Adam Kokesh is a strange bird. He's a veteran of the Iraq war and a hard-core libertarian who claims to support the tea party and Occupy Wall Street.

I'm going out on a limb here and saying he actually tends to lean more anarchist than anything else. Based on his latest and greatest idea, that would seem to be the case.

Kokesh is calling for an armed march on Washington, DC. By armed march, I mean a march from Virginia to Washington, DC with at least 1000 marchers carrying loaded rifles. Being the kind of guy that plans for every contingency, he warns that such a march would be intended to be non-violent, unless...

On the morning of July 4, 2013, Independence Day, we will muster at the National Cemetery & at noon we will step off to march across the Memorial Bridge, down Independence Avenue, around the Capitol, the Supreme Court, & the White House, then peacefully return to Virginia across the Memorial Bridge. This is an act of civil disobedience, not a permitted event. We will march with rifles loaded & slung across our backs to put the government on notice that we will not be intimidated & cower in submission to tyranny. We are marching to mark the high water mark of government & to turn the tide. This will be a non-violent event, unless the government chooses to make it violent. Should we meet physical resistance, we will peacefully turn back, having shown that free people are not welcome in Washington, & returning with the resolve that the politicians, bureaucrats, & enforcers of the federal government will not be welcome in the land of the free.

There's a remote chance that there will be violence as there has been from government before, and I think it should be clear that if anyone involved in this event is approached respectfully by agents of the state, they will submit to arrest without resisting. We are truly saying in the SUBTLEST way possible that we would rather die on our feet than live on our knees.

Yes, Kokesh calls for peaceful retreat with their loaded rifles, but my gut tells me it's not that simple, nor is it so easy to manage a thousand or more "patriots" with their loaded rifles into simply "peacefully turning back."

So far, 975 people have said they're attending. I don't know how many of them would actually be carrying the loaded rifle, though I think it's safe to err on the side of the majority.

Salon has more:

He started an anti-government radio show as the Tea Party picked up steam and was eventually picked up by RT, the news channel funded by the Russian government that is often critical of U.S. policy, where he promoted both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street in a worldview that some sociologists describe as “fusion paranoia,” a visceral anti-governmentalism that isn’t limited to typical left-right divides.

He ran into trouble when he endorsed Ron Paul in the 2012 election, which led to an FEC complaint and his termination from RT, though employees have told me privately that there were other, darker issues.

Since then, he’s taken his show “Adam vs. The Man” to the Internet, and seems to have become increasingly radicalized. “It’s time to abolish the US federal government,” hetweeted yesterday. Today he tweeted this:

When the government comes to take your guns, you can shoot government agents, or submit to slavery.— Adam Kokesh (@adamkokesh) May 3, 2013

If Kokesh carries through with this plan, I do not see it ending well.

Update: I see some serious objections to my characterization of Kokesh as an anarchist. Perhaps it's a question of terminology. I am not attempting to associate him with any sort of official "anarchist" group as much as I was trying to convey his attitude toward government, which can only be described as anarchical in the sense that he sees no need for any form of government at all. It wasn't intended to point at established groups as much as describe his philosophy.

Keep in mind, Kokesh himself calls for 'peaceful retreat' which is consistent with principles espoused by many anarchists. The problem is that you can't issue a call to arms and expect the followers to peacefully retreat.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Public opinion matters a great deal in the American system of government, just as it does in any democracy. But it sure isn’t the only thing that matters, as the following true story demonstrates. It’s what I call A Tale Of Two Constituencies.

Before I get deeper into my tale, though, my reader should know that in the land this tale comes from, the President had been elected and re-elected on not only a progressive platform, but arguably with the most populist rhetoric in 40 years. He had run his campaigns on fighting for the middle class, protecting the vulnerable from harm, taxing the wealthy, and taking on the wealthy special interests who were harming our economy. His re-election campaign had bragged about taking on Wall Street, and harshly criticized the vulture capitalist business practices of his opponent. And because of running these kinds of campaign, this President won 2 decisive victories in a row, becoming the first President of his center-left party to win a clear majority of the votes more than once since the 1930s.

