Extreme partisanship and corporate money. Those are the two biggest problems four departing Representatives -- 2 Republicans and 2 Democrats -- have with today's political climate. Zach Wamp (R-TN), Chet Edwards (D-Tx), Carol Shea-Porter (D-NH) and Mike Castle (R-DE), sat down with ABC News last week to talk about their opinion of today's Congress, politics, and the view from Washington, DC.

It wasn't pretty.

Castle:

Rep. Mike Castle, R-Del., who was taken out in his primary by Tea Party favorite Christine O'Donnell, expresed alarm at the division the movement had caused within his own party.

"The Tea Party movement really is quite a bit different than the old Republican conservative movement, " Castle said. "They're more than willing to take out Republicans, call us Republicans in name only, or whatever it may be. It was one thing when you were dealing with Democrats and Republicans. Now you're dealing with divisions within your own party."

Castle, a known centrist, also said that working with the other party -- the Democrats -- once seen as the cornerstone of a functioning democracy, has become a punishable offense.

"I mean, I know I suffered in my primary defeat [because] I had supported some Democratic legislation, supported the president from time to time. And that was treated as a great sin," Castle told ABC News.

Both Democrats looked to the special interest money on Capitol Hill and in campaign finance as one of the reasons for Congress' dysfunction:

Shea-Porter said watching the growing influence of special interest money had been her biggest disappointment, calling it "awful for democracy."

"I think it's strangling us," she said. "They're in the halls of Congress everywhere, and it means, for example, that you sit on a committee and you say something about concern about Chinese influence or something, you don't even know if in the next election, somehow or another, they manage to send some money to some group that now doesn't even have to say where they got it."

Edwards, too:

"In the future, you're going to have to think before you cast a vote against an individual drug company. They can run a $2 million television campaign against you in central Texas or in Delaware, and take you out under the guise of being something they're not," Edwards said. "Congress has to find a solution to that within the limits of the new Supreme Court decision."

Not surprisingly, none of them had anything nice to say about the news media.

Each member made a point to emphasize the bipartisan work they had taken part in during their time in Congress. However, each pointed out that the more cooperative interaction among members doesn't hit the media radar as much as the conflicts.

Shea-Porter said the media focused too much on the negativity in Congress.

"I have listened to people on television say things like, 'Well, everybody's on the take in Washington,' as if that's a given fact. I think it just makes people more cynical about the whole process," Shea-Porter said.

Edwards blamed a misinformed public. "I think people are getting their news from stovepipe sources of information -- where people are basically getting the news they want to hear. Whether it's Fox on the right or MSNBC on the left, it's making it hard for centrist Democrats. It's making it hard to elect centrists, who I think are critical to the functioning of our checks and balances form of democracy."

Castle, who complained that conservative talking heads such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, misrepresented him during his primary campaign, echoed Edwards' complaints, saying, "People are listening to what they want to listen to, and not hearing any other point of view at all. That, I think, is a huge problem affecting politics in America today."

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I'm not sure who is more evil: Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin. Both have an uncanny ability to sound high-pitched shrill dog whistles for their fellow racists.

Michele Bachmann spoke in Colorado at the Western Conservative Conference over the weekend, and in Bachmann-like fashion, dropped a few claims that just made me shudder. This one, in particular:

"'We are determined to live free or not at all. And we are resolved that posterity shall never reproach us with having brought slaves into the world,'" Bachmann read from founding father John Jay , ending her reading with the statement, "We will talk a little bit about what has transpired in the last 18 months and would we count what has transpired into turning our country into a nation of slaves."

She then launches into the requisite Tea Party theme of tyranny, pointing specifically to health care reform as some sort of tyrannical monster threatening the nation. (Cue death panels.)

