Since my days at the Seattle Times, I’ve tracked the increasingly destructive crimes of the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front.

The left-wingers in the media who are so concerned with domestic terrorism conveniently omit the arsons, threats, sabotage, and violent campaigns waged by anarchic saviors of the planet.

Which is why you didn’t hear much about this last week:

A piece of heavy equipment was used to topple two towers for Everett radio station KRKO, and the national Earth Liberation Front says their members are responsible.

But an FBI spokesman now says it appears that only one person was responsible for knocking down the towers.

And a neighbor who chased that man away from the scene with a shotgun through the predawn darkness says he saw the suspect escape down a riverbank of the nearby Snohomish River.

As the new information came in about the circumstances surrounding the tower toppling incident, the ELF continued to take responsibility for the destruction.

“Due to the health and environmental risks associated with radio waves emitted from the towers, we applaud this act by the ELF,” Jason Crawford, a spokesman for the North American ELF Press Office, said in a prepared statement…

…Crawford confirmed Friday morning that the destruction was the work of the ELF.

He said there is evidence that AM radio waves cause adverse health affects including a higher rate of cancer, harm to wildlife, and that the signals have been interfering with home phone and intercom lines.

KRKO’s additions to its existing towers in Snohomish were completed in February, allowing the station to boost its AM signal to where it could compete with larger broadcasters in the Seattle-Tacoma area. That’s when the complaints from neighbors over telephone interference began.

The Skotdal family also plans to build two 199-foot towers at the same site for a new 5,000-watt AM station that would cover Snohomish County on another frequency.

A hearing examiner denied a permit for the towers, based on claims that radio signals could be dangerous to humans. But the council voted to reverse the finding, saying it was based on shaky scientific evidence.

A King County judge upheld the council’s decision on Aug. 14.

FBI 2008: Eco-Terrorism Remains No. 1 Domestic Terror Threat

Not going to post the photo of their new ad campaign. Click here if you must for the full story and the image that will have you begging for an airsickness bag. And eye bleach:

The granddaughter of Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara is at the forefront of another revolution — for vegetarianism.

Lydia Guevara poses semi-nude in a PETA campaign that tells viewers to “join the vegetarian revolution,” said PETA spokesman Michael McGraw…

…In the ad, Lydia Guevara wears camouflage pants, a red beret, and bandoliers of baby carrots while standing with one fist on her hip and the other outstretched.

“It very much evokes the tag line of the ad, which is ‘Join the vegetarian revolution,’” McGraw said. “It’s an homage of sorts to her late grandfather.”

Yesterday, Roger Hedgecock and the Liberty Papers posted an unclassified DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis report titled:

Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.

The “report” (PDF file here) was one of the most embarrassingly shoddy pieces of propaganda I’d ever read out of DHS. I couldn’t believe it was real.

I spent the day chasing down DHS spokespeople, who have been tied up preparing for a very important homeland security event later today: The First Lady is coming to visit their Washington office. Priorities, you know.

Well, the press office got back to me and verified that the document is indeed for real.

They were very defensive — preemptively so — in asserting that it was not a politicized document and that DHS had done reports on “leftwing extremism” in the past. I have covered DHS for many years and am quite familiar with past assessments they and the FBI have done on animal rights terrorists and environmental terrorists. But those past reports have always been very specific in identifying the exact groups, causes, and targets of domestic terrorism, i.e., the ALF, ELF, and Stop Huntingdon wackos who have engaged in physical harassment, arson, vandalism, and worse against pharmaceutical companies, farms, labs, and university researchers.

By contrast, the piece of crap report issued on April 7 is a sweeping indictment of conservatives. And the intent is clear. As the two spokespeople I talked with on the phone today made clear: They both pinpointed the recent “economic downturn” and the “general state of the economy” for stoking “rightwing extremism.” One of the spokespeople said he was told that the report has been in the works for a year. My b.s. detector went off the chart, and yours will, too, if you read through the entire report — which asserts with no evidence that an unquantified “resurgence in rightwing extremist recruitment and radicalizations activity” is due to home foreclosures, job losses, and…the historical presidential election.

