ON NO LESS THAN THREE PREVIOUS OCCASIONS IN THIS WEBLOG--as in here, here and here--Your Correspondent was wondering how much longer it would take before the Religiopolitical Right would start playing their singsong "Christian Persecution! Christian Persecution!" meme towards the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) in the wake of Texas child-welfare agents removing no less than 425 women and girls from their Yearning for Zion compound in west Texas after charges were raised of Indecent Assault and Forced Marriage of Minors.

Now, it appears as if I have my answer, thanks to ConWebBlog, which is linked to ConWebWatch:

In his April 19 WorldNetDaily column, Joseph Farah offers a somewhat convoluted quasi-defense of the polygamist cult whose children have been taken into custody by the state as part of a child abuse investigation.

While he repeatedly claims that "I don't like polygamy. And I don't like child abuse," he seems willing to tolerate both in the name of religious freedom and to serve as a poke in the eye to what he considers to be overreaching government officials. 

Because the raid on the cult semmed from an "anonymous call" made by someone who has yet to be identified, Farah claims he is "left wondering if the action by the state was excessive." He adds:

I don't doubt that some horrendous abuses took place within the walls of the YZR Ranch. Please don't label me as an apologist for this false religion, which I detest.

What I do doubt is that it was appropriate and legal to seize more than 400 children on such skimpy and non-specific evidence of real criminal abuse.

Is there a community in America where child abuse is not taking place?

Don't we normally arrest individual suspects and try them for their crimes?

Do we normally and preemptively round up all the children in a community where it is suspected abuse is taking place without specific evidence?

When a government school teacher is arrested for abusing one student, are all the students in that school assumed to be victims?

That last point is a laugher, since WND arguably makes a similar claim about "government schools"--better known to the rest of us as public schools--on a regular basis by regularly and falsely portraying something as innocuous as showing students that homosexuals merely exist as irrefutable evidence of "indoctrination."

Farah essentially admits that. After claiming that "neither do I want to see children abused at the hands of the state," he immediately adds, "It happens in government-run schools." He then follows with the usual litany of liberal-and government bashing, concluding with "It happens when officials in states such as California actively try to ban homeschooling."

Two points:

1) Farah distorts the California court ruling to which he is referring. There was no "active ban" of homeschooling; it merely pointed out that California has no provision for homeschooling.

2) Farah ignores the fact that there was, in fact, child abuse happening in the family at the center of the California homeschooling lawsuit. As we've detailed, courts have found that the father, Phillip Long, "has a long history of physically abusing the children and mother has a long history of not protecting them from father."

But WND has virtually ignored the abuse aspect of the Long case. Why? Because it has decided that promotion of homeschooling is more important than the welfare of the Longs' children.

In the Longs, we have a perfect example of what Farah described as "crimes that need to be prosecuted individually." But he won't call for that to happen because Phillip Long is more useful to him as a homeschooling poster boy.

Instead, Farah complains: "But cults aren't illegal, and polygamy and sexual abuse are crimes that need to be prosecuted individually, not collectively on a community that may have allowed them to happen." Farah ignores the closed, insular society in which the polygamist cult operated, making it nearly impossible to gain knowledge about individual cases of abuse. When an entire society is based on that abuse, a collective approach may be the better one.

Thus, like the abuse of the Longs' children, Farah is willing to condone the abuse of the cult's children to prove a larger point. Which seems to put the lie to his claim that he doesn't like child abuse.

Which, no doubt, brings to mind a favourite patsy the Religiopolitical Right will love to use in answering to charges of child abuse tending to overzealous spankings:

None other than "Christian love."

As if that weren't enough, how many families as engage in homeschooling based on apartheid South Africa's Nasionale Christen Opverdoing syllabus actually resort to using incest as an agency of maintaining power and authority?

see more crazy cat pics

TRY TELLING THAT TO THE CLERK OF THE WEATHER, boys and girls: The forecast for northern parts of Minnesota into eastern North Dakota (as in the Red River Valley) calls for Snow Advisories or Winter Storm Watches, depending on the region.

