The money comes from the estate of Robert Harry McCorkell, a longtime Canadian member of the Alliance and chemist who reportedly spent time at MIT and the Smithsonian Institution before dying at age 67 in St. John, New Brunswick, in 2004. The estate includes, among other assets, a collection of ancient Greek and Roman coins, at least some of them gold, that McCorkell collected over the years and that was once displayed at the University of Saskatchewan Museum of Antiquities.

The news that the West Virginia-based Alliance could soon receive a huge infusion of Canadian funds set off a storm among human rights activists, several of whom suggested it might be possible to use Canadian law to halt the transfer.

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The campaign, which is now all over the LGBT blogosphere, encourages the faithful to get "on our knees for America" and the logo, as AmericaBlog puts it "appears to be a man performing oral sex."

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Two men, one of them a member of the Ku Klux Klan, were arraigned today in Albany, N.Y., on federal charges of plotting to build a mobile radiation gun intended to kill Muslims – or “medical waste,” as the plotters called their intended targets.

Glendon Scott Crawford, 49, a Klan member from Galway, N.Y., and Eric J. Feight, 54, of Hudson, are both charged with conspiracy to provide material support for terrorism in the use of a weapon of mass destruction.

The case has been under investigation by a Joint Terrorism Task Force since at least April 2012, when Crawford allegedly reached out to Jewish organizations, asking if Israel would be interested in such a weapon to kill its enemies.

“The essence of Crawford’s scheme is the creation of a mobile, remotely operated, radiation emitting device capable of killing human targets silently and from a distance with lethal doses of radiation,” says a 67-page criminal complaint filed by the FBI.

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Simcox, 52, was arrested yesterday after detectives found probable cause that he had molested the girls, all under the age of 10, police spokesman Sgt. Tommy Thompson told Reuters. The charges stem from incidents over the last few months. Simcox has denied all charges, according to a press release from the Phoenix Police Department.

He faces two counts each of child molestation and sexual conduct with a minor, and one count of attempted child molestation.

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The tax fraud cost the government $700,000 in erroneous payments. For his work, Raymond Leo Jarlik Bell received a 10 percent cut of the refunds paid to others and a flat fee for each bogus return he filed. He also received a fraudulent refund on his own taxes of approximately $35,000.

“Your scheme … is fraud at its core,” U.S. District Judge Ronald B. Leighton told Bell. “You are hurting people intentionally, regardless of your adherence to [your beliefs].”

The judge also had another message for Bell at the hearing last Friday: He ordered him to spend 97 months in federal prison to be followed by three years of supervised released and to pay $705,276 in restitution.

Bell assisted at least eight people in seeking fraudulent tax refunds of more than $3 million. The scheme relied on a bogus use of 1099-OID forms to claim refunds to which the taxpayer was not entitled.

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The federal investigation and prosecution of Joseph Jefferey Brice shines a spotlight on the antigovernment, anti-Semitic links shared between Islamic jihadists and white supremacists.

“Tim’s characteristics are nearly the same as myself, physically (and) politically,” Brice, 23, wrote in an Internet message posted on Jan. 14, 2010.

But the former “self-declared, conservative, right-wing Christian,” appeared to undergo a rapid radicalization to Islam after he nearly died on April 18, 2010, when an acetone peroxide ammonium nitrate bomb he built prematurely exploded near his rural home in eastern Washington.

Local sheriff’s deputies wrote that case off as a teenage prank and didn’t seek criminal charges, but federal investigators later became interested and launched an investigation after a backpack bomb attempt in Spokane in 2011.

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Even the steel doors and isolation of a federal prison can’t seem to stop some antigovernment “sovereign citizens” from continuing to file frivolous legal documents and liens against government officials and judges.

But, as a recent case in Seattle shows, a relatively new federal law is being used by prosecutors to punish inmates and other conspirators who believe they don’t answer to authority and continue to flood the legal system with spurious documents.

