Well, now we’ve got an analog to that and it comes in the form of this shameful screed by one of MSNBC’s newest commentators…

The Republicans lie! They want to see you dead! They’d rather make money off your dead corpse! They kinda like it when that woman has cancer and they don’t have anything for her…My God, Democrats, what’s wrong with you?! You can’t deal with these people, at all!

Isolated incident? Well, here’s more Ed unplugged a while back…

MSNBC is becoming unwatchable these days. I still like Hardball and Morning Joe, but good lord…what the hell is wrong with these people?

(h/t: NewsReal)

But why the uptick in discussion? What are the true roots of the movement, and where are these people coming from? TechPresident:

The news that American southerners are the most likely to question whether President Obama is actually a native-born citizen got a lot of attention last Friday, when a Research2000 survey on that question was released by DailyKos. Eleven percent of all Americans apparently do not believe Obama was born in the United States, but 23% of southerners (compared to roughly 5% of people from the other regions of the country) share that belief. I thought it would be interesting to see what various trend-culling tools might add to this picture.

A look at Google Trends is certainly illuminating. The top ten states where people are searching on the phrase “Obama birth certificate” are:
1. Louisiana
2. Mississippi
3. Colorado
4. Oklahoma
5. Alabama
6. Tennessee
7. Arkansas
8. Missouri
9. South Carolina
10. North Carolina

Of those, only Colorado is not part of the American South.

There has been much speculation and analysis about what all of this means. However, I think there are two basic factors at play here:

1. Racism. Pure and simple. There are some folks who cannot accept that a black man is President of the United States.

2. Hyper-partisanship. While I think that race plays a small part in the Birther movement, I think the larger chunk of this unstable pie-chart is related to the mostly sane, but excessively partisan conservative segment of the GOP.

People do and say crazy things when they are in power — but they also do say crazier things when they are not in power. See: ‘9/11 Truthers‘.

Right now, the far-right-wing of the conservative movement is out-of-power and — understandably — freaking out about it. The problem is that there are so many other more constructive ways to criticize this president without calling into question his eligibility to hold that office.

In addition, the Birther movement is inadvertently giving Democrats the upper-hand. By spouting off all of this nonsense, Birthers are forcing Republicans in the the House, Senate and elsewhere in government to weigh-in on the issue, at possible risk to their (re)electability.

Now that the MSM has picked up on this highly dubious yet extremely entertaining issue, I think that we’ll see more and more elected Republicans being asked over and over, ‘Do you believe that President Obama was born in the United States?’ This certainly plays into the Democrats hands.

It would do the GOP well to come together and denounce the nonsense for what it is: nonsense. Sure, the Republican party may lose a small part of the fringe of their base, but I highly doubt that Birthers are going to rush over the Democratic party.

[cross-posted at ThePajamaPundit.com]

I thought it was a joke when I first heard about it, but “Seasteading” is a serious idea, it’s being backed by Milton Friedman’s grandson and they’ve apparently already raised more than a half a million dollars to realize their dream of building communities…on the sea!

Here’s more from Reason:

Patri Friedman was doing all right himself, living with his wife and child in a mini-commune of sort—the kind people today call an “intentional community”—in Mountain View, California, a bit south of San Francisco. He had a great and challenging job with a great company, Google. But his preoccupation, his passion, lay elsewhere. He thought he had figured out the real underlying problem bedeviling society, and it went deeper than just governments themselves. The real solution, he came to think, would involve the lure of the bounding main, the unbounded horizon, our vast and empty oceans.

Remember those high exit costs? Friedman wondered: What if you could just move—not just you, but everything you own, including your home, and, if your neighbors agreed with you, your whole community? What if you could move all of it where no government would bother you at all, and you could make a new, better society?

Friedman called his theory “dynamic geography.” He remembered a line from his dad’s book The Machinery of Freedom about how differently terrestrial government would behave if everyone lived in trailers and could easily flee state oppression. If land itself could get up and go, the incentive structure of government would change even more, moving it in a libertarian direction.

No doubt it’s an interesting notion, but is this practical? Living on the sea? Just think of how much risk that could entail. Of course you’d do the research to make sure you’re settling in a place that isn’t prone to natural disaster, but it’s still THE SEA. Talk about a wildcard if there every was one.

