In other news, the Texas Senate advanced SB5 today, an anti-abortion bill which Governor Rick Perry called the state legislature into a special session to pass.

Unfortunately there will be no special session to expand Medicaid.

The NSA Eavesdropping Story Week 2; The CNET Meltdown; Snowden’s G20 Surveillance Leak; Irresponsible Journalism; All the President’s Men; Link Bait; The FBI Uses Surveillance; Masturbating Fetus Drones; The Growing Division on the Left; and much more. Brought to you by Bubble Genius, the BobCesca.com Amazon Link and the Bowen Law Group.

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ALBANY, N.Y. — An industrial mechanic with General Electric Co., who is also allegedly a member of the Ku Klux Klan, designed a deadly mobile radiation device that he intended to sell to Jewish groups or a southern branch of the Ku Klux Klan, according to a federal complaint unsealed Wednesday in Albany.

The device was intended to be a truck-mounted radiation particle weapon that could be remotely controlled and capable of silently aiming a lethal beam of radioactivity at its human targets. The concept was that victims would eventually die from radiation sickness.

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The FBI complaint states that on June 5, 2012, Crawford met at a Scotia restaurant with a person working as a confidential source for the FBI. Crawford allegedly talked about his enemies and of being “tired of getting ‘raped,’ that there are people out there who have decided that they don’t get their fair share in life, and that (Crawford) wanted to stop these people.”

In telephone calls recorded by the FBI, Crawford identified himself as “a member of the Ku Klux Klan, specifically, the United Northern & Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.”

Crawford is listed on several websites as a member of Americans Demanding Liberty and Freedom, a Galway-based Tea Party group.

Two months ago, in a five-part text message monitored by the FBI, Crawford, said that he found a power-supply for the weapon in a message laced with political anger. The text messages were sent on April 15, the day of the Boston Marathon bombing.

“Well, tell it to your treasoness bedwetting maggot in chief,” Crawford wrote, apparently referring to President Barack Obama, according to a transcript in the complaint. “He started bringing the scumbags (here) wholesale as he got in charge. He directed the ins (U.S. immigration agency) to start bringing the muzzies here without background checks.”

I for one am glad that the FBI had this man under close surveillance. A man who refers to the president as a ‘treasonous bedwetting maggot in chief’ who is “bringing the muzziez” here without background checks. And if we are to infer anything from the timeline presented by the FBI, it’s that he held the president, or perhaps immigrants, personally responsible for the Boston Marathon Bombing.

Obviously he is entitled to his opinion, but that combined with entering a synagogue looking to pawn off your radiation weapon is certainly enough to warrant scrutiny. It’s a scenario that may trigger additional surveillance of terrorism suspects in other countries under FISA.

Crawford was also a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the New York Safe Act, Governor Cuomo’s gun control legislation, according to the Albany Times Union.

Perhaps Kris Kobach is right. Pro-immigration reform protesters are just like this rabidly xenopbobic Tea Party and KKK member who was planning to mount a radiation cannon to the roof of his van which he lives in down by the river.

It wasn’t very long ago that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was asked to apologize for a memo that warned local departments about right-wing domestic terrorism.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) – Getty Images

Throughout much of the interview, Shafer describes the mundane bureaucratic challenges of dealing with incoming applications for nonprofit status. He said his team flagged the first tea party application because it appeared to be a high-profile case, and he wanted to make sure all high-profile cases received similar attention.

“What I’m talking here is that if we end up with four applications coming into the group that are pretty similar, and we assign them to four different agents, we don’t want four different determinations,” he said. “It’s just not good business. It’s not good customer service.”

Asked plainly, “do you have any reason to believe that anyone in the White House was involved in the decision to screen Tea Party cases?” Shafer replied, “I have no reason to believe that.” [...]

Interviewers also asked Shafer if he told his screeners to specifically pull Tea Party cases.

“Again, I was not asking them for those kind of cases,” he said. “[I]f I would have directed them to pull our Tea Party cases, little Susie’s Tea Party would have been pulled and it wasn’t.”

Early accusations and indications that politics motivated local IRS agents to apply extra scrutiny to Tea Party groups do not appear to be true, and there is no evidence that the White House had anything to do with it. And from my perspective, I’m not certain you could even describe this as “extra scrutiny” rather than a poorly-conceived formality.

I realize that the safest action any politician can take when an apparent scandal breaks is to hastily condemn any wrong-doing in the harshest terms, but I wish they wouldn’t.

When members of congress and even the president himself raced to condemn the politically-motivated actions of IRS agents, they couldn’t have known at the time that politics didn’t play a role in their decision, but the implication that it did was enough to penetrate the public consciousness and become an accepted fact.

