AD Main Menu  Straw man: 'Sovereign citizen' movement grows
across U.S.  Patrik JonssonThe Christian Science Monitor   While
the sovereign-citizen movement has been around for decades --
evolving from a 1970s anti-tax protest to the "freeman" movement
of the 1990s -- it has spread in recent years, driven by high
unemployment, mass foreclosures, and other economic hardships.
The lure is the movement's peculiar ideology: that Americans can
free themselves from the authority of the United States
government through obscure and byzantine legal filings that
purport to reveal the illegitimacy of U.S. law.    The incidents
in Arizona and Arkansas have followed others:   The Guardians of
the Free Republic, a sovereign-citizen group that has tried to
set up an alternative U.S. government, last year sent subtly
threatening letters to all 50 U.S. governors.    Once populated
mostly by white men, the sovereign-citizens movement is now
drawing in women, Hispanics, and African-Americans, according to
the Southern Poverty La