Norway-- Not Flattered By Trumpanzee's Crude Comments

Norways' Prime Minister Erna Solberg with Señor Trumpanzee

Norway is a very prosperous country and a very happy one-- but the birthrate is among the lowest in the world. The half-dozen countries with the highest birthrates are all countries that Trump lumped in among the "shithole countries." I bet Trump couldn't find one of them on a map. Births per woman:

• Niger- 7.3
• Chad- 6.4
• Somalia- 6.4
• Congo- 6.3
• Angola- 6.2
• Mali- 6.0

And here are some other countries' birthrates-- a couple dozen countries that have been in the news for one reason or another, randomly

• Nigeria- 5.5
• Afghanistan- 5.3
• Ethiopia- 4.6
• Iraq- 4.1
• Pakistan- 3.6
• Egypt- 3.3
• Israel- 3.1
• Syria- 2.9
• Mexico- 2.2
• North Korea- 1.9
• France- 1.9
• iran- 1.8
• China- 1.8
• U.S.- 1.8
• U.K.- 1.8
• Russia- 1.7
• Norway- 1.7
• Cuba- 1.7
• Canada- 1.6
• Germany- 1.5
• Greece- 1.3
• Spain- 1.3
• Italy- 1.3
• South Korea- 1.2

Population replacement is 2.1, which means without immigration, all the countries on the above list below Mexico will have shrinking populations. That includes the U.S.-- and Norway.

Birth rates in Norway have decreased for the seventh year in a row. Social pressure is causing women to wait longer and longer before starting families, says one expert. Birth rates of 2.1 per woman are needed to keep population numbers constant. In Norway, the figure is now down to 1.71, having dropped every year since 2009. Many women in their 20s prefer to wait until they have finished studying and have stable, higher-paid jobs before starting families. In fact it's not until after the age of 30 that people in many wealthy western countries-- like Norway-- feel they have enough economic security to start having children. Populations aren't falling, primarily because of Trump's bugaboo: immigration.

According to Statistics Norway, Norway's immigrant population makes up 16.8% of the country's total population as of 2017. This includes immigrants and children born in Norway to two immigrant parents. The ten most common countries of origin of immigrants residing in Norway are Poland (97,196), Lithuania (37,638), Sweden (36,315), Somalia (28,696), Germany (24,601), Iraq (22,493), Syria (20,823), Philippines (20,537), Pakistan (19,973), and Eritrea (19,957). And Norwegians aren't emigrating to the U.S. the way they used to. Trump's comments Thursday isn't going to turn that around either.

The Nordic country, one of the richest in the world by GDP per capita, was last year named the happiest nation on the planet and is known for a cradle-to-grave welfare state funded in part by large reserves of oil and natural gas.

...“On behalf of Norway: Thanks, but no thanks,” tweeted Torbjoern Saetre, a politician representing Norway’s Conservative Party in a municipality near Oslo.

Others condemned the U.S. president’s comments as inappropriate or racist.

“We are not coming. Cheers from Norway,” one woman wrote.

While hundreds of thousands of Norwegians emigrated to the U.S. in the 19th century, just 502 out of a population of 5.3 million people moved there in 2016, down 59 from the previous year, according to Statistics Norway.

“Will there be more now?” the statistics agency asked in a tweet.

Government officials, seeking to deflect attention, turned down a chance to comment. “We respectfully decline the opportunity,” one government official said when contacted by Reuters.

The reference to Norway may have been prompted by Prime Minister Erna Solberg who visited the White House on Wednesday when the president praised Norway for running a trade deficit with the United States and for buying U.S. military equipment.

Christian Christensen, an American professor of journalism at Stockholm University in neighboring Sweden, tweeted: “Of course people from #Norway would love to move to a country where people are far more likely to be shot, live in poverty, get no healthcare because they’re poor, get no paid parental leave or subsidized daycare and see fewer women in political power. #Shithole”

Before the “shithole” controversy, former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt tweeted that, judging by Solberg’s visit, “keys to success with Trump is personal charm, a solid trade deficit with the U.S. and buying tons of U.S. military hardware.”

