The NYTimes reports on “A Mystery With No Good Solution“:
… Nearly a month after a cleanup crew found the live bomb along the planned route of a large downtown march honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the F.B.I. is investigating the incident as an act of domestic terrorism. And Spokane has cycled from shock to relief to reassessment: have the white supremacists who once struck such fear here in the inland Northwest returned at a new level of dangerousness and sophistication?
“We don’t have that kind of intelligence level to make that kind of explosive,” said Shaun Winkler, a Pennsylvania native who recently returned to the region to start a landscaping company and a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan…
That hadda sting, whether or not it’s the truth. Much more information at the link, including what seems to me like a potential reason for planting a bomb at that particular time:
… “We have had issues in Spokane, but primarily they have been in northern Idaho,” Ms. Feist said. “We kind of get painted with the same brush.”
__
The two areas largely function as a connected region, and they are demographically similar. Spokane County is about 91 percent white and less than 2 percent black. Kootenai County, just across the state line in Idaho, is 95 percent white and less than 1 percent black.
__
A week before the bomb was found, the Spokane City Council approved a contract to build a new road that will be the city’s first street named for Dr. King. Previous efforts to rename existing streets were rejected. The application for the street name was submitted by Ivan Bush, the former director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Family Outreach Center in Spokane and one of the organizers of the Jan. 17 march.
S.W. Anderson
“Mr. Winkler, the Klansman, said he still believed that the region was a good place to nurture a racist movement. And as for the bomb in Spokane, he added, ‘Even though we wouldn’t have participated in that, it certainly wouldn’t have hurt my feelings if it did go off.’”
Winkler is perhaps the latest in a long line of people who had the same idea about the region. I take as an index of his knowledge and good sense the fact so many of them are in prison, dead or scattered to who cares where.
Calouste
Somewhat OT, but this shit is going to hit the fan in even larger quantities when this prediction comes true:
And why is China growing so fast?
Do you see any chance the US is going to stay up when half the political class is made up of complete retards for whom infrastructure is a dirty word?
The good news for African-Americans of course is that they might no longer be the prime target of White supremacists in a decade or two.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
Special offer for non-Caucasian customers! Let him do your yard and he’ll throw in a lawn decoration of great historical significance at no extra charge!
Offer also available to non-Christians and non-heterosexuals! Call today or we’ll throw a brick through your window and run away real fast!
Loneoak
If your alibi isn’t “No way would I blow up a bunch of children in a parade,” but instead “I’m too dumb to blow up a bunch of children in a parade,” then you should probably be in jail anyway.
Linda Featheringill
from the cited article:
I was thinking the same thing. If this person is not a joiner, it won’t do any good to investigate the groups.
Gozer
@Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen:
As a current resident of PA…good fuckin’ riddance.
AT
Lets focus on the real issue’s at hand please, a black panther stood harmlessly outside a polling booth!!!!
General Stuck
@Linda Featheringill:
These jackasses are not a monolithic group. There are plenty of them perfectly willing to blow up people, if they feel generally threatened enough, and with enough brain cells to build such a sophisticated device. These are obsessive types anyways, and about all they think about is whatever it is that they hate and how killing it might make them feel better.
And they are not all stupid mechanically nor uneducated, and this one sounded like he might have gotten lessons in the US military. If Obama wins reelection, his second term will be a time, I suspect, when we see more of this sort of thing. This past election may have given us a reprieve from those agonizing to justify taking such deadly actions. Although, obviously it didn’t in this one case. We shall see.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
Perhaps a stealth liberal even!
Seriously, how the fuck does he know?
danimal
Extra credit: Find a way to blame liberals for this attempt at domestic terrorism.
KG
@Calouste: I am less and less worried about the “China issue” because while they are second or third in nominal GDP (depending on whether you count the EU), they are 95th in per capita GDP. The real reason they are growing as fast as they are is because they have a population of over a billion people. For comparison’s sake, the US per capita GDP is $47,000, while China is at $4,000. At some point, they are going to max out their manufacturing capacity, and then what? If their per capita GDP doesn’t improve significantly?
scav
@Linda Featheringill:
And if the person is a joiner, it will do good to investigate the groups.
Yutsano
@danimal: I heard tell of several rumblings of liberal plant already. It’s so much a reflex for them now anyway.
GregB
If President Obama would stop shoving his blackness down our throats…….
Do I get the extra credit?
Wile E. Quixote
@danimal:
Easy. See, the fact that liberals are bringing up the issue of domestic terrorism after the Spokane bomb was found shows that they’re just as bad as the people who are actually planting the bombs.
cleek
OT : AV Club on Glenn Beck
Linda Featheringill
@General Stuck:
My daughter said something similar to me a few weeks ago. I hope that you and she are both wrong, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Viva BrisVegas
@scav:
Even if he isn’t a joiner he is almost certain to be a hanger on of someone who is.
