Discourses

Imagine

noreply@blogger.com (TA) — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 21:53:00 +0000

This is how I choose to commemorate tens years of war and a government that tortures, spies on, and kills people under the guise of freedom.

If only....

The Passion of David Letterman

noreply@blogger.com (TA) — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 16:38:00 +0000

Apparently, making light of a departed al-Qaeda leader joining his predecessor makes you an anti-Muslim, according to al-Qaeda.

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David Letterman Targeted With Threat From Jihadist Website

Group lashed out at late night host over his jokes about an Al Qaeda leader.

By Gil Kaufman

David Letterman is currently on hiatus, but that hasn't stopped the late night legend from angering some people with comments he made before taking off for summer vacation.

According to reports from SITE Intelligence Group, which scans the Internet for terrorist activity, Letterman has been marked for death by a jihadist group for comments the "Late Show" host made on June 5 about Al Qaeda leader Ilyas Kashmiri, who was killed earlier this summer during a U.S. military strike in Pakistan.

The threat on the Shumukh al-Islam web forum, which called for followers to "cut the tongue of the lowly Jew and shut it forever," said that Letterman -- who is Protestant -- should be punished for his comments about the man who had been considered a possible replacement for late terror leader Osama bin Laden.

"He showed his evil nature and deep hatred for Islam and Muslims, and said that Ilyas Kashmiri was killed and he joined bin Laden," wrote someone calling themselves Umar al-Basrawi on the site, according toEntertainment Weekly. "We ask Allah to paralyze his tongue and grant the sincere monotheists his neck."

The FBI is reportedly investigating the threat and Letterman has been informed of the posting. The incident appears to have been inspired by a joke Letterman made in which he announced the death of Kashmiri, which involved the comedian making a slashing motion across his throat.

"He said that Kashmiri was killed in an airstrike in Pakistan ... then, he showed his evil nature and deep hatred for Islam and Muslims, and said that Ilyas Kashmiri was killed and he joined bin Laden. Then the despicable one put his hand on his neck and demonstrated the way of slaughter!!" wrote al-Basrawi.

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1669250/david-letterman-jihadist-threats.jhtml

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What I do not understand is that if it is blasphemy to note that your replacement leader (killed by the same people) is joining his predecessor, does that mean al-Qaeda thinks that Kashmiri is not in paradise with Osama, or vice versa? And if it means that one of them is not in paradise, how does that reflect on our holy warrior friends to pick a leader (Kashmiri or bin Laden) who is not currently enjoying the afterlife with his 72 virgins? And taking offense at making a symbolic choking reference! Dave, welcome aboard the heretic camp.

Of Riots and Dispossession

noreply@blogger.com (TA) — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 22:10:00 +0000

For those who thought the British government might reassess its budget cuts, or the impact of austerity, have their answer in the response of British PM Dave Cameron. His days of appealing for respect and understanding of youngsters with hoodies are officially over. Cameron understands the same principle as any other conservative politician in Europe or the US. Hating young people, especially young people of color, sells and sells very well. I suppose it should not shock anyone, but it never ceases to amaze me to see the love of property exceed the love of our fellow species, even if it means relativizing the impoverished as being less than full members of society. If inequality was a crime, high treason would not be enough to punish those who have turned people under the age of 25 in Great Britain into a generation of disposable garbage.

This is not to endorse the rioting, self-evident is the fool's errand of attacking shops owned by those with barely more money than the folk parceling up their goods, or even burning down and attacking your own neighborhood (punishing no one except yourself and your peers, instead of the banks, corporations, and the media outlets centered on keeping Europe and Great Britain of, by, and for the wealthy). The greatest sin of the youth rioters was not replicating their energies at the gates of Buckingham Palace and parliament. I can think of fewer states in the West, other than my own, more unjust in the way it has decided to destroy the lives of an entire group of people with poverty, unemployment, and debt as the current Cameron government. Say what you will about the French, but they knew who to go after when they 'rioted' in 1789. For some reason, young and poor people in Europe and the U.S. have a difficult time collectively realizing who their real enemies are (and it is not a small shopkeeper). It could be the cumulative effect of the utter brainwashing of our culture that diverts, privatizes, and individualizes our common experience to such extremes that we prefer simulated lives over real ones.

Even the Romans, the empire that so many neo-conservatives, classic liberals and their fellow denizens at the CATO Institute base themselves on, knew the importance of the bread and circus in maintaining social peace. What we have, the real crime scene in England, all across Western Europe, and North America (where conservative governments have become predominant in the last several years) is a divorce from the reality of our society, the belief that we have nothing to keep, no obligations, no values (unless you are a fetus, naturally), etc. That all we have are individuals, but what this philosophy fails to recognize (and willfully so) is that we no longer reside in a world of individuals, or at least since the pre-industrial age. The banks that have moved towards electronically monetizing our lives, the employers that drug test us and treat us like a cost and commodity to be processed, to the descent of our largest employer becoming a global corporation that refuses to hire most of workers full-time, give them benefits, and compels almost a fifth of those employees (in the US) to take public assistance, while selling over 70% of its stocked items from a country that can be best described as a wage haven. We live in a world of power, and that vacuum has been filled, replacing the civic culture we once had, and the social capital we no longer use. It is in that environment that the unconvicted felons we elect tell us to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps. It is in that world the elected criminal class of our society have turned themselves over to the old patronage system by becoming repositories for lobbying influence and accompanying campaign cash from the very interests we are prohibited to mention or question without having our citizenship questioned, the very same entities who diminished our real estate and banking markets, amassing trillions of dollars of debt, stealing hundreds of billions of our money (trillions if you count the monies that the Federal Reserve decided to manufacture for the purpose of toxic asset consumption). Those very same criminals who now tell us we are out of money (surprise), and that we need to pay the bills for the society they have wrecked, devalued, and want to continue to cheapen so they do not have to be inconvenienced with things like paying taxes for young people to go to college, receive an education or, dare the thought, get a decent paying job.

It is in that light I introduce the reasoned perspective of what could be considered as an unlikely source, comedian Russell Brand.

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Big Brother isn't watching you

Dismissing rioters as mindless is futile rhetoric. However unacceptable the UK riots, we need to ask why they are happening

by Russell Brand

I no longer live in London. I've been transplanted to Los Angeles by a combination of love and money; such good fortune and opportunity, in both cases, you might think disqualify me from commenting on matters in my homeland. Even the results of Britain's Got Ice-Factor may lay prettily glistening beyond my remit now that I am self-banished.

To be honest when I lived in England I didn't really care too much for the fabricated theatrics of reality TV. Except when I worked for Big Brother, then it was my job to slosh about in the amplified trivia of the housemates/inmates. Sometimes it was actually quite bloody interesting. Particularly the year that Nadia won. She was the Portuguese transsexual. Remember? No? Well, that's the nature of the medium; as it whizzes past the eyes it seems very relevant but the malady of reality TV stars is that their shelf life expires, like dog years, by the power of seven. To me it seems as if Nadia's triumph took place during the silver jubilee, we had a street party.

Early in that series there was an incident of excitement and high tension. The testosteronal, alpha figures of the house – a Scot called Jason and a Londoner called Victor – incited by the teasing conditions and a camp lad called Marco (wow, it's all coming back) kicked off in the house, smashed some crockery and a few doors. Police were called, tapes were edited and the carnival rolled on. When I was warned to be discreet on-air about the extent of the violence, I quoted a British first-world-war general who, reflecting on the inability of his returning troops to adapt to civilian life, said: "You cannot rouse the animal in man then expect it to be put aside at a moment's notice."

"Yeah, that's exactly the kind of thing we want you to say the opposite of," said the channel's representative.

This week's riots are sad and frightening and, if I have by virtue of my temporary displacement forgone the right to speak about the behaviour of my countrymen, then this is gonna be irksome. I mean even David Cameron came back from his holiday. Eventually. The Tuscan truffles lost their succulence when the breaking glass became too loud to ignore. Then dopey ol' Boris came cycling back into the London clutter with his spun gold hair and his spun shit logic as it became apparent that the holiday was over.

In fact, it isn't my absence from the territory of London that bothers me; it's my absence from the economic class that is being affected that itches in my gut because, as I looked at the online incident maps, the boroughs that were suffering all, for me, had some resonance. I've lived in Dalston, Hackney, Elephant, Camden and Bethnal Green. I grew up round Dagenham and Romford and, whilst I could never claim to be from the demographic most obviously affected, I feel guilty that I'm not there now.

I feel proud to be English, proud to be a Londoner (all right, an Essex boy), never more so than since being in exile, and I naturally began to wonder what would make young people destroy their communities.

I have spoken to mates in London and Manchester and they sound genuinely frightened and hopeless, and the details of their stories place this outbreak beyond the realms of any political idealism or rationalisation. But I can't, from my ivory tower in the Hollywood Hills, compete with the understandable yet futile rhetoric, describing the rioters as mindless. Nor do I want to dwell on the sadness of our beautiful cities being tarnished and people's shops and livelihoods, sometimes generations old, being immolated. The tragic and inevitable deaths ought to be left for eulogies and grieving. Tariq Jahan has spoken so eloquently from his position of painful proximity, with such compassion, that nearly all else is redundant.

The only question I can legitimately ask is: why is this happening? Mark Duggan's death has been badly handled but no one is contesting that is a reason for these conflagrations beyond the initial flash of activity in Tottenham. I've heard Theresa May and the Old Etonians whose hols have been curtailed (many would say they're the real victims) saying the behaviour is "unjustifiable" and "unacceptable". Wow! Thanks guys! What a wonderful use of the planet's fast-depleting oxygen resources. Now that's been dealt with can we move on to more taxing matters such as whether or not Jack The Ripper was a ladies' man. And what the hell do bears get up to in those woods?

However "unacceptable" and "unjustifiable" it might be, it has happened so we better accept it and, whilst we can't justify it, we should kick around a few neurons and work out why so many people feel utterly disconnected from the cities they live in.

Unless on the news tomorrow it's revealed that there's been a freaky "criminal creating" chemical leak in London and Manchester and Liverpool and Birmingham that's causing young people to spontaneously and simultaneously violate their environments – in which case we can park the ol' brainboxes, stop worrying and get on with the football season, but I suspect there hasn't – we have, as human beings, got a few things to consider together.

I should here admit that I have been arrested for criminal damage for my part in anti-capitalist protest earlier in this decade. I often attended protests and then, in my early 20s, and on drugs, I enjoyed it when the protests lost direction and became chaotic, hostile even. I was intrigued by the anarchist "Black bloc", hooded and masked, as, in retrospect, was their agenda, but was more viscerally affected by the football "casuals" who'd turn up because the veneer of the protest's idealistic objective gave them the perfect opportunity to wreck stuff and have a row with the Old Bill.

That was never my cup of tea though. For one thing, policemen are generally pretty good fighters and second, it registered that the accent they shouted at me with was closer to my own than that of some of those singing about the red flag making the wall of plastic shields between us seem thinner.

I found those protests exciting, yes, because I was young and a bit of a twerp but also, I suppose, because there was a void in me. A lack of direction, a sense that I was not invested in the dominant culture, that government existed not to look after the interests of the people it was elected to represent but the big businesses that they were in bed with.

I felt that, and I had a mum who loved me, a dad who told me that nothing was beyond my reach, an education, a grant from Essex council (to train as an actor of all things!!!) and several charities that gave me money for maintenance. I shudder to think how disenfranchised I would have felt if I had been deprived of that long list of privileges.

That state of deprivation though is, of course, the condition that many of those rioting endure as their unbending reality. No education, a weakened family unit, no money and no way of getting any. JD Sports is probably easier to desecrate if you can't afford what's in there and the few poorly paid jobs there are taken. Amidst the bleakness of this social landscape, squinting all the while in the glare of a culture that radiates ultraviolet consumerism and infrared celebrity. That daily, hourly, incessantly enforces the egregious, deceitful message that you are what you wear, what you drive, what you watch and what you watch it on, in livid, neon pixels. The only light in their lives comes from these luminous corporate messages. No wonder they have their fucking hoods up.

I remember Cameron saying "hug a hoodie" but I haven't seen him doing it. Why would he? Hoodies don't vote, they've realised it's pointless, that whoever gets elected will just be a different shade of the "we don't give a toss about you" party.

Politicians don't represent the interests of people who don't vote. They barely care about the people who do vote. They look after the corporations who get them elected. Cameron only spoke out against News International when it became evident to us, US, the people, not to him (like Rose West, "He must've known") that the newspapers Murdoch controlled were happy to desecrate the dead in the pursuit of another exploitative, distracting story.

Why am I surprised that these young people behave destructively, "mindlessly", motivated only by self-interest? How should we describe the actions of the city bankers who brought our economy to its knees in 2010? Altruistic? Mindful? Kind? But then again, they do wear suits, so they deserve to be bailed out, perhaps that's why not one of them has been imprisoned. And they got away with a lot more than a few fucking pairs of trainers.

These young people have no sense of community because they haven't been given one. They have no stake in society because Cameron's mentor Margaret Thatcher told us there's no such thing.

If we don't want our young people to tear apart our communities then don't let people in power tear apart the values that hold our communities together.

As you have by now surely noticed, I don't know enough about politics to ponder a solution and my hands are sticky with blood money from representing corporate interests through film, television and commercials, venerating, through my endorsements and celebrity, products and a lifestyle that contributes to the alienation of an increasingly dissatisfied underclass. But I know, as we all intuitively know, the solution is all around us and it isn't political, it is spiritual. Gandhi said: "Be the change you want to see in the world."

In this simple sentiment we can find hope, as we can in the efforts of those cleaning up the debris and ash in bonhomous, broom-wielding posses. If we want to live in a society where people feel included, we must include them, where they feel represented, we must represent them and where they feel love and compassion for their communities then we, the members of that community, must find love and compassion for them.

As we sweep away the mistakes made in the selfish, nocturnal darkness we must ensure that, amidst the broken glass and sadness, we don't sweep away the youth lost amongst the shards in the shadows cast by the new dawn.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/11/london-riots-davidcameron

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It is a sad world when a comedian sounds rational by comparison to the average British politician.

Thief Fest 2011: The Unconstitutional Disaster of the Congressional Super Committee

noreply@blogger.com (TA) — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 02:59:00 +0000

The fact we are where we are at right now with the budget deal, the resulting market collapse and downgrade, even though the administration used those possibilities to browbeat us into agreeing to a deal the week before, is symbolic of what has become of the Democratic Party in the US. Imagine a 3-inch elephant holding to heel and herding an entire flock of donkeys (and the donkeys emanating with pride at getting the miniature beast to stop scaring them by caving in to all of its demands and then following it with a mass display of hari-kari). In my adult life, and this goes back to the Clinton years, I have never witnessed such a gutless display by the national Democratic Party towards its voters as I have seen these past two weeks. You would almost think that we should be thankful to the House Republican caucus for even allowing us to live. I am sure if the Democratic leadership could negotiate that away, they most certainly would.

And it is not just the budget deal, which was a Republican budget ‘compromise’ (i.e., everything the Republicans want with nothing in return for progressives). Worse than even that, our beloved Senate Democrats have come to the rescue of the Republicans in the House by appointing its newly minted members of the vaunted ‘super committee’ that will deal with budget cuts. And of course, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is not going to appoint members who represent the views of what the Democratic base is like, minus possibly Sen. Patty Murray (Sen. John Kerry has a much more moderate voting record than anyone likes to give him credit for). Understand, one non-progressive member with a slew of conservative Republicans means that there will be a conservative majority and cuts that only conservatives will want to have included in the future for the budget (i.e., Social Security, Medicare, and anything else not related to the Department of Defense).

Enter Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s last pick, Senator Max Baucus, probably the most odious Senate Democrat since Joe Lieberman (before he finally quit the party back in ’06). The same Max Baucus who has been a longtime recipient of corporate campaign money, the result of which was his influence in killing the public option in Obama’s health care bill back in ‘09-10 (with the full support of the Obama Administration).

Max Baucus has never met a corporate interest he could say no to, or an intern or lobbyist for that matter. Putting this waste of Senatorial space on a right-wing-contrived committee (which goes outside of the scope of what Congress is supposed to be doing in Article 1 of our Constitution), a committee that is designed for the sole purpose of destroying Social Security and Medicare (and giving every last dime of our tax money to the upper 1% income tax bracket), is a crime of immense proportions. Essentially, the Democratic Party has declared war on its voters and gone in league with the Republican Party to gut every last vestige of the New Deal and Great Society programs that once made the Democratic Party worth voting for.

At this point, there is only one solution, the defeat of every last anti-progressive Democrat in the US by electoral non-cooperation. There would be no Max Baucus, Lawrence Summers, or Timothy Geithner without us. They have to come to us, the progressive base, to get votes. The Republicans (Attila the Hun types who view anyone to the center of Jefferson Davis as Satanic) will deem all non-Republicans as socialists (just as they red-baited Bill Clinton in the ‘90s, even while he was signing NAFTA, GATT, the Welfare Reform Act, and the Defense of Marriage Act). That is what Republicans do, or at least the incarnations since the Reagan era, and when you negotiate with Republicans this is what you get (i.e., Republicanism). If you want to stab us in the back (the people who put you into office) then you should be replaced, and if that means allowing by omission the Republicans to win then so be it. That is the fate we deserve for having a party filled with jellyfish leaders.

And when we are in the minority, for which we truly deserve to be right now, we should waste no time whatsoever in assigning the blame and holding to account the Obamas and Reids for what they have done to us, as a party and a country.

Give the conservatives in the GOP credit. They know and understand that much in their party, and they have no quandary about seeking ideological purity, and have done so to the point of getting what they want (and winning elections in the process). There is no reason why we should avoid doing the same. And if it means being a permanent minority to prevent our backs, knees, and throats from being slit by DLC-third way corporatists then we do not deserve to win to begin with. I will take that, and losing to an honest person who is wrong, over someone who pretends to care by waiting for the first opportune moment to throw me to the ash heap.

