Arizona is having an immediate impact on the sanity of local politicians all over the country. The latest loony-bin candidate is Virgil Peck of Kansas. And you wonder why Tuscon wants to split off and become its own state? Kansas certainly has its share of the nuts.

LJWorld:

A legislator said Monday it might be a good idea to control illegal immigration the way the feral hog population has been controlled: with gunmen shooting from helicopters.

Rep. Virgil Peck, R-Tyro, said he was just joking, but that his comment did reflect frustration with the problem of illegal immigration. Peck made his comment during a discussion by the House Appropriations Committee on state spending for controlling feral swine. After one of the committee members talked about a program that uses hunters in helicopters to shoot wild swine, Peck suggested that may be a way to control illegal immigration.

Appropriations Chairman Marc Rhoades, R-Newton, said Peck’s comment was inappropriate. Rhoades said he thought Peck was joking, but added, “Hopefully he won’t do it again.”

Asked about his comment, Peck was unapologetic. “I was just speaking like a southeast Kansas person,” he said. He said most of his constituents are upset with illegal immigration and the state and federal government response. He said he didn’t expect any further controversy over his comment. “I think it’s over,” he said.

Feral pigs and guns in helicopters. This is truly a horrifying thing to think, let alone say. And that's not a joke.

Dome On The Range caught the audio and says:

Yes, Virgil. Everyone in Southeast Kansas believes that we should respond to
immigration by sniping down brown people from a helicopter. Should we
bother checking their citizenship status first or should we just go off "their olive complexion," as suggested by your colleague, Rep. Connie O'Brien?

So much for toning down the rhetoric after the tragedy in Tucson. It's worth noting that at the end of February, the Kansas Republican Party called union members protesting in the Capitol "thugs." What seems more thuggish to you: Kansas workers exercising their right to free speech in a public building (in protest to a bill that suffocated their First Amendment rights), or an elected representative suggesting we should gun down immigrants like pigs?

Check out Peck's website. It conjures up visions of a cross between VDARE and Stormfront with a hint of the Hutaree Militia.

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There's nothing quite like those moments on Fox when Megyn Kelly and Monica Crowley share the set, because nobody kvetches louder than these two. Yesterday they had a special segment where they whined about President Obama reportedly referring offhandedly to the Tea Party movement as "teabaggers."

The whole segment, as usual, was rife with disinformation. Crowley tries to characterize the DHS bulletin describing right-wing extremists as a potential terrorist threat as an attempt by the administration to demonize ordinary conservatives -- a simply risible (not to mention deeply irresponsible) claim. Kelly tried to claim that this was the supposedly the "second time" Obama had been caught using the term -- even though, in fact, he didn't actually say it to Earl Blumenauer.

Crowley was especially comical:

Crowley: He ought to really apologize for this vulgar and vile comment referencing the American people, and also try to give some sort of speech -- I know a lot of us have heard enough from the president already -- but he should try to put out some words that are going to make up for this kind of thing.

... But you know, Megyn, even if he were to go out and say this, I would encourage him to do it, but he's got a credibility problem now because it seems that every time there is a movement or an individual or an institution or an organization that disagrees with his policies, he personalizes it. He singles them out, whether it's Fox News, or Sergeant Crowley of the Cambridge police department, or the entire state of Arizona for supporting this new immigration law, whether it's the Tea Party movement, he has this willingness that's very unbecoming of the American president, to go out and single out the American people.

Of course, neither of them get around to explaining exactly why the president needs to show deference to a movement explicitly organized around opposing him and any and every policy he might try to enact, a movement embodied by people who call him a Marxist and a fascist and depict him as a witch doctor with a bone in his nose.

But most amusing of all is the notion that calling Tea Partiers "teabaggers" is a horrendous, unforgivable slur. As Dave Weigel says, it's clear that Tea Partiers find it offensive now, so that's probably reason enough not to use it if you're interested in conversing with them. That's a big if, though.

Moreover, as Jay Nordlinger at National Review admits, the term "teabagger" was introduced to the political lexicon by Tea Party movement leaders:

The first big day for this movement was Tax Day, April 15. And organizers had a gimmick. They asked people to send a tea bag to the Oval Office. One of the exhortations was “Tea Bag the Fools in D.C.” A protester was spotted with a sign saying, “Tea Bag the Liberal Dems Before They Tea Bag You.” So, conservatives started it: started with this terminology. But others ran with it and ran with it.

