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There have been some interesting developments in the bizarre and telling case of Shawna Forde, the Everett, WA, woman who led an offshoot unit of Minutemen who ran armed border patrols for patriotic "fun" and then decided to go "operational." They concocted a scheme to raid drug smugglers and take their money and drugs and use it to finance a border race war and "start a revolution against the government". They mistakenly chose the home of Raul Flores and his wife and two daughters, which had neither money nor drugs; first they shot the father in the head and wounded the mother, and then, while she pleaded for her life, they shot 9-year-old Brisenia in cold blood. (Her sister, fortunately, was sleeping over at a friend's.)

It seems the FBI got a heads-up about Forde's plans -- and did nothing about it, since the information was sketchy. But it also seems that Forde and Co. had a whole slate of violent home invasions ready to roll. From Kim Smith at the Arizona Star:

According to documents filed this week in Pima County Superior Court, two confidential informants for the FBI say they told agents in April 2009 that Forde was recruiting people to raid a house she believed was filled with illicit drugs, money and guns.

...

The documents say Forde, 42, and others were on the verge of hitting additional targets when she, Jason Bush, 35, and Albert Gaxiola, 43, were arrested on June 12, 2009.

...

Both men are described as active members of the border-defense movement who routinely camp on the border so they can spot illegal immigrants and report them to the U.S. Border Patrol.

One of them told investigators that he met Forde in October 2007 while on a mission outside Arivaca. He said that in April 2009, Forde called him, saying the other men she knew in the border-defense movement were "sissies," and she was impressed with his courage.

The informant says Forde knew rocket-propelled grenades, drugs and millions of dollars were being funneled into the U.S. through Arivaca and wanted him to help her protect the community.

Not wanting to get involved, the man told Forde to call another man.

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This just cheered me up. Some youthful activists are sitting in at Tom Coburn's office until he allows the Uganda Recovery Act to pass the Senate. (Boy, the Senate really is the place where good ideas go to die - or get obstructed.) Go sign the petition, donate money for coffee, and cheer these guys on!

The momentum is building and more people just keep coming to join dozens of activists refusing to leave Senator Tom Coburn's office in Oklahoma City until he allows the LRA Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act to pass the Senate. Click here to help from wherever you are.

Here's the low-down: After impassioned lobbying from tens of thousands of activists, historic legislation aimed at ending Africa’s longest-running war is on the verge of passing the Senate unanimously. In fact, the bill has more bipartisan support in Congress than any bill focused on sub-Saharan Africa in American history. But Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn, nicknamed “Dr. No”, is single-handedly blocking this landmark legislation because the bill authorizes new funds to assist victims of the violence (you can read more about why in the Campaign FAQ).

As Senator Coburn prevents this bill from passing, the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) is terrorizing communities across three countries in central Africa. In the past two months alone, Joseph Kony's rebel army has massacred hundreds of people and abducted hundreds more, including children who are forced to become soldiers.

That's why we are holding the Oklahoma Hold Out, and we're not going home until Senator Coburn agrees to a compromise.

The most committed activists - who know that Senator Coburn's obstructionism is preventing the action needed to end this senseless violence - are "holding out" outside Senator Coburn's office in downtown Oklahoma City until the Senator allows the bill to pass.

People are driving and flying from all corners of the country to join in person.

We invite you to join as well, or if you can't join them in person, we need your support from right where you are.

So according to this L.A. Times article, the health insurance got everything it wanted in this healthcare "reform" bill - except the death of the public option. So as relatively small a concession as that is unacceptable to them - which tells you who really owns this country. (Not us.) All the more reason to push your congress critter. Call today!

Reporting from Los Angeles and Washington - As President Obama's push for a healthcare overhaul moves toward its final act, the oft-vilified health insurance industry is on the verge of seeing a plan enacted that largely protects its financial interests.

That achievement, should it stand up in the final legislation, would be the capstone of a sophisticated lobbying and strategic campaign that began even before Obama was elected president.

The specifics of the healthcare legislation are still being hashed out on Capitol Hill, and key details will evolve in the days ahead. Even so, there is broad agreement that the final plan will, for the first time, require Americans to buy health coverage, with taxpayer subsidies for millions who cannot afford it.

For the health insurance industry, that means millions of new paying customers. What's more, there are likely to be no limits on what insurers can charge, while at the same time the plan is expected to limit competition from any new national government insurance plan that lawmakers create.

I mean, really. What's not to like?

