I don;t know whether to be disgusted or just plain angry.

http://www.ksdk.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=201365

Our local NBC affiliate has revealed that the Catholic Church has a center where it "treats" its pedophile priests. Especially heinous offenders are sent to the center for "rehabilitation." A former employer of the center, which is much like a summer camp where the priests are left free to roam, contacted the station after she became disgusted with what the priests there were doing. Some have access to pornography. There is no real supervision.

I have real problems with this. Why is the Catholic Church treated differently from any other organization in the world? If someone did the things that some of these priests are accused of, especially in a church, they would be arrested and incarcerated at a REAL jail to be molested by REAL inmates skilled in such matters.

I invite you to watch the report at the link above and form your own opinion. My respect for the Catholic Church diminishes by the day, especially with every revelation of the actions of its leadership in covering up the actions of its clergy.

Recent updates on life

I finally finished my ham radio installation in my vehicle. The installation of the Yaesu FT-1802M was accomplished by several things. Not only including inventiveness, some shade tree "mechanicin" and a little blood, sweat and tears. This picture to the left shows the antenna installation I opted to do. Rather than break the factory seal on the sunroof, which would probably have resulted in a lot of headaches, roof distortion, hands sticky with silicone sealant and a leaky roof, I decided to compromise and put it through the door I use the least, the passenger side.

As an aside, on Saturday the 24rd I was awoken by my weather radio blaring an alarm about a severe Thunderstorm warning and a tornado warning for my area. As a volunteer storm spotter I leapt into action getting out in truck to start spotting and hopefully make a phone call if there was a storm. The radio hadn't been installed yet so I was armed with the cell phone with a number to the Skywarn office we have at the County EOC.

I opened my door to a yellow sky which isn't a good sign. So I watched the storm clouds gather and sure enough, it started to rain. Only this wasn't an ordinary rain, no, by all means. I think the technical term is GULLY WASHER. Like being in a car wash, except all that is being washed is also possible in the process of being blown away by the high winds being driven by the rain and vice versa. I watch to my right as my neighbors lawn furniture and radio (probably now useless due to its being drenched) start to take flight in the wind.

It was then that I started to notice my roof was leaking. One of the connector points to the sunroof hatch was leaking by drips. Not too bad, but then I didn't want to be wet. I began a search for something to staunch the flow and found a napkin that quickly became saturated. I couldn't see a thing due to the intensity of the rain and wind so I was not very useful at that point as a storm spotter.

I heard someone on the scanner report that someone to the west had seen a funnel cloud over St. Clair Hospital, which is the new one built just to the North west of where I live near Hwy 141 and Interstate 44. So I just have to hope it isn't heading for me. Then the funnel touched down briefly at a spot east of the West County Center Mall. Fortunately it didn't hit a mall crowded with shoppers. It damaged several homes in that area and lifted off heading for Illinois to cause more damage. Another tornado struck Overland, MO ripping apart a storage facility with one spotter reporting shopping carts and items of clothing, appliances and other articles raining from the heavens.

The most amazing thing I was to behold was on the television. KSDK apparently decided that coverage of the Chicago Blackhawks/Nashville Predators Hockey game was far more important than the fact that the city was being pummeled by tornadoes. Usually KTVI, the Fox affiliate is the one I like to watch for emergency weather info because they have a couple of professional Met guys on staff. Chris Higgins is in the Air Force Reserve and spent a year deployed to Iraq, being a lead forcaster in the Air Force office for Central Command. KMOV is usually the more panicky people but have lots of reporters and such out looking for nice pictures. Our ABC affiliate is owned by a large eastern conglomerate and has decided that we need no local news and continued to broadcast the ABC network stream or infomercials it always does.

After this event I began to tell myself I need to get myself set for the need to modify my vehicle. However, I was much too drained to do it over the weekend I encountered another wave of storms the weekend of the 30th. Tornadoes danced all around me but no damage here. I did take my Mom and myself to Shop and Save since it was a better shelter than my trailer.