And, lastly, before I leave the fine reader, I would like to ask, where is the Constitutional challenge to this committee? Where in Article 1 of our Constitution does it give Congressional leadership the right to negotiate away the budgetary process, which is supposed to be under the control of Congress (as a body), over to a White House-brokered special committee with 1/45ths of the US Congress in it? Could anyone reading this imagine what James Madison would think to see his entire article in our Constitution rescinded by a 'compromise' with a branch of government that is not even supposed to be writing our budget or acting as a legislature? With the notable exceptions of Rep. Ron Paul (to give him his due) and Dennis Kucinich, very few members of Congress have spent anytime addressing this issue, to the media or the public. Of course, you will not see this type of objection from our Congressional leaders, Republican or Democratic, never mind the White House. No, so long as you give them what they ideologically want (cutbacks in social spending), the Constitution and the entire budgeting process be damned, to which I say, damned you, Congressional Democratic leaders and the White House for what you have done to our party and this country. It will take a generation to undue the damage you have done with this deal. This is the poison pill you have given us, and may it come back to haunt you all.

Cowardice as Compromise: The Courage of Barack Obama

noreply@blogger.com (TA) — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 03:40:00 +0000

If you listened to President Obama for the past week, you would think this country was about to implode if we did not 'come to a deal' of sorts with House Republicans. And like the weakling he has been from day one of his presidency, by compromise, of course, he means doing what the Republicans want him to do (be it caving in on shutting down GITMO, civilian trials for terrorist suspects, redoing the Patriot Act to eliminate its civil liberties violations, the public option in health care, support for gay marriage, and now budget cuts of the very programs given to us by the president's party). And what did the House Republicans like John Boehner want? Naturally, to gut social spending and keep Bush's tax cuts for upper income earners. And what did Obama give them? Deep social spending cuts and a continuation of Bush's tax cuts for upper income earners.

And how poignant that we allow Standard and Poor's and Moody's to sit in judgment of the US government, threatening to give us junk bond rating status if a 'deal' was not reached. These were the same crediting agencies who gave AIG, Bear Sterns, and Greece AAA ratings. And instead of being fitted for orange jumpsuits and a life behind bars, we continue to allow the very entities who destroyed our economy and way of life, along with giving them our tax money (under the guise of being too big to fail), to compel us to reduce a debt that is of no consequence to our economic well being.

Why would I write such a heretical thing about our capitalist system? Because from the very start of this country's existence, we have run a huge national debt. The only time in American history we consistently balanced our budgets, year after year, was in the 1830s, which presaged several economic collapses in subsequent years. At the time the US was founded, our debts then were greater (as a percentage of our GDP) than they are today. And the response of then-Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton was to encourage the creation of a national bank (subsidized with tax increases), so to fully fund the debts of our states, exclaiming that our national debt was a blessing to the US. Much like the free trade orthodoxy that pollutes almost every business and economics department of our universities, when in fact the US developed into an industrial superpower as a protectionist state well into the middle part of the 20th century, likewise, the US has never been a nation predicated on balancing its budgets (but was created and has funded itself on debt from the start of our history).

Indeed, during our greatest economic booms, like WWII, we ran annual deficits as a percentage of GDP more than twice as high as we do today. The dollar did not die, our economy did not leave us. We had full employment with federal government expenditures as a percentage of GDP around 45% (today, the media and its lackeys in Congress would have you believe we need to 'cap' that spending at 18% or risk doom).

How could it be that this entire debate is overblown and manufactured? Does it not matter at all that we have $14 trillion of national debt? No, it does not. We are no longer a poor nation of farmers, as we were over two centuries ago. Our GDP is over $14 trillion. Moreover, the debt ceiling is wholly unnecessary to the debt 'crisis', and its existence is emblematic at how it has become what it is at this hour. The only thing that really matters to the US government, other than the value of the dollar, is that we can meet the interest payments on our debt. So long as we can pay the interest, the rest of the debt is of no significance. No one will be collecting, no future generations paying, anymore than the grandchildren of Alexander Hamilton did after he drastically increased our debt burdens to the highest levels in our existence. And that is the sham of the debt ceiling debate. From the beginning, it was something that was contrived, so to use as a trojan horse to give Congress and the White House what they really wanted--cuts in federal spending (and not to corporations).

The most fraudulent of Obama's claims (and the Republicans he is flacking for) is the supposed need to 'reform' Social Security. You will never hear this on Fox 'news' or anything owned by Rupert Murdoch, and probably not even CNN at this point, but Social Security has a $22 trillion surplus. That is right, Social Security has a greater surplus than our entire national debt (157% more, to be precise). So, what is needed but to cut it! It is that same neo-liberal mentality in corporate America that gives us a business community that has since 2009 collected and sat on over $2 trillion, making record profits while refusing to use those reserves to expand or hire (thereby extending our recession). We, the people, the live ones, not the preborn or those with the word incorporated or ascription of millionaire at the end of their names, need more financial discipline, to have our money that we paid into these programs taken from us so that millionaires can continue to get a tax cut. Regardless of how Obama likes to call it, that is what he is doing.

From the start of this debate, the House Republicans controlled and dictated the terms of the agreement. The only real quandary that occurred was within the House Republican caucus, between the teabaggers and House Republican leaders who wanted to 'compromise' by cutting 'only' $2.4 trillion, as opposed to $4 trillion. The Senate Democrats, never mind the House Democrats, have never been a part of the debate or negotiation process with the president (that is, until the last minute for the Senate Democrats). Obama handed to his opponents the terms, accepted whatever agreement they generally came to, and then called it a compromise. If this is compromise, schoolyard bullies everywhere should rejoice. They have just been renamed peacemakers.

Why in the world would anyone support or vote for this? I guarantee you that is a question no one will be asking in the mainstream news. If you have been paying attention to what happened to The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur at MSNBC, and how he was strong-armed from the supposedly left-wing channel for being 'too critical' of the administration, you probably have a good idea as to how this proposal is going to be portrayed in the news media (i.e., like a 'grand compromise' that staves off certain financial collapse).

And to anyone who lives the illusion that this was not driven by the Republicans, and that Obama might not have caved in to the GOP, take this line from a CNN article, on one of the stipulations of the deal:

Obama would be able to request only up to $1.2 trillion in additional debt ceiling if the special congressional committee fails to agree to at least $1.2 trillion in cuts.

In other words, the debt ceiling will not go up until the POTUS goes to Congress and allows them to decide on another trillion in spending cuts. For all intents and purposes, Barack Obama has made himself a hostage of the Republican leaders in the House of Representatives. Remember those Bush tax cuts he campaigned against? He extended them last year, is continuing to support them now, and will not take the issue up again until 2012 (right before the election). Is there anyone reading this willing to bet me that Barack Obama will manifest within himself the gumption to take on this issue in 2012 and repeal those tax cuts? I think you already know the answer, but if any of you are willing to bet me, you are welcome to name the wage because I am more certain of President Obama's continued avoidance and oblique support of those tax cuts than I am of myself still breathing this time a year from now.

Eventually, those of us on the real left (who still bother with electoral politics) must become more openly critical of what is happening. It is not that I think it will matter ultimately, as Barack Obama seems bereft to take a stance on whether water is wet anymore (without fear of someone calling him an Islamic socialist), but if nothing else we must make our voices heard. The teabaggers will feign outrage at not being able to decapitate our government and turn this country into a 19th century mine shaft filled with child laborers and only property owners voting, but the sad truth is this proposal gives the GOP everything it wants with absolutely nothing in return (unless you count saving dollars off the backs of the poor and elderly an accomplishment).

And to think, according to the freepers and denizens at redstate.com, this is what socialism is supposed to look like. It is at times like this I think back to the quote from Gore Vidal that the US has one political party with two right-wings.

A Nation of Breiviks: Yahoo Message Boards

noreply@blogger.com (TA) — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 17:35:00 +0000

It never ceases to amaze me to read the Yahoo News messages below its articles. If ever you wonder what real conservatism in America looks like, just read them sometime. For your elucidation, to understand the evil we face in this country and in every Western country filled with these sociopaths, I am offering this post filled with their kind screeds below a Yahoo article on the massacre in Norway this last Friday.

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Bernie

"If he did this to send a message to the government to stop "liberal" immigration and Islam, then I have to applaud him. How far do you think this country is from the same behavior the way our goverrnment shoves these mexicans down our throats or allows Islams to remain after 911 and build them a big mosque to make their plans in."

Idrathernotsay

"i blame the ILLUMINTI and that's final. knight's templar prob hides the fact of freeMASONRY"

HighFlyte

"How much do ALL those Muslims cost the people of Norway?? Do they PAY their way or just latch on and start sucking the nation dry, you know, like here in the states??"

PTHawk

"You see? It is'nt just moo-slums that are being provoked into extreme violence by islam.Islam is the source of most of the worlds violence and it is fear of moo-slum violence that prevents people from speaking out."

Boyd

"This would never happen in the U.S. well unless the Libturds get their way and want to ban guns.
He would have been shot down like the mad dog he is if this happened here and the deaths would have been a lot less.Let this be a lesson to you idiot Liberals out there. if you dont have guns you cant protect yourself agains mad gunmen."

Filthy Animal

"Hey libtards, maybe he can be 'rehabilitated.'"

Clint

"I in no way condone what this guy did, and I don't understand killing children when killing the men in power responsible for his anger would have made him more of a martyr, vice a demon. But at least this guy stood up for what he believed in and had the balls to pull it off. We had men like that here in the US once, they were called patriots and drafted our constitution among other things. Read sometime how much rotten gorilla warfare they used in the Colonial wars. Americans today are just soft, little football-watching, pacifists who are letting their own country slide down the tubes by a Marxist president. Sad."

PeteJohnson

"Libs begging for someone with a gun to save them.. Ha ha ha how ironic!!"

John

"I would say this guy is more like a liberal. Out of touch with reality and tweeting all day. He thinks TV is reality. So the last so called right wing nut job was McVeigh. So lets all now bow to the Muslims since it wasn't them BUT we'll just forget abot the 2,740 victims of 911 and all the troops that died getting Osama. That's how the liberal mind works. We'll just forget the British Bus bombings, Spain train bombings, 911 and now disarm all the white people. LIBERALS ARE A DISEASE!"

VladTheImpaler

"Why don't these people carry guns? I carry my Ruger Alaskan (.454 Casull) all the time. Just do it!! Hell you don't have to carry hand artillery like I do...a 9mm, .357 mag, .44 mag, 10 mm, .40 cal will do just fine. If just one person in that crowd was packing heat, let's say a .454 Casull and he/she drilled the #$%$cker in the head at 40 yards, his head would have exploded and he would have dropped where he stood--deader than hell and many lives would have been saved. Just remember, contrary to popular belief, God DID NOT create all men equal; Samuel Colt did. And I, Vlad the Impaler, challenge ALL you bible bookworms to prove me wrong!!!Take this friendly bit of advice from someone who knows what they're talking about."

NoObamaZombies!

"Honestly... if he has been watching what the "anti christ", Obama has been doing... I understand his motives! He is trying to save his country from Greece's fate. That is what is happening to America, under Obama. If you dont understand that, you have not been following the news!"

PhilippeBailet

"Dear Norwegians, how's that gun control thing working in your socialist paradise?!? ;)"

Laura

"To all of you people saying that we Christians make excuses for 'Christians' who do things like this, while we group Muslims into one generic group of killers: Muslims have a looooong history of killing 'infidels' (by which they mean, anyone who is not Muslim). So, when a Muslim commits an act of terror, he is acting, not as an extremist, but as an adherent to the Koran. Christians, on the other hand, are known for being peaceful. I mean real Christians, not Catholics or Mormons. Christians are forbidden by the Bible to murder for the sake of spreading Christianity (Roman Catholicism has almost as long a history as Muslims of torturing and killing those who would not convert to their false religion). Of course, there are Christians who have murdered. True Christians will repent of their evil and make restitution as much as is in their power. Someone who calls himself a Christian, however, and does a murderous act, must be called into question whether he truly is, or whether he is merely using the name of Christian. He must not be considered a Christian unless he really and truly repents.
This murdering dog who did this terrible act in Norway, and is unrepentant, is not going to be considered Christian by any stretch of the imagination. He may be right-wing, but he's no believer."

Mr Peck

"Typical Liberal Behavior, just like the guy in Tuscon....another nut bag libkook whacktard"

Christine Pritchard

"Conservative experts are learning that innocent children across America are having trouble sleeping at night. They live in constant fear. They can't stop thinking about President Obama's diabolical plan to mandate Death Squads to kill their grandparents, and take from them everything they hold dear! Their screams can be heard across the nation and our tears are falling into a puddle that cries out for restoration!"

Greg

"I'm not sure what's scarier. a guy killing kids or a govornment brain washing at a youth day camp. This is straight out of the Hitler play book kids. Indoctrinate at an early age by brainwashing to be loyal party followers."

The Bargain Shack

"This guy may be another government black ops agent. Timothy McVeigh was a CIA asset, and the Oklahoma City bombing was carried out by the U.S. government to stir up resentment of the militia movement, and to use as an excuse to take away more of our freedoms."

Liberals R Brain Dead

"Another Marxist Leftist along with Ted kaczynki Janet Reno and others who have committed horrific acts so as to force their beliefs on others."

VoteOutTheDevil

"Obama is a radical terrorist but he is half white, half black, half Muslim, half Christian and all Communist!"

Phx70

"Left Wing Liberal Democrats have killed more innocent people than anyone. It's called abortion. Democrats kill babies, defend murderers from capital punishment, defend the rights of terrorists that kill our own, and hate Jesus: The only one who died for their sins."

Kneil Buddee

"It was just a matter of time before liberalism made someone lose it. Better stop catering to gays and mooslimes libs."

Fruity

"well at least he killed socialists, they are a cancer and they desire to tear down the USA look what Obama has done he has singlehandedly destroyed the us economy!!!"

TheTruthSpeaker

"The anti-Christian, anti-conservative bigotry here is staggering. America is spiraling towards a civil war quicker than in the 1850's. You liberals can run your mouths but when the shooting starts, you will only be running."

Dennis

"Had he killed Muslims, I would have no problems with the guy."

Korean Ma ssage Girl

"We need to bring him here to California to kill all the Mexicans here."

ObrTim

"As history tells us, The Cultural Marxists are much more destructive than this guy or one hundred more of him could ever be. They are responsible for the racial, social and moral breakdown of the West. It's no accident the West is collapsing from within . Their goal is to destroy every vestage of Western Civilization so they can FORCEFULLY INSTALL A JEWISH Marxist Dictatorship on the FORMERLY WESTERN WORLD - If you think that's a conspiracy theory, you're no student of history. JUST TAKE A LOOK AT WHAT THEY DID IN THE FORMER SOVIET UNION and TAKE A LOOK AT WHO DID IT."

Da Man

"hard to believe he isnt somehow a muslim"

Rob Zinger

"200 years from now when the planet is infested with illegal immigration, islam and sharia law, people will look back and realize this guy was a hero. He is ahead of his time."

Robert

"muslims need to be stopped now... we need a modern day Hitler to handle them"

Pete Johnson

"The bombing, the shooting, the ridiculous response time, and the insane sentencing all on LIBERALS WATCH!!! This is ALL Liberal ideology at its finest!! Typical Liberal FAIL!!!!!! Liberals the whole world is waking up to your failures!! You let your citizens DOWN. Funny how the whole world sees you for what you and your ideals are and yet you maintain that your ideology is superior to EVERYONE else in the WHOLE world! Its called psychopathic delusions! You think you are above everyone else despite your constant failure!"

Pete Johnson

"This is a man of ACTION!! We could use him here in America!!"

Professor

"There is no excuse for what this nut did but consider that Norway is a Marxist country run by liberals with little or no national pride who has recently opened its borders to Muslims. If we continue to follow Obama, we will reach that point soon."

African King

"Let us not forget that Nelson Mandela was the head of UmKhonto we Sizwe, (MK), the terrorist wing of the ANC and South African Communist Party. He had pleaded guilty to 156 acts of public violence including mobilizing terrorist bombing campaigns, which planted bombs in public places, including the Johannesburg railway station. Many innocent people, including women and children, were killed by Nelson Mandela’s MK terrorists and yet liberals uphold this monster as a hero, how sick is that!!!"

Rob E

"I only wish he'da started in NYC, San Fran, or D.C,...a MUCH more target rich environment in those areas. Communists....you scream for diversity. THIS sort of behavior is the natural and expected reply. Multi-culturalism breeds strife and death. This wicked tree is beginning to bear fruit, just as those intent on destroying the West had hoped."

Mark

"How could this guy be at two places at once...what is the time frame between both incidents? Something smells in Norway!!!! Lefte Wing cover up!!!"

Robert S

"He probably felt helpless,...his leaders all bought by the Euro socialist, government run media daily throwing out its brain washing spew, his country being infiltrated by people who only want to take advantage of it and impose their beliefs and his own elected officals supporting it, his political ideology constantly being lied about and demonized...no political solution in sight. Sound familiar...I wonder how many of these time bombs are walking around in our country and when this reckless president and his communist agenda will set them off."

Laelia A

"He should have killed muslims, not Norwegians."

-------------------------------------------------------

Now, just imagine those posters in a voting booth. I give them credit for stating what they really think. Yes, I know what you are going to say. They are just posting stuff, mostly trolls, blowing off steam, etc. Well, so was Mr. Breivik. And it is no accident that Breivik copied Timothy McVeigh's fertilizer bomb. Does anyone doubt that the right-wing has an insufficient number of armed violent types in this country who are liable to act on this ideological inclination? Just in the last three years, right-wing terrorists in the US have ambushed and murdered police officers because of a contrived outrage over the thought of Obama 'taking their guns,' conducted a deadly attack on a Unitarian church, suicided themselves by flying a plane into an IRS building, murdered an African American security guard in front of the Holocaust Museum, and conspired to assassinate police officers at a funeral to start a civil war.

