Pure coincidence, obviously.  Why would anybody think otherwise?  There is absolutely no connection between eliminationist talk about the real evils of the Census and the intrusive questions they ask us and any ill feelings toward people who are selling out their fellow Americans by helping the Census Department carry out Obama’s plans to end freedom in America.  To think otherwise is silly and unproductive…

BTW, when are we going to stop the plague of sex and violence on American TV and in movies?  Some people will see that stuff and be influenced to act out what they’ve seen and heard.  Do we want more Columbines?...

So, can I blow up Fox Noise HQ and get away with it if I scrawl “dumbass” on the sidewalk? 

I mean, so long as we’re ignoring obvious ties between rhetoric and actions…

The first thing that went through my head was, “Oh my god, what color was he?”  It’s obviously political either way but if this was a lynching, we are in deeper shit than I thought.

In further developments, law-enforcement officials found a man cackling 10 feet from the body who, when questioned, said “Yes, I killed him, and I’d do it again, because he was an agent of the N*&&@! Obamunist government who was involved in a plot to destroy America and enslave us all.”

David Broder was moved to write an op-ed deploring the incivility on both sides of the political spectrum.

Just to be clear - is Jesse making an explicit reference to Michelle Bachman and the census thing?

Bachmann Boasts About Breaking The Law: I’m Refusing To Fill Out The Census

How long before there are people on the Right claiming it was a Leftist who did it to try and blame the Right and discredit the proper concerns of the Right regarding the Census and what evil purposes the information will be used for…?

I remember my mother joining in taking the census in 1960 (a part-time job a “housewife” could do without being accused of “neglecting” her children.)

But she also saw it as a patriotic act.

Thanks right wing nutjob bloviators for endangering the lives of Americans, yet again.

BadKitty,

It most likely wasn’t racial.  There are only about 5% AA in Clay county according to the Census - it’s mind-bogglingly white around here (i live one county down from Clay).  I really doubt the Census is homicidal enough to have a black man going around to peoples’ houses in SE KY - there are parts of my county people tell me not to go, and I’m a white man (moonshine-making, meth-dealing, pot-growing inbreds living in out-of-the-way hollows tend to shoot first, fertilize later, and never ask questions).

And the hanged man is a part-time teacher: sigh.

So, if the nutjob right wing bloviators have had their way, they’ve killed off a public servant on two counts.

OK, now I’m scared to death. My husband is working for the Census right now and he volunteered to canvass in rural West Virginia. Same shit, different state. He faced rifles and inquiries of “What you doin’ lookin’ at my house?“on a daily basis. It turns out the LAST thing he wanted to tell them was “I work for the Federal government”. Most Census workers lasted about a week which is why they were exporting them from Ohio. Luckily, he’s managing people this time around, so he won’t be knocking on doors, but sending other people. Until they lay him off. Again.

Oh my fucking God.

It’s FUCKING 2009!  Not 1909, motherfuckers.

I don’t know what this is, but first glance at the story leads me to believe that this might be the first actual-not-hyperbole lynching in “postracial” America.

You know what?  Fuck whoever did this.  I this was a murder, I want the perpetrator to physically suffer.  I guess that makes me just like them.  I’m sick and tired of seeing people on our side suffering at the hands of rightwing brutality.  When’s the last time you heard about a rightwinger getting dragged to death by a hardcore leftist?  Yeah, I realize that’s what is supposed to make us better than them, but some days it feels like no matter what we do… they win.

We fucking control both houses of Congress and the White House, but we’re seeing that the Republican Party still controls Washington.

The Onion summed it up best:

“Democrats hoping to take control of Congress from Republican minority in 2010”

It doesn’t fucking matter.  We can have 80 fucking Democratic U.S. Senators and Fox News will still be dictating the legislative agenda.

jesus fucking christ

The first thing that went through my head was, “Oh my god, what color was he?” It’s obviously political either way but if this was a lynching, we are in deeper shit than I thought.

