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This week in guns

This guy had a hit list.

Police in Clarkstown, New York have confiscated a cache of high-powered weapons and body armor from a man who was arrested for posting death threats against against many Democratic politicians and every liberal supporter of President Barack Obama.

According to WCBS, 49-year-old Larry Mulqueen was arraigned on Thursday on charges of “making terroristic threats, illegally possessing weapons and harassment.”

Mulqueen’s landlady had tipped off police after she found a “hit list” posted on Facebook that threatened Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY), Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY) and all members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

The Facebook posting said that all of the president’s follower were “traitor scum” and promised “death to them all.”

Nyack-Piermont Patchreported that police searched Mulqueen’s home and found two high-powered rifles, two bayonets, a sword, a knuckle knife, body armor and ammunition. Included in the 100 rounds of ammunition were 27 so-called “tank buster” .50 caliber armor-piercing shells.

Previous criminal convictions meant that it was illegal for Mulqueen to possess the weapons.

“We didn’t want a situation where something did happen and we looked back and it was said ‘well, that law enforcement agency had information and warnings, why did they do nothing about it?” Clarkstown Police Sgt. Glenn Cummings explained to WCBS.

“I think what may have particularly have gotten his ire in the past month or two were the various legislation enacted with respect to the rights to possess a firearm. I think that was particularly upsetting to him,” Cummings added. “One posting which was posted about a month ago said that if anybody ever came to take the arms, they would suffer the consequences.”

Police said that Mulqueen would remain behind bars at least until his court appearance on Monday.

This guy had a hit list too.

A convicted felon and alleged neo-Nazi amassed 40,000 rounds of ammunition and planned to kill black and Jewish community leaders in Detroit as part of a “hit list,” WXYZ-TV reported on Thursday.

Federal authorities said this week that a search of 47-year-old federal suspect Richard Schmidt’s home revealed the list and apparent plans to kill Scott Kaufman, executive director of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit, and Rev. Wendell Anthony, president of the Detroit chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

“You have to realize it is the world we live in,” said Kaufman after being notified of the list. “There are people who don’t like us and would just as soon have us not exist, but you can’t dwell on it.”

According to NBC News, Schmidt was indicted in January 2013 on federal charges of possessing firearms, ammunition and body armor, all of which violated his parole. Schmidt was released from prison in 2003, after 13 years of incarceration in Ohio following a homicide conviction for shooting and killing a man during a traffic stop. Schmidt also wounded two others during that attack.

Investigators then found 18 weapons inside Schmidt’s home in Ohio in December 2012, including various types of shotguns and high-caliber rifles, including two different AR-15 assault weapons.

U.S. Attorney Steven M. Dettelbach, who represents Ohio’s northern district, said investigators have concluded that Schmidt acquired his arsenal at gun shows or via private firearms sales, which currently do not require a background check.

“It’s scary,” Dettelback said about the amount of weaponry found at the suspect’s home, adding that while he would say where Schmidt bought the guns if he knew, “It’s that sitting here today as a senior federal law enforcement official in northern Ohio, I can’t say.”

Schmidt, who owns a sporting good store, is also accused of selling knock-offs of popular brands like Nike, Reebok and Louis Vuitton.

A blast from the past

It turns out he was always a dick. Written five years ago.

In 1984, Falwell called the gay-friendly Metropolitan Community Church "a vile and Satanic system" that will "one day be utterly annihilated and there will be a celebration in heaven." Members of these churches, Falwell added, are "brute beasts." Falwell initially denied his statements, offering Jerry Sloan, an MCC minister and gay rights activist $5,000 to prove that he had made them. When Sloan produced a videotape containing footage of Falwell's denunciations, the reverend refused to pay. Only after Sloan sued did Falwell cough up the money.

