Month: January 2011

Being Wyatt Earp

by digby

Wow. I had heard there were other people with guns at the Tucson massacre, but I didn’t know about this:

“I came out of that store, I clicked the safety off, and I was ready,” he explained on Fox and Friends. “I had my hand on my gun. I had it in my jacket pocket here. And I came around the corner like this.” Zamudio demonstrated how his shooting hand was wrapped around the weapon, poised to draw and fire. As he rounded the corner, he saw a man holding a gun. “And that’s who I at first thought was the shooter,” Zamudio recalled. “I told him to ‘Drop it, drop it!’ “

But the man with the gun wasn’t the shooter. He had wrested the gun away from the shooter. “Had you shot that guy, it would have been a big, fat mess,” the interviewer pointed out.

Zamudio agreed:

I was very lucky. Honestly, it was a matter of seconds. Two, maybe three seconds between when I came through the doorway and when I was laying on top of [the real shooter], holding him down. So, I mean, in that short amount of time I made a lot of really big decisions really fast. … I was really lucky.

When Zamudio was asked what kind of weapons training he’d had, he answered: “My father raised me around guns … so I’m really comfortable with them. But I’ve never been in the military or had any professional training. I just reacted.”

The Arizona Daily Star, based on its interview with Zamudio, adds two details to the story. First, upon seeing the man with the gun, Zamudio “grabbed his arm and shoved him into a wall” before realizing he wasn’t the shooter. And second, one reason why Zamudio didn’t pull out his own weapon was that “he didn’t want to be confused as a second gunman.”

This is a much more dangerous picture than has generally been reported. Zamudio had released his safety and was poised to fire when he saw what he thought was the killer still holding his weapon. Zamudio had a split second to decide whether to shoot. He was sufficiently convinced of the killer’s identity to shove the man into a wall. But Zamudio didn’t use his gun. That’s how close he came to killing an innocent man. He was, as he acknowledges, “very lucky.”

That’s what happens when you run with a firearm to a scene of bloody havoc. In the chaos and pressure of the moment, you can shoot the wrong person. Or, by drawing your weapon, you can become the wrong person—a hero mistaken for a second gunman by another would-be hero with a gun. Bang, you’re dead. Or worse, bang bang bang bang bang: a firefight among several armed, confused, and innocent people in a crowd. It happens even among trained soldiers. Among civilians, the risk is that much greater.

It’s not surprising that the gun fanatics are all praising this fellow, because he’s the poster boy for the belief that none of this awful gun violence would ever happen if everyone just carried a weapon and was prepared to use it. This shows exactly what that means in practice — being lucky.

And you don’t have to be an expert to understand this without having to have it acted out on the streets of Arizona. It’s obvious to anyone with a brain that people wading into gunfire with a gun will just be adding more bullets to the chaos. This rationale for arming everyone to the teeth has been nonsensical and absurd from the beginning and the fact that anyone has ever taken it seriously is a sad comment on our culture.

Consider this:

Happy-hour beers were going for $5 at Past Perfect, a cavernous bar just off this city’s strip of honky-tonks and tourist shops when Adam Ringenberg walked in with a loaded 9-millimeter pistol in the front pocket of his gray slacks.

Mr. Ringenberg, a technology consultant, is one of the state’s nearly 300,000 handgun permit holders who have recently seen their rights greatly expanded by a new law — one of the nation’s first — that allows them to carry loaded firearms into bars and restaurants that serve alcohol.

“If someone’s sticking a gun in my face, I’m not relying on their charity to keep me alive,” said Mr. Ringenberg, 30, who said he carries the gun for personal protection when he is not at work.

Gun rights advocates like Mr. Ringenberg may applaud the new law, but many customers, waiters and restaurateurs here are dismayed by the decision.

“That’s not cool in my book,” Art Andersen, 44, said as he nursed a Coors Light at Sam’s Sports Bar and Grill near Vanderbilt University. “It opens the door to trouble. It’s giving you the right to be Wyatt Earp.”