But really, it's worth looking at her agenda, because Bachmann is as wingnut crazy as Sharron Angle:

“We reform social security, then we reform Medicare, then we pare back welfare to the truly needy, for the truly disabled, because, yes, we can make that determination,” she said. “Close and secure American boarders, cut the budget, limit our foreign entanglements for America, then we massively cut spending first, then we cut taxes.” Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/39608.html#ixzz0tamKLmmS

A closer look, restated with real terms would read like this:

We privatize Social Security, then we privatize Medicare, then we starve those most needy, we let the disabled twist in the wind. Then we leave our troops twisting in the wind while cutting all social programs but not touching military spending. Then we give it all to our corporate masters.

In case you're curious, here's a list of Michele Bachmann's owners.

Tarryl Clark is within striking range. Let's push her over the top and send Michele home to commiserate with half-Governor Palin.

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As part of its campaign to promote their phony story claiming that Obama's Justice Department is shunning cases of voter intimidation by nonwhites, Fox News yesterday devoted a great deal of attention to the New Black Panthers Party, a couple of whose members are at the center of the hue and cry over GOP operative Christian Adams' absurd claims about the DOJ.

At one point, they actually ran an incredibly incendiary video showing one of the two men in question ranting at length about how much he hates white people. Mind you, to most folks in mainstream media, this is normally considered an irresponsible sort of clip to run because it is needlessly incendiary and racially divisive and, moreover, gives these otherwise fringe figures far more attention than they deserve -- not to mention that some of the people who absorb these rants will be persuaded by them.

But when it helps underscore the long-running Fox theme that Obama is a black radical racist who secretly hates white people, they'll run anything, apparently.

Now, it's worth understanding something that only Trace Gallagher briefly mentions here: The New Black Panther Party has long been recognized as a real anti-white hate group, both by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center. (Read these reports in full to understand just how ugly and vicious they are.)

And indeed, Glenn Beck later in the afternoon compared the NBPP characters hanging outside a voting station to the Ku Klux Klan -- a fair comparison, but one that is more revealing than Beck thinks.

Because while the Klan of the Civil Rights era indeed indulged in voter intimidation tactics -- one of the main reasons the DOJ's voter-rights section exists in the first place, in fact -- it did so on a massive, and horrifically violent, scale. From Wikipedia:

In states such as Alabama and Mississippi, Klan members forged alliances with governors' administrations. In Birmingham and elsewhere, the KKK groups bombed the houses of civil rights activists. In some cases they used physical violence, intimidation and assassination directly against individuals. Many murders went unreported and were not prosecuted by local and state authorities. Continuing disfranchisement of blacks across the South meant that most could not serve on juries, which were all white.

The site goes on to detail some of the notorious murders committed by the Klan in their campaign of terror against black voting rights, including Medgar Evers and Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman.

Meanwhile, what have the New Black Panther actually done? Sent a couple of shady-looking dudes to stand outside a mostly black precinct and where no one reported that they were intimidated by their presence. That's it.

So a little perspective is perhaps helpful here: There are indeed black racist hate groups (the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors is another). However, they are dwarfed both in size and in sheer numbers by white racist hate groups. Check the SPLC's compendium of hate groups and you'll see what I mean: they outnumber anti-white racists by about 99 to 1.

Oddly enough, we never get any reporting about these hate groups from Fox News -- except when they want to attack the Department of Homeland Security's bulletin warning about the rising likelihood of violent terrorism from right-wing extremists. Then, they're all too eager to simply whitewash away the very existence of white supremacists and far-right terrorists.

Well, for our readers' edification, we've compiled some of the haters that Fox News won't show and the things they say:

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Leading off the pack is a fellow named Roy Warden. Roy is a well-known Latino-hating racist who is fond of threatening to kill his critics and anyone who opposes him -- and as you can see from the video, in fact packs a holstered pistol to all public events.

Warden is especially noteworthy because, just like those New Black Panthers, Roy Warden was in fact the subject of a DOJ voter-intimidation investigation -- and they indeed decided not to prosecute him based on a lack of evidence, just as in the NBPP case. Media Matters has more:

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Susan Gardner of Daily Kos wrote a review of "Over The Cliff," on Sunday.

