Colorado Bombing-Attempt Suspect Identified: Profile Points To White-Supremacist Background

Colorado bombing-attempt suspect identified: profile points to white-supremacist background

Crooks and Liars- By David Neiwert

April 25, 2011 08:00 AM

[Video from Denver’s Channel 9 News]

John earlier reported on a bizarre case involving an attempted bombing of a mall in Littleton, Colorado, on the anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre in that town last Wednesday.

It seems they’re catching up to the would-be bomber — or at least, they’ve identified him:

Earl Albert Moore, 65, served a federal prison sentence for bank robbery and was released just seven days before authorities believe he left a poorly crafted bomb in a stairwell in Jefferson County’s Southwest Plaza Mall.

Authorities found a small fire, two propane tanks and a crude pipe bomb on Wednesday, the anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre, which prompted mass evacuations and put a community on edge.

Records from the Federal Bureau of Prisons show Moore was released from custody April 13 and remained on supervised parole at the time of the alleged bomb attempt.

Court records show he robbed a West Virginia bank of $2,546, assaulted a bank employee and used a deadly weapon in the course of the 2005 robbery.

It also appears that he has quite a background — including both a tax-resistance case and at least one very interesting tattoo:

Moore’s criminal record in Colorado dates back to 1984 with a drug possession charge. He served six months in state prison on a felony burglary charge out of Arapahoe County in 2004.

VIDEO AND MORE HERE

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Poor, Poor Sarah

Sarah Palin. (Photo: sskennel)

Poor, Poor Sarah

Wednesday 12 January 2011

Truth Out
by: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

So let me get this straight.

Twenty people were gunned down at a supermarket in Arizona on Saturday. Six were killed, including a nine-year-old girl. Fourteen others were wounded, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was the main target of the attack, and who was shot through the head. She is currently lying in a hospital bed with half of her skull removed because brain swelling from her bullet wound could kill her.

Twenty people shot.

Six killed.

Fourteen wounded.

And guess what?

It appears Sarah Palin is the principal victim of the shooting.

No, really.

Don’t believe me? Watch the video she posted to her Facebook page. There she sits, in front of a fireplace and beside an American flag like some cruel joke on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, wreathing herself in pity because people are coming to the conclusion that politicians like her – the ones who have spent the last two years talking about guns and civil war and reloading and such – should bear some of the blame for what happened in Arizona.

How on Earth could anyone come to such an irresponsible and reprehensible conclusion?

Hm. 

In a message posted on her Facebook page Sunday afternoon, Sarah Palin reiterated her call for supporters to “reload” in the battle against health care reform, a term that provoked controversy last week after critics accused her of inciting violence against members of Congress. Presenting her message as an exhortation to college basketball teams competing in March Madness, Palin stood her ground in using firearm imagery against the administration.

“The crossfire is intense, so penetrate through enemy territory by bombing through the press, and use your strong weapons – your Big Guns – to drive to the hole. Shoot with accuracy; aim high and remember it takes blood, sweat and tears to win,” Palin wrote. In the headline of her update, she mockingly predicted that the message would be “subject to new politically correct language police censorship.”

(Emphasis added)

That was supposed to be about basketball, and as usual, all sorts of mean people jumped up and down on her for once again vomiting gun-violence rhetoric into the political debate. Yup, she was the victim then, and is now the victim once again.

Poor, poor Sarah.

Before you start spluttering and staggering in an attempt to comprehend the sheer galactic magnitude of this new round of idiocy – “Who the what the where the when the why the how the what?!” was my initial response – stop a second and remember that this is how people like Sarah Palin operate. This is how they get others to follow them. They make themselves out to be victims, and convince their followers that they, too, are victims.

Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, Savage, O’Reilly and the rest of the right-wing media machine have turned professional victimhood into a license to print money, and people like Sarah Palin are all too happy to jump on that bandwagon. You’re losing your country, your rights, your guns, your family, your religion, the sanctity of your marriage, the supremacy of your heterosexuality, my God, you’re losing Christmas, for the love of God! You’re losing everything (…psssst…they’re talking to White Christians when they say this stuff, by the way, which just cracks me all the way up…), and if you don’t “take up arms” to stop it, well, it will just make the Baby Jesus weep bitter, bitter tears.

