FORMER CONSULTANT TO URINE-FOCUSED CRACKPOT CANDIDATE IS RIGHT-WINGERS' LATEST HERO

Via Breitbart and Mediaite, I see that the right has a new hero:

David Jaques, publisher of the Roseburg Beacon, told Bill O’Reilly tonight President Obama should not come to the Oregon town after he politicized the tragic shooting last week.

... the president is reportedly traveling to Roseburg, but Jaques made it clear to O’Reilly plenty of residents would not be on board with that.

He said Obama’s “not welcome” in Roseburg because people think he will “grandstand for political purposes.”

“He wants to come to our community,” Jaques said, “and stand on the corpses of our loved ones and make some kind of political point.”

Jaques's paper, The Roseburg Beacon, is a small, conservative local publication that has been known to publish conspiratorial crackpottery.



On Jaques's personal Facebook page, he favorites a group called Americans for the Restoration of Freedom, which posts items such as a claim that Hurricane Joaquin was the product of "geoengineering," as well as an assertion that the Justice Department's Strong Cities Network is an anti-Constitution UN plot. There's also, um, this:



In 2010, Jaques was a key consultant to the unsuccessful congressional campaign of Art Robinson, a candidate much mocked for his interest in urine:

A candidate for Congress is soliciting mass urine samples from Oregonians as part of his day job as a scientist, a move some see as a novel approach to improving modern medicine and others call just another odd move in an offbeat political career.

Art Robinson, a Republican making his third bid to unseat Representative Peter DeFazio, a Democrat, last week sent out thousands of fliers across Oregon asking for volunteer urine samples.

Robinson, co-founder of the nonprofit Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, said he is hoping to get 15,000 samples to help calibrate a machine that could use urine profiles to help predict if a person will develop degenerative diseases such as cancer.

This in itself wouldn't be troubling -- Robinson is, after all, a scientist -- if it weren't for his other crackpot notions:

In a monthly newsletter called Access to Energy, Robinson has used his academic credentials to float theories on everything from AIDS to public schooling to climate change (which he believes is a myth). In perhaps his most famous missive, Robinson once proposed using airplanes to disperse radioactive waste on Oregon homes, in the hopes of building up resistance to degenerative illnesses.

"All we need do with nuclear waste is dilute it to a low radiation level and sprinkle it over the ocean -- or even over America after hormesis is better understood and verified with respect to more diseases," Robinson wrote in 1997. He added, "If we could use it to enhance our own drinking water here in Oregon, where background radiation is low, it would hormetically enhance our resistance to degenerative diseases. Alas, this would be against the law." ...

In another essay, he called public education "the most widespread and devastating form of child abuse and racism in the United States," leaving people "so mentally handicapped that they cannot be responsible custodians of the energy technology base or other advanced accomplishments of our civilization."

Robinson theorized that the government had overhyped the AIDS epidemic in order to force social engineering experiments on those aforementioned public school students....

A decade ago, Jaques became president of One Nation United, which appears to be an Astroturf group ostensibly dedicated to Native American advocacy, but actually acting as a front for corporations seeking to limit Natives' rights:

At a recent Douglas County Commission meeting, ONU Executive Director Barb Lindsay described the group as a "nonprofit, nonpartisan public educational umbrella group" formed to "defend private property rights, free enterprise and the rule of law."

... Opponents of the group, including Indian tribes in New York, Oklahoma and Oregon, say it is a racist front group for industries that compete with tribally owned businesses in those states, such as the Oklahoma Petroleum Marketers' Association.

ONU began commanding attention in Oregon when Douglas County Commissioner Marilyn Kittelman joined its campaign for caps on tribal land trusts. And Kittelman's recall campaign manager, Douglas County Planning Commissioner David Jaques, recently became ONU's president.

... Jaques acknowledged that ONU is lobbying Congress to cap tribal land trusts. "But these spurious charges that this is some kind of hate or racist group?

That's insane, like saying the National Federal of Business is a hate group," he said.

Every page of ONU's August 2006 newsletter contains stories about what it calls "misguided" federal Indian policy. One article, for example, says: "The tribes' 'separate-but-favored' status has protected individual tribal members from the predations to which they, historically, were victim. But the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act transformed that shield into a sword that has been thrust into established, non-tribal communities whose citizens are left defenseless."

Sue Shaffer, chairman of the Cow Creek Band of the Tribes of the Lower Umpqua, called ONU a "national hate group" that has tried to stir up resentment here over the Cow Creeks' legal removal of about 2,000 acres from county tax rolls....

All in all, the guy seems like an ideal right-wing hero.