Still, this may represent a better chance to live the libertarian life than via electoral change, as Patri points out…

Libertarians, he says, expend precious time and energy on truly and self-evidently impossible paths toward political change. “Like the Ron Paul movement,” he says. “Lots of libertarians’ effort and millions and millions directed in a way that’s hopeless! For real change [electoral politics is] totally hopeless. Think how much more likely to succeed [libertarians would be] if that amount of resources were put into something that could actually work.” By which he means seasteading. And you have to admit: When you compare it to the likelihood of creating a libertarian world through American politics, seasteading starts to look more and more sensible.

Is it really that hopeless? I certainly don’t think so, but I will say that the Ron Paul movement was unrealistic to the point of being damaging to the libertarian cause. So maybe taking to the seas does have some benefits after all. :-)

In any event, here are some more articles about the movement…

• Live Free or Drown: Floating Utopias on the Cheap
• Seastead, Ahoy!
• Welcome aboard a brand new country

More as it develops…

This is Danielle Ivory, reporting from the American News Project and Alternet.

Back in February, in the House Financial Service Committee, when asked a question about the value of Citigroup’s assets, CEO Vikram Pandit provided a less-than-clear response: “It’s an extraordinarily difficult question.”

Click the video below to WATCH the exchange between Rep. Louis Gutierrez (D-IL) and Vikram Pandit.

Rob Weissman, director of the corporate watchdog group, Essential Action, and author of a new report called Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America, said that, in addition to what Pandit said, there’s an additional factor that could fog the test results: off-the-book assets.

“If you don’t include the off-balance sheet assets in the stress test, then it’s not a legitimate stress test,” Weissman said. “It’s pretty plain that the off-balance-sheet operations are a central part of the story of why we don’t know what the banks own.” The Treasury Department declined to comment on whether they would take off-book-assets into account when running the stress tests.

Weissman says that recipients of bailout money, like Citigroup, Bank of America and JP Morgan, have been engaging in “fanciful accounting” of what they owe and what they own by relocating of their less-than-healthy assets off the books, in shadow corporations. Rep. Brad Sherman has described the process as, “apples on one balance sheet and oranges on another.”

According to RGE Monitor, off-balance-sheet operations have skyrocketed over the last 15 years. From 1992 to 2007, on-balance-sheet assets grew by 200 percent, while off-balance-sheet assets grew by 1,518 percent. In 2007, it was estimated that there was 15.9 times more money parked in off-balance-sheet operations than in on-the-book operations. Not all off-book assets are toxic. Some financial institutions might park assets off their books if they are planning, for instance, to sell them. However, in rough economic times, off-balance sheet accounting allows banks to veil their losses from investors, regulators, and even insiders.

“This turns out to be a really important benefit [for a bank] if it happens to be insolvent,” Weissman added. “And many believe that if you total Citigroup’s assets and liabilities, it is insolvent.”

As of July, Citigroup appeared to have the most off-book assets — an estimated $1.1 trillion. But they aren’t alone. As of July 2008, JP Morgan Chase & Co. had more than $400 billion off their books. Bank of America had $48.2 billion off the books before it bought Merrill Lynch. “If you start adding up all the potential exposures, it’s a huge number,” Sam Golden, former ombudsman for the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, told Bloomberg. “The banks will say that it was disclosed. Investors are saying, ‘Yeah, but it was cryptic.’”

Disclosure rules for off-balance sheet operations are notably less strict than those for assets on the books. Neri Bukspan, chief accountant for Standard & Poor’s told Bloomberg, “A lot of information tends to disappear.”

The use of the off-balance-sheet assets was a core part of the Enron scandal, where they were able to wrap debt inside of debt, using obscure corporations, so no one could track what they owed and what they owned. After the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was set in place, there were efforts to address the problems with off-book assets. But after heavy lobbying by two main trade groups, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association and the American Securitization Forum, banks were given special exemptions.

In September of 2008 as the financial crisis was coming into full view, the Senate Baking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee held a hearing, discussing off-balance sheet operations. Senator Jack Reed recalled Enron: “This phenomenon of moving assets off the balance sheets is eerily familiar. We recall back in the days of Enron that its schemes to manufacture false profits included special purpose entities that conducted transactions off-balance sheet. The goal was to avoid financial reporting. While no one is necessarily suggesting scandals of the Enron kind, we cannot fail to admit the irony. We are dealing with a similar problem yet again, only six years later.”

