Currently viewing the tag: “RightWing”
An “explosive impact” occurred Tuesday morning at the No. 2 reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in northeastern Japan, a day after a hydrogen explosion rocked another reactor, the plant’s owner said….
Yukio Edano, Japan’s chief Cabinet secretary, said he could not rule out the possibility of a meltdown at all three troubled reactors.…
The situation in Japan is unprecedented, as the CNN story from 7:32 pm EDT makes clear. I don’t believe there’s ever been more than one reactor with a malfunctioning cooling system seriously facing a possible meltdown at one time. Yesterday 2 were and now 3 are simultaneously.
The spent fuel in nearby storage pools also poses a great risk that isn’t receiving sufficient media attention (see below).
As long as events keep unfolding at a rapid pace, I’ll try to keep the news up to date with these overnight posts where readers can posts comments and updates.
The NY Times has updated a story as of 8:03 pm EDT that lays out the situation and the risks, “New Blast Reported at Nuclear Plant as Japan Struggles to Cool Reactor”:
An explosion early Tuesday morning may have damaged the inner steel containment vessel of the No. 2 reactor at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, leading to the wide release of radioactive materials there and forcing the evacuation of some emergency workers, the plant’s operator said.The blast appeared to be different — and more severe — than those that at two other troubled reactor at the same nuclear complex because this one, reported to have occurred at 6:14 a.m., happened in the “pressure suppression room” in the cooling area of the reactor, raising the possibility to damage to the reactor’s containment vessel.
Any damage to the steel containment vessel of a nuclear reactor is considered critical because it raises the prospect of an uncontrolled release of radioactive material and full meltdown of the nuclear fuel inside. To date, even during the four-day crisis in Japan that amounts to the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, workers had managed to avoid a breach of a containment vessel and had limited releases of radioactive steam to relatively low levels.
The underlying situation is also grave:
The new blast came after emergency operations to pump seawater into the same reactor failed, leaving the nuclear fuel in that reactor dangerously exposed late Monday into early Tuesday morning.Tokyo Electric Power said late Monday that a malfunctioning valve made it impossible to release pressure in the reactor, which in turn thwarted efforts to inject seawater into it to cool the fuel. The water levels inside the reactor’s containment vessel fell and left its fuel rods exposed — perhaps completely exposed — for some hours.
Workers had been having difficulty injecting seawater into the reactor because its vents — necessary to release pressure in the containment vessel by allowing radioactive steam to escape — had stopped working properly, they said.
In the predawn hours of Tuesday Tokyo Electric announced that workers had finally succeeded in opening a malfunctioning valve controlling the vents, reducing pressure in the container vessel. It then resumed flooding the reactor with water.
But the company said water levels were not immediately rising to the desired level, possibly because of a leak in the containment vessel…..
“They’re basically in a full-scale panic” among Japanese power industry managers, said a senior nuclear industry executive. The executive is not involved in managing the response to the reactors’ difficulties but has many contacts in Japan. “They’re in total disarray, they don’t know what to do.”
It still seems unlike there will be massive amounts of radioactivity released from a meltdown. That said, I listened to a press call today, which included one of my former DOE colleagues, Bob Alvarez, which spelled out a problem potentially equally as large but not receiving much attention.
Sharon Begley, the science columnist and science editor of Newsweek, has a good write-up of the call, “The Japan Nuke Problem No One’s Talking About,” which I’ll excerpt:
To the growing list of worries at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power plant … add this: could the spent nuclear fuel sitting in a nearby storage pool pose an even bigger threat to people and the environment? The spent fuel produced by reactors has been a challenge since the dawn of the nuclear industry, with most reactor operators opting to store it in pools of cooling water on site. At the 40-year-old Fukushima plant, which was built by General Electric, the fuel rods are stored at a pool about three stories up, next to the reactor (a schematic is here). Satellite photos raise concerns that the roof of the building housing the pool has been blown off, says Robert Alvarez, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and a senior policy adviser to the secretary of energy and deputy assistant secretary for national security and the environment from 1993 to 1999. He and other experts are now warning that any release of radioactivity from the spent-fuel pool could make the releases from the reactors themselves pale in comparison.
The spent-fuel pools are rectangular basins about 40 feet deep, made of four- to five-foot-thick reinforced concrete lined with stainless steel. That was thought to be sufficient to prevent a breach. But the disastrous combination of an earthquake (which knocked out power form the electricity grid) and a tsunami (which swamped the diesel generators serving as backup power) forced the power-plant operators to turn to batteries for core cooling.When battery-powered cooling failed, hydrogen in two of the units exploded, damaging the reactor buildings—and, apparently, the spent-fuel area as well. Satellite photos appear to show that two cranes used to move spent fuel into the pool “are both gone,” Alvarez told a press conference organized by Friends of the Earth, a nonprofit environmental group that opposes nuclear power. “There has definitely been damage to the pool area.”