In Obama land, there are no coincidences. It is no coincidence that this report echoes Tea Party-bashing left-wing blogs (check this one out comparing the Tea Party movement to the Weather Underground!) and demonizes the very Americans who will be protesting in the thousands on Wednesday for the nationwide Tax Day Tea Party.

From the report, p.2:

Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.

From the report. p. 3:

(U//LES) Rightwing extremists are harnessing this historical election as a recruitment tool. Many rightwing extremists are antagonistic toward the new presidential administration and its perceived stance on a range of issues, including immigration and citizenship, the expansion of social programs to minorities, and restrictions on firearms ownership and use. Rightwing extremists are increasingly galvanized by these concerns and leverage them as drivers for recruitment. From the 2008 election timeframe to the present, rightwing extremists have capitalized on related racial and political prejudices in expanded propaganda campaigns, thereby reaching out to a wider audience of potential sympathizers.

(U) Exploiting Economic Downturn

(U//FOUO) Rightwing extremist chatter on the Internet continues to focus on the economy, the perceived loss of U.S. jobs in the manufacturing and construction sectors, and home foreclosures. Anti-Semitic extremists attribute these losses to a deliberate conspiracy conducted by a cabal of Jewish “financial elites.” These “accusatory” tactics are employed to draw new recruits into rightwing extremist groups and further radicalize those already subscribing to extremist beliefs. DHS/I&A assesses this trend is likely to accelerate if the economy is perceived to worsen.

From the report, p. 5:

(U//FOUO) Over the past five years, various rightwing extremists, including militias and white supremacists, have adopted the immigration issue as a call to action, rallying point,
and recruiting tool. Debates over appropriate immigration levels and enforcement policy generally fall within the realm of protected political speech under the First Amendment, but in some cases, anti-immigration or strident pro-enforcement fervor has been directed against specific groups and has the potential to turn violent.

And echoing the anti-military bigotry last seen in that disgusting Penn State University training video, there’s this on p. 7:

(U) Disgruntled Military Veterans

(U//FOUO) DHS/I&A assesses that rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to exploit their skills and knowledge derived from military training and combat. These skills and knowledge have the potential to boost the capabilities of extremists—including lone wolves or small terrorist cells—to carry out violence. The willingness of a small percentage of military personnel to join extremist groups during the 1990s because they were disgruntled, disillusioned, or suffering from the psychological effects of war is being replicated today.

There’s no hackneyed left-wing stereotype of conservatives left behind in this DHS intelligence and analysis assessment. I asked both DHS spokespeople to tell me who, specifically, the report was accusing of “rightwing extremist chatter” and which “antigovernment” groups are being monitored as “extremists.” They say they’ll get back to me.

In the meantime, be aware of this from the report, p. 8:

(U//FOUO) DHS/I&A will be working with its state and local partners over the next several months to ascertain with greater regional specificity the rise in rightwing extremist activity in the United States, with a particular emphasis on the political, economic, and social factors that drive rightwing extremist radicalization.

Better make a few last-minute signs for the Tea Party. Obama’s DHS is watching:

Honk if you’re a radicalized rightwing extremist!

Guilty of rightwing extremist chatter

Anti-government, pro-freedom: Sue me

***

Previous: Missouri retracts report linking militias, 3rd party candidates.

***

Oh, I’m sure DHS will be issuing its report on self-proclaimed bank terrorists like Bruce Marks of NACA and criminal rackeeters harassing private citizens in their homes to “exploit the economic downturn” any day now.

***

Update: John Hinderaker weighs in the report.

Also good reading in Jonah Goldberg’s thread here.

I am not a journalist – but I will try to say something balanced here – on one hand people in the city are going about their business as usual (it is a London thing!), on the other hand there is a very real fear that certain pockets of the city are going to descend into chaos. This fear has been compounded by the fact that according to reports, police did not have the manpower present to stop protestors from storming the RBS offices. I left the protests shortly after 1pm (only an hour after they started) and things were already getting bad. Alot of the protestors I saw were drinking….what could possibly go wrong?? Unforunately for the police it is a beautiful, bright sunny day here which means nobody has been discouraged by bad weather. Let me reiterate though there is no sense of ‘panic’ overall (yet)- I saw lots of bankers out in suits and going for jogs at lunch hour etc.

