It's not a threat- it's a WARNING.

So, today being the anniversary of Lexington and Concord (and Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing), all the militia groups (including a lot of teabaggers) are holding protests across the country.

Two are being held in the Washington, DC area, and they couldn't be more different; one is a simple Second Amendment rally, whose organizers are deliberately keeping out anyone who might actually bring a gun into the District or threaten the government.

The other one, being held just across the river in gun-legal Virginia, is more or less the exact opposite:

According to the Washington Post, protesters at the "Restore The Constitution" rally will take advantage of new gun laws signed by President Obama allowing the carrying of firearms in national parks to make an armed stand for liberty today.

Rally organizer Daniel Almond put the event together "because he is upset about health-care reform, climate control, bank bailouts, drug laws and what he sees as President Obama's insistence on and the Democratic Congress's capitulation to a 'totalitarian socialism' that tramples individual rights," the Post reports.

Almond will be packing heat, and he's calling on others to join him. The park is just a few miles from downtown D.C. and, on a clear day, the Capitol dome is visible from the location.

This second rally is so extreme in its orientation that even the organization calling for the military to mutiny against the federal government withdrew its support:

An Oath Keeper's board member explained his group's decision to pull out of Almond's event April 12 to the Post.

"It had gotten to the point that it would be dangerous to attend," the Oath Keeper told the paper. "There are people out there willing to do anything to create chaos in an uncontrolled situation, and [the event] is wide open for disaster."

Yeah, when an organization that waits with breathless anticipation for civil war with a "tyrannical" federal government doesn't want to be part of an armed anti-government rally, you can bet there's trouble.

The thing to remember, though, is that this second protest is absolutely NOT an isolated fringe group. It's part and parcel of the modern conservative movement- and especially the Republican Party. Remember, these people elect representatives who call for their constituents to be "armed and dangerous" in opposition to federal laws, who appear in the South and praise efforts to "rise again" in either ignorance of history or support of rebellion.

And, of course, these are the voters without whom the Republican Party would fall to the ranks of the "third" parties. In part, the armed rally within sight of the capitol is a reminder of this: do as you're ordered, or next time we won't bother with an election.

These are people who, more and more, are coming round to the idea of an armed rebellion against the elected government of the United States.

Granted, there is a little bit of good news about this. In my home state, the governor who said Texas might need to secede is in a tight race against a Democrat... and, by the way, that three-point lead is from a polling outfit with a six-point Republican bias, as (repeatedly) proven by FiveThirtyEight.com . And the Democrats are on the attack, mocking the neo-secessionists and militiamen:

Barnes, in particular, took aim at what he characterized as Republicans’ frivolous pursuits since they took power, such as making it illegal to implant a microchip in a person without his permission and threatening to secede from the U.S.

“Do they not know that the Yankees have got the atomic bomb now?” he joked. “We won’t make it through Bull Run.”

So perhaps there's hope.

But in the meantime... maybe it's time to organize gun owners who SUPPORT the currently elected government for a rally of our own.

Someone needs to make it clear that, if these loonies go to war to overturn an election, they WILL be opposed.

Post-Convention Cull Day

Wow, a LOT apparently happened while I was busy at, or recovering from, the convention I worked at this past weekend. Too much for me to keep track of, or research, or comment in detail on.

So... it's Cull Day!

First off: Oklahoma becomes the first state to begin organizing its secessionist army.

Frustrated by recent political setbacks, tea party leaders and some conservative members of the Oklahoma Legislature say they would like to create a new volunteer militia to help defend against what they believe are improper federal infringements on state sovereignty.

. . .

"Is it scary? It sure is," said tea party leader Al Gerhart of Oklahoma City, who heads an umbrella group of tea party factions called the Oklahoma Constitutional Alliance. "But when do the states stop rolling over for the federal government?"

Incidentally, folks, it should be borne in mind that, just before the Civil War, most newspapers in the South were agents of the fire-eating secessionist wing of the Democratic Party, deliberately ginning up fear, hatred and paranoia among their readership. Today... we have Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, NewsMax.com, Drudge, National Review... so, yeah.