Now back to the subject at hand. I finished the installation yesterday and so far it has held up and I am proud of myself The picture at the top shows my antenna installation which is a magnetic mount with plastic clips holding my antenna wire. The clips are held on with double sided foam stickey which is the same kind of installation we use for our safety lights on the vehicles at work.

Here is the installation at the rear of the vehicle for the antenna proper. You can't see any sticky clips here because they are behind the roof rack.











Now here is the dashboard installation. I got me a ashtray holder from a similar vehicle and used that for my under dash installation. I screwed the bracket for the radio to the spare and then reinstalled it in the conventional location back under the dash. I then installed the radio which is underneath the car CD player above. It is for the moment powered by a cigarette lighter socket connected to the power cable supplied by the manufacturer.



The future of the installation is shown here. This is the ashtray that came with the bracket I stripped from the salvage car. What I will do is cut off the front end of it to place in the bracket to cover the screws. It will look like the ashtray. I may also put the three socket strip I am going to use in the future in that area and that will be used to power cell phone, laptop and other items I need to power.




Now I am set up for my future storm spotting. I need to have the spark plugs swapped out with resister spark plugs to kill the interference from the engine on the radio like Jade has advised.me to do.

Next project? Installing a new rear window with a windshield wiper on the back. Stay tuned.

The Bankers Manifesto of 1892 or could it be 2010

The Bankers Manifesto of 1892

The Father and his more famous son.

Revealed by US Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh, SR from Minnesota before the US Congress sometime during his term of office between the years of 1907 and 1917 to warn the citizens.

"We (the bankers) must proceed with caution and guard every move made, for the lower order of people are already showing signs of restless commotion. Prudence will therefore show a policy of apparently yielding to the popular will until our plans are so far consummated that we can declare our designs without fear of any organized resistance.

The Farmers Alliance and Knights of Labor organizations in the United States should be carefully watched by our trusted men, and we must take immediate steps to control these organizations in our interest or disrupt them.

At the coming Omaha Convention to be held July 4th (1892), our men must attend and direct its movement, or else there will be set on foot such antagonism to our designs as may require force to overcome. This at the present time would be premature. We are not yet ready for such a crisis. Capital must protect itself in every possible manner through combination (conspiracy) and legislation.

The courts must be called to our aid, debts must be collected, bonds and mortgages foreclosed as rapidly as possible.

When through the process of the law, the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and easily governed through the influence of the strong arm of the government applied to a central power of imperial wealth under the control of the leading financiers. People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders.

History repeats itself in regular cycles. This truth is well known among our principal men who are engaged in forming an imperialism of the world. While they are doing this, the people must be kept in a state of political antagonism.

The question of tariff reform must be urged through the organization known as the Democratic Party, and the question of protection with the reciprocity must be forced to view through the Republican Party.

By thus dividing voters, we can get them to expand their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us, except as teachers to the common herd. Thus, by discrete action, we can secure all that has been so generously planned and successfully accomplished."

Greg Palast - Slick Operator - The BP I have known so well

Slick Operator: The BP I've Known Too Well

Wednesday 05 May 2010

by: Greg Palast, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

I've seen this movie before. In 1989, I was a fraud investigator hired to dig into the cause of the Exxon Valdez disaster. Despite Exxon's name on that boat, I found the party most to blame for the destruction was ... British Petroleum (BP).

That's important to know, because the way BP caused devastation in Alaska is exactly the way BP is now sliming the entire Gulf Coast.

Tankers run aground, wells blow out, pipes burst. It shouldn't happen, but it does. And when it does, the name of the game is containment. Both in Alaska, when the Exxon Valdez grounded, and in the Gulf last week, when the Deepwater Horizon platform blew, it was British Petroleum that was charged with carrying out the Oil Spill Response Plans (OSRP), which the company itself drafted and filed with the government.