Tommy Christopher at Mediaite has it about right:

The origin of the term is relevant in determining the relative size of the Tea Party’s violin. What wasn’t pointed out to Tapper is the fact that the Tea Partiers not only invented the term, they did so in order to inflict a similar double entendre onto the President, the Democrats, and liberals in general. Hence, it’s a violin so small, you need an electron microscope with a zoom lens to see it.

Now, they’re trying to re-cast the term as a slur, on a par with the “n-word,” hurtful to all the Tea Party members who are just ordinary moms, dads, sons, and daughters. The latter point has some resonance, but the former is ridiculous in the extreme.

In emails, protest signs, t-shirts, and online, early Tea Party literature urged protesters to “Tea Bag the White House,” and to “Tea-bag the liberal Dems before they tea-bag you.” The suggestion is that the metaphoric “tea-bags” be shoved in the mouths of the President, Democratic members of Congress, and even ordinary citizens who identify as liberal Democrats. The idea that they just didn’t know the term’s only (at that time) meaning is belied by the fact that they obviously knew it was negative (and non-consensual), since they didn’t want it done to them, and also because it only had one meaning.

It was only after MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and David Shuster, and CNN’s Anderson Cooper, turned the tables on the term that Tea Partiers objected. They were perfectly satisfied to advocate the metaphoric mouth-rape of liberal men, women, and children, but had the nerve to become indignant when the insult boomeranged on them.

Here's a video of Griff Jenkins urging viewers to "Tea Bag the White House," plus Charles Krauthammer last November referring offhandedly to the "Tea Bag protests":

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And then there was Neil Cavuto in May:

I understand Tea Partiers want to get people to stop using a word they now find embarrassing. But can we please stop pretending that it's an unconscionable slur?

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Coming on the heels of last weekend's arrests of a group of a militiamen in the Midwest for plotting to kill law-enforcement officers, you'd think people in positions of responsibility would take seriously some of the rising threats from right-wing extremists. And, judging from the story in the Washington Post, it would seem at least the FBI is:

The FBI is warning police across the country that an anti-government group's call to remove governors from office could provoke violence.

The group called the Guardians of the free Republics wants to "restore America" by peacefully dismantling parts of the government, according to its Web site. It sent letters to governors demanding they leave office or be removed.

Investigators do not see threats of violence in the group's message, but fear the broad call for removal of top state officials could lead others to act out violently. At least two states beefed up security in response.

But over in the FoxNewsiverse -- which operates on separate plane in which everything up is down -- it's not really a big deal. Just about the only discussion of the story on Fox yesterday came in the "All Star Panel" section of Special Report with Bret Baier, and it mostly elicited a big yawn.

Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard didn't really know what to make of it, but at least there seemed to be some agreement that even if these were just "kooky people," sometimes "kooky people" can inflict serious harm. Except for Charles Krauthammer, who thought it was all a non-story -- because, of course, activity by right-wing extremists is always a non-story to conservatives:

Krauthammer: Oh, come on. I get e-mails like that every week, and I don't even hold any office. And they don't always include the legally remove you, either.

... And lastly, loony anarchists aren't new in America. We've had 'em since Sacco and Vanzetti. It didn't start with health care reform.

Except, Charles, that these aren't anarchists. These people call themselves "constitutionalists". Just like your Fox colleague, Glenn Beck.

And yes, they've been known to blow stuff up, too.

As Lee Fang at Think Progress explains, the group making the threats is in fact a classic right-wing extremist organization:

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I wonder if Democrats will ever learn that with this gang of right-wing extremists, cooperation is weakness. This story from Think Progress is just appalling:

During his reign as Senate Minority Leader, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has led his party to engage in an unprecedented level of obstruction — wielding the filibuster to block even routine bills and nominations while simultaneously lying about his own previous support of majority rule in the Senate. No one has fared worse under McConnell’s blanket obstructionism than President Obama’s nominees to key government positions, ambassadorships and judgeships. A massive 237 Obama nominees presently await Senate confirmation, yet Mitch McConnell has done nearly everything in his power to ensure that Obama’s nominees will never even receive a Senate vote.