Yes, having everyone armed to the teeth in places like bars where people are drunk or contentious political rallies where people are screaming at the tops of their lungs in each others’ faces is a wonderful idea. What could go wrong?

The gun zealots really seem to believe that it’s reasonable to deal with gun violence by enlisting average citizens to step into a gun fight and dispatch the “bad guy” before he has a chance to get off a round. That only happens in the movies. In real life, the very best case scenario has the bad guy killing quite a few people before the good guy takes him down. Why we’re supposed to settle for that as the best we can do has never made much sense to me.

By the way, Wyatt Earp earned his reputation by being a gun grabber:

“In the 10 months before Earp became town marshal for Dodge City, 25 people had been shot and killed in the town and twice as many wounded in saloon brawls and street battles. In the eight months following the establishment of no guns north of the railroad tracks for Dodge City, only two men had been shot and killed in brawls and no one killed by a police officer.” And this was during the time the cattle drives and celebrating cowboys arrived. (Stewart H. Holbrook, “Wyatt Earp U.S. Marshal,” pages 3, 4, 30)

Update: I should say that I’m not against the right to own a gun. I just see no earthly reason why it should be so easy for people to get them or why people should be allowed to carry them anywhere in public that they choose. It just doesn’t seem like such a huge sacrifice to have some restrictions on it. Certainly the idea that having everyone armed to the teeth will somehow stop gun violence defies common sense. Unless you think drunk, angry and crazy people who have no judgment don’t exist, this is a ridiculous argument on its face.

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God and Gays

by digby

I’m beginning to believe there might actually be a schism in the Republican coalition, something I didn’t think would actually happen:

An ally of CPAC organizer David Keene and of Grover Norquist pushed back hard this morning against the boycott move that Rep. Jim Jordan joined last night.

“A certain kind of social conservative has had an absolute veto over what social policy should be among conservatives for decades, out of all proportion to their numbers,” said James Higgins, who co-directs the conservative Monday Meeting in New York City. “And now that the Tea Party is so important, it’s really out of proportion to their numbers.”

Tea Party members are, polling suggests, quite socially conservative — but aren’t organized around those issues.

The Family Research Council — whose Values Voter Summit is being set up, with the help of the Heritage Foundation, as a rival to CPAC — “is on the fringe of the conservative coalition – it has always been on the fringe of the conservative coalition,” Higgins said, noting that its former president, Gary Bauer “got less than one percent of the Republican primary vote in New Hampshire” in his 2000 presidential bid.

I’ve never heard anyone in the last 30 years describe the social conservatives as “the fringe” of the Republican coalition.

It isn’t true, actually. The religious right is central to the Republican coalition and more importantly, it’s central to their organizing. The Tea Party is a flash in the pan compared to the churches. And while it’s true that the Tea party isn’t organized around social conservatism, you’ll find that Tea Partiers themselves don’t always know that:

Jamie Ratdke, who recently stepped down as chairwoman of the Virginia Tea Party Patriots Federation in order to explore a Senate bid, said she began to consider a run for the Senate after attending a Tea Party convention that featured Rick Santorum, Lou Dobbs, and Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinnelli as speakers:

Radtke said that she had considered running for the state Senate next year but that she began thinking about the U.S. Senate instead after Virginia’s first tea party convention, which drew an estimated 2,800 people to Richmond in October. Radtke, who worked for Allen for a year when he was governor and she was right out of college, said it’s time for a new candidate. She said that Allen was part of “George Bush’s expansion of government” when he was senator and that she was concerned about some of his stances on abortion. Allen has said that abortions should be legal in cases of rape, incest and when the life of the mother is endangered, and he owned stock in the manufacturer of the morning-after pill.

I don’t know the numbers on this, but I think it’s at least possible that many of the female Tea Partiers in particular are actually social conservatives who are following the zeitgeist or getting involved as activists with their husbands. (Sharron Angle and Christine Angle both came out of the Christian Right.) But who knows?

