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Right-leaning groups say the evidence of a distinct rise in militia-type activity is spotty and that the Southern Poverty Law Center is unfairly lumping isolated extremists in the same category as those who are protesting the administration's economic and social policies. Conservative groups are rejecting as "anecdotal and exaggerated" a report out of the Southern Poverty Law Center that claims the election of a black president has fanned the flames of a resurgent anti-government "militia movement." The SPLC report cited a recent rash of ideologically driven violent crimes, rising gun sales, a reported rise in the number of militia groups...

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: MUST READ: Don't believe them From: "Barry Jackson, AARP" Date: Wed, August 05, 2009 4:01 pm To: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Dear Margaret, If your inbox is anything like mine, you're getting a lot of emails about how SCARY health reform is. From allegations about rationing care to wild reports of government-sponsored euthanasia, the rumors just keep getting crazier. And I've had enough. Enough of the fear-mongering. Enough of the myths and unfounded rumors. Enough of the interest groups twisting the truth to stop health reform. I'm fighting back - and I'm asking for your help! Below...

First, credit where it's due: A few lonely Republican leaders are belatedly trying to clean up the party's mess of crazy, from the racially tinged character attacks on Sonia Sotomayor to the unhinged rhetoric of the Birthers to the overall vicious and fact-free spew of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. It's not working yet -- Beck's claiming Obama "has a deep-seated hatred for white people" on Tuesday might be a new low -- but at least someone's trying. Sen. Lindsey Graham tried to kick off a new GOP flirtation with decency when he announced his vote to confirm Sotomayor last...

Dallas Morning News’s Wayne Slater become one of the first pundits after the shootings at the Holocaust Museum on Wednesday to hint that there was a connection to mainstream conservative activists. On CNN Newsroom, about two hours after the story broke, Slater linked this incident and the murder of abortionist George Tiller with “anti-tax secessionists in Texas,” his label for Tea Party protesters. Anchor Rick Sanchez moderated a panel discussion on the Holocaust Museum shootings after the bottom of the 3 pm Eastern hour of the CNN program....Sanchez asked the Dallas Morning News political writer if criminals like this suspect...

For the first time in years, more Americans than not say the country is headed in the right direction, a sign that Barack Obama has used the first 100 days of his presidency to lift the public's mood and inspire hopes for a brighter future. Intensely worried about their personal finances and medical expenses, Americans nonetheless appear realistic about the time Obama might need to turn things around, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll. It shows most Americans consider their new president to be a strong, ethical and empathetic leader who is working to change Washington. Nobody knows how long...

The wackjob Moonbats continue to demonize their favorite target: former VP Dick Cheney. Earlier this month, Keith Olbermann made the same claim citing Sy Hersh. Surprisingly, Cheney's so called "assassins" are merely Joint Special Operations Command, a unit which continues to operate under Obama. And yes, they assassinate terrorists. Which is good because under Team "O", living terrorists are now being treated better than most American citizens.

Anyone that cannot call evil what it is: Evil, is nothing more then a coward..... Christianity was started by a young Palestinian named Jesus and the 9/11 murderers were not Islamic Fundamentalists but simply a generic "teams of terrorists." That's the caliber of politically corrected crap many of our children are being taught in American public schools -- and it's past time all parents took serious notice.

This year's Oscar story lines have already been etched in stone — Mickey Rourke as the comeback kid, Slumdog Millionaire as the art-house wunderkind, Milk as the timely social commentary (released three weeks after Proposition 8 passed in California). Yet while the critics have been fussing over wrestlers and Mumbai quiz shows, audiences have been flocking to Gran Torino — an Oscar outcast that's been doing laps around the competition at the box office. At some point this week, the Clint Eastwood drama will pass the $100 million mark, easily surpassing the box-office receipts brought in by not only some...

"Liberal news outlet The Huffington Post has announced its latest venture funding round. The upswing: It is $25 million, not $15 million as previously rumored."