George P. Miller, Executive Director of the American Securitization Forum, said that moving assets off-book back on to the books would cause dangerous swelling of balance sheets. He added, “There are many other steps that the industry can and should undertake to promote broader and better transparency about risk exposures in these vehicles, whether they are on or off-balance sheet.”

But Donald Young, former member of the Financial Accounting Standards Board countered, “We just had an investment bank [Lehman Brothers] go bankrupt with a fair value balance sheet that showed it had plenty of assets and liabilities. And it almost seems like financial reporting is out of control and not trusted and not believed in. And I think what we do here has got to establish transparency. If the transparency is such that we’re going to bring out some bad news that wasn’t there before, that’s a risk. But I think the benefits of reestablishing confidence in the markets will overwhelm that.”

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) are revising the rules so some off-book assets will have to be reported on the books. However, the changes won’t be effective until January 2010 at the earliest. In March at a House Financial Services Subcommittee hearing, Rep. Sherman complained about this lag. He told the chairman of the FASB, Bob Herz, “If you guys can’t act quickly and logically, perhaps the regulatory accountants need to act and depart from what is a somewhat illogical and certainly slow process that you’ve got.”

In the meantime, in a recent letter to his employees, Pandit has said Citigroup is having its best quarter since 2007 and the bank had conducted its own internal stress tests with positive results. But Weissman says something doesn’t add up. “Either they’ve done a lot of due diligence in a short amount of time that they hadn’t done before, or the stories are incompatible.”

Crossposted at Alternet.

Let me see if I can follow this logic: You are alleging that Jeff Zucker of NBC News is part of a cabal of liberal meanies who are out to smear you (and other conservatives). ‘Far left bloggers’ are also part of this group of ne’er-do-wellers as well, and they, in turn, want to hurt the victims of rape crimes.

Do I have that right?

I complain about O’Reilly on occasion (read: often), and it’s usually for something trite or trivial that really is of no consequence to, well, anyone. Then I saw this clip from last night’s Factor, in which a producer tracks down a ‘far left blogger’ (while she is on vacation) and confronts her with a camera.

This is why I loathe O’Reilly and his Factor. It’s not his politics by which I am so repulsed — he seems to be a reasonable conservative (even if he won’t admit his conservative stance). It’s not his guests. It’s not even his smirky-smug face that I mind. No, it is the gotcha-style ‘journalism’ that he tries to pass off as legitimate. What kind of person sends a camera crew to ambush a political rival/enemy/someone who talks poorly about them?

Read the rest of this post at ThePajamaPundit.com.

Bringing this back around…

The young boy is AIG, the dancing lady is the GOP, the shortsless guy is Geithner and the older woman just coming into the room is the American public.

Discuss.

Here’s the transcript…

Back in the day, really, when people would talk about our military in a poor way, somebody would shoot ‘em. And there’d be nothing said about that, because they knew it was wrong. You don’t talk about our troops. You support our troops. Especially when our congressmen and senators sit there and say bad things in an ongoing conflict.

Let’s just forget that Wurzelbacher is giving a thumbs up to violent fascism and instead put the lie to what he’s saying happened in America. Because who reading this post remembers a time in our history when people were routinely shot for criticizing the military? Anybody?

Sure, that happened in socialist states like China and Russia (still happens in China), but this has never been the standard operating procedure in the US. I suppose one could argue that Americans have been injured or accidentally killed for protesting against military action, but not without massive public backlash. And why Joe doesn’t realize this is beyond me.

As I’ve said in the past, McCain should apologize to the country for elevating this guy as the “Everyman” when he’s anything but.

(h/t: Below The Beltway)

It is.

But $2 trillion is.. ridiculous.

This is Danielle Ivory from ANP.

Congress and the new administration have been focusing their attention on strengthening oversight for the Treasury’s TARP program, but meanwhile few are paying any attention to the Federal Reserve.

Since September, the Fed has lent out about $2 trillion (Bloomberg reported 1.2 trillion in November), but it’s keeping the names of its recipients a big secret.

And while the Treasury’s bailout package has a $700 billion cap, there’s no limit to how much money the Fed can lend.