The pools “contain very large concentrations of radioactivity, can catch fire, and are in much more vulnerable buildings,” he warns. If the pools lose their inflow of circulating cooling water, the water in the pools will evaporate. If the level of water drops to five or six feet above the spent fuel, Alvarez calculates, the release of radioactivity “could be life-threatening near the reactor building.” Since the total amount of long-lived radioactivity in the pool is at least five times that in the reactor core, a catastrophic release would mean “all bets are off,” he says.
Of particular concern: cesium-137 in the pool, at levels Alvarez estimates at 20 million to 50 million curies. The 1986 Chernobyl accident released about 40 percent of the reactor core’s 6 million curies. In a 1997 report for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory estimated that a severe pool fire—made possible by the loss of cooling water—could leave about 188 square miles uninhabitable and cause up to 28,000 cancer deaths.
Once again, warnings from scientists were ignored that could have dramatically reduced the risk here:
The new concern at Fukushima Daiichi highlights an ongoing controversy about the way spent fuel gets stored: what if Tokyo Electric Power had heeded the growing scientific consensus and moved the spent fuel out of the storage pool and into dry, hardened casks for storage? Germany did this 25 years ago. The NRC has rejected this recommendation, but a 2006 analysis by the National Academy of Sciences warned that “breaches in spent fuel pools could be much harder to plug [than those in dry casks], especially if high radiation fields or the collapse of the overlying building prevented workers from reaching the pool. Complete cleanup from a zirconium cladding fire would be extraordinarily expensive, and even after cleanup was completed large areas downwind of the site might remain contaminated to levels that prevented reoccupation.”The NAS report … concluded that “recovery from an attack on a dry cask would be much easier than the recovery from an attack on a spent fuel pool. Breaches in dry casks could be temporarily plugged with radiation-absorbing materials until permanent fixes or replacements could be made … It is the potential for zirconium cladding fires in spent fuel pools that gives dry cask storage most of its comparative safety and security advantages.”
The NRC counts almost 100 spent-fuel pools in the United States.
The NYT has just published a story on this, “In Stricken Fuel-Cooling Pools, a Danger for the Longer Term.”
Both Germany and Switzerland suspended their nuclear plans. The Wall Street Journal reports, “Germany Rethinks Atomic Power”:
Fears of a nuclear disaster in Japan have revived Germans’ angst about atomic energy two weeks ahead of important regional elections, prompting Chancellor Angela Merkel to suspend her contested plan to extend the life of Germany’s nuclear reactors.Ms. Merkel said Monday her government would hold a three-month safety review of Germany’s 17 nuclear reactors while weighing options for drawing more energy from alternative sources.
The AP reports, “Swiss suspend plans for new nuclear plants”:
The Swiss government has suspended plans to replace and build new nuclear plants pending a review of two hydrogen explosions at Japanese plants.
The head of the Swiss federal energy department, Doris Leuthard, said Monday’s suspension affects three requests for “blanket authorization for nuclear replacement until safety standards have been carefully reviewed and if necessary adapted.”
Seriously!
Fakhruddin Ahmed starts out well in this op-ed, explaining the genesis of “Islamophobia” with a greater degree of honesty than most Muslim spokesmen in the U.S. have ever displayed. But he soon enough resorts to the familiar Islamic supremacist tactic of evading responsibility, pointing fingers at non-Muslims who dare to point out how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism and to make recruits among peaceful Muslims. By the end of the piece he has run off the rails entirely, flinging wild charges of racism and bigotry, and blaming Pamela Geller and me for the fact that non-Muslims in America are looking at Islam and Muslims with open eyes, instead of buying into the full-blown campaign of deception, disinformation, and soothing lies that the mainstream media continues to pursue. He never connects up the first half of his piece with the second — in other words, he never explains why Islamic jihad terrorism and Islamic supremacism are real, and yet any resistance to them constitutes racism and hatred.
Yeah, sure, Fakhruddin — as if Pamela Geller and I inspired Khalid Aldawsari, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Lubbock, Texas, or Muhammad Hussain, the would-be jihad bomber in Baltimore, or Mohamed Mohamud, the would-be jihad bomber in Portland, or Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood jihad mass-murderer, or Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square jihad mass-murderer, or Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, the Arkansas military recruiting station jihad murderer, or Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas airplane jihad bomber, or Muhammad Atta, Anjem Chaudary, Omar Bakri, Abu Hamza, Abu Bakar Bashir, Zawahiri, Zarqawi, bin Laden and all the rest.
