Feds Bag another Tea Party Patriot

Its a disturbing but all too familiar pattern. A Sovereign Citizen and Tea Party member takes the law in his own hands and ends up in Jail. Its a sad tale, but its not unsurprising given the tenor of many of the Tea Party protests held during the last 18 months.

This time the Tea Party Patriot in question is 40-year-old James Schmidlin of Cleveland, TN. Reports indicate that Schmidlin holds a master's degree in divinity and that he once worked with Church of God World Missions. How's that for family values?

Anyway according to the Feds, the Patriotic Schmidlin is alleged to have taken part in coordinated telephone attacks against members of Congress during the Health Care debate, placing more than 150 calls to congressional offices from his cell phone alone. According to the Federal indictment, Schmidlin "willfully" threatened to [paywall]:

"unlawfully damage and destroy a building by means of fire; to wit the house of United States Congressman John Boccieri."

Fortunately the FBI apprehended Schmidlin before he took his threats to the next level. Put aside the irony of a self described "man of God" (and an apparent Teabagger as we soon shall see) taking the law into his own hands and threatening to burn down a congressman's house. Any kook could have made a threat like this.

However, we know that by what happened during his arrest, Schmidlin isn't just a kook but also a Teabagger -a hardcore teabagging man of god to be precise.

Prosecutors also say in court records that evidence also includes a blog -- laced with numerous misspellings -- that Schmidlin posted on the website of the New Patriot Journal.

[...]

Records show that when agents attempted to interview Schmidlin last spring he handed them a laminated "sovereign citizen" card and said the government would have to prove that he had the means to carry out the threat.

At Schmidlin's court appearance in Chattanooga following his arrest, the defense attorney and two church representatives vouched for his good reputation and said he is very active in the Church of God.

Sovereignty, Baby! Schmidlin is a Joe Miller style Teabagger. He even had a laminated card declaring himself a Sovereign Citizen. Plus he can't spell and is a Church Official. Nothing says Tea Party more than this toxic combination.

For those of you unfamiliar with our Sovereign Citizen friends, they believe that the government does not have the authority under the Constitution to pass a wide variety of laws from Traffic ordinances mandating "Stop Signs" to the Income Tax and most of everything in between.

Now it is easy to have a laugh at the expense of our Sovereign friend while imagining him trying to explain why the government lacked the authority to arrest him as FBI agents hauled him off to the big house. Easy indeed. Mr. Schmidlin is gonna be getting crash course in governmental sovereignty pretty soon, after all.

However, I can't help feeling a little sorry for him. Would he be in trouble he's in now had he not been infected by the hate and conspiracy churned out daily by the right wing noise machine? He'd have to be much better off, I'd think.

After all, it looks like in his effort to stop imaginary socialized medicine from never not happening by issuing terroristic threats to Congressmen, that now he'll get to experience some real government run health care first hand - in prison.

Yes he'd have been much better off without the right wing noise machine.

Poor Dumb Bastard. Enjoy the Government Health Care.