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This should make us all so proud. A couple excerpts from Tim Egan's piece in today's NY Times.

A Republican candidate for governor of Idaho, Rex Rammell, was at a political barbecue last week when somebody brought up the tags used by wolf hunters, and then made a reference to killing the president of the United States.

“Obama tags?” Rammell replied, to laughter, according to an account in The Times-News of Twin Falls. “We’d buy some of those.”...

Ha-ha. What a knee-slapper, these assassination jokes. And besides, he couldn’t hunt down Obama with out-of-state tags. Get it?

Yeah, we get it all right. Yahoos everywhere. And the more national coverage the lunatic fringe gets (can you remember a day when you didn't hear about Palin/Beck/Limbaugh/Hannity or see their disgusting mugs at least a couple times?), the more these nutjobs will crawl out of the woodwork and the backwoods and seek out the spotlight.

For years, Idaho officials have been trying to convince businesses that their state is not a hotbed of hate-filled rubes, gun-toting racists and assorted nut jobs getting their information from Glenn Beck. Tech companies that thrive in the New West metro area of Boise and the outdoor paradise of the north say the state’s reputation has severely hurt efforts to recruit ethnic minorities.

And you can imagine what our local wingnuts would say to that. "Good. They don't look like the America we love anyways."

But the piece does get positive.

But this is a changed state in a quick-stirring part of the country — not necessarily less Republican, but certainly less tolerant of the kind of hate speech that used to flow with warm beer on late nights at the wacko corral. Obama, the candidate, drew about 14,000 people in his appearance in Boise last year — putting it among the largest political gatherings in state history. He got just under 47 percent of the vote in Ada County, the state’s most populous.

There is hope and promise. But as long as there are people (or a whole party) with no qualms about lying and obstructing progress for political gain and in every way playing to people's fears, we will see what we see now around health care and, the actual point of this piece, wolves. Freedom of speech is a wonderful thing.