J.’s pictures from the eye of the G20 storm:

A taste of things to come, just as I wrote last week. These people deserve to have the book thrown at them. But if past treatment of anti-capitalist anarchists here and abroad is any guide, they’ll get wrist slaps again — guaranteeing another global tantrum.

Anti-capitalist protesters are believed to have broken into a branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland in the centre of London today after smashing windows with a volley of missiles.

With police on horseback unable to maintain control and being forced back, a series of windows at the building were broken, graffiti was daubed on the walls and there were reports that some protesters had broken into the branch.

Hundreds of protesters were seen to converge on the bank, on the corner of Threadneedle Street and Bartholomew Lane, as a total of 4,000 demonstrated outside the Bank of England nearby.

As police on horseback and in riot gear proved unable to protect the building, which was thought to be empty, officers with dogs charged at the crowd in an attempt to force them back. The crowd were heard to chant: “Shame on you” as officers drove them away from the door…

With the demonstrations – carried out by a combination of anarchists, anti-war protesters, environmentalists and others – rapidly heating up, Scotland Yard said cordons had been put up all around the surrounding area in response to “increasing levels of violence.”

…Police confirmed earlier that 11 people had been arrested for impersonating police officers as they travelled towards Bishopsgate in uniform in a fake armoured personnel carrier.

Oh, you’ll love this:

Among those spotted among the crowd was the comedian Russell Brand, who said he was accompanying the marchers because he was interested to see why the protest was taking place.

That’s the same anti-American asshat who Meghan McCain thinks is “freaking hilarious.”

My syndicated column today continues the theme I blogged about two days ago in the “Rule of the Mob” post. Keep an eye on next week’s G20 summit in London. Thousands of anti-capitalism zealots will be amassing there to intimidate and harass bankers. The vandalizing of the Scottish ex-banking executive’s home in Edinburgh is just a prelude. The protests are slated to start tomorrow and last all week; President Obama leaves for the summit on Tuesday. The images above are graphics and posters being disseminated online by protest organizers.

The anarchists are reportedly using Google Streetview and Twitter to organize riots, hang businessmen in effigy at the behest of a university professor known as “Mr. Mayhem,” call for guillotining bank execs, and — get this — target London firms that fail to turn off their lights to commemorate that moronic “Earth Hour” event I wrote about earlier this week. If shops don’t worship at the altar of environmentalism, they will be broken into:

Sir Paul Stephenson said ‘old faces’ from British protest groups – thought to be behind earlier anti-globalisation riots – were also expected in London. Activists have dubbed April 1 Financial Fools Day and are planning to march on the Bank of England, the European Climate Exchange in Bishopsgate and the U.S. embassy. At least 2,000 demonstrators are expected. The first demonstration in London will come tomorrow with ‘Earth Hour’ – targeting City firms that fail to turn off their lights by 8.30pm. Organisers say every office block in London with lights on will be fair game and have warned that they are prepared to break in and put the lights out themselves. The protest group Climate Camp has already released a map of potential targets in the City for its demonstration on April 1, including the Royal Bank of Scotland, carbon offset and trading companies and ‘green-washing’ PR firms.

Think this madness couldn’t happen here? Think again.

***

The new vigilantes and their unaccountable enablers
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2009

If you think there are no consequences to hysterical, anti-corporate grandstanding in Washington, pay attention to what’s happening across the pond: “This is just the beginning.”

So warned a public letter signed this week by a vigilante group called “Bank Bosses are Criminals.” The thugs claimed responsibility for vandalizing a former financial executive’s home and car in Edinburgh, Scotland. The bank official, Sir Fred Goodwin, was excoriated by U.K. politicians for refusing to give up company pension benefits dubbed “obscene,” “grotesque,” “unjustifiable and unacceptable.” The vigilantes were stoked by a former newspaper editor, one Max Hastings, who wrote a diatribe exhorting citizens to violence:

“The time has come to address the entire robber banker culture. Investment banks have been run not for the benefit of society, customers, or even shareholders, but exclusively for the advantage of the bankers themselves…This is why we must stand outside their homes throwing rocks through the windows until they do.”

