If federal prosecutors get their way next week, an aging white supremacist who bragged about being a serial bomber and who was convicted earlier this year of sending explosives to a city office in Arizona will never see the outside world again.

A jury in Phoenix found Dennis Mahon guilty in February on three charges related to the 2004 bombing in Scottsdale that injured three city employees, including the director of the Office of Diversity and Dialogue.

Now, with Mahon’s sentencing scheduled for Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Arizona, prosecutors are asking Judge David Campbell to send the 61-year-old bomber to prison for the next 63 years, which would effectively mean he would die behind bars.

“The amount of premeditation in this case is stunning,” Assistant U.S. Attorney John Boyle wrote in his sentencing recommendation filed late Thursday. He said Mahon “bought generic parts from different locations, assembled the bomb, devised a method to insure the survival of a note, wrote and attached labels to lure the victim into a false sense of security, devised a switch and packing to insure the bomb was not detected before it detonated, and wrote a will to memorialize that his actions were in memory of Bob Mathews and Timothy McVeigh.”

Mahon was tried alongside his twin brother Daniel Mahon, who prosecutors also alleged took part in the bombing. However, despite convicting Dennis on a conspiracy charge, the jury acquitted Daniel Mahon for the same count. He was set free and his whereabouts are currently unknown.

The investigation, led by special agent Tristan Moreland of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, took more than eight years and spanned several states. The back story sounds like something out of a movie script.

Investigators relied on a woman who went undercover and managed to get close to the brothers. She first met them when she and an undercover agent set up a camper in a trailer park in Catoosa, Okla., and hung a Confederate flag in the window. The brothers soon came over and introduced themselves to the woman.

After that, the woman, a civilian, acted as an informant for the feds and helped record audio and video of the brothers bragging about being behind numerous bombings throughout the nation.

Along the way, it became clear that the brothers were in close contact with and possibly inspired by Tom Metzger, one of the nation’s best known white supremacist leaders. Metzger at the time ran an association called the White Aryan Resistance, or WAR, that investigators say promoted the idea of its followers carrying out acts of violence as lone wolves so as to avoid detection by law enforcement. Metzger has denied ever advocating violence.

In 2009 federal authorities had enough evidence to arrest the two brothers who by then were living at their parents’ house in rural Illinois. On the same day, agents searched Metzger’s home in Warsaw, Ind., but never arrested the racist leader.

In requesting the tough sentence for Dennis Mahon, the prosecutor described the bombing as nothing less than “terrorism.”

He “did not merely speak in the abstract in favor of violence,” the prosecutor wrote. “He conspired to and committed actual acts of violence. Rather than express remorse after the Scottsdale bombing, (Mahon) took pride in his actions.”

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This post has been updated.

Curt Schilling is a hero to New England baseball fans, known for his performances in high pressure situations. But as a businessman, he’s in big trouble, and not the kind he can pitch his way out of.

The former MLB all-star’s start-up video game company, 38 Studios, missed a $1.1 million payment to the state of Rhode Island on May 1, and things have only gotten more complicated since.

Rhode Island lured 38 Studios away from Massachusetts in 2010, in exchange for $75 million in guaranteed loans. At the time, then-Governor Donald Carcieri, a Republican, considered the company a chance to jump-start a new business sector in the state. The company promised to create 450 jobs in three years. Massachusetts officials declined to match Rhode Island’s offer. Earlier this year, the company’s first game, “Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning,” came out to positive reviews. “It sings with infectious, engaging excellence,” raved The New York Times.

But the company missed a payment earlier this month, and Schilling was forced to ask for more public assistance this week, The Boston Globe reports. The company said it did not have enough money to make payroll for its nearly 300 employees. The Rhode Island official who oversaw the loan guarantee resigned on Wednesday. And the troubles reached an absurd high point on Thursday, when the company hand-delivered a check to the state for $1.1 million before warning that it didn’t have the funds to cover it.

“38 Studios arrived at [Rhode Island's Economic Development Corporation] at 5 p.m. with a check. Upon learning from the CFO of 38 Studios that there were insufficient funds in the account to cover the check, EDC returned the check to 38 Studios,” Christine Hunsinger, a spokesman for Governor Lincoln Chafee, told The Providence Journal on Thursday. “EDC remains willing to accept payment with readily available funds.”

Late Thursday, Schilling took to his Facebook page to offer a few words on the situation.