It would be nice to say that this will be the exception and not the future, but I would not hold out on that one. I cannot understate the importance of how the election of a black man to the White House has done more to awaken within the minds of many white people in the US a sense of racial consciousness that has not been expressed so openly since the South in the 1950s. And as whites become an increasing minority (and we will be in the next few decades), it is only going to get worse. Ethnic nationalism, and the fear that whites (in the US and Europe) of future oppression at the hands of the coming majority, is going to manifest itself in ugly ways (like anti-immigrant legislation targeting Mexicans and anyone who comes from a Muslim background), also including acts of terrorism from those white Christians who feel as though the democratic process is not representing their viewpoint. I think that whatever else you can say about Mr. Breivik, he is the wave of what will be coming in the next several decades. I hope I am wrong about this and that the Timothy McVeighs and the Hutari militia are just a mirage.

Of course, in the end, the white right will lose. The right has put itself in such a position that it cannot co-exist with a free society whose demographics is fading with the landscape. Even if they were to succeed in establishing an apartheid state (to keep themselves in power), the right would only be giving themselves a stay of execution for their brand of politics, but it will not stop them from trying.

Good Enough for Fort Meade, But Not Rupert!

noreply@blogger.com (TA) — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 08:22:00 +0000

One of the ongoing hypocrisies of the media coverage of the implosion of Rupert Murdoch is the sensationalism of the stories around his editors' involvement in wire tapping of phone conversations, stealing cell phone data (of a murder victim no less), and the possible repeating of such tactics on 9/11 victims, as if the wall of privacy, so great is our respect for it, should never be violated. What few commentators, especially in the mainstream media, bother to mention is how the UK now has the highest per capita use of cameras by its government, covering the moves of millions of its citizens (in some cases for parolees, even in their own homes). Or about how our government since 2001 that has been cataloging every one of our phone calls, spying on our emails, IMs, chats, all without so much as a warrant or cause? We express feigned shock and outrage at a corporation (capricious as it is) for doing what we tolerate our own government doing to us on a daily basis (when our Bill of Rights is supposed to protect our rights from that government).

How convoluted of a society do we have to be living in for federal law enforcement to arrest hackers when we employ hackers as 'advisors' to our DOD security systems? How much like The Matrix are we becoming when that same government threatens to have you thrown in jail for opening up a neighbor's snail mail, and allowing corporations to sue you for millions for downloading one of their products on bit torrent, and yet simultaneously conducts extensive warrantless searches and monitoring of our online activities, etc., the exact kind of behavior that would be illegal for us to partake in?

Can anyone fault News Corporation for thinking, even if only for a second, that there was nothing wrong with its activities? Right now, as I write this, there are civilian contractors in the U.S. who use satellites to spy on us, and monitor our movements, without charge, without evidence, and without any legal oversight (operating on the orders of our government). Our law enforcement, under the Patriot Act, can literally break into your home, take your hard drive without informing you of the theft, and not only is it legal, it is an increasingly accepted custom of evidentiary gathering in anti-terrorist cases (with the distinction of what it takes to be a 'terrorist' decided upon by a member of that bureaucracy, not a prosecutor and court).

Sounds conspiratorial? Consider the story of Aaron Swartz. His crime? He conducted too many online researches, apparently, attracting the attention of federal prosecutors. Oh, by the way, Aaron also just so happens to be a founder of an organization that is critical of the federal government's habit of spying on its citizenry.

-------------------------------------------------

Feds Charge Activist as Hacker for Downloading Millions of Academic Articles

by Ryan Singel

Well-known coder and activist Aaron Swartz was arrested Tuesday, charged with violating federal hacking laws for downloading millions of academic articles from a subscription database service that MIT had given him access to via a guest account. If convicted, Swartz faces up to 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine.

Swartz, the 24-year-old executive director of Demand Progress, has a history of downloading massive data sets, both to use in research and to release public domain documents from behind paywalls. Swartz, who was aware of the investigation, turned himself in Tuesday.

Disclosure: Swartz is a co-founder of Reddit¹, which like Wired.com is owned by Condé Nast. He is also a general friend of Wired.com, and has done coding work for Wired.

The grand jury indictment accuses Swartz of evading MIT’s attempts to kick his laptop off the network while downloading more than four million documents from JSTOR, a not-for-profit company that provides searchable, digitized copies of academic journals. The scraping, which took place from September 2010 to January 2011 via MIT’s network, was invasive enough to bring down JSTOR’s servers on several occasions.

According to the U.S. attorney’s office, Swartz was arraigned in U.S. District Court in Boston this morning where he pled not guilty to all counts. He is now free on a $100,000 unsecured bond. His next court date is Sept. 9, 2011 and he’s represented by Andrew Good of Good and Courmier.

The indictment alleges that Swartz, at the time a fellow at Harvard University, intended to distribute the documents on peer-to-peer networks. That did not happen, however, and all the documents have been returned to JSTOR.

JSTOR, the alleged victim in the case, did not refer the case to the feds, according to Heidi McGregor, the company’s vice president of Marketing & Communications, who said the company got the documents, a mixture of both copyrighted and public domain works, back from Swartz and was content with that.

As for whether JSTOR supports the prosecution, McGregor simply said that the company was not commenting on the matter. She noted, however, that JSTOR has a program for academics who want to do big research on the corpus, but usually faculty members ask permission or contact the company after being booted off the network for too much downloading.

“This makes no sense,” said Demand Progress Executive Director David Segal in a statement provided by Swartz to Wired.com before the arrest. “It’s like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.”

“It’s even more strange because the alleged victim has settled any claims against Aaron, explained they’ve suffered no loss or damage, and asked the government not to prosecute,” Segal said.

JSTOR doesn’t go quite as far in its statement on the prosecution — though there are clear hints that they were not the ones who wanted a prosecution, and that they were subpoenaed to testify at the grand jury hearing by the federal government.

We stopped this downloading activity, and the individual responsible, Mr. Swartz, was identified. We secured from Mr. Swartz the content that was taken, and received confirmation that the content was not and would not be used, copied, transferred, or distributed.
The criminal investigation and today’s indictment of Mr. Swartz has been directed by the United States Attorney’s Office.

When asked about this, Christina Sterling, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s office said, “I can’t speak specifically about this case, but fundamentally speaking, the U.S. Attorney’s Office makes own independent decisions regarding prosecution based on the merits of a case.”

But the feds clearly think they have a substantial hacking case on their hands, even though Swartz used guest accounts to access the network and is not accused of finding a security hole to slip through or using stolen credentials, as hacking is typically defined.

In essence, Swartz is accused of felony hacking for violating MIT and JSTOR’s terms of service. That legal theory has had mixed success — a federal court judge dismissed that argument in the Lori Drew cyberbullying case, but it was later reused with more success in a case brought against ticket scalpers who used automated means to buy tickets faster from Ticketmaster’s computer system.

“Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars. It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away,” said United States Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz in a press release(.pdf).

The indictment (.pdf) accuses Swartz of repeatedly spoofing the MAC address — an identifier that is usually static — of his computer after MIT blocked his computer based on that number. Swartz also allegedly snuck an Acer laptop bought just for the downloading into a closet at MIT in order to get a persistent connection to the network.

Swartz allegedly hid his face from surveillance cameras by holding his bike helmet up to his face and looking through the ventilation holes when going in to swap out an external drive used to store the documents. Swartz also allegedly named his guest account “Gary Host,” with the nickname “Ghost.”

Why would Swartz want to download what is likely gigabytes of information? His history includes a study co-authored with Shireen Barday, which looked through thousands of law review articles looking for law professors who had been paid by industry patrons to write papers. That study was published in 2008 in the Stanford Law Review.

Swartz is no stranger to the feds being interested in his skills at prodigious downloads. In 2008, the federal court system decided to try out allowing free public access to its court record search system PACER at 17 libraries across the country. Swartz went to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals library in Chicago and installed a small PERL script he had written. The code cycled sequentially through case numbers, requesting a new document from PACER every three seconds. In this manner, Swartz got nearly 20 million pages of court documents, which his script uploaded to Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service.

While the documents are in the public record and free to share, PACER normally charges eight cents a page.

The courts reported him to the FBI, which investigated whether the public records were “exfiltrated.” After in-depth background searches, a luckless stakeout and futile attempts to get Swartz to talk, the FBI dropped the case.

The same anti-hacking statute was used to prosecute Lori Drew, who was charged criminally for participating in a MySpace cyberbullying scheme against a 13-year-old Missouri girl who later committed suicide. The case against Drew hinged on the government’s novel argument that violating MySpace’s terms of service was the legal equivalent of computer hacking and a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

A federal judge who presided over the prosecution tossed the guilty verdicts in July 2009, and the government declined to appeal.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/swartz-arrest/

-------------------------------------------------

Think about that. Our government takes $700 billion of our money to bailout banks, all pure deficit spending. The same government, under two administrations (Republican and Democratic), have spent over $1.6 trillion of deficit spending to give tax cuts to millionaires. Our banks and financial institutions wreck and destroy our economy, and not a single CEO has been held accountable, even the ones who knew they were selling toxic assets and betting against them in private (an act of fraud and violation of securities law). Nothing. But download articles from JSTOR, from unprofitable, almost never read academic publications, and well naturally that is a different story.

I will go out on a limb here and say that Rupert Murdoch, even if his managers did hack into the phones of 9/11 victims, will not only remain free and unpunished, but his news service will remain as defiantly dishonest and sleazy as ever, without fail and with the complete support of the media establishment and our so-called socialist president. And your government will continue to treat the rest of us like subjects to be spied upon at will. Still, we can rest easily tonight. The fifteen readers of International Organization will not have to worry about their subscription rates being devalued by an illegal download.

The Greatness of Phil Ochs

noreply@blogger.com (TA) — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 05:21:00 +0000

I do not delve enough on this blog into cultural topics. It is a deficit and one I do periodically lament. I am not sure why, to be honest, because I am every bit a part of this society as the next person. And musically, I pretty much listen to almost all types, even the occasional country music song, along of course with classical, jazz, hip-hop, rap, punk, and rock. Still, I have not always been what you would call a fan of folk music. To be sure, because of my upbringing, I grew up with union songs like this.

Nevertheless, outside of the standard union ballads of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, since they wrote so many labor songs, it was not until my adult years that I began to explore and gain a greater appreciation for folk music. My discovery of Phil Ochs was a revelation for me. I did not begin listening to Ochs until I was in college and I wondered how on earth I had not heard of him before, although I had grown up after his death. Well, this may be why so few Americans know of the sacrifices made by our laboring classes in the 19th century to bring us the 8 hour workday--because the people who own this country, and your contract, do not want you to know.

There is no better time than the present to remedy this shortfall. Without further ado, one of my favorite folk songs from one of this country's most underrated folk singers.

OK, he had another that I am really partial to, as well.

Whoever posted those, a million thank yous.

And to those of us who have these songs handed down to us, we should do more than just appreciate them. We should disseminate them en masse. Who knows, in maybe a few more years the wars really will be over. The peoples we bomb, occupy, and oppress deserve nothing less.

New York: Victory for Human Rights

noreply@blogger.com (TA) — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 03:55:00 +0000

To the tens of readers, I know politics in the U.S. can be a depressing topic. Rarely is there any good news, and it is bereft. Our president stabs us in the back on leaving Afghanistan, refuses to support gay marriage, and the other party is populated by the ancestors of those who tried to destroy this country to maintain ownership of an entire race of people like chattel (and who deep down still think that way today, particularly when telling us why we should be setting up a system of internal passports for anyone who looks remotely Mexican). Yes, I confess, life here can be rough for a progressive.

However, we do not lose every battle. Every once in awhile, we win. Today in the state of New York, we won.

-----------------------------------------------------

Gay Marriage Approved by N.Y. Senate

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and MICHAEL BARBARO

ALBANY — Lawmakers voted late Friday to legalize same-sex marriage, making New York the largest state where gay and lesbian couples will be able to wed and giving the national gay-rights movement new momentum from the state where it was born.

The bill was approved on a 33-to-29 vote as 4 Republican state senators joined 29 Democrats in voting for it.

As the Senate debated the measure, supporters and opponents from around the state packed into two small galleries overlooking the chamber. When the final vote tally was read, the crowd screamed and hollered, began to chant “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” — and to yell “thank you.” A minute or two later, when Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo entered the chamber, the crowd cheered again, rushing the edge of the galleries and chanting the governor’s name.

Senate approval was the final hurdle for the legislation, which was strongly supported by Mr. Cuomo. The Assembly approved changes made by the Senate, after passing an earlier version last week. Mr. Cuomo was expected to sign the measure soon, and the law will go into effect 30 days later, meaning that same-sex couples could begin marrying in New York by midsummer. “I am very proud of New York and the statement we made to the nation today,” Mr. Cuomo said.

The bill’s passage followed a daunting run of defeats in other states where voters barred same-sex marriage by legislative action, constitutional amendment or referendum. Just five states — Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont — permit same-sex marriage. It is also legal in : the District of Columbia.

The approval of same-sex marriage represented a reversal of fortune for gay-rights advocates in New York State, who just two years ago suffered a humiliating and unexpected defeat when a same-sex marriage bill was easily defeated in the Senate, which was then controlled by Democrats. This year, with the Senate controlled by Republicans, the odds against passage of same-sex marriage appeared long.

But the unexpected victory had an unlikely champion: Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat who pledged last year to support same-sex marriage but whose early months in office were dominated by intense battles with lawmakers and some labor unions over spending cuts.

Mr. Cuomo made same-sex marriage one of his top priorities for the year and deployed his top aide to coordinate the efforts of a half-dozen local gay-rights organizations whose feuding and disorganization had in part been blamed for the defeat two years ago.

The new coalition of same-sex marriage supporters brought in one of Mr. Cuomo’s trusted campaign operatives to supervise a $3 million television and radio campaign aimed at persuading a handful of Republican and Democratic senators to drop their opposition.

For Senate Republicans, even bringing the measure to the floor was a freighted decision. Most of the Republicans firmly oppose same-sex marriage on moral grounds, and many of them also had political concerns, fearing that allowing same-sex marriage to pass on their watch would embitter conservative voters and cost the Republicans their one-seat majority in the Senate.

Leaders of the state’s Conservative Party — whose support many Republican lawmakers depend on to win election — warned that they would oppose in legislative elections next year any Republican senator who voted for same-sex marriage.

But after days of agonized discussion capped by a marathon nine-hour closed-door debate on Friday, Republicans came to a fateful decision: the full Senate would be allowed to vote on the bill, the majority leader, Dean G. Skelos, said Friday afternoon, and each member would be left to vote according to his or her conscience.

"The days of just bottling up things, and using these as excuses not to have votes — as far as I’m concerned as leader, its over with," Mr. Skelos, a Long Island Republican, said.

Twenty-nine Democrats voted for the measure, joined by four Republicans: James S. Alesi of Monroe County; Stephen M.. Saland, from the Hudson Valley area; Roy J. McDonald of the capital region; and Mark J. Grisanti of Buffalo.

Just one lawmaker rose to speak against the measure: Rubén Díaz, Sr. of the Bronx, the only Democratic senator to cast a no vote.

“God, not Albany, has settled the definition of marriage, a long time ago,” Mr. Diaz said.

But Mr. Grisanti, a Buffalo Republican who opposed gay marriage when he ran for election last year, said he had studied the issue closely, agonized over his responsibility as a lawmaker, and concluded he could not vote against the bill. Mr. Grisanti voted yes. “I apologize for those who feel offended,” he said. “I cannot deny, a person, a human being, a taxpayer, a worker, the people of my district and across this state, the State of New York, and those people who make this the great state that it is, the same rights that I have with my wife.”

The legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States is a relatively recent goal of the gay-rights movement, but over the last few years, gay-rights organizers have placed it at the center of their agenda, steering money and muscle into dozens of state capitals in an often uphill effort to persuade lawmakers.

In New York, passage of the bill reflects rapidly evolving sentiment about same-sex unions. In 2004, according to a Quinnipiac poll, 37 percent of the state’s residents supported allowing same-sex couples to wed. This year, 58 percent of them did. Advocates moved aggressively this year to capitalize on that shift, flooding the district offices of wavering lawmakers with phone calls, e-mails and signed postcards from constituents who favored same-sex marriage, sometimes in bundles that numbered in the thousands.

Dozens more states have laws or constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage, many of them approved in the last few years, as same-sex marriage moved to the front line of the culture war and politicians deployed the issue as a tool for energizing their base.

But New York could be a shift: It is now by far the largest state to grant legal recognition to same-sex weddings, and one that is home to a large, visible and politically influential gay community. Supporters of the measure described the victory in New York as especially symbolic — and poignant — because of its rich place in the history of gay rights: the movement’s foundational moment, in June of 1969, was a riot against police inside the Stonewall Inn, a bar in the West Village.

On Friday night, as the Senate voted, a crowd jammed into the Stonewall Inn, where televisions were tuned to the Senate hours before the vote began. Danny Garvin, 62, said he had been at the bar on the night of the riot, and came back to watch the Senate debate Friday. On the streets where police beat gay men in 1969, on Friday crowds cheered, as police quietly stood watch. Bernie Janelle, 53, turned to her partner of 16 years, Cindy Hearing, and said, “I’m going to propose to her on Sunday.”

Senate leaders hoped to limit debate to just a few speakers, angering some on both sides of the issue. Mr. Diaz was repeatedly chided for overstepping the two minutes he was allotted to explain his vote, while Kevin Parker, a Brooklyn Democrat, erupted when he and other supporters learned they would not be allowed to make a floor speech.