Whether he was black or white, if this was a murder, it was a lynching.  Obviously, if the Census worker was an African-American, it carries a whole lot more significance as the practice of lynching was almost universally perpetrated against black people (there was one Jew who was lynched at the beginning of the 20th Century), but if this was a murder, it was in fact, a lynching.  Literally.

They finally fucking did it.  I wonder if this will even make headlines long enough to officially disappear down the memory hole by the end of the week.  I wonder whether the ensuing police investigation will be used as further proof that the Obama fascist agenda is encroaching on our civil liberties?

I imagine it has to do with the Bachmann-promoted idea that ACORN and the Census are working together to create a fascist government where white conservatives (and white people in general?) are rounded up and put in concentration camps.  In their view, ACORN is like the brownshirts, and the Census is being used by Obama to gather info that will be used for the Final Solution, I guess. 

More here.

Of course, all of the tea baggers were in Washington for the big Tea Party rally that day which drew millions upon millions of people. So it couldn’t possibly have been any of them.

{raised eyebrow}

I’d be wary before jumping to conclusions on this: the Daniel Boone National Forest is a hotbed for pot growers and meth labs and archaeological looters (Harper’s—subscribers only, alas) and there’s a distrust of anyone considered connected to the federal government, including Forest Rangers and local cops.

This is the roughest part of Appalachia—48% illiteracy rate, below-poverty incomes, high morbidity rates. A common attitude is that the government has abandoned the people while spending its money on the drug war.

So I’d be more comfortable seeing it as what happens when you have a poor-as-dirt local community that’s already set up to see the federal government as the enemy, in a climate where Census workers are being cast as Obama stormtroopers.

Not good.

What’s also stunning is that the body was found on september 12th.  Two things about that:  1) when was he killed (assuming a person who is going to hang themselves doesn’t “scrawl” FED across their body first)? Any chance it was the same day because we all know what day 9/12 was yes?  2)  WHY THE FUCK haven’t we heard about this before now?  It’s Sept 23rd.

The victim seems like he was a pretty upstanding person. He got a teaching degree while going through chemo to beat back Hodges’ disease.

Note this story:

“Take this into consideration. If we look at American history, between 1942 and 1947, the data that was collected by the Census Bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations at the request of President Roosevelt, and that’s how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps ... I’m not saying that that’s what the Administration is planning to do, but I am saying that private personal information that was given to the Census Bureau in the 1940s was used against Americans to round them up, in a violation of their constitutional rights, and put the Japanese in internment camps.”

However, the pot-growers seem like a better answer.

What I’d like to see is the words “USA PATRIOT Act” invoked when talking about an investigation here; let the wingnuts realise that “domestic terrorism” also falls under the wide wide powers they just loved when teh Muslims were the target.

I’d be wary before jumping to conclusions on this: the Daniel Boone National Forest is a hotbed for pot growers and meth labs and archaeological looters (Harper’s—subscribers only, alas) and there’s a distrust of anyone considered connected to the federal government, including Forest Rangers and local cops.

This is the roughest part of Appalachia—48% illiteracy rate, below-poverty incomes, high morbidity rates. A common attitude is that the government has abandoned the people while spending its money on the drug war.

So I’d be more comfortable seeing it as what happens when you have a poor-as-dirt local community that’s already set up to see the federal government as the enemy, in a climate where Census workers are being cast as Obama stormtroopers.

Not good.

While I don’t dispute your assertions that this needs to be examined from many angles, let’s not try to sugracoat what this was.  If the man was in fact hung from a tree by a malicious perpetrator…

IT. WAS. A. LYNCHING.

And while your point shows what can happen when Republican governments allow poor rural white people to basically go off the deep end by not taking care of their most basic needs, this is the EXACT same type of environment which fostered the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan early in the 20th Century.

Yes, the true villains are the fatcat power players on Wall Street and K Street who decided that the war on poverty meant leaving them with almost nothing, but that doesn’t mean that the culture of anger and resentment which they’ve built is any less dangerous.

Truly… what the fuck is the matter with Kansas? (or in this case, Kentucky).