Her review covers a number of topics that we wrote about and she sums it up:

Readability/quality: Concise, persuasive and methodically documented, Over the Cliff is a smooth and sobering read. It feels much shorter than it actually is—there's a lot of information packed in, both historical and current, and a tremendous job has been done in picking through the right-wing landscape for pertinent, on-the-money examples. Lord knows you could spend a couple thousand pages just on documenting the day-to-day rhetoric (in fact, Media Matters does just that). So thanks, guys, for paring it down and honing it.

Who should read it: Everybody. Seriously. This is a wake-up call for those in denial, a refresher course for the painfully aware. Good reference to have on hand in your permanent home library for quick examples of extremism in Obama's first year.

For David, who has written a number of books already this is old hat in a way, but for me it's another new experience. An experience that I'm proud to bear witness to. We'll be going over to answer some questions with Susan next week I believe.

UPDATE: And we're appearing on 'Ring of Fire' with Michael Papantonio Wednesday at 11:30 am PST.

Don't forget to support Liberal authors and grab a copy at many online book stores including Amazon and there are eBook versions too.

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Well, we already knew that Rand Paul's brand of "libertarian conservatism" was actually a front for the far-right beliefs he gets from his father -- even though he's done his best to scurry away from the consequences of having revealed that extremism inadvertently when Rachel Maddow put it in a context that mattered -- in this case, the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s.

But you know it's going to keep bubbling up, nearly every time he opens his mouth. For instance, in a recent interview with an English-language Russian news station recently, Paul held forth on immigration [via Ian Millhiser at ThinkProgress]:

Paul: I recently have been talking more about satellite observation. They say you can sit in front of the store here and a satellite can read the headline on your newspaper. So I think you could also monitor your border with satellites, and then you just have to have some means of intercepting people who come in illegally. You could have helicopters stations positioned every couple of hundred miles.

I think you just have to have some means of intercepting people who come here illegally. You could have helicopter stations positioned every couple of hundred miles. And I think you could control your borders and control your borders within months if you had the willpower to do it. And I think neither party in our country has had the willpower to control our borders.

Q: Why not?

Paul: I don't know. Some of it may be labor force, things like that. But I'm not opposed to letting people come in and work and labor in our country, but what I think we should do is, we shouldn't provide an easy route to citizenship.

A lot of this is about demographics. If you look at new immigrants from Mexico, they register 3-to-1 Democrat. So the Democrat Party's for easy citizenship and for allowing them to vote. I think we need to readdress that.

We’re the only country I know of that allows people to come in illegally, have a baby, and then that baby becomes a citizen. And I think that should stop also.

It's worth noting that Paul is not only opposed to providing a path to citizenship for the undocumented immigrants already here, but he is apparently also opposed to the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. You know, the one that reads:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

This is a bit odd, don't you think, for someone who not only constantly cites the Constitution and calls himself a "constitutionalist," but also accuses his opponents of "violating the Constitution" at every turn? Indeed, only earlier in the segment he declared that President Obama's health-care reforms were "unconstitutional."

Note the words that people like Rand Paul never want to use when they talk about this, but which are what we're talking about here -- namely, birthright citizenship.

And contrary to Paul's assertion, there is a long list of nations [predominantly in the Americas] that practice jus soli. Moreover, it's not, as the Wikipedia entry explains, a particular innovation of American law, having its origins in British common law:

Birthright citizenship, as with much United States law, has its roots in English common law. Calvin’s Case, 77 Eng. Rep. 377 (1608), was particularly important as it established that under English common law “a person's status was vested at birth, and based upon place of birth--a person born within the king's dominion owed allegiance to the sovereign, and in turn, was entitled to the king's protection." This same principle was adopted by the newly formed United States, as stated by Supreme Court Justice Noah Haynes Swayne: "All persons born in the allegiance of the king are natural- born subjects, and all persons born in the allegiance of the United States are natural-born citizens. Birth and allegiance go together. Such is the rule of the common law, and it is the common law of this country…since as before the Revolution."

