On Tuesday, professor Festus Oguhebe pleaded no contest to one count of felony child abuse for putting ants on his child.

Last year, he was charged with five counts of felony child abuse. The charges involved his children, ages 7 to 15.

Oguhebe's attorney, Robert Smith, said that in exchange for a no-contest plea, the other four counts were dropped.

"He believes in academic excellence. This stems from a bad report from school his child obtained, and he was concerned about that," said Smith.

A sentencing date has not been set.

Smith said the children are with Oguhebe's ex-wife.

Alcorn State said that no decision has been made on the professor's future at the university.

A MOTHER held her young daughter's hand to comfort her while she was being sexually abused by a man at remote bush camps in the Northern Territory, a court heard today. The story of the girl's ordeal emerged as Walter Lance Cronin, 50, was sentenced to at least seven years in prison for molesting her for four years from the age of five.

Cronin made the child, known only as S, perform oral sex on him and forced her to watch him have sex with her mother over four years from 1993.

He also molested, hit and verbally abused S, calling her a "whore and bitch'', at a number of locations in the Adelaide River and Roper Valley region.

The little girl sometimes held her mother's hand during the sexual abuse and on at least one occasion Cronin doused the child with petrol and threatened to "warm her'', the court heard during the trial.

Last week the former stationhand and bulldozer driver was found guilty of gross indecency with a minor and of maintaining an unlawful sexual relationship with a child under 14.

Justice Stephen Southwood today sentenced Cronin to 10 years' prison with a non parole period of seven years for his "abhorrent and depraved'' actions.

"He told S what to do and warned her that if she did not do what he told her things could get worse,'' Justice Southwood told the Supreme Court in Darwin.

"It is clear that the offender committed multiple offences of a sexual nature over a substantial period of time.''

He said S often sported bruises and had suffered "overwhelming heartache''.

"S was utterly vulnerable, she had a total incapability to defend herself or remove herself from the situation due to her immature age,'' he said during sentencing.

"The court must do what it can to protect such girls from this sort of behaviour.''

Cronin failed to show remorse for his crime and only stopped the abuse when S moved interstate in 1997, Justice Southwood said.

She reported the abuse at that time but Cronin denied the allegations and was not arrested and charged until 2004.

Justice Southwood said S had been traumatised and that her education and social development had suffered accordingly.

''(But) she realises that in order to have a good life she has to put the bad things behind her. Her courage and resolve to go forward with her life are to be admired.''

Despite an ongoing problem with alcohol, Cronin, who has fathered three children, had a good employment record and his former place of work, Tipperary Station, paid his court costs.

Foley had had to submit his resignation following the revelation of sexually explicit emails that he had sent to young interns at the White House. The congressman, also known to have a drinking problem, blamed the shameful conduct on trauma he had suffered from sexual abuse by a clergyman.

Foley had said he was molested when he was a young parishioner at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church. He forwarded the name Fr Anthony Mercieca to his lawyers. The priest, when contacted, acknowledged that the two had several intimate encounters although he specified that they did not end up in sexual intercourse. He also said he had not abused the boy and that there was brotherly trust and love between them.

The priest, now 69 yrs-old, said the two of them would often swim naked in a lake and visit saunas together. On one occasion, the priest remembers massaging Foley's legs in a room they had shared.

The scandal and the embarrassment have shaken the party. They had hoped the ignominy around Foley's exit would soon be forgotten when the priest acknowledged his liaison to the media. The priest currently lives in Gozo, an island off Malta.

The scandal has triggered many rumors involving other Republicans in similar situations. Fellow Republicans have condemned Foley saying he has brought disgrace not only to himself but also to Congress.

Many in Michoacan's mountains and colonial cities are doing just that: They are tightlipped, their newspapers are censoring themselves and in one town, 18 out of 32 police officers quit saying they had received death threats from drug smugglers.

In the most gruesome case, gunmen burst into a nightclub and rolled five heads onto the dance floor. In another, a pair of heads were planted in front of a car dealership in Zitacuaro, a town best known until now as a nesting ground for monarch butterflies.