So that gives you a sense of the kind of land this was, and the kind of President they had. Now for my tale. You see there two constituencies I wanted to compare and contrast in this democratic land governed by this center-left populist…

The first was extremely small in number, depending on how you count it only a few thousand people at the most. They represented the least popular institution in American society, even less popular in many polls than the Congress, which was saying something in a land where the Congressional leadership had been rated as less popular than head lice and root canal surgery. The group in question was widely blamed for an economic collapse more severe than any in 80 years, and was widely believed by journalists covering them, lawyers for many different clients who had dealt with them, and ex-prosecutors following their practices to have engaged in massive and wide-scale fraud on top of an estimated million counts of perjury in just one scam that they pulled off (something referred to by the media as robo-signing). They were reviled by every major bloc of American voters, including those of the conservative party as well as by all the key blocs of swing voters. And to top it all off, with their money and their rhetoric, they overwhelmingly supported the losing candidate in the Presidential election.

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Mark Fiore asks: Have you had your daily gun today?

Open thread below....

If the National Rifle Association (NRA) were not so dangerous to the physical health and general welfare of the people of the United States, they'd probably qualify as some of the most unintentionally hilarious people on the planet. Seriously, you can't make this stuff up.

Take executive vice-president of the NRA, (the suspiciously French sounding) Wayne LaPierre. If you started from scratch and constructed an (at least theoretical in his case) human being, you couldn't find a better movie villain. A man who foams at the mouth when fetishising about guns on national TV, attacks sitting Presidents in terms usually reserved for dictators and inaugural-lip syncers and has the look of a howling mad member of Alphonse "Big Boy" Caprice's gang from Dick Tracy - replete with the beady eyes, vestigial rage and bad posture.

That Lapierre's little gaggle of government-fearing, 1970s-Death-Wish-obsessing miscreants actually claim they're trying to increase people's safety can almost make your sides hurt from the hysterics, as it carries with it the legitimacy of Manti T'eo giving lectures on Nigerian bank swindles.

These are the guys who released an iPhone app for kids as young as four to shoot at coffin-shaped targets on the one-month anniversary of the Newtown Massacre. That little high-capacity-magazine of brilliance has probably jetted them right past Applebee's on the sliding scale of public-relations brilliance, up next to Alex Rodriguez.

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Take heart, America. While Fox is doing its best to prevent President Obama from implementing preschool for the poor, it’s totally looking out for the little (white) man and woman’s ability to own assault weapons. Case in point: Dan Bongino, a “former Secret Service agent” on Fox & Friends Weekend to explain why he thinks there’s “no such thing as gun control, only people control.” Host Tucker Carlson forgot to mention that Bongino is also a failed Republican senatorial candidate in 2012, now considering running for governor of Maryland in 2014

Bongino wasted no time getting to his larger platform. “Whether it’s the sequester, health care or the gun control issue, what they do is they manipulate an emotional crisis, a national emotional crisis to further an ideological agenda which involves the evaporation, the slow disintegration of your civil rights, your liberties, your ability to live and let live.” But speaking of manipulating emotions, Bongino quickly went on to push people into thinking that gun control is a matter of the wealthy one percent trying to disempower everybody else.

We have this Downton Abbey class of politicians and bureaucrats who – they understand as clear as day that… gun control, with air quotes, has no effect whatsoever on violence or the ability of wolves in our society to impart violence on you. So they feel the need to be protected by weapons and self-defense and the ability to defend themselves with their security details, of which I was one, but they don’t want to impart the same rights upon you, the average American citizen.

Tucker Carlson, who oozes one percent-ness, agreed.

I’ve noticed that. We seem to be developing a two-tier system where privileged people, Mayor Bloomberg, for example, are surrounded by body guards with high-capacity magazines and the rest of us have to make do with double-barrel shotguns. Is that adequate do you think? I mean, is the average person safe with no firearm at home?

BONGINO: No, you’re not.

Later, Bongino said:

We are living in this post-Constitutional society right now where somehow they have sold to you, the American citizens, that it’s moral, ethical, kind or generous to disarm you… while allowing the wolves in our society, the criminals, to impart violence upon you at will – and they know that you won’t be carrying a weapon in these strict gun-control states, one of which I live in, in Maryland.