Falwell uttered countless epithets over his long life--in 1999 he warned that Tinky Winky, a character on the children's showTeletubbies, might be gay--but his most infamous remark arrived on the morning of 9/11, after the terrorist attacks, when he proclaimed, "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'"

Though Falwell's influence waned in his twilight years--his approval rating among evangelicals, according to a 2006 Pew Poll, had drifted downward to 46 percent--his well-publicized gaffes continued to make him one of the most recognizable figures of the Christian right. While the names of evangelical heavies like Focus on the Family founder and chairman James Dobson and Family Research Council president Tony Perkins are unknown to most people, Falwell's pudgy visage remains the symbol of the culture war his apostles have inherited. As Perkins wrote of Falwell in a newsletter after his death, "He was a pioneer whose legacy, marked by courage and candor, blazed the trail for all men and women of conviction to engage--boldly--on the great questions of our day."

But for Falwell, the "questions of the day" did not always relate to abortion and homosexuality--nor did they begin there. Decades before the forces that now make up the Christian right declared their culture war, Falwell was a rabid segregationist who railed against the civil rights movement from the pulpit of the abandoned backwater bottling plant he converted into Thomas Road Baptist Church. This opening episode of Falwell's life, studiously overlooked by his friends, naïvely unacknowledged by many of his chroniclers, and puzzlingly and glaringly omitted in the obituaries of the Washington Post and New York Times, is essential to understanding his historical significance in galvanizing the Christian right. Indeed, it was race--not abortion or the attendant suite of so-called "values" issues--that propelled Falwell and his evangelical allies into political activism.

As with his positions on abortion and homosexuality, the basso profondo preacher's own words on race stand as vivid documents of his legacy. Falwell launched on the warpath against civil rights four years after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools with a sermon titled "Segregation or Integration: Which?"

"If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God's word and had desired to do the Lord's will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made," Falwell boomed from above his congregation in Lynchburg. "The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line."

Falwell's jeremiad continued: "The true Negro does not want integration.... He realizes his potential is far better among his own race." Falwell went on to announce that integration "will destroy our race eventually. In one northern city," he warned, "a pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife."

As pressure from the civil rights movement built during the early 1960s, and President Lyndon Johnson introduced sweeping civil rights legislation, Falwell grew increasingly conspiratorial. He enlisted with J. Edgar Hoover to distribute FBI manufactured propaganda against the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and publicly denounced the 1964 Civil Rights Act as "civil wrongs."

In a 1964 sermon, "Ministers and Marchers," Falwell attacked King as a Communist subversive. After questioning "the sincerity and intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations," Falwell declared, "It is very obvious that the Communists, as they do in all parts of the world, are taking advantage of a tense situation in our land, and are exploiting every incident to bring about violence and bloodshed."

Falwell concluded, "Preachers are not called to be politicians, but soul winners."

Then, for a time, Falwell appeared to follow his own advice. He retreated from massive resistance and founded the Lynchburg Christian Academy, an institution described by the Lynchburg News in 1966 as "a private school for white students." It was one among many so-called "seg academies" created in the South to avoid integrated public schools.

For Falwell and his brethren, private Christian schools were the last redoubt. Rather than continue a hopeless struggle against the inevitable, through their schools they could circumvent the integration entirely. Five years later, Falwell christened Liberty University, a college that today funnels a steady stream of dedicated young cadres into Republican Congressional offices and conservative think tanks. (Tony Perkins is among Falwell's Christian soldiers.)

In a recent interview broadcast on CNN the day of his death, Falwell offered his version of the Christian right's genesis: "We were simply driven into the process by Roe v. Wade and earlier than that, the expulsion of God from the public square." But his account was fuzzy revisionism at best. By 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled on Roe, the antiabortion movement was almost exclusively Catholic. While various Catholic cardinals condemned the Court's ruling, W.A. Criswell, the fundamentalist former president of America's largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, casually endorsed it. (Falwell, an independent Baptist for forty years, joined the SBC in 1996.) "I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person," Criswell exclaimed, "and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed." A year before Roe, the SBC had resolved to press for legislation allowing for abortion in limited cases.

While abortion clinics sprung up across the United States during the early 1970s, evangelicals did little. No pastors invoked the Dred Scott decision to undermine the legal justification for abortion. There were no clinic blockades, no passionate cries to liberate the "pre-born." For Falwell and his allies, the true impetus for political action came when the Supreme Court ruled in Green v. Connally to revoke the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory private schools in 1971. At about the same time, the Internal Revenue Service moved to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, which forbade interracial dating. (Blacks were denied entry until 1971.) Falwell was furious, complaining, "In some states it's easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school."