By a highway outside Tepalcatepec, suspected drug smuggler Hector Eduardo Bautista's tortured body was dumped on July 10. Near a black metal cross put up by his family at the spot, killers apparently avenging his death have been leaving severed heads - five so far - each with a threatening message.

Beheadings and accompanying notes in sometimes cryptic and misspelled Spanish are becoming a ghoulish vogue among the gangs that grow marijuana, cook methamphetamine and run cocaine in Michoacan. There have been 420 homicides in the state this year, including 19 police chiefs and commanders, and Juan Antonio Magana, the state's attorney general, says well over half the killings were drug-related - the work of smuggling gangs reorganizing after authorities captured some of their top leaders.

"These are groups that are very big, very strong and are out to dominate territory," Magana said in an interview.

Drug smuggling in Michoacan has traditionally been controlled by a syndicate known as Los Valencia. Police arrested its leader, Armando Valencia, in August 2003 and one of his lieutenants, Carlos Alberto Rosales Mendoza, a year later.

Now, anti-narcotics investigators say, the Gulf cartel based in northern Mexico is battling its way into Los Valencia territory, relying on "Los Zetas," ex-Mexican army operatives-turned hit men. Los Valencia loyalists have fought back fiercely.

Many notes attached to slaying victims are signed "The Family," a possible reference to Los Valencia. Some mention "La Chata," a known alias for a top reputed Gulf cartel hit man.

"They don't need to leave written messages. The mere fact that they are using such high levels of violence is sending messages of intimidation, causing fear," Magana said. "But doing it shows other gangs they can act in even more gruesome and violent ways than their rivals."

With a vast and sparsely populated Pacific coast and the rugged Sierra Madre del Sur Mountains, Michoacan is good territory for producing and smuggling drugs.

Many farmers have abandoned avocado, coffee and corn in favor of marijuana in the highlands, where roads are few and police can't easily penetrate. Smuggling gangs have cleared forests for airstrips. Small planes crammed with Colombian cocaine streak in, leaving loads that are ferried to the coast and stowed on fast boats that speed north toward the U.S. border.

Michoacan also has become a den for hidden meth labs.

Journalists statewide have covered the murders but some have avoided digging further after receiving death threats. On Oct. 13, police recovered the body of an unidentified man who had been shot 38 times and dumped outside the town of Tacambaro. An attached note in fluorescent yellow marker appeared to directly threaten the media: "The family and the ZZs are the same thing. Media outlets, don't sell out."

Calderon, who will be sworn in as president on Dec. 1, wants a new, better trained federal police force to investigate drug smuggling, longer prison terms for drug convicts and more extraditions of kingpins wanted in the U.S.

He says Mexico also needs more help from U.S. law enforcement, since Mexican smugglers are serving American drug users.

Attorney General Magana denies Calderon's contention that Mexican law enforcement is overwhelmed. But in Villa Madero, a logging town of crowing roosters and stray dogs asleep on cracked asphalt streets, the abrupt mass departure of police officers suggests a different picture.

"There's an enormous pressure here," said former officer Reyes Alberto Gamino, now retired at 21. "It's very dangerous."

Mayor Alberto Villasenor has said the police were fired for failing to show up to guard a municipal dance Sept. 16. The former officers claim they quit because gunmen were waiting to kill them for arresting a reputed drug boss.

One of the officers who resigned is Gildardo Villa. Interviewed in front of his home, Villa seemed nervous, looking over his shoulder constantly and answering questions in hushed tones.

"The threats had been coming for a long time," he said. "That's why we left."

Inside his cramped City Hall office, Justice of the Peace Apolinar Yanez acknowledged that police are afraid of the gangs, whom he described as "very well armed and very dangerous."

"I'm not going to tell you who they are, not going to give you names or tell you what kinds of activities they are involved in. I don't want problems," Yanez said. "But they were threatening the police."

Since the police officers quit, many in Villa Madero say they are afraid to leave their homes.

"There's a fear that affects everyone," said Enrique Acerra, 70, who runs a used-clothing store. "It's hard to feel safe."