The Times of Trenton should be ashamed to print such a farrago, but it isn’t really anything special — just another mainstream media outlet printing a deceptive, disingenuous piece claiming victim status for Muslims in order to deflect attention away from jihad terror and Islamic supremacism.
“Examining a painful history fraught with transgressions,” by Fakhruddin Ahmed in the Times of Trenton, March 12 (thanks to James):
There are cogent reasons why roughly half of Americans, according to polls, harbor an unfavorable opinion of Islam. Besides perpetrating the most horrendous crime on American soil on 9/11, Muslims have been responsible for some pretty ugly incidents lately.
The Ayatollah Khomeini challenged one of the West’s core values, freedom of speech, by issuing a “fatwa,” or religious decree, in 1989, for the murder of Salman Rushdie over his controversial book, “The Satanic Verses.”
The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were quickly followed by Muslim terror attacks in Bali, Indonesia (2002), Madrid (2004), London (2005) and Mumbai (2008). And when some Muslims went berserk, burning and boycotting in reaction to the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2006, the rest of the world held its collective breath in consternation.
Muslim terrorists’ attempts to blow up planes, airports, tunnels and subways in America were thwarted. And if Qur’ans had actually been burned by Pastor Terry Jones in Florida last fall, as he threatened to do, some Muslims would have reacted by creating mayhem. Clearly, there is a less-enlightened, fanatically violent underbelly at work in the name of Islam. Understandably, the Judeo-Christian polemic against Islam centers on terrorism.
Submerged in an all-encompassing anti-Muslim hysteria, when non-Muslim Americans see signs of increasing Muslim presence around them, they feel besieged by an intimidating culture. That America’s complexion is transforming from shades of white to brown is difficult for many Americans to stomach; when some of those brown faces belong to Muslims, the transformation becomes downright frightening.
With no prominent Muslim-American voice to assuage those apprehensions, fear begets fear, spawning more virulent anti-Muslim vitriol.
Are Muslims, their religion and their culture a mortal threat to America? Is this the vaunted “Clash of Civilizations” between the West and Islam, as Harvard’s Samuel Huntington had predicted in 1993?
Civilizational narratives are rarely one-dimensional. Western democracies, especially Britain and France, exploited and repressed most Muslim nations as colonial powers over the centuries, souring Muslim taste for democracy. Conceivably, America’s more recent interventions in the Islamic world are fueling Americaphobia. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, with the concomitant collateral death of thousands of civilians, have exacerbated Muslim-American relations, as have the al Qaeda-seeking drone attacks inside Pakistan that inadvertently kill civilians and whose legality stands on shaky grounds.
We may consider ourselves to be the “good guys” eliminating the “bad guys” before they attack us; but to the child of the civilian we kill in Afghanistan, we are the bad guys. He or she may vow to exact vengeance.
Quid pro quo is in vogue in international relations. America garnered the Muslim world’s gratitude when it rushed to bolster the Afghans after the Soviet invasion of 1979 (which led to Muslim participation in Gulf War I in 1991), and liberated the Bosnians (1995) and the Kosovars (1999) from the Serbs. Muslims were not thrilled, however, when America attacked Afghanistan in 2001 (and has occupied it since); the neoconservatives fabricated WMD “evidence” to facilitate President George W. Bush’s attack of Iraq in 2003; and America started waging an undeclared war inside Pakistan.
Excluded from the debate about them inside America, and reduced to passive observers, Muslim-Americans are chagrined at the spectacle unfolding right before their eyes. Right-wing Republicans see no downside to demonizing the Muslims. It energizes their base, carries no political penalty, and forces the Democrats to defend a progressively unpopular minority.
Democratic defense of Muslim-Americans has not been stellar either, perhaps because they, too, secretly covet the bigot vote. Deprecators realize that Muslim-Americans, who number only 7 million, cannot retaliate electorally, making Muslim-baiting a win-win proposition.
Sarah Palin tweeted last July, imploring “peaceful Muslims” to “refudiate” the proposed New York City mosque near Ground Zero. Other Republicans and some Democrats jumped on the bandwagon, attaching intellectual heft to an originally ignorant far-right-fringe viewpoint.
A “moderate” Muslim is being redefined as one who condemns on demand. Detractors are not interested in Muslim points of view; they want Muslim condemnation of Islam. For them, Islam-bashing is the new normal, the new acceptable form of racism. If any other ethnic or religious group was so maliciously mauled, the attackers would be branded incurable racists.
What astonishes Muslim-Americans is that those hurling imprecations at them on television, on the radio and in the blogosphere do not seem to care that Muslim-Americans are watching and listening. It’s as though Muslim-Americans are apparitions that do not really exist or have feelings. Muslims feel like screaming: “Hey, I am in the room. Stop backbiting!”