Meanwhile, it’s dangerous for Republicans to think that the Tea party is separate from the religious right. They are just coming at it from a different direction:

“It’s a movement about the Founding Fathers and what their faith was to this country, and how they brought faith over to this country,” she says.

Smith is describing a “civil religion” that seems to appeal to many Tea Partiers: the idea that America was a divine experiment, that the Founding Fathers were Christian men who created a nation on biblical principles. She says America in 2010 has lost that.

“That’s what started this whole downfall of America — taking God out of everything, and political correctness,” Smith says. “We were founded on Judeo-Christian principles, and its like ‘What’s happened? Why aren’t we fighting to save that?’ They fought hard for that so why aren’t we? So we’re out here trying to fight for those principles.”

And then there’s Michael Giere, a mortgage banker and evangelical Christian. “We are a Judeo-Christian country, and I don’t care who says we’re not, we obviously are,” he says.

Giere says religious conservatives are the sleeping giant in the Tea Party.

“The discussion of the day is on economics, but when you start peeling back that onion, there is devout faith spread throughout the Tea Party and spread throughout the Tea Party leadership,” he says.

Polls show that Tea Party members are far more likely to be weekly churchgoers and conservative Christians than the population as a whole.

That is what Wendy Wright, president of the evangelical Concerned Women for America, has found. And she says she believes the Tea Party is prompting Americans to look closely at their religious heritage — in particular, at the faith and early writings of the Founding Fathers.

An August poll of nearly 800 Tea Party supporters revealed that a larger percentage than the general U.S. either “agreed” or “strongly agreed” that they were white evangelical Christians.

I couldn’t be happier to see them starting to fight amongst themselves on this. If they manage to undermine their relationship with the Christian Right, so much the better in my book. But they usually are pretty careful about this sort of thing. it’s a testament to how powerful the far right in the party has become, whether Christian Right or “libertarian” that they are jostling for power.

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Policing Their Own

by digby

Lest anyone think it’s only Democrats who are concerned about right wing violent rhetoric and imagery, remember this ad? And it was run in a state that cares as much about guns as Texas:

I think she asked a good question and it was brave of her to do it.

There were other Republicans who spoke out, but they got swiftly punished:

It was the middle of a tough primary contest, and Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) had convened a small meeting with donors who had contributed thousands of dollars to his previous campaigns. But this year, as Inglis faced a challenge from tea party-backed Republican candidates claiming Inglis wasn’t sufficiently conservative, these donors hadn’t ponied up. Inglis’ task: Get them back on the team. “They were upset with me,” Inglis recalls. “They are all Glenn Beck watchers.” About 90 minutes into the meeting, as he remembers it, “They say, ‘Bob, what don’t you get? Barack Obama is a socialist, communist Marxist who wants to destroy the American economy so he can take over as dictator. Health care is part of that. And he wants to open up the Mexican border and turn [the US] into a Muslim nation.'” Inglis didn’t know how to respond.

As he tells this story, the veteran lawmaker is sitting in his congressional office, which he will have to vacate in a few months. On June 22, he was defeated in the primary runoff by Spartanburg County 7th Circuit Solicitor Trey Gowdy, who had assailed Inglis for supposedly straying from his conservative roots, pointing to his vote for the bank bailout and against George W. Bush’s surge in Iraq. Inglis, who served six years in Congress during the 1990s as a conservative firebrand before being reelected to the House in 2004, had also ticked off right-wingers in the state’s 4th Congressional District by urging tea-party activists to “turn Glenn Beck off” and by calling on Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) to apologize for shouting “You lie!” at Obama during the president’s State of the Union address. For this, Inglis, who boasts (literally) a 93 percent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union, received the wrath of the tea party, losing to Gowdy 71 to 29 percent. In the weeks since, Inglis has criticized Republican House leaders for acquiescing to a poisonous, tea party-driven “demagoguery” that he believes will undermine the GOP’s long-term credibility. And he’s freely recounting his frustrating interactions with tea party types, while noting that Republican leaders are pushing rhetoric tainted with racism, that conservative activists are dabbling in anti-Semitic conspiracy theory nonsense, and that Sarah Palin celebrates ignorance.