There should be at least one universal response to this in Britain. Why is Tony Blair still Prime Minister after leading his country into such a disastrous war? Any large company would by now have got rid of a managing director guilty of a mistake on that scale. Any institution you care to name would have done the same. Why is Blair immune from the normal requirements of high office?

Why, instead of being allowed by the cabinet to establish six new policy committees designed to entrench his legacy, has he not been impeached and thrown out of office? Even if his Iraq policy was formed in good faith, the scale of the error surely requires us to ask him and all those concerned with this disaster to leave.

It doesn't matter now whether you were pro-war, strongly opposed to it or somewhere in between, the policy in the Middle East has been an unmitigated failure, an outcome that was built into the earliest planning for the enterprise. People's views four years ago don't count now because Britain is at the heart of a world-changing catastrophe and as far as our interests go, there has not been a single advantage, not even the one of keeping the special relationship alive.

How did we get here? The answer is still not entirely clear. We think we know that Blair manipulated the situation, but we still don't have all the evidence. What is needed is for people to come forward and for the past to be examined more intensively than before.

For instance, it is well worth returning to a memo written by a young diplomat named Matthew Rycroft, which is still significantly undervalued as evidence of the Prime Minister's drive to war and of the innate negligence of American planning for the period after the invasion.

Rycroft is now safely tucked away in Sarajevo as British ambassador to Bosnia. But in the summer of 2002, aged 34, he was Tony Blair's private secretary for foreign affairs. In this capacity, he attended a secret meeting at Downing Street which included Tony Blair, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, John Scarlett, the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General, and Blair's military chiefs and the sofa cabinet - Alastair Campbell, Sally Morgan and Jonathan Powell. He then wrote a memo to his boss, Sir David Manning, Blair's chief foreign policy adviser.

It is really a minute of the meeting. The crucial passage reads: 'C [Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6] reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC [the US National Security Council] had no patience with the UN route and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.'

The Downing Street Memo, as it became known, was published in the Sunday Times on 1 May 2005, five days before the general election. It certainly made an impact but by the end of that week, it had been washed away with the rest of the pre-election clamour. Blair had won a third term and his mysterious hold over the British electorate managed even to vanquish these revelations about British and American thinking eight months before the war.

It took a while for it to surface in the press in the US although its consequence was immediately grasped in the blogosphere. In Britain, the memo became part of the inconclusive miasma of the Hutton report into David Kelly's death and of the Butler review of intelligence on WMD; and it decomposed in the public's understanding at roughly the same rate. Indeed, one often wonders if Blair has been saved by the amount of material produced by public inquiries (Hutton is 740 pages; Butler 192). The more that is published, the more the issues blur.

But the memo is the goods. It establishes Bush's resolve to find a pretext for war, regardless of the facts on WMD and Saddam's links to terrorism. It further makes plain that there was little or no thinking about the postwar period, an error that now must be regarded as equal to or greater than the invasion. No surprise is expressed in Rycroft's account of the meeting about what was going on in America, which leads one to assume that among a very small group, the idea of invasion was a fully fledged possibility, even though Blair was assuring the public and cabinet colleagues outside the inner circle that nothing had been decided.

There was much more in the original Sunday Times report on the meeting. Jack Straw and Lord Goldsmith had doubts about the legal case for war, while Blair was committed from the outset to supporting US plans for regime change. At the time, no one seems to have remembered what Tony Blair had said in his evidence to Lord Butler's report into the intelligence on WMD, published eight months before the memo came to light. Blair said: 'I remember that during the course of July and August, I was increasingly getting messages saying, "Are you about to go to war?" and I was thinking, "This is ridiculous" and so I remember towards the end of the holiday actually phoning Bush and saying we have got to put this right straight away... we've not decided on military action.'

If not a direct lie, it is hardly the truth.

On the September dossier, Tony Blair said: 'The purpose of the dossier was simply to say, "This is why we think there is intelligence that means that this is not fanciful view on our part."'

