You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1332)

PLAYS: (1452)

Judy Thomas in the Kansas City Star has an amazing piece (picked up by MSNBC) about the online fund-raiser being planned for Scott Roeder, the right-wing extremist who shot Dr. George Tiller in the head in his church:

An Army of God manual. A prison cookbook compiled by a woman doing time for abortion clinic bombings and arsons. An autographed bullhorn.

These are among the items that abortion foes plan to auction on eBay and other Web sites in a fundraiser for Scott Roeder, the Kansas City man charged with killing Wichita abortion doctor George Tiller.

“This is unique,” said Regina Dinwiddie, a Kansas City anti-abortion activist who will sign the bullhorn. “Nobody’s ever done this before. The goal is that everybody makes money for Scott Roeder’s defense.”

One abortion-rights leader called the auction deplorable and said it could lead to more violence.

“The network of extremists promoting and defending the murder of doctors is contributing to escalating threats against clinics and doctors across the country,” said Kathy Spillar, executive vice president of the Feminist Majority Foundation.

Roeder, charged with first-degree murder in the May 31 shooting of Tiller, is scheduled to go to trial in January.

Perhaps even more appalling is the line of defense they hope to pursue in the courts with this money:

Leach and others would like to help Roeder hire a lawyer to present what is known as a necessity defense. That strategy would argue that Tiller was killed to prevent a greater harm — killing babies. Other anti-abortion activists charged with violent crimes have tried to use such a defense but with little success.

Yeah, let's legalize killing abortion doctors. Sounds like a job for Antonin Scalia. One can only hope this defense has zero success, as it has in the past.

Rachel Maddow also featured a segment on this story last night on her MSNBC show, including an interview with the attorney for Tiller's family, who says he'll move to have the court attach any funds they raise on Roeder's behalf:

Continue reading »

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (2521)

PLAYS: (11452)

Rachel Maddow addresses the use of the threat of assassination as a political tactic, and those who could care less about ginning up the anger which is driving the angry protesters to these town halls. Rachel stated this better than I ever could so I'll let her take it from here:

Maddow: What is not politics as usual is that opponents of health care reform have chosen to fight at this time with force and with threats of force. Not just fringe talk show hosts, but members of Congress telling their constituents that Barack Obama is like Hitler; members of the United States senate telling their constituents that they are right to be afraid, that health care reform really is a plot to kill the elderly. Corporate funded conservative P.R. operations promoting those lines of attack and then telling their activists to go put the fear of God into members of Congress.

Are we now operating in a political environment which is not just politics as usual, which is not just a rowdy debate? Has enough kerosene been poured on the flames that the possibility of violence-even assassination-is being posited as a real political tactic in the United States?

It's not a rhetorical question. It's not even a question about rhetoric. Because there are people in this country-people in the health care field, in fact-who have faced the actual threat of assassination as a political tactic.

Two and a half months ago, Kansas abortion provider Dr. George Tiller was assassinated and the man who's charged in the case purportedly believe that assassinations were justified because of his own beliefs about abortion. That belief in justified political violence was cultivated by the extreme anti-abortion movement that Scott Roeder is known to have extensive contact with before Dr. Tiller's death.

As the anti-health reform protestors flirt with the same exultation of violence, that same excuses and purported justifications of violence, that echo in the extreme anti-abortion movement in this country, it is worth remembering that the possibility of American politics turning to violence and terrorism-at the fringe-is not all theoretical.

Full transcript and her interview with Dr. Warren Hern to follow.

Maddow: On July 27th, two and a half weeks ago, Democratic Congressman Frank Kratovil was hanged in effigy outside his congressional office in Maryland. The staged lynching, the really well-tied noose and all was gleefully staged by an anti-health care reform protestor.

Later that week, on August 1st, Democratic Congressman Lloyd Doggett of Texas held a town hall event at a grocery store in Austin to talk about health care reform. An anti-health reform protestor there greeted him with a mock marble tombstone engraved with the congressman's name on it.

Two days after that, on August 3rd, Democratic Congressman Brad Miller of North Carolina reported to the Capitol Hill police that he had received death threats over his support for health care reform. One anti-health care reform protestor called his D.C. office and told a staffer, quote, "Miller could lose his life over this."

