What can you do if established media refuses to print your hate- and nonsense-filled talking points verbatim? Start your own newspaper, of course! You can print it in tabloid size, forgo subscriptions, and publish propaganda screeds verbatim off the ad revenue alone.

The Courier Journal, Volume 126, Number 44 arrived free in the mailbox of nearly 70,000 people in the greater Shoals area a couple of Wednesdays ago. It is often the only reading material the area's poorest citizens have.

Filled with ads, the Courier-Journal has grown its audience by nearly one-sixth in the last eighteen months. Headlining this week's edition is "Marriage Matters":

SHOALS--One of our greatest challenges as a nation is preserving the integrity and unity of the home. Many individuals have good intentions, but they lack the determination and skills necessary to keep a family intact.

So far, so good! What wrong with keeping families together? But by mid-first paragraph, you are already getting the spiel:

Using God-centeredness as the foundation, the Marriage Matters conference provides information for maintaining good marriages.

The front page article is basically an ad for faith-based counseling. It is like the "free pregnancy test" advertised inside, wherein young, terrified women get to watch a video about fetal development and are counseled to make "the right choice" before getting their test results.

Crosspoint Church of Christ, which offers the "Marriage Matters" program, has no connection to northeastern "Church of Christ" denominations. In fact, the southeastern Church of Christ has been connected to anti-alcohol politics, blue laws, and the so-called "Constitution Party" for a very long time.

Continue reading »

Ta-Nehisi Coates: This is who they are--America's far right-wing, speaking with all the emboldened ignorance that is fast becoming their stock-in trade

Mock, Paper, Scissors: Peggy Noonan vists Dick Cheney in the hospital

Matthew Yglesias: Conservatives don't care about the deficit

OurFuture: Alan Greenspan and things forgotten

The American Spectator: America's Ruling Class - And the Perils of Revolution

Julian Sanchez: Poor, tragic, troubled Mel Gibson

via Kevin Drum

The Bush administration is now blackballing the attendance of technical experts at a telecom standards meeting this week if they contributed money to John Kerry's campaign. A telecom standards meeting!

Just to give you a flavor of what we're talking about, here's an excerpt from the agenda for the Working Party on Terrestrial Fixed and Mobile Radiocommunication Services:

Recommendation for 400 MHz bands
RLAN in the 5 GHz band
Recommendation on harmonized frequencies for property protection
Revision to Recommendation PCC.II/REC. 67 (XIX-01) on Low Power Radiocommunication devices,
Radio frequency identification devices (RFID)
Broadband Power Line Communications (BPL)
Refarming of 700 MHz band
Answer to Market questionnaire on IMT 2000 and systems beyond
Results of the video conference on wireless broadband

Atrios is right: this is completely insane. The paranoid lengths to which the Bushies will go to punish their perceived enemies is simply stunning.

DOWNLOADS: (888)

PLAYS: (3992)

Embed

Michele Bachmann's paranoia knows no bounds. Now she's claiming that Bill Clinton wants to "take her out" (and not in the dating kinda way, either). Why? Because Clinton criticized her choice of language in calling the government "gangsters," as part of his weeklong observations that the rhetoric from people like Bachmann is what produced unhinged and violent acts like Oklahoma City.

Talk like this upsets the right-wing talkers very much, and of course it then all becomes about how the mean left-wingers are saying nasty things about poor meek conservatives, who have never said a mean things about anyone in their lives. That was Bachmann's schtick last night on Sean Hannity's Fox show.

And as proof that liberals are evilly trying to silence right-wingers, Bachmann trotted out ... net neutrality.

Bachmann: Oh sure, that's all they have left now, is they use pejorative terms, hateful terms, against those who are carrying the message. So whether they're attacking conservative talk radio, or conservative TV, or whether it's Internet sites -- I mean, let's face it, what's the Obama administration doing? They're advocating net neutrality, which is essentially censorship of the Internet!

This is the Obama administration advocating censorship of the Internet. Why? They want to silence the voices that are opposing them.

Net neutrality? Censorship? Really? Well, not really. How about more like the precise opposite?

Somebody's been watching too much Glenn Beck. Bachmann is a prime example of what happens when you let Beck do your thinking for you.