It is clear now that he knew the Americans were fixing their intelligence for war and that he had to get his act together. In all the emails that emerged during Lord Hutton's inquiry, the pressure to make this case is clear. Here is one from young Rycroft: 'Part of the answer of "why now?" is that the threat will only get worse if we don't act now - the threat that Saddam will use WMD, but also the threat that Iraq's WMD will somehow get into the hands of terrorists.' Rycroft was helping to build the dishonest case he knew was being forged on the other side of the Atlantic.

There is a lot still to be discovered. I believe we need to know exactly what happened in 2002 in order to decide what we are going to do now. The collapse of allied purpose is clear, Iraq is in free fall, yet we still have not found out exactly how a small group of politicians and officials hijacked policy and took us to war against the clear wishes of the nation.

As the situation deteriorates in Iraq, Britain's need to distance itself from Blair's policy increases by the day. We need more answers. The call on the political establishment outside Number 10 is urgent. The House of Commons must show it is not been entirely debauched by party politics and bring the government to account and that includes Labour members.

In the meantime, my mailbox is open all hours for the slightest information that may cast light on the path to war.

"What he's (Reid) determined to do is to ensure we've got sufficient prison places, and obviously, he's looking at a number of ways of doing that and a prison ship is one possibility," Home Office minister Vernon Coaker told the BBC.

Britain's only prison ship HMP Weare, which could house 400 low-risk prisoners in Portland Harbour in Dorset, closed in 2005.

The ship, which had opened in 1997 as a three-year temporary measure, was condemned by the Chief Inspector of Prisons Anne Owers who called it an unsatisfactory, expensive "container" located in the wrong place.

The announcement comes as media reports said 47 prisoners were now being held in police cells to deal with the shortage after police forces made 240 places available.

The crisis comes because longer sentences and high reconviction levels have pushed prison numbers to a record high. There are now less than 100 places left in the system.

Other plans being considered by the Home Office include moving some prisoners to open jails and deporting some foreign inmates more quickly.

The Howard League for Penal Reform criticised the emergency steps and called for Reid to support community sentences which it said helped to reduce re-offending.

"Police cells cannot provide services to people who have mental health or drug addiction problems and will not be able to provide safe resettlement," said director Frances Crook.

"The system diverts police away from their community safety duties. No one benefits from this sort of panic measure and it is only necessary because the home secretary has not been paying attention to the deterioration of penal policy."

Earlier this month, the most senior judge in England and Wales said prisons were too crowded to give proper rehabilitation, adding they were often used as "social dustbins" for drug addicts and the mentally ill.

Lord Phillips said more offenders should be given community-based punishments rather than jail terms.

"State representative races can be won with modest budgets and small staffs, while affording the winner possible major media attention and the ability to file and promote legislation that can materially improve our people's plight," proclaimed Duke, citing personal experience.

"Most importantly, a state representative office is winnable for political novices and provides an excellent springboard for higher office."

This electoral strategy for building an extremist political movement in the U.S. was recently echoed by neo-Nazi John Ubele in an essay posted on the website of the Nationalist Coalition, a white nationalist group. In "The 2006 Elections: A Call to Action," Ubele expounds upon the positive uses of local campaigns, even failed ones, in helping lay the groundwork for a "national pro-White political party." These include heightened exposure for extremist ideas and organizational and management experience for activists.

One extremist who has gained both exposure and experience in 2006 is Larry Darby. As a candidate in a two-way Democratic primary race for attorney general of Alabama, Darby lived up to his recently earned reputation as an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. While campaigning, Darby made headlines by stating the Holocaust did not occur, telling an Associated Press reporter that no more than 140,000 Jews died in Europe during World War II, most killed by typhus. His outspoken atheism -- and support for legalizing marijuana -- pushed Darby even further outside the conservative mainstream of Alabama politics.

Yet, despite his views, his (later abandoned) atheism, and his near total lack of resources, Darby managed to poll 44% of the vote -- more than 163,000 votes.

While some of the lessons of Darby's success are particular to the race -- Darby ran against a political unknown, was listed first on the ballot, and was at least a vaguely familiar name to many Alabamians -- one lesson from his race and those of David Duke applies across the country: Dark-horse candidates with extremist views and unsavory allies can make surprisingly strong runs for office and poison public discourse in the process.