The week after that meeting with his past funders—whom he failed to bring back into the fold—Inglis asked House Republican leader John Boehner what he would have told this group of Obama-bashers. Inglis recalls what happened:

[Boehner] said, “I would have told them that it’s not quite that bad. We disagree with him on the issues.” I said, “Hold on Boehner, that doesn’t work. Let me tell you, I tried that and it did not work.” I said [to Boehner], “If you’re going to lead these people and the fearful stampede to the cliff that they’re heading to, you have to turn around and say over your shoulder, ‘Hey, you don’t know the half of it.'”

In other words, feed and fuel the anger and paranoia of the right.

During his primary campaign, Inglis repeatedly encountered enraged conservatives whom he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—satisfy. Shortly before the runoff primary election, Inglis met with about a dozen tea party activists at the modest ranch-style home of one of them. Here’s what took place:

I sat down, and they said on the back of your Social Security card, there’s a number. That number indicates the bank that bought you when you were born based on a proj

ection of your life’s earnings, and you are collateral. We are all collateral for the banks. I have this look like, “What the heck are you talking about?” I’m trying to hide that look and look clueless. I figured clueless was better than argumentative. So they said, “You don’t know this?! You are a member of Congress, and you don’t know this?!” And I said, “Please forgive me. I’m just ignorant of these things.” And then of course, it turned into something about the Federal Reserve and the Bilderbergers and all that stuff. And now you have the feeling of anti-Semitism here coming in, mixing in. Wow.

I think this dynamic is worth thinking about a little bit. It’s true that Republican leaders must be held liable for their kowtowing to the not-so-subtle threats of their aroused, paranoid base. But they are in the proverbial “crosshairs” too aren’t they? If they step out of line even the tiniest bit, they are subjected to wrath of a political movement which is determined to intimidate not only the opposition, but anyone who strays even slightly from their own party line. Many of them are scared to death.

Remember this?:

Yesterday, Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA), the chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, complained to Politico about how Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talkers are able to “stand back and throw bricks” instead of offering “real leadership” in the middle of high-profile public policy battles. Gingrey’s brave remarks got him in hot water.

This morning — because of what he called “high volume of phone calls and correspondence” in response to his comments — Gingrey issued a retraction, declaring his loyalty to hate radio. “I see eye-to-eye with Rush Limbaugh,” he said, later adding that he, Sean Hannity, and Newt Gingrich were “the voices of the conservative movement’s conscience.”

But Gingrey’s mea culpa was not yet complete. Apparently concluding that his criticism of Limbaugh was so off-base that it merited a personal, on-air apology to Limbaugh, Gingrey made a rare guest appearance on Limbaugh’s radio show this afternoon. Addressing the hate radio host as a “conservative giant,” Gingrey apologized for what he termed his “foot-in-mouth disease“:

GINGREY: Rush, thank you so much. I thank you for the opportunity, of course this is not exactly the way to I wanted to come on. … Mainly, I want to express to you and all your listeners my very sincere regret for those comments I made yesterday to Politico. … I clearly ended up putting my foot in my mouth on some of those comments. … I regret those stupid comments.

LIMBAUGH: Well, look, I appreciate that. … I’m glad that you called.

Today, Rush Limbaugh announced that Jared “Loughner has the full support of the Democratic Party.”

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Accountability and Victimization

by digby

Adam Serwer has a good post up today about Clinton’s Oklahoma City speech (which I excerpted earlier, here.) I hadn’t realized until this incident that it was an article of faith on the right that this speech was considered a case of political opportunism which wrongly attributed the bombing to the right wing extremism of the time. I should have known. If they don’t feel any responsibility for Tim McVeigh, then they can say and do anything and will never take responsibility for it.

