Wonder if he owned a liberal hunting license:
A California man accused of threatening to kill Seattle Congressman Jim McDermott has been arrested and charged in federal court.
Charles Turner Habermann — a 32-year-old Palm Springs, Calif., resident with a $3 million trust fund — was arrested Wednesday morning on allegations that he made threatening phone calls to the office of the Seattle Democrat late last year.
***“He said he was trying to scare them before they spent money that didn’t belong to them,” FBI Special Agent Dean Giboney told the court.
“Habermann stated that he never had any intention of hurting anyone,” the agent continued, “and that he had too much to lose — referring to his $3 million trust fund — to ever do anything which could get him sent to prison.”
The threats preceded by several weeks the deadly Arizona shooting that saw six killed and U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords severely wounded.
Habermann also disparaged Democrats for their views on tax cuts and unemployment insurance, according to the statement. Habermann is alleged to have threatened to kill McDermott in an effort to interfere with his vote on the tax cut proposal in December 2010.
A McDermott staffer contacted the FBI on Dec. 10, reporting that the congressman’s Seattle office had received the offending phone calls.
In one, the caller was heard calling McDermott “a piece of human filth,” “a communist,” and a “piece of (expletive) garbage.”
“Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, or George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, if any of them had ever met uh, uh Jim McDermott, they would all blow his brains out,” Habermann said in the first rambling message, according to charging documents. “They’d shoot him, in the head. They’d kill him, because he’s a piece of, of, of disgusting garbage.
“Any you let that (expletive) scum bag know, that if he ever (expletive) with my money, ever the (expletive) again, I’ll (expletive) kill him, okay,” Habermann continued, according to charges. “I’ll round them up, I’ll kill them, I’ll kill his friends, I’ll kill his family, I will kill everybody he (expletive) knows.”
Oddly enough, I thought every trust fund baby bitching about unemployment insurance wrote for the National Review. Guess I was wrong about that.
And, in fairness, I yelled at a Comcast operator a couple years ago, so it is important to recognize that both sides do it.
Rick Massimo
Yeah, but he’s obviously a lone nut who has absolutely nothing to do with conservatism or the tea party because SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP that’s why.
beltane
I saw this story earlier, but without mention of the $3 million trust fund. What college did this parasitic individual attend, Glenn Beck University?
serge
He might be overqualified to write for NRO. Besides, Jonah’s Mom would never allow him to play with this little Chatsworth Osbourne, Jr.
Mark S.
The dipshit’s apparently done this before:
Yeah, pot will do that to you. Well, it never did that to me or anyone I know, but still.
Jeffrey Goldberg:
Now that’s more the thinking I’d come up with if I were high.
geg6
Oh, those trust fund babies. Entitlement is thy name.
matoko_chan
yes and you give EDK a platform to headfake on “reasonable” conservatives and principled “libertarians”.
throw the fucker out.
n/e one with an IQ over room temp sees right through him.
hes just as toxic as Douchebag and McMegan.
throw him out or ban me.
im sick of your cudlip bullshytt.
stuckinred
How come this blog has been loading so slow all day?
Xecky Gilchrist
Well, he doesn’t seem to have said Sarah Palin or Sharron Angle called him up and specifically ordered him to do this, so it’s the Democrats’ fault for taking away his first amendment rights.
Mike S
Is this an Onion piece?
Hogan
Habermann said he’d been drinking the night he made the calls but was “functioning”
Note to self: always add “+12” at the end of death threats.
Legalize
Duh, medical marijuana caused this. And medical marijuana is a pet lib project! So yeah, this is the fault of liberals who are too indecent to stop pointing fingers!
Tom Hilton
The other day I yelled at a driver who ran a red light while I was crossing the street. So between your story and mine, maybe our side is actually worse.
Bulworth
Another “liberal of liberals” I see.
Villago Delenda Est
Um. No.
These guys did not care much for assholes who live off of trust funds. They were fighting a regime built on a foundation of inherited privilege…where merit was pretty much restricted to who your father was. Even if your father didn’t happen to be married to your mother, in many cases.
They would have very little time for the likes of you, especially after those rants. Jefferson was gunning for your type, in particular, with the estate tax.
Fuck. $3 million trust fund? I’d shut the fuck up and enjoy the good life on easy street, if I were you, asshole. Smoke dope and surf all fucking day.
This guy should be deprived of his trust fund and forced to greet people with “do you want fries with that” for an extended period.
Bulworth
Yeah but I’m sure he has a copy of The Communist Manifesto somewhere.