What follows are snapshots of 2006 political races featuring candidates that have espoused extremist views or are allied with hate groups.

Ray McBerry (Georgia)

Office sought: Governor

As the far-right anti-establishment candidate in Georgia's Republican gubernatorial primary, Ray "States' Rights" McBerry urged voters to back his vision of a return to "the Bible and the Constitution." The 38-year-old president of Dixie Broadcasting and hate group leader positioned himself against both "the downtown Atlanta establishment" and "the federal leviathan in Washington," fusing strident anti-immigrant rhetoric with paeans to God and the Old South.

McBerry is chairman of the Georgia branch of the racist League of the South and has ties to the extremist Constitution Party, which includes many radicals who seek to impose Old Testament law on the United States. He is also tied to the neo-Confederate Southern Party of Georgia. If elected, he promised to hold a state referendum on the return of the Georgia state flag of 1956, which included a small representation of the Confederate battle flag and was adopted as a symbolic protest against early civil rights advances such as the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision to desegregate schools.

The longest plank on McBerry's platform was his plan to end illegal immigration, which he called a threat to Georgia's "way of life". He promised to secure state borders using "all ... resources at our disposal" and to apprehend undocumented immigrants residing in the state, which already has some of the toughest anti-immigration legislation in the country. To accomplish this purge, McBerry cryptically called for the use of "numerous state departments ... not currently involved." Once rounded up, McBerry wanted to bill Washington for expenses accrued holding the prisoners "until they are removed from Georgia." In May, McBerry spoke at an anti-immigration rally in Montgomery, Ala., in which participants waved baseball bats and shouted anti-Mexican slurs.

On July 18, McBerry lost his primary bid to incumbent Gov. Sonny Perdue, taking 11.6% of the total, or 48,444 votes.

Shawn Stuart (Montana)

Office sought: State House of Representatives

How does a Republican candidate for the Montana House of Representatives get his own party to disown him and back the Democrat, even before a Democrat has been nominated? Ask Shawn Stuart. The 24-year-old Iraq veteran from Butte neglected to mention his involvement in the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement during his interview with local Republican leaders. When reports of Stuart's extremist activities surfaced in the March 25 issue of the Montana Standard, it was too late for his affiliation to be changed; he and the state Republican Party were stuck with each other. On April 10, the Montana GOP announced it would back the Democratic candidate in District 76, which contains around 3,000 registered voters.

Chuck Butler, a state Republican spokesman, told the Missoula News that had the party known about Stuart's extremist ties, it would not have welcomed him.

Stuart's activities were not that deep a secret. In the first weeks of 2006, two months before he announced his candidacy to applause at a Republican event, Stuart was openly listed as the contact for the newly established Montana chapter of the NSM, the nation's largest neo-Nazi organization. Stuart had by then also posted numerous articles on extremist websites and appeared as a guest on "The Hal Turner Show," a violently neo-Nazi shortwave program beamed out of New Jersey.

Don Goldwater (Arizona)

Office sought: Governor

"I need 643 $5 contributions in the next few weeks or the likelihood of an AZ/Mexico border fence ever being built is in perilous jeopardy."

So declared the website of Don Goldwater in late June. The plea captures both the anti-immigrant populism of the candidate and the regional backlash against illegal aliens that Goldwater hopes to ride into the governor's mansion.

Like the uncle Barry whose name he does not hesitate to invoke -- "The name you know. The name you trust" is among his campaign slogans -- Don Goldwater is no stranger to controversy. In June, Goldwater made headlines calling for illegal immigrants to be rounded up and sent to "work camps" where they would construct a wall along the border and "clean the areas of the Arizona desert that they're polluting."

Goldwater's statement was immediately condemned by U.S. Rep. Jim Kolbe and Sen. John McCain, both Republicans of Arizona, who said the candidate's statements reflected "a stunning lack of respect for the basic values of a generous and decent society."

If he makes it past the Sept. 12 primary, Goldwater promises to deploy the Arizona National Guard along the Mexican border as his first act in office.

