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Pat Robertson, Pope of the Televangelists, is joining with the crackpot theories of Alex Jones that warns Americans the feds are out to get us, just like he did during his Clinton 'black helicopter' days.

Robertson: Long trains full of armored vehicles, personnel carriers with armor, what are they for, the army going into battle against the enemy? They're used by Homeland Security against us,” Robertson ominously warned. “Imagine what Homeland Security is doing is just awful and we’re going to talk about how much ammunition they’re stockpiling: who are they going to shoot, us?

David Edwards:

The same theories have also been picked up in recent weeks by the Fox News Channel and the Fox Business Network.

And on Thursday, Robertson weighed in on the side of the conspiracy theorists, calling it “like something out of science fiction: long trains of full or armored vehicles, personnel carriers with armor.”

And then of course we have to debunk these fictitious reports since it is possible that it could enter the mainstream.

The conspiracy about secretive ammo stockpiling is completely unfounded.

According to the Associated Press, the ammunition is used in trainings for “tens of thousands of federal law enforcement officers” and for the use of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.As Media Matters pointed out, DHS does own light armored vehicles for emergencies and raids on drug cartels, and the recent purchases of such vehicles were actually for the U.S. Marine Corps.

In fact, the conspiracy theory is so baseless that even the NRA has debunked it.

So now we have the religious right joining forces with Alex Jones and the militiamen of America to propagate lies so bad that Joel Surnow wouldn't even touch it. Oh, damn. I hope I haven't given him an idea for a new "24" movie.

CBS 5 - KPHO

Oooh, look out, people. The United Nations is coming to destroy your freedoms and take away your way of life.

Fortunately, we have the far-right Republicans of the Arizona Legislature out there on the front lines protecting us.

The same woman -- Republican Sen. Judy Burges, R-Hateful Old People (aka Sun City West) -- who sponsored Arizona's notorious birther law is back this session with SB 1403, a bill that would prevent Arizona from participating in any kind of legislation that would support the eeeeevil UN "Agenda 21" plan to destroy America through environmental laws.

As Laurie Roberts at the Arizona Republic reports:

“I appear before you to address a United Nations program that is designed to change our way of life, our heritage and our liberties as outlined and protected by our most precious Constitution,” she announced. “I testify to you against the seductive evils contained in the United Nations’ agenda for the 21st Century and more easily stated, Agenda 21.”

The Sun City West Republican has often been on the front lines during her eight years at the Capitol, battling conspiracies of both a global and national nature. So it is no surprise that she is back again this year with Senate Bill 1403, a proposal that appears to undo decades of environmental protections, limit citizen access to information about hazardous materials and in general leave people – the ones who don’t embrace tin foil for its millinery properties — scratching their heads.

Burges’ bill, simply put, would bar state or local government from abiding by any of the principles set forth in the United Nations Rio Declaration on Environment and Development.

Agenda 21, as it’s called, is a non binding agreement approved in 1992 during a UN conference in Rio de Janeiro. Basically, it’s a list of principles detailing how communities can better conserve natural resources.

But if you’re Burgess, it’s a plot to destroy America.

“The truth contained within this United Nations program depicts something sinister and dark,” she told her fellow lawmakers. “The plan calls for government to take control of all land use and not leave any decisions in the hands of private property owners. It is assumed by the backers of Agenda 21 that people are not good stewards of the land and the government will do a better job if it’s in control. Individual rights are to be given away to the global community as determined by a global governing body, not by local elected representatives … and folks, not even your state Legislature. Furthermore, the contents of the United Nations program reveal that people should be rounded up off their own land and relocated to human settlements close to employment centers and transportation hubs.”

Burges has trotted out this bill previously. As before, this bill would effectively preempt the state from enforcing any water-quality, air-quality, or other environmental laws. Which is just peachy, as far as today's Republicans are concerned. Even Richard Nixon would be rolling in his grave.

PT Barnum is credited with saying: "There's a sucker born every day" and history has proven him right. Robert Welch created the John Birch society by conning as many wingnut rubes as he could into forming an anti-government and anti-Communist advocacy group. It became very powerful in the early sixties by promoting crazed Communist conspiracy theories that reached as far up as the White House. Even William F Buckley railed against them as vociferously as he could so that the Republican party wouldn't be besmirched by their apparent lunacy.

The society had been founded in 1958 by an earnest and capable entrepreneur named Robert Welch, a candy man, who brought together little clusters of American conservatives, most of them businessmen. He demanded two undistracted days in exchange for his willingness to give his seminar on the Communist menace to the United States, which he believed was more thoroughgoing and far-reaching than anyone else in
America could have conceived.

