Isolated Incidents? Right Wing Authoritarianism and Violence

¡Hola! Everybody…
I usually don’t merely cut-and-paste, but the following is much too on-point too valuable to simply link. For the full article, click here]

If you want an exhaustive documentation of not just the derailing of the rightwing, but how extremism has now become mainstream, read, Over the Cliff: How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane. It’s prescient that my friend Karen loaned me this book last week, right before the shooting in Arizona.

From the blog, Crooks and Liars:

Terror in Arizona: Just Another “Isolated Incident”

Funny how that list keeps mounting

Predictably, there’s the usual wringing of the hands from the faux liberal contigent concerned that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions. For examples of this see Jon Chait at even the “liberal” New Republic, and Jack Shafer at Slate).

I call bullshit on that. For them this is just another “isolated incident” because Jared Loughner is just “a lone nut.” Sure, there are lots of complicating factors, not the least of which the shooter is clearly deranged. But there are also some factors that are simply undeniable. For example, over at Daily Kos, one blogger has started to document how many of the individuals targeted by Palin have actually been subjected to violence and/ or threats and intimidation tactics. What follows is merely the tip of the iceberg. But I challenge you to read this and tell me that the twisted motherfuckers on the right don’t have blood on their hands.

Just in the past two and a half years, here's the record of “isolated incidents” amassed so far:

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.

Finally Ms. Giffords own statements (months before the shooting) in the wake of Palin's targeting are poignant. Notice, the implication here is that the dems were trying to exploit the violence. Fuckin media whores...

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Many kneepad conservatives are attempting to paint the shooter as some kind of leftist, but even a cursory examination of the trail of videos and assorted writings he left behind in recent years, makes it abundantly clear that he's a devoted anti-government conspiracist. In particular, he seems to have developed an obsession with that classic right-wing conspiracy theory: the belief that American currency, since going off the gold standard, has become "fiat money" based on nothing. Likewise, he seems to have bought into beliefs about "government mind control" quite common to right-wing conspiracy theorists

My Name is Eddie and I'm in recovery from civilization…

Arizona: Failed State

¡Hola! Everybody…
I don’t know about the rest of you, but if I get caught cruising porn while at work, I will most likely be at the unemployment office the next day, being informed I don’t qualify for gross negligence or something like that.

Enter republican Florida state senator Mike Bennett, captured on video Thursday morning looking at pornographic material on his state-issued computer while on the Senate floor. (click here to watch).

Ironically, as Bennett is viewing the material, you can hear a colleague’s voice in the background debating a controversial right-wing-sponsored abortion bill. “I’m against this bill,” said the colleague, “because it disrespects too many women in the state of Florida.”

I can’t make this shit up, folks…

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-=[ Blaming Messakins ]=-

SB1070: Symbol of Arizona’s Failed Economy and Right-Wing Politics

[Note: While doing some research for a post I had in mind, I came across the following. I can’t improve on it, and I feel it’s too important. It offers a brief highlight of the failed economic policies that have brought Arizona to its knees. I am re-posting it in the hopes that it gets the attention it deserves. Links are in italics]

If other state leaders, even conservative ones from border states like Texas, are not rushing to copy SB1070, it's because whatever their partisan politics, they don't share the peculiar brand of pathological right-wing politics and the hollow economy that has left Arizona such a political and economic basket case.

Other states have grappled with a range of programs to reform their economies and budgets during the current economic crisis. That Arizona's claim to fame in this crisis is immigrant bashing in the form of SB1070 is symbolic of years, even decades of failed political and economic policies. That Arizona politics has promoted low-wage jobs that have left state residents with falling individual incomes relative to the rest of the nation and conditions for the state's children that rank at the bottom of the nation. Since the current economic recession began in December 2007, Arizona has lost 265,000 jobs, or 9.9 percent of the state’s employment . And with little else to offer the unemployed, scapegoating immigrants has become a substitute in Arizona for having a real solution to solving the economic needs of its residents.

Individual Incomes Fall Behind the Nation: For decades, Arizona's average wages and income have been falling behind other states. A University of Arizona business school study from 2005 noted that “over the long term, the real income of the average Arizonan has lagged behind the rest of the nation... Arizona slipped from 94 percent of the U.S. level in 1970 to 86 percent in 2003.” While the bubble economy in the state of the mid-decade gave a slight bump to individual incomes in the state, per capita income fell 4 percent from 2008 to 2009 after having been stagnant for the previous two years, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis recently reported. Arizona was tied for fourth place with Idaho in having the highest drop in personal incomes per capita. Nationally, the decline last year was 2.6 percent.