There is only one person on the political right wing that seems to have made a bigger fool of himself in the last five years than Sarah Palin and that's conservative, uh -- well, I really don't know what the hell he does for a living -- Alan Keyes. Actually he was a U.S. Ambassador under Reagan...big freakin' whoop. Now, we've long known that Keyes is a staunch defender of what he calls traditional American Christian values. In fact, he is so far gone in his fixation on making America one big Father Knows Best marathon that he makes Pat...

With all trends running against them, Republicans' only hope is to reinvent themselves as pragmatists. That, or nominate Sarah Palin and go out in a blaze of glory. Surveying the wreckage after American voters gave their party the bum's rush, Republican thinkers have pondered what went wrong, searched their souls -- and decided that the way to regain power is to move further to the right. In postmortem conferences and symposiums, in right-wing journals and Web sites, on Fox News, the overwhelming consensus among Republican analysts is that the only thing wrong with conservatism is that it isn't conservative enough....

Tuesday's Republican debacle was, as the social scientists say, "over-determined." It had many causes. Was it brought on by congressional corruption, Bush administration incompetence, intellectual exhaustion or John McCain's failings as a candidate? All of the above -- and then some. In 2006, voters set out to punish Republicans for loose practices in Washington -- most spectacularly the scandal involving lobbyist Jack Abramoff -- and the mishandling of the Iraq war. This year, they decided that Republicans deserved another whipping, even before the September financial meltdown added yet another black mark against the Bush administration.

Obama's defeat of the heir apparent in his own party and his victory over the much-vaunted Republican machine is a remarkable achievement that owes a lot to his instinct for marketing When the book is written on this election, it should not be titled "The Making of a President," but "The Marketing of a President." Barack Obama's campaign is a case study in marketing excellence. True, it was always going to be a Democratic year. An unpopular war, an incumbent Republican president with rock bottom approval ratings, and many Republican incumbents retiring from Congress as a result all meant that...

...as pundits and partisans have debated the significance of his relationship with Senator Barack Obama, William Ayers has avoided the limelight, steering clear of political commentary and public pronouncements. But on Sunday afternoon, Mr. Ayers, 63, a founder of the 1960s-era radical group the Weather Underground, a former fugitive, former Chicago Citizen of the Year and current professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, appeared without fanfare at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, in Chelsea, to participate in a symposium on educational justice. snip... The two men have been described as friendly, but not close. snip...the WNYC radio...

US Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has attacked his rival for negative campaigning in the final days before the election. Mr Obama, appearing in Nevada, said the "ugly phone calls, the misleading mail and TV ads, the careless, outrageous comments" were preventing change. Republican rival John McCain, aware of being behind in the polls as he spoke in New Mexico, said he was a "fighter". He told supporters not to give up hope of a White House victory. Both candidates were campaigning in western US states during the weekend. Nevada, New Mexico and Colarado were all Republican at the last...

Terrorist strikes on four American cities. Russia rolling into Eastern Europe. Israel hit by a nuclear bomb. Gay marriage in every state. The end of the Boy Scouts. All are plausible scenarios if Democrat Barack Obama is elected president, according to a new addition to the campaign conversation called "Letter from 2012 in Obama's America," produced by the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family Action. The imagined look into the future is part of an escalation in rhetoric from Christian right activists who are trying to paint Obama in the worst possible terms as the campaign heads into the...

Blacks and Latinos are more likely than whites to be stopped, searched and arrested by the Los Angeles Police Department, according to a report released Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. Earlier this year, the Police Commission was told that 252 out of 320 allegations of officers confronting someone solely because of race were unfounded. The remaining cases were dropped due to insufficient evidence or a lack of evidence of misconduct. The ACLU looked at 810,000 field stops between July 1, 2003, and June 30, 2004. The group found there were 4,569 stops per 10,000 black...