The very next day, on August 4th, the idea of a Democratic congressman being killed because he supported health care reform became a punch line for Republican Congressman Todd Akin of Missouri.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. TODD AKIN, MISSOURI: Different people from Washington, D.C have come back to their districts and had town hall meetings and they almost got lynched and so.

(APPLAUSE)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: That same day, Democratic Senator Chris Dodd, who had just announced days earlier that he has prostate cancer, had this screamed at him by an anti-health care reform protestor outside one of his town hall events.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Barack Obama clearly said, all you should do is take a painkiller. How come we don't just give Chris Dodd painkillers? Like a handful of them at a time? He can wash it down with Ted Kennedy's whiskey.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: Two days later, on August 6th, the FOX News anchor Glenn Beck, on national television, turns the threat of a political assassination into the acting out of a political assassination, when he and one of his staffers wearing a Nancy Pelosi mask role-played what it would be like for Glenn Beck to poison the speaker of the House of Representatives.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GLENN BECK, FOX NEWS HOST: I just wanted to-are you going to drink your wine? Are you blind? Do those eyes not work? There you go.

I want you to drink it now. Drink it. Drink it. Drink it.

I really just wanted to thank you for having me over to wine country. You know, to be invited I thought I had to be a major Democratic donor, long-time friend of yours, which I'm not. By the way, I put poison in your-no.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: The day after that, on August 7th, there were more death threats. Congressman Brian Baird of Washington reports that his office received this fax with an image of President Obama with a communist hammer and sickle symbol paint owned his forehead and the message, "Death to all Marxists, foreign and domestic" written underneath.

Continue reading »

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (2468)

PLAYS: (11129)

[Note: My cohort at Orcinus, Sara Robinson, has been nearly as preoccupied the past couple of weeks in dealing with media requests to discuss the recent spate of domestic terrorism now washing up on our shores. She posted her thoughts about it yesterday, and it was so good, I had to pass it along to our readers here. -- DN]

By Sara Robinson

It's been a wild couple of weeks for those of us in the wingnutology business. Our services have been in tremendous demand as the mainstream media tries to sort out the meaning of what Scott Roeder and James von Brunn did. I've done an average of one radio show every day for the past two weeks trying to help various lefty talkers around the country make some sense of it all; and I'm generally gratified at how seriously people are starting to take this.

At the same time, I'm also appalled (though, sadly, hardly surprised) by the conservative mythmaking that's going on around the very serious issue of right-wing domestic terrorism. So it's obviously time to pull together another "Firing Back" piece to give progressives what they need to separate fact from fiction when these talking points start flying.

I've actually had every one of the following myths pitched to me by on-air interviewers, phone-in callers, and/or online commenters over the last two weeks. Most of them have come up over and over, which suggests to me that you're likely to encounter them, too. So let's walk 'em through:

1. These are just "lone wolf" psychos who are acting alone. You can't hold anybody else responsible for what crazy people decide to do.

True and false. But mostly false.

It's true that every one of the nine right-wing terrorists who've made the news since January 20 had a history of mental illness, domestic violence, and/or drug abuse. Several were veterans who were having a really hard time adjusting to civilian life. None of these people could reasonably be considered sane; and, for whatever twisted reasons, they made a personal choice to do what they did.

But it's not true that they were acting alone. People who are dealing with these kinds of demons are often drawn into movements that offer a strong narrative that helps them make sense of a world that never seems to add up right for them. They're usually drawn into organizations like Operation Rescue or the Minutemen that are nominally non-violent; but which also indoctrinate them into a worldview that justifies and motivates people to commit terrorist acts. They come to believe that they must do this to save the world, to serve God, and to be the heroes they desperately want to be.

They're already walking sticks of dynamite. But it takes the heat of that apocalyptic, dualistic, eliminationist, pro-violence narrative to light their fuses and make them explode.

Unfortunately, these groups also make it easy to take that final step over the line, because they often have close ties to other more secretive groups that do advocate and plan terrorist violence as a solution. Operation Rescue teaches that killing abortion doctors is justfiable homicide; and then feeds its most extreme members into the Army of God. The Aryan Nations and several other white nationalist groups supplied the nine members of The Order, a racist terrorist group that killed two people (including left-wing talker Alan Berg) and stole over $4 million during a nine-month spree in 1984. Al Qaeda got many of its recruits from the nominally non-violent (but still radical) Hizb al-Tahrir. Of course, when violence actually occurs, these groups always denounce it -- but they also usually have a very good idea of who was involved, because they've been hanging around with the perpetrators for quite a while themselves.

