Last weekend, the Dutch Islamphobic politician Geert Wilders spoke to a conservative conference hosted by a Christian university in Colorado. The anti-Muslim firebrand served up his usual fare: Islam is not a religion but a “totalitarian ideology,” multiculturalism must be stopped, U.S. courts must end immigration from Muslim countries and mosque construction must be banned.

According to a report on the event in the Colorado Statesman, conservatives at the conference took Wilders’s words to heart, as well as those of fellow anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney.

Former Republican State Senate president John Andrews, who heads up an institute at the university that held the event, told the crowd, “After you hear from Frank Gaffney and our friend from across the Atlantic, Geert Wilders, you’ll know why I just say ‘the threat of Islam’” — as opposed to “radical Islam” or “extremism.”

Current Republican State Senator Kevin Grantham took on Wilders’s message that the West “should forbid the construction of new mosques.” Asked about the proposed ban, Grantham told the Statesman he was for considering it:

You know, we’d have to hear more on that, because, as he said, mosques are not churches like we would think of churches. They think of mosques more as a foothold into a society, as a foothold into a community, more in the cultural and in the nationalistic sense. Our churches — we don’t feel that way, they’re places of worship, and mosques are simply not that, and we need to take that into account when approving construction of those.

The notion that Mosques are not “places of worship” is an absurd extension of Wilders’s bigotry. Even Grantham’s fellow Republican State Senate colleague Kevin Lundberg ignored this contention and saw the fatal flaw in this logic: banning mosque construction violates the basic rights of free exercise of religion codified in the Bill of Rights. Lundberg told the Statesman:

I think immediately of ‘Congress shall make no law …’ and that sounds pretty close to that, doesn’t it?

We’re a free society, and there are risks with freedom. In my mind, we need to give every citizen the opportunity to succeed or fail on their merits, and there are limits we have to put in place for certain public safety issues, but I am much more a stronger defender of the First Amendment than I am of immediately restricting people because of a perceived concern.

Lundberg is right. The First Amendment plainly states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The rest is just bigotry and antithetical to those values.

Military contractors are eager to promote the theory that cuts in military spending — and the resulting decrease in government contracts for their businesses — will slow the economic recovery. A large part of their strategy has focused on promoting statistics showing the oversized effect of cuts in military spending on economic growth.

But statistics about the role of military spending in the U.S. economy are often used to misrepresent the importance of military contractors. Yesterday, USA Today ran an article titled, “Defense Cuts Starting To Pinch Economy.” It said:

Military defense spending fell by about $12 billion, or 3%, from October through May compared with the same period in the previous federal budget year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis, which measures defense-related spending more broadly, said last week that weaker defense spending shaved half a percentage point off first-quarter growth. Instead of growing 2.4%, the economy grew 1.9%

Instead of turning to an objective source, USA Today turned to Lockheed Martin to interpret the data. “Already, defense contractors are feeling the effects. Lockheed Martin CEO Robert Stevens said recently that his company’s workforce is 18% smaller than three years ago, and “‘the pace of our hiring has slowed considerably,’” the article says.

Indeed, war spending has gone down slightly as the U.S. completed its withdrawal from Iraq but the Pentagon’s core budget has actually gone up. Furthermore, the article fails to address the fact that had war funding not decreased, revenue would have to be raised through taxes, cutting other programs, or increasing the deficit. All three options would have negative effects on the economy.

But what goes unmentioned is that the Pentagon’s budget for contractors, like Lockheed, actually increased over those three years. Lockheed’s reduction in work force is far more easily explained by the company’s mismanagement of the Joint Strike Fighter program which has been delayed for five years and labeled “acquisition malpractice” by the Defense Department.

What military contractors fail to address is the fact that defense spending is not a jobs program. Defense spending “is a collective effort to address the facing the country, assure our national security, and secure our interests abroad,” write the Center for American Progress’ Lawrence J. Korb, Alex Rothman and Max Hoffman. “Therefore, the level of defense spending should be dictated by our national strategy and fiscal capacity, both of which point towards a drawdown.”

If job creation is the desired outcome, as outspoken proponents military spending now argue, then far better returns can be enjoyed from funding domestic priorities such as education health care and clean energy. Those sectors create at least 50 percent more jobs per dollar of public spending.

The website Drudge Report, an aggregator that sends a massive amount of web traffic to stories linked on its pages, posted a report from the 9/11 Truther website InfoWars in which two of the nation’s leading right-wing conspiracy theorists Alex Jones with Joseph Farah discuss their paranoia about being attacked by the Obama administration.

In the interview, Farah said he saw a drone over his property in Northern Virginia and suggested that the Obama administration was targeting him. Here’s a screen capture of the Drudge link, with the words “Spy Drone Buzzes Journalist’s Secluded Home…” highlighted in red:

In the interview, Farah told Jones:

I live in one of the most rural places you could possibly live in Northern Virginia and there could only be one thing that this drone was spying on and that would be me, that would be my property. [...]