Solberg, whose office also declined to comment on Trump’s remarks, is expected to announce soon an expansion of her cabinet to include Norway’s Liberal Party, a centrist group that favors strong environmental policies and more immigration.

“The first point of order in the new government declaration: Norway will still not be a shithole country,” tweeted Kjetil Alstadheim, the political editor of financial daily Dagens Naeringsliv.

In Surprise Move, Norway's $1 Trillion Sovereign Wealth Fund May Divest From Fossil Fuels

A shot heard round the world? (source)

by Gaius Publius

Two broad points before the specifics of this story.

First, the Divest from Oil and Gas movement is a real threat to Big Oil as an industry in the same way the Divest from South Africa movement was a threat to South African apartheid — it hits them where the money sits, in the wallet and not in the reputation, the latter of which can always be papered over with expensive ad campaigns telling us how wonderful the industry is.

It's a real advantage having more money than any of your enemies, isn't it.

The Divest from Oil and Gas movement is as threatening to the industry as lawsuits, which are also going on. A divestment movement essentially threatens to collapse the price of oil and gas company stocks, which impoverishes the investing class and, more particularly, the industry's CEO class, since a good part of their pay is in stock.

Once stock prices fall below 50% of their value, it takes forever to build them back up, if indeed they ever recover.

Second, a collapse of oil and gas stock prices is, at some point, inevitable. Consider: If most or all of current in-the-ground fossil fuel reserves — a major basis of valuation of these companies — will stay in the ground as "stranded assets," at some point the value of Exxon, Conoco and Shell will and should be nearly zero.

The only questions are when that will occur and what will be the triggering event. I've written before about the precariousness of Big Oil as an industry — see "Big Oil In Trouble, Enters "No Man’s Land" of Collapsing Balance Sheets" — and that reasoning still holds. Big Oil faces either death by government intervention (the world of power grows an aggressive conscience) or death by market (a permanent fossil fuel glut keeps prices unprofitably low).

Death by global panic as chaos overtakes our shiny, smart-phone world is also on the table. Death of the industry by one of those three forces will certainly occur, and sooner rather than later.

In the earlier piece I wrote:

But one of the unique ways of disrupting supply is to disrupt (degrade, destroy) the financial health of the companies doing the extraction, for example, Exxon. Divestment campaigns — making the holding of Exxon stock morally toxic for institutional buyers like universities — are a form of disrupting supply by disrupting corporate financing. Unfortunately, though divestment campaigns do work — witness the divestment campaign against South African apartheid — they can be slow and spotty, not broad enough to effect an entire industry.

Enter the "magic of the market." If the price of oil is so cheap that it's not profitable to dig it, because it's so plentiful relative to demand, companies will collapse, go bankrupt. We've already seen that with small and mid-size U.S. fracking companies, many of which are so highly leveraged that they can't make a profit on sales and they can't finance their debt.

I don't see the price of oil and gas recovering anytime soon, not with (a) the present market oversupply, and (b) a race to monetize remaining in-the-ground assets by frightened companies, large and small, a race that will guarantee the glut will continue indefinitely.

All we're waiting for is a trigger. Will this be it? Bloomberg (h/t Hunter Cutting via Twitter):

Norway’s proposal to sell off $35 billion in oil and natural gas stocks brings sudden and unparalleled heft to a once-grassroots movement to enlist investors in the fight against climate change.

The Nordic nation’s $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund said Thursday that it’s considering unloading its shares of Exxon Mobil Corp., Royal Dutch Shell Plc and other oil giants to diversify its holdings and guard against drops in crude prices. European oil stocks fell.

Norges Bank Investment Management would not be the first institutional investor to back away from fossil fuels. But until now, most have been state pension funds, universities and other smaller players that have limited their divestments to coal, tar sands or some of the other dirtiest fossil fuels.

Norway’s fund is the world’s largest equity investor, controlling about 1.5 percent of global stocks. If it follows through on its proposal, it would be the first to abandon the sector altogether.

