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Lou Dobbs has always been unrepentant in the face of proof of his many journalistic misdeeds. So it is not surprising that, in the face of a concerted campaign to have CNN remove him as one of its major news anchors, Dobbs defiantly embraces conspiracy theorists who argue, among other things, that President Obama is planning to round up conservatives and incarcerate them in concentration camps, and who feature pro-secession articles on their websites.

Dobbs's irresponsible brand of journalism besmirches the credibility of an organization like CNN. Which means that it needs to choose between preserving its fast-eroding integrity, or sacrificing it on the altar of Dobbs' ego.

America's Voice is stepping up its campaign to have Dobbs removed this week with a series of ads and other measures intended to increase the public pressure on CNN's executives to act.

Dobb's mainstreaming of extremist beliefs and provably false "facts" simply cannot go on if CNN wants to be considered a responsible mainstream news organization:

White nationalist conspiracy theories flow seamlessly from vigilantes and extremist web sites to Dobbs and back again. Watch just a couple of episodes and you'll see how he throws around the term "criminal illegal aliens" with the spite and frequency of a mid-century Southern politician using the N-word. In Dobbs’ world, immigrants are disease ridden criminals who kill cops and are plotting for revolution. Bogus claims that immigrants are bringing a new wave of leprosy to America might be taken with a grain of salt on Fox - but on CNN, it’s news.

Perhaps to quell the criticism, CNN is airing a new mini-series in October called, "Latino in America." The network is in heavy promotion mode, sending the show's host, Soledad O'Brien, around the country to drum up interest.

Yeah, well, nice PR segments never quite wash the bad taste out of your mouth after having to swallow Dobbs' nightly broadcasts of immigrant-bashing.

The movement to challenge CNN to drop Lou Dobbs Tonight is growing. Dozens of local and national advocacy organizations are standing together to take the fight to CNN. Media Matters with DropDobbs.org, Presente.org and dozens of Latino groups with BastaDobbs.org, and Democracia Ahora with TellCNNEnoughisEnough, have all launched excellent campaigns against Dobbs. And groups like the National Council of La Raza have chronicled Dobbs’ extremism through websites like WeCanStopTheHate.org.

Our new campaign to get Dobbs off the air will hit CNN both on the air and online. In addition to the TV ad, we’re running online ads and targeted ads on Face Book. You probably won’t see them unless you work for CNN or Turner – we’re asking Anderson Cooper, Soledad O’Brien, Wolf Blitzer and others how they feel about promoting and enabling Dobbs and his unrelenting campaign of immigrant bashing.

The real question is, what else does Dobbs have to do to get fired? He called Rep. Joe Wilson's outburst a "public service," perpetuated the birther conspiracy, has congratulated the Minutemen, and just last week was honored by the anti-immigrant group FAIR - designated a Hate Group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

It's time that CNN executives and the other "talent" at CNN deport Dobbs to Fox or talk radio where he belongs. He doesn't deserve the CNN seal of approval. Until CNN deals with its Lou Dobbs problem, any attempt to reach out to Latino audiences will be pure hypocrisy.

You can donate here.

[Members of the James Younger Camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in 2006.]

Looking into the background of Rep. Joe Wilson, R-South Carolina, after his heckling of President Obama last night, I came across this:

Joe also has been a member of the Columbia World Affairs Council, Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Sinclair Lodge 154, Jamil Temple, Woodmen of the World, Sons of Confederate Veterans, ....

This is an organization that, as the SPLC has detailed assiduously, has been taken over in the past decade by radical neo-Confederates who favor secession and defend slavery as a benign institution. Leading the takeover is a radical racist named Kirk Lyons, who's been an important legal figure on the far right for some years.* [More below]

In more recent years, the takeover has led to an outright internal civil war. Andrew Meacham at the St. Petersburg Times detailed the internal rift last year:

Experts say the divisions within the Sons vary between two extremes. On one side are the traditionalists, members who focus on cleaning up Confederate grave sites and conducting Civil War re-enactments.

On the other side are the so-called Lunatics, up to 2,000 members who deride traditionalists as "grannies'' and belong to camps named after notorious Southern figures such as John Wilkes Booth and Jesse James.

John Wilkes Booth members have been known to put pennies in urinals, making sure to leave the Lincoln side face-up. Other Lunatic groups have removed the U.S. flag from their halls and banned the Pledge of Allegiance, says Walter Hilderman, who several years ago created an anti-Lunatic group called Save the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

"The problem is it's supposed to be a patriotic organization," says Hilderman, 59. "You are either that or you let guys in who want to secede."