Seeking to capitalize on mounting evangelical discontent, a right-wing Washington operative and anti-Vatican II Catholic named Paul Weyrich took a series of trips down South to meet with Falwell and other evangelical leaders. Weyrich hoped to produce a well-funded evangelical lobbying outfit that could lend grassroots muscle to the top-heavy Republican Party and effectively mobilize the vanquished forces of massive resistance into a new political bloc. In discussions with Falwell, Weyrich cited various social ills that necessitated evangelical involvement in politics, particularly abortion, school prayer and the rise of feminism. His pleas initially fell on deaf ears.

"I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed," Weyrich recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. "What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter's intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation."

In 1979, at Weyrich's behest, Falwell founded a group that he called the Moral Majority. Along with a vanguard of evangelical icons including D. James Kennedy, Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye, Falwell's organization hoisted the banner of the "pro-family" movement, declaring war on abortion and homosexuality. But were it not for the federal government's attempts to enable little black boys and black girls to go to school with little white boys and white girls, the Christian right's culture war would likely never have come into being. "The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion," former Falwell ally Ed Dobson told author Randall Balmer in 1990. "I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something."

As the Christian right gradually transmuted its racial resentment into sexual politics, Liberty University began enrolling nonwhite students and Thomas Road Baptist Church integrated. In the irony of ironies in 2006, at Justice Sunday III, a rally for the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, a man who belonged to a white-only "eating club" at Princeton University, Falwell haltingly rose to sing "We Shall Overcome." Beside him stood Martin Luther King Jr.'s niece, Alveda King, an evangelical antiabortion activist.

On the day of Falwell's death, Republican presidential frontrunners fell over one another to memorialize him. Arizona Senator John McCain, who in the 2000 presidential campaign had called Falwell an "agent of intolerance," then spoke at the 2006 graduation ceremony at Liberty University, praising Falwell as "a man of distinguished accomplishment who devoted his life to serving his faith and country."

Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor whose Mormon faith is listed as a cult by Falwell's Southern Baptist Convention, hailed him as "an American who built and led a movement based on strong principles and strong faith.... The legacy of his important work will continue through his many ministries where he put his faith into action."

Rudy Giuliani, the thrice-married prochoice former New York City mayor, gay rights advocate and erstwhile cross-dresser, was also profuse in his praise of Falwell. "He was a man who set a direction," Giuliani said. "He was someone who was not afraid to speak his mind. We all have great respect for him."

The gushing eulogies of Falwell by leading GOP presidential hopefuls demonstrated the preacher's earthly limitations and his enduring influence. Under Falwell's guidance, the Christian right subsumed much of the Republican apparatus and now holds the key to the presidential nominating process. McCain, Romney and Giuliani may never see eye-to-eye with Falwell, even in heaven, but in the end they paid fealty at his grave.

They're all Jerry's kids now.

Were "well-regulated militias" actually for slave patrols?

Read here.

The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says "State" instead of "Country" (the Framers knew the difference - see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia's vote.  Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that . . . and we all should be too.

In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the "slave patrols," and they were regulated by the states. 

In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia, and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state.  The law defined which counties had which armed militias and even required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who may be planning uprisings. 

As Dr. Carl T. Bogus wrote for the University of California Law Review in 1998, "The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month and authorized them to search 'all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition' and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found outside plantation grounds."

It's the answer to the question raised by the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained when he asks, "Why don't they just rise up and kill the whites?"  If the movie were real, it would have been a purely rhetorical question, because every southerner of the era knew the simple answer: Well regulated militias kept the slaves in chains.

Sally E. Haden, in her book Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas, notes that, "Although eligibility for the Militia seemed all-encompassing, not every middle-aged white male Virginian or Carolinian became a slave patroller." There were exemptions so "men in critical professions" like judges, legislators and students could stay at their work.  Generally, though, she documents how most southern men between ages 18 and 45 - including physicians and ministers - had to serve on slave patrol in the militia at one time or another in their lives.

And slave rebellions were keeping the slave patrols busy. 