David Carroll Stephenson, 57, formerly of Tacoma, Wash., was sentenced last week in Seattle after being convicted by a jury of filing false liens against the director of the federal Bureau of Prisons and the warden at the Federal Correctional Institution in Phoenix.

“He is, in my mind, a very dangerous man,’’ U.S. District Judge Ronald B. Leighton said of Stephenson,  exceeding the recommended guideline range and sentencing the long-time antigovernment activist to 10 more years in prison.

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John Stortstrom, a mechanical engineer who works for the Army at its Edgewood Chemical Biological Center (ECBC), was among 150 white nationalists, many of them young, who attended the American Renaissance conference held in early April in Tennessee. American Renaissance is a journal dedicated to race and intelligence, with a heavy focus on the “psychopathology” of black people. Its editor has written that black people are incapable of sustaining any kind of civilization.

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James L. Gilkerson had a library of antigovernment, homemade munitions and firearms books in his vehicle — along with an AK-47 assault rifle, five loaded 40-round magazines for the weapon, knives, five pounds of gunpowder and a black mask and gloves, authorities say. He was unemployed, spent his time caring for his ill mother, and apparently had no history of mental illness.

One of his books, Resistance to Tyranny, espouses a lone-wolf  “underground movement of secret freedom fighters, each acting individually and independently to ignore, evade, resist and thwart the increasingly heavy hand of government power.”

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While America searches its soul, attempting to make sense of these and other horrific attacks that have rocked the nation with disturbing regularity over the last several years, gun rights absolutists have flooded the Internet and airwaves with wild-eyed talk of sinister government plans to undermine the Second Amendment and disarm harmless American patriots.

At the bottom of the barrel are those who seek to profit off these national tragedies. That’s where you’ll find Caleb Lee, a veteran huckster who has partnered with WorldNetDaily, Glenn Beck and others to offer anyone with $27 information on how to built a completely untraceable AR-15 assault rifle in the comfort of their own garage.

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At least that’s the pitch – and the hope – of the Oath Keepers founder, Stewart Rhodes, as he tries to raise $30,000 in time to get a car on the track for a June 1 NASCAR-sanctioned second-tier race at Dover International Speedway in Dover, Del.

“This is the first of what we hope will be many races run with an Oath Keepers car,” Rhodes writes in an on-line money pitch. “The potential exposure is in the tens of millions.”

On its website, the far-right group says donations “will speak loudly to all the foes of our Republic, both foreign and domestic, so please be as generous as you can to help preserve the liberty we cherish.”

Rhodes, a Yale-educated lawyer and Army veteran, founded the rapidly growing organization in 2009. It is comprised mostly of active-duty police and military, as well as veterans, who worry about issues such as gun control and the much-feared “New World Order.”

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As The Daily Beast reported yesterday, the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity is ostensibly designed to promote a discourse about U.S. foreign policy. But its advisory board is stacked with what writer James Kirchik characterized as “a bevy of conspiracy theorists, cranks, and apologists for some of the worst regimes on the planet.”

And just who are the far-right luminaries helping guide Paul’s new endeavor?

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The Appleby Baptist Church in Nacogdoches, Texas, is among this country’s scattered, independent fundamentalist churches still openly promoting the idea that the Biblical Noah pronounced a curse on descendants of his son, Ham. Ham had sexually molested Noah as he slept in a drunken stupor, and Noah realized it, the story goes. The curse ultimately fell on Canaan, Noah’s grandson, whose descendants were black and fated to be an underclass of slaves, according to this version of the Bible, which has been widely discredited by mainstream religious scholars.

But the canard is trumpeted loud and clear in an online statement of conviction by Appleby leaders. The East Texas church, 90 miles from Shreveport, La., is “a bit of a throwback, but these people are still out there,” Rachel Tabachnick, a fellow at the think tank Political Research Associates, told Hatewatch. She researches the impact of the religious right on politics and society.

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Phillips had a long history in conservative and right-wing movements, including three runs as a third-party presidential candidate. He sat on the board of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) and worked on Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful 1964 presidential campaign. He then went on to get involved in the administration of Richard Nixon, who appointed him head of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO).