One of the things the public is finally beginning to understand is that the "lone wolf" story has never been accurate, because these guys are never really alone in the world. Every one of them was well-marinated in large, long-established subcultures that put them up to terrorism, and promised to make heroes out of them if they succeeded.

2. These terrorists are really left-wingers, not right-wingers. Because everybody knows that fascism is a phenomenon that only occurs on the left.

False does not even begin to cover the absurdity of this claim.

Fascism has always been a phenomenon of the right. Every postwar academic scholar of fascism -- Robert Paxton, Roger Griffin, Umberto Eco, and onward -- has been emphatically clear about this. Mussolini admitted as much. It's part of the very definition of the word.

Continue reading »

Continue reading »

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (749)

PLAYS: (2021)

Last night on his Fox News show, Bill O'Reilly discussed with Amanda Carpenter a website devoted to the memory of Dr. George Tiller called "I Am Dr. Tiller".

The site, as you can see, features many people from various walks of life -- ministers, health-care providers, medical students, even children -- who are making a public statement about their support for the work Dr. Tiller was engaged in before he was gunned down by a right-wing fanatic named Scott Roeder. They are saying when the fanatics go after Dr. Tiller, they're going after people like them too.

Many of them placed the signs proclaiming, "I am Dr. Tiller" over their faces, O'Reilly asks Carpenter this:

O'Reilly: Well, why are they hiding their faces, Amanda, if it's such a noble cause?

Gee, I dunno, Bill. It couldn't be that they're afraid that, after Bill O'Reilly puts their faces on public display and holds them up for public demonization, some fanatic will walk into their church and shoot them in the head, could it?

Of course, Bill himself would adamantly say No. The rest of us, however, are a different story.

[Incidentally, you can see if you visit the site that not all of them protect their identities; O'Reilly can't even get that right.]

abu mugawama: Good News from Pakistan! The Taliban's strategic communications reek almost as bad as ours!

Pruning Shears: This Week In Tyranny

Daily Kos: Ghetto Loans and the latest sub-prime scandal

Alas, a blog: Under the rules of engagement developed in the Bush Administration, we can waterboard Scott Roeder

TBogg: A guy who worked in the BUSHCO Office of Legal Counsel weighs in on blogger ethics!

Brilliant at Breakfast: Ex-SEC Chairman to advise Goldman Sachs -What's wrong with this picture?

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (937)

PLAYS: (3390)

Bill O'Reilly and the rest of the Fox talkers have been busy proclaiming their utter innocence in the assassination of Dr. George Tiller -- as well as the innocence of the anti-abortion groups that were harassing Tiller prior to his death. They've been adamant that only Scott Roeder, the assassin, bears any actual culpability.

Which may be why one of their former guests, Jill Stanek, has been busy playing the anti-abortion version of Radio Rwanda by posting pictures and addresses of the nation's only two remaining late-term abortion providers. Emily Douglas of RH Reality Check (via Jill at Feministe) has the details:

[S]ome anti-choice activists -- even now -- seem only too happy to aid and abet the crazy ones who will resort to violence. Or else why, three days after the assassination of a medical doctor who provides late-term abortions, did Jill Stanek post on her blog photographs of the clinic of Dr. LeRoy Carhart, another physician who provides late-term abortions and who has said he is willing to take over providing services at Dr. Tiller's clinic?

By way of introduction, Stanek writes, "Let's take a station break to view photos of Carhart's "nondescript building," taken in March 2009 on the day it reopened following refurbishment after a fire (NOT blamed on pro-lifers). It was almost immediately shut down because Carhart reopened without getting an occupancy permit, as I previously reported, and was running his electricity off a generator..." She and her readers just want "to take a look." Why? She wants to prove her point that it's a dingy building? Over Carhart's safety, and the safety of his staff and patients?

This is a woman that both Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity have featured on their Fox News programs as an ostensibly credible witness. Ellen at Newshounds pointed out last year after the Hannity appearance just how dubious a witness Stanek actually is.

Appropriately, The General has written to Stanek's pastor, suggesting a rifle-blessing ceremony.