As Heidi Beirich at the SPLC reported, this rift has led to Lyons himself coming under harsh attack from his own right flank. The SCV is a serious mess.

Now, add this to the fact that Joe Wilson, as a state legislator, was one of only seven Republicans to go against their own party and vote to keep the Dixie Rebel flag flying over the South Carolina capitol:

The flag came down that year after Republicans in both houses went for a compromise that would put it on Statehouse grounds at the Confederate Soldier’s monument. The “Magnificent Seven” of Senators who voted to keep the flag up included current Congressman Joe Wilson (who I served with in the 218th Infantry Brigade of the National Guard.)

A clearer picture of why this congressman might so virulently breach protocol and loudly interrupt an African-American president's speech to Congress by calling him a liar does start to emerge, doesn't it?

So inquiring minds want to know:

Is Joe Wilson still a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans?

If so, does he condone the activities of the "Lunatic" faction that now controls the SCV?

Does Joe Wilson consider the Republican Party "the Party of Lincoln"?

Does Joe Wilson support secession?

Blue Texan at FDL has more.

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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 for everything he needs.

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.

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Protesters at an event in Austin, TX yesterday just took the vile rhetoric we've seen on display this August one extra step:

"the protesters had Larry Kilgore, a “Christian activist” and candidate for governor who has endorsed executions for homosexuals; Debra Medina, a Ron Paul Republican and a slightly-less long-shot candidate for governor; and Melissa Pehle-Hill, yet another fringe candidate and a member of a self-appointed “citizens grand jury” investigating Barack Hussein Obama, aka Barry Soetoro."

Kilgore captured the sentiment of the mob. (video here)

“I hate that flag up there,” Kilgore said pointing to the American flag flying over the Capitol. “I hate the United States government. … They’re an evil, corrupt government. They need to go. Sovereignty is not good enough. Secession is what we need!”

“We hate the United States!"

Just a lone nut, I guess. Except the Governor of Texas, Rick Perry, flirted with the secessionists a few months ago. He didn't attend this protest, which I guess is a positive step.

But this has increasingly become the Republican base. A group of people who feel completely justified in chanting "We hate the United States!" I seem to remember being told that I hated America and I was "on the other side" and "in league with the terrorists" because I didn't agree with an unnecessary, illegal and ultimately disastrous war. I don't have tape of myself from every day in that time, but you can trust me that I never chanted "We hate the United States" in front of a state capitol building.

Note, too, the lady who used the phrase, "the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots," a quote from Thomas Jefferson, often misappropriated by extremists and the Patriot movement. Timothy McVeigh was wearing a T-shirt that bore this inscription when he was arrested for murdering 168 people in Oklahoma City.

What the report reflects is a reality that law enforcement trying to deal with domestic terrorism in America must confront: Their subjects are thoroughly American; many of the people drawn into these movements are, if anything, "hyper-normal." Their version of "patriotism," for instance, is so extreme that they actually hate not just their government but their fellow citizens -- in essence, their country: because, you see, it has been "perverted" from its original purposes.

The hyper-normality is a kind of intentional camouflage. The Patriot movement, and militias in particular, were a very specific and intentional strategy adopted in the 1990s by the white supremacists and radical tax protesters of the American far right -- and the whole purpose of the strategy was to mainstream their belief systems and their agendas. The tactic was to adopt the appearance of normal, "red-blooded" Americanism as a way of pushing out the idea that their radical beliefs are "normal" too.

In the process, they often adopted time-worn "patriotic" sayings and symbols, such as the "Don't Tread On Me" flag Beck wears, as their own -- though with a much more menacing meaning. If you've seen that flag at an Aryan Nations compound, as I have, you never quite look at it the same.

This is why the meaning of Thomas Jefferson's quote above is quite different for them than it is for you and me. To all outward appearances, it is just an expression of avid patriotism. But to a Patriot movement follower, it means something potentially deadly.

Patriots who use the symbols of American history while claiming overtly to hate America. This would be something good to ask Dave Neiwert about on Tuesday night in LA.

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Lou Dobbs is hardly the only right-wing pundit on the air transmitting bogus right-wing conspiracy theories. See, for instance, Sean Hannity on his Fox News show last night.