"This is not right," he yelled, before storming from the chamber.

During a brief recess during the voting, Shirley Huntley, a Queens Democrat who had only recently come out in support of same sex marriage, strode from her seat to the back of the Senate chamber to congratulate Daniel J. O’Donnell, an openly gay Manhattan lawmaker who sponsored the legislation in the Assembly.

They hugged, and Mr. O’Donnell, standing with his longtime partner, teared up.

"We’re going to invite you to our wedding” Mr. O’Donnell said. “Now we have to figure out how to pay for one."

Just before the Senate’s marriage vote, lawmakers in the Senate and Assembly also approved a broad package of major legislation that constituted the remainder of their agenda for the year. The bills included a cap on local property tax increases, and a strengthening of New York’s rent regulation laws, as well as a five-year tuition increase at the State University of New York and the City University of New York.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/25/nyregion/gay-marriage-approved-by-new-york-senate

-----------------------------------------------------

Yes, I know, it is not perfect. Yes, churches can continue to be bastions of bigotry, in spite of this law, and I know that New York is just one state, but it will be (excepting the short time California legalized it) the biggest state to legalize gay marriage to date. And to those younger folk, perspective is in order. This is just the beginning.

With New York as the largest state to legislatively pass gay marriage, many other states will surely follow. True, for those of us living in the Western world's version of Afghanistan (i.e., the Bible Belt), gay marriage will likely require a Supreme Court ruling, but even that may not be as far off as we think, either. The more states who legalize gay marriage, beyond just state court rulings making it possible, and with now for the first time a clear majority of Americans in support of marriage equality, it is only a matter of time until our institutions respond to the pressure and expand it everywhere.

That is right, my dear Christian readers. It is coming to your town, and hopefully one day to your village and church. I anticipate the coming apology of the Southern Baptist Convention to the LGBT community somewhere around the year 2234.

Considering where we were at even twenty years ago, this is not a minor achievement. In 1990, 80% of Americans thought homosexuality was 'immoral.' Today, 57% support gays in the military and 53% support gay marriage. Twenty years from now, it will be the norm, to the point that to even think the way the average conservative Republican does today will court the rightful comparisons of those who supported bans on interracial marriage. It is a beautiful world after all.

And to those few Republicans in the New York Senate who voted in favor of this bill, to be fair, let them receive credit here.

Senator James S. Alesi of Monroe County

Email: alesi@senate.state.ny.us

Senate Office Phone: 518-455-2015

Senator Stephen M. Saland, from the Hudson Valley area

Email: saland@nysenate.gov

Senate Office Phone: 518-455-2411

Senator Roy J. McDonald of the capital region

Email: mcdonald@senate.state.ny.us

Senate Office Phone: 518-455-2381

Senator Mark J. Grisanti of Buffalo

Email: grisanti@nysenate.gov

Senate Office Phone: 518-455-3240

I know it is easy to discount these people since they are members of the stupid party, but they took a stand, in spite of their own party and warnings from conservatives that their vote would guarantee an opponent in the next primary. And their stand helped make gay marriage possible in New York. For that reason alone, they deserve some recognition and support. If you have the time, contact these senators and thank them. They need to know that their vote was appreciated.

Going To Jail For Healthcare

noreply@blogger.com (TA) — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 20:14:00 +0000

It is a sad commentary in our society that millions of Americans must go to jail or the military to get adequate health care. Here is to the Potemkin village that kills over 45,000 Americans every year for not being economically viable.

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Man robs bank to get medical care in jail

By Zachary Roth

Some people who need medical care but can't afford it go to the emergency room. Others just hope they'll get better. James Richard Verone robbed a bank.

Earlier this month, Verone (pictured), a 59-year-old convenience store clerk, walked into a Gaston, N.C., bank and handed the cashier a note demanding $1 and medical attention. Then he waited calmly for police to show up.

He's now in jail and has an appointment with a doctor this week.

Verone's problems started when he lost the job he'd held for 17 years as a Coca Cola deliveryman, amid the economic downturn. He found new work driving a truck, but it didn't last. Eventually, he took a part-time position at the convenience store.

But Verone's body wasn't up to it. The bending and lifting made his back ache. He had problems with his left foot, making him limp. He also suffered from carpal tunnel syndrome and arthritis.

Then he noticed a protrusion on his chest. "The pain was beyond the tolerance that I could accept," Verone told the Gaston Gazette. "I kind of hit a brick wall with everything."

Verone knew he needed help--and he didn't want to be a burden on his sister and brothers. He applied for food stamps, but they weren't enough either.

So he hatched a plan. On June 9, he woke up, showered, ironed his shirt. He mailed a letter to the Gazette, listing the return address as the Gaston County Jail.

"When you receive this a bank robbery will have been committed by me," Verone wrote in the letter. "This robbery is being committed by me for one dollar. I am of sound mind but not so much sound body."

Then Verone hailed a cab to take him to the RBC Bank. Inside, he handed the teller his $1 robbery demand.

"I didn't have any fears," said Verone. "I told the teller that I would sit over here and wait for police."

The teller was so frightened that she had to be taken to the hospital to be checked out. Verone, meanwhile, was taken to jail, just as he'd planned it.

Because he only asked for $1, Verone was charged with larceny, not bank robbery. But he said that if his punishment isn't severe enough, he plans to tell the judge that he'll do it again. His $100,000 bond has been reduced to $2,000, but he says he doesn't plan to pay it.

In jail, Verone said he skips dinner to avoid too much contact with the other inmates. He's already seen some nurses and is scheduled to see a doctor on Friday. He said he's hoping to receive back and foot surgery, and get the protrusion on his chest treated. Then he plans to spend a few years in jail, before getting out in time to collect Social Security and move to the beach.

Verone also presented the view that if the United States had a health-care system which offered people more government support, he wouldn't have had to make the choice he did.

"If you don't have your health you don't have anything," Verone said.

The Affordable Care Act, President Obama's health-care overhaul passed by Congress last year, was designed to make it easier for Americans in situations like Verone's to get health insurance. But most of its provisions don't go into effect until 2014.

As it is, Verone said he thinks he chose the best of a bunch of bad options. "I picked jail."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110621/ts_yblog_thelookout/man-robs-bank-to-get-medical-care-in-jail

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We sometimes forget the victims of the crime that is our private health insurance-dominated system. Here is another. Think of this the next time Rick Santorum tells you our government employees were fighting the Germans to give you this.

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Uninsured man's self-treatment for toothache hastens death

by Eve Samples

It began with a painful toothache.

But Mark Erdman was not one to slow down, so he didn't.

The 49-year-old Palm City resident kept working, kept hitting the gym every morning at 5.

Without health insurance, he delayed going to the dentist for as long as he could. Over-the-counter acetaminophen and ibuprofen helped him endure the pain.

Erdman had done well during the boom years as a self-employed gutter and insulation contractor, but his business did not survive the construction bust. Private health insurance was unaffordable for his family of four, even after he landed a new sales job.

"We were making six figures and had money in the bank, insurance and everything — and we just lost it all. Lost it all," said his wife, Renee Erdman.

That was bearable because she still had him, her husband of 19 years.

He was the life of the party, the father of her two children; the Pop Warner football coach and the guy who would change a stranger's tire on the side of the road.

Now, she has lost Mark, too.

The Tylenol and ibuprofen he had been taking for his toothache contributed to fatal damage to his liver and kidneys, Renee said doctors told her. At one point, he took eight over-the counter pills in a single day. He knew it was more than the recommended dose, but he never expected it to take his life.

Mark died last Thursday at Florida Hospital in Orlando, where he had been transferred with hopes of receiving a liver transplant.

"It's so sick. It's like he was unknowingly killing himself," Renee said Monday. "And should you find yourself without insurance, forget it."

Mark was initially admitted at Martin Memorial Medical Center, which does not perform organ transplants. A hospital representative in Orlando told Renee a liver transplant would cost $195,000, with 50 percent of that to be paid up front, as she recalls it.

"I just sat there and said, 'I don't have that kind of money laying around,' " she remembered.

Last week, Mark got Medicaid coverage after Renee called the offices of U.S. Rep. Tom Rooney, R-Tequesta, and state Sen. Joe Negron, R-Stuart. Mark suffered damage to his brain before a transplant became possible.

"We had to take him off of life support," Renee said, her voice breaking. "It's just, who knows about this? Most people I talk to, they don't know this will shut your body down. Mark didn't know."

Acetaminophen can cause serious, sometimes fatal, liver damage if taken in higher-than-recommended doses, according to a consumer update from the Food and Drug Administration. Even at the recommended dose, people who have three or more drinks a day are at greater risk of liver damage, the FDA warns.

Renee wanted to share Mark's story as a cautionary tale.

"Maybe this doesn't have to happen to somebody else," she said.

Mark was always going out of his way to help other people. When he was running his own business, he would drive to Boynton Beach every morning to pick up an employee who did not have his own car, Renee said.

"Everything he did, he did it 100 percent," said Billy Baker, their son Tristan's basketball coach.

Now, family and friends are trying to help Renee, a stay-at-home mom to 9-year-old Kara and 15-year-old Tristan.

An account has been opened at First People's Bank. Contributions can be made at the bank to The Mark Erdman Family Benefit Irrevocable Trust or sent care of the Law Offices of Marc S. Teplitz, 73 SW Flagler Ave., Stuart 34994.

"He was a very positive man, and a very loving man and a giving man," Renee said.

http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2011-03-16/health/fl-toothache-to-death-20110316_1_liver-transplant-health-insurance-toothache

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This is what our country reduces its own citizens to. Meanwhile, bankrolled teabaggers tell us that being able to choose your doctor or having insurance is 'all about freedom.' Of course, that is on the condition you can afford it. If not, then you deserve to die. Sounds harsh? Here are the teabaggers responding to a man with Alzheimer's appealing for health insurance.

Life in these United States. Sometimes I wonder if this is what it was like before they had universal healthcare in the rest of the industrialized world? I do not recall reading about the Germans acting like this when they received their universal health coverage, over a hundred years ago, or the British in 1948, or the Canadians in 1984. Why is it that the slightest reform in this country, be anti-slavery, civil rights, even public education, causes so many of our people to respond with such violence and stupidity?

Meanwhile, if you do not have health insurance and need it, and you are not too poor for Medicaid or old enough for Medicare, our jails and military await you.

The Case of Anthony Weiner

noreply@blogger.com (TA) — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 18:46:00 +0000

One of the least appealing features about being a political scientist in the U.S. is the intense media scrutiny of the personal lives of political figures. I have never considered such peccadilloes to be of much interest to me, so long as it does not impact their job, violate any laws, and the person is not being a two-faced hypocrite. This is why I tend to have a great distaste for Republican sex scandals. Not because of the scandal per se (minus the law-breaking aspect [if there is one]), but because it is a party whose adherents constantly tell us how to live our lives and how the government should be legislating morality on us all, when they are themselves violating the principles they claim to believe in. There are few worse crimes in my eyes (other than those of a purely criminal nature) than hypocrisy.

I have looked back on Rep. Weiner's career, and I cannot recall the last time he advertised himself as a 'family values' type of officeholder. Not one denunciation of anyone else for his/her private behavior. Not a single call for resignation of any of his political opponents for being unable to keep their marital vows. Anthony Weiner is many things, but he is not a hypocrite.

As far as I can tell, although who knows how this will play out in the coming days and weeks, Rep. Weiner has violated no laws. His greatest moral crimes are being a louse, as a husband and person, and a liar (to his wife and his constituents). He did not even have sex with anyone he sent sext messages to (which in itself would still not be against the law). He did not pay anyone for sex, like Senator Vitter and Rep. Ken Calvert have done (and ended up getting re-elected anyway). He has not harmed anyone other than his wife and probably his marriage. If Rep. Weiner is to resign over what he has done, up to this point, someone needs to explain to me why Senator Vitter should still be allowed to occupy space in the U.S. Senate, never mind Rep. Calvert (who was arrested after being caught in the act with a prostitute in his own car).

If Rep. Weiner should be excoriated for anything, it is his habit of sending unsolicited sext messages and pictures to women, many of whom were simply trying to engage him in political conversation. This is a past-time I do not engage in, so maybe I am wrong in what I am writing, but it would seem common sense to me for a man to not send women (he has yet/never met) compromising pictures of himself and sexually suggestive text messages. Maybe this is what our culture has come to, that it is suitable now for people to behave this way, that we have finally come full circle and drafted a member of Congress to be the first guinea pig for ethics in social media networking. And one cannot use age as an excuse because Weiner is a 46 year old man, much older than myself, and a man who did not even start using the internet probably until he was in his 30s (in other words, he did not grow up with the internet or utilize it for the purposes that has ensnared the congressman in his current quandary).

Rep. Weiner's interactions with women on the internet, though, is the part I find most interesting, more so than his pictures or messages (which the media concentrates on [OK, so I posted one with Charlie Sheen pasted in the background]). With the recent advent of social networking in our lives, what is normal conduct for people online? It seems to me from the message boards I read that people and the messages/responses they post are more licentious and aggressive (and abusive) than how we behave in everyday life. However, much of that is on account of the anonymous nature of being online. Weiner behaved the way he did as a public figure, never attempting to hide his identity from anyone (until he was caught, of course). It makes you wonder what he was like when he was posting anonymously or meeting women on the streets. It does not bode well for him as a person, but then it is entirely possible he lived a different life online.

Still, if Weiner did live a different life online, if indeed he treated women he ran into more respectfully than the ones he sent messages to online, why would he continue to act the way he did in his own name, without any attempt to hide the conduct? It is all speculation to me, but I surmise any person who starts sending half-naked pictures of himself to women he has never met is most likely a sexually aggressive person in the flesh. But I could be wrong. The internet age has changed a lot in terms of how people behave and interact with each other, even the language that we use (much of it coarsening over time, replete with emoticons and slang).

Last but not least, if what Anthony Weiner has done is terrible in sending non-nude (albeit inappropriate in light of the fact his were unsolicited) photos of himself, what about those politicians who have posed completely nude? I do not recall too many Fox 'news' correspondents raising a stink about these photos.

Indeed, in the case of Scott Brown, Fox 'news' cooed over his nude photo.

If that is acceptable, and if none of the women Anthony Weiner sexted file a complaint over his conduct, then what is the difference between them? Why is Schwarzenegger/Brown's nudes acceptable and Weiner's partial-nudes reprehensible? Why is it OK to pose nude, and talk about how you are bringing the 'sexy' back to Congress, but if you are half-naked and doing it online (assuming the other party's consent) it is wrong? Is it because of the medium involved? And while I personally think Mr. Weiner's behavior is worse, in light of the fact he sent his pictures to individual females as a married man (and at least one of those women was only trying to engage him in a political discussion, not elicit pictures of his pecks), I still think it is a perfectly legitimate discussion and debate to have. So, to my tens of readers, what doth thou thinketh?

Death of Our Constitutional Republic #1: FBI Widens Rights Violations

noreply@blogger.com (TA) — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 03:31:00 +0000

In the first installment of what is likely to become a long, long series, our beloved government is permitting its law enforcement agencies to re-write its rules to allow the snoops increased powers over your lives.

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F.B.I. Agents Get Leeway to Push Privacy Bounds

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — The Federal Bureau of Investigation is giving significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention.

The F.B.I. soon plans to issue a new edition of its manual, called the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, according to an official who has worked on the draft document and several others who have been briefed on its contents. The new rules add to several measures taken over the past decade to give agents more latitude as they search for signs of criminal or terrorist activity.

The F.B.I. recently briefed several privacy advocates about the coming changes. Among them, Michael German, a former F.B.I. agent who is now a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that it was unwise to further ease restrictions on agents’ power to use potentially intrusive techniques, especially if they lacked a firm reason to suspect someone of wrongdoing.

“Claiming additional authorities to investigate people only further raises the potential for abuse,” Mr. German said, pointing to complaints about the bureau’s surveillance of domestic political advocacy groups and mosques and to an inspector general’s findings in 2007 that the F.B.I. had frequently misused “national security letters,” which allow agents to obtain information like phone records without a court order.

Valerie E. Caproni, the F.B.I. general counsel, said the bureau had fixed the problems with the national security letters and had taken steps to make sure they would not recur. She also said the bureau, which does not need permission to alter its manual so long as the rules fit within broad guidelines issued by the attorney general, had carefully weighed the risks and the benefits of each change.

“Every one of these has been carefully looked at and considered against the backdrop of why do the employees need to be able to do it, what are the possible risks and what are the controls,” she said, portraying the modifications to the rules as “more like fine-tuning than major changes.”

Some of the most notable changes apply to the lowest category of investigations, called an “assessment.” The category, created in December 2008, allows agents to look into people and organizations “proactively” and without firm evidence for suspecting criminal or terrorist activity.

Under current rules, agents must open such an inquiry before they can search for information about a person in a commercial or law enforcement database. Under the new rules, agents will be allowed to search such databases without making a record about their decision.

Mr. German said the change would make it harder to detect and deter inappropriate use of databases for personal purposes. But Ms. Caproni said it was too cumbersome to require agents to open formal inquiries before running quick checks. She also said agents could not put information uncovered from such searches into F.B.I. files unless they later opened an assessment.

The new rules will also relax a restriction on administering lie-detector tests and searching people’s trash. Under current rules, agents cannot use such techniques until they open a “preliminary investigation,” which — unlike an assessment — requires a factual basis for suspecting someone of wrongdoing. But soon agents will be allowed to use those techniques for one kind of assessment, too: when they are evaluating a target as a potential informant.

Agents have asked for that power in part because they want the ability to use information found in a subject’s trash to put pressure on that person to assist the government in the investigation of others. But Ms. Caproni said information gathered that way could also be useful for other reasons, like determining whether the subject might pose a threat to agents.