The American News Project sat down with Washington newcomer, Congressman Alan Grayson (D-FL), who actually used his five minutes of valuable Q & A time in a Financial Services hearing to do some serious Fed fact-finding.

You can see the story or get the embed code here.

Or follow Danielle’s reporting on twitter here.

And visit Acorn Project for more music like this.

Bernie Madoff scam artist action figure

In this economy, would you pay $149.99 for a Bernie Madoff action figure?

Would your answer be influenced if you knew it was a limited edition action figure?

Herobuilders.com is no stranger to controversy, brazenly giving G.I. Joe collectors the meanest enemies possible to wage war on — Saddam, Osama, Hugo Chavez.  Without bad guys, who are the good guys gonna fight, right?

But as brash toymaker Emil Vicale tells the Boston Herald, not everyone wants real-world evil (corrupt CEOs like Lex Luthor are fine) represented in the playroom.

“Everything we do offends somebody,” he says. “If you are looking for a company not to offend somebody, it’s not us.”

(Darren Garnick, who has an Apollo Creed bobblehead on his desk, can be reached at www.cultureschlock.com)

This is Danielle Ivory from the American News Project.

As another $350 billion goes out the door, ANP looks at one small bailed-out bank. Eagle Bank is having trouble making loans. Its CEO, Ron Paul, says that the government has not taken fleeing depositors into account and, as a result, small banks and their surrounding communities will suffer.

Follow Danielle’s reporting on twitter.

http://americannewsproject.com/node/190

WATCH:

Today, Henry Paulson urged Congress to release the second half of the $700 billion of the bailout money. But no one seems know what banks have done with the first $350 billion. Despite the fact that Congress wrote more than one hundred pages about oversight in the bailout bill, they left a gaping hole.

All of the content on ANP is available for free! If you like the piece, please feel free to post it on your blog, or replay on the radio or tv.

http://americannewsproject.com/videos/186

Here’s more about the reporter and what he said…

“This is a gift from the Iraqis. This is the farewell kiss, you dog,” the journalist shouted (in Arabic), Steven Lee Myers of The New York Times reported in a pool report to the White House press corps.

Myers reported that the man threw the second shoe and added: “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.”

Journalists at the scene said the hurler was Muntadar al-Zaidi, a reporter for Al-Baghdadia TV, an independent satellite channel based in Cairo.

A producer for the channel was murdered in Baghdad last year.

My question: why did Bush pop back up after the first shoe was thrown? Aren’t Presidents taught to hit the ground if somebody attacks them?

By the way, isn’t smacking people with your shoe a particularly demeaning insult in the Middle East? Because if I remember correctly, the Iraqis who were riding the statue of Saddam’s through Baghdad were hitting it with their shoes.

Moving on…

Do far right conservatives really think that setting the bar so low for an Obama presidency is a wise move?

Because let’s go down the list of things that Obama has to prove: that he’s an American, he’s not a terrorist, he won’t take away people’s guns, he’s not like Hitler and that raising taxes 3% on the wealthiest 2% isn’t socialism.

In any event, enjoy the crazy because there’s plenty to go around…

Presidential candidate Alan Keyes, vice-presidential candidate Wiley S. Drake, and the Chairman of the American Independent Party, Markham Robinson, have filed suit in California Superior Court in Sacramento seeking to bar Secretary of State Debra Bowen from certifying to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger the names of Electors, and from transmitting to each presidential Elector a Certificate of Election, until documentary proof is produced and verified showing that Senator Obama is a “natural born” citizen of the United States, and does not hold citizenship of Indonesia, Kenya or Great Britain.

In addition, they have asked that the court issue a peremptory writ barring Senator Obama’s California Electors from signing the Certificate of Vote until such documentary proof is produced and verified.

In response to questions about why the suit was being filed, Ambassador Alan Keyes commented, “I and others are concerned that this issue be properly investigated and decided before Senator Obama takes office. Otherwise there will be a serious doubt as to the legitimacy of his tenure. This doubt would also affect the respect people have for the Constitution as the supreme law of the land. I hope the issue can be quickly clarified so that the new President can take office under no shadow of doubt. This will be good for him and for the nation.”

Wow. That was some delicious crazy. I can’t wait to see what the right wing dishes up next.

Also, congrats to Mr. Keyes. You made the news cycle!