“To all the prayers and well wishes to the team and families at 38, God Bless and thank you! We will find a way, and the strength, to endure,” he wrote.

But some people aren’t offering an well wishes.

“We got hoodwinked; we got played,” Republican state Representative Robert Watson told the Globe. “How many millions of dollars does Curt Schilling have? He can’t write a check? It’s Rhode Island that is supposed to provide the money? I think not.”

On Friday, Globe columnist Brian McGrory unloaded on Schilling, who over the years has made no secret of his conservative politics.

“Schilling spent no small amount of time in his career preaching the Republican mantra of smaller government and personal responsibility. He did this fresh off the historic Red Sox World Series win when he backed George W. Bush in the 2004 campaign. He did it on the stump on behalf of John McCain in 2008,” McGrory wrote. “Smaller government? Call me crazy, but I’m betting that wasn’t exactly what Schilling was extolling when he sat behind closed doors on Wednesday pleading with the members of the Rhode Island Economic Development Corp. to put more public money behind his fantasy video game venture.”

Update 4:10 p.m.: 38 Studios has paid the $1.1 million it owed the state after missing a payment May 1, Governor Lincoln Chafee said at a press conference Friday. According the Associated Press, Chafee said the company should now seek private money to stay in business.

“There’s no more easy money,” Chafee said.

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The man in charge of running Arizona’s elections has gone to the birthers. Secretary of State Ken Bennett now says he’s not convinced Barack Obama was really born in the United States and so he is threatening to keep the president off the ballot in November.

Bennett’s comments came in an interview late Thursday with conservative radio talk show host Mike Broomhead on Phoenix station KFYI.

Bennett said he was following the lead of the state’s eccentric Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a fellow Republican who ordered an investigation into the president’s birth certificate last year and concluded the document released by the White House is a forgery. Bennett said he is now trying to get verification from state officials in Hawaii that the certificate is authentic.

In doing so, Bennett caved to a fringe group of activists and writers who believe in a conspiracy theory that just never seems to die no matter how much proof they get. Hawaiian officials have said time and again that Obama was born there in 1961, yet the theory persists.

Bennett, the state’s No. 2 elected official just below Gov. Jan Brewer (R), said his investigation isn’t personal. He said the reason he started looking into it is because he got more than 1,200 emails asking him to do so after Arpaio’s investigation came out.

“I’m not a birther. I believe the president was born in Hawaii — or at least I hope he was,” Bennett said on the show. “But my responsibility as secretary of state is to make sure the ballots in Arizona are correct and that those people whose names are on the ballot have met the qualifications for the office they are seeking.”

Bennett’s newfound birtherism also breaks with Brewer, who led the secretary of state’s office in 2008 when Obama last appeared on the Arizona ballot. Brewer said last year that despite her disagreements with Obama, she is fully convinced the president is eligible for office and believes the birth certificate issue is a “huge distraction.”

“It’s just something I believe is leading our country down a path of destruction and it just is not serving any good purpose,” she told CNN’s John King.

Meanwhile, Bennett is hoping to take Brewer’s job when she becomes term limited in two years. The Arizona Capitol Times reported (paywall) earlier this week that he is already collecting signatures to get on the 2014 ballot for governor.

On Thursday, Bennett said he sent his request to Hawaii officials eight weeks ago but has yet to get the proof he was hoping for. He said he didn’t want another copy of the birth certificate. He wants Hawaii to give him what he described as “a verification in lieu of a certified copy of a birth certificate.”

In the weeks since then, Bennett said, Hawaii officials have forced him to provide proof that he is who he says he is. They asked him to send them copies of the Arizona laws that prove the secretary of state really is the person in charge of handling the ballots. Admittedly, Bennett said they told him they were “tired of all the requests.” But he is continuing anyway.

Broomhead, the radio host, pressed Bennett on what he would do if he didn’t get the right response back from Hawaii.

“If they won’t comply, if they refuse to comply with this, will you remove the president from the ballot?” Broomhead asked. “Will you exclude him from the ballot?”

“That’s possible,” Bennett said. “Or the other option would be I would ask all of candidates, including the president, maybe to submit a certified copy of their birth certificate. But I don’t want to do that.”

