a thread for the (potentially) lynched census worker and its connection to glenn beck, hannity, rush limbaugh etc etc etc

good job glenn, you got another "scalp"!

AP source: Census worker hanged with 'fed' on body

By DEVLIN BARRETT and JEFFREY McMURRAY (AP) – 1 hour ago
WASHINGTON — A U.S. Census worker found hanged from a tree near a Kentucky cemetery had the word "fed" scrawled on his chest, a law enforcement official said Wednesday, and the FBI is investigating whether he was a victim of anti-government sentiment.

The law enforcement official, who was not authorized to discuss the case and requested anonymity, did not say what type of instrument was used to write the word on the chest of Bill Sparkman, a 51-year-old part-time Census field worker and teacher. He was found Sept. 12 in a remote patch of the Daniel Boone National Forest in rural southeast Kentucky.

The Census has suspended door-to-door interviews in rural Clay County, where the body was found, pending the outcome of the investigation. An autopsy report is pending.

Investigators have said little about the case. FBI spokesman David Beyer said the bureau is assisting state police and declined to confirm or discuss any details about the crime scene.

"Our job is to determine if there was foul play involved — and that's part of the investigation — and if there was foul play involved, whether that is related to his employment as a Census worker," said Beyer.

Attacking a federal worker during or because of his federal job is a federal crime.

Sparkman's mother, Henrie Sparkman of Inverness, Fla., told The Associated Press her son was an Eagle scout who moved to the area to be a local director for the Boy Scouts of America. She said he later became a substitute teacher in Laurel County and supplemented that income as a Census worker.

This would be horrible if there's a connection to radical anti-government sentiment. But it's a little premature to reach conclusions at this point.

(It's horrible in any event, I should note)

idk man! pretty weird that a part-time govt worker would feel guilty enough over working for the census two or three times a month to commit suicide in it in some cemetery in kentucky

it could be that someone killed him for some other reason and is trying to distract attention from him/herself, though it's a pretty stupid way to do it, because now there'll be a lot more attention given to the case.

jordy didn't you see what a dust-up this caused on the GOP thread. please be careful.

eh no, sorry

just sayin

You're right, J0rdan. Whatever happened, it is a very strange and sad story.

i've been putting off opening the GOP thread because the bookmark got super super long while i was away

i'll go read now

that thread is way too long for me to try to begin reading it

But that thread is so informative!

i'm sure the nutrition nazi one is too, it's just ... really really long

i don't really follow it either. it's just today's posts though. very productive discussion ^_^

sorry for ellipses

haha

here is a post of mine with the harbl filter poop i hope it's okay poop

Might this be somehow related?

http://www.snopes.com/fraud/identity/census.asp

Basically some scammers have been posing as census takers in NC recently, and robbing/attacking people who let them in. I wonder if someone thought the genuine census worker was a scam artist, killed them, and then... well, the rest doesnt add up, but I dunno.

thought he was a scam artist = wrote "fed" on him

?

Census employees were told Sparkman's truck was found nearby, and a computer he was using for work was found inside it, she said. He worked part-time for the Census, usually conducting interviews once or twice a month.

here's a youtube from some wingnut guy who decides to film/photograph a census worker cuz he has a gps which the gubmint will then use to spy on them

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qqm8ke5Sbc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyXTyDBc3-c&NR=1

Tags:
GPS US Census freaks out avian bird flu bioattack queen elizabeth health care scam ponzi scheme rham emanuel gun ban guns new world order ron paul stimulus rant bailout endtimewatchman conspiracy martial law obama fed illuminati congress ufo

batshit wingnuts no likey u.s. census

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoF2B7T0VR8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-Mo8Klw9lQ

Tags: GPS Census Marking Front Doors of American Babylon Obama FEMA Camps Red Yellow Blue list Wrath Sin Anti-Christ Religion Christianity God Elohim Yehshua El Shaddai Jesus Judaism Islam

still thinking the drug-dudes-in-nat'l-forest angle is the better one - hardcore weed ops occur in california nat'l forests and the dudes who farm them are armed & dangerous

Haha am0n did you notice the comments on those videos?