With between 8-12" of snow (you read that right--snow!) likely in such areas as have already been saturated from previous snow melts, meaning that any snow melt ensuing from this fresh batch could translate into flooding later on along the Red River of the North and tributaries such as the Red Lake and Wild Rice rivers. And also the headwaters of the Mississippi as it issues forth from Lake Itasca.

As if that weren't enough, flood advisories or warnings have been issued for much of Iowa, northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin thanks to flooding aggravated by recent rainfall already making saturated ground all the more so, in its turn delaying (and seriously) spring field work among farmers and planters alike.

All this, and April about to segue into May!

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IT'S HARD TO DISCERN A SERIOUS INTERRELATIONSHIP HERE, but when you get right down to it, Iraqi Shi'a firebrand Muqtada al-Sadr is urging his groupies to continue supporting an ongoing ceasefire in the continuing misadventures in ur-RAHOWA officially packaged as a War on Terrorism.

Meanwhile, Baghdad's Sadr City district, a major base of support for al-Sadr-affiliated groups, is being reduced to nothing less than Third World slum status, thanks to lack of decent power, water and sewerage service, want of proper trash collection and deteriorating infrastructure--and Sadr City's residents, in the main poor, undereducated and easily-influenced, will no doubt be quick to blame the United States Occupation Forces for making the situation in Sadr City worse.

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STAYING WITH THE "MORALLY SUPERIOR" AMERICANS AND ITS MISADVENTURES IN THE MIDDLE EAST FOR A MOMENT, Your Correspondent understands where the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is expressing reservations @ claims from His Fraudulency's Great Within about the North Koreans providing assistance, technical and otherwise, to the Syrians in developing a super-secretive facility for compounding and developing atomic weapons.

Until the Zahal (as in the Israeli Defence Forces, using their Hebrew acronym) came along and destroyed the compound in a super-secret air raid last summer.

In particular the excesses of paranoia being used by we "morally superior" Americans to whip up hatred for the North Koreans.

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EXPECT THIS KIND OF STUFF TO PREDOMINATE AMONG "RETIREMENT SAVINGS FUNDS" SUPPLANTING STATE SOCIAL SECURITY as target the working poor and other unable to find work without assistance from targeted programmes:

Several share issues on the Shanghai bourse have attracted the attention of what the official media dismisses as "gamblers" seeking a quick profit in the manner of pre-Great Depression "bucket shops" as were no better than thinly-disguised gaming houses taking wagers on share prices.

Case in point, per the BBC: Xijin Mining, a Chinese gold-mining company which released a new issue of shares in Shanghai as were snapped up so quickly by "gamblers" that the price rose 200% on the offering such, prompting market supervisors to briefly suspend trading.

And once trading was allowed to resume, the net gain in Xijin Mining's Shanghai issue would be 90% on the initial offer. (BTW, Xijin Mining is also traded in Hong Kong.)

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AS IF HIGH FUEL PRICES, INFLATION AND HIS FRAUDULENCY'S GRAND DELUSION OF "ECONOMIC STIMULATION" PAYMENTS perhaps encouraging wasteful and non-essential consumer spending weren't good enough reasons to consider online shopping ... then what will?

Especially among the cybermallrat crowd.

Which is prompting Your Correspondent to offer the following suggestions for your online shopping when it comes to office supplies (and yes, he would appreciate your patronage):

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AND SPEAKING OF THE ONLINE SHOPPING @ THIS WEBLOG, Your Correspondent has started thinking about making the situation a little easier by launching a separate and dedicated "online mall" through another free webpage host, the better to accomodate more online e-tailers and offer a wider selection without needlessly delaying the weblog download.

Which would still have designs on donating a part of the proceeds Your Correspondent can collect to Some Good Causes, in case you needed a reason to shop online in the first place (especially the kind of social consciousness). And the motivation therefor, no doubt, being as I have mentioned before: Viz., to supplement what I get in disability benefit from Social Security, inasmuch as I have Serious Psychoemotional Conditions precluding more traditional employment (in case any of you get any ideas).