Listen to the whole interview from KFYI:

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In April 2011, Hollywood stars and D.C. VIPs gathered at Ford’s Theatre in Washington for a movie premiere, the first film screening at the theater in 20 years. Kevin Kline, Evan Rachel Wood, Robin Wright, and Tom Wilkinson were there. So were Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Attorney General Eric Holder, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. The film was “The Conspirator,” the story of the only woman charged in the conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. It had been directed by Robert Redford. And it had been bankrolled by Joe Ricketts.

On Thursday, Ricketts was hit by a different kind of limelight, after The New York Times published a report suggesting he might pay for a $10 million ad campaign focused on President Obama’s relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Ricketts’ super PAC, Ending Spending Action Fund, released a statement later in the day repudiating the proposal, saying it “reflects an approach to politics that Mr. Ricketts rejects.” But even if Ricketts won’t spend his money on Jeremiah Wright ads, he clearly has an interest in spending it — he recently dropped $200,000 on the Nebraska Republican Senate primary.

So who is the man who cuts a check for liberal darling Robert Redford one day, then comes close to lighting the fuse of Republican dynamite the next? Meet Joe Ricketts, a man with a thumb in many pies, a man who loves his family, his iPhone, and his motorcycle, and yet another super-rich political donor taking advantage of the post-Citizens United environment to let his money do the talking.

An Entrepreneur

“I’m an entrepreneur, and it’s been my observation that we tend not to become involved in public policy,” Ricketts says in a video on his website. “But, the reason I became involved is because I’ve been able to see and understand the benefits that happen when our free enterprise flourishes… Everybody flourishes, everybody does well.”

Ricketts, 70, did well. He made a fortune after founding the company that become TD Ameritrade. A Nebraska native, Ricketts graduated from Creighton University with a degree in economics in 1968. Over the next several years, he spent time working at Dean Witter and Dun & Bradstreet. In 1975, Ricketts borrowed $12,000 to co-found First Omaha Securities, a retail securities brokerage firm in Omaha. In 1988, as Ameritrade Clearing, the company became the first brokerage firm to offer touch-tone trading. In 1995, it acquired K. Aufhauser & Co., Inc., the first firm to offer Internet trading. Today, the company says it places more trades online than any other brokerage. Ricketts, who stepped down from the company’s board last fall, served as CEO of Ameritrade Holding Corp. from 1982 to 2001 and Chairman from 1982 to 2008. According to Forbes, Ricketts still owns 9.5 percent of the company, while his wife holds 2.5 percent. Two of their sons sit on the company’s board of directors. In February, TD Ameritrade “devoted much of the annual meeting to a tribute to founder Joe Ricketts,” according the Associated Press.

Ricketts is being widely described in news reports as a billionaire, and his family’s net worth — which now includes the Chicago Cubs — easily surpasses the billion dollar mark. But Forbes reports that because the Cubs are technically owned by a Ricketts family trust, “[Ricketts] just missed the billionaire cut” in the Fall of 2011 “as TD Ameritrade’s stock was down.” Still, Ricketts is loaded. In 2009, Forbes ranked Ricketts as the 371st richest person in America, and in 2008 he was pegged as the 962nd richest person in the world.

A Political Activist

A registered independent, Ricketts personally gave $2,500 to both Mitt Romney and Ron Paul in December. In 2000, he was elected to the board of the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI). In the video on his website, Ricketts says that he is an independent “because I don’t really care which party is going to be in favor or which party is going to be in control, but I do care about what they do in order to make our country prosper.”

“If we want the next generation to have the same type of opportunity I had, if we’re
going to have them have the same type of opportunities we’ve had, that previous generations have had, we need to become involved,” he says. “And that’s why I’m becoming involved right now.”

In 2010, Ricketts founded Taxpayers Against Earmarks, which pushed for an earmark ban that lawmakers in Washington eventually adopted. Encouraged by that success, the organization changed its name to Ending Spending and “expanded its focus to the broader fiscal challenges facing the country.” Ricketts then also founded the Ending Spending Action Fund. Brian Baker, a lawyer who has worked for Republican Senators Bob Dole and Richard Shelby, serves as president and general counsel for both groups. In early 2010, in an article about the then-recent Citizens United decision, The Wall Street Journal noted that Ricketts was already forming an organization to play by the new rules. In an interview, Baker praised the Supreme Court’s decision.

“The right to speak in association with other people was affirmed today by the court, and that will be incredibly important for us in the coming year,” Baker told the paper. “We can advertise around election time, when it matters most.”