These anticipated wins -- from an initiative that has at times been portrayed as doomsday for health insurers -- is the result of a strategy developed by one of Washington's savviest lobbyists, Karen Ignagni. Under Ignagni's leadership, the industry group America's Health Insurance Plans adopted the goal of universal coverage while setting out to shape it in a way that benefited insurers -- a crucial move that aligned their interests with those of other groups, including consumers and hospitals.

Insurers poured campaign donations into the coffers of key sympathetic members of the House and Senate, and loaded up on lobbyists. And when Obama and other Democrats began attacking the industry, insurers made a strategic choice not to walk away from the negotiating table.

"While so many in this town have been playing checkers, Karen has been playing chess," said Mark Merritt, a veteran lobbyist who heads the Pharmaceutical Care Management Assn.

[...] In addition to fighting the public option, insurers that offer Medicare health maintenance organizations are battling more than $100 billion in cuts in federal payments to that program. And they are trying to beat back a move by Democrats to go after the industry's decades-old exemption from antitrust law.

But in Washington, many marvel that lawmakers have not wrung more from an industry that, surveys show, is held in low regard by the public.

"The industry is really in no position to be making demands," said Celinda Lake, a longtime Democratic pollster.

And yet, they continue to do so - especially through senators like Olympia Snowe and Kent Conrad. Don't you love it that no matter how much we donate, politicians say they can't support the netroots agenda "because you're not in my district", yet are so very sympathetic to the millions of dollars poured into their states from giant industries like insurance? Looks like our bribes contributions just aren't big enough.

For much of the last three years, industry leaders have been laying the groundwork for this battle. Amid horror stories about insurers dumping sick patients, denying coverage for medical treatment and cherry-picking customers, Ignagni and a few insurance company executives pushed the idea within America's Health Insurance Plans that the industry risked political catastrophe if it did not move proactively.

"They knew they had a very big [public relations] problem, and they knew this day was coming," said Wendell Potter, a Cigna Corp. public relations executive who quit last year. "They knew they had to be perceived as coming to the table with solutions. It was a departure from their previous point of view. But they knew they would be slaughtered if it weren't."

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The right-wing media have been aghast at the unpleasant realities being reported about all those shouters and disruptors at town-hall forums -- namely, that their anger is being ginned up by corporate interests using right-wing populists to derail their political opponents; and that their ranks are riddled with extremists.

And to the extent that the critics of these protesters try to portray the scenes as purely a product of corporate machinations, they have a point. There is real anger out there, and the anti-reform interests are successfully tapping into it.

But the anger they're tapping into is not a new thing; in fact, it's been around a long time. It's a larger anger at the federal government, stoked (as we've seen in the health-care debate) by a combination of real grievances and a pathological belief in explanations for those grievances that are provably untrue, wrapped in paranoid conspiracy theories about government officials and a conspiracist view of history.

In the 1990s, they called themselves militias or "Patriots." Nowadays, they're organizing around the so-called "tea parties" and now the health-care town halls. These are the wellspring of the anger at these meetings -- but this faction has a long history of being motivated by anger anyway.

This is not to downplay the vital role behind the scenes being played by ostensibly mainstream conservative operations, fueled by corporate money. Adele Stan at AlterNet has a thoroughly devastating expose of the machinations behind the protests, beginning with Dick Armey's FreedomWorks operation all the way down to the Birther nutcases who are bubbling up at these shows.

Indeed, Stan gets what the rest of the media are missing: Not only are business and conservative interests ginning up these protests, but they're doing so by empowering far-right extremists from the fringe.

We've been reporting steadily on this phenomenon as it's been happening. Perhaps the best signifier of this empowerment and energizing of the far right on the behalf of the mainstream right is the fact that every single right-wing extremist organization and forum -- ranging from far-right hate groups and white supremacists, such as Stormfront.org, to "Patriot"/militia organizations such as the Militia of Montana and the Constitution Party, to Bircherite conspiracists like Ron Paul and his followers -- are avidly advocating involvement in the "tea parties" and the health-care protests.

And these folks, frankly, are beginning to talk openly of armed revolt. This is something that used to be relegated strictly to the fringes of the far right; now, it's being openly discussed at WorldNetDaily,, which ran a poll with the following headline:

SOMETHING IN THE AIR

Is America on the verge of revolution?

The results:

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Washington Post:

Add yet another name to the GOP retirement list. Arizona Rep. John Shadegg (R) is on the verge of announcing that he will not run for re-election, according to Republican sources.

Shadegg is in his 7th term in the House and is the former chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee. He served briefly as House GOP Policy Chairman and then lost a bid for House Majority Leader in 2006.

