Evidently the Missouri Senate took those arguments to heart and decided they should immediately de-fund the state Drivers' License Bureau in order to fend off the evil liberals who will surely use the data there to take everyone's guns away.

Raw Story:

Missouri state senators on on Monday voted to eliminate all funding for the Department of Revenue’s driver’s license bureau because they were angry about the way the agency was keeping concealed carry gun records.

Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Kurt Schaefer (R) said that he had created that draconian cuts to send a message to Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon’s administration.

“They will not be able to issue any driver’s licenses,” Schaefer admitted on Monday.

[...]

Republican lawmakers in Missouri became alarmed at a recent hearing at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing when Revenue Department Director Brian Longrefused to agree to stop scanning and retaining concealed carry data. Long said that the records helped to prevent fraud.

Long resigned from his post as director earlier this month.

But it wasn't just over concerns that concealed carry permit records were being kept. No, no. There was more.

Melissa Wilson, wife of state Rep. Kenneth Wilson (R), told the committee earlier this month that she was certain that gun records had been shared with the federal government as a part of a United Nations initiative called Agenda 21, which some conservatives believe is a conspiracy to “transform America from the land of the free, to the land of the collective” through “a mind-control” tactic called the Delphi technique.

A 2009 Missouri law prohibits state officials from implementing the federal Real ID Act, and a state House panel this week approved legislation that made it illegal to share information about concealed carry permits.

I'll bet if we look hard enough, we'll find a law on Missouri's books outlawing fluoride in their water, too. Maybe that's why they keep believing all of this nonsense. Fluoride. And fillings, receiving messages from outer space.

In one fantastically wingnutty segment, the American Family Association's Bryan Fischer managed to compare Todd Akin to Jesus Christ -- as well as a victim of rape.

FISCHER: Denis Prager wants him out, Charles Krauthammer wants him out, Hugh Hewitt wants him out, Ann Coulter wants him out, The National Review editorial board wants him out, The Wall Street Journal editorial board wants him out, The Tea Party Express wants him out. Virtually nobody other than the Family Research Council and yours truly even Rush, apparently now is out saying he ought to step aside.

So everybody is gang tackling, uh, Todd Akin. Now you talk about a um, forceable, uh, situation, you talk about somebody being a victim of kind of forceable assault, that would be Todd Akin.

As always, the real victims of bigotry and discrimination in this country are white Christian conservatives.

State: Minnesota

Type of election: Caucus

How it works: Caucus begins at 7 p.m. It is non-binding and the delegates selected tonight will advance to district or county conventions, which in turn elect state delegates, which then choose national delegates. To participate "attendees must be eligible to vote in the next general election, live in the precinct, and be in general agreement with the principles of the political party." In the end, 40 delegates will be chosen.

Official election results: Minnesota Secretary of State

Republican candidates: Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum (all others have dropped out or are polling at less than 1 percent)

Democratic candidates: Barack Obama

Previous performance: In 2008, Romney won the caucus with 41 percent of the vote. Paul finished fourth with 16 percent. Obama won the Democratic caucus with 66 percent of the vote.

Newspapers: Duluth News-Tribune, Minn Post, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Star Tribune, full list

Television stations: Full list

Progressive blogs: Bluestem Prairie, Minnesota Independent, Minnesota Progressive Project, MNPublius, Truth Surfer

Latest polling: Polling for today's contests has been sparse:

Tea party Republican Todd Akin, who refuses to meet with his constituents, has inspired them to take their questions to the web and Twitter with the #AskToddAkin campaign. The website, AskToddAkin.com allows concerned citizens to automatically send tweets that question why the representative opposes programs that help the people of Missouri.

The AFL-CIO says:

So far, he hasn’t been willing to meet with voters in his district, even though he’s been traveling far and wide to tea party meetings and fundraisers hours outside of his district. When his constituents held a town hall meeting a block from his office, he wouldn’t even contact them to decline, although he did issue a press statement saying he wouldn’t go to a “Union Hall,” calling the town hall meeting a “Rally and Protest.”

Among the questions voters can ask Akin:

Yes, Troy Davis has been killed, after a roller coaster ride through the end stages of an execution. But he left a message behind, which said this, in part:

This fight to end the death penalty is not won or lost through me but through our strength to move forward and save every innocent person in captivity around the globe. We need to dismantle this Unjust system city by city, state by state and country by country.

I can’t wait to Stand with you, no matter if that is in physical or spiritual form, I will one day be announcing,

“I AM TROY DAVIS, and I AM FREE!”

I want to take him at his word, and as it turns out, right after I wrote my final post about Troy's execution, someone suggested I look at Reginald Clemons' case, pending in Missouri.

The more I look at it, the more I'm gobsmacked by the idea of this man ending up on Death Row when he was never convicted of the crime committed -- the rape and murder of two white teenagers. Under the prosecutor's theory of the case, Clemons was an accomplice. It is a case with a lot of twists and turns in it, but there are facts which have been clearly established. The fact sheet with the entire story is here. I suggest you read it before going further.