Politics runs in the Ricketts family. Pete Ricketts, a son, was the Republican nominee for Senate in Nebraska in 2006. He lost to Democrat Ben Nelson, but not before pouring $12 million of his own money into the race, according to the Associated Press (via Nexis). Pete Ricketts is now on TD Ameritrade’s board, while also serving on various other boards including those of the Chicago Cubs, the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, and AEI.

Meanwhile, Laura Ricketts, a daughter, is a major fundraiser for Obama. Earlier this week, Open Secrets included her on a list of 27 prominent LGBT Obama bundlers, and reported that she had raised at least $500,000 for the president’s reelection. In the wake of the attention on her father Thursday, Laura Ricketts released a statement saying that her family’s “love of country was instilled in us by my father.”

“Though we may have diverse political views, above all we love and respect each other,” Ricketts said. “My own personal view is that President Obama has been a great leader in very difficult times. He has been leading us to an economic recovery; served with great honor as commander-in-chief during a time of war; been a strong proponent on issues important to women and just last week he exhibited great courage in endorsing the freedom to marry for gay and lesbian Americans.”

A Rich Jack Of All Trades

In recent years, as his role at TD Ameritrade wound down, Ricketts has used his astounding wealth to get involved in all manner of projects and businesses. His family bought the Chicago Cubs. He’s also gotten involved in bison raising, film financing, hyper-local journalism, and third-world education. He even owns a little “luxury-casual” lodge in Bondurant, Wyoming.

Let’s start with the Cubs. In October 2009, a trust that Joe and Marlene Ricketts established on behalf of their family acquired a 95-percent controlling interest in the Cubs and the team’s home park, Wrigley Field. Tom Ricketts, a son, is team chairman, and Pete Ricketts, Laura Ricketts, and Todd Ricketts (another son) all serve on the board. Dad’s place in the headlines this week actually comes at a bad time for the Cubs: the team is trying to work out a deal with the city “that would involve using $150 million in city amusement taxes for a $300 million renovation of Wrigley Field,” The Chicago Tribune reports. An aide to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told The Washington Post that the former White House Chief of Staff was “livid” over the Times story.

“The Ricketts have tried to contact the mayor, but he’s said that he does not want to talk with them today, tomorrow or anytime soon,” the aide said.

Now, about the bison. In 2003, Ricketts founded High Plains Bison, which is now the world’s largest online retail bison provider. The official lean meat of the Chicago Cubs, the company says its herds are “humanely raised on the high plains of North America.” On its website, the company touts standards even a lefty could love: “no hormones, fillers, antibiotics or artificial ingredients.” In a video, Ricketts touts the relative health benefits of bison meat. (Ricketts website features videos of him explaining his many ventures.)

In 2005, Ricketts founded Opportunity Education, which calls itself “the largest non-government, secular organization providing elementary-school education in developing countries.”

Ricketts has also become a hyper-local media mogul. He provided the funding behind DNAinfo.com, a news website covering New York City that launched in November 2009. (While Rickett’s personal biography says he lives in Little Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Capital reports he owns a “massive 78th floor apartment” in the Time Warner Center in New York.) Earlier this month, DNAinfo won six New York Press Club awards.

“He likes the idea of running to a business when others are running away from it,” Editorial Director & Publisher Leela de Kretser said of Ricketts last year, in an interview with Ad Week. “He saw people leaving the news business, and he believes that there is a model there–particularly in the neighborhood model.”

On his bio page on the DNAinfo website, Ricketts provides an email address (joe.ricketts@dnainfo.com) for readers to contact him. It also mentions that “though Joe prefers bison to beef, he has a soft spot for the corned beef from the Carnegie and 2nd Avenue delis.”

Finally, there’s the movies. In 2008, Ricketts founded The American Film Company, with a goal to make films that “accurately portray extraordinary characters and events from American history.” Redford’s “The Conspirator” was the company’s first movie, and had a $25 million budget.

“Like so many people my age, you come to a time in your life when you want to take some more free time,” Ricketts told the Times last April, for an article about “The Conspirator.” “Every once in a while I’d say to my wife, ‘Let’s pretend we’re kids, and go get a hamburger and go to a movie.’ Well, we could never find anything we want to see.”

The newspaper said that Redford was impressed by Ricketts.