Now then, let’s talk about tort reform…

(h/t: Below The Beltway)

This from Powerline’s John Hinderaker…

Obama thinks he is a good talker, but he is often undisciplined when he speaks. He needs to understand that as President, his words will be scrutinized and will have impact whether he intends it or not.

In this regard, President Bush is an excellent model; Obama should take a lesson from his example. Bush never gets sloppy when he is speaking publicly. He chooses his words with care and precision, which is why his style sometimes seems halting. In the eight years he has been President, it is remarkable how few gaffes or verbal blunders he has committed.

If Obama doesn’t raise his standards, he will exceed Bush’s total before he is inaugurated.

Oh. My. God.

What else can you say to that level of crazy? It’s obviously so divorced from reality it makes your head spin wondering how anybody could watch Bush over the past 8 years make one verbal gaffe after another and think he’d be an “excellent model” for Obama.

Excuse me, but I have to go beat my head against a wall.

“It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he’s the one who proposed this national security force. I’m just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may — may not, I hope not — but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism.”
- Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) in an interview with the AP

Well, he’s got one thing right…it does sound both crazy and off base.

But wait…there’s more!

“That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did,” Broun said. “When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist.”

And still more!

“We can’t be lulled into complacency,” Broun said. “You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany. I’m not comparing him to Adolf Hitler. What I’m saying is there is the potential.”

The ignorance is so thick you can cut it with a knife.

First off, any national security force wouldn’t be answering to Obama…it would answering to the President. And that President changes every 4 to 8 years.

Second, if Broun honestly thinks that something anywhere close to what happened in Germany and Russia could happen in America, he’s either not a student of American history or he needs to get on some powerful anti-anxiety meds immediately.

Moving on…

I’m back in Philly, my home away from home, sitting in a swanky hotel lobby, facing a wall, like a crazy person, in order to borrow wireless. And I’ve just published a piece for ANP.

Here’s the scoop…

Today, registered voters in Philly found their names missing from local poll books, which are apparently notorious for being out of date. When those names were checked with the central database, they were verified as registered. Nevertheless, according to election observers in the campaigns and independent of the campaigns, the local election board decided to assign provisional ballots to these voters, which means that their votes probably won’t be counted this evening. If the election is close in Pennsylvania, that’ll make a substantial difference.

This is, yet again, the responsibility of the Philadelphia City Commissioners’ office, led by Marge Tartaglione. Democrats in Philly have a curious way of eating their own..Click here for ANP’s previous coverage of voting in Philly.

Click here for Steven Rosenfeld’s article on Alternet

http://americannewsproject.com/videos/171

My friend and colleague, Lagan Sebert, and I have just published a follow-up on the voting situation in Pennsylvania, arrowing in on a recent legal battle over paper ballots and the Philadelphia City Commission (which has kind of become a peculiar little beat for the ANP, I guess.)

This week, we attended the federal hearing against the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (filed by the NAACP) and the last public meeting of the Philly City Commissioners before the election. We were surprised to see very few members of media at either meeting–Bob Warner of the Philadelphia Daily News was an exception.

If you like it, please do send this along to other people who might be interested or link to it or embed it on your websites! All ANP content is free for use in newspapers, blogs, television, and radio.

Chaos Looms Over Pennsylvania Vote
By Danielle Ivory on Oct 31, 2008

Philadelphia is shaping up to be a key city in a key battleground state in this election, but machine problems and long lines may plague the polling stations and voter disenfranchisement will be a serious risk. Unfortunately for voters, the people charged with running a smooth election in Philly seem surprisingly unconcerned. Philly’s veritable election czar, Marge Tartaglione (D), in particular, shocked ANP with her comments at a recent hearing. See more videos at the American News Project.

ANP has been investigating the perplexing case of the Philadelphia City Commission for a few weeks.

Click for our original story, Philly Official Scoffs at Voting Problems.

Click for our follow-up, Voters Sue Pennsylvania, Election Official Scoffs.

And click for the judge’s recent ruling in the case of the NAACP v. Cortes.

Follow Danielle’s reporting on twitter.

Follow Lagan’s reporting on twitter.

By the way, just in case you don’t know this already, our economy has been predicated on wealth redistribution brought about by progressive taxation. And so is every other first world economy in the world. If you weren’t aware of this, well, now you are.