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The Muslims did it. No, it was an illegal immigrant. Think again – it was a gay guy. Wait, you missed the key signs: Our own government once again pulled off an act of covert terror to promote its nefarious aims.

Fingers have been pointed in all of these directions by conspiracy theory peddlers and professional hatemongers since the bombings Monday.

“It’s a pretty safe bet right now that this attack was carried out by an Islamist,” declared a post on the Tea Party Nation website Tuesday. The obvious cause for the violence? “We have a government that is not committed to protecting America.” Linking Islam with Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” of Communism, the post warned that the Boston bombings are just another event presaging future violence in “an ideological war” that can only be won if we have tougher, more anti-Islam U.S. political leaders. That, of course, would be the Tea Party cabal.

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The 21-year-old Aguigui, according to Georgia state prosecutors, funded his dreams of overthrowing the government through a campaign of political assassination and other acts of terror with money from a $500,000 life insurance policy he received after the “highly suspicious” death in July 2011 of his wife, Deirdre, an army sergeant who had served a tour of duty in Iraq as a linguist.

While the army has been investigating Sgt. Aguigui’s death for nearly two years, military officials released no further details, according to The Associated Press.

Following his wife’s death, Aguigui and his followers spent $87,000 on military-grade weapons and bomb-making material.

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“I can’t see them,” someone else said, climbing on his tiptoes. “They’re too many cops in the way.”

The police presence was indeed overwhelming and the rain steady as the Klan arrived at the courthouse steps at 2:15, about 45 minutes late on the day before Easter. But from the city-designated protest area it was impossible to hear them and nearly impossible to see them except for the tops of their pointy white hoods.

As soon as they arrived, the multiracial crowd of about 400 anti-Klan demonstrators and onlookers — who were kept in the Best Park parking lot, behind a 6-foot high fence and a phalanx of police officers on foot and horseback — began chanting, “KKK out of Memphis.”

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Christopher Lacy’s ideological ties to the sovereign citizen movement, whose adherents generally believe they are immune to federal tax and many criminal laws, were documented with more than 100 interviews and search warrants. But the seven-month investigation failed to determine why he shot CHP Trooper Kenyon Youngstrom on Sept. 4.

The trooper was fatally shot at close range moments after stopping Lacy’s vehicle, which had an “obstructed license plate” as it traveled on busy Interstate 680 near Alamo, Calif., the sheriff’s office said in a just-released summary statement. That was only the latest murder of a law enforcement official during a traffic stop by a sovereign citizen, most of whom believe the government has no right to regulate their driving. On May 20, 2010, two West Memphis, Ark., police officers were slain by a father-son team of sovereigns during a routine traffic stop.

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But James Timothy Turner, delivering his own opening statement at the trial that began Monday in Montgomery, Ala., cast himself as the victim. “I discovered things that big Washington government doesn’t want you know,” he said. “They’re trying to shut me up.”

Turner faces 10 tax charges, including conspiring to defraud the federal government, attempting to pay his own taxes with a fictitious financial instrument and attempting to obstruct an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) investigation. He faces up to 164 years in prison and large financial penalties if convicted on all charges.

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Jarvis Britton, 25, wrote the Twitter threats last year and now faces up to five years in prison when he is sentenced on June 20.

“Free Speech? Let’s Test This! Let’s Go Kill The President!” Britton tweeted on June 29, 2012.

That was followed the next day with, “@BarackObama I wish you were dead.”

But it wasn’t until “an anonymous female caller” contacted the authorities and informed them about the tweets that Secret Service agents interviewed Britton in his Birmingham home last July. According to court papers, Britton admitted posting the threatening statements but said he didn’t intend to harm the president.

He told the agents that he had been drinking and was “just acting stupid.’’ He even apologized for wasting the agents’ time. Britton was not arrested until nearly three months later, when the Secret Service Internet Threat Desk notified the Birmingham office that he was at it again.

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