There are a lot of theories floating around right-wing crowds about what’s behind the brutal death of Census worker Bill Sparkman who was found hanging naked from a tree with the words “Fed” scribbled on his chest. The latest comes from right-wing radio host Rodger Hedgecock who seems convinced that the country’s “open border policy” must have had something to do with Sparkman’s gruesome death. Hedgecock dismisses the possibility that Sparkman was targeted and killed by someone motivated by the anti-government rhetoric being spewed by teabaggers and right-wing politicians who have explicitly bashed the US Census, and instead claims that “illegals” at “pot plantations” may be the cause of forest fires and Sparkman’s death:

Last week, Sparkman’s death became fodder for more attacks on “right-wing violence.” Bloggers wanted to “send the body to Glenn Beck,” and a Time magazine piece speculated that Sparkman was a victim of the culture of another McCain-voting Southern state. Now it looks more like Sparkman was yet another victim of illegal drug operations on national forest land, and possibly also a victim of our still open border with Mexico.

Taking the Census in our national forests is dangerous business. Law enforcement sources say meth labs and marijuana plantations are “prevalent” in the area of Sparkman’s death. Did he stumble across a drug operation in the Daniel Boone National Forest? No one is saying for sure, but the locals believe it…the workers on these pot plantations are illegals from Mexico who live and work in primitive conditions in violation of all workplace safety laws, in a modern day version of slavery…Our open border with Mexico has been changing American society in a number of unpleasant ways. These fires, these destroyed national forest lands, and maybe even Bill Sparkman’s death, may just be the latest way.

It’s unclear what leads Hedgecock or undisclosed Clay County Kentucky “locals” to come to such conclusions about Mexican drug cartel involvement when law enforcement “cited the prevalence of drug activity in the area,” but also conceded that they had “no reason to believe there was a link to Sparkman’s death.” Some recent arrests related to meth lab activity in the Daniel Boone National Forest where Sparkman’s body was found were all of what appears to be white Kentucky-bred natives. Rather than citing Mexican drug cartels, Clay County Sheriff Kevin Johnson attributes the drug activity to “tough [economic] times” in his community. Former Clay County marijuana-grower JC Lawson had long bragged about how his enterprise brought money to his impoverished community.

It also seems unlikely that an “illegal pot plantation” worker from Mexico would commit such a visible crime and risk drawing attention to what Hedgecock describes as a lucrative enterprise. Other lo-brow right-wingers have speculated that Sparkman was a pedophile or that his death might have involved “teenagers and the horrorcore rap scene.”

Even though I have very little sympathy for their “Ahmadinejad won, get over it” theory of the Iranian presidential election, which has aged about as well as Joe Walsh, I think Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett’s op-ed raises some interesting and valid points in regard to possible outcomes of U.S.-Iran talks. But this bit is just stone nonsense:

Because President Obama assembled a national security team that, for the most part, did not share his early vision for American-Iranian rapprochement, his administration never built a strong public case for engagement. The prospect of engagement is still treated largely as a channel for “rewarding” positive Iranian actions and “punishing” problematic behavior — precisely what Mr. Obama, as a presidential candidate, criticized so eloquently about President George W. Bush’s approach.

What part of “without preconditions” do the Leveretts not understand? As a candidate, Obama promised to do this, and weathered a storm of criticism, only to see the idea find broad acceptance in the foreign policy community by the final days of the presidential campaign. The Obama administration is now preparing to sit down with the Iranians, having accepted — rightly, in my view — an Iranian counter-proposal that amounted to little more than an RSVP. All the while, Iran’s nuclear program has continued, as has its support for terrorism and incitement against Israel.

The Leveretts seem to be suggesting that the only way for the Obama administration to demonstrate good faith going into these negotiations is to avoid expressing any and all U.S. and international concerns about Iranian behavior. This is not going to happen, and, frankly, I think the Iranians are savvy enough not to expect it to happen.

As for this:

Unfortunately, the Obama administration was enticed by the prospect of regime-toppling instability in the aftermath of Iran’s presidential election this summer. But compared to past upheavals in the Islamic Republic’s 30-year history — the forced exile of a president, the assassination of another, the eight-year war with Iraq and the precipitous replacement of Ayatollah Khomeini’s first designated successor, Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, with Ayatollah Khamenei — the controversy over this year’s election was hardly a cataclysmic event.