And just as predictably, denial of responsibility is followed by accusations of waving the bloody shirt:

Waving the bloody shirt: it would become the standard retort, the standard expression of dismissive Southern contempt whenever a Northern politician mentioned any of the thousands upon thousands of murders, whippings, mutilations, and rapes that were perpetrated against freedmen and women and white Republicans in the South in those years. The phrase was used over and over during the Reconstruction era. It was a staple of the furious and sarcastic editorials that filled Southern newspapers in those days, of the indignant orations by Southern white political leaders who protested that no people had suffered more, been humiliated more, been punished more than they had. The phrase has since entered the standard American political lexicon, a synonym for any rabble-rousing demagoguery, any below-the-belt appeal aimed at stirring old enmities. That the Southerners who uttered this phrase were so unconcerned about the obvious implications it carried for their own criminality, however, seems remarkable; for whoever was waving the shirt, there was unavoidably, or so one would think, the matter of just whose blood it was, and how it had got there. That white Southerners would unabashedly trace the origin of this metaphor to a real incident involving an unprovoked attack of savage barbarity carried out by their own most respectable members of Southern white society makes it all the more astonishing.

John Amato caught Bill O’Reilly pearl clutching until he turned blue last night over “the left’s” unfair characterization of right wing rhetoric in the wake of the Tucson massacre.

Bernie Goldberg was furious too. Hey, how many people used Keith Olbermann’s book to go out and murder people, Bernie? None of course, but I guess he forgot about Jim David Adkisson, who murdered two people in a Knoxville church after reading Bernie’s book.

The manifesto he composed before his murderous rampage was just released; you can read the whole thing here [pdf file], and it’s worth reading in its entirety for a number of reasons. But I especially took note of Part III:

This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg’s book. I’d like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I know those people were inaccessible to me. I couldn’t get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It’s the only way we can rid America of this cancerous pestilence.

They are extremely upset that anyone would even think to bring this sort of thing up in the wake of an assassination attempt against a Democratic politician. Very unfair. As always.

Right wing victimization is definitional. In the wake of politically inspired right wing violence, their first instinct is to rise up in anger and accuse the other side of waving the bloody shirt — without ever acknowlging where the blood came from in the first place. It’s as American as apple pie.

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Snippets of Revelation

by digby

Anderson Cooper interviewed Bill Maher tonight, playing Devil’s Advocate to Maher’s strong denunciation of right wing violence. It’s worth watching on the rerun if you care to. This was a highlight:

Cooper: I’m reading biographies of Lincoln and Jefferson and Lincoln had horrible things said about him when he was president, really vicious, vicious stuff.

Maher: Sure, and look what happened to him.

Cooper: well…

Maher: yeah, and we saw how that ended.

I guess Cooper hasn’t gotten to the last chapter yet.

In other news, Roger Ailes finally admits that his “news” network shills for conservatives, so truth-telling isn’t completely out of fashion on the right:

With at least two Fox News personalities taking heat over their perceived role in a mass shooting in Tucson, Ailes sought to defend them in an interview with hip hop mogul Russell Simmons.

“I told all of our guys, shut up, tone it down, make your argument intellectually,” he told Simmons. “You don’t have to do it with bombast. I hope the other side does that.”

Ignore, for just a moment, the irony of the man who called NPR executives “Nazis” from “the left wing of Nazism” instructing anyone, even Glenn Beck, to drop the bombast and “tone it down.” What’s more interesting is his “I hope the other side does that.

It’s interesting because, according to the official fiction Ailes has put forth since Fox’s founding, Fox isn’t pulling for one team or the other; it only seems that way because every other media institution is so far left

(Read the whole interview and get depressed, though. Russell Simmons goes full “both sides do it.” Sad.)

That brings us to this excellent, necessary article from SEK at Lawyers, Guns and Money who teaches rhetoric. Some people instinctively understand what “violent rhetoric” means, but after the last few days it’s clear that not everyone does. (And I’m not talking about the flailing right wingers who know very well what they’re doing.) Do yourself a favor and read it.

