In April, I wrote a column “Manufactured Noose Mania” about the sudden rise of nooses as the latest hate symbol. As an example of how new this was, I noted how country singer Toby Keith’s 2003 hit with country icon Willie Nelson, “Beer for My Horses” that contained the lyrics

Grandpappy told my pappy back in my day, son
A man had to answer for the wicked that he’d done
Take all the rope in Texas
Find a tall oak tree, round up all of them bad boys
Hang them high in the street
For all the people to see

elicited no controversy at the time.

Well, now Keith is set to star in a movie based on the song, and now the always insufferable Max Blumenthal has procalimed the song to by a “pro-lynching anthem.” He is particularly incensed that Keith is performing the song on the Colbert Report, The Jay Leno Show, and other venues and no doubt his buddies at Media Matters and the Southern Poverty Law Center will follow up.

Blumenthal writes in the Huffington Post “During the days when Toby Keith’s “Grandpappy” stalked the Jim Crow South, lynching was an institutional method of terror employed against blacks to maintain white supremacy.”

Blumenthal fails to note that the song is a duet with country icon Willie Nelson who actually sings the offending lines. Nelson has impeccable left wing credentials and played at the 2004 Democratic convention and is expected to play in 2008. I am still waiting for Blumenthal to object.

As I noted in my piece, the noose has long been one of the most commonly used devices for execution, for all races, and Keith and Nelson were clearly celebrating the rough justice of whites against whites in the Old West, not lynchings in the South. The music video showed pictures of the former.

Furthermore, like the videos for other country music songs that decry street crime like Montgomery Gentry’s “You Do Your Thing, I’ll Do Mine” and Hank Williams Jr.’s “A Country Boy Can Survive” the video for Beer For My Horses portrays urban criminals is white.
Nonetheless, Blumethal insists the song and video are all about encouraging lynching African Americans,

Cue ahead to 3:00 and watch as Keith intones, “We got too many gangsters doin’ dirty deeds.” The singer’s words are not-so-subtly accompanied by the image of a swaggering black man sporting short dreads and baggy clothes. Thus the profile of Keith’s ideal lynching candidate is revealed.

If his viewers actually watch the whole video, they’ll see the black man is someone who Keith is interviewing in attempting to find a white serial killer, but that doesn’t matter to Blumenthal who has a near supernatural ability to find racism in everything.

A number of Keith fans have taken issue. Blumenthal complained in The Nation that one said, “I can’t believe that this Max can’t find something real to complain about in this crazy world… I think Max is the bigot - he obviously hates country music, country singers and Southerners.”

The ever-hip Blumenthal responded that he is in fact a huge country music fan,

Describing Keith’s over-produced truck commercial schmaltz as “country music” besmirches the dignified tradition established by Bill Monroe, Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton, while insulting the innovative artists propelling the genre into the future, from Neko Case to Son Volt to my good friend Dave Bryan. At his best, Keith is Merle Haggard with a lobotomy.

I consider myself a country music fan, but do not like most Toby Keith’s music. Nonetheless, as a Jew who who grew up in an upper-middle class suburb of Washington, DC; I don’t purport to be the arbiter of what country music is other than what people in the country listen to.

Toby Keith was an oil rig worker from Oklahoma before he was a singer, and his music is incredibly popular with Middle America. Neko Case and Son Volt are from Tacoma, Washington and Illinois respectively, and their fan base is people like Max Blumenthal. I haven’t even heard of Dave Bryan whose fan base is probably limited to just Max Blumenthal.

Blumenthal’s attitude reminds me of Robbie Fulk’s song “Countrier than Thou.” which describes a Boston Jew sneering that the South “is like a planet of peckerwoods and bozos,” while telling people from the Country what country music is:

He loved bluegrass, oh brother, when I said Shania he sneered
“That’s a word I wouldn’t know of. We like to keep it down-home up here”…

Countrier than Thou, Countrier than thou
You weren’t raised in a shack, so you better not act all
Countrier than thou.

Remember the horrible crash in February that killed four kids in Cottonwood, Minnesota? An illegal alien driving a minivan ran a stop sign and smashed into a schoolbus.