An Economy Built on a Construction Bubble: The Urban Land Institute has referred to Phoenix as the “poster child” for the housing downturn and bad mortgages. The average price paid for office space in the Phoenix metro area tumbled more than 50 percent one year in 2009. Back in 2006, when growth peaked, about 30 percent of the Phoenix area’s economic output was tied to real estate and construction; subtract that bubble economic engine and even the nominal job growth in the state during the last decade collapsed into unemployment and foreclosures.

Part of the problem is that state leaders encouraged a low-wage, bubble-based economic strategy that added a mirage of job and population growth during the last decade, but left the state with poor fundamentals for long-term growth when the financial bubble collapsed nationally. Highlighting the weak economic underpinnings of the state economy, the Arizona Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale metropolitan area ranked near the bottom, 192nd of 200 metro areas, for growth in high-tech gross domestic product from 2003 through 2008, according to the Milken Institute.

Fiscal Solutions More Irresponsible Than Any in Nation: Arizona's fiscal crisis is considered one of the worst in the country by the Pew Center on the States. Since 1992, the state has approved 42 tax cuts to its three major revenue sources -- personal and corporate income, and sales -- and eliminated statewide property taxes that accrued to the general fund-- and despite promises of right-wing economic nirvana, the results have been low personal income growth and a generally low-level of resources for human needs.

Arizona has some of the highest foreclosure rates in the country, 18.9 percent of the state lacks health insurance, and 276,500 Arizona children do not have coverage. In the most recent Annie E. Casey Foundation’s annual “Kids Count” report, Arizona ranked 40th in the nation in child well-being, one of the worst in the nation for its teen birth rate (46th), high-school dropout rate (46th) and percentage of children not attending school and not working (44th).

But what truly distinguishes Arizona is its right-wing, inhumane and short-sighted approaches to addressing its current fiscal problems:

• State leaders passed a law to abolish the state’s KidCare program providing children's health care to 40,000 kids, the only state in the country to take such a step, and only reversed themselves when they discovered they would forfeit billions in federal dollars if they did so.
• Wide-ranging cuts in programs across the state, from eliminating full-day kindergarten to cutting state employee salaries to removing 10,000 families from TANF cash assistance.
• Two-thirds of Arizona state parks will be closed.

And this has been combined with a whole range of other right-wing and just plain kooky laws promoted by the Arizona's legislature.

SB1070 Will Make Arizona's Economic Problems Worse: Passing SB1070 will simply deepen the state's economic crisis. As the National Employment Law Project points out, smaller-scale anti-immigrant ordinances have cost individual localities millions of dollars. And other studies estimate SB1070 will further decimate Arizona’s economy by driving immigrant families, undocumented and legal residents alike, from the state, further depressing demands for goods and already vacant housing tracts.

The Arizona Republic detailed, “More than 100,000 undocumented immigrants have left Arizona in the past two years because of the bad economy and earlier enforcement crackdowns. Now, a new wave of Latinos is preparing to leave.”

“So, rather than massive deportations, we are basically going to encourage them to leave on their own,” said State Rep. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, who is also a criminal-justice professor at Scottsdale Community College. But even he admits that the law will likely drive legal residents and their families out of the state.

The Texas-based Perryman Group found if all unauthorized immigrants were removed from Arizona, the state would lose $26.4 billion in economic activity, $11.7 billion in gross state product, and approximately 140,324 jobs.

Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon and other local leaders anticipate a drop in new business creation in the state because of the new hostile environment. Phoenix Vice Mayor Michael Nowakowski observed: “We’re the laughing stock of the country because of these crazy laws.”

(From the Progressive States Network. H/T to the antiracismdsa blog)

Love,

Eddie

Jurisprudence and The "Con" Game

Hola! Everybody...
I awoke to the news that Obama has picked Sonia Sotomayor, a “Nuyorican” who rose from Bronx housing projects to one of the most demanding US Circuit Courts. Let me just say that I am -- yes! -- I am proud of the Sotomayor nomination. she comes from my world, and perhaps we need more Nuyoricans/ Latino/as to serve as powers of example to our children.

Of course, before she was picked, conservatives were already whining -- gnashing teeth and tearing at their clothes.