What's so insane, when I look over that sickening slick moving toward the Delta, is that containing spilled oil is really quite simple and easy. And from my investigation, BP has figured out a very low-cost way to prepare for this task: BP lies. BP prevaricates, BP fabricates and BP obfuscates.

That's because responding to a spill may be easy and simple, but not at all cheap. And BP is cheap. Deadly cheap.

To contain a spill, the main thing you need is a lot of rubber, long skirts of it called a "boom." Quickly surround a spill, leak or burst, then pump it out into skimmers, or disperse it, sink it or burn it. Simple.

But there's one thing about the rubber skirts: you've got to have lots of them at the ready, with crews on standby in helicopters and on containment barges ready to roll. They have to be in place round the clock, all the time, just like a fire department, even when all is operating A-O.K. Because rapid response is the key. In Alaska, that was BP's job, as principal owner of the pipeline consortium Alyeska. It is, as well, BP's job in the Gulf, as principal lessee of the deepwater oil concession.

Before the Exxon Valdez grounding, BP's Alyeska group claimed it had these full-time, oil spill response crews. Alyeska had hired Alaskan natives, trained them to drop from helicopters into the freezing water and set booms in case of emergency. Alyeska also certified in writing that a containment barge with equipment was within five hours sailing of any point in the Prince William Sound. Alyeska also told the state and federal government it had plenty of boom and equipment cached on Bligh Island.

But it was all a lie. On that March night in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef in the Prince William Sound, the BP group had, in fact, not a lick of boom there. And Alyeska had fired the natives who had manned the full-time response teams, replacing them with phantom crews, lists of untrained employees with no idea how to control a spill. And that containment barge at the ready was, in fact, laid up in a drydock in Cordova, locked under ice, 12 hours away.

As a result, the oil from the Exxon Valdez, which could have and should have been contained around the ship, spread out in a sludge tide that wrecked 1,200 miles of shoreline.

And here we go again. Valdez goes Cajun.

BP's CEO Tony Hayward reportedly asked, "What the hell did we do to deserve this?"

It's what you didn't do, Mr. Hayward. Where was BP's containment barge and response crew? Why was the containment boom laid so damn late, too late and too little? Why is it that the US Navy is hauling in 12 miles of rubber boom and fielding seven skimmers, instead of BP?

Last year, CEO Hayward boasted that, despite increased oil production in exotic deep waters, he had cut BP's costs by an extra one billion dollars a year. Now we know how he did it.

As chance would have it, I was meeting last week with Louisiana lawyer Daniel Becnel Jr. when word came in of the platform explosion. Daniel represents oil workers on those platforms; now, he'll represent their bereaved families. The Coast Guard called him. They had found the emergency evacuation capsule floating in the sea and were afraid to open it and disturb the cooked bodies.

I wonder if BP painted the capsule green, like they paint their gas stations.

Becnel, yesterday by phone from his office from the town of Reserve, Louisiana, said the spill response crews were told they weren't needed because the company had already sealed the well. Like everything else from BP mouthpieces, it was a lie.

In the end, this is bigger than BP and its policy of cheaping out and skiving the rules. This is about the anti-regulatory mania, which has infected the American body politic. While the tea baggers are simply its extreme expression, US politicians of all stripes love to attack "the little bureaucrat with the fat rule book." It began with Ronald Reagan and was promoted, most vociferously, by Bill Clinton and the head of Clinton's deregulation committee, one Al Gore.

Americans want government off our backs ... that is, until a folding crib crushes the skull of our baby, Toyota accelerators speed us to our death, banks blow our savings on gambling sprees and crude oil smothers the Mississippi.

Then, suddenly, it's, "Where was hell was the government? Why didn't the government do something to stop it?"

The answer is because government took you at your word they should get out of the way of business, that business could be trusted to police itself. It was only last month that BP, lobbying for new deepwater drilling, testified to Congress that additional equipment and inspection wasn't needed.