Speaking of “taking up arms,” here is Palin’s explanation for such rhetoric: “When we say ‘take up our arms,’ we are talking about our vote.”

Of course. How could we have missed such an obvious reference? Silly us.

Poor, poor Sarah.

MORE HERE

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Why Do Americans Keep Getting Suckered By Right-Wing Lies?

Why Do Americans Keep Getting Suckered By Right-Wing Lies?

The Nation / By Danny Goldberg

Until progressives change the mind sets of the tens of millions who believe right-wing mythology, elections will be disappointing regardless of who is in the White House.

November 21, 2010 |

Ideas don’t happen on their own. Throughout history ideas need patrons.” —Matt Kibbe, president of Freedom-Works, a tea party advocacy group, quoted in Jane Mayer’s piece on the Koch brothers in The New Yorker.

Almost half of the public is either misinformed or subject to unanswered right wing narratives. If I believed that there was a chance of Sharia law being imposed in the United States I too would be gravely concerned. If I believed that most Europeans and Canadians had inferior health care to that of average Americans, I too would be against health care reform. If I believed that man-made global warning did not exist or that there were nothing we could do about it and that environmental efforts were responsible for unemployment I’d be against cap and trade. If I believed that prisoner abuse would make my family significantly less likely to be killed by terrorists, my thinking about torture would be different. And if I believed that the problems with the economy had been caused by too much government instead of too little, that my personal freedom was threatened by the government instead of large corporations, I’d probably be in a tea party supporter and a Republican.

Unless and until progressives change the mind sets of the tens of millions of people who believe right-wing mythology, who never read the New York Times or listen to NPR, who never watch any TV news other than Fox, future elections will have disappointing results for progressives regardless of who is in the White House.

Even Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have limits to their ability to de-program those who have been indoctrinated by conservative orthodoxy. As David Bromwich recently wrote in New York Review of Books, “You can learn from them why the wrong ideas are funny, but you cannot learn why the wrong ideas are wrong.”

Changing minds is more of an art than a science. Polling and focus groups are reasonably accurate at determining how people already feel, but the idea that every message to educate or convert can be mathematically tested is illusory. Even more dangerous is the notion that public opinion somehow comes from the sky and is thus impossible to influence. The right wing knows better.

MORE HERE

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The Noxious Transformation Of The Conservative Movement Into A Rabid Fringe

Days of Rage — The Noxious Transformation of the Conservative Movement into a Rabid Fringe

Crusading to restore a holy social order, Tea Partiers have promoted disorder. Claiming to protect democracy, they smashed windows of elected representatives.

Nation Books / By Max Blumenthal

August 10, 2010 |

Editor’s Note: The following is the new epilogue from Max Blumenthal’s book, Republic Gomorrah, now out in paperback (Basic/Nation Books, 2009).

“He will tell you that he wants a strong authority to take from him the crushing responsibility of thinking for himself. Since the Republic is weak, he is led to break the law out of love for obedience. But is it really strong authority that he wishes? In reality he demands rigorous order for others, and for himself disorder without responsibility.” — Jean-Paul Sartre, “Anti-Semite and Jew”

I am not sure when I first detected the noxious fumes that would envelop the conservative movement in the Obama era. It might have been early on, in April 2009, when I visited a series of gun shows in rural California and Nevada. Perusing tables piled high with high-caliber semi-automatic weapons and chatting with anyone in my vicinity, I heard urgent warnings of mass roundups, concentration camps, and a socialist government in Washington. “These people that are purchasing these guns are people that are worried about what’s going on in this country,” a gun dealer told me outside a show in Reno. “Good luck Obama,” a young gun enthusiast remarked to me. “We outnumber him 100 to 1.” At this time, the Tea Party movement had not even registered on the national media’s radar.

MORE HERE

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Right-Wing Digg Conspiracy: A Lot Of Conservative Hot Air

A Vast Right-Wing Digg Conspiracy Expose Shows JournoList Scandal to Be a Lot of Conservative Hot Air

AlterNet / By Zach Carter

Take note, right-wing scandalmongers, this is what a politically motivated media conspiracy looks like.