The virus incubated by right-wing bloggers Pam Geller and Robert Spencer has been spread so far and wide by Fox News that all of America is now infected with an anti-Muslim epidemic. It hurts Muslim-Americans to see their patriotism questioned, their faith defined, distorted and defiled beyond recognition by anti-Muslim bigots through blatant lies. It is un-American to attempt to sacrifice an entire America-loving community, already reeling under vicious attacks, at the altar of higher television ratings.
Fakhruddin Ahmed starts out well in this op-ed, explaining the genesis of “Islamophobia” with a greater degree of honesty than most Muslim spokesmen in the U.S. have ever displayed. But he soon enough resorts to the familiar Islamic supremacist tactic of evading responsibility, pointing fingers at non-Muslims who dare to point out how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism and to make recruits among peaceful Muslims. By the end of the piece he has run off the rails entirely, flinging wild charges of racism and bigotry, and blaming Pamela Geller and me for the fact that non-Muslims in America are looking at Islam and Muslims with open eyes, instead of buying into the full-blown campaign of deception, disinformation, and soothing lies that the mainstream media continues to pursue. He never connects up the first half of his piece with the second — in other words, he never explains why Islamic jihad terrorism and Islamic supremacism are real, and yet any resistance to them constitutes racism and hatred.
Yeah, sure, Fakhruddin — as if Pamela Geller and I inspired Khalid Aldawsari, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Lubbock, Texas, or Muhammad Hussain, the would-be jihad bomber in Baltimore, or Mohamed Mohamud, the would-be jihad bomber in Portland, or Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood jihad mass-murderer, or Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square jihad mass-murderer, or Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, the Arkansas military recruiting station jihad murderer, or Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas airplane jihad bomber, or Muhammad Atta, Anjem Chaudary, Omar Bakri, Abu Hamza, Abu Bakar Bashir, Zawahiri, Zarqawi, bin Laden and all the rest.
The Times of Trenton should be ashamed to print such a farrago, but it isn’t really anything special — just another mainstream media outlet printing a deceptive, disingenuous piece claiming victim status for Muslims in order to deflect attention away from jihad terror and Islamic supremacism.
“Examining a painful history fraught with transgressions,” by Fakhruddin Ahmed in the Times of Trenton, March 12 (thanks to James):
There are cogent reasons why roughly half of Americans, according to polls, harbor an unfavorable opinion of Islam. Besides perpetrating the most horrendous crime on American soil on 9/11, Muslims have been responsible for some pretty ugly incidents lately.
The Ayatollah Khomeini challenged one of the West’s core values, freedom of speech, by issuing a “fatwa,” or religious decree, in 1989, for the murder of Salman Rushdie over his controversial book, “The Satanic Verses.”
The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were quickly followed by Muslim terror attacks in Bali, Indonesia (2002), Madrid (2004), London (2005) and Mumbai (2008). And when some Muslims went berserk, burning and boycotting in reaction to the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2006, the rest of the world held its collective breath in consternation.
Muslim terrorists’ attempts to blow up planes, airports, tunnels and subways in America were thwarted. And if Qur’ans had actually been burned by Pastor Terry Jones in Florida last fall, as he threatened to do, some Muslims would have reacted by creating mayhem. Clearly, there is a less-enlightened, fanatically violent underbelly at work in the name of Islam. Understandably, the Judeo-Christian polemic against Islam centers on terrorism.
Submerged in an all-encompassing anti-Muslim hysteria, when non-Muslim Americans see signs of increasing Muslim presence around them, they feel besieged by an intimidating culture. That America’s complexion is transforming from shades of white to brown is difficult for many Americans to stomach; when some of those brown faces belong to Muslims, the transformation becomes downright frightening.
With no prominent Muslim-American voice to assuage those apprehensions, fear begets fear, spawning more virulent anti-Muslim vitriol.
Are Muslims, their religion and their culture a mortal threat to America? Is this the vaunted “Clash of Civilizations” between the West and Islam, as Harvard’s Samuel Huntington had predicted in 1993?
Civilizational narratives are rarely one-dimensional. Western democracies, especially Britain and France, exploited and repressed most Muslim nations as colonial powers over the centuries, souring Muslim taste for democracy. Conceivably, America’s more recent interventions in the Islamic world are fueling Americaphobia. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, with the concomitant collateral death of thousands of civilians, have exacerbated Muslim-American relations, as have the al Qaeda-seeking drone attacks inside Pakistan that inadvertently kill civilians and whose legality stands on shaky grounds.
We may consider ourselves to be the “good guys” eliminating the “bad guys” before they attack us; but to the child of the civilian we kill in Afghanistan, we are the bad guys. He or she may vow to exact vengeance.
