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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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Sure, it's easy for Republican senators to get all collegial in the confines of their white-granite hallways and talk sweet nothings to the Latino voters who ran the other direction in the 2012 elections. Just wait till they get out and meet their base and try to talk the same sweet nothings to them.

The word came out of the Beltway yesterday that a group of senators from both parties had cobbled together the outlines of a comprehensive immigration-reform bill, just ahead of President Obama's announcement of his own plan:

A bipartisan group of senators has agreed on a set of principles for a sweeping overhaul of the immigration system, including a pathway to American citizenship for 11 million illegal immigrants that would hinge on progress in securing the borders and ensuring that foreigners leave the country when their visas expire.

The senators were able to reach a deal by incorporating the Democrats’ insistence on a single comprehensive bill that would not deny eventual citizenship to illegal immigrants, with Republican demands that strong border and interior enforcement had to be clearly in place before Congress could consider legal status for illegal immigrants.

As the L.A. Times story notes, this really is quite a sea change, especially considering the nativist spectacle to which we were treated during the 2012 Republican primary season:

The Senate plan is more conservative than President Obama's proposal, which he plans to unveil Tuesday in a speech in Las Vegas. But its provisions for legalizing millions of undocumented immigrants go further than measures that failed to advance in Congress in previous years — a reminder of how swiftly the politics of immigration have shifted since Latino voters' strong influence in the November election.

It's almost certain that this plan is well short of a progressive plan for immigration reform, but it is at least a start -- particularly given that a path to citizenship is now the preferred model for sensible Republicans, rather than the mass-deportation and self-deportation positions the GOP's nativist wing has favored for so many years.

Of course, simply whispering sweet nothings to Latinos after years of demonizing them is not going to be an easy sell to Latino voters, as Digby explains -- these are not going to be voters who lean conservative in any event.

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