WASHINGTON — An ugly line has been crossed in this presidential campaign, one in which some people don't mind calling Barack Obama a dangerous Muslim, a terrorist and worse. "To me, this all feels much worse than we've seen in some time," said Kathryn Kolbert , the president of People for the American Way , which monitors political speech. Experts agree on the reasons: Obama, the Democratic nominee, is different from any other major presidential candidate in history in many ways, and people often don't accept such change gracefully. That different background fuels many fears, said Penni Pier , who's...

Over the weekend Sarah Palin accused Barack Obama of "palling around" with terrorists--a reference to his longstanding friendship and professional association with Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, husband-and-wife Chicago college professors who are unrepentant about their activities in the Weather Underground gang. According to an "analysis" by Douglass Daniel of the Associated Press, "[Palin's] attack was unsubstantiated." Palin said she got her information from the New York Times, and we suppose it says something that this isn't good enough for the AP. Odder still is Daniel's claim that Palin's statement "carried a racially tinged subtext that John McCain himself may...

NEW YORK, Oct 05, 2008 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Hillary Clinton would beat Sarah Palin head-to-head by a 2-to-1 margin if the 2012 presidential election were held today, according to women voters. A national telephone survey of 600 registered women voters was conducted by Blum & Weprin from September 25 through October 3, 2008. The poll, commissioned by SheZoom.com, a new women's internet media company, is titled 'Palin vs. Clinton - You Decide.' The survey (with a margin of error of +/- 4 percentage points) queried women in all 50 states on their personal and political preferences pertaining to the...

In five weeks, I hope to look back on this column with a wry chuckle at my paranoia. If the system works, Barack Obama will take the White House. The two issues John McCain is most closely associated with, invading Iraq, and deregulating the economy, have produced history-snatching catastrophes in the eyes of 80 per cent of Americans. In the first debate, McCain revealed he had nothing to say except more of the same: aggression abroad, market fundamentalist ideology at home. So why am I worried? Obama is only a few jittery points ahead in the polls, and he has...

In a white-steepled church along a stretch in picturesque canyon country, the preacher laid out the basic blueprint of a godly marriage: Husbands lead, wives submit. Speaking recently before hundreds of worshipers at Placerita Baptist Church in Newhall, guest preacher Chris Mueller affirmed the view that loving male headship and gracious wifely submission are God's plan for spouses. Placerita, like many conservative Christian churches, teaches that a wife's role is to be her husband's helpmate (Genesis), "workers at home" (Titus) and submissive to her husband in everything (Ephesians). So how do these congregants square such teachings with their support for...

HOUSTON — Illegal Immigration, a hot-button populist issue that many experts had expected to top the nation's political concerns this year, has largely vanished from the presidential campaign amid waning interest from voters and mounting delays in constructing a 670-mile border fence between the United States and Mexico. Moreover, primary results and opinion polls in recent months indicate that the Republican Party's emphasis on a crackdown against illegal immigrants may be driving many Hispanic voters... At the presidential level, the three remaining contenders have little to debate on the topic...all essentially agree on the need for...measures to permit the estimated...

THE curse continues. Regardless of party, it’s hara-kiri for a politician to step into the shadow of even a mediocre speech by Barack Obama. Senator Obama’s televised victory oration celebrating his Chesapeake primary trifecta on Tuesday night was a mechanical rehash. No matter. When the networks cut from the 17,000-plus Obama fans cheering at a Wisconsin arena to John McCain’s victory tableau before a few hundred spectators in the Old Town district of Alexandria, Va., it was a rerun of what happened to Hillary Clinton the night she lost Iowa. Senator McCain, backed by a collection of sallow-faced old Beltway...

Well, I was browsing around Hastings a few minutes ago and what do I see? A Movie Maker magazine with an article called "Hollywood Invades Iraq". Of course, Hollywood and Iraq don't make a good mix, so I investigated...and it seems the liberals are wasting no time in generating propaganda for the 2008 election. First, we've got "Against All Enemies" which is apparently going to talk about how Bush missed warnings of 9/11 and then botched the War on Terror (I guess no one told the producers about how the planning for 9/11 started when Clinton was in office and...