After all, I am not the kind to take too easily for disreputable "make-money-fast" scams as serve to exploit the vulnerable like myself through formula-written "turnkey" webpages heavy on glowing generalities via suspiciously-glowing-sounding testimonials.

In any case, your thoughts on the idea would be appreciated, and can be left in the comments section or otherwise by e-mailing moi.

WITH THE WATERPARK CAPITAL OF THE WORLD STILL HOME TO A SUBSTANTIAL NUMBER OF INDEPENDENT, "MON-AND-POP" MOTELS AND RESORTS to accomodate the nearly three million shoobies visiting every year (and this includes all the major waterpark resorts, a concept which Wisconsin Dells gave the world), you could just imagine the likelihood of the following hilarious-sounding "Engrish" blurb (originally found in a resort hotel brochure from somewhere in Europe) appearing in a Dells-area motel brochure (and the owners actually managing to attract tourist business in the process):

Having freshly taken over the propriety of this notorious house, I am wishful that you remove to me your esteemed costume. Standing among savage scenery, the hotel offers stupendous revelations. There is a french widow in every bedroom, affording delightful prospects. I give personal look to the interior wants of each guest. Here, you shall be well fed-up and agreeably drunk. Our charges for weekly visitors are scarcely creditable. Peculiar arrangements for gross parties, our motto is ever serve you right!

Come to think of it, it might be interesting to ask just how many motels and resorts in the Dells region (including such particiating in the Superior Small Lodging and Lake Delton Family Lodging schemes) could be considered "notorious houses" for the sake of the above.

On the other hand, expect there to be plenty of "notorious houses" in and around Branson and the Tri-Lakes (as in Taneycomo, Table Rock and Bull Shoals) in the guise of motels and resorts, "notorious" all the more thanks to their attracting especially the weird and unwholesome element attracted to Branson's "nutritious patriotism" in "music show" form--and especially so neo-Nazis, Ku Kluxers, "citizen militia" Zealots and True Believers (including such acting in a "lone wolf" mode, so to speak); in short, the Archie Bunker/Alf Garnett element whose notions of Amerikanischer Realkultur see Branson as its Acme and Perfection not unlike Nazi Germany's use of folk-culture festivals for propaganda ends.

THE CLARION-LEDGER OF JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI, LEGENDARY IN RECENT YEARS FOR LIFTING THE VEIL OF THE INFAMOUS MISSISSIPPI SOVERIGNTY COMMISSION and its racist agenda in the name of "states' rights," has revealed where a $100,000 bounty offered by the Ku Klux Klan for Martin Luther King, Jnr.'s assaination may have motivated James Earl Ray to carry out the act of martyrdom.

Read on:

Before escaping from prison in 1967, James Earl Ray talked repeatedly about getting a bounty from the Ku Klux Klan to assassinate the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., FBI documents show.

Word of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi offering a $100,000 bounty made it into a Missouri prison where Ray was, according to FBI records.

A month after King's April 4, 1968, assassination, the FBI interviewed one of Ray's former cellmates, Raymond Louis Curtis, who told the agent Ray discussed a bounty from the Klan in the South to kill King.

Curtis said Ray told him that if he got out in time and King was still alive, he "would like to get the bounty on King."

King's friends are now asking the Justice Department to review his assassination after emerging evidence involving the Klan, and researchers want the department to make public all records from the investigation in hopes of answering remaining questions.

In 1968, Ray pleaded guilty to killing King and got life in prison. He recanted days later.

In the late 1970s, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded there was "a likelihood that James Earl Ray assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a result of a conspiracy." One area the committee explored was whether Ray thought he would be paid for killing King.

The committee examined a $50,000 bounty on King's head, supposedly put up by a St. Louis businessman.

But little attention was paid to the $100,000 bounty FBI documents say the Klan offered.

Curtis told the FBI the subject of killing King came up during a discussion of the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy.

Ray never mentioned whom he would contact to get this bounty but did say he would demand the bounty be placed in a foreign bank, according to Curtis. After assassinating King, Ray fled the U.S. but was captured in London before he could travel to Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.