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Armed And Confused

by digby

It’s hard to know what to say about this, so I’ll just let you contemplate the sheer weirdness of the man who was named as the most admired man in America by the Tea Party:

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Independents Day

by digby

So it turns out that the shooter was a registered Independent. Gloria Borger seemed to swallow her tongue when she abruptly realized that her entire worldview had been shattered. In the Village, you see, “Independents” are the practical, moderate centrists who just want everyone to get along. It’s unthinkable that someone who calls himself independent might not be right in the middle between the two extremes. How ever will we figure out what the polls mean from now on?

Borger and Blitzer chatted amiably about how well the congress has done in the wake of the tragedy and Borger then came up with a 2004 “target” map from the Democrats and said it shows that both sides are equally wrong and we shouldn’t look in the rear view mirror:

I think what we see here Wolf is that nobody has the moral high ground here. These are the words we use in elections, ok? And there is nobody who’s got the corner on “I’m holier than thou and I’ve never used this kind of language.” What we can say though Wolf is that the test of leadership will be somebody who can talk to voters and calm down the rhetoric rather than ratchet it up.

Blitzer replied, “Thanks. Good, good, good point there Gloria, as usual.”

Yes, that was a brilliant insight and she was very proud of it. And she’s half right. Except for the carnage over the past two years, nobody has the moral high ground. From Dave Neiwert:

— July 2008: A gunman named Jim David Adkisson, agitated at how “liberals” are “destroying America,” walks into a Unitarian Church and opens fire, killing two churchgoers and wounding four others. — October 2008: Two neo-Nazis are arrested in Tennessee in a plot to murder dozens of African-Americans, culminating in the assassination of President Obama. — December 2008: A pair of “Patriot” movement radicals — the father-son team of Bruce and Joshua Turnidge, who wanted “to attack the political infrastructure” — threaten a bank in Woodburn, Oregon, with a bomb in the hopes of extorting money that would end their financial difficulties, for which they blamed the government. Instead, the bomb goes off and kills two police officers. The men eventually are convicted and sentenced to death for the crime. — December 2008: In Belfast, Maine, police discover the makings of a nuclear “dirty bomb” in the basement of a white supremacist shot dead by his wife. The man, who was independently wealthy, reportedly was agitated about the election of President Obama and was crafting a plan to set off the bomb. — January 2009: A white supremacist named Keith Luke embarks on a killing rampage in Brockton, Mass., raping and wounding a black woman and killing her sister, then killing a homeless man before being captured by police as he is en route to a Jewish community center. — February 2009: A Marine named Kody Brittingham is arrested and charged with plotting to assassinate President Obama. Brittingham also collected white-supremacist material. — April 2009: A white supremacist named Richard Poplawski opens fire on three Pittsburgh police officers who come to his house on a domestic-violence call and kills all three, because he believed President Obama intended to take away the guns of white citizens like himself. Poplawski is currently awaiting trial. — April 2009: Another gunman in Okaloosa County, Florida, similarly fearful of Obama’s purported gun-grabbing plans, kills two deputies when they come to arrest him in a domestic-violence matter, then is killed himself in a shootout with police. — May 2009: A “sovereign citizen” named Scott Roeder walks into a church in Wichita, Kansas, and assassinates abortion provider Dr. George Tiller. — June 2009: A Holocaust denier and right-wing tax protester named James Von Brunn opens fire at the Holocaust Museum, killing a security guard. — February 2010: An angry tax protester named Joseph Ray Stack flies an airplane into the building housing IRS offices in Austin, Texas. (Media are reluctant to label this one “domestic terrorism” too.) — March 2010: Seven militiamen from the Hutaree Militia in Michigan and Ohio are arrested and charged with plotting to assassinate local police officers with the intent of sparking a new civil war. — March 2010: An anti-government extremist named John Patrick Bedell walks into the Pentagon and opens fire, wounding two officers before he is himself shot dead. — May 2010: A “sovereign citizen” from Georgia is arrested in Tennessee and charged with plotting the violent takeover of a local county courthouse. — May 2010: A still-unidentified white man walks into a Jacksonville, Fla., mosque and sets it afire, simultaneously setting off a pipe bomb. — May 2010: Two “sovereign citizens” named Jerry and Joe Kane gun down two police officers who pull them over for a traffic violation, and then wound two more officers in a shootout in which both of them are eventually killed. — July 2010: An agitated right-winger and convict named Byron Williams loads up on weapons and drives to the Bay Area intent on attacking the offices of the Tides Foundation and the ACLU, but is intercepted by state patrolmen and engages them in a shootout and armed standoff in which two officers and Williams are wounded. — September 2010: A Concord, N.C., man is arrested and charged with plotting to blow up a North Carolina abortion clinic. The man, 26-year–old Justin Carl Moose, referred to himself as the “Christian counterpart to (Osama) bin Laden” in a taped undercover meeting with a federal informant.