The trial is done, and the Guatemalan is guilty on all counts. A sentencing date has not yet been set.

In the end, a Kandiyohi County jury believed that Olga Franco was behind the wheel of a van when it plowed into a loaded Cottonwood school bus nearly six months ago, killing four students and injuring 17.

The 24-year-old Guatemalan native, who had claimed that her boyfriend was driving the van, showed no emotion when the verdict was read — guilty on all 24 counts, including criminal vehicular homicide and criminal vehicular injury.

Family members of the victims wept quietly as the verdict was read about 10 p.m.

Over more than four days of testimony from crash experts and other witnesses, the jurors had been faced with one central question: Had Franco been driving the van that plowed into the bus on Feb. 19?

Even if they had determined that Franco wasn’t behind the wheel and had acquitted her, she hadn’t been expected to walk out of the courthouse. She still faces federal identity theft charges and was likely to be deported because authorities say she is in the country illegally.
[Franco found guilty in Cottonwood school bus crash, Minneapolis Star Tribune, August 7, 2008]

In addition to the above-mentioned crimes, she was also charged with failure to stop at a stop sign, not having a valid driver’s license, and providing a false name and date of birth to a police officer.

Shown below are the four children killed (left to right) Hunter Javens, 9, and his brother Jesse Javens, 13, both of Cottonwood; Emilee Olson, 9, of Cottonwood; and Reed Stevens, 12, of Marshall, MN.

The Agence France Presse reports,

A Chinese immigrant who stabbed, gutted and beheaded a fellow passenger on a bus traveling across Canada last week also cannibalized the victim and pocketed his nose, lips and ear, a court heard Tuesday.

Vince Weiguang Li, 40, of Edmonton faces a second-degree murder charge in the horrific case.

The victim has been identified by friends as Tim McLean, a young man of 22 years who was returning home to Winnipeg from a job as a carnival worker in Edmonton in Western Canada.

In his second court appearance, Li was overheard saying “please kill me.”

Prosecutors said police observed him eating pieces of his victim when they surrounded the bus on a desolate highway about 90 kilometers (55 miles) west of Winnipeg immediately following the July 30 attack.

Li had decapitated the victim, sliced off an ear and bits of flesh and was taunting police and bystanders with the head, refusing to leave the bus and screaming “I have to stay on the bus forever,” the Crown said….

After a three-hour standoff, Li tossed a knife and scissors out of a broken window of the bus, jumped out and was subdued by police, the court heard.

In his pants pocket, police found several body parts hacked from the victim’s face, said Dalmyn….

People who knew Li said the accused had showed signs of mental health troubles in the years leading up to the attack, but refused help.

His estranged wife told police he’d once been hospitalized for four days for strange behavior, the court heard.

Li did not speak in court. He nodded yes when asked by the judge if he understood the seriousness of the charge and shook his head no when asked if he wanted a lawyer.

“He doesn’t seem to want to engage in any discourse,” his interim defense lawyer Randy Janis told AFP after meeting with Li to try to convince him to accept legal counsel.

“His few responses are non-verbal, there’s very little eye contact. Occasionally, he’ll nod or shake his head to answer,” he said, describing Li as withdrawn.

The judge ordered a psychiatric evaluation of the accused before his next scheduled court appearance on September 8.

Chinese immigrant in bus beheading dined on victim: prosecutors, August 5, 2008.

Acknowledgment: Lawrence Auster.

For years, the Mexican government has made a great show of protesting the executions of Mexican murderers in the U.S.

Several years ago I wrote an article which was entitled For Fox, Some Dead Mexicans More Equal Than Others. It’s about how the earthly remains of executed cop-killer Javier Suarez Medina received a hero’s welcome in Mexico, with a flag-covered casket and 6,000 mourners at a four and a half hour funeral.

Another Mexican, Jose Medellin (or Joe Medellin as he preferred to be called) was just executed in Texas. Despite protest from the Mexican government, the Medellin execution has failed to stir up much commotion in Mexico. My impression is most Mexicans don’t give a hoot. Some have even defended the execution.

Plus, Mexico has plenty of violence here, which is leading some Mexicans to call for the re-institution of the death penalty in their country .