"Curtis was of the opinion that not over three people would have been involved in the actual assassination," a May 3, 1968, FBI report says. "It would have been well planned with diversionary measures, and in the opinion of Curtis a second individual, not Ray, would have driven the getaway car to Atlanta as a diversionary measure."

The inmate, however, told the FBI he would never testify, saying he feared for his life.

David Garrow, the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said the belief Ray was motivated to shoot King to collect a bounty "can be credited above and beyond ... what Curtis remembers."

Gerald Posner has penned what is regarded as the most definitive book on the King assassination, Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., concluding Ray shot King but that there may have been a conspiracy.

"Racism makes it easier to take on a bounty like that," Posner said. "It's like a neo-Nazi businessman being paid to shoot a prominent Jewish businessman. Money is like a bonus."

Despite his work, he believes there is more to learn about the assassination. "I'm the eternal optimist when it comes to investigating," he said. "It can always be explored. It's not impossible."

He was confident enough to call his book on the Kennedy assassination Case Closed, he said, "but I didn't do that with the King assassination."

Klansman-turned-FBI-informant Delmar Dennis told The Clarion-Ledger before his death that the White Knights regarded itself as a national organization and King as the ultimate enemy.

In 1965, the White Knights learned King's route across a bridge in east Mississippi. They planned to plant dynamite and station snipers nearby. Dennis tipped off the FBI, and King traveled a different route.

In 1966, when King took part in the Meredith March through Mississippi, members of the White Knights killed a black man to lure King to the Natchez area. That plot failed.

Claims of the White Knights' involvement emerged in the wake of King's assassination. Three months later, Margot Capomacchia, the mother of Jackson schoolteacher Kathy Ainsworth, told an FBI informant her late daughter and others played a role.

She said her daughter and four men were involved in King's death and "used radio equipment ... in jamming police calls."

The FBI discounted her claim, saying she was "believed to be mentally disturbed."

Eight years later, a similar allegation surfaced in Miami Magazine, claiming members of the White Knights, including Ainsworth and Tommy Tarrants, were involved in jamming police radios that day.

The FBI blamed Tarrants for the bombings of synagogues, civil rights leaders' homes and other targets in Mississippi.

In 1968, he was sentenced to 30 years for attempted murder but was released eight years later after a Christian conversion. He since has denounced his racism and violent acts.

He has denied any role in the King assassination but said it's possible the White Knights were involved without his knowledge.

Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock, authors of an upcoming book, Seeking Armageddon: The Effort to Kill Martin Luther King Jr., are exploring evidence related to the White Knights.

One area the authors are exploring is the identity of the man supposedly seen with Ray in Los Angeles in March 1968.

Ray supposedly received calls from New Orleans and Atlanta.

The manager of the hotel where Ray was staying told the FBI the caller had a light Southern accent and identified himself as John Hardin. The manager also told agents a man who later appeared at the hotel sounded the same as Hardin.

Wexler said Hardin appears to have been an alias.

FBI documents contain an artist's rendering of the white man, identified as between 35 and 45 years old, 5-foot-7 to 5-foot-8, weighing between 140 and 150 pounds, with dark hair and dark eyes.

Wexler said he can't determine from FBI documents whether agents ever identified this man.

But agents appear to have linked him to an unknown racial provocateur connected to the 1962 riot at the University of Mississippi and the 1967 bombing of Rabbi Perry Nussbaum's house, Wexler said.

The provocateur's name remains unknown because it's blacked out.

The only way to get the name revealed is to prove the blacked-out name belongs to someone who has since died, Wexler said. "How do you do that when you don't know what the name is?"

Up until March 1968 in Los Angeles, Ray appears to be wandering, getting his bartending license, dabbling in the pornography business and taking dance lessons, Wexler said. "It's only in mid-March that he starts going whole hog after King, stalking him. The question becomes, 'What triggered the change?' "

In the early 1990s, the Justice Department began making public all of the records surrounding President Kennedy's assassination, but the opposite is true of the records surrounding King's assassination, which remain largely redacted and, in some cases, sealed. (An estimated 600,000 pages studied by the House Committee on Assassinations remain secret.)

