Yesterday's protest in front of the U.S. Capitol, organized by Rep. Michele Bachmann, had the usual cast of tea-party extremists. But this time, they were openly assembled by GOP leaders as an official House Republican event. Republican members of Congress stoked the crowd's extremism and gave them their seal of approval.

Dana Milbank described the scene:

In the front of the protest, a sign showed President Obama in white coat, his face painted to look like the Joker. The sign, visible to the lawmakers as they looked into the cameras, carried a plea to "Stop Obamunism." A few steps farther was the guy holding a sign announcing "Obama takes his orders from the Rothchilds" [sic], accusing Obama of being part of a Jewish plot to introduce the antichrist.

But the best of Bachmann's recruits were a few rows into the crowd, holding aloft a pair of 5-by-8-foot banners proclaiming "National Socialist Healthcare, Dachau, Germany, 1945." Both banners showed close-up photographs of Holocaust victims, many of them children.

Not just their extremism and frothing-at-the-mouth hatred of Barack Obama was on display. The crowd's hypocrisy was also on full display. Again from Milbank's column:

[A] man standing just beyond the TV cameras apparently suffered a heart attack 20 minutes after event began. Medical personnel from the Capitol physician's office -- an entity that could, quite accurately, be labeled government-run health care -- rushed over, attaching electrodes to his chest and giving him oxygen and an IV drip. ...

By the time it was over, medics had administered government-run health care to at least five people in the crowd who were stricken as they denounced government-run health care. But Bachmann overlooked this irony as she said farewell to her recruits.

"You," she said, "are the most beautiful sight any of us freedom fighters have seen for a long time."

Talk about hypocrisy - and not just about government-run health care. They say they're "freedom fighters." Whatever principle it is that motivates these extremists, it sure isn't freedom.

Where were they when President Bush claimed that simply by declaring an American citizen an "enemy combatant" - a decision unreviewable by a court or any other entity - he could have that person arrested without a warrant and imprisoned for life without access to a lawyer or an impartial judge?

Where were they when Americans were arrested at Bush events simply for wearing John Kerry tee-shirts and having anti-war bumper stickers? Or when President Bush planned a Total Information Awareness program, in which the federal government would regularly monitor our credit card purchases, our travel, our telephone records, and other everyday activities? Or when President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program was executed in flagrant violation of the law, to say nothing of the Bill of Rights?

Where were they? These "freedom fighters" did nothing.

Perhaps some enterprising journalist will ask people who attended yesterday's staged event where they were when freedom was genuinely threatened during the course of the Bush presidency.

Of course, journalists don't need to ask where the people who organized the event were while Bush was engaged in a war against America’s civil liberties: They were helping him.

Ed Whelan in yesterday's post about Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals nominee David Hamilton bemoans Hamilton's "inventive invocation of substantive due process to suppress evidence of a criminal defendant's possession of cocaine." Sound ominous? Perhaps - if it were true.

Here's the real story.

There were two defendants in this case. The first, the cocaine dealer, was convicted and received a sentence from Judge Hamilton of 188 months. Although Hamilton concluded that the search warrant pursuant to which drugs were found was not based on probable cause, he nonetheless refused to exclude the evidence obtained from the search because the officers conducted the search based on good faith that the warrant was properly issued. The defendant challenged Judge Hamilton's decision on appeal and lost in the Seventh Circuit. No substantive due process suppression of evidence for this defendant.

The second defendant was a girlfriend of the convicted cocaine dealer. She was charged with possession of marijuana and related offenses--but what concerned Judge Hamilton was how the police collected their evidence against her: by using a school social worker to interrogate her nine-year old daughter for, as Judge Hamilton found, the sole purpose of getting the "goods" on her mother.

This offended Judge Hamilton's sense of fundamental fairness and he concluded as such in an extremely carefully-reasoned opinion. He found that this governmental abuse of power violated a core interest at the "foundation of American liberty long protected by constitutional safeguards: the privacy and sanctity of family relations."

The Seventh Circuit didn’t agree with Judge Hamilton’s analysis of the government’s rationale for questioning the defendant’s daughter and the balancing of government interests v. intrusion into familial relations and it so reversed the decision. But this is not exactly the picture of "extremism" painted by Whelan, is it?
 

The Equine Posterior Achievement Award has been created to honor that leader whose abilities to misrepresent an issue, manipulate his/her followers, brazenly disregard reality or pander to our baser instincts reach such ridiculous levels that we don't know whether to laugh or cry. In other words, a genuine "horse's patootie."

To that individual we are pleased to present PEOPLE FOR THE AMERICAN WAY's Equine Posterior Achievement Award -- this year, to be known as the Honorary McPalin Equine Posterior Achievement Award.

The duo of John McCain and Sarah Palin -- the latter, especially -- exemplified the spirit of this award in a unique way. But moving beyond the obvious, we wanted to focus this year on some people who may have slipped under the radar or just deserve consideration in their own right.

The nominees are listed at http://site.pfaw.org/epaa Go there now to cast your vote for this year's winner!