According to an AP article entitled Medellin’s death gets little notice in crime-weary Mexico, (Mark Stevenson, Aug. 6th, 2008), a lawyer interviewed in Mexico City while his shoes were being shined was asked about the Medellin execution and responded in this manner:

There is no reason for outrage. The man was a rapist. If we had the death penalty here, there wouldn’t be so many crimes.

Sergio Sarmiento, a very sharp Mexican pundit whom I quote from time to time, wrote a few columns in recent months putting the case in perspective, describing the savagery of Medellin’s crime.

These columns provoked the wrath of Edgar Rebollar, a Mexican diplomat who functions as a protective consul in Omaha. So Rebollar wrote to Sarmiento to complain.
In his Aug. 6th column , Sarmiento quoted the irate consul, who wrote to the commentator that,

After having read your articles, the reader can get the impression that the Mexican government spends the tax money of his fellow citizens in the defense of criminals. Once again I repeat, Mr. Sarmiento, the Mexican government does not defend criminals nor does it ask that they be exonerated. As you should know, in our country the death penalty is not applied and that is the only thing that our government asks of the U.S. government.

So according to Rebollar,the U.S. government should not be permitted to execute Mexicans, regardless of what they do.

Sarmiento quoted more of Rebollar’s letter, responded to it, and concluded with this comment:

” .. in neither of his [Rebollar's] two letters has he even mentioned the names of Elizabeth Pena and Jennifer Ertman. Maybe for Mexican diplomats there are those condemned to death, but no victims of their crimes.”

Allan Wall is scheduled to be interviewed by Chuck Wilder on “George Putnam’s Talk Back” show (George Putnam has been off the air lately due to health problems ). The interview is scheduled for 1:05 p.m Pacific Time, Thursday August 7th
(that’s 4:05 Eastern). You can listen live here and  it’s repeated at 8 p.m. Pacific Time each night.

UPDATE: I’m putting this up at the top of the blog as a reminder, but there’s lots of new stuff below it.

The weight of evidence is rapidly approaching the threshold of “beyond a reasonable doubt” that government bioweapons defense researcher Bruce E. Ivins was the 2001 anthrax terrorist. As Greg Cochran pointed out to me during a long conversation Wednesday evening, Occam’s Razor is pointing right at Ivins. He had the means (he was the custodian of the anthrax used in the attacks) and he had motives that, while they remain uncertain, appear explicable (he likely wanted to focus attention and funding on his field of expertise — anthrax vaccines).

What’s indisputable is that Ivins, who killed himself on July 29, was a mad scientist.

Something I learned as I’ve gone through life that initially surprised me was what a high proportion of people suffer from mental problems at one point or another. The mind is very complicated and it can jump the rails more than you might think. For example, I’m about as even-keeled as anybody I know, yet I suffered panic attacks and depression for several weeks after I was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer a dozen years ago.

Ivins, though, didn’t have run-of-the-mill mental health troubles. He was, during his worst years, bad crazy in a way that, fortunately, I’ve never come in contact with. Apparently, nine other people had access to Ivins’ anthrax, but, as Greg pointed out, it’s unlikely that any one of them was as crazy as Ivins.

From the New York Times:

In the summer of 2000, Ivins told a counselor that he was interested in a young woman who lived out of town and that he had “mixed poison” and taken it with him when he went to watch her play in a soccer match.

“If she lost, he was going to poison her,” said the counselor, who treated Ivins at a Frederick, Md., clinic four or five times that summer. She said Ivins emphasized he was a skillful scientist who “knew how to do things without people finding out.”

The counselor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Wednesday that she was so alarmed by her client’s emotionless description of a specific, homicidal plan that she alerted the head of her clinic, a psychiatrist who had treated Ivins and the Frederick Police Department. She said the police told her nothing could be done because she did not have the woman’s address or last name.

The account of the counselor, who was interviewed by the FBI early last week, is part of a dark portrait of Ivins that emerged Wednesday.