“This is an enormous change,” said Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres, a non-profit that advocates for sustainable investing. “It’s a shot heard around the world.” [emphasis added]

The fact that it's Bloomberg reporters covering this, the nation's business best, all with concerned looks on their faces, and not just the good people at Friends of the Small County News, is itself convincing evidence that the Norwegian move to divest, if it occurs, will indeed be an industry problem.

The Bleak Future of Oil and Gas

Norway as a nation is in a unique position. A great deal of its wealth — more than 20% of its GDP — is already tied up in oil and gas production. This by itself represents a large exposure to industry pricing shocks. For that country's sovereign wealth fund to also be owners of oil and gas stock makes no investment sense at all. Thus their discussion about divesting from that sector and diversifying, or even hedging by investing in the renewables sector.

But Norway's problem is a general problem for other investors as well. At some point no investor will want to hold those stocks, given the "poised to fall" nature of the entire fossil fuel industry. An industry doesn't have to falter before its stock prices falter; a price collapse could easily precede an unstoppable and escalating worldwide transition to renewables. After all, investors want either future growth or future dividends, or both, from their investments. "No growth on the horizon" plus "poised to collapse" is not a happy prescription for the price of any stock.

Call it "the magic of the market," working for you for a change.

You Too Can Divest

Feel free to accelerate that magic. If your college or university is still invested in fossil fuel, consider asking them to follow Norway's lead — and remind them that their money too could be vulnerable to a future "price shock."

If your mutual fund is invested in fossil fuel, at Vanguard, say, or Fidelity, say the same thing to their customer representatives.

And if you are invested in fossil fuel, directly or indirectly, give some thought to transferring your investment elsewhere. After all, that would not only make good financial sense, but good moral sense as well.

GP
 

Glenn Beck gives Rupert Murdoch something to smile about

"There was a shooting at a political camp, which sounds a little like, you know, the Hitler Youth. I mean, who does a camp for kids that's all about politics? Disturbing."

-- Glenn Beck, on his radio show Monday

by Ken

When shocked word began to spread about Glenn Beck's latest sociopathic blitherings, I'm guessing that Rupert Murdoch cracked his first smile in weeks. I imagine him saying to one of his underlings something like: "Thank God the little shit isn't our problem anymore."

Jon Swaine reported in the Telegraph:

Torbjørn Eriksen, a former press secretary to Jens Stoltenberg, Norway's prime minister, described the comment as "a new low" for the broadcaster, who has frequently been forced to apologise for offensive remarks.

"Young political activists have gathered at Utoya for over 60 years to learn about and be part of democracy, the very opposite of what the Hitler Youth was about," he told The Daily Telegraph. "Glenn Beck's comments are ignorant, incorrect and extremely hurtful."

I suppose it's good to know that someone's keeping track of Glenn's "new lows," and if the job has to be entrusted to Norwegians, well, at least somebody's on the job. And it's not an easy one. After all, this is a man who tries his darnedest to outdo himself every time he gets near a microphone. He can't set a new low every time out, but it's not for want of trying.

This is a fascinating phenomenon, the Hate Hitler campaign the ultraloonified Right has been waging in recent years. I have to assume it's overcompensation for what must be as obvious to them as it is to anyone with any familiarity with the sociology of Hitler's National Socialism: that they are in virtually every respect -- ideological, political, organizational, strategic, and not least in matters of personal and group style (the total surrender to paranoia, hatred, and fear) -- indistinguishable from the original Nazis.

As usual, our Glenn is absolutely and utterly wrong about everything. It's the stunning accomplishment of the modern-day Loonified Right to live entire lives without ever grazing up against any thought that is remotely factual. So, just as he is 100 percent perniciously ignorant about the Norwegian Labor Party's youth camps, he really knows nothing about the Hitler-Jugend, or Hitler Youth. From Wikipedia:

The HJ were viewed as future "Aryan supermen" and were indoctrinated in anti-Semitism. One aim was to instill the motivation that would enable HJ members, as soldiers, to fight faithfully for the Third Reich. The HJ put more emphasis on physical and military training than on academic study. The Nationalsozialistischer Reichsbund für Leibesübungen (NSRBL), the umbrella organization promoting and coordinating sport activities in Germany during the Nazi period, had the responsibility of overseeing the physical fitness development programs provided to the German youth.