Here's some of what you will learn:

• At the time of the crime, Reggie Clemons had a clean record, was in school studying to become a mechanic. There does not appear to be any common link between the victims, Clemons, or his friends.
• The original suspect was a cousin of the victims, Thomas Cummins, who eventually implicated himself in the crime after his initial story came up short. Charges against Cummins were dropped and charges brought against the three African-American teenagers who were in the area that night. Clemons was one.
• Police beat Clemons, denied him an attorney after he asked for one, and coerced a statement from him, admitting to rape of the girls but not pushing them off the bridge.
• Thomas Cummins retracted his confession, claiming it had been beaten out of him. He settled his police brutality complaint and prosecutors dropped all charges. They ignored Clemons and his co-defendants' claims of police brutality, dropped the rape charges, and charged them all with capital murder. Clemons charges stemmed from their theory of the case; namely, that he was an accessory to murder by virtue of being in the same location.
• Reggie Clemons had extraordinarily ineffective attorneys. One of them was practicing tax law in California while returning to Missouri for court appearances.
• The prosecutor improperly excluded African-American jurors from the panel. It was so egregious he was later sanctioned for it.
• One of his co-defendants, Marlin Gray, was executed in 2009.

There's more. But this gives you a flavor of what this case is about. As if all of that isn't bad enough, there's this nugget, discovered after 8th Circuit Court of Appeals stayed his execution: There is a rape kit from one of the victims in the police evidence room that has never been tested and was never brought forth at trial. A rape kit! Something that would have proven or disproven Reggie Clemons' coerced confession.

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Lately, there would seem to be a whole lot more people who have a direct channel to the Big Guy Upstairs than one could have humanly thought possible.

It is oft-said that "God works in mysterious ways". But when Michele Bachmann hears voices telling her to run for president, am I the only who thinks the most likely explanation is a batch of bad clams or one-too-many nights role playing The Book of Eli with her equally demented husband Marcus?

Perhaps, these are the very same voices that have shared with her the important role "Founding Father John Quincy Adams" played in ending slavery as he battled the oncoming scourge of puberty? I don't know, just a stab in the dark.

Regardless, whether it is gay marriage or spotting the Virgin Mary in your gordita, our re-embrace of culture-by-theology in the United States (not unlike much of the rest of the world) has led supposedly "serious people" to say things that not so long ago would have landed them a starring role in Girl, Interrupted.

In our current age, in fact, possessing a direct cerebral channel to Deus (or at least claiming you do) would seem to be a requirement for receiving an invitation to a GOP presidential debate.

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One of white racists' favorite lines -- especially when they whine about the supposed racism of ethnic groups like the NAACP or La Raza -- is that they're really only about the same thing: pride in their racial heritage.

Which, of course, they primarily display by demonizing, dehumanizing, terrorizing, belittling and degrading people of other races.

Like this white-heritage proponent down in Missouri:

At the request of sheriff Rick Walter, Scott County homeowner Rick Hoskins removed a Halloween display in front of his home Wednesday that's the subject of much controversy in the Sikeston area.

The display, which featured a Ku Klux Klan figure alongside an effigy of a black man hanging from a noose, could be seen by drivers on Interstate 55.

Walter said his office had received several complaints about the display, so he contacted the office of prosecuting attorney Paul Boyd to see if it was within the sheriff's department's rights to remove it due to the problems it could cause.

Boyd encouraged Walter to discuss the matter with Hoskins and to ask Hoskins to take it down. Hoskins complied, but indicated he would contact his attorney with the intent of putting the decorations back up.

"There's been a bunch of people that's stopped by since I put them up," said Hoskins. "Said they want to shake my hand. They said they're glad to see a little white pride is still left in this country."

Hoskins also flies a Confederate flag in his front yard, and says he has for years.

"They're my Halloween decorations," Hoskins said. "I think they speak for themselves."

The most striking aspect of this is just how bold these people are becoming. It used to be they hid their Klan robes in the closet. Now they're coming out. Gee, wonder how that could be happening.

Bill Hennessy is co-founder of the St. Louis Tea Party, self-published political guru and a sales guy who also works in tech. He's also an angry man with a message: Blame "the left" for everything wrong in the world. Hennessy has a platform and a voice and he's not afraid to use it, particularly in furtherance of his primary goal, which he lays out in a post castigating fellow Tea Party agitators for failing to put a stop to a sales tax increase:

The tea party is out to destroy the left in America. If we’re not going to do that—if we’re going to just wave yellow flags and wear clever t-shirts—then let’s go back to our regular programming.

Seriously, ask yourself not what you believe, but what you will DO. The time for standing in a park shouting is over. It’s time for action.

Ordinarily Hennessy's threat would be a shruggable event. The politics of personal destruction don't play all that well on the main stage, and the idea of "destroying the left" reeks of John Bircherism with a large dose of indoctrination by right-wing anti-taxers.

Except for this: Bill Hennessey, right-wing radio pundit Dana Loesch, and Big Government publisher Andrew Breitbart are using Kenneth Gladney's bogus injuries as their proxy for race-baiting and union bashing to leverage gains in the upcoming midterm elections.