His influence was near-hypnotic, and his ideas wild. He said Dwight D. Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,” and that the government of the United States was “under operational control of the Communist party.” It was, he said in the summer of 1961, “50-70 percent” Communist-controlled...read on

Conspiracy nuts have been on the fringes of political discussion for a long time, but with the rise of Fox News, the Tea party and the Internet, Glenn Beck has snatched the crown from Welch and proudly wears it for all to see. In the process, he's making millions of dollars off the dupes and weak-minded followers of extreme right-wing orthodoxy.

Here's Beck's latest nonsensical conspiracy rant about the possible Islamic brainwashing of John Brennan:

Perhaps the most amazingly hypocritical thing about Glenn Beck is that his entire Blaze network serves as nothing but a repository for conspiracy theories, wild speculation, and outright lies while Beck holds himself up as a champion of "the truth."

Case in point. On his program last night, Beck took up the allegation that John Brennan, President Obama's nominee to head the CIA, may have secretly converted to Islam as part of a counterintelligence operation run against him by the Saudi government.

Despite the fact that this claim originated from one laughably unreliable source, Beck found it to be entirely "plausible," saying that "if somebody makes a charge like that, shouldn't we at least explore it" before saying that the media wouldn't even bother to investigate because "it seems like we can't even ask reasonable questions any more"

Yes, crazy indeed, but we've seen his Muslim hysteria many times before.

Beck: I believe that I can make a case in the end that there are three powers that you will see really emerge. One, a Muslim caliphate that controls the Mideast and parts of Europe. Two, China, that will control Asia, the southern half of Africa, part of the Middle East, Australia, maybe New Zealand, and God only knows what else. And Russia, which will control all of the old former Soviet Union bloc, plus maybe the Netherlands. I'm not really sure. But their strong arm is coming. That leaves us and South America. What happens to us?

Not much daylight between Glenn Beck and Robert Welch!

The idea that anyone who hates liberals and makes a lamebrain assertion about anyone at all immediately becomes plausible and should be investigated. Can you imagine if he did acquire a network?

Evidently there are some corners of the Internet I haven't discovered, because if I had, I'd know all about the guys behind the FPS Russia YouTube channel, which is one of the top-viewed channels on the Internet these days.

The guy in front of the camera in that video lives on. But the guy who handled the business side of the videos, Keith Ratliff, was killed with a single gunshot sometime last week. Via Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

One of the operators of a popular YouTube channel promoting high-powered guns and explosives was found shot to death last week in northeast Georgia.

Keith Ratliff, 32, was found dead at 5:45 p.m. Thursday at his business on Hayes Road in Carnesville, said Franklin County Sheriff Steve Thomas in a press release.

Ratliff, of Frankfort, Ky., had been shot once in the head, and his death is a homicide. He had been dead for some time when the body was discovered, Thomas said. He was last seen alive Wednesday around 7 p.m.

The GBI has been called in to assist in the investigation, and Ratliff’s body was taken to the GBI Crime Lab in Atlanta for an autopsy.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Ratliff was either working for or a partner in FPS Industries Global, LLC. In April, 2012, Ratliff appeared before the local planning commission to request a zoning change for the company's property in order to allow for a work area to develop prototypes for accessories for firearms. That request was granted with some restrictions on the land use, such as a ban on live firing outdoors.

This story is made for conspiracy theorists to run wild with it, and they are already picking up that ball and running with it, speculating that he was tied to a chair and shot once through the head as a "leftist plot", among others. Evidently another high-profile gun gear guy, John Noveske, died in a vehicle accident on January 4th. This has sparked speculation that the left is somehow picking off people who are at best peripheral to the gun industry in their efforts to take away their guns pass reasonable gun control laws.

Testing this story against the theory that if he had been armed, the outcome might have been different yields a predictable result:

Ratliff’s body was sent to the GBI Crime Lab in Atlanta for autopsy. Thomas said Ratliff was found inside his FPS Industries business and there were multiple firearms inside. He would not say if the weapon relating to the homicide was recovered.

My condolences to his wife and 2-year old son. It's a terrible loss, and one I wish they hadn't had to suffer.

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If there is any kind of silver lining lurking in yesterday's horror show at Sandy Hook Elementary, it is this: The national conversation on guns is sharply changing. Perhaps that's because, as Charlie Pierce observes, this bell has been tolling long and loud -- and now we realize that it tolls for us.

It's a reflection of the depraved state of our national conversation that it took a parade of massacres culminating in a schoolhouse full of murdered 5-year-olds to awaken that realization in us. But that's where we are. The question now is how to get out of it.