This is the first term. If [Obama] is re-elected, it’s going to be war. They will be openly at war. We will be hunted down like dogs.

(Listen to clips from the whole Jones radio interview with Farah here.)

Farah also mentioned another damaging right-wing conspiracy theory that vaccine programs are a dangerous and airport security patdowns as evidence of government “attempts to control us.” He went on:

This is where the resistance starts. Because this is part of conditioning for what is really the ened game for them…

It’s everything our founding fathers fought against. And we gotta be like our founding fathers all over again. And the only question in my mind is whether we have the fearlessness, the courage and the conviction that they had to do that.

When the Romney campaign recently outlined its strategy to ignore mainstream media and work its message through right-wing websites, Drudge was at the top of the list. ThinkProgress noted at the time that Drudge has a history of promoting Birtherism and Jones’s 9/11 Truther website InfoWars.

But it’s hard to keep track of the dizzying number of conspiracy theories Alex Jones and Joseph Farah can expound upon in one ten-minute interview. What’s most remarkable is that Mitt Romney’s favorite news aggregator linked to it. (HT: Michael C. Moynihan)

Back in 2009, private security company Blackwater changed its name to “Xe” in an effort to rebrand itself after controversial work in Iraq tarnished its image. But the company had difficulty shaking the “company formerly known as Blackwater” moniker and late last year changed its name again, this time to “Academi.”

But it turns out that the re-re-brand to “Academi” is bringing about a whole new set of problems. The Virginian-Pilot reports today that a Texas-based sporting goods store Academy, Ltd is suing the company formerly known as Blackwater because it thinks “Academi” is hurting its own image:

The security company, which rechristened itself Xe in 2009 and Academi last year, is being sued for trademark infringement by Academy Ltd., a Texas-based sporting goods chain.

The lawsuit, filed last week in U.S. District Court in Houston, says the similarity of the two names will sow confusion in the public mind and cause Academy “irreparable harm” given Academi’s corporate history and “the negative media coverage stemming from its security operatives in Iraq.”

Blackwater security guards opened fire on unarmed Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007 that left 17 dead. In December, 2009, a federal judge dropped charges against five former Blackwater guards involved in the shooting — a move that drew the ire of many Iraqis — but in April of last year, a federal appeals court reopened the case against four of the contractors. Last month, the Supreme Court refused to review that ruling and rejected an appeal by the four guards who argued prosecutors made improper use of their statements to investigators in charging them with 2007 killings in Baghdad.

Earlier this year, Harper’s Magazine published YouTube videos of Blackwater contractors’ erratic behavior in Iraq. One video shows a Blackwater guard randomly and “enthusiastically” firing an AK-47 from the turret of an armored vehicle and another shows a private guard yelling obscenities at passers-by and other armored cars smashing into civilian vehicles. (HT: Politico)

As with many police states, Iranian opinion polling is notoriously unreliable. That is what made it so curious that an online survey on a state-run news website produced results at odds with official policy on the country’s disputed nuclear program.

The IRINN put up results on its homepage from an online survey on Tuesday asking what Iran should do in response to the increased pressure levied by the West against Iran. But the Iranian news agency quickly took down the results and accused the BBC — which had reported on the survey — of hacking the website to tamper with the poll’s outcome.

According to Golnaz Esfandiari at RFE/RL, the survey asked respondents:

What method do you prefer for facing the unilateral Western sanctions against Iran?
1. Giving up uranium enrichment in return of the gradual removal of sanctions
2. Retaliatory measure by closing the Strait of Hormuz
3. Resistance against the unilateral sanctions for preserving nuclear rights

As of Tuesday evening, 63 percent opted for the first option: for Iran to give up domestic enrichment. During recent nuclear talks with the West, however, Iran has held fast to a position of maintaining the full nuclear fuel cycle. (Multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions demand enrichment be suspended, but Iran says such demands violate its rights as a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty — a right some experts dispute.)

Though also not entirely reliable, a 2008 World Public opinion survey found that 90 percent of Iranians support “hav(ing) a full fuel cycle nuclear program” — which would entail enrichment — and a RAND survey last year (PDF) found that nearly 90 percent of Iranians “strongly favored” a civilian nuclear program and 98 percent viewed the program as a national right.

The IRINN survey, therefore, represents a startling shift made all the more stark because it was published on a government-run media site. An initial analysis on the IRINN, according to the BBC, cast doubt on its own survey by remarking that the results “by no means can reflect the views of all or even the majority of the revolutionary people of Iran.”

Nonetheless, the disparity between policy and the survey results may have driven the news agency to quickly remove the results and replace them with a survey about soccer. The website put up a statement that the survey was hacked by “countries outside of Iran, including England,” according to Esfandiari, adding that the BBC’s Persian service — an old foil of the Iranian government — had promoted the results, suggesting complicity in the supposedly skewed results.

The BBC released a statement calling the accusations “both ludicrous and completely false, and the BBC Persian Service stands by its reporting.”