In July of 2011, just days after the massacre of 77 mostly children at a youth summer camp by a Rightwing extremist in Norway, Brian Levin, the Director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University interviewed Daryl Johnson, formerly of the Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS).

Johnson was the agency's senior domestic terrorism analyst from 2004 to 2010. He was also the lead author of DHS' April 2009 draft report --- which was, shortly thereafter, retracted under pressure from Republicans, rightwingers and some veterans groups --- entitled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment" [PDF].

After the public outcry from the Rightwing victimization industry, the DHS shamefully apologized for working on the report at all, even though it was begun during the Bush Administration; was being produced in response to a mandate from Congress; followed a DHS report on Leftwing extremism [PDF] (which received no similar outraged protestations) in January of 2009; and was authored by Johnson, who describes himself in the interview below as a pro-life, pro-gun, conservative Republican Mormon.

The draft 9-page DHS report had cautioned about the re-emergence of potentially violent extremist groups "that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely."

It warned that similar conditions to those in the 1990's (an economic recession, a Democrat in the White House) which had led to, among other domestic terrorist incidents, the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, had brought about a "growth in the number of domestic rightwing terrorist and extremist groups and an increase in violent acts targeting government facilities, law enforcement officers, banks, and infrastructure sectors."

The report cautioned that "lone wolves and small terrorist cells embracing violent rightwing extremist ideology are the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States" and concluded that "rightwing extremism is likely to grow in strength."

Following the deadly attack on two police offers and another person on Sunday in Las Vegas, allegedly carried out by two married members who self-identified as part of the so-called "Liberty Movement" and who appeared at the Nevada ranch of Cliven Bundy during the recent armed protest against the federal government with others in the movement, it seems a good moment to revisit that 2011 interview with the lead author of that retracted DHS report.

The alleged killers in the tragedy over the weekend later killed themselves. They reportedly draped the dead bodies of the two cops they shot with the Gadsden ("Don't Tread on Me") flag, popular with those in the "Tea Party" and "Liberty" movements, and were said to have kept Swastikas and other Nazi memorabilia in their apartment.

Neighbors told reporters that the two "had a reputation for spouting racist, anti-government views, bragging about their gun collection and boasting that they’d spent time at Cliven Bundy’s ranch during a recent standoff there between armed militia members and federal government agents."

In other words, the warnings of Johnson, both in the retracted 2009 DHS report and in his 2011 interview, seem extraordinarily prescient today, for some odd reason.

Here are extended excerpts, some of them chilling in retrospect, from that 2011 interview of Daryl Johnson by Brian Levin...

You may have already heard at least some of the bizarre story about three "Tea Party" supporters of Mississippi's Republican U.S. Senate candidate Chris McDaniel who found themselves locked inside the Hinds County Courthouse around 2am on primary election night last Tuesday. McDaniel himself is now locked in a run-off for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate against six-term Senator Thad Cochran, after the nail-biter on Tuesday which left the two men reportedly about 1,400 votes apart out of more than 300,000 cast.

Ultimately, neither candidate received more than 50% of the vote, so they'll face each other again in a run-off for the GOP nomination on June 24. But the incident that left the three McDaniel supporters calling for help to let them out of the courthouse in the middle of the night after the last election official had locked the door and left almost three hours earlier is more than curious. It has many wondering what the hell the three were doing at the location where ballots are tallied and vote tabulators stored, in one of the last counties to come in with their results on the squeaker of an election night.

The details of the story, and why the three --- one a top campaign official for McDaniel (and a former Presidential campaign staffer for Newt Gingrich) --- were there at all, remain murky. On Wednesday, the Hinds County Sheriff's office said that there were "conflicting stories from the three of them." But by Thursday evening, despite what a Sheriff's spokesman described as a "fabrication" from the President of the Central Mississippi Tea Party who contacted a fellow Hinds County Republican executive committee member to seek his help in getting out of the courthouse, the county decided that she and the two men caught in the courthouse caper along with her broke no laws.

"Based on our findings and subsequent conclusion," the County Sheriff's office announced in a statement, "there is no reason to believe that the three individuals engaged in any criminal activity nor do we believe any laws were broken."