The new manual will also remove a limitation on the use of surveillance squads, which are trained to surreptitiously follow targets. Under current rules, the squads can be used only once during an assessment, but the new rules will allow agents to use them repeatedly. Ms. Caproni said restrictions on the duration of physical surveillance would still apply, and argued that because of limited resources, supervisors would use the squads only rarely during such a low-level investigation.

The revisions also clarify what constitutes “undisclosed participation” in an organization by an F.B.I. agent or informant, which is subject to special rules — most of which have not been made public. The new manual says an agent or an informant may surreptitiously attend up to five meetings of a group before those rules would apply — unless the goal is to join the group, in which case the rules apply immediately.

At least one change would tighten, rather than relax, the rules. Currently, a special agent in charge of a field office can delegate the authority to approve sending an informant to a religious service. The new manual will require such officials to handle those decisions personally.

In addition, the manual clarifies a description of what qualifies as a “sensitive investigative matter” — investigations, at any level, that require greater oversight from supervisors because they involve public officials, members of the news media or academic scholars.

The new rules make clear, for example, that if the person with such a role is a victim or a witness rather than a target of an investigation, extra supervision is not necessary. Also excluded from extra supervision will be investigations of low- and midlevel officials for activities unrelated to their position — like drug cases as opposed to corruption, for example.

The manual clarifies the definition of who qualifies for extra protection as a legitimate member of the news media in the Internet era: prominent bloggers would count, but not people who have low-profile blogs. And it will limit academic protections only to scholars who work for institutions based in the United States.

Since the release of the 2008 manual, the assessment category has drawn scrutiny because it sets a low bar to examine a person or a group. The F.B.I. has opened thousands of such low-level investigations each month, and a vast majority has not generated information that justified opening more intensive investigations.

Ms. Caproni said the new manual would adjust the definition of assessments to make clear that they must be based on leads. But she rejected arguments that the F.B.I. should focus only on investigations that begin with a firm reason for suspecting wrongdoing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/13/us/13fbi.html

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Amazingly, this is not much different than how the Syrian government monitors and keeps track of its citizens, which our State Department uses to criticize the Syrians. If we used the standards by which we judged the Syrians, our government would have to indict itself, but of course we know the likelihood of this occurring. And just imagine, this is what it is like living under an "Islamic socialist who hates America." Take a moment to envision what Sarah Palin's national security policies would be like. And notice the lack of criticism of this manual from the leadership of our two parties in Congress. Apparently, the party of dinosaurs-walked-the-earth-6,000-years-ago is more worried about the 'Communist' government forcing you to purchase a private health insurance plan. I am sure the ex-Stasi agents are having a good laugh.

Bin Laden may be dead, but his spirit of getting our government to destroy our liberties is alive and well. RIP, right to privacy. You were a wonderful right while we had you.

Moron Report #46: The Rick Santorum Express

noreply@blogger.com (TA) — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 01:13:00 +0000

It must be tough being Rick Santorum. He was annihilated by over 700,000 votes when he ran for re-election five years ago (to an anti-abortion Democrat, no less). Worse (for him), the ex-senator from Pennsylvania is most known to people under the age of 30 as the combination of fecal matter and lube not infrequently found inside of the very folks he would just as soon see in prison (or worse). But good ole Rick is fighting the good fight for every right-winger's most favored Bethlehem carpenter. And how do you best deliver the message that healthcare is un-American? You hide behind military veterans, of course.

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Santorum: D-Day Troops Fought For Health Care Freedom

by Jillian Rayfield

Newly minted GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum is appalled that President Obama would disrespect those who fought at Normandy by not trusting them to make their own health care decisions. "Those Americans risked everything so they could make that decision on their health care plan," he said Monday.

Santorum was speaking at a rally in Pennsylvania to mark his official entry into the race for president, and railed against those who oppose Paul Ryan's (R-WI) proposal that effectively ends Medicare as we know it, and instead gives seniors a voucher to buy their own plan. These people, he said, "want to hook you."

"They believe in themselves, the smart people, the planners, the folks in Washington who can make decisions better than you can," he said, using what he called "Mediscare" as an example. "They're saying to seniors, 'you need to trust us. We are the ones who are gonna make decisions what every senior can have. We cant trust seniors to make decisions.'"

But, Santorum said, what he and Paul Ryan want to do is "give people the resources to go out and choose for themselves choose what's best for themselves."

Unlike Obama, he continued, who is spitting in the face of those Americans who fought on D-Day, 67 years ago today. "Almost 60,000 average Americans had the courage to go out and charge those beaches on Normandy, to drop out of airplanes who knows where, and take on the battle for freedom," Santorum said.

"Average Americans," he added. "The very Americans that our government now, and this president, does not trust a to make decision on your health care plan. Those Americans risked everything so they could make that decision on their health care plan."

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/06/santorum-d-day-troops-fought-for-the-ryan-plan.php

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I am certain the irony is completely lost on the ex-senator that the surviving veterans of the Normandy invasion are now all on government healthcare (Medicare), and they were dependent completely on government healthcare while they were charging those beaches 67 years ago. But no, they were trying to take out those German 88s for everyone else's 'right' to overpriced private healthcare, insurance bureaucracy, and a system that kills over 44,000 Americans every year for a lack of access. Surely, all of this was lost because otherwise Mr. Santorum would not have delivered that speech with anything resembling conviction. Then again, he is a member of our stupid party.

Welcome to my hall of shame, Rick, right alongside the ex-governor of Alaska and some idiot who mistook some ashes inside of an urn for cocaine. You are a deserving addition.

Arundhati Roy and Violent Resistance

noreply@blogger.com (TA) — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 03:52:00 +0000

Those of us on the left, particularly in the West, constantly hear about the importance of non-violence resistance. Of course, Western liberals are also apt to lecture the Third World folk about the importance of non-violence resistance, too, even when they are being violently repressed by their governments. Arundhati Roy, on the other hand, takes a different tact, one that presupposes the right of a people to defend themselves by force of arms against those who would kill you, which in this era of course is akin to advocating terrorism--and thus one of Roy's problems, in the West and even back in her home country. Interesting article and interview.

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Arundhati Roy: 'They are trying to keep me destabilised. Anybody who says anything is in danger'

by Stephen Moss

The Booker prize-winning novelist on her political activism in India, why she no longer condemns violent resistance – and why it doesn't matter if she never writes a second novel.

This is not an ideal beginning. I bump into Arundhati Roy as we are both heading for the loo in the foyer of the large building that houses her publisher Penguin's offices. There are some authors, V S Naipaul say, with whom this could be awkward. But not Roy, who makes me feel instantly at ease. A few minutes later, her publicist settles us in a small, bare room. As we take our positions on either side of a narrow desk I liken it to an interrogation suite. But she says that in India, interrogation rooms are a good deal less salubrious than this.

Roy, who is 50 this year, is best known for her 1997 Booker prize-winning novel The God of Small Things, but for the past decade has been an increasingly vocal critic of the Indian state, attacking its policy towards Kashmir, the environmental destruction wrought by rapid development, the country's nuclear weapons programme and corruption. As a prominent opponent of everything connected with globalisation, she is seeking to construct a "new modernity" based on sustainability and a defence of traditional ways of life.

Her new book, Broken Republic, brings together three essays about the Maoist guerrilla movement in the forests of central India that is resisting the government's attempts to develop and mine land on which tribal people live. The central essay, Walking with the Comrades, is a brilliant piece of reportage, recounting three weeks she spent with the guerrillas in the forest. She must, I suggest, have been in great personal danger. "Everybody's in great danger there, so you can't go round feeling you are specially in danger," she says in her pleasant, high-pitched voice. In any case, she says, the violence of bullets and torture are no greater than the violence of hunger and malnutrition, of vulnerable people feeling they're under siege.

Her time with the guerrillas made a profound impression. She describes spending nights sleeping on the forest floor in a "thousand-star hotel", applauds "the ferocity and grandeur of these poor people fighting back", and says "being in the forest made me feel like there was enough space in my body for all my organs". She detests glitzy, corporate, growth-obsessed modern Indian, and there in the forest she found a brief peace.

There is intense anger in the book, I say, implying that if she toned it down she might find a readier audience. "The anger is calibrated," she insists. "It's less than I actually feel." But even so, her critics call her shrill. "That word 'shrill' is reserved for any expression of feeling. It's all right for the establishment to be as shrill as it likes about annihilating people."

Is her political engagement derived from her mother, Mary Roy, who set up a school in Kerala and has a reputation as a women's rights activist? "She's not an activist," says Roy. "I don't know why people keep saying that. My mother is like a character who escaped from the set of a Fellini film." She laughs at her own description. "She's a whole performing universe of her own. Activists would run a mile from her because they could not deal with what she is."

I want to talk more about Mary Roy – and eventually we do – but there's one important point to clear up first. Guerrillas use violence, generally directed against the police and army, but sometimes causing injury and death to civilians caught in the crossfire. Does she condemn that violence? "I don't condemn it any more," she says. "If you're an adivasi [tribal Indian] living in a forest village and 800 CRP [Central Reserve Police] come and surround your village and start burning it, what are you supposed to do? Are you supposed to go on hunger strike? Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation."

Her critics label her a Maoist sympathiser. Is she? "I am a Maoist sympathiser," she says. "I'm not a Maoist ideologue, because the communist movements in history have been just as destructive as capitalism. But right now, when the assault is on, I feel they are very much part of the resistance that I support."

Roy talks about the resistance as an "insurrection"; she makes India sound as if it's ripe for a Chinese or Russian-style revolution. So how come we in the west don't hear about these mini-wars? "I have been told quite openly by several correspondents of international newspapers," she says, "that they have instructions – 'No negative news from India' – because it's an investment destination. So you don't hear about it. But there is an insurrection, and it's not just a Maoist insurrection. Everywhere in the country, people are fighting." I find the suggestion that such an injunction exists – or that self-respecting journalists would accept it – ridiculous. Foreign reporting of India might well be lazy or myopic, but I don't believe it's corrupt.

She sounds like a member of a religious sect, I say, as if she has seen the light. "It's a way of life, a way of thinking," she replies without taking offence. "I know people in India, even the modern young people, understand that here is something that's alive." So why not give up the plush home in Delhi and the media appearances, and return to the forest? "I'd be more than happy to if I had to, but I would be a liability to them in the forest. The battles have to be fought in different ways. The military side is just one part of it. What I do is another part of the battle."

I question her absolutism, her Manichaean view of the world, but I admire her courage. Her home has been pelted with stones; the Indian launch of Broken Republic was interrupted by pro-government demonstrators who stormed the stage; she may be charged with sedition for saying that Kashmiris should be given the right of self-determination. "They are trying to keep me destabilised," she says. Does she feel threatened? "Anybody who says anything is in danger. Hundreds of people are in jail."

Roy has likened writing fiction and polemic to the difference between dancing and walking. Does she not want to dance again? "Of course I do." Is she working on a new novel? "I have been," she says with a laugh, "but I don't get much time to do it." Does it bother her that the followup to The God of Small Things has been so long in coming? "I'm a highly unambitious person," she says. "What does it matter if there is or isn't a novel? I really don't look at it that way. For me, nothing would have been worth not going into that forest."

It's hard to judge whether there will be a second novel. The God of Small Things drew so much on her own life – her charismatic but overbearing mother; a drunken tea-planter father whom her mother left when Roy was very young; her own departure from home in her late teens – that it may be a one-off, a book as much lived as written. She gives ambiguous answers about whether she expects a second novel to appear. On the one hand, she says she is engaged with the resistance movement and that it dominates her thoughts. But almost in the same breath she says others have "picked up the baton" and she would like to return to fiction, to dance again.

What is certain is that little of the second novel has so far been written. She prefers not to tell me what it is about; indeed, she says it would not be possible to pinpoint the theme. "I don't have subjects. It's not like I'm trying to write an anti-dam novel. Fiction is too beautiful to be about just one thing. It should be about everything." Has she been blocked by the pressure of having to follow up a Booker winner? "No," she says. "We're not children all wanting to come first in class and win prizes. It's the pleasure of doing it. I don't know whether it will be a good book, but I'm curious about how and what I will write after these journeys."

Are her agent and publisher disappointed still to be waiting for the second novel? "They always knew there wasn't going to be some novel-producing factory," she says. "I was very clear about that. I don't see the point. I did something. I enjoyed doing it. I'm doing something now. I'm living to the edges of my fingernails, using everything I have. It's impossible for me to look at things politically or in any way as a project, to further my career. You're injected directly into the blood of the places in which you're living and what's going on there."

She has no financial need to write another novel. The God of Small Things, which sold more than 6m copies around the world, set her up for life, even though she has given much of the money away. She even spurned offers for the film rights, because she didn't want anyone interpreting her book for the screen. "Every reader has a vision of it in their head," she says, "and I didn't want it to be one film." She is strong-willed. Back in 1996, when The God of Small Things was being prepared for publication, she insisted on having control of the cover image because she didn't want "a jacket with tigers and ladies in saris". She is her indomitable mother's daughter.

I insist she tell me more about her Fellini-esque mother. She is, says Roy, like an empress. She has a number of buttons beside her bed which, when you press them, emit different bird calls. Each call signals to one of her retinue what she requires. Has she been the centre of her daughter's life? "No, she has been the centre of a lot of conflict in my life. She's an extraordinary women, and when we are together I feel like we are two nuclear-armed states." She laughs loudly. "We have to be a bit careful."

To defuse the family tensions, Roy left home when she was 16 to study architecture in Delhi – even then she wanted to build a new world. She married a fellow student at the age of 17. "He was a very nice guy, but I didn't take it seriously," she says. In 1984 she met and married film-maker Pradip Krishen, and helped him bring up his two daughters by an earlier marriage. They now live separately, though she still refers to him as her "sweetheart". So why separate? "My life is so crazy. There's so much pressure and idiosyncrasy. I don't have any establishment. I don't have anyone to mediate between me and the world. It's just based on instinct." I think what she's saying is that freedom matters more to her than anything else.

She chose not to have children because it would have impinged on that freedom. "For a long time I didn't have the means to support them," she says, "and once I did I thought I was too unreliable. So many of the women in India who are fighting these battles don't have children, because anything can happen. You have to be light on your feet and light in your head. I like to be a mobile republic."

Roy has in the past described herself as "a natural-born feminist". What did she mean by that? "Because of my mother and the way I grew up without a father to look after me, you learned early on that rule number one was look out for yourself. Much of what I can do and say now comes from being independent at an early age." Her mother was born into a wealthy, conservative Christian community in Kerala, but put herself outside the pale by marrying Ranjit Roy, a Hindu from West Bengal. When she returned to her home state after her divorce she had little money and was thus doubly marginalised. The mother eventually triumphed over all these obstacles and made a success of the school she founded, but growing up an outsider has left its mark on her daughter.

Roy says she has always been polemical, and points to her run-in with director Shekhar Kapur in the mid-1990s over his film Bandit Queen – she questioned whether he had the right to portray the rape of a living person on screen without that woman's consent. It may be that the novel is the exception in a life of agitation, rather than the agitation an odd outcrop in a life of fiction-writing. But has she sacrificed too much for the struggle – the chance to dance, children, perhaps even her second marriage? "I don't see any of these things as sacrifices," she says. "They are positive choices. I feel surrounded by love, by excitement. They are not being done in some martyr-like way. When I was walking through the forest with the comrades, we were laughing all the time."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/05/arundhati-roy-keep-destabilised-danger

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Out of all the issues addressed in this article, more than Roy's background, feminism, which are interesting and notable topics for discussion on any other day, what I find most interesting, and have always found most interesting, is that of violent revolution. This is nothing new, of course, as this has been a topic going back to Marx in the 19th century, when he was one of the few voices who supported the Paris Communards, and resonated in the 20th century, as it became one of the dividing contentions between the Communists and social democrats throughout Europe, but it deserves an updated redressing today. Just when is it legitimate for people to take up arms against their own government?

Countries like Libya, Bahrain, and Syria seem obvious to most Westerners, outside of the security forces in those governments, of course, but those countries are either dictatorships or semi-democratic states. India always likes to advertise itself as a free society, "the world's largest democracy." If you are an Adivasi in India, you live in something like a democracy, what should you do? Do traditional non-violence tactics (many employed in India by Gandhi over two generations ago) really work anymore?

Western apologists for armed uprisings in dictatorial countries that we dislike prefer using qualifiers, such as,

"you have no choice in a non-democratic setting but to use violence to overthrow the oppressive government that rules over you," but can you not have the same settings in democratic countries, too? The US was considered a democracy when women or African Americans were not allowed to vote. And when is it legitimate for people to take up arms in democratic settings in which they are being oppressed? These are the types of questions I would think that are more appropriate not just in the case of Roy but at times even in my own country, when our current government decides to spy, monitor, torture, and murder us under the guise of national security.

If I had to look at it objectively, I would think what differentiates the Adivasi from the average American is that they are an actual group (or groups) of people, not just individual citizens, and their government (knowing they are an extreme minority [well below 10% of the country's overall population]) deems it right to tear down their homes and villages and put up their land for sale to the highest corporate bidder. I would certainly think that you could apply this to the experience of the indigenous peoples in American history, and one could justify their resistance to 'defending' what they believe to be their country from a foreign invader, but this is where it becomes more complex because India is an ancient civilization, heterogeneous in population, with groups and subgroups who have lived side-by-side for thousands of years, not just a few decades.

A second issue that makes it even more interesting is that few non-tribal Indians seem to care that much about the plight of the Adivasi, including the Indian government, even though they are included as one of the 'scheduled tribes' under Indian law. Even so, they are dozens of different major ethnic groups in-country and subregionally, and India is certainly not the first country to push natives out of their land for future development (Brazil, the US, and Australia, for example). The problem with the other cases is that they were long ago (Brazil being the most recent). Also, there are few defenders of such policies today, even if they still partake in 'development' programs in indigenous areas (like in Colombia and Peru). Nevertheless, in that context, the Adivasi are hardly alone.

