David Wynn Miller

SPLC blames Ayn Rand, David Icke and Others for Arizona Shooting
Who is to blame for Jared Loughner’s bizarre shooting yesterday? According to Mark Potok, anyone with even the vaguest links to his bizarre and disjointed online ramblings. As a shocked world looks to the background of accused shooter Jared Lee Loughner for clues as to why he would shoot a Congresswoman, a Federal Judge and others, Mark Potok, spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, predictably stepped forward on Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC program to paint a broad brush against th...

ADL's Jared Loughner Report: Mental Illness, Not Ideology Likely Led To Tragedy
Mental Illness, rather than Tea Baggery's likely to blame for Loughner's rampage, says the ADL Since Saturday's massacre in Tucson, both the left and the right have parsed alleged killer Jared Lee Loughner's YouTube videos, the statements of his supposed school chums, his favorite books (everything from To Kill a Mockingbird to Mein Kampf), and any other scraps of info out there on the guy. The left has surmised he's your classic anti-government, Wingnut Teabagger. The right's labeled him an a...

There Is Yet No Loughner / Far-Right Connection
It is worth stating again that there is at present no — zero — evidence that purported Tucson shooter Jared Loughner was affiliated with any Tea Party group or other mainstream conservative cause. But nor is there any reason to think that Loughner was aligned with even far-right or radical political causes.  Some people who study right-wing Militia groups and those who align themselves with the so-called Patriot movement said Mr. Loughner’s comments on subjects like the Am...

Exploring the Mind and Behavior of Jared Loughner
Jared Loughner is not cooperating with police, remaining silent since being taken into Custody. So we only have his past patterns to use to try and understand his character and his motivations for arriving at the Tuscon Safeway with a loaded gun on Saturday. It looks increasingly clear that Loughner was a normal teen who gradually lost touch with reality, probably due to Mental Illness. He was anti-government but not in a coherent way. And it appears he held a grudge against Gaby Giffords. Ti...

Loughner's Grammar
Carrie Budoff-Brown tracked down the origins of Jared Loughner's strange ideas: Jared Lee Loughner’s rants about grammar and mind control track closely to the writings of a Conspiracy theorist who believes that is how the government controls the populace, one leading group says – and the man tells Politico he agrees with some of Loughner’s statements. The far-right Activist,...

Who is Jared Loughner?
An interesting analysis of Jared Loughner by Mark Potok of Southern Poverty Law Center. At one point, Loughner refers disparagingly to “currency that’s not backed by gold or silver.” The idea that silver and gold are the only “constitutional” money is widespread in the antigovernment “Patriot” movement that produced so much violence in the 1990s. It’s linked to the core Patriot theory that the Federal Reserve is actually a private corporation run f...

Gunman's Grammar Conspiracy Connection
(CANVAS STAFF REPORTS) - A nation is trying to understand the shooting rampage in Tucson, Ariz. that left 14 wounded, including a congresswoman in critical condition, and six others dead, including a Federal Judge, a congressional aide and a 9-year-old girl. As investigators look into the life of alleged gunman Jared Lee Loughner they are noticing his strange obsession with grammar and its ties to a Milwaukee man's Conspiracy Theory website. In early coverage of Saturday's shooting of Rep. Gabri...

Arizona Sheriff Dubnik Was Aware of Loughners Mental Illness, Did Nothing
From Reuters: The suspect in Saturday’s shooting rampage in which a U.S. congresswoman was critically wounded was unstable and had been known to make Death Threats in the past, the local sheriff said. The FBI is investigating whether the man is the same person who posted a rambling Internet manifesto accusing the government of mind control and demanding a new currency. Jared Lee Loughner, 22, of Tucson, was taken into Custody moments after the shooting at a political meeting held by Dem...

Arizona Sheriff Dupnik Was Aware of Loughners Mental Illness, Did Nothing
From Reuters: The suspect in Saturday’s shooting rampage in which a U.S. congresswoman was critically wounded was unstable and had been known to make Death Threats in the past, the local sheriff said. The FBI is investigating whether the man is the same person who posted a rambling Internet manifesto accusing the government of mind control and demanding a new currency. Jared Lee Loughner, 22, of Tucson, was taken into Custody moments after the shooting at a political meeting held by Dem...

A Disturbing Motif: Online Manifesto, Mass Shooting
  As the authorities sort out motives from emotions in the Arizona shooting rampage, one aspect of the multiple-tragedies event is clear: Jared Loughner, the alleged gunman, had an active Internet presence. Like many people nowadays, Loughner, 22, has lived a public life. He reportedly had a MySpace page — which has been removed since the Jan. 8 shootings — and a YouTube Channel, under the user name Classitup10. Anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can see remnants of...

David Wynn Miller?
A possible influence on the bizarre theories of Jared Loughner? ...

Of the right?
The Southern Poverty Law Center's Mark Potok has followed the Far Right, in detail, as long as anyone, and he was the first to tie Jared Loughner to an obscure, bizarre theorist of mind-control through grammar, David Wynn-Miller, who styles himself the King of Hawaii. (Miller supported that view in an interview with my colleague Carrie-Budoff Brown.) “The idea weirdly enough of controlling grammar, of somehow the government using grammar to control the people is an idea that exists on th...