This is no marginal movement. Some 3,000 protesters from around the world are expected to wreak havoc on the G20 summit next week in London. What happened at Sir Fred’s house is a mere dress rehearsal. Bankers are being told to dress down to disguise themselves and avoid becoming riot targets.

Demonstrators are threatening to hang effigies. Protest organizer and university professor Chris Knight vowed worse: “We are going to be hanging a lot of people like Fred the Shred from lampposts on April Fool’s Day and I can only say let’s hope they are just effigies. To be honest, if he winds us up any more I’m afraid there will be real bankers hanging from lampposts and let’s hope that that doesn’t actually have to happen.”

How soon before we see this same kind of anarchic domestic terrorism on this side of the Atlantic? It’s already here.

Animal rights’ terrorists have firebombed researchers’ homes and Molotov cocktail-bombed their cars and been convicted of inciting threats, harassment, and vandalism against employees of a private company engaged in animal research.

Environmental terrorists have set developments on fire.

Anti-globalization anarchists in Seattle caused $2.5 million in damage to stores and downtown businesses in 1999.

Self-proclaimed “bank terrorist” Bruce Marks of the government-supported Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, whom I reported on last March, has been threatening bank employees in their homes and harassing their children for years.

And last weekend, of course, the radical ACORN mob and its corporate shakedown allies chartered a bus — with twice as many outrage-stoking MSM photographers in tow — to menace AIG executives in their homes.

Democratic Rep. Barney Frank shrugged off testimony from AIG president Edward Liddy concerning death threats leveled against the company’s employees. GOP Sen. Charles Grassley recklessly called on executives who accepted retention bonuses to commit hari kiri. Left-wing billionaire George Soros’s ground troops in the ANSWER coalition waved signs decrying, “CAPITALISM IS ORGANIZED CRIME! STOP AIG!” And 85 House Republicans, led by Minority Whip Eric Cantor, abetted the demagoguery by voting for the 90 percent retroactive bonus tax.

Pundits on both sides of the aisle demonized the business people whose sin was continuing to work for a company that accepted taxpayer funding from Chicken Littles in Washington who forked it over in a blind frenzy. Washington scribe Mort Kondrake joked about boiling the execs in oil. But the families who received the following threats through AIG’s website can’t afford to be so glib. Among the vile messages disclosed this week in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by NBC Connecticut and Hearst Newspapers:

– All you motherf***ers should be shot. Thanks for f***ing up our economy then taking our money.

— Watch your backs because someone will come to get you, you can be sure.

Federal authorities are investigating and will take action against warped vigilantes. But when will the enablers on the Hill, in newsrooms, and on TV sets be held to account?

You have no doubt read about the grisly botched abortion case in Florida where the intended murder victim was born alive, then left in a trash can to die. The details of the story involve senseless savagery. The mother’s lawsuit says the clinic staff knocked the 23-week-old baby “off the recliner chair where she had given birth, onto the floor. The baby’s umbilical cord was not clamped, allowing her to bleed out. Gonzalez scooped the baby, placenta and afterbirth into a red plastic biohazard bag and threw it out.” The mother is horrified and deeply regrets the abortion; her lawyer said: “She came face to face with a human being And that changed everything.”

You won’t see pro-choice extremist Ashley Judd appearing in ads condemning such barbarism and speaking up on behalf of women suffering post-abortion trauma. You will, however, see her in those new animal-rights ads condemning the “senseless savagery” of predator control in Alaska. To paraphrase her favorite t-shirt: THIS IS WHAT A FOOL LOOKS LIKE.

***
Ashley Judd: Clown in wolf guardian’s clothing
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2008

Actress Ashley Judd has finally earned her Hollywood stripes and provided award-winning comic relief. With Washington poised to shove a trillion-dollar “stimulus” pork pie down our throats, we need all the distractions we can get. I give Judd’s unintentionally entertaining performance in a new Sarah Palin-bashing animal rights ad two diversionary thumbs up.

The Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund sponsored the YouTube video starring Judd. They’ve dubbed their campaign, launched this week, “Eye on Palin.” With all the serious, socially responsible celebrity earnestness she could muster, Judd decried aerial hunting of wolves in the GOP Alaska governor’s state. “It is time to stop Sarah Palin, and stop this senseless savagery,” Judd intoned.

Casting herself as an environmental expert, Judd attacked Palin for “casting aside science and championing the slaughter of wildlife.” The video shows a wolf being shot, writhing in pain, with an ominous soundtrack throbbing and menacing photos of Palin flashed across the screen. “Riddled with gunshots, biting at their backs in agony, they die (pause for quiver) a brutal death,” Judd enunciates slowly as wolf squeals punctuate the video. Defenders of Wildlife assails Gov. Palin for proposing a $150 bounty for every dead wolf killed by aerial hunters. She’s cruel and bloodthirsty and she must be stopped!

It’s a compelling, black-and-white story line. But like the world Ashley Judd inhabits, this plot is make-believe.

Fact is, the policy is intended to protect other animals – moose and caribou – from overpopulation of wolves. Alaskans rely on caribou and moose for food. Not all Americans care to live on environmentally-correct starlet diets of tofu salad and Pinkberry yogurt.

Neither Palin nor the aerial hunters in those scary low-flying planes that have Judd quivering promote the program out of malice and animal insensitivity. On the contrary, they are the true, compassionate conservationists. The bounty helped state biologists collecting wolf age data and provided incentives to reduce the wolf population when wildlife management efforts had fallen behind. This is about predator control. But to liberal, gun-control zealots thousands of miles away, it’s all heartless murder.
Federal law makes specific exceptions to aerial hunting for the protection of “land, water, wildlife, livestock, domesticated animals, human life, or crops.” Targets are not limited to wolves. And, as Alaska wildlife officials note, the process is tightly controlled and “designed to sustain wolf populations in the future.”

No matter. As Judd proclaimed, “It is time to stop Sarah Palin.” That is the true aim of left-wing lobbying groups and their allies in Hollywood. Palin is a threat not to Alaska’s wolves, but to the liberal establishment’s wolves. Defenders of Wildlife isn’t targeting the ads in states affected by these policies. They’re running the Judd-fronted ads across battleground states. It’s about electoral interests, not wildlife interests. The eco-Kabuki theater is just plain laughable.

On a deadly serious note, Judd’s selective concern for savagery is not lost on longtime observers of the activist entertainer’s political forays. A militant, pro-choice feminist, Judd lashed out at the Republican ticket during the campaign: “[A] woman voting for McCain and Palin is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders.” Yet, not a peep has been heard from Judd about the serial predators of Planned Parenthood who have been caught on tape urging young girls to cover up statutory rape to facilitate abortion procedures. And she won’t be starring in any YouTube ads decrying grisly late-term abortion procedures.

In a starlet’s world, “senseless savagery” only applies to the poster pet of the month.

I wrote about PETA’s anti-fishing jihad back in 2003. They’re still at it.

So, PETA now wants to rename fish “sea kittens” to turn children against the joys of sportfishing. And fish-eating. (Hat tip: Doug Ross)

Not kidding:

People don’t seem to like fish. They’re slithery and slimy, and they have eyes on either side of their pointy little heads—which is weird, to say the least. Plus, the small ones nibble at your feet when you’re swimming, and the big ones—well, the big ones will bite your face off if Jaws is anything to go by.

Of course, if you look at it another way, what all this really means is that fish need to fire their PR guy—stat. Whoever was in charge of creating a positive image for fish needs to go right back to working on the Britney Spears account and leave our scaly little friends alone. You’ve done enough damage, buddy. We’ve got it from here. And we’re going to start by retiring the old name for good. When your name can also be used as a verb that means driving a hook through your head, it’s time for a serious image makeover. And who could possibly want to put a hook through a sea kitten?

Ask the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to stop promoting sea kitten hunting.

I think I’ll make sea kitten sticks for lunch today.