August 7, 2010 |Finally, a real media conspiracy! After weeks of right-wing bloviating about the JournoList non-scandal, we finally have evidence of a secretive plot to hijack the media in pursuit of an ideological agenda. But the scandal has nothing to do with JournoList– a superhyped non-event about liberal journalists emailing each other. Instead, an investigative report written by oleoleolson published on AlterNet Thursday exposed that a cadre of conservatives, including multiple journalists, has been abusing Digg’s social media platform to bury stories with a progressive bent.

The Digg conspiracy is as devious as it is simple. Digg is a program that allows people to rate stories on the Internet. If you like a story, you click a button marked “digg.” If you don’t like it, you click “bury.” Stories that get the most diggs and the fewest buries are featured prominently on the Digg.com Web site, scoring millions of clicks from Digg’s vast audience. As AlterNet reported yesterday, a group of conservatives calling themselves the “Digg Patriots” have been aggressively voting down progressive stories, gaming the system by creating multiple accounts to cast multiple votes on stories, and adopting a secretive, coordinated effort to silence progressive ideas.

If the facts are as plain as yesterday’s report, these Digg shenanigans are a clear-cut right-wing online media conspiracy. Members of the Digg Patriots operated anonymously and did not publicly disclose their coordinated effort to crush progressive stories as part of a broad, conservative ideological agenda.

MORE HERE

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Glenn Beck Suggests He Is Afraid George Soros Will Kill Him (VIDEO)

Glenn Beck Is Afraid George Soros Will Kill Him. No, seriously.

Crooks & Liars- By karoli Tuesday Jun 22, 2010 8:00am

Alternative Title: Glenn Beck descends further into paranoid delusion.

BECK: Gasoline Brazil. Now why am I telling you about this? Have you heard of another word? Soros. George Soros. I do have a bulletproof car, George. I just want you to know.

George Soros — I’m going to show you this tonight. I’m going to spend an hour on this. I want you to DVD, write down, take notes, look into this. We’re going to be talking a little bit about this in the next few days. This is — I like to call it the circle of life, as it is now understood in America.

As a relative newcomer to the crazy that is the far right wing, I do not now, nor am I likely to ever understand the obsession they have with George Soros.

The right wing non-profit money machine outspends progressive non-profits by amounts in the billions. What Soros spends in a year on American politics is a big zero. Yet FreedomWorks grinds more tea in our face every day with full-throated (and walleted) support from the right.

There was a time in this country where people as paranoid and self-focused as Glenn Beck were placed in a room with padding and round corners until the meds took hold.

Now they go on national television. Rupert Murdoch’s epitaph should read “He mainstreamed crazy.”

h/t: Media Matters

Vodpod videos no longer available.

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Americans Simply Don’t Do Sacrifice Anymore

The president wrapped up his address Tuesday night by asking Americans to pray for the victims — both human and environmental — of the BP oil spill. I thought it was a strange way to end his first Oval Office address during a national emergency insofar as praying makes the situation appear too big for conventional solutions. As though all that remains between us and a sea of oil is the Hail Mary.

This morning it occurred to me that this was the only thing he could really ask Americans to do.

Why? Simply stated, it doesn’t require any effort to silently invoke spirituality while stopped at a traffic signal or while chewing a gluttonous mouthful of Double Down. Actually, I take back that second part. I can’t imagine doing anything other than suffering a massive infarction while eating a Double Down.

Instead of prayer, the president could have asked us all to make sacrifices towards the goal of weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels. Maybe he should have asked for sacrifice. It probably wouldn’t have hurt. But it would have been mostly ignored.

Americans simply don’t do “national sacrifice” anymore. During World War II, Americans were asked to ration everything from sugar to oil to cheese — even shoes. Those days are long gone. Today, we’re asked to go to Disneyland or the beach. Or we’re asked to pray. (It’s difficult to imagine the modern right-wing, for example, accepting the rationing of anything at the behest of the current president when most of them refuse to fill out a U.S. Census form. More on that presently.)