John Ubele (Florida)

Office sought: Pasco County Mosquito Control Board

Twenty-eight-year-old John Ubele wants to help rid Pasco County of mosquitoes. Judging by his ties to a succession of neo-Nazi groups, mosquitoes are just the beginning. Indeed, Ubele sees his election to the Pasco Mosquito Control Board as the first step on the way to state and national office.

"Let's make 2006 the year we explode onto the political scene," wrote Ubele on the website of the neo-Nazi Nationalist Coalition (this breakaway group was recently formed by the Tampa and Denver chapters of National Vanguard, which itself earlier split off from the neo-Nazi National Alliance). "Every other race has politicians in office which represent their interests. It's time [whites] have politicians to represent ours."

To become one of those politicians, Ubele will first have to unseat five-time incumbent Rosemary Mastrocolo, a retired nurse. "I don't know what he knows about mosquito control," Mastrocolo told the St. Petersburg Times. "He hasn't gone to any meetings."

James Hart (Tennessee)

Office sought: U.S. House of Representatives

Notorious eugenicist James Hart, after being kicked off the ballot by the executive committee of the Tennessee Republican Party in March, is mounting a write-in campaign in the state's 8th Congressional District.

In 2004, Hart won 78% in the Republican primary and polled 60,000 votes in the general election despite losing to Democrat John Tanner. Two years later, Hart is once again vowing to keep "less favored races" from passing on their "poverty genes," thus turning America into "one big Detroit." Hart, 62, has argued that if American society had been integrated before the mid-20th century, the automobile, the airplane and the light bulb would never have been invented.

In his "Eugenics Manifesto," he declares: "Equality is man's most dangerous myth. All men do not have an equal right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Only the ethical, moral and law abiding have a right to liberty; only the productive and creative have a right to life; and only the wise have a right to the pursuit of happiness."

Glenn Miller (Missouri)

Office sought: U.S. House of Representatives

A former member or leader of the National Socialist Party of America, the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Confederate Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Patriot Party, Miller is running this year as a write-in candidate in Missouri's 7th Congressional District after being denied ballot access as a Democrat. The website of the former Green Beret, whty.org ("Let's get er done!! VOTE WHITE!!"), features links to the sites of David Duke, the White Patriot Party, the National Alliance, and Stormfront.org, a clearinghouse for neo-Nazi news and views.

In 1986, after months of leading his White Patriot Party in paramilitary marches through several Southern cities, Miller was convicted of violating a court order that prohibited him from engaging in paramilitary activity. Evidence revealed that active-duty Marines had helped him obtain stolen military weapons. Miller responded by going underground and declaring war on the United States, "race traitors" and Center co-founder Morris Dees. He was caught months later.

Today, Miller may be best known for having fingered others on the radical right in a 1988 sedition trial. After testifying against his one-time friends and colleagues, the former truck driver served three years in prison before being freed and moving to Missouri. Despite being known as a traitor to his movement, Miller has teamed up with fellow white supremacist Alex Linder to produce a racist newspaper that has been distributed around the country.

Art Jones (Illinois)

Office sought: U.S. House of Representatives

Art Jones, an insurance broker and former National Socialist White People's Party "stormtrooper," appeared in the March Republican primary for Congress in Illinois' heavily Democratic 3rd Congressional District. Jones' opponent, retired part-time clown Ray "Spanky" Wardingly, defeated him amid low turnout.

During the campaign, both men took pains to play down their pasts. Jones, 58, told a local reporter that he is no longer a white supremacist. Although his campaign literature touted his past membership in the neo-Nazi NSWPP, he called that "ancient history."

"I [now] consider myself a white racialist," Jones clarified. "I define ... a white racialist as someone who believes in the greatness of his people's past and the destiny of his people's future."

Jones' opponent, meanwhile, who retired from professional clowning in 1995, also urged voters to forget his past. "That was a long time ago," Wardingly told The Forest Park Review. "After a while, you say, 'Enough is enough.' I just put away that little red wig."

