi and Alabama when it comes to sheer bigotry:

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- An underground library effort is underway in Albuquerque to get banned Hispanic books back into Arizona.

Acclaimed Mexican-American author Rudolfo Anaya helped box up books for the journey to Arizona's underground libraries after the Tuscon Unified School District recently banned Hispanic books, including Anaya's famous novel, "Bless Be Ultima."

"It's been called a classic," Anaya said. "It's been read all over the country, the world. I have translations in China."
Mexican-American studies were banned in Tucson almost a year ago. In response, a group called Librotraficantes formed in Houston to bring Hispanic novels back to Arizona.

The caravan stopped to pick up books in Albuquerque.

"That's what we will continue to do. We're not going to stand by and allow our history and our culture to be banned from the classroom," Anaya said.

Anaya's books have been used for decades in classrooms across the country.

"Diversity is good. Diversity is a fact, and the way you are going to learn more about your neighbor is by reading your literature, knowing their history, knowing who they are," he said.

State: Arizona

Type of election: Primary

How it works: This is a standard closed primary where only Arizona Republicans who were registered before January 30 will be able to vote. 29 delegates are at stake. There is no Democratic primary.

Official election results: Arizona Secretary of State

Republican candidates: Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum (all others have dropped out or are polling at less than 1 percent)

Previous performance: In 2008, Romney finished second to John McCain with 35 percent of the vote while Paul finished fourth with 4 percent. Barack Obama finished second to Hillary Clinton with 42 percent.

Newspapers: Arizona Republic, Phoenix New Times, full list

Television stations: Full list

Progressive blogs: Arizona Eagletarian, AZ Netroots, Democratic Diva, Friendly Fire, Random Musings, Rum, Romanism and Rebellion

Latest polling: New York Times:

We Ask America: Romney 43 percent, Santorum 27, Gingrich 21, Paul 10

PPP: Romney 43, Santorum 26, Gingrich 18, Paul 11

ARG: Romney 39, Santorum 35, Gingrich 11, Paul 9

Rasmussen: Romney 42, Santorum 29, Gingrich 16, Paul 8

NBC/Marist: Romney 43, Santorum 27, Gingrich 16, Paul 11

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Rick Santorum's performance in Wednesday's debate was not his best. Perhaps the pressure of being criticized by news outlets including his own Fox News is getting to him. Or maybe he was tired. Or maybe he has been made to accept the fact that Mitt Romney will be the Chosen One, no matter how well he performs on the campaign trail or in debates.

Still, this moment was weird for a couple of reasons. First, he admitted voting for NCLB without being prompted. This, of course, generated the already-primed audience to erupt in a series of boos, which prompted this response from him:

I have to admit, I voted for that. It was against the principles I believed in, but, you know, when you're part of the team, sometimes you take one for the team, for the leader, and I made a mistake.

(BOOING) You know, politics is a team sport, folks. And sometimes you've got to rally together and do something. And in this case, you know, I thought testing was -- and finding out how bad the problem was wasn't a bad idea.

Here's the thing. No Child Left Behind passed the Senate on a vote of 91-8. So what, exactly did he "take for the team?" Yes, he managed to insert an irrelevant and insulting intelligent design amendment into it, but he could just as easily have voted against it altogether and stayed true to his "conservative principles."

But what came next? Well, that was rich indeed.

SANTORUM: What was a bad idea was all the money that was put out there, and that, in fact, was a huge problem. I admit the mistake and I will not make that mistake again. You have someone who is committed.

(APPLAUSE)

I know the importance of local control of education. And having gone through that experience of the federal government involvement, not only do I believe the federal government should get out of the education businessI think the state government should start to get out of the education business and put it back to the state, -- to the local and into the community.

Two points of order here. First, there's the small matter of this home-schooling dad utilizing an online school in Virginia which taxpayers in Pennsylvania were on the hook to pay, and no small sum -- $72,000.00. That strikes me as inconsistent with those "conservative principles."

But beyond even that, there is a disturbing pattern in his reference not once, but twice, to the "education business." Education is not a business. It is what civilized societies do. I repeat: Education is not a business. I don't care what Rupert Murdoch and the rest of them say. It's just not, nor is making it a business the pathway to academic competitiveness on a global level. I also loathe NCLB and always have, because it separates students from real-life experiences and forces teachers to teach to the test and standards without regard to what is actually going on in their lives or their communities.

However, since standardized tests are (for now) the measure of success, let's consider the international ranking of the United States education system as it stands today, which is "mediocre." This is something that Michelle Rhee, President Obama and Arne Duncan all use as the hammer for education reform. That's fine, but the problem is what they propose to do with it.

Taking assessments and turning the educational system on its head by privatizing schools in the name of improving test scores has one result: discriminatory education weighted toward communities who can afford to feed the for-profit beasts. Or government feeding it. It means variance in curriculum and no assurance that the quality of education will be any better than a publicly funded school.

But wait, there's more. Rhee's formula of firing teachers by test score rankings is one that is gaining traction nationwide. New York recently reached an agreement with their teachers' unions to use this particular method of assessment, and as Diane Ravitch writes, the consequences will be ugly:

This agreement will certainly produce an intense focus on teaching to the tests. It will also profoundly demoralize teachers, as they realize that they have lost their professional autonomy and will be measured according to precise behaviors and actions that have nothing to do with their own definition of good teaching. Evaluators will come armed with elaborate rubrics identifying precisely what teachers must do and how they must act, if they want to be successful. The New York Times interviewed a principal in Tennessee who felt compelled to give a low rating to a good teacher, because the teacher did not “break students into groups” in the lesson he observed. The new system in New York will require school districts across the state to hire thousands of independent evaluators, as well as create much additional paperwork for principals. Already stressed school budgets will be squeezed further to meet the pact’s demands for monitoring and reporting.