With their loud protest, they lent an air of credibility to a theory that, at this point, doesn’t seem to be supported by the facts.

The same could be said for every other fake scandal that has emerged recently, and it doesn’t just apply to politicians. Journalists, bloggers, and other writers also have a responsibility to reserve judgment unless otherwise persuaded. Skepticism does not make you an apologist.

Kansas’ Republican secretary of state, Kris Kobach, said that the immigration reform activists who protested on his porch over the weekend were committing acts of “intimidation” and were no different than the “Ku Klux Klan.”

“They’re just not wearing white cloaks, but this is exactly KKK type of intimidation,” Kobach told Glenn Beck on his radio show Tuesday.

Beck responded by saying that “these people have learned from the Klan.”

They learned from the Klan, which is exactly why they’re protesting peacefully for a righteous cause rather than burning a cross in Kobach’s front yard or fire-bombing a church because they believe in the Master Race.

Kobach also told Fox News that this is the “reason we have the Second Amendment.” To shoot mobs of protesters who just want to be treated equally. Obviously.

Paging Stephen Colbert.

TAMPA, Fla. — Police say a gun found by a 9-year-old boy inside a bathroom stall at a movie theater in Tampa’s Ybor City neighborhood belonged to a Hillsborough County deputy.

The incident happened on Father’s Day, while Zane Noland, his 15-year-old brother and his dad were attending a 3 p.m. showing of the new Superman movie, “Man of Steel.”

Shortly after the film started, the boy said he went to the bathroom. The Tampa Bay Times ( http://goo.gl/v6TTD) reports he found a loaded Glock 26 on top of a toilet paper dispenser in the theater’s restroom. The child then told his father, 48-year-old Marine veteran Wesley Noland.

“Dad,” he said. “There’s a gun.”

See that? The owner was a police deputy. Where the hell was he keeping his gun that he needed to stash it on the toilet paper dispenser?

The National Security Agency contractor who disclosed the spy agency’s collection of data on billions of telephone calls made by Americans apparently obtained a highly-classified court order about the program during a training stint, NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander said Tuesday.

Alexander told reporters after a House Intelligence Committee hearing that the man who’s acknowledged being the source of the recent leaks, Booz Allen Hamilton information technology specialist Edward Snowden, had access to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order and related materials during an orientation at NSA.

“The FISA warrant was on a web server that he had access to as an analyst coming into the Threat Operations Center,” Alexander said. “It was in a special classified section that as he was getting his training he went to.”

I’d be shocked if the NSA isn’t in lockdown right now.

Testifying before a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Tuesday, National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander said that his agency employed or contracted with around 1,000 system administrators.

“There are system administrations throughout NSA and in all our complexes around the world,” Alexander said. “And there is on the order of a thousand system administrators, people who actually run the networks, that have in certain sections, that level of authority and ability to interface with the system.”

I think we can all agree this is a dangerous breach of security. But the consequence will obviously be tighter security and, ultimately, far fewer Snowdens coming forward with leaks.

The other day, an elected member of the U.S Congress, Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX) was discussing the anti-choice bill that careened through the lower chamber and said this: “Watch a sonogram of a 15-week baby, and they have movements that are purposeful… They stroke their face. If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. If they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to believe that they could feel pain?”

Yes, Congressman Burgess said male fetuses masturbate. The only thing more bizarre than actually saying this in public is the fact that he looked at a blurry, pixelated sonogram, observed a fetus doing something with its arm and then took the super-colossal leap to the conclusion that the fetus was masturbating. Put another way, someone who connects fetuses and masturbation so easily has, you know, issues. Perhaps the authorities should check his crawlspace for a filthy clown suit.

Now, to my knowledge there really isn’t a liberal equivalent to what Burgess said, at least coming from a Democratic member of Congress. But what’s become glaringly obvious over the last couple of weeks is that a popular, highly visible faction of the far-left has grown increasingly divorced from reality and reason. Not Burgess crazy, but disturbingly unhinged, kneejerk and highly susceptible to groupthink. And this schism has been exacerbated by the NSA story, leaving two very distinct left-wing factions. On one side, pragmatic liberals with a skeptical eye on these events, and a well-known clique of utopians who refuse to acknowledge the realities of politics.

There’s a tea party emerging on the left, slowly and without the actual tea party’s major party support, but a lefty tea party nonetheless. It’s already underway — minus the tea bags. (Instead of tea bags, the left has long acronyms and puppet-effigies.) [READ ON]