Gustopher
@Linda Featheringill:
I dunno. I think investigating radical racist groups might be a good thing, even if it doesn’t help this particular case.
General Stuck
I wonder if any of you have ventured into the on line militia world? Not long before the Obama election, I was feeling froggy and able, I thought, to withstand the ugliness I knew I would find there. So one day, or night, I tracked one down on the tubes, and started following links from blogrolls.
After I was done, I thought to myself, never again would I do this, and had fitful sleep for several nights afterwards. There are more than a few of these folks out there, and they seem to have an underground grapevine created like a alternate universe that is hard to imagine in this country.
Many were just talk, others, put the fear of gawd in me reading their violence implied, white supremacy diatribes. And the worst ones seemed to me to be the most literate and lucid.
The internets. Full of promise for good, and evil.
danimal
You all get gold stars on your progress report. I guess I’m either too tired or not cynical enough to figure out ways to blame liberals 24/7. Conservatives are more creative than I credit them.
soonergrunt
So Mr. Winkler and his buddies don’t have the kind of intelligence level to google the phrase “nail bomb design”?
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
@soonergrunt: They’re too busy buying toys for orphans.
Or searching for sheep pr0n. I forget which.
The Republic of Stupidity
@General Stuck:
There are an estimated 270,000,000 guns in civilian hands in this country…
Yes… you read that right 270MM…
And ain’t nearly enough of them in the hands of those on our side…
Just sayin’…
soonergrunt
@Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen: grin. Where would you like your internets delivered?
Jim C
“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” – Verbal Kint, The Usual Suspects
Hopefully, local journalists aren’t so trusting.
scav
@Viva BrisVegas: yup, ifs all round, so it would be stupid not to investigate the groups. Logic along the lines of “I know I’ve lost my car keys so I won’t look in the obvious places because if they were in one of the obvious places they wouldn’t be lost.”
And it is rather amusing to watch someone cling to the “We’re too dumb to manage that” line of defense.
Lincolnshire Poacher
There was someone on a forum in my neck of the woods against naming streets for MLK and any other civil rights leaders as in his words those streets inevitably become havens of crime, desperation, and race wars, the opposite of what they envisioned. “I have a dream …” But did he mean dreams of urban decay and corrupt politicians stealing money from agencies devoted to the poor to pay off gambling debts, the poster argued?
In case you are wondering the town in my story has a MLK Development League that has no direction and whose leaders, all black, took money that was supposed to go to housing the poor and disabled and ran off with it. The office sits sandwiched between a boarded up building and a cheap fly by night on-line institute of technology.
soonergrunt
@Lincolnshire Poacher: And what the hell, pray, does this have to do with nail-bombers attacking the Spokane MLK parade other than to try to excuse them?
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
Let the apologetics begin!
dmsilev
@cleek:
Rosie O’Donnell? Really?
dms
Yutsano
@dmsilev: Lesbyterians will rule the universe dude. You just watch, it’s gonna happen.
RareSanity
@Calouste:
Sweet, naive Calouste…
African Americans are always the prime target of American White supremacists, been that way for centuries. You can add as many other groups as you like, Jews, Chinese, Muslims, the French, Mexicans…it doesn’t matter, African Americans will always be their undisputed, heavyweight champion of hate.
This is so because African Americans are the only group that they were allowed to denigrate, discriminate, enslave and kill, over centuries, legally. One (or more) of those options, is what pops into most teabaggers minds, when they talk of, “taking their country back” or “returning to a more simple time”.
Wile E. Quixote
@Lincolnshire Poacher:
What Lincolnshire Poacher didn’t mention is that the black guys who stole this money were Herman Cain, Michael Steele, Alan Keyes and Clarence Thomas.
Seriously though in case you’re wondering the town in Linconshire Poacher’s story doesn’t exist, because it’s just a a story, he made all of this up to attempt to justify the attempted bombing of the MLK day parade in Spokane. What a fucking piece of useless, lying, conservative racist garbage.
Steeplejack
@Lincolnshire Poacher:
Thank you for your unsourced anecdata, you racist fuckhead.
Loneoak
@RareSanity:
My dear friend Chief They Took My Land and Made My Food Go Extinct begs to differ.
RareSanity
@Loneoak:
I was going to respond, about my opinion, of the difference between the two. However, both groups have suffered so much in this country, it just seems tacky.
Yutsano
@RareSanity: Yeah. Comparing genocides is usually a path to madness. We did some damn awful things getting to the top of the heap.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
@Wile E. Quixote:
Don’t cut the cheese, man.
Nerull
@Loneoak: Not to mention “…but I wouldn’t mind seeing a bunch of children blown up in a parade.”