President Obama said in his State of the Union address that teachers should “stop teaching to the test,” but his own Race to the Top program is the source of New York’s hurried and wrong-headed teacher evaluation plan. According to Race to the Top, states are required to evaluate teachers based in part on their students’ test scores in order to compete for federal funding. When New York won $700 million from the Obama program, it pledged to do this. What the President has now urged (“stop teaching to the test”) is directly contradicted by what his own policies make necessary (teach to the test or be rated ineffective and get fired).

No high-performing nation in the world evaluates teachers by the test scores of their students; and no state or district in this nation has a successful program of this kind. The State of Tennessee and the city of Dallas have been using some type of test-score based teacher evaluation for twenty years but are not known as educational models. Across the nation, in response to the prompting of Race to the Top, states are struggling to evaluate their teachers by student test scores, but none has figured it out.

You should read the whole thing. As Ravitch says, "this is madness," but what it isn't, is a business. To hear Rick Santorum refer to education as a "business" is chilling and indicative of how all of these candidates view education in this country. The problem is, they're all so insane I can't see how we can actually have a decent conversation around the issues. And yes, that means on all sides of the debate, including President Obama.

What do Foster Friess and Michelle Rhee have in common, indeed? At first, you might just think they were at a fundraiser for an education project or something, right? Wrong. Michelle Rhee and her new husband Kevin Johnson were honored, along with Gary Sinise and NRA President Wayne LaPierre by the Joe Foss Institute for being "outstanding Americans". Friess was the chairman of the event.

Who is the Joe Foss Institute?

The Joe Foss Institute was created to work with youth in schools and youth groups across America—with those who will defend our freedoms in the future—encouraging & teaching democracy, patriotism, integrity, and public service. We help our audiences understand—and stand up for—the ideals upon which this country was founded, as reflected in our Founding Documents: the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence.

We do this because somehow we—as a nation—have devalued the teaching of history, and have, according to our own Department of Education, done an alarmingly poor job of helping students gain a solid understanding of the historical and philosophical foundation upon which our nation was built.

Here. Let me translate that for you. What they meant to say was this: We have defunded our school systems in order to degrade the education children get. We did this because schoolchildren were not being taught sound conservative Christian values in our schools. Now we will indoctrinate them properly.

The Joe Foss Institute has some interesting directors, as seen on this cached page as well as the current one.

• Mike Ingram, Arizona real estate mogul who bought up lots of Arizona real estate in the early oughts with the goal of developing Arizona's desert. Most of those areas were hard-hit by the Great Recession.
• Renee Giltner, also treasurer of the Goldwater Institute.
• William G. Boykin, former Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence division and Muslim-hater. (More information)
• George Argyos, former Ambassador to Spain, real estate mogul, billionaire, and more. His Freddie Mac associations might disqualify him from running for President, but they're not as important when funding charities to indoctrinate children.

While it's important to note the right-wing bent of this group, it's more interesting to see what they do and why Michelle Rhee and Foster Friess might have a common interest in them.

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It's a good day for labor across the country as three anti-worker bills appear to have died in the legislatures of Arizona, Colorado and Pennsylvania. Arizona's was the worst, as it was a full-out assault on collective bargaining rights for state workers. It stalled in the state senate:

State Arizona Republicans acknowledged they don’t have enough votes to pass the bill. The collective bargaining bills were written with the help of the Goldwater Institute. The group flew in union-busting Governor Scott Walker from Wisconsin for an event late last year. The bills would have taken away the rights of unions to negotiate at the bargaining table.

The Professional Fire Fighters of Arizona are working with other public employee groups to engage elected officials to rally support and it has made a huge difference in this legislative session.

Unions are still fighting a dues deduction bill. The bill would ban government employees from having dues automatically deducted from their paychecks. The measure would also affect health insurance and deferred compensation deductions.

There is also an on-going push in Arizona to pay younger people less than the minimum wage.

Colorado Republicans failed in an attempt to make the state a right-to-work (for less) state:

Sources from the Colorado AFL-CIO have confirmed that Colorado Senate Bill 100 (Right to Work) has died in the Senate Business, Labor and Technology Committee.

SB 100 was sponsored by Tea Party State Senator Tim Neville.

Colorado voters previously defeated “Right-to-Work” in its 2008 form, Amendment 47. This round of “Right-to-Work” push was led by an adviser to the Independence Institute, Jeff Crank from Americans for Prosperity, The National Right to Work Committee, the Associated Builders & Contractors and Tony Gagliardi from the NFIB. The Colorado AFL-CIO alleges that “not one real worker or real business owner showed-up to back these extremists and it made them look pathetic.”

The bill died in a 4-2 vote.

Finally, Pennsylvania Republicans failed to weaken the state's prevailing wage statute:

An effort by Pennsylvania House Republicans to weaken the state’s prevailing wage law failed when, despite having the majority, they could not get enough votes. House Republicans claimed that raising the project cost threshold that triggers the prevailing wage from the current, 1961-established level of $25,000 would save local governments money. There is little evidence that this is true, however. In fact, many experts argue that raising the threshold would truly only guarantee that work would be done by under-trained, frequently non-union contractors, resulting in higher long-term costs.

The House GOP was stopped in its tracks by (gasp!) pro-labor Republicans, including roughly a dozen from the Philadelphia suburbs who refused to go along with party leadership because they believe the desired threshold of $185,000 is too high. Democrats, who opposed the bill, claimed it was an attack on PA workers.

These are all good signs that when we fight back, we can win, even in places where governors and legislatures are hostile to working families.