Carlson gushed, “That is about the most eloquent defense of the right of self-protection I’ve heard in a long time!”

Forget Social Security. Let ‘em eat guns!

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While he works on launching a U.S. senatorial run in Massachusetts, Fox’s “Medical A-Team” psychiatrist, Keith Ablow, has his platform on the “fair and balanced” network to promote his candidacy. So this morning, when he visited Fox & Friends to discuss the psychological scars that might affect Ethan, the Alabama kindergartner just rescued after being held hostage for nearly a week, Ablow gratuitously attacked those who think this is another example of the need for stricter gun regulations and suggested they are so dedicated to an anti-gun agenda that they’d rather people get shot by the mentally ill than institutionalize them.

I’ve written many times about what a crackpot Ablow is and his propensity for diagnosing people without benefit of an examination. In this case, he diagnosed Ethan as more or less doomed to mental illness - without knowing much more than his first name. Reacting to a report that the boy has been “laughing, joking, playing and eating” after being reunited with his mother, Ablow rendered his opinion: These are “also the things that five- or six-year-olds do when they’re desperately trying to maintain some semblance of normality… I can tell you that the effort to maintain that sense of normality in and of itself has set the stage for all kinds of trouble down the road. So, as sad as it is, Ethan isn’t OK. He’s at tremendous risk for depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, alcohol and drug abuse later in life. Fractured relationships. All manner of disabilities from psychological problems.”

Nobody challenged Ablow’s “evaluation.” Instead, Steve Doocy opened the door for Ablow to opine on policy by asking if maybe “somebody should have connected some dots” about the state of the abductor’s mental health.

Ablow replied:

Gee, ya think? And there’ll be people, by the way, who say this is an argument for more gun control. Those people are reprehensible. Because the bottom line is, this guy had a hearing for medicine coming up. You mean to say the court couldn’t have connected the dots between that and the fact that his neighbors said that he had threatened kids’ lives? And that he had beaten a dog to death with a pipe and said, ‘We are holding you in the psychiatric unit for evaluation against your will.’ Really?

Gretchen Carlson prodded for more by “asking” why they don’t do that.

With unintentional hilarity, Ablow said it’s because it takes “work” and “It takes not pontificating and trying to make political points by saying we’re gonna take everybody’s guns! …Obvious people who need help aren’t given that help when we could deliver it – because we have the expertise – but we’re not willing to allocate resources, partly out of stigma, and partly out of the fact that people would rather try to pander to certain voting blocs by saying it’s all about guns. Which it isn’t.

Doocy closed by validating the hypothesis: “It didn’t have to happen.”

Just days after the chairman of Gun Appreciation Day tried to misappropriate the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., the always execrable Rush Limbaugh pointed both barrels at the civil rights movement. Just in time for the weekend jointly marking King's birthday and President Obama's second inauguration, Limbaugh asked:

"If a lot of African-Americans back in the '60s had guns and the legal right to use them for self-defense, you think they would have needed Selma? If John Lewis, who says he was beat upside the head, if John Lewis had had a gun, would he have been beat upside the head on the bridge?"

Now, Congressman Lewis didn't "say" he was "beat upside the head" on March 7, 1965; any American can watch the video of the vicious attack by Alabama state troopers. Regardless, Lewis responded to Limbaugh's obscenity in exactly the dignified way all Americans should by now have to come to expect from him:

"Our goal in the Civil Rights Movement was not to injure or destroy but to build a sense of community, to reconcile people to the true oneness of all humanity. African Americans in the '60s could have chosen to arm themselves, but we made a conscious decision not to. We were convinced that peace could not be achieved through violence. Violence begets violence, and we believed the only way to achieve peaceful ends was through peaceful means. We took a stand against an unjust system, and we decided to use this faith as our shield and the power of compassion as our defense."

To put it another way, for John Lewis the answer to the atrocities of the segregationists was love, not guns. But we didn't need Friday's statement from Congressman Lewis to remind us of that eternal lesson of the civil rights struggle. As he showed four years ago, Lewis is its living embodiment.