5 Myths About Rendition (and That New Movie) By Daniel Benjamin Saturday, October 20, 2007 With hearings in Congress, legal cases bouncing up to the Supreme Court and complaints from Canada and our European allies, the issue of rendition is everywhere. There's even a new, eponymously titled movie in a theater near you, starring Reese Witherspoon as a bereft wife whose innocent husband gets kidnapped and Meryl Streep as the frosty CIA chief who ordered the snatch. Like most covert actions and much of the war on al-Qaeda, the practice is shrouded in mystery -- and, increasingly, the suspicion that...

Photos of a shirtless Vladimir Putin on vacation in Siberia have stirred numerous debates and set hearts aflutter. But some of the photos of him taken on the same trip -- topless and with a rifle -- were only made available to the Russian media.

Aug. 23, 2007 - The Soviet Union was in its final days of existence when I visited Vietnam in late December of 1991. The cold war was about to end forever with the collapse of one of the two adversaries that had kept it going for 40-odd years. A lot had changed in Vietnam, too, I discovered during my trip. The coziness between Moscow and Hanoi, once comrades within the Soviet bloc, had curdled into mutual hatred. Throughout the country, but especially in the North, the Vietnamese had come to despise the large resident Russian population for its cheap spending...

Brian Williams and Tim Russert made it sound like John Warner, "one of the president's strongest allies on the War in Iraq", has now changed his stance and wants to bring the troops home. John Warner sold the president up the river long ago. For the NBC talking heads to claim this is a new, dramatic shift, is an outragous lie and they need to be called on it. I don't believe I have every witnessed a more blatant collection of lies.

During an interview with Bill O'Reilly about Hurricane Dean, Accuweather expert Joe Bastardi stated that current oceanic temperature patterns mirror the patterns of the 1930's and 1940's. A chart was displayed showing the specific Pacific and Atlantic temperature patterns. Although Bastardi didn't clearly state that current conventional Global Warming theory is bunk, the CLEAR inference of his commentary was that the worshipers of the Religion of Global Warming are disconnected from history, and from the truth.

President Bush got a lesson from a group of recent high school graduates. They were Presidential Scholars, a program designed "to recognize and provide leadership development experiences for some of America's most outstanding graduating high school seniors." The 141 Presidential Scholars were being honored at the White House. One of them, Mari Oye, from Wellesley, Mass., describes what happened: "The president walked in and gave us a short speech, saying that as we went on into our careers, it was important to treat others as we would like to be treated. And he told us that we would have to...

In his public television special "Buying the War," Bill Moyers decries the tendency of the media to help the White House sell war to the public. Moyers should know. He was quite a salesman in his day. Moyers served as press secretary to Lyndon Johnson in the run- up to the Vietnam War. In that role, he employed all the tools of modern-day public relations, from schmoozing reporters to intimidating them, to get the press to go along with a war "so poorly planned it soon turned into a disaster." In the documentary, Moyers ap plies that description to the...

NEW YORK // Crammed with Lenin buttons, dusty memos from the McCarthy period, and crumbling pages of internal briefings dating back a century, the 2,000 cardboard boxes handed over to New York University last month hold secrets about the Communist Party USA that make archivist Peter Filardo's heart flutter. ...Last year, Filardo received a phone call from the Communist Party's national chairman, Sam Webb, who told him the organization wanted to donate its archival collection to the Tamiment Library at NYU. The party planned to renovate its headquarters, Webb said, and it no longer had room for the cache, which...

BERKELEY, Calif. - Jane Stillwater is an unlikely war correspondent. She's 64, a self-described Berkeley "flower child, 40 years later" and broke. So how did this mother of four grown children end up in Baghdad, churning out commentary ranging from shock at Thursday's bombing of the Iraqi parliament cafeteria, to the weirdness of touring Saddam Hussein's bathroom? Inspired by a sense of outrage and determined to blog from inside the war zone, Stillwater ate peanut butter sandwiches for months to save up for a ticket to Kuwait. She got a small Texas newspaper to help her secure press accreditation, and...