It’s this guy: http://www.wgu.edu/why_WGU/testimonials?page=2 (search for Sparkman).

I was not expecting him to be in his goddamn sixties.

You know, I have a pretty strong stomach. I read the news most days, click on the links, keep up even on the bad shit. This is the first time I’ve even had my stomach jump at a headline. WTF.

There’s “knowing” something like this could happen (and is getting more likely) and then there’s the reality of it. Oof.

Of course, all of the tea baggers were in Washington for the big Tea Party rally that day which drew millions upon millions of people. So it couldn’t possibly have been any of them.

This explains why they’re so hot to expand 60,000-75,000 to two million - they need to establish alibis…

BadKitty:

A lynching doesn’t have to be racially motivated. At least from where I sit, “lynching” is best described as hanging someone to intimidate the community they belong to—an act of political terrorism.

We already know that there are people agitating against the census, and no shortage of people openly advocating a violent overthrow of the government. If the story is as reported, this was a lynching, plain and simple.

What the fuck is WRONG with people in this country??!!?

What the fuck is WRONG with people in this country??!!?

The same thing that’s wrong with people in every other country: they’re stupid and uncritical.

You men from the bank?

(Pete) You Wash’s boy?

Yes, sir. Daddy told me to shoot

who’s ever from the bank.

We ain’t from the bank, young fella.

Yes, sir. I’m supposed to shoot folks

servin’ papers.

- We ain’t got no papers, neither.

- I nicked the census man.

A lynching doesn’t have to be racially motivated. At least from where I sit, “lynching” is best described as hanging someone to intimidate the community they belong to—an act of political terrorism.

Or a form of populist justice, as happened to two white men in San Jose, CA in 1933:

A telegram sent by an FBI agent to Washington D.C. on November 27, reported the events at St. James Park to the home office. It read, Hart kidnapping subjects thurmond and holmes under state custody san jose were taken by mob and lynched midnite tonite. The front page of the New York Times on November 27, 1933 read, Batter Down Jail Door, Leaders at San Jose Seize 2 Kidnappers, String Them to Trees. The Washington Post said, Here is the Story of 5,000 Persons Who Went Mad; Only an Army Could Have Stopped Double Hang. Across the nation, newspapers reported on the lynching in San Jose, calling the mob crazy, bloodthirsty and savage. Many reflected on how such a thing could happen in a quiet, civilized town like San Jose. Oaklands Post Enquirer called it Vigilante Justice for Brooke Hart Slayers while the Washington News said, Lynchings Inspire Fear of God. 

In San Jose, most people were satisfied that the kidnappers got what was coming to them, though not all agreed with the method used. St. James Park was a shambles and curiosity seekers still roamed about, looking for souvenirs from the lynching. Many people cut off pieces of the trees where Thurmond and Holmes met their end. City employees were forced to construct wooden boxes around the trees to prevent them from being cut to pieces. It was an outburst characterized by hysteria and ribaldry, said the New York Times, with a frenzied rush for souvenirs after the naked bodies of the slayers were cut down. Dozens of heavily armed police patrolled around the park while authorities surveyed the damage to the jailhouse. Sheriff William Enig and his deputy suffered concussions and were still in the hospital. The bodies of Thurmond and Holmes lay at the county morgue, ironically, alongside Brooke Hart. They remained there, together in death, until late that morning when the Hart family had Brooke removed to a funeral home.

From the Wiki:

The lynching was unique in American political and criminal justice history because it marked the first time that a lynching was a media event. It was also unique because of the political involvement of a state governor and the eager conspiracy by civic and business leaders and law enforcement (including the FBI) to lynch two men who had not been indicted, arraigned, tried, or sentenced for the crime in a court of law.

And that would be the fucking canary.

A goddamn lynching. Fuck.

David Broder was moved to write an op-ed deploring the incivility on both sides of the political spectrum.