Quid pro quo is in vogue in international relations. America garnered the Muslim world’s gratitude when it rushed to bolster the Afghans after the Soviet invasion of 1979 (which led to Muslim participation in Gulf War I in 1991), and liberated the Bosnians (1995) and the Kosovars (1999) from the Serbs. Muslims were not thrilled, however, when America attacked Afghanistan in 2001 (and has occupied it since); the neoconservatives fabricated WMD “evidence” to facilitate President George W. Bush’s attack of Iraq in 2003; and America started waging an undeclared war inside Pakistan.
Excluded from the debate about them inside America, and reduced to passive observers, Muslim-Americans are chagrined at the spectacle unfolding right before their eyes. Right-wing Republicans see no downside to demonizing the Muslims. It energizes their base, carries no political penalty, and forces the Democrats to defend a progressively unpopular minority.
Democratic defense of Muslim-Americans has not been stellar either, perhaps because they, too, secretly covet the bigot vote. Deprecators realize that Muslim-Americans, who number only 7 million, cannot retaliate electorally, making Muslim-baiting a win-win proposition.
Sarah Palin tweeted last July, imploring “peaceful Muslims” to “refudiate” the proposed New York City mosque near Ground Zero. Other Republicans and some Democrats jumped on the bandwagon, attaching intellectual heft to an originally ignorant far-right-fringe viewpoint.
A “moderate” Muslim is being redefined as one who condemns on demand. Detractors are not interested in Muslim points of view; they want Muslim condemnation of Islam. For them, Islam-bashing is the new normal, the new acceptable form of racism. If any other ethnic or religious group was so maliciously mauled, the attackers would be branded incurable racists.
What astonishes Muslim-Americans is that those hurling imprecations at them on television, on the radio and in the blogosphere do not seem to care that Muslim-Americans are watching and listening. It’s as though Muslim-Americans are apparitions that do not really exist or have feelings. Muslims feel like screaming: “Hey, I am in the room. Stop backbiting!”
The virus incubated by right-wing bloggers Pam Geller and Robert Spencer has been spread so far and wide by Fox News that all of America is now infected with an anti-Muslim epidemic. It hurts Muslim-Americans to see their patriotism questioned, their faith defined, distorted and defiled beyond recognition by anti-Muslim bigots through blatant lies. It is un-American to attempt to sacrifice an entire America-loving community, already reeling under vicious attacks, at the altar of higher television ratings.
Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) recently defended his union busting efforts, claiming that no one should be surprised because it’s what he campaigned on (Walker actually didn’t campaign on busting unions). Walker’s defenders on the right such as Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, have picked up on this meme. “He’s actually doing what he campaigned on,” Gingrich said.
Now the false talking point has made its way up the usual right-wing echo chamber chain to Fox News’ “straight news” anchor Chris Wallace. Yesterday on Fox News Sunday’s online discussion “Panel Plus,” Juan Williams noted that a majority of Americans support the public unions’ right to collectively bargain “when it comes to the governor in his bullying way is trying to take away their negotiating rights.” But Wallace interrupted:
WALLACE: Why is it a bullying way? … The question is, he ran on this issue, he was elected, you got a Republican majority. I mean, you know, with Barack Obama you kept saying elections have consequences, why is it bullying to say, “I was elected, I want to enact my agenda”? […]
WILLIAMS: Well no but this is bullying when you won’t even sit down and negotiate and talk with people talk with the Democrats –
WALLACE: Aren’t the Democrats over there in Illinois?
WILLIAMS: Because they had to flee because this guy was just going to ram it through. But let me just say, it’s that kind of tactic –
WALLACE: Which they never did on health care.
Watch it (starting at 2:50):
Politifact Wisconsin took a look at this talking point last week and determined that it’s not true:
But Walker, who offered many specific proposals during the campaign, did not go public with even the bare-bones of his multi-faceted plans to sharply curb collective bargaining rights. He could not point to any statements where he did. We could find none either.
While Walker often talked about employees paying more for pensions and health care, in his budget-repair bill he connected it to collective bargaining changes that were far different from his campaign rhetoric in terms of how far his plan goes and the way it would be accomplished. We rate his statement False.
And contrary to Wallace’s suggestion, President Obama actually did campaign on reforming the health care system and he didn’t get everything that he originally wanted, including a public option.
Last year, First Lady Michelle Obama took up the fight against childhood obesity as her signature cause with the “Let’s Move” campaign aimed at “solving the problem of obesity within a generation, so that children born today will grow up healthier and able to pursue their dreams.”
However, some right-wingers have a different take on what the First Lady is trying to accomplish. Sarah Palin slammed the campaign as yet another instance of “the government thinking that they need to take over and make decisions for us according to some politician or politician’s wife priorities.” Rush Limbaugh blasted Mrs. Obama for promoting healthy eating despite the fact that she doesn’t “project the image of women that you might see on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, or of a woman Alex Rodriguez might date every six months or what have you.” Mitt Romney and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) have all jumped on board. Mrs. Obama has even been blamed for an increase in pedestrian deaths.
