As if things aren’t bad enough with the faltering economy, devastating job losses and rapid home foreclosures, a new government report is warning that right-wing extremist groups could be planning to use the hard times and the election of the nation’s first Black president as a recruiting tool. Click for more.

Hate Groups See Obama’s Election as a Good Thing In the eyes of many White supremacist groups, the election of a Black president wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Federal law enforcement officials and those who keep a bead on racist organizations say that these groups have seen a dramatic rise in their Internet recruitment since Barack Obama was elected. “It is the dark, underside of the Internet,” Raynham Police Chief Louis J. Pacheco, one of the founders of the High Tech Crime Consortium, told The Enterprise News of Brockton, Mass. “The Internet allows instant gratification and positive reinforcement to things outside the mainstream idea that you couldn’t  get prior.” The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which monitors white supremacist and neo-Nazi activity, counted 630  “hate sites” on the Web last year.  ”Every time the television shows an image of Obama it will be a reminder that our people have lost power in this country,” said a recent posting on an Arkansas-based Ku Klux Klan Web site. Read the rest here.