The Tea Parties are trying to unite... except, well, it's only those tea party groups funded and run by Republican Party activists that are uniting:

Mark Skoda, a Tea Party leader from Memphis (and a founder of the recent Tea Party Convention), is serving as the chief spokesman for the effort, and appears to have played a leading role in putting it together. Skoda, working closely with Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation, had helped organize and promote February's convention, at which Sarah Palin delivered the keynote speech and which enjoyed widespread media coverage. Also part of the new coalition is the Tea Party Express, the brainchild of a team of California Republican political consultants.

But one prominent group, the Tea Party Patriots (TPP), doesn't appear to be joining the party. Jenny Beth Martin, a leader of TPP noted to TPMmuckraker that her group already considers itself the largest grassroots Tea Party organization, and said it hadn't been involved in planning the new federation. TPP had also stayed away from February's convention.

It should be noted that Tea Party Nation is the group founded and led by former Republican leader Dick Armey. This is a clear case of the Republican Party trying- and failing- to co-opt the teabaggers, who are definitely much more radical and bigoted than the national average. Even Fox News is calling the teabaggers out on their lunacy, now that they realize they won't be controlled.

Even as Virginia Governor McConnell apologizes and backtracks on his leaving slavery out of the Civil War, Mississippi governor Haley Barbour brushes slavery off as unimportant:

CROWLEY: You know what I'm trying to get at here is that there's a sort of feeling that this is insensitive. But you clearly don't agree?

BARBOUR: To me, it's a sort of feeling that it's a nit, that it is not significant, that it's not a -- it's trying to make a big deal out of something doesn't amount to diddly.

So, yeah: slavery was wrong, "everybody knows that," but apparently it wasn't important at all to the Confederacy. Riiiiight.

Matthew Yglesias cuts right to the heart of both the Republican desire to celebrate the CSA, and the core of teabagger support:

... something that links the mentality of today’s right to the mentality of the slaveowners and segregation proponents is the white southern political tradition’s very partial and selective embrace of majoritarian democracy. As long as national institutions are substantially controlled by white southerners, the white south is a hotbed of patriotism. But as soon as an non-southern political coalition manages to win an election—as we saw in 1860 and in 2008—then suddenly the symbols of national authority become symbols of tyranny and the constitution is construed as granting conservative areas all kinds of alleged abilities to opt out of national political decisions. Even if you think opposition to the Affordable Care Act has nothing whatsoever to do with race, the underlying political philosophy by which a George W Bush or James Buchanan is a national president but an Abraham Lincoln or a Barack Obama merely a sectional one remains incoherent and pernicious.

Meanwhile, if you haven't had enough reminders of innate Republican evil, Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief of staff in the State Department, testified that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld knew full well they were imprisoning- and torturing- innocent people in Guantanamo and elsewhere:

I came to understand that there were several different reasons for the refusal to release detainees in Guantánamo, even those who were likely innocent. These reasons continued to the time of my departure from the Department of State in 2005. At least part of the problem was that it was politically impossible to release them. The concern expressed was that if they were released to another country... the leadership of the Defense Department would be left without any plausible explanation to the American people...

. . .

Another part of the political dilemma originated in the Office of Vice President Richard B. Cheney, whose position could be summed up as “the end justifies the means”, and who had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent, or that there was a lack of any useable evidence for the great majority of them. If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it. That seemed to be the philosophy that ruled in the Vice President’s Office.

Of course, with Dawn Johnsen's nomination to the Office of Legal Counsel scuttled, the last faint hope of Obama ever following up on this testimony has long since flown away.

And finally, a recent federal court ruling puts a major kink in plans for net neutrality regulations. That said, it was almost certainly the right ruling:

If “ancillary jurisdiction” is enough for net neutrality regulations (something we might like) today, it could just as easily be invoked tomorrow for any other Internet regulation that the FCC dreams up (including things we won’t like). For example, it doesn't take much imagination to envision a future FCC "Internet Decency Statement." After all, outgoing FCC Chairman Martin was a crusader against "indecency" on the airwaves and it was the FCC that punished Pacifica radio for playing George Carlin’s “seven dirty words” monologue, something you can easily find on the Internet.