If the FBI would make all its files public, "it would make amends for the unseemly things that (longtime FBI Director) J. Edgar Hoover did to Dr. King," Wexler said. "This would give them an opportunity at redemption."

But then again, there raises an interesting likelihood, if unlikely:

With J. Edgar Hoover known to have a strong dislike for Dr. King, even to the extent of suggesting that his movement was "Communist-influenced" or otherwise had Communist Party connexions, you have to wonder if Il Capo di Tutti Capi (as in Hoover) bankrolled part of the Klan's bounty on Dr. King's head, hoping to control the civil rights movement enough before such spiralled into full-blown Communist Revolution.

And did so secretly to avoid attracting suspicions.

Especially considering where Hoover was a reputed closet queen with narcisstic tendencies about Law and Order, preferably of the "iron heel" model, same being seen as "necessary" to maintain the White Male Christian Power Structure as one with "the antient and pecuilar soverignty and soverign identity" of the United States, and the defence thereof.

Said Power Structure obviously dominated by alcoholics, drug addicts, sex maniacs and pervertos, the emotionally disturbed and others weird and/or unwholesome, drawn from the Dregs of Society for the most part.

(Thanks to the Intelligence Project of the Southern Poverty Law Centre for the hat tip--which is something maybe the Secular-Progressive Blogosphere ought to follow, even if it means driving Bill "No-Spin Zone" O'Reilly all the closer to Al Cohol.)

I see through your disguise
All the games I see you play....

 --from "Toast and Marmalade for Tea" by Tintin, vintage 1969

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HAT TIP TO RAWSTORY.COM FOR BRINGING THE ATTENTION OF YOUR CORRESPONDENT to the following item from TheDenverChannel.com, revealing what may be a sinister side to Rush Limbaugh as needs to be watched all the more by Right-Thinking Americans:

Talk show host Rush Limbaugh is sparking controversy again after he made comments calling for riots in Denver during the Democratic National Convention this summer.

He said the riots would ensure a Democrat is not elected as president, and his listeners have a responsibility to make sure it happens.

"Riots in Denver, the Democrat Convention would see to it that we don't elect Democrats," Limbaugh said during Wednesday's radio broadcast. He then went on to say that's the best thing that could happen to the country.

Limbaugh cited Al Sharpton, saying the Barack Obama supporter threatened to superdelegates that "there's going to be trouble" if the presidency is taken from Obama.

Several callers called in to the radio show to denounce Limbaugh's comments, when he later stated, "I am not inspiring or inciting riots, I am dreaming of riots in Denver."

Limbaugh said with massive riots in Denver, which he called "Operation Chaos," the people on the far left would look bad.

"There won't be riots at our convention," Limbaugh said of the Republican National Convention. "We don't riot. We don't burn our cars. We don't burn down our houses. We don't kill our children. We don't do half the things the American left does."

He believes electing Democrats will hurt America's security and economy and appeared to call on his listeners to make sure that doesn't happen.

"We do, hopefully, the right thing for the sake of this country. We're the only one in charge of our affairs. We don't farm out our defense if we elect Democrats ... and riots in Denver, at the Democratic Convention will see to it we don't elect Democrats. And that's the best damn thing that can happen to this country, as far as I can think," Limbaugh said.

Denver will host the DNC on Aug. 25 to Aug. 28.

Secretly, though, Your Correspondent just has to imagine The Oxycontin Cow playing the role of agent provocateur (howbeit indirect, judging by the remarks in question) in inciting the disorder he wants seen over the Queen City of the Plains--even if he later goes into doublethink mode and denies responsibility if, indeed, the desideratum ensues.

And remember what I said previously about holding the purveyors of conservative propaganda liable for the acts, deeds and exploits ensuing as a result of their comments. Especially where civil disorder, hate crimes and general mayhem and tolchocking ensue.

With that in mind, I have referred the item to the FBI's Denver office so they may be aware of it. Especially considering the likelihood of serious doublethink by which Mr. Limbaugh seeks to buy alibis "just in case."

Let alone pathetic excuses, patsies and sammy acts, chief among which is the line that such should be seen as "harmless entertainment."