Besides these kind of terrible impulses, he suffered from delusional obsessions. His psychiatrist in 2000 suggested he had “paranoid personality disorder.” He believed that the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority was waging a “fatwa” against him. The LA Times reported:

Long before, however, Ivins had acted oddly; for example, the documents released Wednesday said that he had used two post office boxes over 24 years to “pursue obsessions” — including an intense interest in the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. One confidential witness said Ivins had admitted breaking into a Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority house to steal a secret handbook, apparently while he was pursuing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of North Carolina.

The documents also included a message board post by Ivins on a conspiracy theory website,  www.abovetopsecret.com . Asking for replies at the e-mail address goldenphoenix111@hotmail.com , he wrote that the sorority had labeled him as an enemy decades ago. “I can only abide their ‘Fatwah’ on me,” he said.

(more…)

In September 2001, America was first terrorized by a rich supervillain who lives in a cave, then by a genuine mad scientist.

We now know that the FBI learned in early 2005 from state-of-the-art gene sequencing that terrorist anthrax had to come from one of ten people at Ft. Detrick, and that Stephen Hatfill, the “person of interest” in this case, wasn’t one of them.

How long did it take the FBI investigators to refocus themselves?

David Willman’s breakthrough article in the 8/1/08 LA Times tells us:

Federal investigators moved away from Hatfill — for years the only publicly identified “person of interest” — and ultimately concluded that Ivins was the culprit after FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III changed leadership of the investigation in late 2006.

The FBI’s new top investigators — Vincent B. Lisi and Edward W. Montooth — instructed agents to reexamine leads or potential suspects that may have received insufficient attention. Moreover, significant progress was made in analyzing genetic properties of the anthrax powder recovered from letters addressed to two senators.

The renewed efforts led the FBI back to USAMRIID, where agents first questioned scientists in December 2001, a few weeks after the fatal mailings.

By spring of this year, FBI agents were still contacting Ivins’ present and former colleagues. At USAMRIID and elsewhere, scientists acquainted with Ivins were asked to sign confidentiality agreements in order to prevent leaks of new investigative details.

So, it looks like about a year and a half went by while the old FBI team continued to spin its wheels, stuck in the rut of blaming Hatfield. People don’t like to admit they’re wrong.

It was only in late 2006 when the FBI boss reassigned the old investigators and brought in a new team that the FBI began to make progress in finding a suspect that fit the genome sequencing data that they had had since early 2005. That year and a half lag may help explain why the government paid so much ($5.8 million) to Hatfill recently.

Clearly, much of the blame directed at Hatfield was because, like the bad guy in a Hollywood thriller, he had lived for a number of years in Rhodesia and South Africa. But there was some other circumstantial evidence — he had a history of claiming advanced degrees he hadn’t earned, he had been very interested in anthrax terrorism, he was taking Cipro at the time of the attacks for sinus surgery, and some minor coincidences. He was not a totally unreasonable suspect at first.

I bet, however, it was, especially, the unjustifiable 1.5 or so years between the genome sequencing in early 2005 and the FBI changing investigators and then suspects in late 2006 that led the government to settle on lavish terms with Hatfill.

Candidate John McCain is still mulling over whom to select for his Vice-Presidential candidate. There has been some talk of him having a woman on the ticket, such as Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska.[McCain VP Talk Turns to Two Female Conservatives Joseph Curl, Ralph Z. Hallow, Washington Times, Aug. 1st, 2008

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who supports Governor Palin, has some advice for McCain, counseling the GOP candidate not to select “one more relatively boring normal mainstream Republican white guy”.
So what does Gingrich mean by that?
Does he consider himself “one more relatively boring normal mainstream Republican white guy” ? How about McCain, is he also “one more relatively boring normal mainstream Republican white guy”?
Does Gingrich consider all the previous GOP presidents, from Abraham Lincoln to George W. Bush, as “relatively boring normal mainstream Republican white guys” ?

Would Gingrich accept a candidate who is white, but is not “relatively boring”?
How about one who is Republican but who isn’t “mainstream” but is a “white guy”?
Now is the kind of person Gingrich describes at all equivalent to the “typical white person” described by Obama?
Would Gingrich have advised McCain not to select “one more relatively boring normal mainstream Republican black guy”?

Readers can go here to ask Newt for clarification.