But does that give them the right to take up arms against an otherwise democratic government that has decided to disenfranchise and de-land them? Ultimately, that is what it comes down to. From their perspective, I would certainly not take kind to my government seizing my land, kicking me out by force, burning down my subsistence, and expelling me or the people that I love and care about (like an indigenous enclosure). I am not sure if I would take up arms and fight it, since I have been fortunate enough not to be put in those life circumstances, but it would be hard for me to judge someone who did so, although I would qualify such support under limited circumstances to prevent the type of etho-centric separatist movements that so often tend towards human rights abuses far beyond that of the national government it is fighting (such as the Tamil Tigers). To that ends, it would have to be an environment in which an entire group (ethnic or otherwise) is being violently and collectively targeted and unjustly expelled (as a group) from their lands without legal redress, and even then much of this would depend on other factors (realistic assessment for success, the willingness of opposition government to negotiate, etc.).

In addition, should not our enlightened international community consider what is happening any different than a foreign military invasion of a national homeland (since these are militias and military forces expelling and expropriating Adivisai lands they have lived on for centuries)? In Kosovo, we called such actions ethnic cleansing (and in that case the natives, the Serbs, were the ones accused of the crime for running out several hundred thousand Kosovar Albanians during their war with the KLA-UCK). What I would like to know is should not such group-targeting tactics be considered a form of ethnic cleansing under international law? Does it somehow make it more acceptable to do this because the government is not, on paper, a formal dictatorship or is acting under the appearance of 'economic development' exculpate the nation-state in question from its conduct? I ask these as open questions.

Sarah Palin and the Ride of Paul Revere

noreply@blogger.com (TA) — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 20:52:00 +0000

I love living in this country and I love living in these times. Not because I enjoy seeing my country descend into its coming post-imperial slide, which will ultimately bankrupt and doom us in the coming century. No, I enjoy watching just how much dumber right-wing politicians in the US act (or pretend to act) to garner the votes of those who think a 2,000 year old carpenter is coming back at any moment.

I am sure Samuel Adams appreciated ole Paul ringing bells and shooting off guns to inform the British that they were not taking our firearms! Well, you have to give Sarah this much. At least she did not say that the revolution started in Concord, New Hampshire. She has a ways to go to catch up with Michele Bachmann. Maybe next week Sarah can tell us how Benedict Arnold won the Battle of Yorktown by firing the beheaded carcases of atheists out of cannons at the British. Goddess bless America.

The Price of Religion: Hatred and Death Threats

noreply@blogger.com (TA) — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 03:40:00 +0000

It is at times like this that I am so glad that the man who wrote our establishment clause in the First Amendment is not amongst the living to witness what we have descended to. Here is a story you will not be seeing on Fox 'news' anytime soon.

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US high school student threatened with death for opposing school prayer

NORTH LOUISIANA has been described as “the buckle on the Bible Belt” – and not without good reason, as high school student Damon Fowler at Bastrop High School has discovered to his cost.

On the eve of his graduation, the atheist student contacted the school superintendent to let him know that he opposed the inclusion of a prayer at the graduation ceremony. He pointed out that government-sponsored prayer in the public schools was unconstitutional and legally forbidden – and that he would be contacting the ACLU if it went ahead. The school agreed to substitute it with a moment of silent reflection, which was subsequently scuppered by a Christian student.

Then Fowler’s name, and his role in this incident, was leaked. As a direct result:

1) Fowler has been hounded, pilloried, and ostracized by his community.

2) One of Fowler’s teachers has publicly demeaned him.

3) Fowler has been physically threatened. Students have threatened to “jump him” at graduation practice, and he has received multiple threats of bodily harm, and even death threats.

4) Fowler’s parents cut off his financial support, kicked him out of the house, and threw his belongings onto the front porch.

Oh, and the school went ahead and had the graduation prayer anyway.

According to this report, Fowler has become the center of what he terms a “shitstorm”: he has been harassed, vilified, targeted with insults and name-calling and hateful remarks. He’s been told t he’s the devil. He’s been told, “Go cry to your mommy… oh, wait. You can’t”. (A reference to him being disowned by his parents.) He’s been told that he’s only doing this to get attention. A student’s public prayer at a pre-graduation “Class Night” event was turned into an opportunity for the school and community to gang up on Fowler and publicly close ranks against him – teachers as well as students. (Here’s video). And people seen defending him have been targeted as well.

Here are a few comments on the Bastrop Enterprise news story about the controversy:

I personally see him as a coward.

I hope they [Christians] put enough pressure on this kid to convert him and save his soul from the fire of hell.

If he don’t want prayer at graduation he can stay at home and not come to graduation.

I hope that the little athiest (sic) is offended.

What he is really doing is trying to shove his views down people’s throats.

Satan continues to prowl and is deceiving many in this world.

A piece published yesterday by PoliticusUSA points out that Christian fundamentalists have persecuted atheists and agnostics for the past 30 years with accusations that non-believers are aggressive and are “throwing atheism in our faces,” when the opposite is true.

There is a dangerous trend of Christian fundamentalists taking over the government to change the nature of America. It may be in part because in America, like the rest of the world, Christianity is on the decline and the number of Americans claiming to be Atheists, Agnostic, or non-religious has increased by 15 percent leading to an alarming trend of fundamentalists making a last-ditch effort to force Christianity on the country.

The young man who protested prayers at school events is not an isolated case, and around the country young people are standing up to school officials and fundamentalists who “force their religion down the throats” of non-believers regardless of age or station in life. The Constitution does not forbid religious fundamentalists from praying whenever and wherever they please, but it does maintain the separation of the government and religion and it means no public school prayer.

The article concluded:

Evangelical Christian leaders recently conceded in an interview that there were Christians around the country who were prepared for armed conflict to enforce Christianity if necessary, and they claimed the military and Congress had been infiltrated by fundamentalists; it is a foreboding that should frighten every person in America. If any American thinks they are safe from fundamentalist Christians whose intent is replacing the Constitution with the Ten Commandments and its Stone Age punishment (stoning), they are deluded and do not comprehend the level of violence extremists are capable of inflicting in god’s name.

If in America in 2011, one student faces public threats without a theocratic government or the Ten Commandments as the law of the land, imagine the violent Crusade and Inquisition a group of well-armed, angry fundamentalists will unleash if given authority and power.

Last month, an interviewer asked four evangelical church leaders if their intent of using violence to force Christianity on Americans was tantamount to the Taliban in Afghanistan. They replied that, ‘yes, they were the same as the Taliban except they were better armed, better organized, and had the full support of conservatives in positions of power’.

Still think fundamentalist Christians are harmless? You should be mortified.

http://freethinker.co.uk/2011/05/30/us-high-school-student-threatened-with-death-for-opposing-school-prayer/

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If Thomas Jefferson lived in Bastrop, Louisiana, he would have been strung up or run out of town for his irreligious views, which included observations like the following:

Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.--letter to Peter Carr (August 10, 1787).

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.--Notes on Virginia (1782).

Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.--Notes on Virginia (1782).

I concur with you strictly in your opinion of the comparative merits of atheism and demonism, and really see nothing but the latter in the being worshipped by many who think themselves Christians.--letter to Richard Price (January 8, 1789).

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State.--letter to Danbury Baptist Association, CT. (January 1, 1802).

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes--letter to Alexander von Humboldt (December 6, 1813).

Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.--letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper (February 10, 1814).

In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.--letter to Horatio G. Spafford (March 17, 1814).

Getting back to the original story, I am not sure what is more disheartening. The death threats and hatred of this young man by the students and community, or the pathetic, almost violence-enabling response of the educators (the one group of people who should know better and care enough to want to ensure the safety and well being of their students). This is the base of the Republican Party, people, just in case you ever lose sight of it. This is the America that Sarah Palin thinks is the "real" America, small town USA, where being a non-believer can possibly get you beaten to a pulp or killed.

The irony in all of this, and it never ceases to amaze me when dealing with Christian fundamentalists, which I do on a regular basis in the Deep South, is how would Jesus have reacted to someone like Damon Fowler? Could you imagine Jesus trying to beat him up and threatening to kill him? How about calling him the devil or disowning him (like the way his parents have)? Apparently, to the people of Bastrop, Louisiana, yes. You would have thought a religion founded by a man who befriended the homeless and prostitutes would have kindlier followers, but like with all religions based on ancient credos, and contemporary populations looking for simple answers to delude themselves into thinking their material impoverishment perfectly acceptable in this world, you would be wrong.

For those Christians reading this, I would for once like an explanation for this type of behavior. Please, tell me, how kicking your child to the curb, because he refuses to believe in your religion, could possibly uphold your faith and values, and is keeping with a man who washed the feet of commoners.

BTW, here is an interview with Damon Fowler, along with his brother, about his experiences in Bastrop High School, as well as the response from fellow non-believers to his plight. It is well worth the read.

http://friendlyatheist.com/2011/05/26/an-interview-with-damon-fowler-and-his-brother-jerrett/

And good luck, Damon. You have shown more maturity in youth than all of the members of your community.

The Death of The Constitution Act: Obama and the Extension of The Patriot Act

noreply@blogger.com (TA) — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 02:45:00 +0000

You would think that there would be great outrage by progressives over the Obama administration's signing of an extension of the Patriot Act, one of the most hated pieces of legislation by civil libertarians during the Bush era. To give credit where it is due, there certainly have been some recriminations in the pages of the DailyKOS or the Democratic Underground, but otherwise you will not find too much dissent from the left. It speaks volumes when someone like Ted Rall has to opine that the loss of his career, or what is left of it, was not a product of his editorial cartoons lampooning Bush, but the negative reaction of publications like The Nation over his criticisms of President Obama, particularly his carrying over of Bush's odious policies on national security and civil liberties.

And for those Democrats who continue to live the illusion that the POTUS is on the right side of this issue, he most certainly is not. Indeed, Obama is more extreme than President Bush. How extreme? Right now, as I write this, our POTUS has interpreted a secret clause (right out of Dean Wormer on Animal House) from the Patriot Act that allows him to unilaterally do whatever he wants in the name of national security. Sounds crazy? Here it is.

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There’s a Secret Patriot Act, Senator Says

by Spencer Ackerman

You think you understand how the Patriot Act allows the government to spy on its citizens. Sen. Ron Wyden says it’s worse than you know.

Congress is set to reauthorize three controversial provisions of the surveillance law as early as Thursday. Wyden (D-Oregon) says that powers they grant the government on their face, the government applies a far broader legal interpretation — an interpretation that the government has conveniently classified, so it cannot be publicly assessed or challenged. But one prominent Patriot-watcher asserts that the secret interpretation empowers the government to deploy ”dragnets” for massive amounts of information on private citizens; the government portrays its data-collection efforts much differently.

“We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says,” Wyden told Danger Room in an interview in his Senate office. “When you’ve got that kind of a gap, you’re going to have a problem on your hands.”

What exactly does Wyden mean by that? As a member of the intelligence committee, he laments that he can’t precisely explain without disclosing classified information. But one component of the Patriot Act in particular gives him immense pause: the so-called “business-records provision,” which empowers the FBI to get businesses, medical offices, banks and other organizations to turn over any “tangible things” it deems relevant to a security investigation.

“It is fair to say that the business-records provision is a part of the Patriot Act that I am extremely interested in reforming,” Wyden says. “I know a fair amount about how it’s interpreted, and I am going to keep pushing, as I have, to get more information about how the Patriot Act is being interpreted declassified. I think the public has a right to public debate about it.”

That’s why Wyden and his colleague Sen. Mark Udall offered an amendment on Tuesday to the Patriot Act reauthorization.

The amendment, first reported by Marcy Wheeler, blasts the administration for “secretly reinterpret[ing] public laws and statutes.” It would compel the Attorney General to “publicly disclose the United States Government’s official interpretation of the USA Patriot Act.” And, intriguingly, it refers to “intelligence-collection authorities” embedded in the Patriot Act that the administration briefed the Senate about in February.

Wyden says he “can’t answer” any specific questions about how the government thinks it can use the Patriot Act. That would risk revealing classified information — something Wyden considers an abuse of government secrecy. He believes the techniques themselves should stay secret, but the rationale for using their legal use under Patriot ought to be disclosed.

“I draw a sharp line between the secret interpretation of the law, which I believe is a growing problem, and protecting operations and methods in the intelligence area, which have to be protected,” he says.

Surveillance under the business-records provisions has recently spiked. The Justice Department’s official disclosure on its use of the Patriot Act, delivered to Congress in April, reported that the government asked the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for approval to collect business records 96 times in 2010 — up from just 21 requests the year before. The court didn’t reject a single request. But it “modified” those requests 43 times, indicating to some Patriot-watchers that a broadening of the provision is underway.

“The FISA Court is a pretty permissive body, so that suggests something novel or particularly aggressive, not just in volume, but in the nature of the request,” says Michelle Richardson, the ACLU’s resident Patriot Act lobbyist. “No one has tipped their hand on this in the slightest. But we’ve come to the conclusion that this is some kind of bulk collection. It wouldn’t be surprising to me if it’s some kind of internet or communication-records dragnet.” (Full disclosure: My fiancée works for the ACLU.)

The FBI deferred comment on any secret interpretation of the Patriot Act to the Justice Department. The Justice Department said it wouldn’t have any comment beyond a bit of March congressional testimony from its top national security official, Todd Hinnen, who presented the type of material collected as far more individualized and specific: “driver’s license records, hotel records, car-rental records, apartment-leasing records, credit card records, and the like.”

But that’s not what Udall sees. He warned in a Tuesday statement about the government’s “unfettered” access to bulk citizen data, like “a cellphone company’s phone records.” In a Senate floor speech on Tuesday, Udall urged Congress to restrict the Patriot Act’s business-records seizures to “terrorism investigations” — something the ostensible counterterrorism measure has never required in its nearly 10-year existence.

Indeed, Hinnen allowed himself an out in his March testimony, saying that the business-record provision “also” enabled “important and highly sensitive intelligence-collection operations” to take place. Wheeler speculates those operations include “using geolocation data from cellphones to collect information on the whereabouts of Americans” — something our sister blog Threat Level has reported on extensively.

It’s worth noting that Wyden is pushing a bill providing greater privacy protections for geolocation info.

For now, Wyden’s considering his options ahead of the Patriot Act vote on Thursday. He wants to compel as much disclosure as he can on the secret interpretation, arguing that a shadow broadening of the Patriot Act sets a dangerous precedent.

“I’m talking about instances where the government is relying on secret interpretations of what the law says without telling the public what those interpretations are,” Wyden says, “and the reliance on secret interpretations of the law is growing.”

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/05/secret-patriot-act/

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How nice for our government to be able to secretly reinterpret laws as they see fit. How I would love to tell my bank I have decided to reinterpret the law which commands repayment on the loan for my car purchase to mean that I do not have to pay for it after all. I am sure they would be thrilled to hear that, as would the court and repossession agent from hell that would surely hound me. Apparently, only governments are permitted to know the depths and legitimacy of deceiving populations.

How can any self-respecting progressive look at this assault on our Constitution, from the leadership of both parties, and not be outraged? Where are the teabaggers, where are the right-wing libertarians, where are the civil libertarians on this issue? And why is there little debate (with few honorable exceptions) about this in Congress? It takes someone like Senator Wyden and even Rand Paul (yes, I give him his due on this issue) to finally state the obvious, but they are a minority in Congress (and in the case of Wyden he cowered to Senate Majority Leader Reid and pulled the more transparent amendments to the Patriot Act that he originally proposed). The entire leadership of the Democratic Party in Congress voted to extend the Patriot Act. The same with the Republicans. In the so-called mainstream media, there has been too little discussion on this issue, excepting Cenk Uygur from The Young Turks on MSNBC.

Think about what is happening to our republic. Right now, the POTUS could claim you to be a terrorist, without charge, without presentment, without indictment, and have you monitored, arrested, tortured, and/or killed, on his orders alone. How is this different than the powers given to a government like North Korea? How is this different than the excesses that occurred in Stalin's Russia or in Hitler's Germany? If your government can monitor, arrest, torture, and kill you without charge, without cause, without warrant, without anything other than the word of one government bureaucrat, ladies and gentlemen, you no longer live in a free society. You can call it semi-free, semi-dictatorial, whatever you want, but it is not a free society worth its name.

Consider also the Patriot Act was passed weeks after 9/11, with that terrorist attack used as the backdrop and claimed rationale for why we had to temporarily suspend our Bill of Rights. The planner of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, is comfortably tucked away in Guantanamo Bay, and the leader of the organization that attacked us, Osama bin Laden, swimming with the fishes in the Persian Gulf. By the CIA's own estimates, there are probably no more than a few hundred hardcore members of al-Qaeda in Pakistan left. How in the world can we continue to justify allowing the NSA to catalog every one of our phone calls? It certainly did nothing to prevent the Fort Hood shooter. What is next, just have the federal government monitor all internet activity? Why not, that is what the Chinese government has been trying to do for the past decade, and we certainly seem to be catching up with the PRC in the manner in which we spy on our citizens.

What President Obama has done in signing the extension of the Patriot Act is momentous. It is as momentous as the day George Bush originally signed it into law because ten years later we have pretty much crushed our enemies. At this point, there is nothing left to rationalize it except future hypothetical attacks by people we do not know about. If that is the case, then what is the point of having privacy or a Bill of Rights at all? If one takes what our president has told us, none. And that is the lesson. We are now moving over to normalizing the elimination of our rights as standard operating procedure for federal law enforcement and national security agencies. For all intents and purposes, the Fourth Amendment is a dead letter. Its utility is in name only.