It seems like you are blowing a lot of smoke just to get channel views, there is nothing illegal or innapproiate about what the census worker did.

Coinneach2 (7 hours ago) Show Hide 0 Marked as spam Reply | Spam
Well, the Bureau uses its own system and doesn't automatically have the most updated maps and addresses that have been added or changed over the last decade. It is up to the Bureau to update all that out on its own, it doesn't collect those updates from other government or non-government agencies. Awkward, yes, but that's how the Bureau is set up.

CaptainLorax (7 hours ago) Show Hide 0 Marked as spam Reply | Spam
that's 9:54 seconds I will never get back. I cant believe I wasted my time on listening to you paranoid freak

CaptainLorax (7 hours ago) Show Hide 0 Marked as spam Reply | Spam first of all you are such a wingnut that I wouldn't even be surprised that you had this whole thing staged.

and if it wasn't staged, what's the big deal that he came back to your house and rand the bell.

and for all I know you were shouting death threats at him during the parts you edited out from the first video.

Even if this is, as it seems, anti-Census violence, I wouldn't put too much blame on Fox or cable news.

Parts of Appalachia have been scary for decades. I remember, when planning an aborted Appalachian Trail thru hike 18 years ago, that guidebooks advised moving through some counties in Kentucky, North Carolina and West Virginia as fast as possible, and interacting with no locals outside of fairly established commercial towns.

IIRC, there were a string of unsolved rapes and murders of AT hikers in these areas, and a lot of verbal resentment from locals about the ATs creation from Forest service land some 30-40 years prior.

In short, parts of this nation don't deserve anyone's tourist dollars, no matter how scenic.

still thinking the drug-dudes-in-nat'l-forest angle is the better one - hardcore weed ops occur in california nat'l forests and the dudes who farm them are armed & dangerous

J0hn OTM I am kinda leaning towards this explanation as well

esp given recent stories about how far mexican drug cartels have infiltrated into the states, with associated spillovers in violence.

guys, it is worth mentioning that Daniel Boone Nat'l Forest supplies much of the weed for the mid-southern parts of the United States, and is also a haven for anti-government wingnuts. there was a fantastic article on the forest a while back in Harper's, which you can read here: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/07/0082096 .

this talks about that potential drug angle
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jbzG_BlkG2Hfc818EPRRn1bBlP6gD9ATVMKG2

Davis acknowledged Clay's "pretty wild history of a black market economy, a drug economy." He noted that Sparkman's death occurred at a time when marijuana producers are typically harvesting their crop.

damn hippies on the warpath

having spent some time in that intersection of ky/va/tn/nc, i'd say there are a lot of people there who don't need any lessons from glenn beck in how to hate the gubmint. or much provocation to violence. who knows what'll come out, anything's possible. but pockets of southern appalachia are still pretty snarly in ways that predate talk radio by a considerable amount. (there's also lots of cool stuff there, culturally and even politically -- great union history, for one thing, and a lot of environmental activism. but that coexists with and in some cases overlaps with a pretty deep suspicion of outside authority.)

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jbzG_BlkG2Hfc818EPRRn1bBlP6gD9AUMOOG0

"The only thing he had on was a pair of socks," Weaver said. "And they had duct-taped his hands, his wrists. He had duct tape over his eyes, and they gagged him with a red rag or something."

"And they even had duct tape around his neck. And they had like his identification tag on his neck. They had it duct-taped to the side of his neck, on the right side, almost on his right shoulder."

Weaver said he couldn't tell if the tag was a Census Bureau ID because he didn't get close enough to read it. But both of the people briefed on the investigation confirmed Sparkman's Census ID was found taped to his head and shoulder area.

Quite an extravagant suicide.

i hadn't heard about this this is fuckin nuts

A part-time census worker found hanging in a rural Kentucky cemetery was naked, gagged and had his hands and feet bound with duct tape, said an Ohio man who discovered the body two weeks ago.

