Required reading for 'shysters'

LAWYERS are "punks, weaklings, con artists and losers" and they are destroying the United States of America. At least that's what you're likely to believe if you're an avid reader of the attorney-bashing US journal AntiShyster.

Amid advertisements for ammunition and cartoons of barristers beating Lady Justice with hammers, nestle articles aimed at exposing the US legal profession as "a criminal activity that depends on the public's confidence".

Dallas-based publisher Alfred Adask has told the US National Law Journal that more than half of his estimated 45,000 readers are members of the patriot movement - the right-wing fringe that is thought to include alleged Oklahoma City bomber Timothy J McVeigh.