David Neiwert

It was easy to predict, going in, that the dynamics of race and politics were going to be a big factor in this year's election -- the main question was how naked the Republicans would play it. And now we're seeing what their plan is: Play it subtle, with a raft of images that will send off all the necessary messages to the lizard-brained wingnuts of their base, but nothing overt that can be readily flagged as racial -- and when the Obama camp inevitably responds, play the wounded party.

There's a new book, due out in September, titled The Conservative's Handbook: Defining the Right Position on Issues from A to Z, which seems to be setting itself up as a kind of dogmatic Bible for the denizens of Greater Wingnuttia. It too seems to be trying help conservatives just figure out who the fuck they are. Lotsa luck with that, fellas.

You all remember Richard Jewell. He was the hapless guy who made the mistake of being a security guard in the vicinity of right-wing nutcase Eric Rudolph when the latter set off a bomb at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and wound up getting blamed for it, wrongly. Now it seems they're trying to do the same thing with Ivins.

One of the changes I've wanted to make since I came onboard as managing editor at Firedoglake last April was to make the blog more responsive to breaking stories, as well as more capable of breaking news on its own, while maximizing the premium, often meaty posts that help make it special. But doing so has meant shuffling a lot of our regular voices, so it's taken some time and careful thought before coming up with a plan that I think will work. Today, we're kicking it off.

It's becoming increasingly apparent that the Bush administration -- including the FDI, Homeland Security, and the Pentagon -- all want the anthrax-killer case to quietly die with the person of Bruce Ivins. Yep, case closed, move along, folks. Right? Well, if you don't mind, we still have a few questions...

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Those right-wing e-mail forwards that everyone gets (usually from family members or friends) are one of the right's most effective ways of spreading lies about Democrats. My friend Woodrowfan decided to do a tally.

The East Valley Tribune in Mesa, Arizona, recently ran a five-part series on Crazy Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the wingnut nativist who has been doing his damnedest to round up and deport every illegal immigrant in Maricopa County. It's really quite damning from the outset; the initial piece makes it clear that Arpaio has transformed what was once a typical local law-enforcement agency into an immigration bureau. Even more damning is the reportage on how grossly "America's sheriff" and his crew violate federal laws along the way.

James David Adkisson shot up that Unitarian Universalist church "because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country's hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of media outlets."

The word is starting to spread that what happened last month in Postville, Iowa, was much more than a mere immigration raid. A line was crossed by the federal government, and the citizens who saw it firsthand have decided to stand up. And this time, it appears that Congress is paying attention too.