2/2/2014::Wild and Wacky, SOME leftovers from this past weekend

White Supremacist Felon Gets Eight Years in Weapons Case

John Christian Parks was determined to prove that the Forest Service rangers who arrested him while smoking meth and firing off rifles out in the woods with his buddies had made an “illegal gun grab” when they confiscated his weapon. But what he accidentally wound up proving instead is just how easy it is for convicted felons to ignore federal laws prohibiting them from owning guns.

Parks, a 38-year-old white supremacist from western Washington state, was busted in March 2013 with several of his friends when Forest Service officers encountered them at a clearing in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. The officers let Parks go on his own recognizance, but confiscated methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia, along with his rifles. According to a detailed account by Levi Pulkkinen in Seattlepi.com, Parks began leaving phone messages demanding his guns and body armor back from the officers within days of his arrest.

That in turn spurred the interest of federal firearms agents, since Parks was a well-known felon – in fact, he had eight prior convictions. In 2004, while in King County jail on drug charges, Parks had briefly escaped by dashing out a jailhouse door and onto the street. Parks was free for several hours before he was surrounded by a crowd of concerned citizens and returned to custody.

Barton: God Will Come Out of Heaven to Oppose Our Unbiblical Economic System

David Barton has returned for another extended appearance on Kenneth Copeland's "Believers Voice of Victory" television program where he made the case that our economic system must be set up to correspond to "the way God says the government should do economics," which means that government needs to "reward those who make a profit."

Koch-Tied Groups Funded GOP Effort to Mess With Electoral College Rules

Last election season, a shadowy nonprofit pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into a campaign to change how electoral votes are counted. The group didn't disclose who was funding its efforts—a fact that Mother Jones highlighted in a story titled "Who's Paying for the GOP's Plan to Hijack the 2012 Election?" But now, thanks to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonpartisan government watchdog, it's clear that organizations with ties to billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch footed at least some of the bill.

Each state and the District of Columbia has a certain number of electoral votes, based on their population, and they get to decide for themselves how those votes should be allotted. Currently, every state except Maine and Nebraska gives all of their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the statewide popular vote. But in 2011, GOP lawmakers in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin introduced bills that would divide electoral votes among candidates based on how many congressional districts they won. Because Republicans drew the boundaries of the districts in those states, this scheme would be almost certain to hand Republican presidential candidates the majority of their electoral votes—even if more voters cast ballots for Democrats. (Read more about how the plan would work here.) Presuming the race is close enough, this could decide the nationwide outcome.