Meanwhile, prominent Washington, DC journalist Michael Barone had some professional questions of his own for the AP reporter covering this local crime: Does it make any difference that the victim was a census taker? And why report a minor detail of this everyday homicide like the word “fed” being scrawled on the victim’s chest? Finally, how is it in any way relevant that the corpse was found hanged to death in a southern state?

“What the fuck is WRONG with people in this country??!!?”

Their fucking stupid & mean. As a former resident of the states of Tennessee & Kentucky, I would just like to say fuck those god damn hillbillies. Drop a fucking bomb on ‘em. We’re better off.

Shit.

And no, Bachman and the rest don’t get a pass even if it turns out the murderers had other reasons to dislike the federal government.

What are you folks insinuating?  FED is an old Soviet rangefinder camera.  If anything, this is clear evidence that the crime was committed by communist liberals.

Or a form of populist justice, as happened to two white men in San Jose, CA in 1933

I’d be careful about characterizing it utilizing the word “justice”.

Yes, there have been instances of townspeople deciding to act as judge, jury, and executioner in some cases, and it was considered “populist justice”, but it wasn’t just the two white men in San Jose who were hung under circumstances such as these.  Many black victims of lynching were people who had been accused of committing heinous crimes, which they may or may not have been guilty of (often not), but even if they had been guilty of the crimes they were accused of, these matters are not meant to be arbitrated by vigilante community justice leagues.  It’s why we have an institutionalized judicial system.

pseudonymous in nc: I wouldn’t say that imputing a connection between suspicion of the federal government in white Appalachia and suspicion of the federal government in the white supremacist, Appalachian-stronghold-based Republican party is jumping to conclusions. There needs to be a full investigation of what kind of death this was, homicide or suicide, and how those letters got scrawled into that man’s body. If the man was murdered by anti-government terrorists who happened to grow pot, well, how different would that be from murders committed by anti-government terrorists who happen to grow poppies?

My heart jumped at the story; my stomach is doing the jitterbug waiting to see what comes out of an investigation of this. As a black person who has thought about the threat of lynching coming back as one of the main risks of this political moment, I’m reluctant to accept the idea that the Bachmann Census Overdrive is really inspiring lynchings at this point. I hope it’s not true.

I don’t have any problem calling this a lynching regardless of the race of the victim—or the murderers, for that matter.

We already know that Mr. Sparkman was killed by a gang (stringing a man up is not a one-person job), and that he was killed for being a “Fed” (like my wife, BTW).

So, we already know he was killed by a mob in order to make a political point and intimidate his fellows.  Yes, a lynching.

Well, this is rather disturbing…

Doing a Google News search for the string “hanging + census worker” (without quotes) I come up with 160 results.

Doing a Google News search for the string “lynching + census worker” (without quotes) I come up with:

Your search - lynching + census worker - did not match any documents.

I guess maybe they want to first ascertain that this was in fact a homicide before they use such a highly charged word like “lynching”.  That said, if the man was in fact murdered, they need to call it what it was - a lynching.  Very, very few members of the MSM (notable exceptions being Maddow and Olbermann) had the intellectual honesty to characterize the murder of Dr. Tiller accurately - as an assassination.  I hope they don’t downplay yet another death caused by rightwing hatred.

What’s even more disturbing than the terms they use to characterize this is that this horrific tragedy got virtually no national media attention until nearly 2 weeks after the fact.

I realize the victim wasn’t a public figure, but for fuck’s sake… if this was a lynching as it appears to be, this is PRECISELY the type of thing that the scorned DHS domestic terrorism report was referring to.

If the man was murdered by anti-government terrorists who happened to grow pot, well, how different would that be from murders committed by anti-government terrorists who happen to grow poppies?

Well, there are parts of the US that are really not that far off the Af-Pak “tribal areas” in terms of their poverty, cultivation of prohibited substances as a cash crop, gun culture and outright resistance to government authority.

My guess as to why this story took a while to break? It scared the crap out of the authorities round those parts.

I think I’m going to be sick…

While the pot growing angle is certainly a legitimate alternative motive, I don’t see that being hostile to the government because you are doing something illegal as mutually exclusive to maintaining racist, far right eliminationist fantasies about our current administration and its employees. 