Xecky Gilchrist
@Villago Delenda Est: I’d shut the fuck up and enjoy the good life on easy street, if I were you, asshole. Smoke dope and surf all fucking day.
You and me both, except maybe for the surfing part, but since that’s clearly another universe why not.
We clearly don’t have the aggrieved entitlement and violent tendencies necessary to be real American Patriots, heirs to the mantle of Jefferson and Reagan.
BGinCHI
I like the part where he said “I’ll kill you and your whole family” a bunch of times then said he didn’t mean it.
Oh, ok.
That, in a nutshell, is what’s wrong with all the bullshit the right is peddling about violent rhetoric and its consequences.
freelancer
@matoko_chan:
Rong moov sistah.
PurpleGirl
@serge: You forgot “the Third”.
Chyron HR
Clearly a pot-smoking liberal assassin, or as they call them in Obama’s homeland (whatever it is), a “Hashishin”.
McWaffle
“too much to lose to ever do anything which could get him sent to prison.”
Except make death threats to senators. What a dumbass.
MikeJ
Those lucky duckies without trustfunds. *They* can threaten people because they don’t have $3M to lose!
stuckinred
@matoko_chan:
whacky wabbit
Barb (formerly Gex)
He obviously worked very hard to select the sperm and the egg that he came from – obviously his trust fund was earned on merit.
The only thing he did to get rich was
hopewait for his parents to die.Ella in New Mexico
This is awfully off track, but too good not to pass on:
How To Know Whether You Are Talking To Darrell Issa On The Phone: A Primer
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/12/darrell-issa-howard-kurtz-correction-primer_n_808106.html?ir=Politics
Xecky Gilchrist
@BGinCHI: I like the part where he said “I’ll kill you and your whole family” a bunch of times then said he didn’t mean it.
Sure! Sharron Angle called for assassinations multiple times and said she didn’t mean it and nothing happened to her, so why not?
BGinCHI
@Ella in New Mexico: Oh, snap.
Howie, you is so dumb. Hey, it’s a good thing you neither teach journalism nor comment on how it works.
Seriously, there are literally THOUSANDS of people who could do his job and would all do it better.
tPirate
James Madison was very proud of Massachusetts’ estate tax, for most of the reasons the rest of like them, too.
fasteddie9318
Just as an aside, is there any quote in American history that’s been more mangled than Jefferson’s “tree of liberty” quote has been by militia teatards? Jefferson didn’t want the fucking government to be overthrown every 20 years; he wanted ignorant assholes like the teatards to get their complaints out there, violently if need be, and to let off their steam so that they could then be better informed about whatever gripes they had, after which they would settle down and let society move on. The tree is being watered with the blood of misguided, misinformed rebels who have to be coaxed out into the open and done away with so that tensions don’t simmer and ultimately topple the whole system.
G. Nelson Buttnergle (formerly Mumphrey (formerly Renfrew Squeevil (formerly Mumphrey Oddison Yamm (formerly Mumphrey O. Yamm (formerly Mumphrey)))))
Clearly this guy is a Democrat, a “liberal’s liberal”, if you will, who made these threats in a desperate attempt to make Republicans look bad. I bet he reads The Phantom Tollbooth in his spare time.
Glen Tomkins
A cunning plan
Look, they call us Marxists anyway, so we might as well get our money’s worth.
All estates over $250,000 are subject to 100% tax. Make it retroactive for 50 years back. All trust funds get confiscated at age 21, and they can pay out a maximum of $50,000 per year for living expenses until then.
This will help out a lot with the deficit, but that’s not it’s main goal. It’s main goal is to get rid of this class of malignant idlers. So an important element of the plan is that we use as much of the confiscated money as necessary to get some foreign country to accept these people.
Maybe we could get a deal from Mexico. They might be reluctant to take competent anglophones at any price, given our history of filibustering and such. But these losers would present no threat whatever. Let’s hope the Mexicans demand enough money for accepting these people that they can afford to set up the necessary social support system, because these people won’t be able to support themselves.
BGinCHI
@Xecky Gilchrist: The party of personal responsibility strikes again.
How many strikes do they get?
asiangrrlMN
@Villago Delenda Est: I know you’re probably snarking with this:
but I have long felt that the only way to get anything through the thick skulls of asshats like this is to make them do exactly that. Put his trust fund on ice for a year (yeah, I know it’s not legal, but some day, when I’m king….) and make him get by on what he would earn at a job he gets by himself. Same with Congresspeople who decry the evils of sociaIist health care–they don’t get any.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Mark S.:
Frum has a data set now.
serge
@PurpleGirl…I’ve already dated myself for those who got the reference. He was definitely a “Jr.” Played by an actor named Steven Franken, hmmm, know any other Frankens?