Actually, the person who's running propaganda camps for kids is our Glenn. MSNBC reports:

Despite his harsh words, Beck actually has some involvement in political youth camps himself. His 9/12 Project -- which aims to unite Americans as much as they were on the day following the Sept. 11 attacks -- has been running camps for kids this summer. The Utah camp, for example, seeks to provide "heritage-based education for youth, with special focus on the Constitution and the Founding generation."

I doubt very much that our Glenn so much as knows anyone who knows anything about either the Constitution or the Founding generation -- apart from the propaganda delusions self-circulated among the self-created mental defectives of the Loonified Right, who get their "information" out of their posteriors. (I suspect too that fitness doesn't figure much in Glenno's indoctrination camps. Although it does seem to have mattered to the older survivalist wackos of the Loonified Right, the newer cohorts seem more devoted to slothful lard-tub corpulence like their role models, including Glenno.)

How proud Glenn must be, to be 100 percent counterfactual on all fronts once again! You'd figure the laws of probability dictate that occasionally something would ooze out of his maw which isn't egregious bulldoody. But his personal permanent War Against Truth seems to have enabled him to achieve the unachievable: being always wrong.

On the other hand, even in the extremity of their fanaticism the Nazis might have been wary of our Glenn. The Nazis prized few qualitiies more than loyalty, whereas our Glenn's history suggests that he eventually betrays everyone who's foolish enough to invest any trust in him. There's no evidence that he believes in anything apart from cynically opportunistic self-promotion.

THIS MAN SHOULD BE SELLING CRYSTAL BALLS
INSTEAD OF PROMOTING SLEAZY GOLD SCAMS

I love this concluding tidbit from the MSNBC report:

Beck also said he predicted something like this would happen. "I warned that this what was coming in Europe . . . Last fall I said Europe is going to go into financial trouble and it's also going to go into problems with radical Islam."

All the way back in the fall of 2010 the Great Glenno predicted that Europe was "going to go into financial trouble"? Whatta guy! The mind boggles! For his next trick, Glenno will predict the winners of last year's World Series, Super Bowl, Stanley Cup, and NBA championship. And probably get them wrong too.

NOW AS FOR THOSE PROBLEMS WITH RADICAL
ISLAM THAT EUROPE WAS GOING TO GO INTO . . .

Do you suppose it would help if somebody who’s skilled at communicating with logic-challenged five-year-olds were to sit down with Glenno and try ever so patiently to explain to him what happened in Norway? The horrors that happened there weren't caused by "radical Islam." They were caused, as far as we can tell, by a mental defective who lives in a world of delusion permeated by lies and delusions about "radical Islam." Someone, in other words, apparently very like Glenn Beck.

These are people who don't know anything about any aspect of Islam, radical or otherwise, but who use their idea of "radical Islam" as a playground for their raging paranoid sociopathology and psychosis. Which is not to say that there is no such thing as Islamic fanaticism. Just that the people who blither endlessly about it 24/7 are as categorically ignorant about it as they are of everything else, which is hardly surprising given that, again, everything they know about it comes out of their butts.

WAS RUPERT SMILING AGAIN AS GLENNO TRIED
TO TALK HIS WAY OUT OF HIS MONDAY MESS?

Here's how the New York Daily News's Nina Mandell reported it:

A day after shocking the world by likening the victims of the Norway massacre to the Hitler youth, Glenn Beck took to the airwaves to defend his right to use Hitler comparisons -- and argued that any impediment on his freedom to do so, or criticism of such remarks, portends the Nazification of America.

Beck made the comments on Monday because the victims were attending political camp, and on Tuesday he complained on his radio show about the reaction whenever he makes a similar analogy.

The remarks came when he was making another Nazi comparison by discussing the similarities between the reaction to President Obama's policies and the reaction to Adolf Hitler's.

"Anybody who pointed it out were ridiculed and marginalized and were later killed," he said.

That's when his co-host jumped in to try to soften Beck's comparison by saying "and the point here is not to say gas chambers in Kansas."