On May 9, 1961, Freedom Rider John Lewis was viciously beaten in a whites-only waiting room at the Rock Hill bus station. In February 2009--48 years after Lewis sustained a fractured skull in the assault--his attacker Elwin Wilson came forward and apologized to Georgia Congressman Lewis. As ABC News reported:

"I'm so sorry about what happened back then," Wilson said breathlessly.

"It's OK. I forgive you," Lewis responded before a long-awaited hug.

For Lewis, who in the intervening years became a U.S. representative from Georgia, the apology was an unexpected symbol of the change in time and hearts.

"I never thought this would happen," he told "GMA." "It says something about the power of love, of grace, the power of the people being able to say, 'I'm sorry,' and move on. And I deeply appreciate it. It's very meaningful for me."

As Lewis explained in a joint appearance with Wilson on CNN:

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Steve Doocy teamed up with Daily Caller’s Vince Coglianese this morning to dig up one of then-State Senator Barack Obama’s 1999 votes on gun violence and held it up as “proof” that Obama is more interested in cracking down on guns than gun violence. Even worse, the actual digging was done by Obama’s 2004 U.S. Senate opponent. In other words, from GOP oppo research to Fox News airwaves.

Doocy began the Fox & Friends segment by saying that President Obama “sounds pretty emphatic” about curbing gun violence but “when he had the chance to be a part of legislation to crack down on school shooters while he was an Illinois State Senator – what did he do? He voted present.” Doocy deliberately sneered and sad trombone music underscored the "fail" meme.

Coglianese told us that in 1999, after the Columbine massacre, Illinois had a bill to try juveniles who commit school shootings as adults. Although the Illinois’ state senate passed it by a vote of 52-1, Obama was one of five who voted “present.”

Doocy prodded for more. “I see that the Daily Caller, you tracked down a long record of Obama voting against tough-on-crime legislation.”

Well, not exactly – unless your idea of “tracking down” means dusting off the work of an old Obama political foe and looking for ways to use it now. Coglianese said that he and a Daily Caller colleague “went to Chicago – and this was in the midst of the election – and picked up all this opposition research prepared by Jack Ryan, who was one-time Obama’s Republican Senate opponent.”

Somehow, both Doocy and Coglianese forgot to mention that Ryan might not be the most credible of sources to Fox News family values viewers, having dropped out of his U.S. senate campaign after divorce papers revealed his actress wife accused him of taking her to sex clubs.

Even worse, Doocy ignored how Coglianese revealed he had unquestioningly taken on Ryan's slant as his own.

COGLIANESE: (Ryan) found all this information and the way that he framed it - and I think it’s probably right – is that Obama was always very soft on crime but very tough on guns. Every time Obama had a crime vote to take when he was in the Illinois state senate, he always voted present… for two reasons: One, he said that crime, criminal law disproportionately affected African Americans. He saw a racial component there.”

… And additionally, he said that I don’t want to clog the court system with all these cases. Well, what do you want to clog the court system with? And we thought that given his rhetoric on guns lately that it would be interesting to bring up this ’99 vote where he said, “You know what? I don’t want to give tougher prosecution to children who shoot at schools.”

Doocy murmured, “Sure,” approvingly as Coglianese spoke.

But as Media Matters pointed out, this attempt to paint President Obama as a hypocrite on gun laws was either disingenuous or half-baked (or both). Obama’s reasons for voting present in 1999 were his opposition to automatically transferring juveniles into the adult system and none of Obama’s current proposals call for trying juveniles as adults.

Fox must be getting pretty desperate for dirt to throw at Obama's gun proposals if they’re stooping to this.

Silent movie star Harold Lloyd poses for the Time Magazine cover I'd like to see. Open thread below....

So, according to CNN's Erick Erickson, the problem isn't that a mentally-ill person had easy access to a .223 caliber semi-automatic assault rifle with high capacity magazines. It's that too many people in this country are having unapproved sexytime. This is exactly, by the way, what Mitt Romney stupidly argued during the campaign.

Republicans and the NRA are going to pull out all the stops on this one. We can't let them win this time.