After all, war is war. When you're out to destroy people, truth just doesn't seem to make that much of a difference. It doesn't seem to matter that Gladney's injuries didn't come close to matching up with what he claims was done to him, or that his original "lawyer" was also his employer, or that the whole dustup began over insulting imagery on buttons he was handing out at a town hall meeting. For these folks, and Hennessy in particular, it's war. All-out, scorched-earth kind of war.

Adam at St. Louis Activist Hub has put together a timeline of false accusations, outright lies, and machinations to promote Gladney's case and discredit not only the Obama administration, but anyone whose politics fall to the left of, well, just about anyone. It's pretty damning, no matter how many blustery posts they write claiming otherwise.

Still. I could shake my fist in the air and write it all off as more of the same, but there's this one thing that keeps nagging at me. Andrew Breitbart, Bill Hennessy and Dana Loesch are also associated with American Majority. American Majority is funded by the Sam Adams Alliance. The Sam Adams Alliance has a newly-established relationship with close Dick Armey associate and former chief of staff Denis Calabrese. Denis Calabrese is also founder and principal of The Patriot Group, a lobbying firm established with the goal of "lobbying with backbone."

Hennessy's most recent post links to the American Majority 'grassroots summit' in Kansas City this weekend. One of the featured speakers is Eric O'Keefe, Chairman of the Sam Adams Alliance, also on the board of Wisconsin Club for Growth and a former director of Americans for Limited Government. ALG has been associated with Howard Rich and Grover Norquist.

Scroll down a bit further on the page and you'll find the Koch connection through the Americans for Prosperity Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska sponsorships.

So it goes once again. These so-called grass roots activists are really all just part of the thug wing of the Republican party. If we were to analyze the DNA of the St. Louis Tea Party, we'd find Jack Abramoff, Grover Norquist, Charles Koch, and a bunch of College Republicans on the main strand.

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Glenn Beck spent a little while on his Fox News show yesterday explaining to his audience that law enforcement in Missouri shouldn't be concerned about right-wing extremists because the real problem is cop-killing parolees on the loose in Oakland, California.

Or something like that. It was hard to piece the argument together, but the nub of it seemed along those lines. First he went on at length about how the weekend's horrible shootout in Oakland, which left four police officers dead alongside the shooter/parolee, was another sign of things going to hell in California. OK, whatever. But then he makes the big leap:

Beck: Next, look at the government's priorities. This is an actual cop killer, who clearly wasn't rehabilitated. But the Missouri State Troopers now -- and wait until you hear the rest of the story, the update on this one coming up in a few minutes -- they're worried about militias.

Beck then goes on to mostly regurgitate last week's rant about a Missouri State Patrol intelligence report discussing the recent resurgence of militia activity in their neck of the woods specifically and in the country generally.

But as we reported then, the report (you can read it for yourself here) is in fact entirely factual, and simply a normative report giving an accurate profile of right-wing extremists' behavioral tendencies.

Beck added some new charges to his already dubious case:

Beck: Let's put this into perspective here: Our researchers couldn't find a single report of a single death specifically linked to a militia group, or an individual member of a militia, in over a decade. Yet an average of more than 150 officers die every year nationwide. Have you counted the number of dead police officers in Philadelphia? And militia numbers are reportedly down after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 -- seems it gave them a bad name. So why are militias getting so much attention from Missouri?

Well, it might just have something to do with the fact that, per square mile, the Ozarks have as rich a history of right-wing extremism as any section of the nation. And while they haven't been making news in recent years, the very report that Beck dismisses in fact details not just the decline of the militias after 1995, but also their current ongoing revival, particularly in the wake of Barack Obama's presidential victory.

Included in the report are such incidents as the Montana Project 7 gang, which was plotting to kill local police officers; a plot by Idaho militiamen to murder a federal judge; and the Alabama militiamen who were plotting to murder as many Hispanics as they could get away with in a shooting spree.

What all of these cases have in common, of course, is that in fact they were all potentially deadly situations all nipped in the bud. And how did that happen? Through effective local law-enforcement work that relied on intelligence-gathering like this.

Beck wants to fob this kind of activity off as disenfranchisement, but when it comes to these folks -- especially in places like rural Missouri -- it's something much deeper and much uglier. (Just read the above link to the piece about Ozark extremism to see what I mean.) So while he's busy showing off pictures of black cop killers from Oakland by way of attacking a police intelligence report in Missouri, I'd like to introduce to him to someone from Missouri.

Glenn Beck, please meet Timothy Thomas Coombs:

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The Left Coaster: The days of BUSHCO dictating to the Iraqis are over.

Halfway There: Why polling is volatile even if voter's aren't

Beggars Can Be Choosers: No president in history has ever handed off a bigger mess to his successor

The Strange Death of Liberal America: 'Hillary Trojans' are McCain people masking themselves as disgruntled supporters of Hillary Clinton. They are the new Swift Boaters.

The Brad Blog: A Missouri voter refused an illegal demand to show a photo ID at the polls and got thrown in jail. November should be interesting.

No More Mr. Nice Blog: Get the smelling salts...Obama said America is not always great!!!