The BP oil spill has been a daily reminder of our toxic relationship with decomposed dinosaurs. On just about every blog and every cable news show, we’ve watched in shock-horror as 75,000,000 gallons of oil spew from the top of the Deepwater Horizon’s blowout preventer. We see it. We cringe. Some of us shout, “Why, oh, why?!” Others curse Tony Hayward and BP. Maybe some of us curse President Obama or former President Bush. A clear majority of Americans are pissed off, and they’re taking it out on everyone except themselves: the ones actually buying the oil.

Once we’re exhausted with blaming and yelling, we climb into our oversized cars, crank up the air conditioner, drive to Burger King and order a ammonia-washed beef sandwich the size of a baby — while mindlessly idling at the drive-thru.

As the president pointed out last night, scientists, experts and politicians alike have been urging us to make the transition to clean energy and away from fossil fuels. In the last ten years alone, we’ve endured the largest terrorist attack on our soil and subsequently fought two wars, all prompted by American intrusions into the Middle East to satisfy our collective petro fix.

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Chernus: Neocon Vampires Sink Their Fangs Into the Tea Parties

Like vampires, the neocons never die. They constantly revive themselves, going where the vein is richest, eager to feed upon new blood.

By Ira Chernus, AlterNet, May 27, 2010

Remember the neoconservatives? Maybe you don’t. Their death was announced on the cover of Time magazine long before George W. Bush left the White House. By now you might think that they’re, thankfully, only a footnote to the history of a frightening bygone era.

But no. Like vampires, the neocons never die. They constantly revive themselves, going where the vein is richest, eager to feed upon new blood. Now — we should have seen it coming — they are sinking their fangs into the Tea Party. That’s where the fresh political blood is, so that’s where the neocons are.

Continues >>

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How Obama’s Election Drove The American Right Insane

How Obama’s Election Drove the American Right Insane

For huge numbers of dedicated right-wing Americans, November 5, 2008, was the end of the world. Or at least, the end of America as they knew it.

PoliPoint Press / By John Amato and David Neiwert

May 26, 2010 |

The following is adapted from “Over the Cliff: How Obama’s Election Drove the American Right Insane,” due out next month from PoliPoint Press.

On the day Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, much of the nation — particularly those who supported and voted for him — celebrated the election of the first African American to the country’s highest office. For those who voted for his opponent, John McCain, there was naturally the usual bitterness and disappointment.

Among a certain subset of those Americans, however — especially those who opposed Obama precisely because he sought to become the nation’s first black president — it went well beyond the usual despair. For them, November 5, 2008, was the end of the world. Or at least, the end of America as they knew it.

So maybe it wasn’t really a surprise that they responded that day with the special venom and violence peculiar to the American Right. Like the noose strung in protest from a tree limb in Texas.

Students at Baylor University in Waco discovered the noose hanging from a campus tree the evening of election day, near a site where angry Republican students had gathered Obama yard signs and burned them in a big bonfire. That same evening, a riot nearly broke out when Obama supporters, chanting the new president’s name, were confronted outside a residence hall by white students who told them: “Any nigger who walks by Penland [Hall], we’re going to kick their ass, we’re going to jump him.” The Obama supporters stopped and responded, “Excuse me?” — and somehow managed to keep the confrontation confined to a mere shouting match until police arrived and broke things up.

MORE HERE

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How Many US Progressives Please the Right-Wing Israel Lobby

Professor Ira Chernus, CommonDreams.org, May 17, 2010

I was rather baffled by many of the comments to a column I posted last week. I offered what I thought was a modest and quite harmless suggestion: You should urge your representative in Congress to sign the Kind-Delahunt letter, which calls on the president to make strong efforts to move Israelis and Palestinians toward a two-state solution.

Oh no, no, said most of the commenters. Don’t bother. Each had their own reason and their own particular way of phrasing their common conclusion, which I think I paraphrase accurately here: Any effort to pressure the U.S. government is wasted, because the U.S. will always support the policies of Israel, no matter how unjust. (Oh, and the author is a fool — or worse — some added.)

Continues >>

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