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Warning Bells

by digby

I’m listening to tea party chief Judson Phillips on TV this afternoon saying that there’s no correlation between guns and politics and that the debate hasn’t been particularly violent.

I’m sorry to do this again, but it’s just got to be emphasized right now:

Tuesday, April 06, 2010

Working Themselves Into A Frenzy

by digby

You’ve probably already heard about the arrest in Washington of a person who threatened to kill Senator Patty Murray for her vote on Health Care Reform:

According to the criminal complaint, between March 22 and April 4, 2010, WILSON called Senator Patty Murray’s office on multiple occasions leaving expletive laden threatening messages. WILSON stated that Senator Murray “had a target on her back.” WILSON stated, “I want to (expletive) kill you.” WILSON discussed assisting others in an attempt to kill the senator. WILSON’s threats were in response to the passage of the Health Care Reform Act.

WILSON allegedly made the calls from a telephone line with a ‘blocked’ phone number. However, federally subpoenaed telephone records revealed the calls came from his home phone line. FBI agents were able to further confirm WILSON was the caller. WILSON told undercover FBI agents that he regularly carries a firearm with a concealed weapons permit. He also stated that he was extremely angry about the passage of the health care reform legislation

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Don’t tell me that hate radio and Fox didn’t have a hand in working this nut up. nobody in their right mind would normally want to kill someone over a health care bill.

People have been driven mad. You probably haven’t heard the hideous racist telephone message aimed at John Lewis that was also released today.(I couldn’t find it online anyway. Chris Matthews played it on the air:

Yes, Bill Ves, calling from (inaudible) I ain’t gonna get no health insurance, tell that son of a bitch that, I ain’t getting the damned health insurance. That goddamned ni**er, don’t tell me I gotta get some goddamned health insurance. I ain’t paying no goddamned fine. Tell that ni**er he can come put my ass in jail if he don’t like it. Goddamn worthless ni**er, and all them other ni**ers that voted for him. That ni**er Obama and them white trash honkies that voted for that damned communist, socialist stuff. Dumb motherfuckers, Goddamn! I ain’t getting the goddamned mandatory health insurance from some bitch motherfuckers! Goddamn bunch of ni**er,white trash honkies, sone of a bitch communist who voted for this shit. I didn’t go fight in no goddamned wart so I could be forced to do something I don'[t want to do. So fuck all y’all ni**ers. Fuck you John Lewis, you goddamned worthless, communist ni**er.

What an impressive fellow. According to Republican legislators and conservative leaders, Lewis has no one to blame but himself for this. If he hadn’t voted for health care, he wouldn’t have made this man mad and then this wouldn’t have happened. These Democraats need to understand that when they vote for thing Republicans don’t like they will be subject to violence. That’s how democracy works. (Of course, it’s also true that John Lewis made it all up. — according to them.)

This isn’t the end of it. The wingnuts are working overtime to keep this at a high boil. Check this out:

Now that might be benign under some circumstances. It only sort of looks like a target. But it happened at a Florida gun show.

“A year ago, you could have described the mood as one of hysteria.”

A year later, Burns said, a lot of gun owners are still waiting to see if the Obama administration decides to make it harder for them to keep the guns that they lawfully own. It’s one reason, he said, why people who support the right to bear arms come to an event like this one: out of concern that their freedom to buy another gun might get challenged in the future.