By the time the Constitution was ratified, hundreds of substantial slave uprisings had occurred across the South.  Blacks outnumbered whites in large areas, and the state militias were used to both prevent and to put down slave uprisings.  As Dr. Bogus points out, slavery can only exist in the context of a police state, and the enforcement of that police state was the explicit job of the militias.

If the anti-slavery folks in the North had figured out a way to disband - or even move out of the state - those southern militias, the police state of the South would collapse.  And, similarly, if the North were to invite into military service the slaves of the South, then they could be emancipated, which would collapse the institution of slavery, and the southern economic and social systems, altogether.

These two possibilities worried southerners like James Monroe, George Mason (who owned over 300 slaves) and the southern Christian evangelical, Patrick Henry (who opposed slavery on principle, but also opposed freeing slaves). 

Their main concern was that Article 1, Section 8 of the newly-proposed Constitution, which gave the federal government the power to raise and supervise a militia, could also allow that federal militia to subsume their state militias and change them from slavery-enforcing institutions into something that could even, one day, free the slaves. 

This was not an imagined threat.  Famously, 12 years earlier, during the lead-up to the Revolutionary War, Lord Dunsmore offered freedom to slaves who could escape and join his forces.  "Liberty to Slaves" was stitched onto their jacket pocket flaps.  During the War, British General Henry Clinton extended the practice in 1779.  And numerous freed slaves served in General Washington's army.

Thus, southern legislators and plantation owners lived not just in fear of their own slaves rebelling, but also in fear that their slaves could be emancipated through military service.

At the ratifying convention in Virginia in 1788, Henry laid it out:

"Let me here call your attention to that part [Article 1, Section 8 of the proposed Constitution] which gives the Congress power to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States. . . .  

"By this, sir, you see that their control over our last and best defence is unlimited. If they neglect or refuse to discipline or arm our militia, they will be useless: the states can do neither . . . this power being exclusively given to Congress. The power of appointing officers over men not disciplined or armed is ridiculous; so that this pretended little remains of power left to the states may, at the pleasure of Congress, be rendered nugatory."

George Mason expressed a similar fear:

"The militia may be here destroyed by that method which has been practised in other parts of the world before; that is, by rendering them useless, by disarming them. Under various pretences, Congress may neglect to provide for arming and disciplining the militia; and the state governments cannot do it, for Congress has an exclusive right to arm them [under this proposed Constitution] . . . "

Henry then bluntly laid it out:

"If the country be invaded, a state may go to war, but cannot suppress [slave] insurrections [under this new Constitution]. If there should happen an insurrection of slaves, the country cannot be said to be invaded. They cannot, therefore, suppress it without the interposition of Congress . . . . Congress, and Congress only [under this new Constitution], can call forth the militia."

And why was that such a concern for Patrick Henry?

"In this state," he said, "there are two hundred and thirty-six thousand blacks, and there are many in several other states. But there are few or none in the Northern States. . . . May Congress not say, that every black man must fight? Did we not see a little of this last war? We were not so hard pushed as to make emancipation general; but acts of Assembly passed that every slave who would go to the army should be free."

Patrick Henry was also convinced that the power over the various state militias given the federal government in the new Constitution could be used to strip the slave states of their slave-patrol militias.  He knew the majority attitude in the North opposed slavery, and he worried they'd use the Constitution to free the South's slaves (a process then called "Manumission"). 

The abolitionists would, he was certain, use that power (and, ironically, this is pretty much what Abraham Lincoln ended up doing):

"[T]hey will search that paper [the Constitution], and see if they have power of manumission," said Henry.  "And have they not, sir? Have they not power to provide for the general defence and welfare? May they not think that these call for the abolition of slavery? May they not pronounce all slaves free, and will they not be warranted by that power?

"This is no ambiguous implication or logical deduction. The paper speaks to the point: they have the power in clear, unequivocal terms, and will clearly and certainly exercise it."

He added: "This is a local matter, and I can see no propriety in subjecting it to Congress."

James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution" and a slaveholder himself, basically called Patrick Henry paranoid.