Meanwhile, my fellow sea kitten-eaters at Twitter share their new names for other favorite foods:

Pasture puppies: Steak.

Yard birdie parmesan: Chicken parmesan.

Tuna sea kitties. Tuna fish.

And another snort-worthy euphemism:

“Maybe we should rename rats tube puppies. Think how much nicer the NYC subways would be!”

***

Wonder what names PETA has for all the animals it has killed?

***

Har!: Castle Argghhh! has redesigned your tuna sea kitten cans.

Get this: they’re college students renting the place. But that’s silly; whoever heard of college students getting involved with violent, radical politics?

The landlord thinks his tenants are clean:

Still, [landlord Frank] Male said the tenants never posed any problems or acted suspicious.

“They all seemed like regular UCSC students to me,” he said, adding that they always paid their rent on time. “They don’t drink alcohol. They don’t smoke pot. Every time I’d go over to the house it was immaculate.“

Yeah, there’s something deeply wrong there. Those do not sound like ordinary UCSC students to me.

More in the LA Times, including a defense of animal-rights terror by pro-violence animal rights spokesman Jerry Vlasak.
______________________

{Post by See-Dubya.}

So it’s no surprise that the anonymous animal rights klansmen have graduated to firebombing university researchers’ homes and cars.

The family was home at the time of the firebombing and the victims, including two young children, escaped on a fire ladder from a second-story window, according to police. One family member suffered injuries during the escape and had to be hospitalized briefly, police said. That bombing is being considered an attempted homicide because the family was home, police said.

You developing cures for cancer? AIDS? Malaria? If you use laboratory mice, then guess what: you’re a a target. Better buy a gun now.

More at the San Jose Mercury-News.

___________________

UPDATE: This reminds me of a useful related post by S. Weasel, detailing how profoundly fug-buck looney PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk really is.

___________________

{Post by See-Dubya}

What are the disadvantages of shortness? I was bullied a lot when I was a kid. I was actually beat up because I was little. People frequently tell me in interviews that they were bullied as children. But no one ever steps forward and says, “I was the bully.” They don’t want to admit to being a bully.

What do you think playground bullies grow up to be? Right-wing Republicans.

He must not get out much in Berkeley and the Bay Area. It’s not right-wing Republicans assaulting police officers, abusing government authority to try and drive out the Marines, waging nationwide war on recruiters, and terrorizing researchers in the name of animal rights.

On that last story, which I blogged about last month, here’s a follow-up:

In the hills above the University of California’s Berkeley campus, nine protesters gathered in front of the home of a toxicology professor, their faces covered with scarves and hoods despite the warm spring weather.

One scrawled “killer” in chalk on the scientist’s doorstep, while another hurled insults through a bullhorn and announced, “Your neighbor kills animals!” Someone shattered a window.

Borrowing the kind of tactics used by anti-abortion demonstrators, animal rights activists are increasingly taking their rage straight to scientists’ front doors.

Over the past couple of years, more and more researchers who experiment on animals have been harassed and terrorized in their own homes, with weapons that include firebombs, flooding and acid…

…The Washington-based Foundation for Biomedical Research said researchers were harassed or otherwise victimized more than 70 times in 2003, up from just 10 the year before. The number of attacks has held steady or risen ever since, according to the group.

Activists say the escalation in tactics results from a frustration that nonviolent methods have failed to stop what they call the needless torture and killing of animals.

“An animal has as much of a right to life as we do. To take a life without provocation is immoral, it’s violent, there’s no excuse for it,” said Jacob Black, 23, an organizer of demonstrations at the homes of UC Berkeley researchers. “To name and shame these people as morally bankrupt individuals in our society is key.”

Care to comment, Professor Reich?

Sure.

Via the SFChronicle with a hat tip to reader Andy G.:

Officials have been trying to keep it quiet, but 24 UC Berkeley researchers and seven staffers have been harassed by animal rights activists in recent months, in some cases having their homes or cars vandalized.

“What they all have in common is that they all work in animal research,” UC Berkeley spokesman Robert Sanders said of the targeted employees.