That, of course, hasn't stopped the Nativists who want to either overturn or ignore the Constitution. Indeed, Paul is just echoing the latest efforts of Arizona's immigrant-bashing nativists. And as we noted then:

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You all remember how the Right freaked out last year over that DHS bulletin for law enforcement warning that the nation was looking at a surge in right-wing domestic terrorism -- the kind of trend that always has lethal consequences for law enforcement personnel.

They were especially freaked out over a single footnote in the bulletin:

Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.

The report further detailed some of the antigovernment belief systems it was warning about, and how they would exploit the current circumstances:

Historically, domestic rightwing extremists have feared, predicted, and anticipated a cataclysmic economic collapse in the United States. Prominent antigovernment conspiracy theorists have incorporated aspects of an impending economic collapse to intensify fear and paranoia among like-minded individuals and to attract recruits during times of economic uncertainty. Conspiracy theories involving declarations of martial law, impending civil strife or racial conflict, suspension of the U.S. Constitution, and the creation of citizen detention camps often incorporate aspects of a failed economy. Antigovernment conspiracy theories and “end times” prophecies could motivate extremist individuals and groups to stockpile food, ammunition, and weapons. These teachings also have been linked with the radicalization of domestic extremist individuals and groups in the past, such as violent Christian Identity organizations and extremist members of the militia movement.

The bulletin, it turns out, could have been describing Jerry Kane.

C&L was one of the first news organizations to report that last Thursday's shootout in West Memphis, Arkansas, involved a far-right extremist named Jerry Kane and his 16-year-old son Joe, acting evidently on the paranoid belief systems they had been traveling the country promoting.

Now more details are emerging about Kane. And the portrait that is emerging is one that's becoming all too familiar: Yet another "sovereign citizen" radicalized by far-right belief systems, fully convinced that the American government and its laws are illegitimate, which gives them the right to act beyond the law.

And once they move beyond the law, anything is possible. This is why we've seen so many "sovereign citizens" acting out violently now, from Scott Roeder, the killer of Dr. Tiller, to James Von Brunn, the Holocaust Museum shooter, to Jerry Kane. This is also why we're seeing so many police officers -- seven in the past year alone -- mowed down by these far-right radicals.

The first firm details came an Associated Press report that described some of Kane's wanderings and previous brushes with the law:

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It's people like this who I most fear, because they are completely irrational, own guns, and embrace violence. It's also why I loathe Michele Bachmann and her ilk. They actually encourage this type of behavior.

Watch this exchange. This man starts out angry, but controlled. He's got a problem with our new "socialist-communist" health care bill, and he'll tell anyone within 50 feet about it. When pressed on specifics, he just rolls out of control, first shouting for death to the communists, then death to the videographer.

"Get out of here before I run you up with this flag and throw you to the river," he cries. "I fought for this country, you sonofabitch. What did you do?"

With all due respect for his service to our country, he seems to have a disconnect when it comes to Constitutional rights. Evidently free speech, which he is exercising liberally in this clip, is only acceptable when it's right wing free speech.

Part of me really dislikes giving any attention to these people. At the same time, ignoring them also ignores the fact that when mentally unstable people are stirred up and their anger ignited, it will not end well.

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Janet Napolitano is probably getting some satisfaction from the fact that reality has proven the bulletin issued by her Homeland Security department last year -- warning that the nation was about to be hit by a fresh wave of right-wing extremism and its attendant violence -- all too prescient.

Especially the part where it warned that these extremists were working hard to recruit military veterans:

Returning veterans possess combat skills and experience that are attractive to rightwing extremists. DHS/I&A is concerned that rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to boost their violent capabilities.