“You’ve got common people out here, concerned about their gun rights,” he said. “Some people think we’re all just a bunch of militants and survivalists. We’re not. These are people watching our rights being taken away by the folks in Washington.”

I guess he must be talking about his right to have other people pay for his emergency room visit if he doesn’t have health insurance, because nobody’s taking away his right to bear arms. In fact, Obama signed a law allowing these yahoos to carry guns in national parks.

When I see that stuff, I get worried for Grayson. He is a target for a lot of reasons. I hope he has protection. There are plenty of nuts like that one who left the message on Murray’s and Lewis’s answering machines out there. One of them could easily take it in their heads to take it to the next level.

Just a little reminder. Some of us have been disturbed by this for the last two years.

Update: Here’s another example.

Some images from the Southeast Republican Club gathering at a gun range could prove incendiary.

Though most of the targets of gunfire were standard gun-range fare — large silhouettes of a human figure — a few shooters used large color posters instead. They depicted a menacing figure, adorned in a kaffiyeh, the kind of headdress worn by the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. The person in the picture was holding a rocket-propelled grenade.

One of the shooters at the Tuesday evening event was Robert Lowry, a Republican candidate hoping to unseat U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston. Lowry’s target had the letters “DWS” next to the silhouette head.

Lowry said he didn’t know who wrote Wasserman Schultz’ initials on his target, but said he knew they were there before he started shooting. He initially described it as a “joke,” but after answering several questions he said it “was a mistake” to use a target labeled “DWS.”

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Balancing The Budget

by digby

dday reports:

Between California and Illinois, you’re looking at about $45-48 billion dollars to balance budgets, between tax hikes and program cuts. The anti-stimulative effect of that almost totally wipes out the $55-60 billion in stimulative measures that aren’t just extensions of current law in the tax cut deal.

That’s not a commentary on how the tax cut deal could have ended state budget crises (although an innovative policy solution could have at least put that in motion and at least begun to set up some counter-cyclical fund so states don’t have to contract during recessions). It’s more a commentary on how economic forecasters assumed major growth from this tax cut deal, even though it’s almost entirely composed of poor stimulus and would be overwhelmed by budget cuts at the state and probably federal level. Austan Goolsbee likes to talk up the stimulative power of that tax cut deal, but he’s looking at it in a vacuum. Fiscal policy in 2011 and 2012 is still very likely to be contractionary, and nobody in Washington is arguing for that to change. Vain hopes of “stimulus” seem very odd, in this context.

Read the whole thing to get an idea of what happening in California and Illinois. It’s pretty desperate.

I find it fairly hard to believe that the smart people like Goosbee didn’t realize that their “stimulus” was going to be balanced out by catastrophic cuts in state spending. The best face you can put on it is that they just don’t have the political will to fight it and are simply clapping louder in hopes that everything will turn out ok in the end. Nothing else makes sense

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Cruel Entertainment

by digby

When you read something like this in the wake of our latest massacre, you have to wonder if there’s any hope for this country:

In what was one of the greatest and most entertaining spectacles at CES, Taser had consumers lining up to get shocked—and I got it all on camera.

Why would anyone want to get Tased? You got me—but it sure was fun to watch! I wasn’t the only one who found it entertaining, either. The please-tase-me-bro show drew huge crowds. All of us gathered in a circle around the island shaped booth eagerly awaiting showtime. The crowd was cheering, laughing, shouting—it was like being a spectator in the Roman Colosseum.

Luckily, before the juice started flowing, the Taser folks spotted my Cult of Mac badge and offered me a prime seat so I could witness the spectacle firsthand. I wasn’t about to miss that opportunity. I crouched down in the front row, set my camera on high speed capture, and documented the face of a man being pumped with 50,000 muscle-cramping volts. I admit all of this may sound barbaric, but I ask you, are you not entertained!?

Maybe at the next plumbers convention they could set up a waterboarding exhibition.

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