This is a both/and blog after all.

Maddow is covering this right now on MSNBC.  And wondering why this wasn’t picked up by the national press sooner.

BTW, not that it diminishes the horror of this story… but the victim was in fact a white man.  A 51-year old single father cancer survivor at that.

I feel horrible for his young son.

I really have a hard time buying that drug dealers display the bodies of the victims like this.  I think this is exactly what it looks like.

I wonder what this country is waiting for before it wakes up and demands a big political price be extracted from those who support this hatemongering rhetoric, and from those who further, refuse to denounce it?  Not the people here, but in general.  Another Oklahoma city?  Nancy Pelosi getting one in the head? 

What?  I really don’t know, but this is just making me feel ill.

There’s one way to stop this.  Turn any politician who engages in it, or refuses to stand against it, a dead fucking duck politically.  Look, any liberal who supported what is that radical environmental group, elf?  Whatever.  Or bill Ayers, or whoever the boogey man of the day is - what would happen to them?  Theyd’ be fucking dead in the water, and our MSM would ensure it.

There is a real simple answer here.

“There’s one way to stop this.  Turn any politician who engages in it, or refuses to stand against it, a dead fucking duck politically.”

Good sentiment, but the fact is The Base is generally out of control already, and the Reichwing politicians are perfectly aware of that fact. 

It’s true they are on the tiger’s back, and getting off will be a painful experience.  But in the meantime they’re going to ride that tiger for all it’s worth, regardless of the collateral damage…

“They lynched (probably mostly white) men in the wild west for stealing cattle. Those “Pace Picante Sauce” commercials play on that fact with their “Get a rope” spots. Only requirement was the act of theft. “
That was hardly ever called a “lynching”, though. Which is part of the reason that, until this thread, I thought “lynching” only referred to the racially-motivated variety of hanging…

Well if that is true Mike, and I guess it probably is, then independents need to start extracting a price for that.  And I think they would if they only knew enough of what is going on.  I can’t help blaming the media for much of this.  Them and their false equavalences.  They are so FOS.

I feel very badly for this poor man, and for his poor son.  What a terrible waste, and it didn’t have to happen.  That’s the part that really burns, that it didn’t have to happen and if modern day elected republicans had any honor whatsoever, well that would have gone a long way to ensuring it didn’t.  Honestly I’d like to throw that fucking Bachman and that insane stooge Beck right into prison over this.  I know, we can’t, it’s not American.  Whatever that means these days.

I really have a hard time buying that drug dealers display the bodies of the victims like this.  I think this is exactly what it looks like.

My thoughts, too.

Somebody over at HuffPo speculated that this could have just been some guy who unknowingly walked into the wrong meth lab, but I have to think that if the perpetrator just wanted to get rid of some innocent bystander who found his hideout, he would have simply shot the man and dumped his body somewhere obscure… not hung him from a fucking tree.  And not with the word “FED” painted on his chest.  This was an act of terrorism, designed to terrify government workers, namely low-paid census takers.

And you know what sucks the most?  This lynching will probably have the chilling effect of frightening some people away from taking these necessary jobs.  Which is the godammned textbook definition of terrorism.  These sick fucks didn’t just victimize Bill Sparkman and his family, they’ve harmed their entire community.

hanging is a public state-sanctioned punishment.

lynching is a combo vigilante-terrorist action by a mob.

Cow rustlers get hanged, because that’s a recognized mode of property protection in an area underserved by justice facilities. 

Anyone can get lynched, like those Italians in New Orleans.

BTW, there was a notorious lynching of Leo Frank in Atlanta, but other jews have indeed been lynched, as well as Chinese etc, etc.

People really underestimate the extent to which terrorism was a major player in American politics.

Those are really good points DTG, I hadn’t put this in that context yet.  That’s a lot to think about.

