A brief chronology:

An Objective Assessment on Public Safety Concerns

April 7, 2009: The Department of Homeland Security releases a nine-page assessment document entitled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment" (in PDF).  Among the findings:

Threats from white supremacist and violent antigovernment groups during 2009 have been largely rhetorical and have not indicated plans to carry out violent acts. Nevertheless, the consequences of a prolonged economic downturn--including real estate foreclosures, unemployment, and an inability to obtain credit--could create a fertile recruiting environment for rightwing extremists and even result in confrontations between such groups and government authorities similar to those in the past.

The assessment also warned of "a heightened level of extremist paranoia" and "lone wolf extremists capable of carrying out violent attacks."

Right-wing Blowback and Politicization

April 14, 2009: Former Speaker Newt Gingrich:

The person who drafted the outrageous homeland security memo smearing veterans and conservatives should be fired

April 14, 2009: Conservative commentator Sean Hannity intentionally misrepresents the focus of the assessment as targetting "people who have pro-life bumper stickers."

April 14, 2009: Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin:

The "report" ... was one of the most embarrassingly shoddy pieces of propaganda I'd ever read out of DHS. I couldn't believe it was real. ...

By contrast, the piece of crap report issued on April 7 is a sweeping indictment of conservatives.

April 15, 2009: House Republican leader John Boehner demands an apology from the Department of Homeland Security for the report.

The Report's Tragic Accuracy

May 31, 2009: Dr. George Tiller, a frequent target of right-wing hate and violence for performing late-term abortions, was murdered.  The suspect apprehended is a right-wing extremist with a long history of violent rhetoric and criminal actions on behalf of the right-wing anti-choice movement.

June 10, 2009: A lone gunman opened fire at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, killing a security guard and injuring others.  The suspected shooter is a right-wing extremist with a long history of violent rhetoric and criminal actions on behalf of the right-wing white supremacist and Holocaust denier movements.

The Moral of This Brief Chronology:

Our public safety and national security should never be politicized, especially not by Republicans and right-wingers desperate for relevance in the media.  How many times do Republicans have to be wrong and divisively political - and have their "wrongness" be illustrated in tragic events - before they either change their tune or have the traditional media stop taking them seriously?

There's more...

Cross-posted at Project Vote's blog, Voting Matters

Weekly Voting Rights News Update

By Erin Ferns and Nathan Henderson-James

Project Vote normally uses this update to give news roundups on voting rights-related stories from the past week. However, with the reverberations from the Supreme Court's Crawford vs. Marion County voter identification decision just starting to filter down into statehouses across the country, we felt it was necessary to spend this update concentrating solely on voter ID, giving progressives a concise summary of the problems associated with it and offer some framing devices to help fight against it.

There's more...

Cross-posted at Project Vote's blog, Voting Matters

Weekly Voting Rights News Update

America's Democratic Promise
The history of democracy in the United States is one marked by the steady, though intensely contested, expansion of the right to vote. Where once only male landowners were permitted the right to choose their representatives, the United States now proudly extends that right to all adult citizens. The most recent expansion of the franchise were the result of years of struggle through the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement. The seminal Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the 26th Amendment ratified in 1971 created enforcement mechanisms to protect minority voting rights and extended the right to vote to 18 year olds.

There's more...

Cross-posted at Project Vote's blog, Voting Matters

Harper's Magazine has released an examination of Republican efforts to politicize the Justice Department and argues that these efforts have propagated a scam on the American public - voter fraud - in order to ensure Republican victories in future elections. Long-time readers will recognize this issue from numerous past blog postings and can find longer discussions of attempts to subvert the machinery of elections for partisan gain in recent Project Vote publications, The Politics of Voter Fraud and Caging Democracy: A 50-Year History of Partisan Challenges to Minority Voters.

Some choice quotes from Scott Horton's exhaustive article:

   "The Republican project of the past seven years has been to build on [the Supreme Court decision in Bush vs. Gore], to transform the legal apparatus of the United States into an instrument of partisan force."

   "The former political director of the Texas Republican Party, Royal Masset, actually told the Houston Chronicle in 2007 that it is an `article of religious faith that voter fraud is causing us to lose elections,' but then acknowledged that such faith was unfounded. What he did believe, according to the Chronicle's paraphrase, was that `requiring photo IDs could cause enough of a drop-off in legitimate Democratic voting to add 3 percent to the Republican vote.'"

   "The American system of democracy has many defenses, and the Bush Administration overcame each of them in turn. It was not enough simply to control the bureaucracy. High officials as well had to understand that their function was not to enforce the law but rather to express the will of the president."

The full report may be read here.

There's more...

There's more...