Hannity must be looking over his ratings shoulder at Glenn Beck these days, because he was cribbing from Beck, promoting the bogus far-right "constitutionalist" theories about state sovereignty Beck himself promoted a couple of months ago.

Hannity had on a couple of doofus state legislators from Nebraska who are promoting the notion of "state sovereignty" -- distinct from outright secession, but nonetheless built on a set of theories that were popularized in the 1990s by the Patriot/militia movement.

As I explained at the time:

Now, it's one thing to point out the radical origins of these "constitutional theories." But it's also important to understand where they want to take us -- to a radically decentralized form of government that was first suggested in the 1970s by the far-right Posse Comitatus movement.

They essentially argue for a constitutional originalism that would not only end the federal income tax, destroy all civil-rights laws, and demolish the Fed, but would also re-legalize slavery, strip women of the right to vote, and remove the principle of equal protection under the law.

Suffice to say that no one in this segment was particularly, um, persuasive. The only thing Hannity and his guests managed to convince anyone of was the growing reality that Hannity, like Dobbs and his Fox colleagues, has no compunction about reaching into that far-right grab bag for his nightly talking points. It's always amusing to see the critters they come out with.

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Nixon's Ghosts: Documents from the Archives: Pat Buchanan was for Affirmative Action before he was against it

Mondoweiss: Olmert tries to resuscitate one of the all-time great lies in the Oslo peace process

Mock, Paper, Scissors: Anatomy of a column

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Last week Glenn Beck scoffed at the notion that he had been promoting the notion of state secession, somehow overlooking the fact that he had in fact been promoting the notion of state secession.

So yesterday, to further demonstrate his skepticism, he invited on his Fox News program a fellow named Dan Miller, who runs the Texas Nationalist Movement. As you can see, he provided two full segments of the show to an interview that most kindly could be called “credulous,” and less kindly would make a crude reference to teabagging.

And indeed the Teabaggers’ Parties was an important topic, because Beck raised it himself at the end:

Beck: You actually believe the Tea Parties are, um, are the “gateway drug” to secession. Is that true?

Miller: Well, I think that’s definitely the case for a lot of folks. Because, you know, the Tea Parties have been about venting frustration and anger with what’s going on in Washington, D.C. And what we’re seeing here is a lot of people are looking for solutions, and the solution for Texas is Texas, independence.

Beck: Unbelievable.

Well, it's nice of them to admit that the Tea Parties in fact have been a prime recruiting ground for all kinds of extremist right-wing belief systems, most notably those arising from the "Patriot" movement of the 1990s.

Because there were some noteworthy aspects to this interview that went unmentioned on the air:

-- The Texas secession movement in fact has long been the most significant arm of the far-right "Patriot movement" in that state since the 1990s, when it was responsible for various armed standoffs with law-enforcement authorities and a range of domestic-terrorist acts.

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Glenn Beck wants everyone to rest assured he's not a complete nutcase. He's not a fan of state secession, after all!

Beck: Did you catch the New York Times this weekend? [Giggles weirdly.] They published the third -- count it, three -- the third op-ed in the New York Times blaming Bill O'Reilly and me, or Fox News in general, of spreading hate and inspiring people like the killer of Dr. Killer, uh, Tiller, in Kansas. Also, we were the inspiration apparently for the guy at the Holocaust Museum last week.

You know, there are groups out there that preach hate and violence and racial violence. There are groups out there so fed up they want to secede from the union. But we ain't one of them!

Hmmmm. An interesting denial. There's only one problem with it: Beck was downright enthusiastic about Texas secession two months ago when he interviewed Chuck Norris:

GLENN: Chuck, you live in Texas.

NORRIS: Yes, I do.

GLENN: Somebody asked me this morning, they said, you really believe that there's going to be trouble in the future. And I said, if this country starts to spiral out of control and, you know, and Mexico melts down or whatever, if it really starts to spiral out of control, before America allows a country to become a totalitarian country, which it would have under I think the Republicans as well in this situation; they were taking us to the same place, just slower.

NORRIS: It was slower, yeah.

GLENN: Americans will, they just, they won't stand for it. There will be parts of the country that will rise up. And they said, where's that going to come from? And I said Texas, it's going to come from Texas. Do you agree with that, Chuck, or not?

NORRIS: Oh, yeah. You know, Texas is a republic, you know. We could actually --

GLENN: It was a country before it was a state.