But with one of the original headlines about the story focused on the fact that the three had been locked in the empty courthouse "with ballots on Election Night," there remain a number of questions about what actually happened, despite initial reportage indicating that "ballots had been secured prior to the intrusion" and a subsequent report noting that "some precinct information wasn't sealed."

So, The BRAD BLOG contacted the Hinds County Election Commissioners to get more information on the exact type of voting system used there, which aspects of it might have been vulnerable to the three McDaniel supporters alone inside the courthouse, and what type of information was left unsealed there on election night.

We received detail answers to our questions from one of the five Hinds County Election Commissioners --- the one who would, perhaps, have the most reason to be suspicious of the trio of McDaniel supporters...

[This article now cross-published by Salon...]

Glenn Beck's natives are getting very restless, and many of them are now taking their frustrations out on him.

The organizers of last Friday's "Operation American Spring" (OAS) had claimed their massive Washington D.C. protest, "calling for the removal of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Nancy Pelosi, and Eric Holder as a start toward constitutional restoration," was likely to draw 10 million to 30 million fed-up American patriots to the nation's capital.

To the weekend-long bemusement of Democrats and progressives, the number of attendees at the rally was closer to 10 than 30 million. As even the rightwing Washington Times reported, attendance fell "woefully below expectations," with turnout claims varying from a few hundred to a few thousand. "Hundreds is more like it," said one of the attendees quoted by the Times.

Progressives were predictably entertained by the dismal failure of the umpteenth rally to save our nation from the "outlaws" or "commies" or "Muslims" or "Constitution haters" who have now taken it over the government --- through peaceful elections. But once the King of the American Patriots himself, Glenn Beck, and his online "news" outlet The Blaze, appeared to join in to mock the event, the real patriots could no longer hold their tongues.

Long-time supporters of Beck's turned their sights on the radio host-turned-CNN-host- turned-Fox-"News"-host-turned-multi-millionaire-Internet-entrepeneur after The Blaze's Oliver Darcy covered the event, describing it as "only millions short of projected turnout," featuring "only a few dozen protesters" and as having "failed incredibly."

Many of Beck's fans were decidedly not happy about that, some going so far as to declare Beck himself "the enemy"...

If you do nothing else today, watch the moving closing remarks from the last two candidates in Idaho's Republican primary candidates debate for Governor, beginning at 52:20...

The rest of the debate was pretty much as awesome. But I realize a full hour of that is a tall ask.

On a more substantive note, while The BRAD BLOG had been considering an endorsement in this race for the guy who had been living in Fat Jack's cellar, we're trying to find Fat Jack himself to see if he can be drafted as a write-in instead.

Also, too, we're a little disappointed that the last guy didn't tell us anything about "the Negro". Seems a missed opportunity.

Over the weekend, Showtime's James Cameron-produced environmental documentary series, Years of Living Dangerously, released an online-only video segment focused on NJ Gov. Chris Christie's still-unexplained flip on the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI).

RGGI is the very successful cap and trade system created by northeastern states to help curb global warming gasses. The video segment cites a piece of our exclusive 2011 blockbuster report featuring audio recordings of that year's secret Koch Brothers' Summer Seminar near Vail, CO, where Christie appeared as the billionaires' super-secret, superstar keynote speaker...

The video, as Grist describes it, "featuring food writer Mark Bittman grilling [Koch-funded] Americans for Prosperity henchman Steve Lonegan about climate change, muses on the possibility that Koch money funded Christie’s rapid retreat on New Jersey’s part in the regional cap-and-trade system RGGI." That is, of course, one of the issues we first posited when initially breaking the story, based on comments made during Christie's introduction at the seminar by David Koch.

Here is the complete audio (and transcript) of Christie's address and his intro by Koch, who calls the Governor his "true political hero" while describing another secret meeting the pair had in New York City before Christie suddenly pulled NJ out of RGGI in May of 2011, just weeks before the Vail confab.

"Another example of Governor Christie's commitment to the free enterprise system is that only a few weeks ago he announced that New Jersey would be withdrawing from the [Regional] Greenhouse Gas Initiative," Koch said proudly during his remarks to cheers and applause. The fossil fuel magnate then went on to lie to the crowd that RGGI "would have raised energy costs, reduced economic growth and led to very little, if any, benefit for the environment." On mention of the word "environment" a "boo" is heard on the audio from amongst the gathered millionaires and billionaires in attendance.