Authorities have also said the word "fed" was scrawled with a felt-tip pen across 51-year-old Bill Sparkman's chest, but they have released very few details about the case and said investigators have not determined if it was a homicide, suicide or an accident.

u gotta be fucking kidding me

Anyone want to explain to a Britisher why this is connected to beck, hannity etc.? They not mentioned once on the thread and I don't want to click mental youtubes.

they hate the census because it's a way for the federal government to control you and give your money to illegal immigrants or something

more than that -- the 2010 census is almost certainly going to show an increase in the hispanic population, with possible congressional districting consequences for states like texas and arizona. (in ways that are not going to be helpful to republicans, naturally.) and with a democratic administration running the census, right-wingers are ostensibly worried about "overcounting" of poor/urban/minority populations. (which a lot of people say have been traditionally undercounted, because it's a fairly transient population.) basically, they see a census overseen by a black president as all part of the political emasculation of white people.

sounds like a total drug-trafficking murder to me

has there been any updated info on the story since it broke? this wigs me right out.

"The man was found stabbed 47 times. Authorities have ruled the death a suicide."

today's roundup

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/09/witness_sparkman_was_bound_gagged_and_naked_when_f.php

right-winger floats a different theory...

http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2009/09/was-census-worker-bill-sparkman-a-child-predator.html

as soon as I saw he'd been a schoolteacher and scout leader, I got this feeling someone was going to go there

like "it wasn't an F, it was a P"

pfederalst

yeah it's sadly typical, casting around for some reason to excuse or sympathize with the brutal act rather than with the victim of it.

i think we're living in a really authoritarian moment, maybe we always are. i have this dark suspicion that if you carried out a basic thought experiment -- ask people to give their first impression to a simple situation: "two people are beating a single individual"; how many would want justification that the single individual had it coming? a quarter of americans? half?

have i brought that up before on ilx? i can't remember... i think about that hypothetical poll question and it's possible results all the time, i have since abu ghraib

just-world theory

huh, that's interesting... there have been a number of fake electric shock experiments over the years, haven't there!

i'm pretty under-educated in moral philosophy.

as soon as I saw he'd been a schoolteacher and scout leader, I got this feeling someone was going to go there

i thought about that too. i certainly hope there was nothing unkosher going on there -- i'd like to believe that adult males can be responsible mentors for children.

but my feeling is that he just got caught in the company of some dangerous people and it was a random attack.

Census worker's hanging death was suicide: US police

(AFP) – 51 minutes ago

CHICAGO — The death of a US census worker that sparked fears of anti-government violence after he was found bound to a tree with the word "fed" scrawled on his chest was ruled a suicide, police said Tuesday.

Bill Sparkman's body was discovered in September amid a wave of anger-charged protests of President Barack Obama's policies.

The story made national news and some reporters theorized that Sparkman's work for the Census Bureau -- which is a federal government agency -- made him a victim of anti-government sentiment.

But police say Sparkman -- who had recently taken out two life insurance policies that would not pay out in the event of suicide -- staged his gruesome death to make it appear as if it were a homicide.

"Despite the fact that Mr. Sparkman was found hands, feet and mouth bound with duct tape, rope around his neck and the word "FED" written on his chest, analysis of the evidence determined Mr. Sparkman's death was self-inflicted," the Kentucky state police said in a statement.

"A thorough examination of evidence from the scene, to include DNA testing, as well as examination of his vehicle and his residence resulted in the determination that Mr. Sparkman, alone, handled the key pieces of evidence with no indications of any other persons involved."

Sparkman's friends told police that he had discussed ending his life and the anti-government sentiment in his rural, conservative county.

His death was investigated by the Kentucky State Police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the US Forest Service, the State Medical Examiner's Office, and the Clay County Coroner's Office.

Jesus.

are all republicans sleazy?

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/04/sean-hannity/558272/

yes