Virginia AG Ken Cuccinelli has been in the news a lot lately. You may have heard about the letter he wrote earlier this month to all of Virginia’s public colleges – UVA, VA Tech, William and Mary, etc. calling on them to drop policies banning discrimination against gays and lesbians. He claims they have no legal authority to adopt such policies.

Or maybe you heard Cuccinelli speculate about whether President Obama was born in the United States. In this recently unearthed recording from the campaign trail, Cuccinelli can be heard telling a birther that he might be able to challenge federal laws on the basis of Obama’s birth place:

Cuccinelli has since dashed off a denial, but the fun doesn’t stop there.

In another recently unearthed recording, Cuccinelli told a crowd that he’s worried about the government tracking his family. He said he might not register his newborn son for a Social Security number because "it is being used to track you." He also claimed that many other Americans aren’t registering for Social Security numbers for the same reason:

We're gonna have our 7th child on Monday, if he's not born before. And, for the very concerns you state, we're actually considering – as I'm sure many of you here didn't get a Social Security number when you were born, they do it now – we're considering not doing that. And a lot of people are considering that now, because it is being used to track you.

Cuccinelli’s hard line against gays, paranoia about the Social Security Administration, and openness to birther conspiracies prove that he is the real deal – a bona fide Teabagger of the highest order. And now he’s the chief legal officer of an entire state.

For anyone wondering what a Tea Party-controlled GOP might look like, keep your eyes on Virginia.

[Richard Mack at a Bellevue, WA, militia organizing meeting in February 1995. Photo by David Neiwert.]

The more we learn about the Tea Party movement as it evolves, the more disturbing a portrait emerges: One of a right-wing populist movement animated by cultural resentments and paranoia that previously were the domain of fringe conspiracy theorists and militiamen.

There were a number of important reports on the Tea Party movement this week that underscored and confirmed something we've been reporting at C&L (similarly confirmed in that report for Newsweek) for some time: That the Tea Party movement has been overtaken by right-wing extremists of the Patriot movement.

The most important of these was David Barstow's report in the New York Times describing the movement's evolution into a revival of the Patriots:

The Tea Party movement has become a platform for conservative populist discontent, a force in Republican politics for revival, as it was in the Massachusetts Senate election, or for division. But it is also about the profound private transformation of people like Mrs. Stout, people who not long ago were not especially interested in politics, yet now say they are bracing for tyranny.

These people are part of a significant undercurrent within the Tea Party movement that has less in common with the Republican Party than with the Patriot movement, a brand of politics historically associated with libertarians, militia groups, anti-immigration advocates and those who argue for the abolition of the Federal Reserve.

Urged on by conservative commentators, waves of newly minted activists are turning to once-obscure books and Web sites and discovering a set of ideas long dismissed as the preserve of conspiracy theorists, interviews conducted across the country over several months show. In this view, Mr. Obama and many of his predecessors (including George W. Bush) have deliberately undermined the Constitution and free enterprise for the benefit of a shadowy international network of wealthy elites.

Loose alliances like Friends for Liberty are popping up in many cities, forming hybrid entities of Tea Parties and groups rooted in the Patriot ethos. These coalitions are not content with simply making the Republican Party more conservative. They have a larger goal — a political reordering that would drastically shrink the federal government and sweep away not just Mr. Obama, but much of the Republican establishment, starting with Senator John McCain.

One of the key figures in this takeover, as this story describes, has been Richard Mack, the '90s militia figure who has become a fixture on the Tea Party circuit, as we reported previously. Indeed, his December appearance in Spokane was one of the signal events in the NYT piece.

Mack, who I photographed in February 1995 while addressing a militia-organizing session in Bellevue, Washington, has been a key figure for the Patriot movement in "transmitting" its talking points and beliefs into the mainstream for a long time. But he is hardly the only Patriot figure heavily involved in the Tea Parties, as the NYT piece describes.

One of the people who sometimes accompanied me in the 1990s when I attended militia gatherings, Devin Burghart, now works for the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, and he was at the National Tea Party Convention and attended its seminar. and speeches. He filed a detailed -- and revealing -- report for IREHR:

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (726)

PLAYS: (2293)

Embed

It's not news to regular C&L readers that militias are forming again in rural areas, a reality confirmed this summer by the SPLC.