In several instances, the activists have shown up outside researchers’ homes in the middle of the night with bullhorns and chanting, “Animal killers.” Sometimes they have scrawled slogans on the sidewalk in chalk.

On more than one occasion, rocks have been thrown through the researchers’ windows and their cars have been scratched up.

“Sometimes (the activists) go up to the door,” Sanders said, “which can be very frightening to the family.”

According to UC, there have been 20 reports of damage to researchers’ homes in Berkeley, Oakland and El Cerrito since August, including seven broken house windows and three vandalized cars.

Thirteen researchers have been harassed on more than one occasion, authorities said. One researcher, who studies how cat brains work for epilepsy research, has reported seven incidents at his home.

This NY Times article made me chuckle–for all the green pieties of the Times’ readership, things can turn real ugly when one’s garden is threatened or the herons are using your koi pond for a sushi bar. In addition to the porky-flattening grandma above, pitchforks, drownings, shotguns, and various unspecified violent means are resorted to, sometimes without a pang of guilt, to defend one’s heirloom tomatoes and arugula beds.

Then again, sometimes there’s plenty of guilt and a little new age ritual to absolve it:

Finally, the artist decided he would have to shoot the animals. First, though, he went to each hole and made an announcement.

“I said: ‘I intend to kill you. You have 24 hours to get out,’ ” he recalls. “I wanted to give them fair warning. I said, ‘If I were you, I would find another place to live.’ I also promised them I would not take a shot unless I knew it would be fatal.”

He is making this into a funny story, he says, but when he killed his first woodchuck he “literally felt sick.”

“I went outside and knelt down to it and said a little prayer to whatever the powers that be that when my turn comes, I will do it as gracefully and uncomplainingly.”

Eventually, though, he embraced his mission, and grew so obsessed with it that an aunt began to call him Woodchuck Johnny.

The squirrel drowners–she an environmentalist and lawyer–have gotten eerily desensitized at their rather elaborate squirrel-destruction method Part of me isn’t surprised; if we didn’t effectively rationalize our need to kill pests, our species would have died out long ago. Whacking woodchucks is just as necessary, and not that different from,stepping on crop-devouring locusts, except that the woodchucks are cuter. And gooshier.

Exit question: do you think it’s possible that this whole green thing is just a sham the city folk put up to fool each other?

Nah, couldn’t be.

________________

{Post by See-Dubya}

At the request of the Swiss government, an ethics panel has weighed in on the “dignity” of plants and opined that the arbitrary killing of flora is morally wrong. This is no hoax. The concept of what could be called “plant rights” is being seriously debated.

A few years ago the Swiss added to their national constitution a provision requiring “account to be taken of the dignity of creation when handling animals, plants and other organisms.” No one knew exactly what it meant, so they asked the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology to figure it out. The resulting report, “The Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants,” is enough to short circuit the brain.

Sure, you vegans thought yourselves so morally pure. But according to the Swiss government, your hands are stained with the chlorophyll of innocent beings.

Go ahead and read the whole stupid thing now, because it’s going to be all over Fox News and every local-market talk show and right-leaning blog this week.

While you’re there, take a nice heady sniff of European morality, and with that fragrance still stinging your nostrils, go read Patterico’s expert takedown of the New York Times’ new Supreme Court reporter, Adam Liptak, who graces the pages of that august publication with a tiresome muddle of predictable criticism of American prison policy.

What does prison policy have to do with the Free Swiss Chard! movement? Well, you experienced VRWC operatives might see this one coming…among his many misstatements and misreadings of the data, Liptak inevitably reaches for that good ol’ reliable cudgel liberals use to attack American policy: European moralists who are shocked and disgusted at our cowboy-mentality barbarism.

Patterico:

Liptak continues:

“Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.”

Guess what, Adam Liptak? I’m “mystified and appalled” by the number and length of European prison sentences — specifically, the mystifying and appallingly short sentences that too often result in cases of clear, premeditated murder.

For example, in Germany, activists bombed an American military base and killed a U.S. soldier, and received a “life” sentence. By August of last year, two had been paroled after serving only 21 years. In the Netherlands, Volkert Van der Graaf confessed to assassinating politician Pim Fortuyn and was sentenced to all of 18 years.