You should meet some of these little bureaucrats with the fat rule books. Like Dan Lawn, the inspector from the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, who warned and warned and warned, before the Exxon Valdez grounding, that BP and Alyeska were courting disaster in their arrogant disregard of the rule book. In 2006, I printed his latest warnings about BP's culture of negligence. When the choice is between Lawn's rule book and a bag of tea, Lawn's my man.

This just in: Becnel tells me that one of the platform workers has informed him that the BP well was apparently deeper than the 18,000 feet depth reported. BP failed to communicate that additional depth to Halliburton crews, who, therefore, poured in too small a cement cap for the additional pressure caused by the extra depth. So, it blew.

Why didn't Halliburton check? "Gross negligence on everyone's part," said Becnel. Negligence driven by penny-pinching, bottom-line squeezing. BP says its worker is lying. Someone's lying here, man on the platform or the company that has practiced prevarication from Alaska to Louisiana.

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

---

Greg Palast has investigated the illegal disenfranchisement of voters for BBC Television, "Rolling Stone" (with Robert Kennedy Jr.), "Harper's," "The Nation" and Truthout.org. Palast co-authored the investigative comic book, "Steal Back Your Vote" with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., available in full-color print or for download at www.StealBackYourVote.com for a donation to the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund.

Politics has come full circle

We have come back to the beginning of our political struggle. In the early late 1800's and early 1900's, we lived in a world vastly different from today. People lived in squalid tenements. they worked 12 hours a day in factories often times with their children with them for pennies. The working conditions were horrendous. Machines were unsafe often maiming or killing their operators. They were machines that would not be stopped because those in charge did not want to loose money to down production time. Workers were treated like expendable property. Robber barons played Monopoly with real buildings, real cities, real railroads and real people. They controlled the political process through intimidation, graft, thuggery and other despicable acts.

The few progressives started a battle to gain rights for workers and the people so they would no longer be treated as wage slaves and property to be used up at a bosses whim. They stopped work and took on the strike breaking thugs employed by business owners. They gave us gifts we take for granted today. Break time, Lunch time, the Eight Hour day, the weekend and vacations are things we have thanks to those few who fought those battles so that we might enjoy freedom to be people and not endure the constant drudgery of work. The populist progressives battled the trusts, the affluent, the political elite, the Klan and its minions, and the robber barons. All of these disparate battles combined and resulted in a nation that won the Second World War, gave us the greatest standard of living we ever had, landed on the moon, and gave us a generation of statesmen who accomplished much.

Something changed in the 1980's. We elected a president who said that government was the problem and that business was too shackled by onerous regulation which limited the ability to gather wealth and power. We were told that we needed to change things to give us wealth. We forgot the lessons of that greatest generation, and now we have had the rise of abject poverty, the greed of the corporate capitalists, and a nation falling apart at the seams. The conservatives dismantled the regulatory framework which kept the greedy in check, and resulted in a generation of greed. The result of which has created the greatest economic calamity since the Great Depression.

Now politics has come full circle. Most of the populist progressivism which resulted in the nation we had up to the Reagan era (which created the politics we live in today) happened in the early 20th Century. That world of progress was dismantled and now the world is a bastardized mess of greed and avarice. The rich and the powerful roam at will in our halls of power and dictate policies which affect the lives of millions. They exploit the people, lie, cheat and steal with impunity and are rewarded with riches. We live in this world of our creation and ignore it at our own peril.

We now have to again fight those battles since we forgot those lessons. We need to rise up and take back what is ours, our rights to be free of greed and those who would exploit us in the blind pursuit of wealth. Our world can be bright again. We can enjoy freedom from poverty again. We only have to have the courage to change the world we live in.

One reason I am against Concealed Carry Laws

May 5, 2:37 PM EDT

Woman's gun stolen after leaving it in restroom

JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) -- A 24-year-old Juneau woman went into a public restroom packing heat and left burned. The Juneau Police Department reports Veronica Valle-Arnes was carrying a Ruger .380 - a small pocket pistol - worth about $400 with her Friday night.