It's deja vu all over again. And just as they did in the '90s, they're all insisting they really are just sincere patriots concerned about the looming tyranny of the federal government. And just as in the '90s, journalists are lapping it up.

The chief beneficiaries of this parachute-style journalism have been the reformed Michigan Militia, which was previously profiled by CNN in similarly heartwarming fashion.

Two reports this week on the Michigan Militia continued in this vein, though they at least contained some notes indicating that something darker is at work with militia organizing than the image the militiamen themselves want to cultivate -- that of ordinary citizens who are being civic-minded and patriotic.

Which is true. What's also true is that they're jacked up on large doses of paranoia about a "tyranny" that simply doesn't exist (particularly a fear that President Obama plans to take their guns away).

What's striking to me is how they sound just like the militiamen I met in the 1990s when they knew reporters were around (and, as we learned eventually, it was quite different from the way they talked among themselves in private). But even then, they sounded fairly extreme and marginal in their beliefs.

Now, they sound just like your average Tea Partier. Indeed, it's remarkable how much their rhetoric is echoes Glenn Beck.

One report, from Michigan NPR Radio, was reasonably careful in dealing with the subject:

It's a Wednesday night in February, and 22 men and one woman are gathered at Mayberry's Restaurant in Farmington Hills. They're all Caucasian. Some are middle-aged, out of shape; others are in their twenties, and fit.

This is the militia's monthly business meeting. It's also recruitment night.

You also get the feeling that the militiamen are overhyping the success of their recruitment efforts:

Only one potential new member shows up at the meeting. Jeff is in his early thirties, he has a wife and a new baby. He's deeply distrustful of the government and he believes something is to about happen, probably the collapse of the American economy.

"Well, I feel like I can't rely on our elected officials, I can't rely on our military who works for our government, so bottom line is we have to have somebody to rely on," he says.

This is fairly typical of the paranoia that was common to the '90s militias as well. Of course, if you watch Glenn Beck regularly and believe the garbage he peddles, then you're probably going to be in a similar state of mind.

They're also fearful about their guns, still:

Protecting the Second Amendment is the primary reason for the militia's existence.

Jeff is 42. He's a rifle team leader. He believes the current administration is sneaking around the back door to take his guns away, and he wants the right to protect his family during an emergency

"Okay, I've got this food, I've got this water," he says. "I need to be able to defend that from people that don't. In a time of need, a couple of weeks without food and water and gasoline, people are going to be hungry. And they're going to do desperate things to do whatever they can to feed their families."

Right. Sounds a lot like that scenario

Beck's guest offered just the other day.

The second piece on the Michiganders was from WWMT-TV, and it contained largely more of the same.

In it, militia leader Lee Miracle does offer a novel reason why it's unfair to connect the militias to Tim McVeigh:

“Let's say after the Oklahoma City bombing they said Timothy McVeigh, a known bread eater, blew up a building. Now when you go the store and buy some bread they're going to say, 'Oh he's eating bread just like Timothy McVeigh,'” said Miracle.

Well, if there were something in bread that made a person a person believe in conspiracy theories and various "facts" about incipient government tyranny that eventually will enslave all Americans, then this might be an accurate analogy. Because all that is true of the militias, and has a powerful causal connections to the motives of people like McVeigh when they set off bombs and commit terrorist acts. It is not, however, true of bread.

Which is why one can't help be darkly amused when the WWMT reporter asks Miracle if there's any chance he could suddenly become a violent terrorist with a gun. His answer:

“No, I'm a postal worker."

Somehow, that's less than assuring.

The Mudflats: The real story behind the "rogue" in Palin's new book

digby: The right may be confused but they are thrilled to be wallowing in their domestic paranoia once again.

Pam's House Blend: Facebook poll - "Should Obama be killed?"

Taylor Marsh: In Iraq, General Ray Odierno and Ambassador Christopher Hill are at loggerheads

The Peking Duck: World Bank Head: The dollar will lose its place to the euro and reninbi

The Satirical Political Report: Forget Chicago as Host City. here's what Obama should really pitch to the IOC

DOWNLOADS: (2071)

PLAYS: (7174)

Embed

Probably the most ironic -- no, make that flat-out bizarre -- aspect of Glenn Beck's ultimately successful campaign to force out Van Jones is that it was predicated on Jones' supposed indulgence in extremist rhetoric ideas.