War on terror backfires: think tank The US-led war on terror is only fuelling more violence by focusing on military solutions rather than on root causes, a British think tank has warned. "The war on terror is failing and actually increasing the likelihood of more terrorist attacks," the Oxford Research Group said in its study Beyond Terror: The Truth About The Real Threats To Our World. It accused the United States and Britain of using military might to try to "keep the lid on" problems rather than trying to uproot the causes of terrorism.

To the editor, Radical Christian fundamentalists are not preaching peace and understanding. I am disturbed by the March 31 letter that claims America is at "world wide war" with Muslims. Our own homegrown fundamentalist Christians are behaving as warmongers who believe in a "clash of civilizations." They do not want to assimilate into America's multicultural melting pot. Radical fundamentalist Christians believe that this "war" will not stop with dialogue, only with one side being defeated. They will not be satisfied until the entire world is one big "Christian" theocracy. Right now, here in America, fundamentalist Christian pharmacists are refusing to...

A new, long-term hunger strike has broken out at the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, with more than a dozen detainees subjecting themselves to daily force-feeding to protest their treatment, military officials and lawyers for the detainees said. Lawyers for several hunger strikers said their clients’ action were driven by harsh conditions in a new maximum security complex to which about 160 prisoners have been moved since December. The 13 detainees now on hunger strikes is the highest number to endure the force-feeding regimen on an extended basis since early 2006, when the military broke a long-running strike...

House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) has asked the Republican National Committee to provide his committee with copies of all the e-mails sent by administration officials “for partisan political purposes.� Waxman, who is traveling in the Middle East this week with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), sent a letter to RNC Chairman Mike Duncan on Wednesday requesting his political committee to provide the government reform panel with e-mails that are still stored on RNC servers. The government reform chairman is following up on revelations that surfaced during a hearing last week that White House political aide...

Britain must accept arrest in Iran waters Published: 03.28.07, 22:15 / Israel News Britain must accept that Iran arrested the 15 British sailors in Iranian waters, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said on Wednesday. "The real picture is that the British sailors were arrested in the territorial waters of Iran ... This must be accepted by the government of the UK," Mottaki said. Asked if Tehran plans to release the only woman servicewoman arrested along with 14 sailors and Marines by Thursday, Mottaki said: "As soon as possible." (Reuters)

President Bush tried to meet Congress halfway on that trumped-up federal prosecutor nonsense - and got his hand slapped away. No surprise. So why did he even bother? On Tuesday, the president decided to let Congress look at executive-branch internal documents regarding personnel practice - an almost unheard of gesture. All he asked was that lawmakers not issue subpoenas and create a media spectacle over the matter. But less than 24 hours later, a House panel nonetheless authorized subpoenas for White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, ex-Counsel Harriet Miers and other key Bush aides. So much for the...

The other day, a friend asked, "Is it just me, or are the wheels coming off the world?" It's not him - the wheels are coming off. And that was true before reports of an assassination attempt against Vice President Dick Cheney in Afghanistan.

US Corporate Profits At Highest Levels, Too (CBS4) WASHINGTON -- The percentage of poor Americans who are living in severe poverty is the highest in thirty years, in which millions of working Americans are falling closer to the poverty line, and the gulf between this country’s ''haves'' and ''have-nots'' gets wider. The McClatchy Company - owners of the Miami Herald – a CBS4 news partner - went through an analysis of 2005 census figures, the latest available, and found that nearly 16 million Americans are living in deep or severe poverty. A family of four, with two children and...