Inscrutable Writing
Inscrutable Writing by digby This article in Politico is intriguing, although it's hard to know if it has any bearing on what happened yesterday: Jared Lee Loughner’s rants about grammar and mind control track closely to the writings of a Conspiracy theorist who believes that is how the government controls the populace, one leading group says - and the man tells POLITICO he agrees with some of Loughner’s statements. The far-right Activist, David Wynn Miller, said in a telephone intervie

Franklin delivers new novel _ with a little help
When author Tom Franklin submitted the first 80 pages of his new novel, "Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter," to his literary agent, he got an alarming response. Nat Sobel would fly down. Immediately. "That was definitely one of those moments like you see on TV when an alcoholic is confronted by all his friends — the intervention," said poet Beth Ann Fennelly, Franklin's wife. Sobel's visit sent a clear message: The book was a mess and needed work. Franklin had already wrestled with it for a f...

An Energy Epiphany: Staying Home Is Cheap
Erich Schlegel for The New York Times A smart meter. There is a new thrill in my life. Every week Reliant Energy now sends me a weekly e-mail summary of my home electricity bill. No kidding, for someone interested in energy use and conservation, the Smart Meter reading is interesting. I just got my e-mail and I learned that between Jan. 2 and Jan. 8, my wife, 5-year-old daughter and I spent $23.12 on our home electricity. That is $9.68 more than we spent the week before, when we were mostly away...

Vivian Diller, Ph.D.: The Challenge of Aging in a Narcissistic World
Aging has never been a walk in the park, but doing so in today's world is a challenge few us were prepared for. Which reminds me of two recent news items that have created quite a flurry. Upon first reading them, they seemed unrelated, but I now believe there is a connection that explains the attention they're getting. The New York Times article, "A Fate That Narcissists Will Hate: Being Ignored," described the pending removal of narcissistic personality disorder (N.P.D) from the fifth edition...

Ready to See New York
John Orris/The New York Times Josephine the baboon, on arrival in Brooklyn in July 1957. Like all dutiful new arrivals on these shores, Josephine the baboon was equipped to record her visit in July 1957. She was on her way from Mombasa, Kenya, to the St. Louis Zoo, via the Bush Terminal in Brooklyn, where the freighter Lombok landed with bustards, dik-diks, elephants, giraffes, hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, secretary birds, tortoises and zebras. The full tale — and 17 pictures from the ar...

Verizon vs AT&T; iPhone Smackdown
The iPhone will finally sever its exclusive relationship with AT&T today when it debuts on Verizon. These two telco giants share the same mother, Ma Bell that is, but apparently Broadband runs thicker than blood. Jenna Wortham breaks it down for The New York Times: “I’m not sure iPhone users are ready for life in the slow lane,” Mark Siegel, an AT&T spokesman, said in a company statement. Say what! “AT&T is known for a lot of things, but network quality is ...

MRC's Double Standard on Moral Equivalency
MRC's Double Standard on Moral Equivalency Topic: Media Research Center In a Jan. 7 TimesWatch item, Clay Waters asserted that a New York Times reporter "betrayed a moral equivalence" in a story on on the bombing of a Christian church in Egypt by poetraying "the majority Muslims and the country’s often persecuted minority of Coptic Christians posed as equally to blame" for sectarian violence. The MRC's crack bias-hunters, meanwhile, just can't seem to find the ...

Loughner's ties to conspiracy theory
Jared Lee Loughner’s rants about grammar and mind control track closely to the writings of a Conspiracy theorist who believes that is how the government controls the populace, one leading group says – and the man tells Politico he agrees with some of Loughner’s statements. The far-right Activist, David Wynn Miller, said in a telephone interview that he didn’t know Loughner, but agreed with his statement in a YouTube video that “the government is implying mind cont...

Politicos Ben Smith gives credence to baseless SPLC comments on Tea Party connection in Arizona shooting
Matthew Boyle is a contributing reporter at The Daily Caller. In a column published late Sunday night, Politico’s Ben Smith quoted a Political Activist at the Southern Poverty Law Center as a source to link the weekend shooting in Arizona to mainstream Conservatism. SPLC’s Mark Potok told Smith that the connection is through Far Right-wing Activist David Wynn Miller. Miller is a former Milwaukee welder who has declared himself the “King of Hawaii.” He’s associated w...

GOP introduces bill to make English Minnesotas official language
Rep. Michele Bachmann’s statement saying she wants Minnesotans “armed and dangerous” during a Radio Interview in 2009 has become a target of liberals in the wake of the tragic shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona this weekend. Rep. Keith Ellison, Bachmann’s neighbor to the south, said such statements have consequences, while New York Times columnist Paul Krugman used it as an example of the “climate of hate.” Most of the funding for the National Orga...

After Giffords shooting, Palin aide says crosshairs really surveyor marks
An aide to former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said on a conservative radio program Sunday that last year’s much-maligned ads by Palin’s PAC showing rifle crosshairs over 20 Democratic Congressional Districts - including Gabrielle Giffords’s CD8 in Arizona - were actually meant to represent surveyor’s symbols on a map. Minnesota politicians send wishes to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords Reps. Bachmann, McCollum and Walz have begun issuing statements and posting online upda...

Times Goes to Left-Wing SPLC to Suggest Shooter Had 'Far-Right' Leanings
Monday’s front-page story from Tucson, the site of the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and Murder of six others, began with concerns from suspect Jared Loughner’s college classmates about his bizarre and aggressive behavior, but the Times switched to the role of politics in his life. Times reporters treated as an objective source of facts an unlabeled left-wing group that reliably finds right-wing “hate” wherever it looks on the right. Sure enough, the Sout...

A moment of silence
The talking heads started in right away after the shooting. Once again they had no idea what they were talking about. This article will not be seen by many because it doesn’t cover Cleveland, Oh politics. The real reason is the truth. The truth is powerful and national politics affect everyone otherwise you would not pay federal Income Tax. The examiner review team obviously doesn’t understand that. The talking heads, the same people who are always asked when it comes to politics, ar...