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Well, you can't say Andrew Breitbart doesn't have an active imagination.

The Hollywood right-winger went on Glenn Beck's Fox News show yesterday -- guest-hosted by Judge Napolitano -- and proposed the following conspiracy theory: The White House is collecting e-mail addresses so it can send out "netroots gangs" to physically attack and intimidate its critics.

Breitbart: Well, what people need to understand here is that they're being community organized. And the White House absolutely understands how the Internet works, and understands that there are countless blogs, Media Matters, the Daily Kos, which are collecting information and putting out the disinformation.

What the White House wants to do is create a hierarchy of who its enemies are. Every week, or periodically, they meet with the netroots. And the netroots acts as an action gang that can go out there and attack the enemies of the president and attack the enemies -- the, the, the people who would attack his plan.

So it is vital for this White House to find out who its enemies are, and then to sic its gang of netroots people on the American people.

Breitbart goes on to contend that the non-prosecution of two Black Panthers for polling-place violations was connected to this conspiracy:

Breitbart: That sends a direct message to the netroots people out there: Don't worry, this administration has our back. Those people that would community organize on behalf of the president and his initiatives will be protected.

Yeah, I should have guessed that black-radicals/liberal geek connection from the Black Panthers booth at Netroots Nation last week.

Wotta maroon.

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Judge Andrew Napolitano sat in as the guest host yesterday on Glenn Beck's Fox News show, and featured a segment devoted to the notion that the hate-crimes legislation currently before the Senate might somehow be abused to undermine Americans' free-speech rights. His guest was David Rittgers of the Cato Institute.

There is, however, a problem right off the bat with their thesis: The bill in question -- the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act (LLEHCPA) -- contains specific language designed to ensure that the bill is never construed in such a fashion:

Nothing in this Act, or the amendments made by this Act, shall be construed to prohibit any expressive conduct protected from legal prohibition by, or any activities protected by, the Constitution.

Any honest discussion of this aspect of the legislation would have to bring this language into consideration -- but it's never mentioned by either Napolitano or Rittgers. Rittgers has written about it at Cato -- mostly objecting on the basis of concerns about federalism -- and similarly omits any discussion of the bill's actual language (which also explicitly recognizes the primary role of the states and local jurisdictions).

Watch instead what Napolitano and Rittgers do in the course of this discussion: they bring in a totally unrelated piece of legislation -- the "Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act", which is indeed highly dubious from a constitutional point of view -- as though it were part and parcel of the same hate-crimes legislation issues -- even though the two laws have nothing to do with each other.

And then they return almost seamlessly to the federalism and double-jeopardy issues around the LLEHCPA -- Napolitano just refers briefly to "this legislation," but it's quickly clear they're discussing not the Megan Meier bill, which does not raise such issues, but rather the LLEHCPA. It's all so muddied up that anyone watching the show could easily conclude that they're somehow packaged together.

Moreover, the double-jeopardy problems -- as we've explained in some detail -- are largely nonexistent, or rather simply reflect the ongoing debate over "dual sovereignty doctrine," which involves many more issues than merely bias crimes.

The ACLU strongly supports this bill, despite its usual concerns over double jeopardy, and if you look the bill's actual language, you can see why:

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