In the wake of tragedy at the Boston marathon finish line, fear and a rush to classify the nature of the attack have been rampant. But one Texas Republican’s comments have led to outrage and head-scratching after he said that in the wake of the bombing, Americans must remember that radical Islamists are training to “act like Hispanic.”
(Source: questionall, via recall-all-republicans)
Joel Pett editorial cartoon
…if sometimes you feel like a nut, you might have been listening to Rand Paul…
Missouri GOP Senate candidate Todd Akin not only wrote a letter praising a right-wing paramilitary group in the 1990s, but he defended the militia movement to the media and “checked out” the local group, a newly unearthed news report shows. And he did all this the month after the Oklahoma City bombing, perpetrated by militia movement sympathizer Timothy McVeigh.
In the wake of the April, 19 1995, bombing that left 168 people dead, the Springfield (Missouri) News-Leader published a front page article on the militia movement and then-Democratic Gov. Mel Carnahan’s concern that the paramilitary activists could be a threat. The story, which has gone unnoticed in the years since, quotes then-state Rep. Todd Akin defending the movement and saying that he met with its leader and “checked out the unit.”
People for the American Way, a progressive activist group that broke the news about Akin’s arrests, dug up the News-Leader article at the Library of Congress. The St. Louis alt weekly Riverfront Times posted the full story here. Akin’s letter praising the militia group has become a campaign issue several times in the past decade, and every time Akin pleaded ignorance. “I did not want to speak there … I didn’t want to have any part of it,” Akin told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2000. “I didn’t know who they were, I didn’t want to have anything to do with them,” he told radio host Laura Ingraham in August of this year.
As we reported last week, there’s plenty of evidence that Akin knew members of the militia group – Akin donated $200 to the political campaign of the militia’s chaplain, Tim Dreste, a radical pro-life activist — but the News-Leader story confirms that Akin was familiar enough with them to defend them at their lowest hour.
So what was the 1st Missouri Volunteer militia? Well, while Akin said that a Jewish group OKed his meeting with the militia, a March 1993 report from the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks radical right-wing groups, noted that literature offered at the meeting Akin was supposed to speak at included “extracts from hate publications like the Liberty Lobby’s The Spotlight, The Truth at Last, published by anti-Jewish agitator Ed Fields of Georgia, and The Jubilee, a journal that espouses the anti-Semitic pseudo-theology of the ‘Identity Church’ movement.”
Lawmakers meeting with constituents is ordinary, publicly defending a violent anti-government movement after a fatal attack is not ordinary.
During an appearance on CNN’s Starting Point on Monday, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) could not explain when President Obama “apologized” for the United States, despite repeatedly claiming that he went on an “apology tour” across the Middle East shortly after becoming president.
Since violence broke out across the region, Republicans have charged that Obama’s “defeatist” policies have caused the unrest and contributed to the death of Libyan ambassador Christopher Stevens. But pressed to detail where Obama has apologized for America by CNN host Soledad O’Brien, King came up short:
O’BRIEN: Never once in that speech, as you know, which I have the speech right here. that was — he never once used the word “apology.” He never once said “I’m sorry.”
KING: Didn’t have to. The logical — any logical reading of that speech or the speech he gave in France where he basically said that the United States can be too aggressive. […]
O’BRIEN: Everybody keeps talking about this apology tour and apologies from the President. I’m trying to find the words ‘I’m sorry, I apologize’ in any of those speeches. Which I have the text of all those speeches in front of me. None of those speeches at all, if you go to factcheck.org which we check in a lot, they all say the same thing. They fact check this and they say this whole theory of apologies…
KING: I don’t care what fact check says.
O’BRIEN: There are fact checks. You may not care, but they’re a fact checker.
KING: No. Soledad. Any commonsense interpretation of those speeches, the president’s apologizing for the American position. That’s the apology tour. That’s the way it’s interpreted in the Middle East. If I go over and say that the U.S. has violated its principles, that the United States has not shown respect for islam, that’s an apology. How else can it be interpreted?
O’BRIEN: I think plenty of people are interpreting it as a nuanced approach to diplomacy is how some people are interpreting it. So I don’t think that everybody agrees it’s apology.
Soledad O’Brien is my hero, we need so many more journalists like her!
Is Todd Akin Mainstream? (Social Security, Minimum Wage, and Student Loans)
Not only is Republican Todd Akin NOT mainstream, he has very extremist views. This one minute video will show you some of his radical views.
(via recall-all-republicans)
King supports Arizona-style immigration laws.
By EMILY DERUY
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney endorsed Steve King (R-Iowa) for Congress during a campaign stop in northwestern Iowa on Friday. The move drew criticism from Democrats who cited King’s far-right immigration policies as evidence that Romney is catering to extreme views.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) tossed red meat to attendees of the Republican convention by saying he thinks the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the Affordable Care Act doesn’t settle the question of the law’s constitutionality.
“I still think it’s unconstitutional!” Paul thundered.
Do you think Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas have changed their minds?I think if James Madison himself — the father of the Constitution — were here today he would agree with me: The whole damn thing is still unconstitutional! This debate is not new and it’s not over. Hamilton and Madison fought from the beginning about how government would be limited by the enumerated powers. Madison was unequivocal. The powers of the federal government are few and defined. The power to tax and spend is restricted by the enumerated powers.
h/t: Brian Beutler at TPM
Pennsylvania GOP Senate Candidate: Getting pregnant from rape is ‘similar’ to having a baby out of wedlock