However, today on Fox News Sunday, former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AK) came to the First Lady’s defense:
What Michelle Obama is proposing is not that the government should tells you that you can’t eat dessert. What Michelle Obama has proposed is that we recognize that we have a serious obesity crisis — which we do.
Seventy-five percent of military eligible kids going into the army can’t qualify for the physical because they are either overweight or obese and can’t meet the minimum army standards. That’s serious. This is no longer a health issue, an economic issue, it’s becoming an issue of national security.
Watch it:
Yet, Huckabee still wanted to “be clear” that he wasn’t saying that “Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and Rush Limbaugh” are “all wrong” — even though that is precisely what he implied. Gov. Chris Christie also defended the First Lady’s obesity campaign today, stating that the criticism of Michelle Obama that is coming from the right is “unnecessary.” “I think it’s a really good goal to encourage kids to eat better…I think the First Lady is speaking out well,” said Christie.
MSNBC's Chris Jansing, referencing a report by the liberal Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on "active U.S. hate groups," asked Wednesday if the rise of radical right-wing groups coincided with the motives behind Jared Loughner's assassination attempt on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.).
When asked about the "hate groups" report, guest Mark Potok of the SPLC immediately pointed to the rise of "radical right-wing groups" and attributed the rise to "resentment over the changing racial demographics," "frustration over the lagging economy," and "mainstreaming of conspiracy theories."
"The economy since the fall of 2008, of course, has really played into this in terms of unemployment, anger with the bailouts, and so on," added Potok. "It's really ginned-up anti-government feeling, in many ways."
Jansing then tried to pin the widespread angst with Loughner's motives. "Now obviously, it does seem as though this guy has some serious mental health issues. But beyond that he also did talk about his extreme hatred for the government. You have a state where immigration issues have been boiling for quite a while. Do you see those kind of direct connections?" she asked Potok.
Potok backed away from the assessment, though, and turned to more specific examples of domestic terrorism. "Well I wouldn't make the connection too directly in the case of Jared Loughner," he carefully assessed before citing examples of radical extremists planning to carry out domestic terrorism before they were caught.
The liberal SLPC's "hate map" includes the social-conservative Family Research Council on its list, for being "anti-gay." The report also labels as "hate groups" the Traditional Values Coalition (anti-gay), Federation for American Immigration Reform (anti-immigrant), and various "radical traditional Catholicism" groups.
A transcript of the segment, which aired on February 23 at 10:23 a.m. EST, is as follows:
CHRIS JANSING: Hate groups across America are growing, both in number and in hatred of the federal government. A new report released by the Southern Poverty Law Center puts the number of active U.S. hate groups at more than 1,000 – that's the first time ever. The report also shows a 60 percent spike in anti-government patriot groups, and there's a growing fear that these extremist movements could produce more homegrown acts of terrorism. Mark Potok is the intelligence project director for the Southern Poverty Law Center. Good morning, thanks for being with us.
MARK POTOK, intelligence project director, Southern Poverty Law Center: Good morning, Chris. Thanks for having me.
JANSING: As you looked into this, it's a pretty extensive report. What did you find out? What's going on here? Why the increase?
POTOK: Well, basically what we found was really quite an enormous expansion in radical right-wing groups in general, of both hate groups and nativist groups, and especially anti-government patriot groups, what we used to call the "militias" back in the 1990s. You know, I think basically there are three things driving this growth. They are the changing racial demographics of the country, and that's reflected in a number of ways, in non-white immigration and very much sort of a patheocisized in the person of Barack Obama. So there's a lot of anger and angst among some people about that. And there's a reaction. In addition, the economy since the fall of 2008, of course, has really played into this in terms of unemployment, anger with the bailouts, and so on.
(On-Screen Text)
Fueling the Hate:
– Resentment over the changing racial demographics.
– Frustration over the lagging economy.
– Mainstreaming of conspiracy theories.
POTOK: It's really ginned-up anti-government feeling in many ways. And I think the third major factor is the move of right-wing propaganda, of conspiracy theories, into the political mainstream. So you know we have ideas that originate on the far-right like the theory that Mexico is secretly planning to re-conquer the American Southwest. And those ideas have essentially moved into the political mainstream. So you'll now often hear them on cable news television, on radio talkshows –
JANSING: Well let's talk the specifics if we can, because obviously what's in everybody's mind most recently is Jared Loughner and what happened with the tragedy in Tucson and Gabby Giffords. Now obviously, it does seem as though this guy has some serious mental health issues. But beyond that he also did talk about his extreme hatred for the government. You have a state where immigration issues have been boiling for quite a while. Do you see those kind of direct connections?
