White Supremacist Crazy-Head Arrested for Threatening Chicago Judges . . .

. . . . Chicago Tribune can't help but call him "blogger" instead.

I kid the Trib, but seriously, this is a guy who hosts radio shows and works with National Vanguard and other white supremacist groups, and to make your headline:

Blogger arrested in threats on federal judges

Well, it just seems like maybe they're letting some emotional content shine through, there.

I don't know a whole lot about Hal Turner except that he's another white supremacist (or separatist, or racialist, or whatever term he prefers) who doesn't get how the real world works. He's also full of beans, as evidenced by his years and years of making threats. He posted his ideas for unmanned drones with bombs to attack the Obama inauguration with the words, "I'm not saying what I'm going to do, but after Tuesday the name Hal Turner will go down in history." Only Tuesday came and went, he did nothing, and nobody cared.

He was actually arrested a couple of weeks ago on charges of inciting violence against state officials in Connecticut and elsewhere, but today it's the FBI who picked him up because the targets of his alleged threats were, again according to the Tribune, the three-judge panel of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals who ruled in favor of Chicago's handgun ban last month. I can certainly understand why people are angry at those particular judges, because the ruling was ridiculous (that was the one in which the 7th claimed that the right of self-defense is not fundamental; that the legislature creates the right to defend yourself, and if the legislature passes a law requiring that you submit to attack or murder, then that's that) but judges say and write stupid things all the time. These particular judges were swimming against the tide on that decision, and they knew it. They knew there was a pretty good chance that they would be overturned by the Supreme Court, and in fact the case has already been appealed to that body. So why freak out and threaten to kill these judges over that case?

You want my guess? Because, A., Hal Turner is the kind of nutjob who sees the world in terms of who he can blame for everything and never really needed a rational reason to whip out yet another death threat, and B., Hal Turner has learned from long experience that death threats are no big deal. He's been frothing away for years, not following through on any of these big macho threats, and nobody has done a whole lot about it. Reading between the lines, it looks like the Connecticut case may come to nothing as well; legal experts are saying that incitement will be hard to prosecute based on internet postings. Personally, I'm of the opinion that the internet is Serious Business--I saw it on a lol poster once--but the law doesn't see it that way. Apparently there's a de facto "loudmouth on the internet defense" built into most incitement statutes.