“He’s a big, strong guy from Omaha, straightforward, like a fullback,” Redford said. “Nothing fancy, very solid, but a great supporter of the film. He only came to the set once, made no presumptions, didn’t interfere. He told me he trusted us to make the film. The only thing was, when we discussed me taking the job, he said: ‘O.K., great, but you have to let me know by this afternoon. I want to leave here knowing whether or not you’re on board.’ He was all business.”

TPMMuckraker

For the second time this year, officials with the Missouri National Guard are investigating whether a white supremacist has been serving in their midst.

In March, officials accused a Missouri guardsman of participating in neo-Nazi activities while also serving in the military’s honor guard, which routinely helped pay last respects at funerals for veterans who fought in WWII. The sergeant was fired from the honor guard after former coworkers said he kept a picture of Adolf Hitler in his living room and tried to recruit them to the white supremacist movement.

Now, the military is investigating whether another guardsman, an Iraq War veteran, might have traveled to Florida to train a group of white supremacists who were accused earlier this month of planning to start a race war and arrested as part of a domestic terrorism probe.

“Active membership in an extremist organization is not consistent with the values of the Missouri National Guard or the Department of Defense,” guard spokeswoman Maj. Tammy Spicer said on Wednesday while confirming the military had launched an investigation into the latest case.

The newest soldier in question, Spc. Ryan Riley, shares the same name as a man who surfaced in court documents last week as part of the probe into the Florida chapter of the white supremacist group American Front.

The investigation, run by a joint terrorism task force of the FBI and local law enforcement, resulted in the arrests of the chapter’s leader, Marcus Faella, his wife, and ten other alleged American Front members. They were accused of stockpiling weapons, experimenting with the creation of the toxin ricin and plotting some sort of “disturbance” on Orlando City Hall.

Riley has not been arrested. Documents detailing the probe described him as a “patched” or recognized member of the hate group’s Missouri chapter. They also said he was as a “member of the United States National Guard.”

“Faella had Riley conduct Paramilitary training on techniques (Hand to Hand Combat, edge weapon techniques) he learned from the National Guard,” the court documents said. “Additional training was held on breaking down assault rifles, water purification and other survival skills.”

On Wednesday, Spicer, the military spokeswoman, said it was too early to say for sure whether the person mentioned in the documents is the same person still serving as a specialist in the National Guard.

“We do not have any conclusions that this would be the same person at this point,” she said.

She said the National Guard’s Riley joined the the force a year ago and that he is on a typical part-time status, serving one weekend a month and two weeks a year. He served in another branch of the military for about seven years before that, but Spicer did not know which branch it was. She said, however, he served in Korea from 2004 to 2005 and Iraq from 2006 to 2007.

Riley could not be reached for comment.

The last time the Missouri National Guard took action because of the alleged racist ties of one of its members was earlier this year after guardsmen complained about a sergeant who served a full-time role on the honor guard.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch broke the story in March. It revealed that Sgt. Nathan Wooten had been the subject of complaints by his colleagues for months over vile, racist comments he apparently made. They said Wooten claimed to be a member of the National Socialist Movement, the largest neo-Nazi organization in the nation.

“He always talked about how great of an organization it is and how they hate minorities like blacks, Mexicans and Jews and how great the U.S. would be without them,” one of his colleagues said, according to the newspaper. Wooten also reportedly kept a picture of Hitler in his living room and balked at presenting flags to the families of black and Jewish veterans.

Wooten denied the allegations to the newspaper, but just before publication of the Post-Dispatch story, he was fired from his full-time role with the honor guard.

TPMMuckraker

Donations to George Zimmerman’s defense fund have slowed considerably since his attorneys forced him to shut down his old website last month and opened a new one in his name days later.

The man charged with second-degree murder in the killing of unarmed Florida teenager Trayvon Martin had managed on his own to raise more than $200,000 in just a few weeks using a crudely built website and a PayPal account.

But in late April, his new lawyer ordered him to shut down the site. That’s when Zimmerman revealed he had raised all that cash.

Days later, attorney Mark O’Mara announced he would open a new website in his client’s name to keep the donations flowing. He hired a former IRS agent to watch over the funds and promised donors that their identities would be kept confidential.

The promises haven’t seemed to convince potential donors, however. Late Wednesday, Zimmerman’s defense team said he had only been able to raise about $15,000 since the new site went live on May 3. The biggest donation was $3,000, they said, while most ranged between $25 and $100.