And I could go on.

I believe many Americans are also “mystified and appalled” by the leniency of these European sentences for premeditated murder. But somehow, Adam Liptak gives no prominence to their views.

Not to mention the fact that dude, they think plants have dignity and rights. But I guess it’s a wash: if you do murder a hydrangea with malice aforethought, they won’t imprison you for very long.

It’s going to be hard to take anything a European not named Thatcher says seriously ever again. They’re not particularly interested in stopping Islamic honor killings, but zut! that American prison system is too harsh.

And oh yeah, plants have rights.

God help us.

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{Post by See-Dubya}

Kathleen Soliah, a former member of the radical Symbionese Liberation Army, was released on parole this week from a California women’s prison after serving about six years behind bars for her role in a plot to kill Los Angeles police officers by blowing up their patrol cars.

The white-haired convict, who has changed her name to Sara Jane Olson, had been sentenced to 12 years in prison. Like most California inmates, Soliah earned credit against her sentence for working while in prison. She served on a maintenance crew that swept and cleaned the main yard of the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, prison officials said.

The 61-year-old Soliah, who was released Monday, must now serve a three-year parole, although prison officials declined to provide the conditions of her release.

Reached at her family’s home in Palmdale on Thursday, Soliah refused to comment. Her husband, Dr. Gerald Peterson, who was also at the house, said only that he was “relieved.”

Soliah’s attorney, Shawn Chapman Holley, said, “We’re thrilled she’s out and can return to her family. For someone who was not a danger or a threat to society, it was six years too long.”

Los Angeles police see Soliah in far harsher light.

She “attempted to murder LAPD officers by bombing two police cars,” said Tim Sands, president of the Police Protective League, which represents the city’s 9,300 rank-and-file officers. “She needs to serve her full time in prison for these crimes and does not deserve time off for working in prison. Criminals who attempt to murder police officers should not be able to escape justice simply because they have good lawyers.”

The child of a middle-class Palmdale family, Soliah joined the violent band of radicals best known for kidnapping newspaper heiress Patty Hearst in the mid-1970s. She was charged with taking part in a 1975 plan to plant pipe bombs beneath police cars in retaliation for a shootout with Los Angeles police that left six SLA members dead.

The nail-packed bombs didn’t detonate when the triggering device on one malfunctioned. Not waiting around to make her case in court though, she fled.

She changed her name to Sara Jane Olson, left California and married Peterson, an emergency room physician. The couple lived for a while in Zimbabwe before settling in St. Paul, Minn. Soliah lived the quiet life of a homemaker and mother of three daughters in a Tudor-style home in an upscale neighborhood near the Mississippi River and performed in a local theater’s Shakespeare productions.

Elsewhere in southern California, animal rights terrorists are wreaking havoc on the UCLA campus–forcing regents to sue them to get them to stop:

It was late into the night when 25 people in ski masks descended on professor Dario Ringach’s family home. Pounding on the door, frightening his small children, they screamed into megaphones, “Animal killer! We know where you live! We will never give up!”

And they apparently meant it. That year, 2006, according to court documents, animal rights activists launched a summer-long campaign of harassment against Ringach, an assistant professor of psychology and neurobiology at the University of California at Los Angeles and other scientists who conduct research with laboratory animals.

They hurled firecrackers at his house in the middle of the night and planted Molotov-cocktail-like explosives at other faculty houses, threatening to burn them to the ground.

UCLA hired private security, but Ringach feared for his family. “Effectively immediately, I am no longer doing animal research,” he finally wrote in an e-mail to his persecutors, pleading to be left alone. “Please don’t bother my family anymore.”

The University of California regents have responded by suing UCLA Primate Freedom, the Animal Liberation Brigade, the Animal Liberation Front and five people allegedly affiliated with them. It is a tactic that the regents successfully employed nine years ago.

The regents hope to win a permanent injunction similar to one granted against Last Chance for Animals in 1989. But some experts note that the regents now are battling more violent, Internet-savvy foes who thrive in online communities, post faculty “targets” on Web sites and upload how-to guides for their attacks.