She told police she took the gun out of her waistband and set it on top of a toilet paper dispenser in the women's room at the Fisherman's Wharf, a building on Juneau's downtown waterfront with a bar, eateries and shops.

She told police she forgot to pick it back up. When she realized it was missing a few moments later, she returned to the restroom but the gun was gone.

� 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Fox News, Nazis and the Tea Party

This was an interesting article I encountered this morning. Apparently, any attempt to connect the Tea Party to its similarity to the Nazi movement of the 1930's is sacrosanct. The very fact that Tea Party protesters keep calling the President a "Nazi" and a "Fascist" shows no real understanding of the true meaning of the terms. Several definitions are available for these terms and the previous administration was well on the road to fulfilling the true definitions of the terms mentioned above.

AlterNet / By Chip Berlet

I Was the Target of a Fox News Hoax

When I was asked to address a conference at Brandeis, a right-wing shock jock created a hoax to stir up the right. Then Glenn Beck ran with it.

April 30, 2010 |

Photo Credit: NewsCorpse.com

The story surfaces nationally with a surreal Glenn Beck segment and two ludicrous Fox News discussions highlighting the false claim that Brandeis University was hosting an international conference linking the Tea Party movement to Nazis in Europe. The conference, which took place yesterday, revealed the entire propaganda campaign was a hoax, but not before anguished Holocaust survivors, conservative Jews in the Tea Party movement, and others had deluged Brandeis University with complaints.

Now it seems that the story emerged as part of a Fox News campaign to defend the diverse and complicated Tea Party movement from evidence that its supporters include a significant contingent of White people who harbor racial resentment against Blacks and Latinos/Latinas.

For the original Brandeis story on Fox News reporters relied on the claims of a single local Boston Tea Party advocate and conservative talk radio shock jock, Michael Graham, for its information. So Fox News featured the offensive hoax based on biased hearsay, unsubstantiated supposition, and a misreading of the conference program by a person who is a Tea Party supporter

The Glenn Beck segment drifted farther away from facts and logic.
Glenn Beck segment:
3:20 Brandeis conference denounced
6:00 Beck tells viewers to contact Brandeis

As Media Matters for America observed, apparently the most significant aspect of the story for Beck was that the university was named after the late Jewish scholar and Supreme Court justice, Louis D. Brandeis. For Beck, wrote a Media Matters researcher, the "Brandeis University symposium on political extremism is suspect because Louis Brandeis was in [Woodrow] Wilson's cabinet;" the quip accompanies a link to that portion of Beck's tirade which skirted on the thin ice of classic antisemitic conspiracy claims about manipulation of politics by powerful elite Jews.

Since I was a conference participant, and part of the hoax was based on the title of my paper, "From Tea Parties to Armed Militias," I am writing this from a personal perspective. And am I pissed off? You betcha!

Unlike Fox News and the right-wing blogosphere, some people actually contacted me before the conference and fact-checked the claims. Not Graham, who wrote an op-ed in the Boston Herald repeating his false claims.

My conference paper, which clearly stated that I did not think that Tea Party activists were Nazis, was presented at an interdisciplinary conference coordinated by the Brandeis Center for German and European Studies. The conference title was "New Right-Wing Radicalism: A Transatlantic Perspective." A range of scholars with demonstrable expertise on the subject from Europe and United States were invited.

When Brandeis realized the conference program was being misinterpreted, it issued the following statement:

On April 28, the Center for German and European Studies at Brandeis University is hosting a conference on the rise of right-wing radicalism.

The event, which features speakers from a variety of universities and institutions, focuses on developments in Europe, including the rise of neo-Nazi and anti-semitic groups. It also includes discussion of a wide range of movements and activities in the United States, from the extreme and violent to the Tea Party, as a point of comparison.

The logo created for the conference showed a swastika inside the international symbol of negation, reflecting the legitimate concern people feel over the activities, often violent, of neo-Nazi extremists.