I have to agree with AnglScarlett.  Pot growers seeking to conceal their activity from discovery might easily kill someone who stumbled across it.  However, they most certainly would not do so in such a way as to draw all kinds of attention, especially from federal law enforcement, to themselves.  If it was simply a drug gang keeping their activity secret, the man would have just disappeared, never seen again.  He’d not have been left hanging in a tree with “Fed” carved in him as a warning to others.

Pot-growing hillbillies may be dumb, but they ain’t stupid.

(Whoops, too slow.)

Another thing, DTG; besides frightening people from taking jobs with the census, this will likely also intimidate the other poor folks in that area from cooperating with the census.

The definitive book on Southern lynching of blacks is Philip Dray’s “At the Hands of Persons Unknown:  The Lynching of Black America.”

Dray explodes a number of misconceptions in the book - two that I see at a glance on this thread are

1)  that lynching refers specifically to something that was done to black people - it refers generally to a certain form of mob violence.

and

2)  that Southern lynchings of blacks were characterized primarily by hanging - in fact during the heyday of lynching as racist terrorism lynching usually meant burning at the stake. 

I also was surprised to learn from Dray’s book that the Reconstruction-era clan did not burn crosses and that this conceit was probably adopted from the film “Birth of a Nation.”

One of the few times that I have to say that it is a pity that guantanamo is closing - this, my friends, is what terrorism looks like.

BTW, if urban populations are accurately counted, but rural hickville crackers run, hide, and threaten census workers ... well, guess who isn’t gonna be counted and will lose representation?  Yep.

This will also be the point where we see whether endless years of republican control and politicizing have rendered the FBI (not that it was ever all that) completely unable to do the job for which it was ostensibly created. Killings of federal employees because they are federal employees is also pretty much the definition of insurrection.

People really underestimate the extent to which terrorism was a major player in American politics.

Vastly underestimate.  I watched part of an episode of “American Experience” last night that was about Hernandez v Texas, a pretty important civil rights case that established that everyone is under the protection of the 14th Amendment.  In Texas during that era, lynchings of Mexican-Americans were not uncommon, to say the least.

Think back to one of the most famous terrorist killings in the United States:  James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered for investigating a church burning.  At least two of the men who murdered them are still alive today.

This isn’t ancient history, folks.  This is all well within living memory.

This AP article has “apparent homicide” as cause of death.

Lucindia Scurry-Johnson, assistant director of the Census Bureau’s southern office in Charlotte, N.C., said law enforcement officers have told the agency the matter is “an apparent homicide” but nothing else.

BTW, if urban populations are accurately counted, but rural hickville crackers run, hide, and threaten census workers ... well, guess who isn’t gonna be counted and will lose representation?  Yep.

The problem with seeing that as a good thing is that it involves stereotyping a wide swath of people.

Obviously, overt Klan-like racism is far more prevalent in the South and in extremely rural poor areas like Appalachia.  That said, we shouldn’t allow the vile acts of a few really shitty human beings be used to create a negative image of the entire populace of a given region.  The truth is, in almost any large geographic region, you are going to have a wide cross-section of humanity.  Sure, you can analyze some basic things like race, median income, and average education level and make some generalizations, but you cannot make broad-brushed assumptions about the character of an entire community because of the vile actions of some of its residents.

That’s why I can’t stand hearing provincial blue-state progressives suggesting that Texas secession would be a good thing.

The fact is, the only real generalizations we can make about the people of Appalachia is that they are mostly white, rural, and dirt poor.  But they aren’t all conservative racist hillbillies.

Case in point… the murder victim himself was presumably a resident of Appalachia.  Suggesting that we should just bomb the whole place out of existence is tacitly approving of killing a whole lot of good and decent human beings.

What I think can be taken from this is an examination of the effects of extreme poverty on race relations and political ideology, and how these people, most of whom have never even thought of lynching another human being, are in many cases themselves victims of rightwing governance that has treated them in a patronizing manner acting as if they were looking out for their interests, but in fact were robbing these people blind as well.

Ever heard of mountaintop removal?