Stay-tuned for a lot of mention of “judicial activism,” something very evil, right up there with satanic rituals involving the sacrifice of unborn lives (and stem cells), pulling the plug on Terry Schiavo, teaching evolutionary theory to our children, and, well, all that nasty, anti-Jesus shit we liberals engage in all the time...

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-=[ The Judicial Activism (neo)Con ]=-

“... I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male... ”

-- Sonia Sotomayor

This morning Obama chose Sonia Sotomayor as his pick for the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS). Even before she was nominated, there was a concerted effort to smear and disqualify her. The conservative attack strategy will be three-pronged.

The first smear is that she’s a “lightweight.” Evidently a woman of Puerto Rican parents who grew up in the projects of the South Bronx, diagnosed with diabetes at age 8, who then made it to summa cum laude at Princeton University, where she earned the highest award given to Princeton undergraduates, Pyne Prize, who then went on to get her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal equals lightweight.

Only in the alternative, reality-challenged universe of Republicans could this be true. This is a weak argument and won’t have much traction, though it will serve as a way to create the initial smokescreen to take away from what should be the focus: her judicial philosophy.

The second smear attack (“swift-boating”) utilizes the quote I’ve posted above. It’s a common neoconservative attack ploy: take a quote out of context and beat the public over the head with it. And one could make an argument that the quote, taken out of context, makes for a poor judicial temperament. However, read in its original context, it’s a powerful message. Here’s the full quote:

“... Justice O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O’Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case. I, like Professor Carter, believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group. Many are so capable. As Judge Cedarbaum pointed out to me, nine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions and on many issues including Brown. [...]”

Notice that she’s not advocating a view that one’s gender or race makes one better qualified. Rather, she’s pointing out that 1) life experiences count, and 2) even great white men have come to judicial conclusions that trampled on the rights of minorities and women. These are historical facts, not conjecture.

Finally, the last strategy, and the one with most traction, is the whole notion of “activist judge.” It is essentially a scam. The fact is conservatives only care to point out such “activism” when rulings go against their own political beliefs and principles. When rulings go the other way it isn’t activism, it’s justice, or it’s rooted in the Constitution, etc.

When was the last time you heard the phrase, “conservative judicial activism”? Probably never. Perhaps you should hear it more often.

In every case where a court issues a decision on a controversial matter that produces an outcome which right-wing ideologues dislike, they immediately start -- without bothering even to learn what those issues are, let alone bothering to read anything about them -- condemning the court’s decision as some sort of lawless expression of “judicial activism.” In reality, the only ones engaged in “judicial activism” -- which means, I suppose, determining the propriety of a court ruling based on outcome preferences rather than legal analysis -- are the ill-informed critics of the court’s ruling, who are judging the ruling based exclusively on their objections to the outcome.

“Judicial activism” essentially refers to the willingness of judges to overturn laws -- and to their actually doing so. It gets more complicated.

In its neocon usage (read: “liberal” form), judicial activism implies an approach to the Constitution that emphasizes the ambiguity of language, recognizes the flexibility of meanings and circumstances, and tries to respond to the spirit of the document. In certain cases, it has resulted in the establishment of legal principles, such as the right to privacy, which are seen to “inhere” in the Constitution, despite the fact that the words themselves do not appear there. What conservative commentators have done, with the Warren Court as whipping boy, is to wrap this all up as “loose constructionism” and then associate it with a general cultural permissiveness and a “politicization” of the law that they blame for the decline of post-Eisenhower America.

Whew! LOL!

But conservatives have their own brand of judicial activism, no less ideological and no less influential. It is distinct in its methodology (tending toward a narrow interpretation of text) and in its values (tending to give priority to property rights over civil rights, for example). Yet when it comes to the fundamental action of activist jurisprudence -- the overturning of laws -- conservative and liberal judges are equally powerful.

The methodical erosion of the rule of law in America has many aspects, and one significant one is that conservatives have been trained to believe that they have the right to have judges issue rulings that produce outcomes they like, and when that doesn’t happen, it means the judicial process is flawed and corrupt. Put another way, conservatives have been taught that they are entitled to have courts ignore the law in order to ensure the outcomes they want.

Either way, all this won’t work. Why? Because Sotomayor’s credentials are impeccable. Put this nomination in the books, folks. Sotomayor, imminently qualified, will become the first Latina Supreme Court justice!

Wepa! (<-- Nuyorican expression of excitement)