But Beck wasn't about to stop -- and took offense to being limited on his Hitler comparisons.

"Don't start," the conservative pundit roared. "Don't even. Don't!

"If we're living in a society where we can't say X in the same paragraph as Y and not be told we are comparing it . . . we are going to be a society of gas chambers," he yelled. "If you can't have a logical conversation . . . the question is, does this country bypass the mainstream media faster than it's destroyed. I'm betting yes. It's called GBTV. You want to have a real conversation? Let's have a real conversation. But you have to bypass the mainstream media . . . enough is enough."

So just to be clear, Glenno, there are or aren't gas chambers in Kansas, or wherever, for people who have unfavorable reactions to President Obama's policies? Since we do that sort of thing a lot here at DWT, we'd kind of like to know. Oh, and by the way, while Glenno and the rest of the Loonified Righties are busily pulling bogus Nazi analogies out of their behinds, have they considered not going bonkers anytime anyone points out that they are the unconflicted and uncompromising heirs of Hitlerism? Their total ignorance and delusionality is an explanation, but not really an excuse.

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Anders Breivik Says He Has No Regrets... Does Pat Buchanan?

Although the attorneys of right-wing terrorist Anders Breivik are claiming their client is insane (see video below), MSNBC's in-house Nazi claims he was right... no, not just right-wing, correct. He may be borderline senile but Pat Buchanan has been an unrepentant Nazi since at least the 1970s. Here's what he wrote at the American Conservative:

[A]wful as this atrocity was, native-born and homegrown terrorism is not the macro-threat to the continent.

That threat comes from a burgeoning Muslim presence in a Europe that has never known mass immigration, its failure to assimilate, its growing alienation, and its sometime sympathy for Islamic militants and terrorists.

Europe faces today an authentic and historic crisis...

As for a climactic conflict between a once-Christian West and an Islamic world that is growing in numbers and advancing inexorably into Europe for the third time in 14 centuries, on this one, Breivik may be right.

MSNBC should be ashamed. What they ought to do is fire this hate-spouting bigot and give the conservative slot-- if they insist they need another one-- to someone principled and rational like David Frum.

As Media Matters pointed out after Buchanan's outburst, terrorists are never right. "Their actions are wrong, and the ideas that motivated them are wrong." Norwegian society is grappling with the whole concept of how tolerant they can afford to be of Breivik's (and Buchanan's) kind of extremism.

Hours before the bombing in central Oslo and a shooting rampage that killed at least 76 people, self-described perpetrator Anders Behring Breivik reportedly posted a video on YouTube containing anti-Muslim imagery. Set to eerie music, the video features text that rages against multiculturalism and echoes Breivik's 1,500-page manifesto calling for a Christian war to defend Europe from Islamic domination.

Breivik has been described in the media as a lone lunatic on the far-fringe of society.

But Rune Berglund Steen of the Norwegian Center Against Racism disagrees.

"Most of his ideas, his view of society is not original," Steen says. "He has bought into a certain ideology already there, including the distrust, hatred of Muslims."

Breivik, 32, once belonged to the ultra-rightwing Progress Party, which has become the second largest party in Norway. Steen says the Progress Party wants much stricter controls on immigration, while Breivik is much more violent.

"What he wants is to kill the people who are not like him," Steen says.

...Breivik claims he is part of a terrorist network with two other extremist cells in operation, and investigators are focusing on whether he acted alone or had accomplices.

It's a big challenge because rightwing extremism had been more or less ignored by Norwegian security officials.

Professor Lars Gule of Oslo University has monitored extremist websites for years, even chatting with Breivik a few years ago on one of the suspect's favorite ultra-rightwing sites.

"These websites are working as greenhouses because they tend to be isolated," Gule says. "There is no opposing voice there, so the extremist postings are the fertilizer within the greenhouse and we should not be surprised when a terrorist flower sticks its head up."

He estimates that many thousands of people regularly visit such websites in Norway alone. Adding the rest of Scandinavia, Britain, France and Germany, Gule says, "We are talking about hundreds of thousands of people with extremist, reactionary, xenophobic, and islamophobic views."