Because the government includes several agencies and boards whose members are required by law to be bipartisan, however, the party-out-of-power’s Senate leader traditionally gets to make a few nominations of his own. One such McConnell nominee is Sharon Browne, a nominee to the Legal Services Corporation’s board who fundamentally disagrees with the Corporation’s mission of providing legal services to the poor. Browne has spent most of her career with a right-wing litigation shop that repeatedly fought to cut off funding for indigent legal services; and she was a plaintiff in a court case which claimed that a method of funding legal services for poor Californians violated that state’s law. In other words, McConnell has selected someone to help lead the Legal Services Corporation who is committed to destroying the Legal Services Corporation.

Yet despite Browne’s obvious unfitness for this job, and despite the fact that her patron has fought tooth and nail to prevent President Obama’s nominees from even receiving a Senate vote, Senate HELP Committee Chair Tom Harkin (D-IA) scheduled a committee vote on Browne’s nomination this Wednesday. Not one Democratic senator has taken a serious step to slow down Browne — such as placing a hold on the nomination — and she appears to be on track for confirmation.

Call Sen. Harkin's office at (202) 224-3254 and ask why Democrats are allowing the appointment of someone who wants to destroy the agency to which she's nominated.

[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:

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David Gregory paints this phony outrage as a firestorm, but Friedman has to correct him. Even Tom Brokaw was stunned at the ignorance and stupidity of the right wingers going ballistic over President Obama's speech to our school kids.

Meet the Press:

MR. GREGORY: We brought it up with David Axelrod. Well, this has created such a firestorm. Here's the New Canaan Public Schools, writing a parent letter, and in it they say this. "In developing their plans our principals have considered issues such as developmental appropriateness, curricular relevance, the time at which the speech is being broadcast and the importance of teachers assuming responsibility for the selection of instructional materials. In elementary schools the administration and faculty will view the speech, download it and after discussing it, make decisions regarding how it might be used in the future--including deciding its appropriateness for various grade levels. Parents will be notified, if and when, the decision to show the speech is made." Tom Brokaw, talk about tortured language. What's going on here?

MR. FRIEDMAN: Signs of the apocalypse. I mean, really.

MR. BROKAW: It's stunning to me. I come from a time and a place in America where it would be thrilling to have a president of the United States address your school about the importance of studying and staying in school. And this president, whatever else you think about his political philosophy, is a symbol of working hard, coming from difficult circumstances and getting to where he is in part because of education. I think it's so ripe for satire, it's unbelievable. The superintendent of the Gettysburg Public School System said today that they have devised a plan for students to be shielded from a President Abraham Lincoln who will be coming to make an address. Look, that is the most tortured thing I can possibly imagine, what we just read there. It sounds like East Germany trying to form some restrictions on people leaving the eastern sector to go into the western sector. I think it's perfectly appropriate for parents to say, "I don't want my child to hear that. I would rather keep them out or put them in a different school that day." But this is completely out of control, in my judgment. And it's not--it's not partisan. I mean, if--when I was a student or when my children were in school...

MR. GREGORY: Right.

MR. BROKAW: ...if it had been Dwight Eisenhower or John Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson or Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan or George Bush, the idea of hearing a president of the United States saying we should study hard and that's how we advance and we all need to get in on, on this, I think is an appropriate message.

MR. GREGORY: Mayor Giuliani, you ran for president and one of the things that I've noticed in my experience covering a Republican president,George W. Bush, is the lack of respect for the institution of the presidency. Whether it's people saying during Bush's time, "Hey, he's not my president." Well, no, yes, he is. Does that trouble you?

MR. GIULIANI: Yes, it does, and Tom is right. But the difference is we looked at President Eisenhower or President Reagan, even up to about that point, even President Bush 41 differently. There's a lack of respect for the president, there's a lack of respect for politicians. And David Axelrod said, "Well, this isn't politics." Everything the president does nowadays is politics, for better or worse. And I think that's what you're seeing. You're seeing people distrust the president's motives or the administration's motives. It's not just about the speech, it's about the lesson plan. I think it's unfortunate and I think, you know, what's the--it almost seems a shame to say what's the harm in a president speaking to a group of children.

FMR. REP. FORD: I wish when I was in fourth...

MR. GIULIANI: I think, I think the president should be given the opportunity to do it.