I suppose it’s helpful in terms of balance to see someone making the reverse of Robert Kagan’s silly argument that President Obama was “siding with the Iranian regime” against the election demonstrators, but this is the first time I’ve read an analysis of the recent post-election controversy — which saw, among other things, a substantial portion of the Iranian clerical establishment break with the regime — as anything less than a pivotal moment for the Islamic Republic.

As they tend to do with every bit of news having to do with Iran, the Washington War Party is trying to spin the recent disclosure of a nuclear facility near the seminary city of Qom as a debunking of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (pdf), which stated that “we judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program,” but also assessed “with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons.”

Linking to this Weekly Standard blog post — by Thomas Joscelyn, one of the few people still claiming that torture stopped an attack on L.A.’s Library Tower — Newt Gingrich tweeted yesterday that “Iran’s hidden facility at Qom shows how wrong the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran was.”

That’s not true. As the New York Times reports this morning, “American spy agencies have stood firm in their conclusion” — first made public in the 2007 NIE — “that while Iran may ultimately want a bomb, the country halted work on weapons design in 2003 and probably has not restarted that effort.”

This isn’t to suggest that the Qom site isn’t cause for serious concern. As to the question of whether the facility demonstrates that Iran was prepared, at some point, to proceed covertly with a nuclear weapon, Iran analyst Gary Sick surmises:

If you start with the conviction, as I do, that Iran was and is determined to develop a nuclear capability that would permit it to “break out” and build a nuclear weapon if and when a decision was made by Iran’s highest authorities, probably in response to a direct military threat to Iran by another nuclear power, then the creation of this site would serve two logical purposes.

First, it would disperse Iran’s enrichment capabilities, making it much more difficult for an enemy to destroy its nuclear program with a single strike. If the facility was unknown to the enemy, it would provide an immediate fallback capability in the event the enrichment site at Natanz was destroyed or severely damaged. It was very likely a component of Iran’s post-strike Plan B and assumed that any internal opposition to a nuclear weapon would have been removed by the military attack. As such, this facility would very likely be intended to produce a nuclear weapon.

In other words, in Sick’s view — and granted this is all speculation — the Qom facility was likely intended to produce a weapon — in the event of a strike on Iran, which would both vindicate the claims of Iran’s War Party about the need for an Iranian nuclear deterrent, while removing Iranian domestic opposition to obtaining one. It’s darkly humorous, then, that the American War Party is trying to spin the existence of the Qom site as evidence that we need to strike Iran. It’s turtles all the way down with these guys.

It also worth noting one reason that the NYT article suggests U.S. intelligence agencies are being so meticulous about what the Iran data do and do not show: The Iraq debacle, in which the Bush administration and its media allies misrepresented the intelligence about Iraqi WMD, and then turned around and blamed the CIA when Iraq’s reality didn’t match the Bush administration’s apocalyptic fantasy. So, in their attempt to get America into yet another war, conservatives are being stymied by their lies about the last one. That, my friends, is poetic justice we can believe in.

Today, the Republican National Committee (RNC) released a statement from Chairman Michael Steele announcing the release of a new video in celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month. However, though the press release emphasizes the Republican Party’s “commitment to the Hispanic community,” apparently that commitment does not include hiring a qualified Spanish translator. The Spanish translation of Steele’s statement is riddled with embarrassing typos and errors. Even Yahoo’s automatic online translator, Babel Fish, produces better results. A quick revision highlights the multitude of glaring errors:

The substance of the accompanying video isn’t much better. Its main focus is on highlighting the accomplishments of conservative Latinos and completely ignores renowned Latino leaders like civil rights activists César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, and completely sidesteps the recent confirmation of Puerto Rican Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Watch it:

The video doesn’t even acknowledge one of the Republican Party’s most respected leader, former Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL) who resigned from his post as RNC chairman in 2007 in response to his party’s anti-immigrant views. Before abruptly leaving Congress this past August, Martinez admitted that his party’s “divisive rhetoric” during the 2007 immigration debate had tarnished the GOP brand amongst Latinos, stating “the Republican Party had better figure out how to talk to them [Latinos].” Ironically, while Steele indicated that the GOP would not be changing its position on immigration, he did say that the Party had to work on its messaging, which is often perceived as “insensitive.”