The Nation -- Republican apologists for the Bush administration's failed fight in Iraq and their amen corner in the media have been looking for something, anything, to distract the American public from a necessary discussion about the need to end the U.S. occupation of that country. They finally settled last week on the "scandal" involving House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's mode of transporation. Pelosi, a California Democrat, was informed as she prepared to assume the speakership -- a position that places her third in the line of succession to the presidency -- that she could no longer travel as she previously...

American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America Chris Hedges reviewed by Prof. Jon Wiener Free Press / 256 pages / $25 American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America is a call to arms against what Hedges sees as the efforts of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and the operators of Trinity Broadcasting Network, among others, to turn the United States into a Christian nation. ...In American Fascists, Hedges reports in fascinating detail what goes on inside the churches, conventions and meeting halls of the Christian right. He attends a "Love Won Out" conference in Boston,...

Friday January 12, 2007 By AARON C. DAVIS Associated Press Writer SACRAMENTO (AP) -- How great is California? Well, if it broke off from the United States and became its own country, it would be the ``sixth-largest economy'' in the world, as the oft-repeated phrase goes. The description has become ubiquitous, championed so often by politicians and reporters that it has become boilerplate for describing the state's buoyant economy. Most recently, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger used it in his state of the state address to make a case for comparing California to ancient Greece a modern-day ``nation-state.'' ``California has the ideas...

NYT: THREATENED BY THE INTERNET, TIME MAGAZINE SLIMS DOWN Sun Jan 07 2007 19:12:16 ET TIME magazine, which has been coming out every Monday for over 36 years, hit the streets last Friday instead. "I believe that getting the magazine on newsstands on Friday helps us set the news agenda," explained Richard Stengel, the managing editor. NEW YORK TIMES media columnist David Carr takes the opportunity to rain on TIME's first weekend parade: "At the end of the month, there will be significant layoffs at the magazine division... In the last six months, the huge rate base of Time magazine...

Accusing ExxonMobil of funding a "disinformation campaign" against global warming, an environmental activist group said Wednesday the oil giant has been paying advocacy groups to create confusion about climate change. The corporation and two of the organizations targeted by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) dismissed the allegation, variously calling it a smear, "junk," and motivated by a left-wing agenda. In a new report, the UCS charged that ExxonMobil "doesn't want you to know the facts about global warming" and that it "vehemently opposes any governmental regulation that would require significantly expanded investments in clean energy technologies or reductions in...

Characters on Showtime's 'Sleeper Cell' Espouse How Bush and CIA Behind 9/11 Attacks Posted by Brent Baker on December 11, 2006 - 18:47. The premiere Sunday night of the second season of Showtime's week-long mini-series, Sleeper Cell: American Terror, gave time to two characters espousing how President Bush and the CIA were behind the 9/11 attacks. The eight-part series, airing for an hour at 9pm EST/PST (with an 11pm EST/PST) repeat every night through this Sunday on the CBS-owned network, picks up after last season which ended with an undercover Muslim FBI agent at the last-minute thwarting a plot to...

To live peacefully with Muslims and Jews, Christians must put aside the notion that their faith requires the creation of a Christian kingdom on Earth, a Lipscomb University theologian told an interfaith gathering at the university. "We are not going to get very far in our relationship with Jews or Muslims if we do not let go of this idea," Lipscomb professor Lee Camp said at Tuesday's conference. The unusual gathering of several dozen clergy and lay people was devoted to resolving religious conflict in Nashville and around the world. "We need to forsake the Christendom model," Camp said. "The...

Nairobi, Kenya – A new United Nations children’s book promoting fears of catastrophic manmade global warming is being promoted at the UN Climate Change Conference in Kenya. The book's main character, a young boy, is featured getting so worried about a coming manmade climate disaster that he yells “I don’t want to hear anymore!” The new children’s book, entitled “Tore and the Town on Thin Ice” ((http://www.unep.org/PDF/TORE.pdf)) is published by the United Nations Environment Programme and blames “rich countries” for creating a climate catastrophe and urges children to join environmental groups. The book is about a young boy named Tore...