MR. FRIEDMAN: But David, you know, you said, it's a firestorm. And we live in the age of firestorms. You know, today, or this week, it's the president speaking in school. What it needs is for people to stand up and say that's flat out stupid, OK? That's flat out stupid what you're talking about. The president of the United States, addressing schoolchildren in this country to study hard, work hard because that's the way you advance in today's global economy. And instead of that, we kind of dance around it, you know. It's flat out stupid.

Wow, Friedman said something I can get behind here. "Signs of the apocalypse." That's how their reaction is to everything done by the president. Why didn't Gregory call it stupid too? Rudy couldn't even defend their actions. That's saying a lot when the only thing he can come up with is that it's all politics now. How does that make it OK? When will the media start acting like the f*&king media? They can't even do it for something as absurd as this.

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David Frum spoke out this weekend about the reckless direction America's right-wing talk-show hosts are taking our national discourse -- embodied by the nuts bringing guns to events featuring President Obama:

Nobody has been hurt so far. We can all hope that nobody will be. But firearms and politics never mix well. They mix especially badly with a third ingredient: the increasingly angry tone of incitement being heard from right-of-center broadcasters.

The Nazi comparisons from Rush Limbaugh; broadcaster Mark Levin asserting that President Obama is "literally at war with the American people"; former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin claiming that the president was planning "death panels" to extirpate the aged and disabled; the charges that the president is a fascist, a socialist, a Marxist, an illegitimate Kenyan fraud, that he "harbors a deep resentment of America," that he feels a "deep-seated hatred of white people," that his government is preparing concentration camps, that it is operating snitch lines, that it is planning to wipe away American liberties": All this hysterical and provocative talk invites, incites, and prepares a prefabricated justification for violence.

And indeed some conservative broadcasters are lovingly anticipating just such an outcome.

Frum notes that conservatives were quick to attack a Homeland Security bulletin warning law-enforcement officers of a looming threat from right-wing extremists -- only to have those warnings come all too true:

Newt Gingrich tweeted: "The person who drafted the outrageous homeland security memo smearing veterans and conservatives should be fired."

I don't think the former speaker could tweet such a thing today in good conscience. The person who drafted that homeland security memo has gained very good reason to be worried. The guns are coming out. The risks are real.

It's not enough for conservatives to repudiate violence, as some are belatedly beginning to do. We have to tone down the militant and accusatory rhetoric. If Barack Obama really were a fascist, really were a Nazi, really did plan death panels to kill the old and infirm, really did contemplate overthrowing the American constitutional republic—if he were those things, somebody should shoot him.

Frum was on CNN's Reliable Sources this Sunday and talked about it with Howard Kurtz:

HOWARD KURTZ, HOST: Um, just before I came out here, David Frum, I read a column that you wrote for The Week magazine about people who bring guns to these town meetings or Obama events. And you really took on some on the right, on your side, so to speak -- Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity -- you talked about hysterical talk about violence, you said that we have to tone it down, we have to tone down, excuse me, "the militant and accusatory rhetoric."

DAVID FRUM: Ah, we do. We do. Because --

KURTZ: Is it fair to blame the broadcasters for this atmosphere?

FRUM: Uh, yeah, it's very -- coping with a downward trend in advertising revenues for talk radio, the broadcasters have ramped up what they are saying. When you have broadcasters saying the president is, quote, literally at war with the American people, um -- literally at war is a very serious thing, Al Qaeda is literally at war with the American people.

KURTZ: And has a deep-seated hatred for white people.

FRUM: And has a deep-seated hatred -- so it's inflammatory. And the thing that is so enraging about all this, is obviously people are getting more excited about that, than they do about the details of health insurance.

Interestingly, Kurtz a little later discusses Fox's flaming hypocrisy in backing anti-Obama protesters when previously it had dismissed anti-war protesters as "loons", something they were called out for by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show:

KURTZ: [H]asn't Fox, in fact, flipped -- some Fox hosts, I should say -- from slamming liberal protesters to defending these anti-Obama protesters?

That, in fact, is part of the bigger picture: The teabaggers are being inflamed and openly encouraged to act irrationally and disruptively by Fox News and its right-wing radio cohorts, specifically because they know that no matter how crazy they act -- even bringing guns to events featuring the president -- they will be actively defended for it, instead of exposed for the thugs they are.

Transcript below the fold:

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Conservatives have been working like mad to whitewash out of public view the existence of violent right-wing extremists, only to run into one problem: They keep popping back up again, time after time. Darned reality intrudes again.