As I wrote at Mother Jones at the time (in the article seen briefly in the video as a clip of the Koch audio "obtained by a journalist" is played):

If you don't subscribe to Showtime, you can at least watch the first episode of the series, featuring Harrison Ford, Don Cheadle, Chris Hayes, Arnold Schwarzenegger and many other well-known journalists and scientists, online below...

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It was a very good week for the Koch inheritance babies, no matter how much they now whine and pretend to be victims...

During Thursday's Green News Report, we briefly discussed Charles Koch's claim in his Wall Street Journal op-ed this week, that he and his brother David, are using their inherited fossil-fuel millions to discredit global warming science (and other inconvenient realities), simply because they are fighting "to restore a free society and create greater well-being and opportunity for all Americans." Sure they are.

Over at the Washington Post's "Plum Line" blog, Paul Waldman has another thought on the Koch op-ed this week, which was published at virtually the same moment as the rightwing judicial activists on the U.S. Supreme Court trashed 40 years of campaign finance law in order to allow the approximately 600 Americans who had already maxed out their previously allowed $125,000 per-election-cycle donations to political candidates and parties to be "free" to give millions to candidates and parties instead.

Waldman avers that the Koch op-ed and the SCOTUS McCutcheon decision "are parts of the same effort," which, he argues convincingly, is "Nothing less than the construction of a new version of liberty."

In his WSJ piece, Koch joined a growing procession of billionaire Rightwingers recently whining aloud about their perceived persecution at the hands of...well, anyone who doesn't share their political views and who doesn't have the "freedom" to also have billions, inherited or otherwise, in their bank accounts.

"Instead of encouraging free and open debate, collectivists [ed note: apparently he means anyone who is not a Republican?] strive to discredit and intimidate opponents," Koch bemoans. "They engage in character assassination," he complains, before adding parenthetically,"(I should know, as the almost daily target of their attacks.)"

"Poor" fellow. Waldman, however, sees the Koch Agonistes very differently...

Well, it just makes sense. Republicans aren't actually running on anything in 2014 other than "Democrats are no good! Also, Obamacare!"

As Jesse LaGreca points out, however, "50+ repeal votes, a SCOTUS decision and a Presidential election, still no GOP alternative to Obamacare, just trolling & BS."

So, it's not much to run on. But that's okay. The Rs have an advantage this year thanks to the D's huge wins in 2008, leaving Dems with much more territory to defend this year in the U.S. Senate. More importantly, while Republicans have little or no policy initiatives to actually run on --- or, at least, few they'd like to mention out loud --- they don't really need to. The Koch Brothers are so desperate to see Republicans back in power, and all the swell goodies that come with it, they are unleashing everything they can to simply buy their way back into greater control of our nation's once-of-the-people, by-the-people, for-the-people government.

At the same time, unfortunately, Democrats aren't running on much more themselves. "We're not crazy Republicans!" may be true, but it doesn't give American voters much to vote for, especially while the Kochs are outspending outside Democratic-leaning groups 10 to 1 so far this year. So it all makes sense that with the Kochs' money running this year in lieu of actual Republicans with policies, Democrats seem to be set on simply run against the Kochs. That appears to be the plan. Or, at least the one that's working for them so far, according to Dave Weigel at Slate today:

So, running against The Koch Brothers brings in three times as much money as running on...whatever else the Dems have been trying to run on so far this year.

It'd be nice if the Democrats gave voters something concrete to vote for. It might even solve their oft-cited problem of D voters not turning out for mid-terms. Why should they, after all? That's not a criticism, that's an actual question. Why should voters turn out? What are they supposed to be voting for?Democrats might want to start thinking about offering a concrete reason or three. But, in lieu of that, running against the two privileged sons of an oil baron who are willing to spend as much of their father's hard-earned money as they need to in hopes of buying the United States whole hog will have to suffice, apparently. In 2014, with few, if any, policy promises (so far) presented to voters, Koch is it.

Unfortunately, for every dollar raised by the Dems, the Kochs can just cut a check for three or ten more. So, if you'd like to start questioning the Democrats' 2014 election strategy, now would be a good time.