"I was struck with surprise," Madison said, "when I heard him express himself alarmed with respect to the emancipation of slaves. . . . There is no power to warrant it, in that paper [the Constitution]. If there be, I know it not."

But the southern fears wouldn't go away. 

Patrick Henry even argued that southerner's "property" (slaves) would be lost under the new Constitution, and the resulting slave uprising would be less than peaceful or tranquil:

"In this situation," Henry said to Madison, "I see a great deal of the property of the people of Virginia in jeopardy, and their peace and tranquility gone."

So Madison, who had (at Jefferson's insistence) already begun to prepare proposed amendments to the Constitution, changed his first draft of one that addressed the militia issue to make sure it was unambiguous that the southern states could maintain their slave patrol militias. 

His first draft for what became the Second Amendment had said: "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country [emphasis mine]: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person."

But Henry, Mason and others wanted southern states to preserve their slave-patrol militias independent of the federal government.  So Madison changed the word "country" to the word "state," and redrafted the Second Amendment into today's form:

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State[emphasis mine], the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Little did Madison realize that one day in the future weapons-manufacturing corporations, newly defined as "persons" by a Supreme Court some have called dysfunctional, would use his slave patrol militia amendment to protect their "right" to manufacture and sell assault weapons used to murder schoolchildren.

On the positive side...

...if they're shooting up newspaper offices they won't be doing mass shootings at the local grammar school. I think there must be something in the Second Amendment about threatening to kill reporters too.

Mr. Doig pointed out that the recent publication of gun information by other papers has made access to this public information more difficult because legislators started blocking the data immediately. “The backlash, very typically from this, is for legislators to try to close up the access to this type of data.”

Mr. Worley said he had received mainly taunting phone calls sprinkled in with callers who said “you should die.” He found broken glass outside of his home and would not say how much time he was spending there right now. But he said he had largely been supported by the newsroom.

The Journal News’s features editor, Mary Dolan, said that while she was not involved with the publication of the article, her home address and phone numbers were published online in retaliation. She has had to disconnect her phone and has “taken my social media presence and just put it on the shelf for a while.” She has also received angry phone calls from former neighbors in Westchester whose gun information was published.

She said she was especially concerned about the part-time staff members who write up wedding anniversary and church potluck announcements who have been harassed. But she supports the paper for its decision.

“It sparked a conversation that needed to occur in this country, and it revealed tactics that will be employed when gun owners feel their rights are threatened,” she said.

Putnam County has refused to release similar data, but Ms. Hasson said she would continue to press for it. She would not say whether the paper had lost any of its advertisers. According to the Alliance for Audited Media, The Journal News, like many newspapers nationwide, has had sharp declines in circulation. Its total circulation from Monday through Friday fell from 111,536 in September 2007 to 68,850 in September 2012.

At the same time, Ms. Hasson has been trying to calm the nerves of her family after photographs of the home she is renting and references to her adult children were put online.

“They are concerned about my safety,” she said about her children. “But they are very supportive.”

 

Wackadoodle

Here.

It wasn't me, it was the gays!

Gee, we know that guns don't kill people, gays kill people. But now they're saying that atheists kill little kids in grammar school. Can't we just blame it on the Jews, or Obama?

All that was needed to make the national tragedy of the killing of 20 children and 6 adults into an anti-God kick in Jesus’ teeth fest was for the usual suspects who hate Jesus to step up to defame His Name again. Of course I’m talking about the “Christian” leaders who can be counted on to drag the name of Christ through the mud at every profitable fundraising importunity. Christian leaders say that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut was the result of our national falling away from fundamentalist Protestant gullibility.

The idiots — religious village idiots that is — are at it again. I thought Dobson was dead but I guess not. He’s just retired. He’s still alive enough to act like the zombie-for-Jesus’-younger-dumber-brother he is.(I went on his show 3 times back in the day when I too was part of the religious idiots club.) Bryan Fischer, the American Family Association hate host talk-show host, and Franklin-sell-my-soul-to-the-Mormos-because -I-hate-Obama-so-much-Graham (of course), the president and CEO of the tax-exempt Billy Graham Evangelistic Association was not to be outdone.