NORRIS: Yeah, we could break off from the union if we wanted to.

GLENN: You do, you call me.

NORRIS: Oh, yeah.

If the people who call for state secession are complete nutbags, then why does Beck keep featuring on his show his good buddy Chuck Norris? The guy who wrote this:

On Glenn Beck's radio show last week, I quipped in response to our wayward federal government, "I may run for president of Texas."

That need may be a reality sooner than we think. If not me, someone someday may again be running for president of the Lone Star state, if the state of the union continues to turn into the enemy of the state.

From the East Coast to the "Left Coast," America seems to be moving further and further from its founders' vision and government. ...

... I'm not saying that other states won't muster the gumption to stand and secede, but Texas has the history to prove it.

Of course, Beck is busy making this claim and running far far away from the right-wing nutcases whose theories he spent much of his first couple of months at Fox promoting.

Because heaven forfend that anyone should look at Beck's proclamation after the Holocaust Museum shooting that "the pot in America is boiling" and start figuring out who turned up the temperature.

Dr. Slammy at Scholars and Rogues has a great post on the phoninness of the "lone wolf"/"isolated incidents" meme that seems to be all the rage on the right these days.

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Now that it's embraced its inner right-wing populist by sponsoring all those 'Tea Parties,' Fox News is going straight for the moonshine by promoting "state sovereignty" advocates who, as we mentioned yesterday, are the "Patriot" movement activists who were promoting militias in the 1990s.

Glenn Beck featured an entire hour devoted to the subject yesterday, while Neil Cavuto warmed up the subject for him by featuring a segment on the subject as well. And both of them featured people who have been heavily involved in promoting "Patriot" belief systems for years.

The most striking, of course, was Beck's hourlong "The Civilest War" program, which early on featured Beck adapting Martin Niemoller's famous "First they came" poem -- about the Nazis and the Holocaust -- to our present-day circumstances:

I think this is the problem. First they came for the banks. I wasn't a banker, I didn't really care. I didn't stand up and say anything. Then they came for the AIG executives. Then they came for the car companies. Until it gets down to you. Most people don't see -- they are coming for you at some point! You're on the list! Everybody's on the list. You may not be rich -- as currently defined.

Because, of course, bailing out failing banks and insurance companies and auto manufacturers is just like rounding up minorities and hauling them away to death camps.

As if that weren't enough bats--t crazy paranoia, much of the rest of the hour was devoted to similarly crazy talk from his participants. A Republican Utah legislator rants about "liberties and freedoms being destroyed" and the "tyranny of the federal government." Another Republican legislator, this time from Texas, talks about how Obama and the Democrats are creating "a socialist state".

Beck also calls upon a right-wing historian named Kevin Gutzman, who even his fellow right-wingers dismiss as a neo-Confederate, obsessed with a misreading of early American history that is like so many other "constitutionalist" interpretations, based on an originalism that would destroy such innovations as the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage (not to mention nearly everything else). [More on that below.]

But everything comes into sharp focus when Beck calls on Gary Marbut -- who Beck describes as the originator of the Montana gun law that inspired all these other legislators. We listen to Marbut's wisdom and absorb his advice in this show; indeed, Beck wraps up by calling on Marbut to tell us "what we've learned."

Marbut, you see, has been a fixture on the far right in Montana for many years. He's never actually been elected to any office at all, though he has run numerous times, because Montanans are all too well aware just how radical a nutcase the guy is.

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From Countdown's WTF!! segment. Keith considers what would happen to Texas if their wingnut Governor got his wish it did secede from the United States. You'd better be careful what you wish for Governor Perry since leaving, as Keith notes, would be pretty expensive for Texas.

Mercury Rising: Do many small wars add up to a very large one?

field negro: Hey Texas, when are you going to start that little secession thing? The rest of us are getting impatient

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They gave us a republic: Roxana Saberi Free

Our friend Alicia Morgan of Last Left Turn Before Hooterville has been asked to sing at Marcy Winograd's campaign kickoff event today in Los Angeles.  Winograd is taking on Jane Harman for the CA-36 seat.

After calling for secession, now he's asking for federal help for his state? Rick Perry reminds me of a little kid who says he's running away from home - and asks Mom to pack him a lunch. Where's your pride, Rick?

SAN ANTONIO – Gov. Rick Perry has asked for 37,430 courses of anti-viral medicine from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention because of the swine flu outbreak.