While that still averages more than $1,000 a day, it’s a far cry from the rate Zimmerman was hauling in on his own.

O’Mara has said the money will be used for defense costs and Zimmerman’s living expenses.

TPMMuckraker

The killing of Trayvon Martin was “ultimately avoidable” if George Zimmerman had just stayed in his vehicle instead of pursuing the unarmed teen, Florida police investigators concluded in one of a series of reports on the case released late Thursday.

Instead, the Sanford Police Department investigators wrote, Zimmerman confronted the teen, ended up in a struggle and eventually shot him in the chest. In the end, Martin was dead and police were recommending the neighborhood watchman be brought up on a criminal charge of manslaughter.

The conclusions came to light on Thursday as part of a huge release of evidence by the Florida prosecutors who later performed their own investigation and charged Zimmerman with the more serious crime of second-degree murder. Totaling 183 pages, the heavily redacted documents include police narratives, witness interviews, autopsy reports and photos of Zimmerman bloodied after the Feb. 26 struggle.

“The encounter between George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin was ultimately avoidable by Zimmerman,” the report said, “if Zimmerman had remained in his vehicle and awaited the arrival of law enforcement, or conversely if he had identified himself to Martin as a concerned citizen and initiated dialogue in an effort to dispel each party’s concern. There is no indication that Trayvon Martin was involved in any criminal activity at the time of the encounter.”

The documents [PDF] were obtained by several news outlets, including NBC News, which put them online Thursday.

The investigators’ conclusions were in a document dated March 13. Zimmerman wasn’t charged until April 11 after special prosecutor Angela Corey was assigned to the case by Florida Gov. Rick Scott. By then, the killing was already the focus of international attention and outrage.

Previously, Zimmerman has said he believed the teen looked “suspicious” as he crossed through the gated neighborhood in Sanford, Fla. Zimmerman called 911 at the time but ignored the requests of a police dispatcher who told him not to pursue the teen.

Zimmerman has pleaded not guilty to the second-degree murder charge, claiming he acted in self defense, saying Martin attacked him first and he had to shoot him to save his own life.

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Virginia Delegate and Republican Senate candidate Bob Marshall, who led the battle against the judicial nomination of an openly gay Richmond prosecutor, appeared on CNN Thursday and defended his position, saying, among other arguments, that “sodomy is not a civil right” and that he was worried how a gay judge would rule in the case of a “bar room fight between a homosexual and heterosexual.”

Virginia’s House of Delegates defeated the nomination of Tracy Thorne-Begland earlier this week, after what The Richmond Times-Dispatch called a “late-hour lobbying offensive by social conservatives.” Thorne-Begland would have been the first openly gay judge elected in Virginia.

In his CNN appearance, Marshall criticized Thorne-Begland, a former Naval officer who came out as gay 20 years ago, for lying about his sexuality to the military.

“He displayed a pattern of behavior that was inconsistent with what we have come to expect in Virginia judges,” Marshall said. “We’ve never appointed an activist of any kind along these lines, much less somebody who has a long history of this.”

“Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks never took an oath of office they broke,” Marshall said, in response to a question from host Brooke Baldwin. “Sodomy is not a civil right, it’s not the same as the civil rights movement. You have to look at the past. In late 2011, he was critical of the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’ He criticized our attorney general simply for explaining what the law of Virginia is with respect to certain protected classes. So, he has gone beyond that. He can be a prosecutor, if he wants to. We don’t want advocates as judges.”

Baldwin then asked: “You bring up sodomy. Is the reason why you voted against him because he’s gay, pure and simple?”

“No. Sorry, you’re mischaracterizing that,” Marshall said. “I said sodomy is not a civil right and there’s an effort by homosexual lobbyists to equate the two. That’s wrong.”

Watch:

TPMMuckraker

What kind of gift can you get for the budding survivalist in your life? How about a great big Jim Bakker food bucket.

The disgraced televangelist is now hawking survivalist gear and books about the apocalypse on his website almost 20 years after he was released from prison on a conviction of bilking followers out of millions of dollars.

Back from the evangelical wilderness, Bakker now tapes a daily TV show from the rolling Ozarks of Missouri and uses his website to pitch what he calls “love gifts,” essentially a variety of odd products including “Tiffany style” jewelery, fuel-less generators and buckets of dried food.

