Editor's Note: Gibbons embarrasses Nevada (a rightwing nuttjob)

Rep. Jim Gibbons is a right-wing nutjob. In recent weeks, the seemingly mild-mannered Reno congressman has revealed himself to be a bumbling kook, regularly jamming his loafered foot into his gabbling mouth.

And by the way, he's the front-runner to become Nevada's next governor.

It would be funny if it weren't truly disturbing.

Gibbons is in his fourth term representing Nevada's 2nd Congressional District, which encompasses most of Nevada outside the urban core of Las Vegas. Until recently, the Gulf War vet led a fairly quiet political existence, lounging in the back seat as more serious and experienced individuals drove Nevada's congressional efforts.

But then Gibbons, a go-along, get-along trooper for the Bush administration, was passed over for a key post: chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. This disappointment prompted Gibbons to turn his attention to running for governor, and lately he's delivered a bizarre spate of comments that have many people wondering what the hell Gibbons is thinking.

Two blunders stand out.

In January, Gibbons, speaking to NBC News, objected to protests against public financing of the inauguration, saying that "anybody who is against that obviously is a communist."

Wha? Who, in the 21st friggin' century, is going around accusing Americans of being communists? Joseph McCarthy has been dead for a good while now, and one figured his ruinous red-baiting rhetoric of the early 1950s had been buried with him. Alas, now we find that Jim Gibbons sees the world through the same warped lens: There are two kinds of people: flag-waving, God-fearing, abortion-opposing Americans and communists.

more...

http://www.lasvegasmercury.com/2005/MERC-Mar-10-Thu-2005/25995949.html

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THE JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY


By Barbara Aho


With the onset of the McCarthy era 50 years ago, any perceived threat to U.S. sovereignty from the British Round Table and its American branch shifted to an obsession with the Soviet Union. Roy Cohn, who was legal counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy during the anti-Communist Senate investigations of the 1950s, would later become a member of the John Birch Society and a principle figure in the JBS intelligence gathering operation, the Western Goals Foundation. Out of the latter emerged the core group which, in 1981, formed the present Council for National Policy -- a consortium of high level political, corporate and evangelical leaders which is the primary coordinating body and funding conduit for Christian Right projects.

Sara Diamond's book, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States, notes:"Before and after the formation of the John Birch Society, corporations played a major role in rallying the public to the anticommunist cause." 1. In 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act granted corporations the right to distribute literature to counter labor union organizing -- a movement they blamed on the communists. To reduce the cost of producing and distributing anti-Communist materials, corporations turned to non-profit organizations such as the JBS.

By 1963, corporations were spending an estimated $25 million per year on anticommunist literature... Some corporations circulated print and audio-visual materials produced by the John Birch Society; other corporations produced their own in-house literature...By the early 1960s, the Nation magazine reported that there was a minimum of 6,600 corporate-financed anticommunist broadcasts, carried by more than 1,300 radio and television stations at a total annual budget of about $20 million...Leading sponsors included Texas oil billionaire H.L. Hunt and Howard J. Pew of Sun Oil. The corporate sector's massive anticommunist propaganda campaigns created a favorable climate for the mobilization of activist groups like the John Birch Society. 2.

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<link> http://watch.pair.com/jbs-cnp.html

Their motto, "If you don't love Wal-Mart, you are a communist!"

didn't it?

I thought we were supposed to love communists.
Does Jesus love communists?
I think so.

...mongoloid hordes!

So someone's catching on. Right?

After all. That's what, "You're with us or against us" comes down to.

That's Ranger boy's war cry.

That's wrong. It was stolen there, too.

I know....the voters out there get to much sun....right?

Elko is 8 hours north from Las Vegas!! It has nothing to do with sun one way or the other. It has to do with isolation, rural communities, single industry towns dependent on natural resources ...yada, yada ....

Too bad the article didn't mention that Gibbons (along with another certifiable, Richard Pombo) is responsible for the "report" denying that mercury levels found in fish are harmful to pregnant women and developing infants.

http://www.grist.org/news/muck/2005/02/24/little-mercury/

Not only is the man off the deep end with his obsession with 'communism,' but he actually advocates poisoning people and increasing the incidence of birth defects!