Particularly because the other half of the conversation -- the gun-rights absolutists who increasingly retreat into paranoid conspiracy theories to justify their worldviews, as well as an insurrectionist interpretation of the Second Amendment asserting that the real purpose of gun ownership is to enable the overthrow of a tyrannical government -- is just plain ol' bug-eyed crazy. Not to mention psychopathically insensate, exemplified by the Brian Fischers and Mike Huckabees out there blaming liberals for the murders.

How exactly are we supposed to conduct a conversation with people who cling insistently to irrational nonsense?

And what is nearly certain to happen next is going to make the conundrum inescapable.

It's clear, both from his remarks yesterday and his radio address today, that President Obama has now screwed up the political courage to try to tackle the matter of the mass proliferation of guns in American society. And that, as it happens, will fall in line with the paranoid predictions of the gun nuts before the election.

You remember what they were saying:

"[The Obama campaign] will say gun owners -- they'll say they left them alone," LaPierre told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Friday. "In public, he'll remind us that he's put off calls from his party to renew the Clinton [assault weapons] ban, he hasn't pushed for new gun control laws. ... The president will offer the Second Amendment lip service and hit the campaign trail saying he's actually been good for the Second Amendment."

"But it's a big fat stinking lie!" the NRA leader exclaimed. "It's all part of a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and destroy the Second Amendment in our country."

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Our friend and sometime contributor Leah Nelson has a post up over at the SPLC's Hatewatch site examining that fringe world between far right and far left -- dominated by the rightist element, in the person of Alex Jones and his proto-Patriot conspiracy shop.

In this case, it's these pseudo-economists who put out conspiracist newsletters to investors -- their most recent theory being that President Obama is plotting to defy the Constitution and ensconce himself for a third term come 2016 -- whose Planet Bizarro version of reality gets a good sharp look:

'Anarcho-Capitalists’ Seen as Cousins of the ‘Patriot’ Movement

The star of the show is a fellow named Porter Stansberry, a scam artist/"financial guru" convicted of making over a million dollars selling false "inside tips" (he claimed a First Amendment defense) and was subsequently fined $1.5 million by the SEC.

Evidently soured on the government by his brush with the law, Stansberry has turned from scam artist to antigovernment radical, using various Internet publications to mix dubious investment advice with apocalyptic warnings about a coming era of tyranny that will destroy America.

His most recent insight? According to a YouTube video distributed across a multitude of far-right websites and discussed with great seriousness by figures like antigovernment conspiracist Alex Jones, President Obama is planning to overthrown the Constitution, implement socialism, and seize a third term in office.

According to Stansberry, Obama won’t even have to use force to do it. Instead, the president plans to buy his third term with untold profits gained from mining America’s vast shale oil deposits, which will lead to an era of extraordinary prosperity unlike anything America has seen before.

“All of this new wealth,” Stansberry says, “will seem like a gift from the Prophet Muhammad to the administration of Barack Obama.”

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Poor BillO is still reeling from Mitt Romney's loss and America's rejection of conservatives so he's jumping on the outrageous assertions by the wingnut elites that the Benghazi attack and Republican freakout is exactly the same thing as Richard Nixon's Watergate.

Look, Bill: All that happened after the horrendous incident in Libya was that Susan Rice went on air and repeated to the media what information was given to her by the CIA. That's the scandal. Paul Waldman explains this quite nicely:

But now, some Republicans, particularly John McCain and Lindsay Graham, are essentially saying that this horrifying cover-up was quite possibly the greatest crime in the history of the United States government, and if we're going to get to the bottom of it nothing short of a select committee—a "Watergate-style committee," as it is being referred to by reporters—will do.

Who knows what it might uncover? Were there CIA whistleblowers whose bodies are now lying at the bottom of the Potomac? Was David Petraeus being blackmailed? Are William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright involved? Did Susan Rice fly to Tripoli, have a steamy liaison with a clone of Ayman al-Zawahiri created in a secret underground laboratory, then go to Benghazi where she personally killed Ambassador Chris Stevens with a hat pin? We won't know unless we spin this out into a multi-week story!So what's going on here? I can sum it up in two words: scandal envy...read on

But after you purchase an all day pass to O'Reilly-World, here's what you get:

BIllO: Are We Dealing With Another Watergate? The testimony is under oath so it's serious.

After saying it can go either two ways, a massive cover-up ala Gordon G. Liddy or a big nothing he adds:

BillO: This has raised all kind of conspiracy theories and now you have Gen.Petraeus added to the mix.

Only the Republicans are throwing down on the conspiracy theroies in hopes to delegitimize Obama. Cut to a clip of McCranky yelling at a reporter.