True, there may be no opposing voice on these deranged websites, but the voice that's there is reinforced by a mass media dominated by inveterate fascists... like Rupert Murdoch. Just take a look at how the supposedly mainstream Wall Street Journal reported the tragedy through its own far right prism.

Before they knew the facts of the terror attacks in Norway last Friday, editors at the Wall Street Journal concluded it was the work of Islamic extremists and whipped off the following kicker paragraph for an editorial that appeared in Saturday’s paper:

In Jihadist eyes [Norway] will forever remain guilty of being what it is: a liberal nation committed to freedom of speech and conscience, equality between the sexes, representative democracy and every other freedom that still defines the West. For being true to these ideals, Norwegians have now been made to pay a terrible price. They are not in the wrong movie. They are on the right side.

...The Journal’s editorial page wasn’t alone in jumping to conclusions. ABC News’ Brian Ross breathlessly suggested in the hours after the attack that al-Qaeda and Ansar al Islam might be behind it, but then scrubbed the online article of any mention of radical Islamic groups. And there were many other examples [though none as disgusting as right-wing hack Jennifer Rubin's in the Washington Post] Friday afternoon of hasty conclusions hastily withdrawn after an ironic rush to look well-sourced or ideologically validated.

Honest journalists, when they get something wrong, don’t expunge the record, they correct it. But in the larger sphere, the premature Islam-alarm has set off a resonating debate over whether anti-Islamism fuels Christian-extremist violence. A variety of Western politicians and writers in the U.S. and Europe have pushed back in recent years against what they see as decades of multiculturalism which has allowed the infiltration of Islamic values antithetical to societies that are properly Judeo-Christian. Leading the post-Norway backlash, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald says:

If, as preliminary evidence suggests, it turns out that Breivik was “inspired” by the extremist hatemongering rantings of Geller, Pipes and friends, will their groups be deemed Terrorist organizations such that any involvement with them could constitute the criminal offense of material support to Terrorism? Will those extremist polemicists inspiring Terrorist violence receive the Anwar Awlaki treatment of being put on an assassination hit list without due process?

Don't forget Breitbart.




WHEN THERE'S WINGNUT STUPID-AND-CRAZY IN THE
AIR, YOU KNOW GLENN BECK HAS TO BE HEARD FROM

Especially now that he's off the TV, our Glenn probably worries that people will forget about him, maybe think he can't match anyone in the land for stupid-and-crazy. So Monday on his radio show he likened the camp at which so many young Norwegians were slaughtered while learning about democracy and the political process to . . . the Hitler Youth. Now amid the blowback, he's defending himself by, as the Telegraph's Jon Swaine reports, "suggest[ing] that people who sought to stop his use of such comparisons were leading the US into a 'society of gas chambers.'"

I'll have more on our Glenn's relentless crusade to keep himself at the top of the stupid-and-crazy rankings in my 6pm PT post. -- Ken

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Re. the horror in Norway: Do right-wingers have contact of any sort with reality?

"Anders Behring Breivik from the video he posted on YouTube before his shooting spree": caption for the photo accompanying the Telegraph's Sunday-datelined report, "Norway killings: Breivik posted hate-filled video on YouTube hours before attacks"

by Ken

Further to Howie's overnight post ("Who Blew Up Oslo? A Right-Wing Terrorist, Of Course"), I've wondered occasionally what happens when right-wingers, who have now given their brains over entirely to whacked-out delusion, are forced into contact with actual reality -- or, alternatively, how it happens that it never seems to happen.

It's an especially pertinent question now while the sociopathic mental cases now infesting the houses of Congress and statehouses all over the country, flouting the muscle of their ignorance and total disconnect from reality, are insisting on remaking the country in the image of their mental deformity.

And here once again we have it. If at any time a prick of reality should force its way into their murky consciousness, they either pretend it never happened, make up an even nuttier story than their now-discredited one, or just change the subject.

In my post last night I began by passing as quickly as I could over the Norwegian horror. And I freely own that I was eager for a change of subject. The difference is that my flight from reality wasn't aimed at denying that reality.