Dobson commented while speaking to listeners of his Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk program: “I mean millions of people have decided that God doesn’t exist… And a lot of these things are happening around us, and somebody is going to get mad at me for saying what I am about to say right now, but I am going to give you my honest opinion: I think we have turned our back on the scripture and on God almighty and I think he has allowed [this Newtown massacre] judgment to fall upon us. I think that’s what’s going on.”

Bryan Fischer of the American family Association said the victims at Sandy Hook had lost God’s protection because prayer has been prohibited from schools. “The question is going to come up, where was God?,” Fischer said. “I thought God cared about the little children. God protects the little children. Where was God when all this went down. Here’s the bottom line, God is not going to go where he is not wanted… Now we have spent since 1962 — we’re 50 years into this now–we have spent 50 years telling God to get lost, telling God we do not want you in our schools, we don’t want to pray to you in our schools, we do not want to pray to your before football games, we don’t want to pray to you at graduations, we don’t want anybody talking about you in a graduation speech… In 1962 we kicked prayer out of the schools. In 1963 we kicked God’s word out of ours schools. In 1980 we kicked the Ten Commandments out of our schools. We’ve kicked God out of our public school system. And I think God would say to us, ‘Hey, I’ll be glad to protect your children, but you’ve got to invite me back into your world first. I’m not going to go where I’m not wanted. I am a gentlemen.”

Franklin Graham wrote a “response” to the Newtown Massacre and did not mention the word gun.

Graham said more or less blamed the mdia and president Obama in a round about way: “’The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.’ He continued: “In fact, the Bible gives clear testimony to just how evil the human race became. ‘The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord ‘was grieved in His heart’ (Gen. 6:5-6).”Where do we go from here? We might start by looking at what we watch and listen to.” Graham — who has called President Obama a Muslim and not Christian at times — then took a cheap shot saying: “For example, South Korean rapper sensation Psy, who has gained worldwide acclaim by singing that Americans should be killed ‘slowly and painfully,’ including, ‘daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law and fathers’ was featured last weekend at ‘Christmas in Washington,’ a charity concert attended by President Obama. Parents and children are feeding on entertainment that portrays violence whether through lewd television programs, violent movies, offensive music, vulgar video games and anything- goes Internet gaming sites.”

Then Old Paths Baptist Church Pastor Sam Morris (of Tennessee) said: “Why do you still send your kids to the governmental schools?” the pastor asked the congregation. “What’s behind this shooting that we saw on Dec. 14 in Newtown, Connecticut and the other one’s like it? What’s going on. Well, number one, deception… I got news for you, when you kicked God out of schools, you’re going to be judged for that. He added: “They think homeschoolers are a bunch of crazies, man. But I’m going to tell you something, I’ve never seen a police officer or a medal detector at a home school. Never. Amen. Now, there’s plenty of guns at my home school. Amen. I guarantee you we’re not going to have a mass shooting at any of the schools that are represented in this building today. I guarantee you, if there is a shooting, it won’t last very long. Amen. I guarantee you there’s at least six or seven guns in this place right now. Amen.“So, here you are, you’re an animal and you’re a god! So, what are we going to teach you about in school? Well, we can teach you about sex, we can teach you how to rebel to you parents, we can teach you how to be a homo!”

Who hates Jesus? It isn’t the so-called new atheists like Richard Dawkins. It’s the Christian leaders bent on taking Christianity down with them into their private hell of stupidity. With friends like these Jesus needs no enemies. The re-crucifixion of Jesus by his “followers” continues.

 

Both sides do it

Both sides dump manure at the other guy's headquarters. Right?

It's the kind of thing that fun-loving tricksters of all political parties do.

Or this.

A gunshot was fired into President Barack Obama's downtown Denver re-election headquarters on Friday while campaign workers were inside but no one was struck, police said.

Denver Police Detective Raquel Lopez said a worker inside the office called police in mid-afternoon to report that a bullet had shattered a window pane.

"Right now, no one is in custody and investigators are looking at surveillance video to see if a vehicle can be identified," Lopez said.

Lopez said it was a single shot and no one inside was physically injured.

Detectives are not aware of any threats made to the campaign, but are exploring all possibilities, she said.