POTOK: Well I wouldn't make the connection too directly in the case of Jared Loughner, although it's certainly true that he had adopted a number of anti-government ideas, and of course Gabby Giffords, the congresswoman he tried to assassinate, was the leading representative of the government, of the federal government in his reach. You know, I think maybe another way of looking at this is to think of another – an 11 day period in the same month that this occurred, in January, we saw three essentially major domestic terrorist plots. A man named Jeffrey Harbin, a well-known neo-Nazi, was arrested on his way to the border in Arizona. He had manufacured, allegedly, 12 IEDs – improvised explosive devices – that a prosecutor described as built to maximize human carnage. We don't know exactly what he was up to, but a few days later, three days later, in fact, a very large anti-personnel weapon, bomb, was found along the route of a Martin Luther King Day parade in Spokane, Washington.
(On-Screen Text)
Growing Voice of Hate:
National Numbers:
Ku Klux Klan: 221 Groups
Neo-Nazis: 170 Groups
Black Separatists: 149 Groups
White Nationalists: 136 Groups
Racist Skinheads: 136 Groups
Neo-Confederate: 42 Groups
POTOK: And then just another seven days after that, we had a man arrested in car filled with explosives parked right outside a mosque – a very large mosque – in Dearborn, Michigan, apparently planning an attack. So there's a lot going on out there.
JANSING: Yeah, it's a very sobering report. Mark Potok, thanks so much for coming on to tell us about it.
National tea party groups like Americans for Prosperity have been bussing conservative activists to Madison, WI to confront protesters there standing up to Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) union busting. But Tea Party Nation and Mark Williams, the disgraced former chairman of Tea Party Express, who was forced to resign after making offensive racial comments, are calling for a more radical approach. In an email alert to supporters sent last night, Tea Party Nation promotes Williams’ “great idea” to impersonate SEIU organizers at upcoming labor rallies in an attempt to embarrass and discredit the union.
Williams lays out a highly dishonest and fairly involved scheme to have “plants” sign up on the SEIU website to be organizers for an upcoming rally, dress up in SEIU shirts, and to then make outrageous comments to reporters covering the events in order to “make the gathering look as greedy and goonish as we know that it is”:
That link will take you to an SEIU page where you can sign up as an “organizer” for one of their upcoming major rallies to support the union goons in Wisconsin. Here is what I am doing in Sacramento, where they are holding a 5:30 PM event this coming Tuesday: (1) I signed up as an organizer (2) with any luck they will contact me and I will have an “in” (3) in or not I will be there and am asking as many other people as can get there to come with, all of us in SEIU shirts (those who don’t have them we can possibly buy some from vendors likely to be there) (4) we are going to target the many TV cameras and reporters looking for comments from the members there (5) we will approach the cameras to make good pictures… signs under our shirts that say things like “screw the taxpayer!” and “you OWE me!” to be pulled out for the camera (timing is important because the signs will be taken away from us. […]
Our goal is to make the gathering look as greedy and goonish as we know that it is, ding their credibility with the media and exploit the lazy reporters who just want dramatic shots and outrageous quotes for headlines. Even if it becomes known that we are plants the quotes and pictures will linger as defacto truth.
Williams is even hoping to make a few bucks off the idea, asking readers to “Please contribute!!!” as “I need to travel beyond Sacramento to the other SEIU rally cities and then Madison, and in short order!”
And Williams has no qualms about employing this treachery, telling his “plants”: “Chances are that because I am publishing this they’ll catch wind, but it is worth the chance if you take it upon yourself to act.” In an update, Williams say activists in Iowa, Colorado, Massachusetts, “and several other states” were already on board, and he said “Tea Party Patriot groups and individuals are flooding me with emails vowing to participate and come up with their own creative ruses!”
Williams’ plan appears to have been taken down from both Tea Party Nation and Williams’ own site, suggesting they perhaps realize this plan is entirely in the wrong, but view a cached version here, and screen grabs here and here.
We’ve learned quite a lot about how loathsome a commentator Lawrence O’Donnell is from his “Rewrite” segment on James Hudnall’s and Batton Lash’s “Obama Nation” cartoon. His hilariously uptight lecturing and blatant hypocrisy have already been documented, but one element of his “Rewrite” that needs more attention is his shocking violation of journalistic ethics. Not only does O’Donnell make a fool of himself here, but he crosses several lines, going from pompous to downright menacing.