He is a cousin of Al Franken. Go figure.
Elvis Elvisberg
This guy should be the face of the GOP, just like Willie Horton was linked to Mike Dukakis.
Lurking Canadian
You know what I find most striking about this? A $3M trust fund, while obviously better than working for a living, almost certainly does not provide enough income to put him into the 250K tax bracket. In other words nobody was threatening to raise this guy’s taxes anyway.
El Cid
You lefties always trying to blood libel any Real American who speaks their minds.
What he was saying weren’t threats, but common terms used in surveying.
Mr. Poppinfresh
@Glen Tomkins: I just hopped into this thread to say almost the exact same thing, and saw that you beat me to the sentiment.
Fuck it. If they want class war, let’s give them class war. I’d rather coat my ass in beef broth and run naked through a pack of wild jackals than listen to one more over-entitled twatwaffle trustie complain about marginal tax increases. The only solution, then, is to eliminate them as a class by taking all their goddamned money and using it to fund the ridiculous bullshit they have packed into the Federal budget over the years.
If paying Dynacorp and Xe and Lockheed and Haliburton on time is so fucking important, let’s pay for it with your Ivy-league attending human wart of an offspring’s piggy bank.
Villago Delenda Est
@BGinCHI:
N+infinity more than some black kid in the ghetto, that’s for sure.
meh
@Lurking Canadian:
He was probably living off investment income derived from that trust fund – thus he is only paying 15% as capital gains. There has been talk of upping that.
Villago Delenda Est
@El Cid:
Obviously, to imply otherwise in any way is blood libel.
I will go now sit in the corner.
Xecky Gilchrist
In any case, this guy now proves that Conservatives’ MO is intimidation and violence. I recommend remedies involving the fifteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth amendments.
Suffern ACE
@Lurking Canadian: Unless his parents weren’t dead yet…
Mattminus
“Habermann stated that he never had any intention of hurting anyone,” the agent continued, “and that he had too much to lose—referring to his $3 million trust fund—to ever do anything which could get him sent to prison.”
This is a novel defense. The rich are, a priori, innocent of any accusation, because they have far too much to lose. It would be an insane waste of time to ever even investigate them due to this.
I think the elite punditocracy and Supreme Court could really get behind this legal theory.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@Just Some Fuckhead: Anecdata at most. But good enough for punditry.
El Cid
@Villago Delenda Est: Questioning whether or not it’s blood libel is blood libel.
trollhattan
This certainly stuffs the irony back into the Death Tax.
BGinCHI
@El Cid: Double blood libel.
WereBear
I am reminded of a favorite line from a Donald E. Westlake novel, “He had been born rich, and so never learned to control his emotions.”
That’s all there is to it; they don’t have to grow up, and so they never do.
Villago Delenda Est
@El Cid:
Oh, man, am I screwed!
Putting on dunce cap while sitting in the corner now…
On edit: I guess I’m on Double Secret Blood Libel Probation…
Davis X. Machina
@Glen Tomkins: Too radical, too ‘Property is theft’-y. I suggest ‘Property is ‘borrowing’ our stuff for a long, long time, like my neighbor did, with my saber saw.’
Sure it won’t fit on a bumper sticker, but then that’s a small price to pay to avoid gutters running with blood, and, quite frankly, the way my privatized, outsourced electric company’s been maintaining the street lights, I’m not sure my lanterne is up to taking the weight of any but the lightest aristos.
Calouste
@Lurking Canadian:
It would if he had invested with Bernie Madoff’s 11% guaranteed investment funds.
SFAW
You lie! As was clearly shown by his having a trust fund, he is a Lieberal! QFED!
Which are those – gnats, boils, heartbreak of psoriasis? And it’s amUendments, smart guy.
Villago Delenda Est
@Ella in New Mexico:
Kurtz is such a hack. Was he hung over the day they covered “know who the hell you’re talking to on the phone” in Journalism 101?
Tim
I think Matako Chan is kind of awesome.
Keeps the place spicy!
and I love “cudlip,” whatever the hell it means.
The Moar You Know
If yelling at a Comcast operator is wrong, then we are all truly guilty.