BIllO: Sen. McCain feels very strongly that there is government malfeasance involved in the Libyan chaos, but that has yet to be proved.

What hasn't President McCain been cranky over? Then Bill begins his Watergate comparison.

BIllO: If the press hadn't been aggressive to this low level break in Nixon would have gotten away with it. And the break in at the Watergate hotel is not nearly as important as defining a terrorist attack that killed four Americans.

Benghazi was just tragic on a massive scale, but it is not in any way shape or form related to the Watergate break in-cover up scandal. Do I really have to lay it all out? Benghazi was a terrorist attack on foreign soil and Richard Nixon had a goon squad called The Plumbers that did illegal activities including going after Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist and to help Nixon win re-election by breaking in and wiretapping the DNC headquarters. And it was deep throat helping Bernstein and Woodward that blew it wide open. What possible motive is there for the WH to lie and then coverup the Benghazi attack? It's never made any sense.

Kevin Drum: A Conspiracy Theory With No Conceivable Motive

As best I can tell, the suggestion from the right has been that Obama didn't want to admit that Benghazi was a terrorist attack because....well, I'm not sure, exactly. Something about how this would blow a hole in his claim to be decimating al-Qaeda via drone attacks. Or maybe it would remove some of the luster from being the killer of Osama bin Laden. Or something.

But one way or another, the story is that Obama was deeply afraid of admitting that terrorists are still out there and want to do us harm.This has never made a lick of sense. If anything, the continuing existence of terrorists justifieshis drone attacks. And it certainly wouldn't do him any harm in an election. The American public routinely rallies around a president responding to a terrorist attack.

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Eric Bolling and the Fox & Friends hosts put on their tinfoil hats this morning as they sniffed around for the evil Obama re-election plot they felt certain was lurking behind the just-released jobless numbers.

A Fox News Alert announced that the jobless numbers rose to 439,000, when the estimate had been 375,000. Brian Kilmeade set the tone early by saying, “Wow! Are you kidding? …Oh, my goodness!”

Steve Doocy gave the tinfoil signal by saying to Bolling, “You have been suspicious of the numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics before.“

Bolling paused dramatically, before saying, “Alright, let me try not to get myself into too much trouble. This is the first week after the election.”

“That’s the first thing everyone’s gonna think about,” Gretchen Carlson said supportively.

Bolling continued, “Does anyone find it odd that the weeks leading into the election – (jobless numbers) going down, the number went towards 350, and now the first week after, first full week after 439?”

Kilmeade added, “Everyone finds it odd. I appreciate your parsing your words.”

Actually, not everyone finds it odd. In a report full of facts and devoid of inflammatory speculation, Reuters noted the devastating impact of Hurricane Sandy on the economic statistics.

“Stepping back from the storm distortions, the economy is growing at about 2 percent,” said Ryan Sweet, senior economist at Moody’s Analytics in West Chester, Pa. “We will likely see a step back in job growth” because of the storm, he added. “The economy is just muddling along.”

… The economic impact of the storm is likely to be temporary. …Economists say the storm could shave as much as half a percentage point from economic growth in the last three months of the year, but should be made up early next year.

But without offering any rebuttal to the expert analysis or providing any grounds for concluding something sinister was afoot, Bolling continued suggesting Obama had somehow cooked the numbers during his re-election campaign to make the economy look better than it really is:

I’m saying there’s going to be an explanation… They blame weather for employment numbers, they blame weather for jobless claims numbers, they’ve blamed weather for retail sales numbers. Something is going to come out here because that doesn’t make sense. That number’s just blaring, saying, “Hello, hello! Something’s wrong with this number!” Unless it’s catch up. You know, if it’s catch up, I have a real problem. That means that the numbers that were looking so good over the last few weeks were caught up today. We’ll do a little more digging.

In other words, none of them had a single piece of evidence to back up their conspiracy theory.

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Ever notice how right-wingers aren't particularly picky about where they get their information? Oh, sure, that guy on the teevee may look like some leaf blower got ahold of his toupee out on the used-car saleslot, but if he says something nasty about Barack Obama, then his word is gold!

Brian Tashman at RightWingWatch happened to catch one such character, speaking before the awestruck crowd at last week's "Values Voters Summit 2012", a self-proclaimed "former terrorist" who has renounced Islam and the evil ways of the Islamist conspiracy against America because he found The Love of JeHaySus. (Heather discussed him earlier.)

Here "Saleem" regales the slack-jawed VVS audience with his new Obama conspiracy tale:

SALEEM: And when we surrender to them authority, and we apologize to everybody over there, in Islam that is a victory, and that is the start of the march now somewhere to take over the land, take over your country and fulfill your purpose and become united Islamic nations!