And a high school near San Antonio has been ordered closed this week because a third student from the school may have the disease. Two cases have been confirmed.

"As a precautionary measure, I have requested that medication be on hand in Texas to help curb the spread of swine flu by helping those with both confirmed and suspected cases of this swine flu virus, as well as health care providers who may have come in contact with these patients," Perry said in a prepared statement.

We blew the lid off of Texas Gov. Rick Perry's outrageous and treasonous statements regarding the secession of Texas from the union.

All the insane talk coming from the Limbaugh National Convention is spreading into the fabric of the entire GOP. Listen to Texas Gov. Rick Perry say:

Perry: Texas is a unique place. When we came into the Union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that.

We got a great Union. There's absolutely no reason to dissolve it, but if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what may come out of that.

Media Matters recently released some very disturbing information about Perry:

Media Matters Action Network released a memo outlining Texas Governor Rick Perry's ties to a Texas secessionist group whose former leaders are responsible for numerous acts of domestic terrorism. "From bomb threats, to kidnapping, to planning attacks using biological weapons, the Texas Nationalist Movement has a long violent history that cannot be ignored," Media Matters Action Network Managing Director Ari Rabin-Havt said. "Governor Perry should be ashamed of his association with these domestic terrorists."..read on
Very disturbing indeed.

John Sharp is running in Texas against Perry and although I don't know much about him, he's not taking Perry's secessionist comments lightly.

During WWII my father was shot in defense of the greatest country on earth and I proudly wore the uniform of a United States Army Reserve officer. So I'm offended when it become acceptable for anybody to talk about Texas leaving the Union.

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They gave us a republic: The Hits Keep Coming

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From Hardball April 16, 2009. Why oh why does Chris Matthews feel the need to keep bringing this man on his show. Tom DeLay defends Gov. Rick Perry's talk of secession for Texas and explains how it would work. Did Matthews actually expect anything else from this thug?

Matthews: You know Mr. DeLay all through the Bush administration the government money, the debt went rising and rising and rising. It went from something like four to seven trillion dollars to almost triple, double that rather and there wasn't this talk of secession or leaving the union or this incredible radical talk. Why is it coming now because we have a Democratic President?

DeLay: It comes all the time in the state of Texas. Texans are Texans and they fight for their sovereignty and fight for the Constitution of the United States. And every time the federal government mandates things from the state of Texas, the state of Texas is a huge donor state. We only get about seventy cents back for every dollar we send to the federal government. Now we're paying for a lot of this and the Americans, Texans are fed up with the government growing like it's growing. Uh, I tell you what the biggest skunk at the party is for someone to come into Austin. And we are absolutely fed up with what is going on as I think hundreds if not millions of people yesterday were expressing the exact same sentiment in these tea parties.

Matthews: You know that sounds like, you sound like some rebel leader in the sixties in the Congo in Katanga Province that produced all the mineral wealth for the country and wanted to secede from the Congo. I mean this idea that suppose maybe Texas does produce a lot of the wealth. A lot of states are wealthier than other states. They just are. Does that mean they should secede?

DeLay: Chris Texas is wealthy because it works hard. It's a pro-business state. It doesn't overtax its businesses and its citizens. It's no where near what California or New York or New Jersey that's losing businesses left and right. Losing jobs left and right. It ain't even close to what the rust belt is. We are a pro-business state. We love jobs. We love businesses to come to Texas. We will not overtax you. We don't have an income tax. We're, we're, that what people are coming to Texas is because of our ability and our penchant to fight for what we believe in and we're going to use every means possible, uh, legally to fight for our position and fight the Obama administration and the Democrat liberals Pelosi and Harry Reid in what they're attempting to do to this country and to the state of Texas.

Matthews: When you talk about the sovereignty of the state of Texas are you talking about nullification. What are you talking about? The right of the state to deny the role of the federal government. What right are you insisting on when you say sovereignty? Like it's an independent country again.

DeLay: It is an, it's an independent state.

Matthews: It is?

DeLay: And given many powers by the tenth amendment of the United States Constitution. The tenth amendment is violated every day in Washington DC and we're standing up and reminding the American people that the tenth amendment is strong and we're going to defend it and we're going to fight for it.

Matthews: So all powers not delegated to the federal government reside in the states. Right?

DeLay: That's exactly right and we ought to return to that Constitution.