Of course, this ruling can- and probably will- lead to more direct and stringent regulation of telecoms and internet providers by the FCC, since they won't be allowed to do spot-checks on egregious incidents. This issue is by no means settled.

Help! Help! My right to oppress others is being oppressed!

A group of neo-Confederate lawyers wants people to self-identify on the 2010 Census as "Confederate Southern Americans”.

“A significant number of Southerners identifying themselves as Confederate Southern Americans on the Census form could finally spell the beginning of the end for the discrimination that has been running rampant, especially for the last 20 years or so, against all things Confederate, and for that matter against Southern heritage and identity in general,” SLRC executive director Roger McCredie said in a written statement.

He said this campaign could result in protections for “Confederate Southern Americans” much like those for other groups.

“In this age of honoring diversity, Southern/Confederate people are the last group in America that can be maligned, ridiculed and defamed with impunity,” said SLRC Board Chairman Neill H. Payne. “Using the Census to unite the Southern/Confederate community can be a significant first step to our obtaining rights and recognition that all American ethnic groups are entitled to.”

So... crackers are an ethnic group, then? And furthermore, separate from Caucasians elsewhere in the USA. Apparently Pennsylvania hillbillies are innately different from the Carolina variety.

And furthermore, the descendants of Confederates are apparently the victims of discrimination. (Because, you know, all that slavery, and Jim Crow, and lynching, and Bull Connor and Strom Thurmond and George Wallace and all that, that doesn't count.)

But who, exactly, is the SLRC? Well, the Southern Poverty Law Center has an article on the founders of the Southern Legal Resource Center (SLRC):

Since its incorporation in 1996 by Kirk Lyons (see biography, "In the Lyons Den," Summer 2000 edition, Intelligence Report) and two other men, the Southern Legal Resource Center has operated out of a nondescript duplex on a quiet street in Black Mountain, a historically liberal town near Asheville.

The SLRC replaced an earlier Lyons creation in Texas known as CAUSE, short for Canada, Australia, the United States, South Africa and Europe — the parts of the world where Lyons judged white majorities' rights under threat because of rising minority populations.

. . .

From the start, the SLRC was the creation of extremists. The core staff is made up of Lyons and his long-time partner and brother-in-law, Neill Payne, along with the two men's parents-in-law.

Both Lyons and Payne were married on the compound of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations in Idaho. The pastor presiding over their 1990 double wedding was Aryan boss Richard Butler, and their spouses were both daughters of Betty and Charles Tate, who now work at the SLRC. Betty Tate had been an Aryan Nations secretary, while her husband was a Butler aide; the couple's son is in prison for terrorist crimes. Louis Beam, a violently racist former Klan leader, was Lyons' best man at the ceremony.

The SLRC's board includes Lourie Salley III, who is executive director of the board and also a prominent member of the League of the South, a neo-Confederate hate group. (Salley's hobby, according to Aiken, S.C., City Attorney Richard Pierce, is refitting small planes as "Nazi German observation planes.")

. . .

For more than two years, Kirk Lyons has been a key player in an attempt to turn the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) from its original mission of defending the memory of Southern Civil War combatants to far-right political activism. He helped organize a major pro-Confederate flag rally in South Carolina in 2000, which in turn helped to boost Lyons' credentials within the 32,000-member SCV.

There's much more, including evidence of outright fraud and deception, and the article is seven years old- which means there's seven years not covered by its evidence.

So... a legal board founded and run by a white supremacist wants white decendants of Confederates to use the Census to advance his self-serving battle to preserve white power.

And he and his are the victims.

Let me be very blunt here: there is only one defining factor that splits southern white people in America from the rest. There is only one bit of heritage that both unifies the South and differentiates it from the rest of the Union. It is the "peculiar institution" that the first seven states of the Confederacy seceded to defend.

It is race-based chattel slavery.

Defending the memory of brave soldiers who fought for the South in the Civil War, putatively in defense of home and hearth against Union invasion, is one matter. Defending the culture that started that war by firing on the American flag- first on January 6, 1861 against the ship Star of the West, then on April 13 to force the surrender of Ft. Sumter, both in Charleston, SC- defending that culture is entirely different. That culture was built upon the belief in aristocracy and racial supremacy- and upon a contempt bordering on anathema for the entire concept that "all men are created equal."