The Other Chuck
@Lincolnshire Poacher:
MLK Boulevard in Berkeley is quite nice.
Maybe cities should stop naming streets in already shitty areas after MLK.
RareSanity
@Yutsano:
As a matter of fact, my mood changed to absolute sorrow, just thinking about it.
These are the times when we need a good – PC vs. Mac vs. Linux, iPhone vs. Android – geek, cage match to lighten the mood…
Loneoak
@RareSanity:
It is nonetheless interesting that Native Americans rarely receive anything like the same vitriol that African Americans do. Is it just demographic? I would say proximity, because the Southern wingnuts probably don’t meet many NA’s, but there’s a far better chance that someone in Idaho knows NA’s than AA’s. Some reading I’ve done on the topic suggested that there’s a history of begrudging respect given to NA’s, particularly because the westward-bound settlers say them as a caricatured role model even as they were slaughtered. There’s also some very interesting history of solidarity between NA’s and AA’s in the deep South, especially in the swamps where slaves would escape to.
Jeanne ringland
@Nerull: That was truly disturbing.
Jeanne ringland
@The Other Chuck: Ding ding ding!
King County, WA is quite nice.
RareSanity
@Loneoak:
I think that the venom toward African Americans is more personal to bigots. There was the Civil War, Black suffrage, the Civil Rights legislation, forced busing and Equal Opportunity laws.
The bigots have, over time, been forced to deal with that which they hate, African Americans. They have to see and share space with African Americans everyday. Even though, from their perspective, African Americans are not worthy of enjoying the same experience in America as they are.
They resent this fact, it festers, and is passed one generation to the next.
Villago Delenda Est
@Loneoak:
The vast majority of them were deported out of the South in the middle of the first half of the 19th century.
Off to Oklahoma, the lot of them.
Jeanne ringland
@Loneoak: The crazies all think they’re part NA, even though they also think they’re white through and through.
I’ve had discussions with some in my own family and with us Cherokee seems to be the preferred variety, even though I can not find a single solitary incidence of a NA in the family.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Jeanne ringland:
It’s almost always Cherokee.
Yutsano
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): The Cherokee made a concerted effort to adopt white ways when they foresaw the inevitable encroachment on their lands. They hoped that the European settlers would accept them as another people just like them. It kind of worked until gold was found on Cherokee land in Georgia. Thus became the Trail of Tears. But part of that assimilation attempt was encouraging white/Native marriages. So a lot of families got Cherokee blood that way.
Spoken from the great-great grandson of an Ogala Sioux chief’s daughter.
Jeanne ringland
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): I have noticed that and not just among my family.
If we have any NA it should have been either Lenny-Lenape or Otoe, but there isn’t any at all, not anywhere.
One elderly, distant cousin told me his great great grandpa was, based on the man being listed as part of the group that escorted the Cherokees on the Trail of Tears. I gently explained that that meant his great-great Grandpa was almost certainly not a Cherokee and was more likely in the army, at which point he stopped speaking to me.
The Republic of Stupidity
@Villago Delenda Est:
And you are, of course, referring to this…
Trail of Tears, indeed…
I grew up in Upstate NY, right smack dab in the middle of what had once been the Iroquois Nation’s turf… and I recall finding an arrowhead on the playground when I was in mebbe 2nd grade… ever so exciting, and when I took it home that night to show it off to the family, I asked my father whatever happened to the Indians in these here parts…
I can still remember that look of… embarrassment… that flickered across Dad’s face… he paused and then told me that yes, there had been Indians in the area years before but… they had gladly given up the land and moved on so Americans could live there…
Or something to that effect…
It wasn’t until years later that I learned there were still remnants of the Senecas and other Iroquois tribes still in the area, on small, very well hidden reservations…
Nick
@The Republic of Stupidity:
Well, I own 3 of them
Lincolnshire Poacher
@Wile E. Quixote:
http://comics.feedtacoma.com/tacomic/tacomic-martin-luther-king-housing-development-authority-asks/
Here you go Vile Coyote. Eat your own shit I know you will enjoy. Maybe you can share it with Steeplejack. I am sure you can think happy thoughts while spooning each other.
Oh and racism is not exclusive to Spokane soonergunt. So maybe you work out a threesome with those other two.
gwangung
@Lincolnshire Poacher: Think carefully, o ye of small intellect. What is the point of your singular point of data? And what’s the relationship to this topic?
Nerull
His point, apparently, is that children deserve to be murdered because some comic author doesn’t like black people.
asiangrrlMN
@Loneoak: I think it’s also partially because Native Americans have been pretty much decimated in large numbers and are not really heard from all that often. Whereas blacks are seen by some to have risen above their place, so to speak. Getting uppity and all.
@Nerull: Yeah, that was kinda what I saw as the point as well.