And what is next in line for this slouching towards a praetorian state? Government collection of all of our DNA at birth? You could certainly use that as a rationale to solve a lot of unsolved crimes in this country, since familial DNA matches will bring up a lot of hits on CODIS. How about having GPS devices on our population, beyond the criminals and parolees? That would make it a lot easier to find suspected terrorists who have come to the attention of the FBI. You know, mass killers and crazed bombardiers like peace activists and pacifists, whose anti-war activities have put them under anti-terrorist federal monitoring over the past several years (and without pesky things like warrants or cause to get in the way of the predilections of our friends in law enforcement).

You might think I am being conspiratorial about this, but I am not. Who twenty years ago would have ever envisioned that the POTUS would have an assassination list that would include American citizens, to be killed without charge and on the orders of the commander-in-chief? I never would have anticipated that development. Just imagine, we threw a gasket at the thought of Nixon finding out about a break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters, and trying to cover it up, but say nothing of the the crimes committed by our presidents over the past ten years (crimes that have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands and repealed the liberties of our entire population). Who would have ever thought before 9/11 that our government, through the NSA in Fort Meade, would catalog all of our phone calls and monitor around 10% of our internet activity on any given day (without warrant or cause)?

If someone sneaks into your mailbox and reads your mail, he or she could be prosecuted under federal law and go to jail for years, but that same government sneaks into your emails every day, without invitation, without your knowledge, and without accountability (indeed, the law now allows our government to selectively re-interpret the act to do as it pleases). A decade ago, I would have thought such possibilities the product of a warped mind. Not anymore, sadly, and unless the people of this country rise up, en masse, by the millions (people of all ideological persuasions) against what is taking place, or until (if ever) the Supreme Court bothers to step in and rein in these abuses, you can kiss goodbye your freedoms.

Still Here: The Non-Rapture Post-Mortem

noreply@blogger.com (TA) — Sun, 22 May 2011 00:14:00 +0000

Curse ye, Harold Camping. Now, I have to get ready for work next week. My student tuition debt payments thank you for the disappointing evening. May the totally awesome goddess Juno strike you down.

Now for something not completely different, and in homage to those who thought we were going to be raptured, I introduce John R. Butler's Hand of The Almighty.

Bye, Bye, Osama, and Adios to Our Souls

noreply@blogger.com (TA) — Wed, 18 May 2011 00:44:00 +0000

I am not a cheering type, and in spite of the noise being made on t.v., radios, and the streets (seemingly a contest as to who can beat their chests and scream the loudest), the death of Osama bin Laden does nothing for this country but settle a score on a massacre in which we already had in custody the actual planner and organizer of the attack.

There is one thing that has happened as a result of this assassination, which is what this was, regardless of what else we call it. It now sets the precedence that our government (and by extension any government with the power to get away with it) can legitimately invade the national territory of any other country and kill someone that we do not like. This is not to defend bin Laden. He needs no defense. As a person, he lived a wretched and deluded life. He killed thousands and because of that I cannot find it within me to mourn him (anymore than Father Geoghan).

However odious he may have been in life, however, we are still or we are supposed to be living in something like a free society, a society predicated on the rule of law. Can one say that Osama (who was not even born in this country) was any worse of a person morally than Jeffrey Dahmer? Notice, Dahmer received a trial for his acts of murder, but if you are labeled a terrorist one need not worry about such distinctions anymore. You can be branded a 'combatant' deserving instantaneous death, regardless of whether you are a combatant at the time of your death. Ask yourself, if being unarmed in a house in Pakistan, without a uniform or country, operating as a private killer, makes you a combatant on par with a member of the Imperial Japanese Army at Iwo Jima, how can one then be upset at any terrorist who would rationalize the slaughter of a Westerner on the grounds that we subsidize the governments that oppress them, and as such are 'combatants' who should be killed? That is the slippery slope that terrorism and wars against terrorism bring upon a population.

Yes, I know the response and have already heard it before writing this post. So, dear pinko embryo-eater, what would you have done about Osama then? Well, first, I would not invade another country to kill him. That was our excuse for going into Afghanistan and Iraq, and you can see how that worked out. We have paid over $3 trillion in the past decade, killed hundreds of thousands, including our own soldiers, for a war to supposedly get one man. Tell me, now that bin Laden is dead, why are we still in Afghanistan? To support President Karzai, who had to rig his last elections and whose brother is the largest heroin dealer in Asia (and living off the dole of the American taxpayer)?

No, I would have done something much different, other than not wasting a few trillion dollars invading countries, killing people, and turning my country into a praetorian state, shredding the very rights in our Constitution that we supposedly hold so dear. I would have an international arrest warrant put out on Mr. bin Laden, impose sanctions on the countries harboring him (I should add, that includes our wonderful 'friends' in the Pakistani government that the American taxpayer gave $30 billion to since 9/11), and do something truly extraordinary. I would have prosecuted him in a court of law, which is what you do with a murderer.

For those who think the law is a triviality and manifestation of bad intentions (thanks be to the efforts of nefarious types like James Madison), how would all of those fellow Americans cheering the past couple of weeks have reacted had the Cuban government sent in its version of a special forces squad (if this was ever possible) to openly assassinate Orlando Bosch? Yes, that is right, the same Orlando Bosch who, as a right-wing anti-Castro activist, decided it best to blow up a Cuban airliner in 1976, killing 78 people. We, our government, the one way pay taxes to, trained Mr. Bosch, had an agent attend one the meetings in Washington DC, in which the said terrorist planned the bombing, and took this mass murderer in because of his past training from the CIA--thereby protecting Bosch from imprisonment, to which he lived out the last few decades of life as a free/plane-bombing terrorist. Most Americans have no idea who this person was, sadly. Well, what if the Cuban government had (without our consent) come into our country, in the name of vengeance (i.e., justice) for those innocent lives Bosch snuffed out, and shot a couple of bullets into his chest and head? How many Americans would be cheering this? As much as I disliked the man, I certainly would not have been one of them, anymore than with bin Laden.

Once we replace constitutions and the law with special operations, it is but a stepping stone for that same government to turn its barrels on its own population. As I write this, and it is not the first time I have complained about it, our POTUS (the so-called pro-Islamic socialist) has compiled a hit list that includes American citizens, who are to be killed on sight and on the unilateral orders of our Commander in Chief. No trials, no formal legal accusation, presentment, grand juries. Nothing. All it takes to be included on this terrorist hit list is the whim of our President.

If this is the way a supposed liberal governs, do you think it will ever get any better under a Republican or subsequent Democratic administration? Instinctively, we should already know the answer to this question. It is the same as those who wondered several years ago what it would take to get a repeal of the Patriot Act, and how much longer would we tolerate allowing the NSA to catalog all of our phones calls (since October 2001) without so much as a court order or cause? Now that Osama is dead, we have the answer. Unless there is an intervention by the Supreme Court, our government is going to continue the suspension of our Constitution. Our growing police state, the government monitoring of our lives, and periodic killing of the citizenry without charge, will resume and become a normalized, permanent feature of life in this republic.

The saddest part of all is that this is an issue that should unite the right and left (the so-called radical individualists on the libertarian right and the civil libertarian left), but so far it has not. When the US House voted on a resolution announcing its love and approval of Osama's killing, not a single member had the guts to vote against it (no, dear right-wing Left, not even your beloved Ron Paul). Only four members voted 'present', while the rest tripped over themselves to celebrate extralegal state killing under the guise of justice and anti-terrorism. This is what we have become.

Whether or not the cheering, happy throngs of demonstrators in this country realize it they are pumping their fists in approval for something far beyond the death of Osama bin Laden. It is the loss of our way of life as a constitutional republic.

Viva Vermont! First State to Pass Single Payer

noreply@blogger.com (TA) — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 22:26:00 +0000

Yes, I know, Vermont is culturally, politically, and socially very different than most states in this country, but it is worlds apart from the nonsense of the Oklahoma legislature spending taxpayer's time creating an official gospel song. The great state of Vermont is now the first state in the US to pass a universal single payer health care bill.

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Vermont Senate advances health care bill

By DAVE GRAM

MONTPELIER, Vt.

The state Senate gave preliminary approval Monday to health care legislation that is a key part of Gov. Peter Shumlin's agenda.

The bill, a version of which already has been passed by the House, would put Vermont on a path toward what it calls a "universal and unified health system" and what the Democratic governor calls single-payer health care, with the objective of ensuring health insurance coverage for every resident.

The Senate legislation won initial approval on a 21-8 vote and is due for final action Tuesday. It calls for setting up a health care marketplace, called an exchange, in keeping with federal health care legislation. It also sets up a board that would review and approve designs for a publicly financed program available to all residents.

Differences between the House and Senate versions of the legislation would be worked out in a conference committee, and then the bill would go to the governor for his signature.

Sen. Claire Ayer, D-Addison and chairwoman of the Senate Health and Welfare Committee, began the Senate debate by reading a comment from a resident upset with the rising cost of health care. Someone identified only as Aunt Serena wrote to The Burlington Free Press about the difficulties of paying medical bills.

"The patient not only has to be sick and is full of aches and pains and other hardships ... (but also) has to scrabble to pay his taxes and his grocery and feed bills," Ayer read.

But Aunt Serena was a woman of optimism and determination.

"It will work out," Ayer read. "It will have to. We've got to face it and fix it."

The letter was written in 1929 and was dug up by state archivist Gregory Sanford, Ayer said.

"I think it's taken us a while to get here," she added.

The bill still leaves a long way to go. For example, it leaves until January 2013 -- after the next election -- the crucial question of how the new system will be paid for. Also to be decided later: what health services the benefit package will cover.

But Monday's vote, largely along party lines with Democrats in support, sets a course that could give Vermont a Canadian-style, publicly financed health care system by late in the decade.

Ayer said the legislation would get Vermont "off the track of escalating and out of control costs and develop a business plan that brings costs under control, covers all Vermonters (and) is financed by all participants in a sustainable fashion."

Critics of the legislation said it creates too much uncertainty for business by not saying up front how the system will be paid for, and they raised the specter of doctors and other health care providers fleeing Vermont in pursuit of a better living elsewhere.

Sen. Randy Brock, R-Franklin, said that at a recent forum in St. Albans that included doctors, "three of the five doctors told us point blank that if a single-payer health care system comes to pass they will seriously consider relocating elsewhere in the U.S."

The Green Mountain Care Board, a new state panel created by the bill, would review proposals from executive branch agencies on how the program would work and be financed. By January 2014, it would set up the exchange, required by the federal health care bill passed last year. The exchange later would become the framework for the single-payer system.

Some senators cautioned that previous forays into publicly financed health care have had problems.

Sen. Vincent Illuzzi, R-Essex-Orleans, pointed to Medicaid, which he said reimburses doctors and hospitals at just 60 percent of their cost of providing care. The state-subsidized Catamount Health Care Plan, a less ambitious public health care program passed five years ago, "has been declared financially unsustainable by the governor," Illuzzi said.

Supporters, though, were not deterred from what for many has been a lifelong goal.

"We're from Vermont," said Sen. Anthony Pollina, a Progressive from Washington County. "We're in one of the smartest states in the country, and we're in one of the healthiest states in the country, and we can figure this out."

Shumlin, in a statement released by his office, sounded similarly optimistic.

"Today the Legislature took a huge step toward making Vermont the first state ... in the nation to control skyrocketing health care costs and remove the burden of providing health care coverage from small business owners," he said. "This bill is good for Vermonters and Vermont businesses."

http://www.beckershospitalreview.com/news-analysis/vermont-senate-passes-legislation-that-moves-state-toward-single-payor-health-system.html

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A state that prioritizes its own citizens before corporate donors. Imagine that. Well, if you live outside of Vermont you will have to keep dreaming because it is right now the only state legislature not completely in the pockets of large corporations in this country.

By the way, Vermont remains the only state in the union that decided not to straight jacket itself with a balanced budget requirement in its constitution. The result? A more fiscally responsible and prudent state. I wonder how Texas, Oklahoma, and all of the red states are doing with their budgets? Well, since you are wondering, for FY 2011 Vermont's deficit is $150 million (or $239.72 for every man, woman, and child in the state of Vermont). By contrast, in good ole red state Texas, under a Republican governor and legislature (and much of everything else), the lone stars have tallied up a budget deficit for FY 2011 of $27 billion, coming to $1,073.75 for every man, women, and child in Texas. In other words, in socialist Vermont (without any budgetary constraints that conservatives and their libertarian lemmings constantly pine for) its budget deficit (on a per capita basis) is almost 1/5 of what it is in Texas (and that is with a state that already has previously passed health care legislation to cover more Vermonters).

I suppose if I ever get to live a second life, I should think about moving to Vermont.

Because of Vermont's size, to be sure, it is considered symbolic, but symbols have a way of steamrolling into much larger, more substantive movements and resulting policies. Here is to hoping that Vermont is a harbinger of things to come.

War In Libya: Wrong and Illegal

noreply@blogger.com (TA) — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 03:39:00 +0000

I know in this late hour that it is popular to denounce Muammar Gaddafi as the devil incarnate. It is easy to do so because Gaddafi is by all accounts a dictator with a predilection for repression. Sadly, this world is filled with many such people, including not an infrequent number in my own country (within my government and in the body politic). However, that does not justify or rationalize my government, never mind the European contributors, to attack and bomb Libya.

In essence, the charge is that the Libyan government's crackdown on its population in February was so harsh, so severe, that it necessitated a 'no-fly' zone, an enabling resolution from the UN Security Council, and the sweet joys of dropping our cluster bombs throughout Tripoli and the roadsides of the country to "protect" the people of Libya (i.e., the rebels fighting Gaddafi's government). To be sure, the US at least bothered to get the UN Security Council to pass a resolution, to give us some legitimacy in our attack (something the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration saw as akin to supporting Islamic terrorism), but that does not exculpate the crime of the attack itself.

My opposition in based on three grounds. One, history. Two, the hypocrisy of inaction of similar crackdowns in the rest of the Arab world. Three, the blatant violation of the US Constitution that is taking place in this intervention.

One, if anyone has paid attention for the past few decades, my government has a long, sordid, and not altogether very successful record of military interventions in the Middle East, interventions that have shredded our reputation, prestige, and called into question our own values. One could go back our interventions in Lebanon in the '50s and the '80s, our overthrow of the Mossadeq government in Persia in 1953, but in more recent times our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Granted, we 'won' to the extent that Kuwait (that bastion of democracy with an unelected head-of-state) is free and Saddam Hussein long departed to the hereafter, but we also preemptively invaded the country on our second visit, caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of our military personnel, and spent about a trillion dollars of tax monies to subsidize and prop up a democratically-elected Islamic state.

And in the process of all this we also permanently damaged our reputation throughout the world, making us a pariah state in the Muslim world and for that matter most everywhere outside of the walls of the Manhattan Institute. And we are still in Iraq and will be for the foreseeable future, in spite of what our President says.

And then there was Afghanistan. We are going on year ten in Afghanistan. The Taliban is resurgent and stronger than ever, and the people responsible for wrecking the planes into our buildings are hiding comfortably in Pakistan (assuming any of them are still alive). Again, if this is what we call a success I would really like for someone to point out what a failed military campaign looks like (next to getting physically expelled from the theater of operations).

True, we are supposedly only going to use air power in Libya (minus a couple of thousand of Marines that are to be on-call), will pass this war off to NATO (even though the commanding general of NATO is at all times, by rule, an American general and who will impose a 'no fly zone-plus' on Libya [I would like to see how that remains within the construct of UN Resolution 1973]), so as to make certain that we do not to make ourselves look like the evil imperialists we have become over the years. But nothing is going to change the fact that we are militarily supporting a group of insurgents in another country by attacking its government. We are committing acts of war against yet another Arab nation. Is it any wonder why the rest of the region is a little circumspect and doubtful about our intentions? One only need to look at what we have done to their brethren.

Two, why is it that we must act and intervene in Libya, when we refuse to do so in cases of violent repression that are every bit as awful, if not worse, than what happened in Tripoli last month? In Yemen, the government (and our close ally) decided that the best way to deal with its demonstrators (who wanted to be rid of its authoritarian leadership) was to use snipers on them, killing and wounding hundreds of innocent people. The government in Bahrain was even more blunt. After losing the ability to torture and kill its demonstrators, it decided to employ the use of Saudi security forces to assist them. Imagine if the Bahraini government used security forces from, say, China or Libya to shoot and torture its demonstrators. I am certain Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would have done more than caution the Bahraini government. All of this, by the way, is occurring during the same time span that Libya's crackdown was situationally used as an exemplar demanding US/UN military action. I suppose someone should have told the demonstrators in Damascus that they should have flown to Tripoli. We might have paid more attention to their sniper shots and baton wounds.

Three, as hard as this is to believe, since every POTUS has ignored our Constitution when it comes to war-making powers since World War Two, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 clearly states that Congress, not the President, has the legal authority to make war. Of course, we have not had a president who bothered to even pay attention to Congress on war and foreign policy issues since FDR and the Neutrality Acts of the 1930s, but it should be noted that even President Polk, the wretch who wanted to invade and annex Mexico to spread slavery to newly conquered territories and guarantee the institution's survival, even a man as backwards as James K. Polk, waited until Congress declared war before actually going to war with Mexico.

When Barack Obama ran for President back in 2008, one of his campaign themes was his criticism (insincere though it was) of Bush Jr. for his overuse of unitary executive authority--aka the imperial presidency (prevalent in American foreign policy since FDR, at the earliest). Amazingly, Barack Obama once pretended to care about our Constitution. You might remember him.

This is the same man who now has a personal assassination list, filled not just with names of foreigners but even American citizens, who are to be killed on sight, because they are accused (but not indicted or prosecuted) of being terrorists.* And now this is the same man who preemptively goes to war with Libya without so much as consulting Congress or paying attention to that pesky Article 1 of our Constitution.