Shadegg will be the 22nd House Republican to announce his retirement this cycle. Another three GOP lawmakers are running for other offices. Read on...

This makes 29 Republicans jumping ship so far, and it's a safe bet Shadegg won't be the last to go. This is great news for Democrat Bob Lord who is running for Shadegg's seat. Please go to Lord's website and show him some love. You can read Rep. Shadegg's full statement here.

via The Gavel: During the 110th Congress, Republicans have repeatedly attempted to use motions to recommit with instructions to kill bills on the verge of passage. The strategy is to institute a divisive change to the bill at the last moment, often unrelated to the original intent of the legislation, hoping that the altered bill can then be defeated on final passage.

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Frank: "Parliamentary inquiry, Mr. Speaker - does [Republican] whining come out of my time?"

Frank: "Members on the other side had every opportunity at the committee, and in this open rule fully to debate this and to offer amendments. They chose not to. They chose instead to legislate by ambush..."

[Republicans boo]

Frank: "Oh, Mr. Speaker, I have underestimated the tenderness of the feelings of the members opposite..."

[Democrats laugh asses off]

An instant classic...She attacks Jessica Valenti about taking a picture with a group of bloggers at a Bill Clinton luncheon some time ago and then flies into a rage (threatening to hang up) because it was brought up in the conversation by Garance Franke-Ruta of TAPped...She goes on and on after that about the meanies that attack HER...

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Althouse: I know you know some of the people who are especially nasty to me----I don't accept your..WAIT a minute...WAIT a minute. I DON"T accept your saying that Jessica Valenti breast controversy. I consider that an insult...you know..I, I'm on the verge of hanging up with you, for, for bringing it up that way...it was nasty and character assassinating to talk about it that way...

Narcissistic much? Michael Berube has more...Lefarkins transcribes another interesting tidbit ...Orcinus transcribes the whole painful exchange

Update: TRex goes into the original story and it ain't pretty for Ann...

But maybe this is why the Right Wingers like you. You have perfected one of their favorite maneuvers, the Reverse Malkin, which is where you launch a vicious, factually challenged, hate-filled personal attack against someone and then when they push back, you stand to the side and screech, "Wait! I'm the victim, here!...read on

(H/t BloggingheadsTV)

First D'Souza, now Glenn Beck.

“You know, there’s a new poll out that Muslims, the higher educated Muslims in the Middle East are more likely to be extremists? More and more Muslims now hate us all across the world, and it really has not a lot to do with anything other than our morals.

“The things that they were saying about us were true. Our morals are just out the window. We’re a society on the verge of moral collapse. And our promiscuity is off the charts.

“Now I don’t think that we should fly airplanes into buildings or behead people because of it, but that’s the prevailing feeling of Muslims in the Middle East. And you know what? They’re right.”

Someone really ought to remind conservatives like Beck that you can’t love America if you hate Americans.

Kevin adds: "[This] perpetuates the trope that 'they hate us for our freedoms.' And if they hate us for our freedoms, guess what? It means they don't hate us for our actions."

Steve finds this piece of revealing data..

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BLITZER: Let's move on and talk a little bit about Iraq. Because this is a huge, huge issue, as you know, for the American public, a lot of concern that perhaps they are on the verge of a civil war--if not already a civil war--We see these horrible bodies showing up, tortured, mutilation. The Shia and the Sunni, the Iranians apparently having a negative role. Of course, al Qaeda in Iraq is still operating.

BUSH: Yes, you see — you see it on TV, and that's the power of an enemy that is willing to kill innocent people. But there's also an unbelievable will and resiliency by the Iraqi people…. Admittedly, it seems like a decade ago. I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma because there is — my point is, there's a strong will for democracy. (emphasis added)

This is an appalling statement to make. With a civil war full of Iraqi bloodshed and over 20,000 of our men and women killed or wounded since the war started--one would think this might matter more than a simple pause. Apparently, it doesn't. Steve has more...

The attack against the media is a calculated attempt to try and stop the sinking poll numbers for the Republicans over the war in Iraq and obviously shift the blame away from Bush to help with the '06 elections. That strategy is going to fail as more reporters come out and explain how they can and cannot do their jobs.

Time reports

"In recent weeks, a startling realization has begun to take hold: if the elections were held today, top strategists of both parties say privately, the Republicans would probably lose the 15 seats they need to keep control of the House of Representatives and could come within a seat or two of losing the Senate as well...read on

The Moderate Voice analyzes both sides of the aisle. "Scrambling Republicans On Verge Of Losing House Of Representatives And Close To Losing Senate"