Wile E. Quixote
@Lincolnshire Poacher:
Nice link to a racist cartoon drawn by a racist shithead, I wonder which one of the racist shitheads making the comments on that site you are. Or perhaps you’re the racist shithead who runs the site. Of course there’s something you left out, the politicians who got this group their money and who shot down all of the attempts at any oversight, Brian Ebersole and Frank Chopp, are both white. But hey, I guess that in your tiny little mind the actions of Felix Flannigan justifies the MLK bomb attempt in Spokane. You’re still a worthless racist cocksucker, fuck you.
Nope, there’s still a lot of it down in Tacoma, which is a real shithole of a town. Of course this begs the question of why is Tacoma such a fucking shithole? Well, it’s because until the 1990s the local paper mill was dumping tons of sulfur dioxide into the air, which caused what was called “the Tacoma Aroma”. What this meant was that the whole city smelled like the nastiest shit you can imagine, the odor would hit you as soon as you hit the Narrows bridge coming in from Kitsap County, Fife coming in from I-5 southbound or Lakewood coming in from I-5 northbound. Seriously, the place fucking stank, on a hot day it would make your eyes and throat burn. Oh, and there’s also the fact that a whole bunch of Tacoma is nasty and toxic thanks to decades of emissions from the Asarco smelter at Commencement bay, so much so that if you live in North Tacoma anywhere close to Ruston you’re advised not to eat anything grown in the soil in your yard.
So Tacoma’s kind of fucked up. It’s toxic as Hell and you had, until the EPA booted Simpson Kraft in the ass and got those bastards to install pollution controls on the pulp mill, a city that smelled so bad that at times it would make your eyes water and your throat burn when you drove through it. Now, here’s a question for Lincolnshire: what race were the politicians and businessmen who made and profited from the bad decisions that turned Tacoma into a shithole while Seattle, Bellevue and Everett prospered. Well they were white. But hey, that doesn’t matter to Lincolnshire, he probably is one of the white trash racists who lives down in Tacoma and can’t get a job due to the heavy-metal induced brain damage he suffered as a child from eating contaminated dirt, which is why he thinks that Felix Flannigan’s incompetence justifies trying to kill a bunch of people in an MLK day parade.
Oh, and here’s another question for Lincolnshire. In 1986 the King County Council renamed King County. Originally King County was named after a guy named William Rufus King, a homosexual slave owner, in 1986 the King County Council decided to rename it after Martin Luther King. Please show how King County, which is home to Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing and most of the high-tech employment in the state has suffered from this decision? You know, maybe the problem in Tacoma isn’t that they named a street after MLK but that the city is being held back by white racist dumbfucks like Lincolnshire Poacher. Maybe if all the white, racist dumbfucks killed themselves Tacoma would be a better place to live. Come on Lincolnshire, make Tacoma a better place to live and imitate former Tacoma police chief (also white) David Brame, but do it in a private place, and don’t shoot anyone else.
kdaug
@General Stuck:
See McVeigh, Timmothy
Calouste
@RareSanity:
Sarcasm, meet RareSanity. RareSanity, meet Sarcasm. I’m sure you would like to get to know each other.
Sm*t Cl*de
If this person is not a joiner, it won’t do any good to investigate the groups.
And if the person is a joiner, it will do good to investigate the groups.
You people seem to really have it in for cabinetmakers.
RSA
Fixed.
soonergrunt
@kdaug:
McVeigh did not learn how to do that in the Army. I don’t know where he learned it, but there’s no course nor field manual of which I am aware that teaches that, and I have had a TS clearance for almost 20 years. Some even more interesting.
He had OSUT-Infantry School, Primary Leadership Development Course, and the first part of Special Forces Assessment and Selection.
The first one teaches how to be a Soldier and very basically, how to run around on the battlefield with a rifle under close supervision. The second course teaches how to be that close supervisor. The third one doesn’t actually teach anything. It’s an endurance test to see if the candidate has what it takes to join the Special Forces. He voluntarily withdrew from that course in the second week.
He learned the discipline and operational mindset that allowed him to see his plan through, certainly. But if he had applied those skills to a small business, we would be cheering his resourcefulness and hard work.
adolphus
A little late to this thread, but what is the latest news, if any, related to those bombs sent to MD and DC government offices last month? The shooting in AZ wiped them off the map, but if this is a “where are they now” thread on recent bombings I’d love to know and haven’t found any updates in awhile.
Svensker
@adolphus:
There hasn’t been any news about it because the perps weren’t Muslim. Non-muslim white folks can’t be terrorists (my brother told me this, so it must be true), so therefore this shit either didn’t happen or was just a local law enforcement issue.
Paul in KY
@soonergrunt: I think I saw somewhere that he said he got into improvised explosives when he was in Iraq.
That’s what a murdering, POS, who would lie at the drop of a hat recounted.