Gary Kreep, a longtime antigovernment activist, “birther” and hate group leader who uses anti-Obama rhetoric as a proxy for anti-Muslim hate, has emerged victorious in a tight race for a seat on San Diego’s Superior Court, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports.

Kreep, who received the San Diego County Bar Association’s lowest rating of “lacking qualifications,” beat opponent Garland Peed, a deputy district attorney of 27 years who received the county bar association’s highest rating and who was supported by local police unions and sitting judges.

The San Diego Superior Court is part of the state’s trial court system, which handles a wide variety of cases, including civil lawsuits and felony criminal cases. Kreep will serve a six-year term and earn an annual salary of $178,789. ( continue to full post… )

Lord help us. Alabama Public Television (APT), a voice of reason in a state that often seems to have very little, is apparently succumbing to the crazies.

Last week, the two top executives of the network were summarily fired by the Alabama Educational Television Commission, APT’s governing body, after they resisted an effort by a new commissioner to air DVDs produced by a far-right theocrat who has been roundly condemned by historians. In the days that followed, three members of a foundation set up to raise money for APT also resigned.

The videos were produced by David Barton, an evangelical propagandist who claims falsely that America was founded as a Christian nation and has also become Glenn Beck’s unofficial — and completely untrained — “historian.” The DVDs were suggested by commissioner Rodney Herring, an Opelika-based chiropractor who was appointed to the panel last year and elected its secretary in January. ( continue to full post… )

UPDATE: Late Thursday, Rachel Nelson, public relations director for Premiere Networks, said any ads from Westboro Baptist Church would be rejected. “Premiere Networks is not considering an offer of sponsorship from Westboro Baptist Church,” Nelson said in a message to Hatewatch sent from the company’s Sherman Oaks, Calif., headquarters.

Guess who’s knocking on Rush Limbaugh’s door as his advertisers flee like rats from a sinking ship? It’s the people behind the infamous GodHatesFags website — the Westboro Baptist Church, the most notorious gay-bashing group in America — and they’re ready to step in to keep the embattled Limbaugh on the air.

“As a matter of fact, I can confirm that,” Westboro spokesman Steve Drain told Hatewatch today when asked if the church was seeking to advertise on “The Rush Limbaugh Show.” “We’re preparing our first ad at this very moment, and we’ll have a 30-second radio spot ready to go by Friday.” ( continue to full post… )

There’s stupid, and then there’s really stupid. Finally, there’s blind, leaden stupidity, a quality personified in great detail by the loathsome Glenn Beck last week.

Beck has long been aware of his own ridiculous qualities, telling The New York Times for a major 2009 profile that he was a mere “rodeo clown,” not really a serious kind of a fellow. But that’s letting the one-time Fox News host off the reality hook a little too easily. The plain truth is that Beck has done as much as anyone to inject complete falsehoods, conspiracy theories and demonizing propaganda into American political discourse. Facts mean nothing to the rodeo clown.

Neither, it turns out, does any kind of taste or judgment. ( continue to full post… )

In the last several years, an obscure United Nations accord called Agenda 21 has emerged as something of a unified field theory for the antigovernment movement. On its face, Agenda 21 does nothing but provide countries and communities with a set of principles to grow smartly –– a plan, in short, to fight overpopulation, pollution, poverty and resource depletion.

But for a far-flung network of antigovernment extremists who have risen up to attack it, the nonbinding document that was approved 20 years ago at the UN’s Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro is not really about preserving the planet at all. Between the lines, they argue, lies a blueprint for the “New World Order.”

In his final days on Fox News, Glenn Beck passionately argued that by agreeing to follow Agenda 21, the U.S. government had colluded with internationalists to undermine its own sovereignty and turn the nation into an environmental refuge where nature would take precedence over people. ( continue to full post… )

Anti-liberal propaganda has been ramping up for years. Former Fox News host Glenn Beck, who was cited as an inspiration for at least three rightwing extremists accused of committing or plotting violence, called himself a “progressive hunter” and attempted to rebrand Hitler as a leftist. Anti-Muslim activist Frank Gaffney routinely warns of a “red-green” alliance between liberals and violent Islamist terrorists.  But the people behind a website called “Target of Opportunity” (motto: “Eliminating the planet of liberals one at a time”) have taken things several steps further, creating a “Hit List” profiling supposed liberal enemies of America.