This is also the same man who, like every POTUS since Richard Nixon, has refused to recognize the War Powers Act, even though it is an act of Congress and law, which restricts the president from sending troops into harm's way without consulting Congress. Congress has never bothered to take any president to court probably because it knows that since it cowered and abnegated its own Constitutional authority our beloved Supreme Court (who considers corporate money speech) would likely side with the White House's assumed near imperial status in deciding which country to blow up. Notice, few, if any, members of Congress ever talk about the WPA, except maybe Dennis Kucinich, and he is almost completely blackballed by the media (and hated by the leadership of his own party for having the guts to call for the impeachment of our last president).

Be that as it may, how can any progressive call for the impeachment of George Bush for the invasion of Iraq and yet ignore this preemptive war (preemptive because there is no formal declaration and Libya has not attacked us)? How can we be honest with ourselves as citizens by playing favorites in who we think should be allowed to violate our laws and traditions in this country? True, it can be easily argued that just about every president since 1945 should have been impeached (except maybe Gerald Ford [who was not in office long enough to start a war]), but it would be a start in reasserting the control of this country's foreign policy back to where it belongs and where the people who wrote our Constitution intended for it to be--our legislative branch.

Sounds radical? It should not. Here is our first Secretary of Treasury on the matter:

“The President is to be commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States. In this respect his authority would be nominally the same with that of the king of Great Britain, but in substance much inferior to it. It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces, as first General and admiral of the Confederacy; while that of the British king extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies — all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the legislature.”--Alexander Hamilton, Federalist #69

This is exactly why Congress (regardless of which party is in power) should be the first institution of choice to decide whether or not we go to war with Libya or for that matter anyone else. The UN Charter does not obviate our legislature's final word on the matter. An enabling resolution does not require us to use force, if we decide not to. But our Constitution does require our President to have the authorization for any use of force from Congress. For some reason, this gets ignored in the mesh of the Libyan war when it should be first in our considerations.

*=Even Jeffrey Dahmer saw his day in court. Apparently, Mr. Anwar al-Awlaki does not have to worry about such trivialities. If only he was a serial-killer and cannibal.

The Republican/Teabagger Way: Hating Teachers and Workers

noreply@blogger.com (TA) — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 20:56:00 +0000

Only in the twisted world of a used repository for billionaires, millionaires, and large multinational corporations would you hear one of these servants whine about privileged economic elites. What kind of economic elites are they worried about? You know, those big salaried teachers, janitors, and snow truck operators, pulling in their lavish $30-40,000/year salaries, most all of them with health care coverage! Those rich Communists.

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Indiana's governor calls public unions 'elites'

CINCINNATI —

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels has called public unions "the privileged elite" during a speech in Ohio.

Daniels' state faces a political standoff over issues including labor legislation. He told a crowd at a county GOP dinner in Cincinnati Wednesday night that public jobs and salaries went up while private jobs were lost and that private sector salaries have shrunk.

The Cincinnati Enquirer reports Daniels said there might have been a time when government employees needed protection and reform, but that was a long time ago.

Public employee rights are a hot issue in Ohio, with a bill proposing to restrict collective bargaining for state workers.

Considered a potential 2012 presidential contender, Daniels stressed he wasn't making a stump speech. His comments about public employee unions got strong applause.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-oh-daniels-unions,0,108198.story

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Yes, these are the forces bankrupting us. Not the $150-plus million of tax cuts that Gov. Daniels gave corporations (through property tax caps), or his advocacy of tax cuts for millionaires (all the more laughable considering that Daniels is a multimillionaire, ex-corporate executive, and graduate of Princeton University, spending his formative youth dodging the Vietnam War and smoking weed [earning him an arrest record for his efforts, while attending that non-elite school disguised as an Ivy League college]). Of course, those are not privileged types at all. Those are just average, everyday rich people, doing the Lord's work. Or, if we are talking about the federal government, how about the $100 billion of tax cuts given to corporations by our president in his stimulus package? Or how about the $700 billion bailout of our banks and insurance companies, including the multi-billion dollar bonuses they gave themselves (with the support of our Congress and presidential advisors on the grounds that the contract is an inviolable thing, which can never be violated)?

Funny how these servants, like Governors Walker and Daniels, never seem to care about the holiness of the contract when it comes to someone making $32,000 a year to teach your kids. Surely, those teachers were involved, somehow, in the speculative boom and bust that caused the collapse of our real estate market (the real instigators and culprits who remain some of Governor Daniels' biggest campaign contributors). I am sure those teachers were responsible for wasting over a trillion dollars of our tax monies (all pure deficit spending) to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq (something Daniels should know all about, seeing how he was at the OMB at the time and estimated that the wars would cost less than $100 billion [fiscal crimes only apply to state workers, apparently]). Surely, these overpaid elites living off our money, doing such nefarious things like teaching our children how to read and write, were responsible for Bear Sterns and AIG, not to mention Tyco and Enron (or the crimes of Eli Lilly during Mitch's time as an executive there). Obviously. This is why they (the workers) are elites, and billionaires and millionaires and fetuses the only legitimate citizens of this republic, according to the party of elephants.

If only we had seen this coming, we could have stopped these all-powerful workers from running up a $14 trillion national debt. I mean, they must have votes in Congress, right? I mean, these unions are privileged elites, just like Louis XVI and George III.

Well, at least the GOP took the day off from blaming the swine flu on Muslims and Mexicans, but do not wait for them. I am sure tomorrow another hated and bashed minority of the hour will become newly enshrined elites, to be taken down by the knee scrapes for the upper 1% income tax bracket.

And to the members of the Wisconsin State State Police, chasing down the people who gave you a union to accrue the very benefits you would take from another fellow worker, this one is for you, you union-busting finks.

Oh, and Governor Daniels, on the off chance your toking habits have not eliminated your memory to read to this point, please tell, do you consider privileged elites those children of the Hilton fortune, inheriting all of their family's wealth without so much as a worry of any tax on estates? I think we already know the answer to that one.

So, dear teachers, be aware. You are the new scourge of humanity to the right-wing of this country. This is what the repositories think of you and every last worker (and have since they took up arms to keep many of you in slavery and the rest working 72 hours a week without benefits).

Wisconsin: The War on Workers

noreply@blogger.com (TA) — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 20:24:00 +0000

It is a common refrain from conservatives and Republicans that those of us on the left are guilty of the most vile of offenses (next to killing babies and sodomy): promoting class warfare (namely, against them and their upper 1% income tax sponsors). Rarely do we get to see them do it in such a blatant way as what the GOP in Wisconsin is trying to do to its state workers. For those of you who think the right-wing in this country cares about you (unless you are a millionaire or fetus), Exhibit A.

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Wis. gov calls on Dems who fled state to return

By SCOTT BAUER, Associated Press Scott Bauer, Associated Press

MADISON, Wis. – Wisconsin's Gov. Scott Walker has called on Democrats who fled the state to block a vote on an anti-union bill to "come home."

Senate Democrats left town on Thursday to stop Republicans who control the chamber from taking a vote on Walker's proposal that would take away collective bargaining rights from public employees.

Walker told reporters on Friday that the Senate Democrats should come back to the Capitol and stop hiding out.

The GOP governor has said that he is not trying to rush things. He told The Associated Press on Friday that he's prepared for the stalemate to drag on into next week.

Democrats on the run in Wisconsin avoided state troopers Friday and threatened to stay in hiding for weeks, potentially paralyzing the state government in a standoff with majority Republicans over union rights for public employees.

The party's battle against balancing the state budget by cutting the pay, benefits and collective bargaining rights of public workers is the boldest action yet by Democrats to push back against last fall's GOP wave.

But the dramatic strategy that has clogged the Capitol with thousands of protesters clashes with one essential truth: Republicans told everyone months ago that unions would be one of their targets, and the GOP now has more than enough votes to pass its plans once the Legislature can convene.

The 14 Senate Democrats left the state Thursday, delaying action in that chamber on the sweeping bill. Among them was Sen. Jon Erpenbach, who said Friday that the group was prepared to be away for weeks, although he would prefer to end the stalemate sooner.

"That really, truly is up to the governor," he told The Associated Press in an interview Friday at a downtown Chicago hotel. "It's his responsibility to bring the state together. The state is not unified. It is totally torn part."
Meanwhile, protests at the state Capitol entered a fourth day and continued to grow — to an estimated 40,000 people, the largest crowd yet. Many schools were closed again after teachers called in sick, including the state's largest district, in Milwaukee.

And neither protesters, Democrats or the GOP appeared ready to make any accommodations for the other side.

Demonstrators vowed to stay as long as necessary to get concessions. New Republican Gov. Scot Walker rebuffed requests to sit down with Democrats to seek a compromise.

Erpenbach (URP'-ehn-bahk) accused Walker of trying to rush the legislation, which was publicly unveiled only a week ago.

"I'm not calling him a dictator. But this is dictatorial almost," Erpenbach said. "I don't think I've ever seen such a draconian piece of legislation come down from any governor, Democrat or Republican."

Republicans had warned since last year's campaign that they would seek major concessions from unions. But for lawmakers in the minority, "The only other option we had to slow things down was to leave."

Erpenbach said the decision to flee happened on the spur of the moment as Democrats gathered near the Capitol for a regular strategy meeting Thursday morning.

An hour later, he threw a few travel essentials — a toothbrush, razor and few changes of clothes — into a duffel bag and a backpack. He took just two or three minutes to pack, and jumped in a car for a prearranged meeting at a hotel in Rockford, Ill., just south of the Wisconsin border.

The lawmakers were concerned that police could have detained them, even though the Wisconsin Constitution prohibits the arrest of state lawmakers while the Legislature is in session, except in cases of felonies, breaches of the peace or treason.

"We knew their jurisdiction ends at the state line, and that's why we came to Illinois," Erpenbach said.
From Rockford, the legislators headed in different directions, most of them traveling to the Chicago area or to other parts of northern Illinois, Erpenbach said.

Since leaving Wisconsin, he said he had not spoken to any of his Republican counterparts.

The 14 Democrats planned to meet later Friday somewhere in Illinois to discuss strategy.

"We just need some time to sit down and talk, figure out where we are at and what we are hearing form our constituents, and what we're hearing form the Republicans," Erpenbach said.

Also Friday, the leader of the state's largest public employee union said workers were willing to make financial concessions but not to give up bargaining rights.

Marty Beil, executive director of the Wisconsin State Employees Union, issued a statement saying the protests would continue until Walker sits down with the unions.

In a sign that the commotion might be causing other problems for the governor, he pushed back the release of his two-year budget plan by one week, to March 1.

The governor insists the concessions he is seeking from public workers — including higher health insurance and pension contributions — are necessary to deal with the state's projected $3.6 billion budget shortfall and to avoid layoffs.

Eliminating their collective bargaining rights, except over wage increases not greater than the Consumer Price Index, is necessary in order to give the state and local governments and schools the flexibility needed to deal with upcoming cuts in state aid, Walker said.

Those arguments don't wash with Democrats who say the fight is really about political power and quashing the unions, whose members are longtime supporters of Democrats.

Republican Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald said he spoke with Democratic Minority Leader Mark Miller by phone late Thursday and asked him to bring his caucus back to Madison, but Miller refused.

By Friday morning, Fitzgerald was tired of waiting. With the governor's approval, he asked the state patrol to go to Miller's house in a Madison suburb.

Fitzgerald said he hoped a visit from the police would send a signal about the circumstances at the Capitol. Troopers knocked on Miller's door and rang his doorbell, but no one answered.

The protests are growing so large that Capitol workers cannot safely move through the halls, Fitzgerald said, calling the situation "a powder keg." The situation was expected to ratchet up on Saturday, when conservative tea party groups planned their own rallies.

Republican support for the bill remains strong, he added. "If anything, what's going on around this building is galvanizing this caucus," Fitzgerald said.

The Wisconsin walkout was similar to a 2003 move by Texas Democrats who were outnumbered by Republicans in a battle over congressional redistricting. The group got on a bus and fled for the Oklahoma border.

Work in the Texas House was halted for a week, and GOP leaders asked state troopers to find and arrest the 52 absent lawmakers. It was the beginning of a bitter partisan confrontation that dragged on for months.

Later that summer, a group of Senate Democrats fled to Albuquerque, N.M., for more than a month.

In the end, the walkouts only delayed the redistricting plan, which eventually passed and helped give the GOP more seats in Congress.

Still, organizers of the walkout say it was worth it.

"It was the toughest thing I've ever done politically," said Sen. Leticia Van De Putte, chairwoman of the Democratic caucus in the Texas Senate. "It was not something we wanted to do. It was the last thing we could do to protect minority voting rights."

Back in Madison, some Democrats from the state Assembly went to Walker's office to demand a meeting. Walker's spokesman said the governor's scheduler would get back to them.

The Assembly speaker said the chamber could vote on the bill later Friday, but it was not clear whether the GOP would attempt to proceed without Democrats, who were in a closed caucus meeting.

Minority Leader Peter Barca said he expected a "long, protracted debate" over their strategy.

Republicans hold a 57-38 majority in the Assembly, but they need 58 lawmakers present to take up the bill. That puts the lone independent, Rep. Bob Ziegelbauer, in a powerful position.

Ziegelbauer said he would show up, but hoped to convince Republican leaders to first make changes to the collective bargaining parts of the bill.

Democratic strategist Chris Lehane called the walkout in Madison the boldest action Democrats have taken since midterm elections swept Republican to power in statehouses across the country.

Walker "has been so strident that the way he's engaged . has effectively given the Democrats the high ground in terms of how they're responding," Lehane said.

"What Wisconsin is going through isn't all that different from other states," he added. "But the way it's being handled is."
___
Associated Press writers Todd Richmond, Dinesh Ramde and Jason Smathers in Madison; Michael Tarm in Chicago; and Michael Gormley in Albany, N.Y., contributed to this story.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110218/ap_on_re_us/us_wisconsin_budget_unions

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These people are fighting our battle, dear non-Wisconsonian progressives. This is the biggest fight for labor rights in the last generation. If the right-wing wins in Wisconsin (a traditional labor state), you can rest assured they will replicate this retrograde legislation elsewhere (just like their targeting of Mexicans and Latino immigrants, now being taken up by Republican-dominated legislatures this year). Ohio is already following Wisconsin's lead with Senate Bill 5. The only way to guarantee something like a minimal existence for those who work some of our most essential jobs (educating this population) is to win this first skirmish and kill this return of wage slavery that the GOP and their corporate-sponsored teabagging friends are trying to deliver to us.

Sounds harsh? The same Republican Governor Walker of Wisconsin is adding over $100 million of debt to the state coffers to give tax cuts to corporations, money that he is going to be taking off the backs of public sector workers. When you see a conservative talk about making sacrifices to balance the budget, why is it that this never includes anyone who is wealthy? Why do they not shoot out the windows of and threaten to murder/assassinate those members of Congress (like they did during the healthcare bill debate) who voted to take $700 billion of our money and hand it over to banks and insurance companies? Because they want to keep the gigantic vacuum cleaner running, sucking upwards your jobs, wages, benefits, and pensions, so the humanized corporations who subsidize them can accrue the loot that these unconvicted felons have stolen from us, that's why.

By the way, here is a petition you can sign to tell Governor Walker what you think of him.

https://secure3.convio.net/pn/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=825

And here is Governor Scott Walker's contact information. I am sure he would love nothing more than to hear from you, especially if you think less kindly of his attempt to steal away the right of workers in his home state.

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Email
govgeneral@wisconsin.gov
Mail
Office of Governor Scott Walker
115 East Capitol
Madison WI 53702
Phone
(608) 266-1212

Devils and Angels: Reupping The Patriot Act

noreply@blogger.com (TA) — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 17:47:00 +0000

After procedurally and accidentally wrecking the Patriot Act in the House of Representatives a week and a half ago, our friends in the US Senate wanted to make sure that our government could continue spying and violating your Fourth Amendment rights. The vote was not even close.

And that is what this does. Our Congressmen do not live in the real world, or the one that respects our Constitution. The parts of the bill most valued by our Senate include the clauses allowing for roving wiretaps that permit surveillance on multiple phones, permits the government to seize records and property in "anti-terrorism operations" without a warrant or court order (with the non-judged law enforcement bureaucrat being the final arbiter of what constitutes terrorism), and allow surveillance against a so-called lone wolf, a non-U.S. citizen engaged in "terrorism" (without court oversight) who may not be part of a "recognized terrorist group" (group that our State Department calls terrorists, not the ones we subsidize in the Colombian military, or Hosni Mubarak's security detail, naturally).

In a sea of evil, in which our own lawmakers conspire to destroy our rights and our way of life, there is not much good that can come of it. Well, there were a few angels, a few decent people.

Here they are. The twelve good members of the US Senate. And yes, dear members of the right-wing left and libertarians, your beloved Senator Rand Paul is with the angels.

Baucus (D-MT)
Begich (D-AK)
Brown (D-OH)
Harkin (D-IA)

Lautenberg (D-NJ)
Lee (R-UT)
Merkley (D-OR)
Murray (D-WA)

Paul (R-KY)
Sanders (I-VT)
Tester (D-MT)
Udall (D-NM)

As for the rest of the members of the world's greatest deliberative body I suppose warrants and cause with legal and court oversight, the bedrocks of our criminal justice system for over two centuries, need not apply. To those 86 enablers and defenders of our increasingly Praetorian state, shame on you and what you have done to our Constitution.

Happy Emperor Claudius Day

noreply@blogger.com (TA) — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 18:52:00 +0000

I cannot count the ways in which I hate Valentine's Day because that is how much I sincerely wish the worst to the Hallmark company and its shrills for turning this commercial fake holiday into an compelled rationale to show that you really care (as if such sentiments should be determined by how much money you spend, not in how you actually feel or live your life, year round).

On this one issue, I am with the Islamic and Hindu fundamentalists.