That racist loon with the gun intimidating voters in Arizona

Latino voters in Arizona were confronted by aggressive anti-immigrant activists armed with a video camera and a gun at a polling station in Tucson yesterday. They were well known in Arizona from the extreme lunatic fringe of the extreme anti-immigrant movement.

Armed, threatening and almost pathetically eager to provoke conflict and violence Ray Warden has a noxious history of intimidation and bullying:

With a fanny pack loaded with water bottles strapped to his belly, a Glock 9mm on his hip, and a bullhorn to amplify his outrage, Roy Warden, 59, emerged this spring as one of the country's most controversial, volatile, and, many believe, dangerous characters of the anti-immigration movement. Along with occasional sidekicks Russ Dove, a former militia leader and convicted car thief, and Laine Lawless, the founder of the group Border Guardians who earlier this year urged neo-Nazis to terrorize Hispanics, Warden has burned and trampled Mexican flags in public, nearly started at least one riot, regularly wreaked havoc on Tucson City Council proceedings, and E-mailed a death threat to a prominent local public defender. Without regular followers or even a named group behind him, Warden is a one-man band of immigrant-bashing hate, a man so untamed that other anti-immigration activists shun him as an embarrassment.