First of all, check out how O’Donnell introduces Batton and Lash to his audience. The “Rewrite” segment usually includes a comic-style graphic with the title of the segment and, if he’s talking about a right-winger, an unflattering picture of his target next to the word (no picture when it’s a left-winger). However, this particular instance of “Rewrite” went a step further, pasting each author’s picture in the “Rewrite” graphic as well as their names. The formatting turns the graphic into a phrase/sentence: “Rewrite James Hudnall” and “Rewrite Batton Lash.” Am I splitting hairs? Not as finely as those who called for a “New Tone” because of Palin’s target map. From the deluge of death threats these men have received in the wake of O’Donnell’s show, these graphics (and the uniqueness of their layout in this instance) clearly violate the rhetorical standards that pundits like O’Donnell haughtily demanded in the wake of Gabrielle Giffords’ horrendous shooting.
The New Tone at work.
Furthermore, O’Donnell divulges the name of Batton Lash’s wife- not once, but twice. She is a private citizen who had no role in the creation of the cartoon. That fully constitutes an unwarranted breach of privacy on its own, but he goes even further by naming the city in which she and Lash live, directly asking his viewers to confront them in public about Lash’s cartoon- in effect, commanding them to personally harrass a private citizen.
Did any conservative commentators do this to Nir Rosen for his truly despicable tweets about Lara Logan? Did Glenn Beck say, “He lives in [town]; if you find him, say ‘Shame on you!’” Did Sean Hannity directly address his family members? What about Chauncey DeVega and his demonstrably racist screed? Were his family members dragged into right-wing responses to his disgusting attacks on Herman Cain? Was there a talk show host on Fox who scrambled to post his real name and face onscreen?
As James Hudnall originally stated, Lawrence O’Donnell should be disciplined for his indiscretions. Giving out the name of a private citizen who was not involved in the story, giving out the home city of that private citizen, and putting up a graphic which, in effect, reads “Erase this person”- this is totally unprofessional behavior. Who on the right responded to offenses far greater than “Obama Nation”’s cartoon with such egregious intimidation and personal endangerment? Perhaps we’ll find some angry leftist commenter who can point to an obscure example of a right-wing host doing one of these things, but what about all three in a single outrageously sanctimonious segment?
Also, I’ll be waiting patiently for SNL to mock O’Donnell for not looking into his camera the same way they did Michelle Bachmann.
Our guest blogger is Charlie Eisenhood, a student at New York University and the Editor-in-Chief of the New York City-based blog NYU Local.
Last week, the New York City Council held hearings on whether or not to allow the construction of a proposed Wal-Mart in the city, one of many meetings that take place every week. However, conservative hate blogger Pamela Geller, upset that the Council is not meeting to discuss the financing of the Park 51 Islamic community center slated to be built in lower Manhattan, organized a rally at the hearing to protest the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque.”
Geller has generated much of the loony, right-wing apoplectic rage about Park 51 and Islam. She compared the building of the community center to the Ku Klux Klan building a “shrine” near a black church. She also launched anti-Islamic advertisements around the country, said the community center project was the “2nd wave of the 9/11 attack,” and recently pitched a book that would discuss how to fight “creeping Sharia.” She even told the New York Times that she doesn’t believe in a “moderate Islam.”
Geller’s protest, attended by about 10 people, fizzled as she failed to interrupt the hearings with comments about Park 51. After she left, Think Progress caught up with her to ask about Rep. Peter King’s (R-NY) upcoming McCarthyesque hearings on the radicalization of American Muslims. Geller told us she endorsed King’s hearings. “Of course,” she told us, adding that she’s “proud” of King’s efforts:
TP: Considering your comments on the Ground Zero Mosque, are you glad to see that Peter King will be holding hearings on the radicalization of American Muslims?
GELLER: I am happy for any defense of America. And if those hearings lead to a better understanding of those that are plotting against this country, of course. As an American, of course I’m proud of any politican who is vigorously pursuing information against people that are trying to take over and overthrow America.
Watch it:
King, the House Homeland Security Committee Chairman, has refused to “include all groups seen as potential domestic terrorism threats” in the hearings, choosing to focus on Muslims. Though he feigns moderation by declining to call some of the most bigoted and nasty anti-Muslim commentators as witnesses, King’s own record includes suggesting that Muslims aren’t “American” in times of war and arguing that Muslims are the “enemy amongst us.”
Of course, if the hearings were really about “pursuing information” against terrorists, King would have opened them to include all domestic terror threats, not restricting it just to Muslim Americans. King seems to justify his witch hunt with the claim that Muslims “do not cooperate” with law enforcement. In fact, they do. Bigots like Geller and King, who believes that four out of five mosques in this country are “controlled by radical Imams,” an obviously absurd claim, are using these hearings as a way to stoke Islamophobia and fear, not to root out terrorist plots.
The Los Angeles Times writes today, “[A]nti-Islamic feeling in this country is real and widespread. King’s hearings run the risk of exacerbating that.”