Ayers and Wright were stronger than this weaksauce.

Moving on…

UPDATE:
Upon listening to this again…Obama wasn’t even advocating redistribution of wealth via the courts. In fact, just the opposite. He said it would be a clumsy way to do that, and because the Warren court didn’t do it, that means they weren’t such a radical court.

Also, he was arguing that folks within the civil rights movement looked too much towards the courts to bring about change, instead of doing more community organizing and building change infrastructure.

Jeez, this was even thinner than I thought.

UPDATE:
TIME points out another obvious flaw in this argument: any politician who’s for progressive taxation has to be for wealth redistribution of some sort…

This argument remains problematic for McCain, because back between 2000 and 2004 McCain also had concerns about the distribution of wealth in America. More specifically, he opposed the Bush Tax cuts because a “disproportional amount went to the wealthiest Americans.”

NBC’s Tom Brokaw asked McCain about this on Sunday, during a Meet The Press sit down. McCain’s answer is a bit difficult to parse. He seems to suggest that some progressivity is good in the tax code, but that progressivity should be minimized (or at least not increased) during difficult economic times.

Is John McCain a socialist?

See, we can do it too.

Just by way of introduction, the ANP is an independent non-profit video news organization in DC. We produce pieces for the web, but offer all of our content for free to newspapers, blogs, websites, radio, and television so please feel free to embed or share our videos. We see all visitors to our website as potential partners and hope that our community will eventually help fund specific beats, send us news tips and story ideas, and join us as freelancers. Another great site to check out is http://spot.us.

We’re convinced that journalistic collaboration will be essential to the future of news, and so far it’s worked pretty well for us. We’ve worked with McClatchy, The Nation, the Washington Independent, and The Huffington Post on investigative and breaking stories and look forward to more teamwork in the future.

Recently, I’ve been covering voting infrastructural issues for the ANP and found myself in Philadelphia. During the 2008 primary, parts of Pennsylvania (particularly areas with high concentrations of poverty and people of color) experienced major delays due to machine failures, and many voters ended up waiting in line for hours or getting disenfranchised. When I spoke to Philly’s Deputy Commissioner, Fred Voigt, I was startled by a strong sense of institutional inertia, an unwillingness to admit that serious problems exist and, what’s more, that these problems could possibly be fixed with better management and funding. Furthermore, he and the commission (headed by Marge Tartaglione) seemed alarmingly unconcerned about long lines leading to disenfranchisement. We aired a story about this on Monday, featuring this disturbing interview. Since then, the NAACP and the Election Reform Network have filed a lawsuit against the state or Pennsylvania, requesting that paper ballots be made available for the voters of PA in case there are machine breakdowns. ANP’s original story was quoted in the complaint—Voigt’s comments were described as an example of a “woefully inadequate” official response to election problems.

We aired a follow-up yesterday, covering the lawsuit and presenting more of our strange interview with Fred Voigt. I asked Voigt how voters could avoid lines, and gave me another surprising answer.

We’ll continue following this case and the state of voting in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. (If you have ideas or tips, please feel free to email us at contact@newsproject.org.)

ANP: Voters Sue Pennsylvania, Election Official Scoffs

Click here to view our original story.

Click here to view the Voter Action complaint and plaintiffs’ memorandum.

From CBS 4 Denver:

DENVER (CBS4/AP) ? CBS4 has learned at least four people are under arrest in connection with a possible plot to kill Barack Obama at his Thursday night acceptance speech in Denver. All are being held on either drug or weapons charges.

CBS4 Investigator Brian Maass reported one of the suspects told authorities they were “going to shoot Obama from a high vantage point using a … rifle … sighted at 750 yards.”

Law enforcement sources tell Maass that one of the suspects “was directly asked if they had come to Denver to kill Obama. He responded in the affirmative.”

And given what these folks hard in their car, it doesn’t look like they were fooling around…

Sources told CBS4 police found two high-powered, scoped rifles in the car along with camouflage clothing, walkie-talkies, wigs, a bulletproof vest, a spotting scope, licenses in the names of other people and 44 grams of methamphetamine. One of the rifles is listed as stolen from Kansas.

The story also details that one of the would-be assailants is linked to a white supremacist group. Yes folks, this one has a racial angle.

I’ll be tracking this one and have more in the morning.