“This website is a list and record of people that betray and endanger America by their Seditious, Treasonous, and/or Terrorist activities,” its homepage reads. “Operating under the false illusion of Peaceful and Non-Violent activism, their methods are anything but Peaceful and Non-Violent. These people present a serious threat to all Americans. Each and every one of them should be considered a “TARGET OF OPPORTUNITY.” ( continue to full post… )

Even stopped clocks are right two times a day, so why can’t hate group leaders be half as accurate?

Internet evangelist Bill Keller, head of the anti-Muslim, anti-gay, anti-Mormon hate group Bill Keller Ministries, spoke the truth exactly once in a press release issued yesterday. Exhorting Christians not to follow Glenn Beck, he observed that the former Fox News entertainer “views himself as a modern day Paul Revere or Moses,” and makes money – “mostly from gullible Christians” – by scaring them into “buying gold, safes, and food insurance.”

Truer words were never spoken – unfortunately, they were spoken by a lunatic. ( continue to full post… )

As the Occupy Wall Street protesters are swept out of their encampments around the nation, many are asking what the movement’s next step will be and if the police actions might actually help the two-month-old populist outburst grow.

But even for those seeking to discern the future of the OWS movement, a more instructive question might be: What was OWS, anyway?

To hear the denizens of the far right tell it, the protesters who filled public spaces in cities around the country and even abroad were unwashed hippies, lazy potheads incapable of holding a job, homeless opportunists scarfing up free food and shelter. They were Nazis. They were Marxists. They were anarchists. ( continue to full post… )

Given his reputation as a corrupt master of manipulation, disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff has been given a surprisingly credulous welcome by the media following the Nov. 1 release of his book Capitol Punishment: The Hard Truth about Washington Corruption from America’s Most Notorious Lobbyist.

Described by its publisher as “an engrossing, informative work” that will “serve as a corrective” to Abraham’s “wildly misunderstood” story, the book and its author have in the past week been portrayed with relative sympathy by at least two important mainstream outlets, CBS’s “60 Minutes” and The New York Times. Neither lets him off the hook entirely; the Times, for example, notes that his book tour is “classic Abramoff” and “reflects his latest and most personal lobbying effort yet: the one on which he lobbies for himself.” But (ironically, given the subject matter) neither do the two reports look at who is behind this effort to redeem “Casino Jack,” and who stands to benefit from it. ( continue to full post… )

Move over, Glenn Beck. The amusingly misnamed Accuracy in Media, a far-right organization that generally spends its time defaming gay people and all things on the political left, yesterday published an exhaustive, and exhausting, report that purports to unmask a Latino rights organization. And it makes the former Fox News host’s famous blackboard look downright simple.

The new “report” was written by James Simpson, identified as a former Office of Management and Budget analyst who also freelances for far-right publications like FrontPage Magazine and Soldier of Fortune. It purports to show that “the company associated with Gustavo Torres and CASA de Maryland comprises a who’s who of the radical left.” CASA, it says, is “of a piece with all other American organizations of the far, far Left.”

If you want to actually read it, you’ll have to wade through about 18 pages of mind-numbing accusations, insults and a blizzard of alleged links to people and organizations that Simpson and Accuracy in Media believe are scary indeed. We took the easy way out, just studying a spectacular spaghetti bowl of links and ties that Simpson diagrammed to make his point. It’s all there, the connections between George Soros and the Communist Party USA and the AFL-CIO and ACORN and the Obama Administration and… well, you get the picture.

And in the unlikely event that you still haven’t been fully illuminated on the threat posed by CASA, Simpson has some soothing words for you. In the next few weeks, he says, he’ll be releasing even more explosive materials “that could not be included due to space constraints.”

Apparently, some things are too much even for Accuracy in Media.