This isn't just a matter of the pot calling the kettle black. It's more like the black hole calling the sunspot dark.

Glenn Beck's history of indulging in extremism -- not just turning a blind eye to its presence, but promoting it outright to an audience of millions -- is so deep and wide that whatever indiscretions Jones might be guilty of fade into total insignificance.

Of course, we're all familiar with the remarks that lie at so much of the root of this matter: Beck's outrageous claims that President Obama is a "racist" who has a "deep-seated hatred of white people", which prompted a largely succesful campaign by Color of Change to encourage advertisers to pull their support for Beck's Fox News program. But that, frankly, is barely scratching the surface.

Keith Olbermann has put out a plea for information about Beck's own background in outrageous remarks. Of course, all he probably needs to do is go through the C&L archives on Beck

Still, what Olbermann -- and everyone else wondering how to fight back from this latest round of right-wing viciousness -- should focus on is the inordinate number of times that Beck has simply promoted extremist ideas and memes straight out of the most fringe elements of the American far right.

It goes back several years. Beck, in fact, openly promoted the John Birch Society and its "New World Order" conspiracy theories frequently when he was still at CNN Headline News. As I observed at the time:

Beck is busy building a narrative that not only opens the Pandora's Box of mass public consumption of far-right conspiracism, it also portrays the most hateful and paranoid and poisonous bloc of American politics as credible and normative.

Since joining Fox in January of this year, however, the tendency has not only intensified, it's simply gone off the rails.

Most notably, Beck has actively promoted ideas, theories, and concepts taken directly from the far-right "Patriot"/militia movement, many of which in turn derive from the ugliest sector of the right, white supremacy:

-- He "war-gamed" out an apocalytpic American future in which society has completely crumbled, leaving behind a "Road Warrior" society in which militias remained the only defenders of the remnants of white society.

-- He told his audience for several weeks running that he "could not disprove" the existence of concentration camps run by FEMA in which conservatives were to be rounded up. After a few weeks of this, he finally ran a segment that in fact did debunk these claims, explaining that in reality all of the supposed "evidence" for these camps was the product of a long-running hoax that began in the 1990s with the "Patriot"/militia movement. (He then later claimed that he had done nothing to promote these theories.)

-- He ran several segments, including one on his radio show, in which he promoted the concept of the secession of Texas from the Union. A little later, he tried to pretend he didn't agree with the concept while in fact giving a secessionist the opportunity to promote his plans to Beck's audience.

-- He regularly promoted "one world government" paranoia. This included a supposed plot to put us all on a global currency controlled by the New World Order.

-- He tried to argue that the chief cause of the sour economy was the United States' reliance on a central banking system.

-- He hosted an entire hourlong segment devoted to promoting militia-derived constitutional theories about state sovereignty.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (1542)

PLAYS: (3076)

Embed

We had one of those great existential crises occur yesterday: Rush Limbaugh showed up to talk about the Evil Federal Government on Glenn Beck's Fox News show.

Normally, this much complete wingnuttery in one location threatens to create a black hole, a tear in the time-space continuum, and thus end all life as we know it. Fortunately, we seem to have been saved by the fact that Limbaugh wasn't actually present in Beck's studio. Who knows what would have happened then.

As it was, it was pretty bad. They devoted the focus of the segment to talking about Beck's theory that the government is going to "nationalize" the states and strip them of their ability to levy taxes, which even Mark Sanford dismisses as a "conspiracy theory". But evidently, Limbaugh believes in Beck's theory, at least in its larger outlines:

The question that we're all asking is: At what point the American people decide they wanted this kind of power grab by government into the private sector or have they decided that? Did they vote for a cult-like figure based on emotion when they voted for Obama? If so, what's it going to take for them to wake up?

I mean, the politics of this is, that with the numbers in Washington, even if the Republican Party was a unified conservative opposition in stark contrast to Obama, even if they were all unified, they don't have the numbers to stop anything that he is doing. It's going to be — it's going to require the American people stopping this and you have to wonder at this stage at — where are they?

Do they want the government owning their house? Do they want the government owning the mortgage company that they deal with and the bank that they deal with? Do they want the government owning the car company that they're going to buy their little putt-putt from?

Continue reading »