At the time the bulletin was issued, the right-wing media put up a hue and cry claiming that DHS was smearing veterans as potential terrorist threats, and demanding Napolitano's head. And even though Napolitano rebutted their nonsense, the conventional-wisdom talking point out of the affair was that DHS had unfairly smeared folks in the military.

Now it's clear that the Pentagon is aware that it has a problem: From Stars and Stripes:

The Pentagon is cracking down on extremism in its ranks with a new set of rules restricting servicemembers from participating on the Web sites of supremacist groups.

A new Defense Department directive on dissident and political activity issued on November 27 — the first since 1996 — says servicemembers “must not actively advocate supremacist doctrine, ideology, or causes.” This includes writing blogs or posting on Web sites.

... Last July, Stars and Stripes reported that 130 members of newsaxon.org, a social networking Web site affiliated with the National Socialist Movement, had listed “military” as their job in “Facebook”-style user profiles. Swatsikas, Nazi symbolism and militant imagery emblazon the site.

...

Army and Defense Department officials said at the time that extremist activity was not considered “an Army-wide issue.” And there was confusion, Potok said, about what defined “active participation.” Previously, membership alone in an extremist group was not enough for disciplinary action, though banned activities included distributing materials and demonstrating.

“The one worry here is that enforcement of these regulations may be very uneven. It leaves the decision up to local commanders and we’ve really yet to see how that’s going to work,” Potok said. “The hope is that this clarifies that even advocacy of these kinds of ideas is not consistent with being in the military.”

The arrests of the Hutaree militia made clear that the concern was full grounded in reality. As Newsweek observed in its report on the rise of right-wing extremists:

The rambling rants of the Hutaree might seem funny, in a sick sort of way, but they are far from harmless. The FBI busted nine members last month for allegedly plotting to trigger an "uprising" against the government by assassinating a local police officer and then ambushing colleagues who attended the funeral by blowing up improvised explosive devices. They may have had some professional instruction: one of the men in the group, Michael Meeks, is a Persian Gulf War veteran who served four years in the Marines and was a decorated rifle expert, according to Marine Corps records. Another member, Kristopher Sickles, is an Army vet (discharged "under other than honorable conditions," according to prosecutors).

After all, as we explained at the time, the DHS report's assessment of the situation vis a vis veterans was if anything understated:

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Bill O'Reilly was all worked up last night on his Fox News show, claiming that the "liberal media" are waving the bloody shirt again, using the violence and extremism and racism of a handful of joiners to smear an otherwise entirely innocent movement.

First, his Talking Points Memo segment was devoted to the notion that "the Tea Party as a whole is not responsible for the loons who may lurk among them."

Which is, you know, pretty much true. Unless, of course, the movement seems to attract a high percentage of loons, and especially if the movement itself employs loons as their speakers and representatives.

Which is the case with the Tea Parties.

This is pretty funny, really, coming from the guy -- as Matt Corley at ThinkProgress notes -- who only a couple of years ago was culling off comments at DailyKos to smear the entire liberal blogosphere as the equivalent of Nazis.

O'Reilly brought on Rev. Al Sharpton, who seems to have figured out how not to let O'Reilly make him into a punching bag, because he pretty effectively rebutted most of O'Reilly's points. Nonetheless, Monsieur Falafeloofah managed to assert that the "liberal media smear" of the Tea Parties by blaming them for their kooks is "unfair!"

This was followed by a segment with Mary Katherine Ham and Juan Williams. And Williams set off O'Reilly by pointing out that the Tea Parties are fundamentally a rebirth of the Patriot/militia movement of the 1990s:

WILLIAMS: You know, people who's have a lot of hateful attitudes towards President Bush and then somebody who is extremist on the fringe, yes. And if that was also to be then the case with the Tea Party, yes, that's too much and unfair. But, when you start to see militia groups start to associate with the Tea Party --

O'REILLY: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let me stop you there. I haven't seen militia groups associating with the Tea Party.

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