"A Picture of Such Horror as Should Be Unrealized Anywhere in the Civilized World"

This week, a federal judge in Southern Mississippi gave new life to the words, "Let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream."

Judge Carleton Reeves — only the second African-American to serve on the federal bench in Mississippi's history — entered a blistering order giving final approval to a consent decree that bans the horrendous practice of subjecting kids convicted as adults to solitary confinement and requires the state to move such kids out of the brutally violent privately run prison where they are currently housed.

The consent decree settles a lawsuit brought by the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center on behalf of 1,200 Mississippi youth, ages 13 to 22, confined to the Walnut Grove Correctional Center. That prison is operated by the GEO Group, the second-largest private prison operator in the world. The lawsuit detailed monstrous abuses by GEO staff — including peddling drugs to the teenagers in their custody and subjecting them to brutal beatings, sexual exploitation and solitary confinement.

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Rightwing Hate Groups in US on the Rise: Report

Fueled by superheated fears generated by economic dislocation, a proliferation of demonizing conspiracy theories, and the reality of an African-American president in Barack Obama, radical hates groups and antigovernment groups grew explosively in 2011, according to a new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center. This year's report, The Year in Hate and Extremism (pdf), follows past work where the SPLC catalogs the number of 'hate groups' and other radical rightwing movements in the US and gauges their motivations and the size of their membership.

"The SPLC counted 1,018 hate groups operating the United States last year, up from 1,002 in 2010. That was the latest in a string of annual increases going all the way back to 2000, when there were 602 hate groups," reads the report. Exploiting the issue of "non-white immigration" by such groups was cited as the driving force behind such growth.

The most stunning growth among all groups came among the rightwing anti-government "Patriot" groups, which the report classifies as those groups which perceive the "federal government as their primary enemy." The "Patriot" groups grew from 149 groups in 2008, skyrocketed to 512 in 2009, jumped to 824 in 2010, and last year continued to surge to 1,274. That's a 755% growth spurt in just three years.

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The Impending Perfect Wingnut Hate Storm

by Vyan

We've all seen the warning signs and heard the angry cries from Wingnuttia - but it's time to stop laughing and recognize a very real threat that faces this nation.

The Southern Poverty Law Center headed by Morris Dees is the countries premier anti-hate resource, and in it's current yearly "Intelligence Report" on the activities of various domestic Hate Groups, there are more than a few familiar faces.

This week a report detailing at least 60 Post-9/11 plots of violence by Militant Right-Wing Militia and Birther groups was spiked in Missouri under the argument that sharing the information with Officers in the field would have been Political Profiling!

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Add in a bit of economic collapse and you have a toxic mix. Tom