So when the Southern Poverty Law Center recently confirmed what we've been reporting at C&L for awhile now -- that the far-right "militia" movement of the 1990s was roaring back to life -- it really wasn't a big surprise when Fox ran a story quoting a bunch of various right-wing officials dismissing it:

"I think it's utter nonsense to say it's racial," said Carter Clews, spokesman at Americans for Limited Government. Clews said Obama's "doctrinaire socialistic approach to government" has triggered a populist backlash, but "it's inappropriate to use the word militia."

The SPLC report came just four months after the Department of Homeland Security issued a controversial report on "right-wing extremists." That assessment carried many of the same themes and warnings as the new "militia" report, also warning that the election of the first black president could be exploited as a recruiting tool.

According to data ALG obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, the DHS relied in large part on news articles, questionable Web sites and several already-public SPLC reports -- not official government sources -- in writing its "right-wing extremists" report.

William Gheen, president of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, said the latest SPLC report suggests that DHS and the law center are relying largely on the same pool of information to make their claims about the rise in right-wing extremism.

"They are attempting to brand all right-of-center protesters as potential domestic terrorists or extremists," he said. "They are painting whole swaths of people as hate groups and extremists."

This is, of course, pure bunk of a sort: The report specifies that the key to considering someone under the influence of the Patriot movement is their willing adoption of the various conspiracy theories and provably false "facts" that form the bedrock of the movement's belief systems. Things like, for instance, believing Obama is actually a non-citizen born in Kenya.

So to the extent that the SPLC is branding "whole swaths" of people, that's only true as far as these kinds of far-right beliefs spread. Unfortunately, as we've seen with the adoption of "birther" beliefs by nearly half of all Republicans, that now includes a much broader swath of society than we'd heretofore suspected.

But that is not the SPLC's fault. Rather, all that point raises is serious questions about the direction that movement conservatism is now taking.

After all, all those Obama-hating crazies are not coming out of the woodwork in a vacuum.

Earlier this week, Keith Olbermann explored this in depth with the SPLC's Mark Potok. It's an enlightening discussion.

Jon Voight is the right's Hollywood darling, and as always, everything that comes out of his mouth is a lie:

A Hollywood conservative has headed East. It's "Freedom Concert" time for Jon Voight. The Academy Award winner will join Sean Hannity in Cincinnati and Atlanta this weekend to honor fallen soldiers and present college scholarships to surviving children. Mr. Voight -- a warrior himself in many ways -- has been cogitating about the state of America, meanwhile.

"There's a real question at stake now. Is President Obama creating a civil war in our own country?" Mr. Voight tells Inside the Beltway.

"The real truth is that the Obama administration is professional at bullying, as we have witnessed with ACORN at work during the presidential campaign. It seems to me they are sending down their bullies to create fist fights among average American citizens who don't want a government-run health care plan forced upon them," Mr. Voight says. "So I ask again. Is President Obama creating a civil war in our own country?" Read on... (warning, link goes to Washington Times)

The only people trying to start a civil war are the extreme, right wing fringe elements of our society who are beginning to take over the Republican Party. How many Obama supporters have been showing up to town hall meetings with loaded weapons, shouting uncontrollably? How many Obama supporters are wanting to secede from the United States?

(video courtesy of Think Progress)

CNN's Don Lemon interviewed two astroturf town hall protesters in Atlanta Monday, and when one of them claimed that no "real Americans" spoke at Obama's town hall meetings, Don shut him down instantly -- and didn't let up:

Lemon:...At least the president is trying to reform health care, so where did the outrage suddenly come from?

Hardage: Don, this is the second town hall he's done in the last week that I actually saw real Americans get up and ask questions, it wasn't a pre-selected group or a -

Lemon: Hang on, before you do that - Real Americans - that's another term that sets people off. We're ALL real Americans, everybody.

Hardage: Anybody can get in, anybody can ask questions, you've seen a completely different tenor in the town hall he held on Tuesday and today than townhalls we've been seeing so far in this debate. That's what I mean by real Americans.

Lemon: You know what, that whole real Americans thing, can we lose that real Americans? Because everybody in the country who is a citizen is a real American. We're all real Americans and that's part of the issue that really sets people off and divides people, so let's get rid of that "real American." I'm a real American, you're a real American, conservative, liberals, independents, we're all real Americans."

How refreshing to see on a corporate news channel.