That culture does not need to be celebrated, or preserved, or protected. It needs to be buried and washed away by the years.

But not forgotten. No, never forgotten- for the evils of the past can return, if we forget just how evil they were... even the undeniable evils of slavery and racial supremacy.

The Unwanted Return of Cull Day

Too many bookmarks and open browser windows, and I have to shut down the machine come morning to go work at a convention (because that's what I do).

So, I declare today a Cull Day- when I take all the bookmarked stories and stuff I won't be able to make a full-length post on anytime soon, and hand them to you, my handful of readers, with a few personal notes.

Beginning with Rep. Bart Stupak (D in name only-M). One day he claims to anticipate a compromise on his holding out for an amendment to the Senate health care bill to essentially ban all insurance coverage for abortions (so that federal subsidies and tax breaks can't be used to pay for abortions). Today he says there's no compromise in sight, and that he and eleven other Democrats will still vote no on health care over the abortion issue. Well, thank goodness he's getting a serious primary contender... maybe I should send off a campaign donation.

Texas judge rescinds anti-death penalty ruling - See, this is why judges should NOT be elected. At most a recall or retention election might be a good idea... but subjecting the justice system to political pressure, and allowing scum like Goodhair Perry to appeal to the ignorance of the people to threaten the tenure of a sitting judge, is a HORRIBLE way to ensure that justice is done.

Alan Grayson introduces Public Option Act - Why can't I have THIS guy for my representative? Well, besides the fact that he's from Florida. Anyway, it's not even the classic public option- it's literally Medicare For All, except that those under 65 would have to pay premiums if they want in, so that the expansion is revenue-neutral.

Fired Up - Andrew Sullivan is glad to see Obama finally taking his fight for health care reform to the people. I'm not so enthusiastic- mainly because Obama has fought to kill any publicly-funded competition to insurance corporations while doing absolutely nothing to prevent healthcare providers from jacking up their charges once this passes- you know, like they did in Massachusetts, when pretty much an identical health insurance reform was enacted, and health care costs promptly jumped 60% in three years. But more to the point: why, exactly, has Obama remained silent until his cornerstone program was in imminent threat of total collapse?

Creeping Clintonism; Or How Rahm Is A Scaredy-Cat - This time I agree with Sullivan so completely that I have absolutely nothing to add.

The Pro-Israel Lobby And The New Israel - Another Sullivan post- I'll quote my favorite bit here:

Nothing illustrates better the total bizarreness of the US-Israel relationship. No one in Washington - apart from a few Likudniks and Palinite end-timers - actually supports more settlements or any settlements i the West Bank. At the same time, Washington exercizes a UN veto to protect Israel from international law, funnels a vast amount of foreign and military aid to the country, helped finance the pulverization of Gaza last year, provides absurd international cover for Israel's 150 nukes, has worked tirelessly to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear capacity, and on and on.

In return? Fuck you, Obama. To which the overwhelming response in Washington is: Obama screwed up.

Cornyn Pledges GOP Will Run On Repealing Health Care Reform - And this, folks, is why health care reform SHOULD take place IMMEDIATELY... and not be postponed until (under the most current version) 2018, after Obama is long gone. It's almost certain to be repealed by a Republican Congress and a Republican President before then- and there WILL be such a combination, because the health care reform package is going to remain deeply unpopular unless it contains a public option or unless the individual mandate is repealed. Only when (and if- I have the liveliest doubts) the reforms prove their worth in making health care affordable for everyone will they become too popular to repeal... and that won't happen, by DESIGN, for ten years.

GOP Lawyer's Latest Gambit: State Bill That Could Tie Up Health-Care Reform - Nullification lives, despite being quite obviously and blatantly unconstitutional... and can secession be far behind?

Waterboarding for dummies - Yes, despite what we were told, the American version of waterboarding turns out to actually have been MORE cruel than methods used by the Spanish Inquisition, the Imperial Japanese Army in World War II, and the Khmer Rouge. But not to worry, torture advocates- your poster boy's former boss is still on the Supreme Court, still ruling that torture is perfectly legal.