This is what happened. Egypt is the capital of the OIC -- the OIC meeting here in America with Hillary and her staff! You are about to introduce U.N. Resolution 1618, the hate crime bill, which will subjugate American people to be arrested and put to jail, and the churches and synagogues shut down and go underground. And if they still go they will be put in jail and be fined big time. Which will break the First Amendment and Second Amendment.

This is about to be put as early as January. As early maybe as March, at most. Right now, it is on the table to be put together. We got something to fight for, and that fight is for our children, for our grandchildren, for our liberty! For our freedom! For the future! For the nations!

Yyyyyyyeah. OK. Whatever you say, dude.

Actually, Tim Murphy of Mother Jones ran into Saleem at the VVC and tried to get him to answer some of the questions he's been asking about Saleem and his story for a long time:

But as I reported in a piece for the magazine last spring, much of Saleem's story doesn't add up. California police have no record of an incident he describes vividly in the first chapter of his book; the FBI says it has no record of meeting with him. And those who knew him before he began traveling the country under a stage name say they have serious doubts about huge portions of his narrative. Wally Winter, a former roommate during the period Saleem purports to have been grooming terrorists, told me, "He could sell swampland in Louisiana. I really do not believe the story about the terrorism."

Gotta love Saleem's brass, though. And guess where he picked up all that evangelical style: Straight out of Pat Robertson, his former employer:

Doug Howard, a professor of Middle Eastern history at Michigan's Calvin College, first encountered Saleem in 2007, when he was invited to speak at the school. Howard quickly became suspicious: For starters, Saleem claimed to be a descendant of the "Grand Wazir of Islam," a position that doesn't exist. Howard dug deeper and discovered that Saleem's original name was Khodor Shami—and that for more than a decade before outing himself as a former terrorist he had worked for Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network and James Dobson's Focus on the Family. (CBN declined to comment. Focus on the Family confirmed Saleem was an employee but would not comment further.)

Though I have to say: At least Saleem is more credible than Paul Ryan.

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It turns out now that the amateurish hate film that sparked the lethal riots in Egypt, Libya, and Yemen -- or at least, in the case of the Libya murders, provided a pretext -- is a product of the fetid, far-right underbelly of American politics. And it seems that not only did the Islamophobic far-right militiamen behind the movie make it with the explicit intent of sparking riots abroad, but they even attempted to pin the blame for its production on Israeli Jews.

The Associated Press reports on the identity of the filmmakers:

The person who identified himself as Bacile and described himself as the film's writer and director told the AP on Tuesday that he had gone into hiding. But doubts rose about the man's identity amid a flurry of false claims about his background and role in the purported film.

Bacile told the AP he was an Israeli-born, 56-year-old Jewish writer and director. But a Christian activist involved in the film project, Steve Klein, told the AP on Wednesday that Bacile was a pseudonym and that he was Christian.

Klein had told the AP on Tuesday that the filmmaker was an Israeli Jew who was concerned for family members who live in Egypt.

CBS' Bill Whitaker has more.

But who is Steve Klein? Max Blumenthal tells us:

While Bacile claims to be in hiding, and his identity remains murky, another character who has been publicly listed as a consultant on the film is a known anti-Muslim activist with ties to the extreme Christian right and the militia movement. He is Steve Klein, a Hemet, California based insurance salesman who claims to have led a “hunter-killer team” in Vietnam.”

Klein is a right-wing extremist who emerged from the same axis of Islamophobia that produced Anders Behring Breivik and which takes inspiration from the writings of Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, and Daniel Pipes.

It appears Klein (or someone who shares his name and views) is an enthusiastic commenter on Geller’s website, Atlas Shrugged, where he recently complained about Mitt Romney’s “support for a Muslim state in Israel’s Heartland.” In July 2011, Spencer’s website, Jihad Watch, promoted a rally Klein organized alongside the anti-Muslim Coptic extremist Joseph Nasrallah to demand the firing of LA County Sheriff Lee Baca, whom they painted as a dupe for Hamas.

Indeed, Klein's activities as a "Christian militiaman" were the focus of an astonishing SPLC report filed this spring by C&L's own Leah Nelson:

In a 22-acre compound at the southern edge of Sequoia National Park in California, a secretive cohort of militant Christian fundamentalists is preparing for war. One of the men helping train the flock in the art of combat, a former Marine named Steve Klein, believes that California is riddled with Muslim Brotherhood sleeper cells “who are awaiting the trigger date and will begin randomly killing as many of us as they can.”

“I know I’m getting prepared to shoot back,” Klein says.

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