Surly Duff
@Villago Delenda Est:
Don’t you know that $3 million in California is really not that much money, and that really puts him squarely in the middle class? How is he supposed to afford a house, mercedes, high-quality steaks, and top shelf liquor only only $3 million? He doesn’t even have a job. Have you no heart?
PurpleGirl
@serge: Oh yes, he was a Jr. But the whole name as I remember it was Chatsworth Osborne, Jr., III. Granted my google search didn’t turn up any reference to “the third”. hhhrrrmmmpppp.
ETA: I wonder how many others got the reference?
Svensker
@El Cid:
FTW
Three-nineteen
Maybe he was just using the Chinese mom technique on the Congressman.
New Yorker
John, your “watering the tree of liberty” comment made me think of something: so much of what passes for argument from the right comes from parroting slogans from people they admire (and think we should too). Hey, Thomas Jefferson said we need a revolution now and then, and Jefferson was a great man, and thus we must need a revolution now and then.
You know, I admire Jefferson a great deal, but I still think we need to judge each action and statement of each person we admire and be willing to say, “no, that’s wrong”. Maybe, just maybe, Jefferson was wrong when he said the above? Maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t take it at face value in the 21st century?
Nellcote
There should be a database of people that make death threats against officials similar to the one for sex crimes. Neither should be allowed to own guns. Zero tolerance.
Nellcote
@The Moar You Know:
word!
Villago Delenda Est
@Surly Duff:
It was surgically removed when I accepted a commission in the Army, I’m afraid.
Nellcote
@New Yorker:
Or maybe he didn’t necessarily mean an armed revolution ie industrial revolution, the internet etc.
tworivers
“My money”? Sounds like it’s daddy and mommy’s money, and he’s just sucking on the teat of privilege.
Another asshole who was born on 3rd base and thinks he got a triple.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Nellcote:
I wonder why our Tree-of-Liberty quoting types today show so little appreciation for the actual revolution in France that Jefferson himself admired and supported. I guess it all depends on whose head is in the basket, huh?
Ryan Colpaart
As much as people want to draw a direct connection to this political assassination attempt and the heated rhetoric that we’ve grown so accustom to in this country, in the final analysis it may have had a small affect but the signs point to Loughner being a very sick individual:
Jared Loughner : Why Did He Do It?
joe from Lowell
I was in an argument about “both sides do it” on another blog, and the other guy linked to a story about a Republican candidate who was pelted with tomatoes.
Honest to God. He wanted to link to a bunch of stories about people who’d committed violence against Republicans, and his searches came up with:
1. Somebody who tried to run over Katherine Harris seven years ago – an actual, legitimate story about a violent attack on a Republican politician. From seven years ago.
2. Somebody who went on a cross-town shooting spree of people he knew or say everday, which included somebody who carried gory abortion pictures in front of a middle school.
2. Someone who slashed someone’s tires.
3. A group of people who beat somebody up in New Orleans.
4. A Republican candidate who had tomatoes thrown at him.
In other words, a lower total body count over the past seven years than Democrats have had over the past seven days, all of which were killed by someone who was carrying our personal grudges.
joe from Lowell
@Ryan Colpaart: Very sick individuals are a damn good reason to keep violent imagery and rhetoric out of our politics.
aimai
@New Yorker:
But I also thought they’d removed Jefferson as a founding father and replaced him with Calvin? I can’t keep up. The memos keep getting lost.
aimai
SFAW
Pray tell, which people are those? Because the discussion around here – at least in the last two days or so – hasn’t been about drawing “a direct connection”. Except when the right-wingers play victim and claim that libs/lefts are trying to say that Sarah Palin told Loughner to do it, or some such idiocy.
YellowJournalism
I hope these comments are going to continue being a feature on these kinds of articles, because that one was sublime.
Mnemosyne
Fred Clark at Slacktivist is on a roll right now:
“Only a crazy person would take what we say seriously”
Don’t you know that you can count me out
buckyblue
Hamilton was actually a bad shot, and was one of our first victims of political gun violence. How ironic. Apparently Hamilton’s and Burr’s egos were too big for the new nation to endure.
Ozymandias, King of Ants
@The Moar You Know: If yelling at a Comcast operator is wrong, I don’t wanna be right.
Bill Murray
@buckyblue: so the country wasn’t big enough for the both of them
polyorchnid octopunch
@BGinCHI: It goes all the way down, just like those turtles, doesn’t it?
de stijl
I was born on 3rd base and all I got was a fingerbang. Where the hell is my $3 mil?