You also might want to ask them why they aren't doing much more to fight against the madness unleashed by the infamous Citizens United in 2010 and the way that Republicans (particularly the Kochs and Karl Rove) have gamed every last inch of whatever scraps are left of campaign finance law in this country. Come to think of it, a hard promise to pass laws to effectively overturn Citizens United and restore campaign finance enforcement at the FEC would be just one concrete policy that Americans might actually turn out to vote affirmatively for. And, Democrats could beat up on the Kochs all they like in the bargain. Win-win! So, of course, Democrats probably won't do it.

This is what politics now looks like inside the Republican Party, where Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is staring down the double barrels of a very aggressive "Tea Party" primary challenge from Matt Bevin, and then a very close contest with Democratic general election candidate and Kentucky Sec. of State Alison Lundergan Grimes...

Remember, that ad is by fellow Republicans. In other words, the ridiculous and toxic (if too often effective) tactics they've been using for years against Democrats are now being deployed against each other.

As Josh Marshall said when flagging the ad above, "I guess you make your own bed." Or, perhaps, as the most most haunting movie ad ever said: "The call is coming from inside the house."

Good luck with that, Republicans. You are what you eat.

Oh, I'm sorry. Those weren't more than 80,000 'Tea Partiers' marching in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, over the weekend. Those were people peacefully demonstrating against the radical Rightwing 'Tea Party' policies of the North Carolina Legislature and Governor.

Had they been 'Tea Partiers' protesting, of course, you would have already heard about the march, as it likely would have been featured by every news outlet in the nation, along with the repeated claim that such a massive gathering of angry voters portends disaster for Democrats this November.

Such as these were not angry Rightwingers marching, however, the event barely made the "news" beyond North Carolina's borders. But it happened, whether the national, so-called "liberal media" covered it or not and, as these photos demonstrate, it was pretty damned huge...

A federal District court judge has nixed a rightwing "voter fraud" group's Motion to Intervene on behalf of the state of Texas in the U.S. Dept. of Justice's lawsuit to block the Lone Star state's polling place Photo ID restriction law.

Last month, The BRAD BLOG reported on the DoJ's Opposition motion filed in response to the motion by the Republican "voter fraud" fraudsters who call themselves "True the Vote" (TTV). In its motion, TTV sought to become a party to the DoJ's federal legal challenge to SB-14, the state's polling place Photo ID restriction law which TX Attorney General Greg Abbott (R) instituted just hours after the U.S. Supreme Court demolished one of the central protections of the long-standing federal Voting Rights Act this past summer.

Last week, U.S. District Court Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos tersely dismissed TTV's motion, issuing a two-page order [PDF] finding that the organization's "interests are generalized and are adequately represented by the State Defendants."

"The Court finds that True the Vote's intended contribution to this case may be accomplished without the necessity of, or burden incident to, making it a party," Ramos said.

The Judge's ruling was in line with the DoJ's own response to TTV's motion. They had argued that the group had not established a right to intervene because their motion detailed little more than a generalized grievance and because its allegation "that illegal voting might be prevented by enforcement of SB 14 is, at best, speculative." Permissive intervention was inappropriate because, the DoJ argued at the time, since the group was adequately represented already by the State of Texas itself. Its participation in the case, the DoJ claimed, would be unduly burdensome in that the group seeks to divert the court's attention from the legal issues relating to polling place Photo ID restriction laws "to issues concerning True the Vote's numerous allegations of purported voter registration irregularities."

In our previous piece on the DoJ's response to True the Vote, we highlighted the group's extraordinary track record of deceptive voter suppression tactics and noted that it would be "absurd" that the hapless TTV should be ever be taken seriously by anybody, much less allowed to intervene in a critical federal lawsuit.

Although the court will still permit TTV to file amicus curiae (friend of the court) briefs, last week's ruling should serve to help expedite the proceedings without unnecessary diversionary tactics from this unreliable, deceptive Republican voter suppression front group.

Judge Ramos has set a September 2014 trial date in the case, which will come just two months before Abbott, defending the state as AG, will likely face his own election contest for Governor as the Texas Republican Party's currently-presumptive nominee. This past September, we detailed how the TX law at issue had already been found in violation of both federal law and the Constitution in previous cases that had come before the courts prior to the U.S. Supreme Court carving out the heart of the federal Voting Rights Act in late June of this year.

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The last graf from an AP article describing the plunge in spending by "outside" Rightwing groups, so far this year, on 2014 campaigns...