Or any number of corporate malfeasance cases which involved raping this land, dumping toxins in the water, and leaving behind a bunch of very, very sick cancer stricken dirt poor white children in their wake?

This is the culture of “clinging to their guns and their religion”.  These people are NOT the enemy (the murderers of Mr. Sparkman excluded), but they have been made into pawns by the enemy.

Get these people some basic resources like decent schools and community access to healthcare and adequate housing and decent employment opportunities, and you’ll see West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and the rest of these forgotten areas turn from red to blue in a generation.

As much as many of them may not realize it, a lot of these dirt poor rural white people have quite a bit in common with dirt poor urban black people in terms of how much they’ve been fucked over by their own government when it’s being run by greedy corporate whore politicans whose true sentiment is “fuck the poor”.

However, they most certainly would not do so in such a way as to draw all kinds of attention, especially from federal law enforcement, to themselves.

Federal law enforcement is already all over that part of Kentucky. If you’ve thinking that census workers knocking on doors and talking to locals might be collecting information for the FBI and DEA, then you might be minded to send a message.

I read that Harper’s piece when it came out—I wish it wasn’t behind the subscription wall, but it’s worth the sub—and it really did make me think of the Pakistani badlands.

As much as many of them may not realize it, a lot of these dirt poor rural white people have quite a bit in common with dirt poor urban black people in terms of how much they’ve been fucked over by their own government when it’s being run by greedy corporate whore politicans whose true sentiment is “fuck the poor”.

Which is why Jesse Jackson went to West Virginia. And why Charles Barkley, of all people, made the same point: “They want poor people to—I call it divide and conquer. That’s all they do is divide and conquer.”

While it’s probably no consolation to anyone, killing a federal worker—any federal worker—who is doing his or her job is a federal crime.  That’s how the late Sausage King ended up on death row here in California.

DTG, you make some good points—but I’d go further and say it doesn’t matter, or it shouldn’t matter, if those changes turn WV and KY into blue states or not. What I’m concerned about is whether or not the modern Republican party and the meaning of red state necessarily need to imply “lynch law,” the much more expansive problem we’re all talking about here beyond whether or not this apparent homicide is necessarily a racialized lynching. Although on this planet, a lynching is pretty much all about white supremacy and patriarchy. I’d be happy with 50 red states where things like this were never on the verge of happening and everyone had healthcare, but sadly, the Republican party seems to have given up on the idea that being part of that would be better than the alternative.

DTG, I think you may be misreading Ms. Kate’s intent with her comment.  I interpreted it as pointing out the self-fulfilling nature of the anti-government feeling:  the locals feel that the government has lied to them, failed to help them, and taken away their livelihoods, thus leading to enough anti-government sentiment that some one (or a group) lynched a federal worker; if the area isn’t properly counted in a census, they will lose the opportunity to have representatives to look out for their interests in the government, thus ensuring that the government fails to address their needs.

I don’t think it was schadenfreude.

Given the extremely remote nature of Clay County, and all the other characteristics of this area already mentioned in the comments section above, I think we should just note that there was already PLENTY of anti-government resentment in this area.  It would not have needed any stoking by the Becks and Bachmanns of this world in order to turn violent.

Our country has little Third World pockets all over the place.  Clay County is definitely one of them.

That’s how the late Sausage King ended up on death row here in California.

Fuck, Abe Froman died?

/obvious

“The problem with seeing that as a good thing is that it involves stereotyping a wide swath of people.”

Ironic is not synonymous with good.  This is the same thing that everyone pointed out when Bachmann went off on her little tirade: refusing to cooperate with census-takers leads directly to a loss of political power and representation of those refusing to cooperate because of the way resources and representation are apportioned.

My grandmother is from that region and I had visited my great-grandfather there and spent a summer at a small college there. They’re a scary bunch out that way, but the history of being anti-feds goes back to George Washington and the Whiskey Rebellion. Yes, you’d think drug dealers would hide the body, but these are descendants of the same people who had no compunction about having gun battles with federal revenue agents over moonshine 100 years ago.