On a similar note, you simply must read this essay by Andrew Sullivan about what torture is doing to our nation. Especially since, despite the uncontested evidence, every door that might lead to justice keeps being slammed shut.

Virginia AG To State Colleges: Scrap Protections For Gay Workers - To explain, a quote:

In a letter to the state's institutions of higher learning, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli argues that the schools lack the legal authority to ban anti-gay discrimination, because only the state legislature can do so, the Washington Post reported over the weekend. That's a step that the GOP-controlled legislature recently declined to take.

Now, in my book this isn't just an order to all the colleges in Virginia to take away protections against discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation. This is, in effect, a direct order to begin/resume discriminating against gays. Cuccinelli is saying that colleges do not have the authority to NOT discriminate. And this is after the newly elected governor of the same state repealed all anti-discrimination protections for homosexuals. Republicans prove themselves once again opponents of freedom and advocates of fear, hatred and evil.

That's all for now- see you all next week.

Lincoln and Douglas are Still Dead

I didn't watch the Republican gubernatorial debate the other night- didn't really feel a need to. I haven't decided for certain yet which primary I'm going to vote in- vote for the best Democrat or the worst Republican- but I already knew how I felt about all three of the people seeking to be the chief executive of Texas.

That said, the Houston Chronicle's account of the debate is a bit interesting.

Gov. Rick Perry spent most of the evening defending his promotion of the Trans-Texas Corridor, toll roads and the spending of $380 million to attract businesses to move to Texas. Perry said he would not have done anything differently during his nine years in office.

I hope the Democrats have THAT little clip in hand for their fall ads. "If you hated the last nine years of Republican rule, how about four more?" Or better yet, "If this man has his way, someday all Texas roads will be toll roads- including the street on which you live."

U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison again tried to square her “94 percent pro-life” voting record with her support for the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. She also took the brunt of anti-Washington rhetoric.

Dead campaign walking. In this environment, nothing other than "the right to life begins at conception and ends at birth" is going to satisfy the radical right organization that the Texas Republican Party has become.

Hutchison restated her promise to quit the Senate no matter whether she wins or loses the governor's race.

So what's keeping you?

Please don't say manana if you don't mean it...

Activist Debra Medina had to distance herself from statements she made last year that if efforts to promote states' rights fail, the nation may need a “bloody war” of secession. Medina said she is against secession. She said she wants the state to be able to nullify federal laws...

So, you don't support secession, you just support the thing that led to secession a hundred fifty years ago.

Debra, dear, don't be ashamed of your pro-secession views. Rick Perry shares them, remember?

But very few concrete ideas were offered by the candidates on how to resolve a possible $17 billion shortfall in the state's budget over the next two years or how to pay for an expected $300 billion in highway construction needed over the next 20 years.

And this is the fundamental point of the debate. The Republican Party has forgotten how to even HAVE ideas. They've lost their brains and have nothing left but their campaign reflexes- fight, and fight dirty.

It's ironic that almost the only idea of any solidity came from the teabagger outsider, Medina:

She offered one of the more direct proposals of the evening: replace the property tax with increased sales taxes — even if that means the sales tax rate would have to go to 14 percent.

I actually ran with this as my main platform plank when I sought a seat in the legislature as a Libertarian, back in 2006. I still think it's not a bad idea, provided you make most necessities of life tax-free and provide some mechanism to ease the pain on the poor.

But it's not really a Republican idea, and never has been, because it requires that one tax be raised to offset the abolition of another. No mainstream Republican has the honesty to admit the need to do this; instead, it's "cut taxes" forever, and to hell with balancing the budget or maintaining minimum services for the worst off among us.

It's sad that a pro-secession, lunatic-fringe teabagger candidate appears to be the most honest and most sensible of the Republican options. It's also not a little bit frightening. Right now the empty suits like Perry and Hutchinson are the only things standing in the way of an open (and possibly armed) revolt by the people who Debra Medina represents. If they don't come up with better policies- or, more to the point, better candidates- then the old Republicans will sink...

... and something new, and much more savage and ruthless, will rise in its place.