More detail on Republicans in Arkansas

Here. I especially appreciate that he compares "American Christians" to those goosesteppers of the past.

"American Christians are assuming a similar stance as did the citizens of Germany during Hitler's rise to power." 

I'd noticed the same but it means more when it's coming from the horse's, er, mouth.

And here is some stuff on Charlie Fuqua, another Arkansas Republican. I think the proper term is eliminationist.

I wonder why this is being underreported

The cop killings in Louisiana struck me as being underreported. You would think that the national press would have some more details after a couple days and seven arrests.

Apparently, the far right is becoming unhinged. After all, it is an election year and a black man is running. In Wisconsin a neo-Nazi shoots up a Sikh temple. Now it appears that these seven people are part of the Posse Comitatus, a reactionary group that had some prominence back in the Seventies.

A year ago, he was wanted by Nebraska authorities for allegedly making “terroristic threats” to law enforcement.

By Friday, investigators said Kyle Joekel, 28, was one of seven people involved in what was being described as a pair of ambushes on sheriff’s deputies outside of New Orleans. Two deputies were killed and two others wounded before it all came to an end early Thursday morning.

According to a report by the Shreveport Times, investigators in Louisiana had Joekel on their radar for months before the shooting and believed he was part of some sort of “anti-government group.”

A spokesperson for the Louisiana State Police, which is the lead agency in the ambush investigation, declined on Friday to say whether his agency’s investigators believe anti-government views were a motive for the killings. However, Sgt. Len Marie told TPM those questions could lead to something bigger.

“We’ll definitely look into that and it will be part of a much larger investigation outside of the murder investigation,” Marie said. “We just don’t want to rule anything out.”

The previous probe into Joekel was conducted about two months ago by the DeSoto Parish Sheriff’s Office in north Louisiana, according to the Shreveport Times. It began after neighbors apparently saw Joekel and others carrying assault weapons in and out of a trailer. But nothing ever came of it, the newspaper reported, because investigators were unable to get enough evidence for a search warrant or arrests.

Joekel’s run-ins with police were nothing new. He was wanted by authorities in both Nebraska and Kansas since at least August 2011.

The website of the Gage County Sheriff’s Office in Nebraska listed him as a fugitive, saying he fled the area after being involved in a bizarre incident that took place in both states and involved him making “terroristic threats toward law enforcement and other individuals.”

The details of the incident were not immediately clear on Friday afternoon, but the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that the sheriff of Gage County believed Joekel was part of a group known as Posse Comitatus. The group, which was largely active in the 1970s and 80s, was seen as the precursor to the sovereign citizens movement.

“It just didn’t look right,” Sheriff Millard “Gus” Gustafson told the newspaper. “These guys would be driving around at night, and they’d have weapons on the front seat. If you’re doing that, something’s wrong — you’re either hunting illegally or doing something else.”

Authorities said Joekel and another suspect, Brian Smith, 24, were still in the hospital as of Friday afternoon, having been injured in the shootout with police. Authorities have not released details on their conditions. Five others were arrested and each being held on at least $350,000 bond: Terry Lynn Smith, 44; Derrick Smith, 22; Chanel Melissa Skains, 37; Britney Keith, 23; and Teniecha Teniel Bright, 21. Authorities said Terry Lynn Smith with the father of Brian and Derrick Smith.

Investigators said the first attack happened at about 5 a.m. on Thursday in the parking lot of a Valero refinery in LaPlace, in south Louisiana, just upriver of New Orleans.

St. John the Baptist Parish sheriff’s deputy Michael Scott Boyington approached a car that five of the suspects were in. Authorities said someone from the car shot him. The group then drove away.

A short time later, the suspects were followed to a trailer park in LaPlace. There, police said, deputies arrested one of the suspects and had him in custody when another one sneaked up on them and opened fire. St. John Sheriff Mike Tregre said the suspect used an assault weapon in the attack, but the state police spokesman declined to confirm what types of weapons were recovered in the investigation.

Authorities have not disclosed which suspects were allegedly present at the second incident or who pulled the trigger. Deputies Jeremy Triche and Brandon Nielsen were killed. A fourth deputy, Jason Triche, was wounded.