Tony Dolz

Office sought: State Assembly

Tony Dolz has a unique biography for a vigilante border crusader. A founding member of the Minuteman Project, Dolz is a naturalized Hispanic immigrant who speaks English as a second language and is married to a naturalized immigrant from Europe. He has also spent much of his adult life in the famously liberal northern European states of Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

But none of that stopped Dolz from volunteering in the Arizona desert in April 2005 to "protect our borders" with the group that was characterized by President Bush as a "vigilante" organization, or from emerging as a rising star in southern California's anti-immigration activist scene. On June 6, Dolz won 76% of the vote in the Republican primary for California's 42nd District, which includes the greater Los Angeles enclaves of Santa Monica and Malibu.

Dolz's website prominently features a "Hall of Heroes" containing just four names - Minuteman co-founders Chris Simcox and Jim Gilchrist, U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo (the Colorado Republican who has publicly claimed that illegal aliens are coming to the United States in order to kill Americans), and Barbara Coe, who heads the California Coalition for Immigration Reform (CCIR) hate group and is also a member of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (that group has said non-white immigration is turning the U.S. population into "a slimy brown mass of glop"). Dolz's relationship with Coe is not a distant one -- he said in his candidate statement that he works for CCIR as her "national security analyst."

Randall Terry (Florida)

Office sought: State Senate

Randall Terry, the controversial founder of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue and longtime advocate of theocracy, is challenging Republican incumbent Jim King for a state Senate seat in Florida's 8th District. Terry has earned an international reputation for his anti-abortion activism, having organized and participated in hundreds of protests resulting in more than 40,000 arrests. His most infamous acolyte, James Kopp, was charged in the 1998 assassination of a doctor near Buffalo, N.Y., and sentenced to 25 years to life.

At a 1993 anti-abortion rally in Fort Wayne, Ind., a local newspaper quoted Terry declaring, "Our goal is a Christian nation. ... We have a biblical duty; we are called by God to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism. Theocracy means God rules."

As a candidate, Terry mixes his Bible thumping with heated rhetoric against gays, immigrants and lawyers.

Austin Farley (Tennessee)

Office sought: State House of Representatives

Austin Farley, 34-year-old member of the racist Council of Conservative Citizens and co-host with James Edwards of the far-right radio program "The Political Cesspool," ran for state representative in Tennessee's 97th District. Farley's platform included a law that would make it illegal to change the names of contentious Tennessee parks and Civil War monuments, such as Jefferson Davis Park.

"The Political Cesspool" is the recipient of a Dixie Defender award from the Sons of Confederate Veterans, an extremist-led Southern heritage group, and it is regularly plugged on the white supremacist Stormfront.org website. Incredibly, the Memphis City Council also has made the show's two hosts "Honorary Memphis City Councilmen," citing their program for "outstanding contributions to the community." The program's guest list reads like a Who's Who of leading anti-Semites, white supremacists, Holocaust deniers, neofascist politicians, neo-Confederates and hate group leaders.

On Aug. 3, Farley lost his bid with just 16% of the vote.

Jimmy D. Giles (Mississippi)

Office sought: U.S. House of Representatives

The declared "anti-Zionist" and "pro-White" independent candidate for Louisiana's 3rd Congressional District, Jim Giles just wants to "be left alone to be happy and safe and productive." And the best way to accomplish this, he says, is "separating the races."

Giles, who has previously run for governor, Senate and Congress, is a former systems engineer for IBM and current Internet radio station owner and organic farmer. On his campaign website ("Working for Whites" is his slogan), he concedes that his "biggest personal flaw is my hot temper, but we need some real men in Congress and not just sissies." He goes on to complain about "the Jewish owned media," affirmative action, and a host of similar matters.

In his official platform, Giles calls for abolishing "titles of nobility" (a common goal for the radical right, many of whose adherents believe lawyers have such a title); ending of all immigration for 50 years and deportation even of those immigrants who have been amnestied; ending the ability of the "private" Federal Reserve Board to issue currency (another radical right bogeyman); and ending all relations with Israel.

In a 2004 interview with the Jackson (Miss.) Free Press, Giles called the conflict in Iraq "a war for the Jews" and added that Jews "run our country for the most part." "All politics and all life is about race," he added. "There is no escaping that reality."

Alexander Zaitchik is a staff writer at the Intelligence Report, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center.