Unfortunately, this logo created an impression that Brandeis and the conference organizers equated a range of organizations, including the Tea Party in the United States, with extremist groups on both continents.

That was not the intention of the faculty, staff or students of the University who were involved in creating the conference, and Brandeis regrets the unintended association and pain this caused. The logo has been removed from the event page promoting the conference

So Brandeis understood that the agony for Holocaust survivors caused by the hoax media claims required a revised graphic and an apology. Good for Brandeis. No apologies yet from Fox News for not bothering to fact-check the allegations before misrepresenting the Brandeis program on national television and spawning a storm of controversy on the right-wing side of the Internet.

After the conference Fox News continued to beat the dead horse droppings of their manufactured story. They featured Graham, who is publicizing himself by contacting other conservative outlets such as Accuracy in Media and highlighting his role in publicizing what he calls a scandal and I call a hoax.

Fox News is using the Brandeis controversy to insulate the Tea Parties from increasing media coverage of racism and xenophobia within the movement. I reviewed the racial bias in the Tea Parties in my Brandeis presentation yesterday.

On their first story about the Brandeis conference Fox News sandbagged NPR commentator Juan Williams who was asked to comment on the charge that the Tea Party activists were Nazis. Not surprisingly Williams thought the charge was outlandish. It is. It is also a hoax. Williams should be more alert to the idea that Fox News would exploit William's skin color as a way to dismiss increasing evidence of racial bias in the movement.

Victor Goode on RaceWire, the Colorlines Blog, summarized a New York Times poll that "shows that while their most important concern is the economy, they often view this issue through the lens of racially tinted glasses."

The University of Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race & Sexuality has released a study that shows the "tea party is not just about politics and size of government. The data suggests it may also be about race" study author Christopher Parker, explained. The study asked questions about the trustworthiness and intelligence of Black and Latino/Latina people in the United States, and showed that Tea Party supporters are significantly more prone to prejudice, than those who oppose the movement.

According to a University press release:

Indeed, strong support for the tea party movement results in a 45 percent decline in support for health care reform compared with those who oppose the tea party. "While it's clear that the tea party in one sense is about limited government, it's also clear from the data that people who want limited government don't want certain services for certain kinds of people. Those services include health care,"Parker said.

Some defenders of the Tea Parties go so far as to claim the movement is not on the political right at all. David A Graham on the Newsweek Web site has put together a photo essay depicting similar historic conservative movements. According to Graham, "the United States has a long tradition of reactionary, conservative, populist movements, dating back to before the Civil War. Many of them included racial or ethnic prejudice and hostility toward immigrants.

The second Fox News program on the Brandeis affair, after the conference, attempted to divert attention away from the potential anti-immigrant trends in the Tea Parties. One recent Tea Party event featured anti-immigrant Machiavellian mastermind Tom Tancredo--a notorious bigot and racist. The former Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo told a Tea Party rally in South Carolina that Obama should be sent back to Africa.

One of the core themes of Beck and Fox News is that fascism is a left-wing movement. The subject came up at the Brandeis conference, and one of the German scholars observed that while it was undeniably true that national socialists led by Gregor Strasser played an important role in the Nazi Party, the 1934 R�hm-Putsch (aka the Night of the Long Knives), terminated the revolutionary socialist agenda of the Nazi Party. He said, however, it was generally accepted that German Nazism was a right-wing movement.

I was part of a group of scholars asked by the History News Network to review Jonah Goldberg's book, Liberal Fascism, and all of us thought the claims and analysis in the book were unsubstantiated, and contradicted the majority scholarship.

The discussion of the role of angry middle-class right-wing populist movements intersecting with opportunistic politicians and media demagogues to facilitate the formation of fascist and neo fascist movements is well studied in scholarly literature. But hyperbolic claims from the political Left that the Tea Party movement itself is a Nazi movement flow from deeply inaccurate and superficial perceptions about the nature of fascism and the actual attitudes within the Tea Party movement.