For just $500, you can get “Jim’s All American 4 Star Vegetable” buckets. A cool two grand will get you the “Jerry Jones Special,” which promises “over 3,300 servings of food and enough fuel to cook 480 meals.”

Preparing for the end of the world is nothing new for Bakker, who served almost five years in prison following his conviction for the $158 million rip off of his followers. “Pastor Jim,” as he calls himself now, published a book in 1998 called Prosperity and the Coming Apocalypse, which he sells on his site for $20 and proclaims: “This is not just a book of prophecy, it is a book of survival.”

His longtime wife Tammy Faye having divorced him while he was in prison, Bakker married his new wife, Lori, the same year he published the book. She now works beside him as a pastor at the Jim Bakker Show and offers her own line of products like the “Lori’s Little Lambs Chrystal Necklace” for $35.

Most of the goods, the Bakkers assure their followers, are at least partially tax deductible.

And by the way, if you buy into Bakker’s new pitch and end up getting impatient waiting for the end of the world or the next earth-changing disaster, there’s another place where you might be able to put the survivalist gear to use. As io9 noted earlier this year, Bakker’s long abandoned amusement park called Harvest USA is something of a “post-apocalyptic ghost town” these days.

TPMMuckraker

For the second time this year, officials with the Missouri National Guard are investigating whether a white supremacist has been serving in their midst.

In March, officials accused a Missouri guardsman of participating in neo-Nazi activities while also serving in the military’s honor guard, which routinely helped pay last respects at funerals for veterans who fought in WWII. The sergeant was fired from the honor guard after former coworkers said he kept a picture of Adolf Hitler in his living room and tried to recruit them to the white supremacist movement.

Now, the military is investigating whether another guardsman, an Iraq War veteran, might have traveled to Florida to train a group of white supremacists who were accused earlier this month of planning to start a race war and arrested as part of a domestic terrorism probe.

“Active membership in an extremist organization is not consistent with the values of the Missouri National Guard or the Department of Defense,” guard spokeswoman Maj. Tammy Spicer said on Wednesday while confirming the military had launched an investigation into the latest case.

The newest soldier in question, Spc. Ryan Riley, shares the same name as a man who surfaced in court documents last week as part of the probe into the Florida chapter of the white supremacist group American Front.

The investigation, run by a joint terrorism task force of the FBI and local law enforcement, resulted in the arrests of the chapter’s leader, Marcus Faella, his wife, and ten other alleged American Front members. They were accused of stockpiling weapons, experimenting with the creation of the toxin ricin and plotting some sort of “disturbance” on Orlando City Hall.

Riley has not been arrested. Documents detailing the probe described him as a “patched” or recognized member of the hate group’s Missouri chapter. They also said he was as a “member of the United States National Guard.”

“Faella had Riley conduct Paramilitary training on techniques (Hand to Hand Combat, edge weapon techniques) he learned from the National Guard,” the court documents said. “Additional training was held on breaking down assault rifles, water purification and other survival skills.”

On Wednesday, Spicer, the military spokeswoman, said it was too early to say for sure whether the person mentioned in the documents is the same person still serving as a specialist in the National Guard.

“We do not have any conclusions that this would be the same person at this point,” she said.

She said the National Guard’s Riley joined the the force a year ago and that he is on a typical part-time status, serving one weekend a month and two weeks a year. He served in another branch of the military for about seven years before that, but Spicer did not know which branch it was. She said, however, he served in Korea from 2004 to 2005 and Iraq from 2006 to 2007.

Riley could not be reached for comment.

The last time the Missouri National Guard took action because of the alleged racist ties of one of its members was earlier this year after guardsmen complained about a sergeant who served a full-time role on the honor guard.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch broke the story in March. It revealed that Sgt. Nathan Wooten had been the subject of complaints by his colleagues for months over vile, racist comments he apparently made. They said Wooten claimed to be a member of the National Socialist Movement, the largest neo-Nazi organization in the nation.

“He always talked about how great of an organization it is and how they hate minorities like blacks, Mexicans and Jews and how great the U.S. would be without them,” one of his colleagues said, according to the newspaper. Wooten also reportedly kept a picture of Hitler in his living room and balked at presenting flags to the families of black and Jewish veterans.

Wooten denied the allegations to the newspaper, but just before publication of the Post-Dispatch story, he was fired from his full-time role with the honor guard.

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