If it turns out that it was indeed a lynching because he was a Census worker, I suggest we organize a postcard writing campaign to Michelle Bachmann with four simple words: Blood on her hands.

If he stumbled across a meth lab or grow op and was murdered then it is is possible that some reasonably cunning murderer would scrawl FED on him as a way to have the cops etc looking at the Politicals rather than the Practicals.

If he stumbled across a meth lab or grow op and was murdered then it is is possible that some reasonably cunning murderer would scrawl FED on him as a way to have the cops etc looking at the Politicals rather than the Practicals.

At this point, we are speculating on insufficient information, like a car spinning its tyres on ice with no traction.  I’d suggest adopting a wait-and-see policy.

The current meth labs and pot “farms” up there are run by the descendents of the proverbial “moonshiner”.  We are really talking Hatfield/McCoy territory up there. 

If you look at what has happened in Columbia or Mexico over the past several years, or in Iraq with those contractors hung from the bridge a few years back, or in Sicily, you find criminals who very often very publicly kill perceived “authorities” to send the message to the rest of the “Revenuers”, “Feds”, “Federales”, etc. to back off.  Some parts of Appalachia are just as out of federal, or even local government control as those places.  This sort of thing has happened before in that part of the world, even with census workers.

The “real” Census hasn’t started, yet.  He must have been doing one of the other surveys the Census does in between Censuses.  Some of them are rather detailed and intrusive.  For example, the Current Population Survey runs to 99 pages, and somewhere around page 70 goes on a fishing expedition for forms of income not otherwise covered. To the wrong person this is going to sound like the census worker is asking about drug money.  Given that Al Capone famously went to Federal prison for tax evasion, not for the liquor smuggling that made him rich, I imagine that descendents of ‘shiners are going to be a bit touchy about questions about detailed income surveys.  Other surveys ask about criminal record, ownership and finance of their home or business, etc.

I don’t imagine a lot of people who read Pandagon also read militia/white power newsgroups, but there’s been a lot of chatter on those sites about how census workers are coming up to their porches and using GPS devices, and how’s it’s actually evidence that the FEMA guys are here to slap a sticker on your mailbox so they know what camp to load you into whatever. This chatter started in like May/June so it’s had plenty of time to take root and spread around to people in the broader wp network who aren’t necessarily plugged into it all with technology.

Try looking up variants of ‘census worker’ on youtube and you can eventually stumble upon some people spouting these wack-ass theories (assuming they haven’t all been taken down by now).

ftr if I were a betting man I’d put some money down that whoever killed this guy was a member of the ASWP or the Appalacian Knights of the KKK, which both have active branches in SE KY.

One doesn’t need to stereotype a wide swath of people ... one need only live amongst and tolerate and encourage the murder of people who come to count people so that people are properly represented.  Sure there are good people in these places - most are.  However, all it takes is a few idiots bent on mayhem to disenfranchise a wide swath of people.  It doesn’t help if they have broad support for their behavior from “good” law abiding people.

Reap ... sow ... etc.

RV man, census 2010 has started.  The numbers are reported in 2010, not gathered.  Much of the census 2k data I used for my dissertation work was released in 1999.

The FBI is now walking back a lot of the original reports; the victim apparently wasn’t literally hanging from a tree, and they refuse to confirm that he had “FED” written on him. They haven’t even declared it was a homicide yet.

Walking back original reports—

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/24/AR2009092404690.html

State and federal law enforcement officials on Thursday dismissed the suggestion from a news service report that the man, William Sparkman, 51, may have been targeted because he worked for the federal government, calling that speculative.

State and federal officials would not say whether Sparkman was found with the word “fed” scrawled on his chest, as the Associated Press reported Wednesday, citing a law enforcement source. They would also not discuss whether he was working on census matters before or at the time of his death.

The coroner’s confirmed that he had “fed” written on his chest; one of the witnesses who found him also says that his hands and eyes were duct-taped.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2009/09/census_worker_found_with_fed_o.html