With America's dysfunctional healthcare system getting fixed up and coverage getting extended to 32 million more Americans, the Tea Party loons are in overdrive hurling racial epithets, including the N-word, at Black Democrat lawmakers and calling Barney Frank, the openly gay Congressman a "faggot" and "homo". (Actually, he is Jewish too but they seem to have forgotten that). Let's call it for what it is: this is a redneck lynch mob, the kind of people who hanged or burned more than two thousand African Americans in the early 20th century.
How much of that is about the US having its first black president? Or has the struggling US economy with its massive job losses, created an environment for extremist groups? Are bad times turning people mad?
Actually, it might be the latter. A report by the civil rights group, the Southern Poverty Law Center, reported here, has found that the US is seeing a surge in right wing extremists and militias.
The report says: "Patriot groups have been fuelled by anger over the changing demographics of the country, the soaring public debt, the troubled economy and an array of initiatives by President Obama that have been branded "socialist" or even "fascist" by his political opponents. Already there are signs of … violence emanating from the radical right. Since the installation of Barack Obama, rightwing extremists have murdered six law enforcement officers. Racist skinheads and others have been arrested in alleged plots to assassinate the nation's first black president. One man from Brockton, Massachusetts – who told police he had learned on white supremacist websites that a genocide was under way against whites – is charged with murdering two black people and planning to kill as many Jews as possible on the day after Obama's inauguration. Most recently, a rash of individuals with anti-government, survivalist or racist views have been arrested in a series of bomb cases."
The report says the extremists are being given a veneer of legitimacy as their views are being propagated by the likes of Glenn Beck from Fox News.
As the WalletPop blog says, the economy is literally driving people crazy.
no comment untill now