You'd think that even the most minimal sense of decency would have encouraged people to keep their traps shut, beyond expressing horror and sympathy for the victims. I mean, at least until we had actual information. But no, there were the brain-deads of the Right braying about Muslim extremism. Shades of Oklahoma City. Or the Tucson shootings.

These days, however, the right-wing mindset has now evolved so harmoniously into terrorist mode that the chances have become ever greater that the reality will turn out to be what it apparently has turned out to be in the case of Norway's home-grown right-wing loon. Which I'm guessing will mean that the Right's interest will vanish, just as it did when the Oklahoma City bomber turned out to be a home-grown American right-wing nutjob. The story that had to that point enflamed the right-wing flamers suddenly disappeared -- except for the occasional superwacko who just went right on trumpeting his delusions.

Ditto with the Tucson shootings. Everybody with a working brain quickly came to understand that the pathetic delusionary responsible was another pure-bred product of the climate of right-wing hate and ignorance and psychosis. And the more sensible of the nutjobs understood that their most sensible course was just to shut the hell up and let the thing go away. But since there isn't that much sense among the nuts, the impulse to belligerence quickly returned, and the talking no-brainers demanded to know how anyone could make a political thing of this, and it's all the liberals' fault anyway.

Of course if one of these shooters turned out to be the left-wing terrorist of the nutjobs' dreams, we would never hear the end of it, in accordance with the principle of our old game of If the Shoe Was on the Other Foot.


UPDATE: A Few Words From Political Terrorism Expert Dave Neiwert

This evening Dave posted about Breivik's obsession with "Cultural Marxism."

The picture that's emerging is of an ordinary right-wing man stoked into anger by theories about "Cultural Marxism" that originated on the anti-Semitic far right but have in recent years been spreading into more mainstream venues, promoted by the likes of Andrew Breitbart, among others.

...Based on online posts apparently by Anders Behring Breivik circulated in Norway, the alleged terrorist opposed multiculturalism and Muslim immigrants in Norway. Breivik championed opposition to "Cultural Marxism," a right-wing antisemitic concept developed primarily by William Lind of the US-based Free Congress Foundation, but also the Lyndon LaRouche network.

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Who Blew Up Oslo? A Right-Wing Terrorist, Of Course

Dirty Arab!

Republican Party propagandist, Erik Erickson, was one of the first to try to blame Muslims for the OK City-like mayhem in Oslo today. "It was not Lutherans who did it," he declared on his extreme right-wing blog. But, it turns out it was-- a Lutheran... and, like Erickson, a right-wing fanatic. And a Dexter fan to boot!

[A] darkly disturbing portrait emerged last night of Anders Behring Breivik, 32, the key suspect in twin attacks that killed at least seven people in a government-district explosion in Oslo and 80 more in a shooting spree at a bucolic teen summer camp.

The Norwegian daily Verdens Gang quoted a friend as saying Breivik became a right-wing extremist in his late 20s-- expressing strong nationalistic views in online debates, and blasting the idea that people of different cultural backgrounds can live alongside each other.

He also went to online forums to vent extremist Islamophobic views and blast immigration policies, reports said.

He lashed out at socialism for breaking down traditions, culture, national identity and other societal structures-- blaming it for creating a society that was weak and confused.

On his Facebook page, Breivik listed his favorite books as The Trial by Franz Kafka and 1984 by George Orwell.

And he said his favorite television show was "Dexter," a series about a Miami police forensics expert who moonlights as a serial killer of criminals whom he believes have escaped justice.

The site appeared to have been blocked by last night, but earlier it had listed interests including bodybuilding, conservative politics and freemasonry.

Norwegian media said he had set up a Twitter account a few days ago and posted a single cryptic message July 17 saying: "One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests."

His earlier life was in stark contrast, the Times of London reported, saying his attended a middle-class secondary school in Oslo and lived with his mother in a wealthy neighborhood in the city.

He'd set up his own business, Breivik Geofarm, and a month ago started to run an organic farm in Hedmark, in eastern Norway, where he reportedly produced and stored fertilizer.

No word yet if he preferred Limbaugh, Beck or Hannity.

He sure looks like a Republican, doesn't he?