There is, however, a set of dynamics that the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as "Rage on the Right," that involves the Patriot Movement, the Militias, Anti-immigrant groups, and the Ultra Right including neonazis.

In recent months a number of progressive scholars and journalists have opened up a discussion about these dynamics, most recently Noam Chomsky, but preceded by Sara Robinson, David Neiwert, author of The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right.

This is not the same as denouncing the Tea Party movement as Nazis. It is a comparative analysis of the role of right-wing populist movements in Germany during the Weimar regime, and the role they played in the decision of elite faction in Germany to give power to Hitler to solve the "crisis;" but also to block the growing power of socialist and communist parties and movements.

That's not the situation in the U.S. today. The Tea Party movement is not on the verge of joining the tiny "groupuscule" of neonazis in our country. It is far more likely they will pull the Republican Party further to the right -- chased by the Democrats led by deluded spin doctors who apparently control what passes for Democratic Party strategy built around snidely deriding the Tea Party activists as ignorant and lunatic "wing-nuts."

Of course like all populist social movements on the right or left, the Tea Party could collapse in a few months, or merge into a revitalized Republican Party, or splinter into segments built around libertarianism, xenophobic anti-immigrant activism, Gun Rights, anti-Muslim fears, and the Christian Right gender-drive social agenda of pushing gay people back into the closet and forcing women into back alleys for abortions. Nobody knows for sure.

Shock Jock Graham apparently missed the parts of my presentation dealing with why a comparative analysis of how the Tea Party, Town Hall, and Militia movements interact in a dynamic way with the Republican Party on one side and organized insurgent ultra-right movements on the other side. He might have picked up one of the diagrams I distributed at the conference, but if so, he apparently missed the point. (this version is from 2009, as it shows how long I have used this analytical lens mentioning the reformist and dissident Tea Party movement as situated between the reformist Conservative Right and the Insurgent Ultra Right including neonazis.

I have also explained the dynamic of how angry right-wing populism can lead to aggression and violence, especially against people of color and immigrants, on Religion Dispatches, and in the Progressive magazine in a February cover story titled Taking Tea Partiers Seriously."

Since Graham apparently has not bothered to actually read any of my work, or else he simply ignores its content. So here is the text from the end of my Brandeis conference paper:

...Fascism exploits anger and frustration and directs it into demonization and scapegoating; creating a potential for aggression and violence that in the worst case scenario can end in genocide.

The work of Fritzsche and others on voting patterns in Weimar Germany demonstrates that in the late 1920s Hitler's Nazi Party was able to exploit the fears of exasperated middle class voters by promising to fix a broken economic and political system.

After the First World War Yeats wrote in his poem "The Second Coming" :

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold...

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Most right-wing populist movements never become fascist, and most fascist movements never gain state power; but the turmoil created in these volatile periods can undermine civil society, and harm the individuals targeted as scapegoats.

Even if you think my presentation is hogwash, please understand that no one at Brandeis and no panelist here today, including me, ever meant to suggest that the Tea Party movement was the equivalent of the Nazi Party. We all thought that was obvious.

A simple Internet search would have demonstrated that I have repeatedly condemned the trivialization, mockery, and name-calling aimed at the participants in the Tea Party movement.

For media demagogues to exploit the agony of the Holocaust for political gain and to attract personal attention is offensive to this audience, the Brandeis community, Jews around the world, and every decent person on this planet.

You may disagree with everything I said here today, but know that the point of conferences like this is to ensure we have learned the horrible lessons of the Nazi genocide, and continuously explore it from a variety of perspectives. And I hope all of us here today can agree on one point... Never Again!

========================================

This post is my personal rant (see, for example going Santelli) . It does not in any way represent the views of my employer, my freelance editors, or the many subversive pinko human rights groups to which I belong or support as a board member or advisor.

More on right-wing populism is here

Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates, is editor of the book, Eyes Right! Challenging the Right Wing Backlash (South End Press).