Nick Baumann

News Editor

Nick is based in our DC bureau, where he covers national politics and civil liberties issues. Nick has also written for The Economist, The Atlantic, The Washington Monthly, and Commonweal. Email tips and insights to nbaumann [at] motherjones [dot] com. You can also follow him on Facebook.

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Gawker Says What Needs To Be Said

—By Nick Baumann

| Tue Jan. 12, 2010 10:57 AM PST

Gawker's Alex Pareene on Harold Ford's plan to (maybe) run against Kirsten Gillibrand for US Senate in New York:

The problem most people had with Kirsten Gillibrand was that she was a moderate from upstate whose career wasn't particularly distinguished and who held some beliefs (mostly gun control) that wouldn't fly with New York City Democrats.

So, of course, these brilliant minds decided that she would best be challenged by a conservative from Tennessee whose career is a joke and who holds no beliefs. Honestly, Democrats? Field conservative and moderate Democrats in conservative and moderate districts and states. In New York, field a fucking liberal New Yorker. There is not a Republican Senator from Mississippi who happens to be an anti-war atheist. There should not be a pro-gun anti-choice Senator from New York. [Emphasis added.]

The rest is here. The man who works for Nick Denton is right. There's a pretty good liberal argument to be made for Harold Ford as a senator from Tennessee. But you'd have to think that Sen. Ford (D-N.Y.) would make Nate Silver's next list of "least valuable Democrats." This doesn't make much sense.

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Erroll Southers and "Christian Identity"

—By Nick Baumann

| Tue Jan. 12, 2010 10:26 AM PST

Flickr/cesarastudillo (Creative Commons).RedState's Erick Erickson has been doing a lot of lying about Erroll Southers, the Obama administration's nominee to head the Transportation Security Administration. Erickson is trying to suggest that Southers said anti-abortion activists and Christians in general are a major terrorist threat to the US—bigger than Al Qaeda. As you can probably guess, none of that is true. The trigger for all this lying is this statement by Southers, who was responding to the question "Which home-grown terrorist groups pose the greatest danger to the US?":

Most of the domestic groups that we have to pay attention to here are white supremacist groups. They're anti-government and in most cases anti-abortion. They are usually survivalist type in nature, identity orientated. If you recall, Buford Furrow came to Los Angeles in, I believe it was 1999. When he went to three different Jewish institutions, museums, and then wound up shooting people at a children's community center, then shooting a fellow penal postal worker later on. Matthew Hale who's the Pontifex Maximus of the World Church of the Creator out of Illinois and Ben Smith who went on a shooting spree in three different cities where he killed a number of African Americans and Jews and Asians that day. Those groups are groups that claim to be extremely anti-government and Christian Identity oriented.

Erickson—and Andrew Breitbart's breitbart.tv, which also picked up the "story"—either don't know or are pretending not to know what "Christian Identity-oriented" means. Mother Jones' own James Ridgeway knows. So does my friend Matt Gertz at Media Matters, who enlightens the unenlightened:

According to the Anti-Defamation League, "Christian Identity is a religious ideology popular in extreme right-wing circles. Adherents believe that whites of European descent can be traced back to the 'Lost Tribes of Israel.' Many consider Jews to be the Satanic offspring of Eve and the Serpent, while non-whites are "mud peoples" created before Adam and Eve. Its virulent racist and anti-Semitic beliefs are usually accompanied by extreme anti-government sentiments."

I really hope that the mainstream media isn't dumb enough to make this mistake.

Conan the Underdog

—By Nick Baumann

| Tue Jan. 12, 2010 9:49 AM PST

It looks like Conan O'Brien may get shafted by NBC's failed "Jay Leno at 10 p.m." experiment. It's sad for Conan, and embarassing for NBC. But it's good for viewers: Cone-Dog has always thrived under pressure. Behold—a truly great Conan monologue:

What To Watch Tonight

—By Nick Baumann

| Tue Jan. 12, 2010 9:25 AM PST

Via the New York Times, I see that BBC World News has a truly incredible story on tap for tonight's broadcast:

New to Facebook, Brandon Neely was searching the site for acquaintances in 2008 when he typed in the names of some of the detainees he had guarded during his tenure as a prison guard at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Mr. Neely, an Army veteran who spent six months at the prison in 2002, sent messages to one of the freed men, Shafiq Rasul, and was astonished when Mr. Rasul replied. Their exchanges sparked a face-to-face meeting, arranged by the BBC, which will be shown on Tuesday. Mr. Neely, who has served as the president of the Houston chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War, says his time at Guantánamo now haunts him, and has granted confessional-style interviews about the abuses he says he witnessed there. In a message to Mr. Rasul, Mr. Neely apologized for his role in the imprisonment.... The BBC paid for Mr. Neely’s flight to London last month, where a camera crew filmed him meeting Mr. Rasul and a second former detainee, Ruhal Ahmed, on a Saturday afternoon.

(Click through to the Times story for a great photo.)

Neely is the same guard who gave the UC Davis' Center for Study of Human Rights in the Americas 15,000 words of testimony about his participation in prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay. He caught a lot of flak for that.

There's more over at the BBC's site, including this:

Mr Ahmed admits they had a secret agenda for entering Afghanistan, but it wasn't to join al-Qaeda.

"Aid work was like probably 5% of it. Our main reason was just to go and sightsee really and smoke some dope".

These guys don't sound like hardened jihadis. Anyway, I'll be watching.

Gun Laws and Stupidity

—By Nick Baumann

| Tue Jan. 12, 2010 4:35 AM PST

Flickr/Editor B, dbking (Creative Commons). Flickr/Editor B and dbking (Creative Commons).The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence put out a press release last week arguing that if Gilbert Arenas, who plays for the Washington Wizards NBA team, did in fact bring guns in to the Verizon Center, well, then he should be "punished to the full extent of the law, including jail time if appropriate."

Normally it would be uncontroversial to suggest that people who are convicted of breaking the law should be punished. But it's not always so clear-cut. Many conservatives see gun restrictions in much the same way that some liberals and libertarians see federal marijuana bans: unjust laws that don't need to be obeyed. (I'm not passing judgment on the relative merits of gun control and the drug war, just saying they incite similar political reactions.)

A few weeks ago I reported on Joshua Bowman, who was arrested near the Capitol during President Barack Obama's health care speech in September after cops found hunting guns in his car trunk. Bowman is a pretty committed Republican, was a career employee in the Bush White House, and was on his way to hang out with a bunch of congressional Republicans at the Republican Club when he was arrested. The facts of the case suggest that Bowman probably wasn't intending to harm anyone when he brought his guns to DC. Bowman lives in Virginia and forgot the guns were in his trunk when he consented to a search, his lawyer told me.

Basically, Bowman just made a stupid mistake—he didn't take the law seriously enough to think about the potential consequences of driving around Capitol Hill during a high-security speech with guns in his car. Some might accuse Arenas (or NFLer Plaxico Burress, who accidentally shot himself with an unregistered handgun and is now in jail) of similar recklessness.

I suspect the same thing is at play with folks who blatantly violate marijuana laws. It takes a truly stupid (and foolish) pothead to get arrested for smoking pot at a police softball game. I sympathize with the idea that some laws are unjust and can be morally disobeyed. But bringing your guns to Capitol Hill, or to the Verizon Center, for that matter, is like getting high in the police station parking lot. It's just dumb.