Chelated

from Eric Boehlert

2010-05-08T13:15:00.001-05:00

Fox News, health care, and the right-wing nervous breakdown

Watching Fox News personalities recently come unglued as the realization set in that (surprise!) Democrats might actually have the votes to pass health care reform -- and noting how extraordinarily loopy and dire both the attacks on the White House, and the proclamations for pending, apocalyptic doom were becoming -- I was getting nervous that one of Fox News' more unhinged hosts might finally just snap and pull a Rev. Jim Jones, beseeching viewers to make the ultimate sacrifice.

Honestly, unless you've been monitoring the ticking time bomb that is the far-right media in recent days, you probably don't appreciate how frighteningly possible that cultish scenario has become, as the GOP Noise Machine, led by Fox News, publicly suffers a nervous breakdown. It's a mental and emotional collapse that's been advertised in recent days as cablers, radio talkers, and right-wing bloggers have reached for increasingly hysterical, often blood-curdling rhetoric to describe the irreversible atrocity -- an incurable, metastasizing malignancy!! -- that's about to seize and destroy the United States in the form of a bill to expand health care coverage.

Listening to the calamitous warnings (i.e. "the end of America as we know it"), it's not that unreasonable to think that at some point one of the media mob leaders is going to suggest that life itself just is no longer worth living.

After all, late last week the nation stood on the precipice, just three "days away from the United States of America being over as we've all known it," according to Rush Limbaugh, who warned that reform would drive every private insurance company out of business. Glenn Beck also went full tilt, warning that the bill represented a "turning point," like the Civil War and Peal Harbor, while colleague Sean Hannity pinpointed the health care vote as the "very hour" that America turned "completely towards socialism."

The Washington Times likened reform to the "Black Plague," and the online reaction was somehow even more unhinged. It was "RIP USA," because with the vote, America would become "occupied by a hostile foreign power." Indeed, a "socialist putsch" had been sprung and "America's Day of Wreckoning [sic]" was at hand. Why? Because the Democrats' health care legislation "will make every American a POW, strip them of their Freedoms and Liberty and shove them in a meat cellar for cold storage."

Not scared yet? Well, just keep in mind that "Fascist healthcare will destroy America," "civil unrest is coming," and President Obama is to blame. More? "Fascist House Democrats are preparing to euthanize America." And don't forget that Sunday's health care vote in Congress represented a "dark day for America, the worst since 9/11."

And, progressive politicians, heed this warning: "Democrats who crammed this unwarranted bill down the throats of the American people who clearly and overwhelmingly opposed it deserve to be drawn and quartered."

That's right, tortured.

As Jon Stewart noted last week while playing the straight man in a Daily Show bit about the increasingly unhinged, right-wing response, "The rhetoric seems completely divorced from reality." And that observation came before the weekend theatrics inside the Beltway, when self-described patriots, egged on by the right-wing media, rallied to "Kill the bill!" and in the process reportedly tossed racial and anti-gay epithets at Democratic members of the Congress. (The far-right reaction? So what if they did?)

Trust me. This televised, incoherent meltdown has gone way beyond sore loserdom. Or even sore loserdom on steroids. This hasn't just been more of the usual Democrats-are-crooks type of whining that Fox News has turned into an art form since Obama's inauguration. And it's gone far beyond the usual scare tactics that the cable channel has trademarked. (Recent on-screen graphics: "Will the health bill ruin the economy?" and "Does Obamacare mean millions more jobs destroyed?")

Instead, this bout of spastic lashing out has been unique even by the previous standard adopted by Beck, who, on the eve of the health care vote, likened Democrats to Al Qaeda terrorists who were trying to bring America to its knees from the inside.

Because apparently when conservatives lose consecutive nationwide election cycles, thereby allowing Democrats to set the legislative agenda, conservatives' objections render passing bills a criminal act, and "tyranny" threatens to topple our democracy.

Let's face facts. It's never pleasant when activists are confronted with their own political impotence. (Not to mention their abysmal vote-counting skills.) But that's exactly what happened over the weekend as Democratic members of Congress passed health care reform -- reform that the radical right had already pronounced dead. In fact, the GOP Noise Machine had spent weeks dancing on reform's grave and mocking Democrats' inability to act. So how did it all go so terribly wrong for health care haters?

My hunch is that over the past few months, the right-wing media, along with self-adoring Tea Party members, made the mistake of believing their own hype. They convinced themselves that not only did 2 million people take to the streets of the nation's capital last September to protest Obama (a number that was off by 1.9 million), but that "millions" more had marched coast-to-coast over the past 12 months (a number that was completely fabricated). They fastidiously constructed their own parallel universe and convinced themselves that last summer's mini-mobs at local town hall forums had defeated health care reform. They thought their rowdy show of force, complete with Nazi and Hitler posters, and even some protesters parading around with loaded guns, had changed the debate.

Listening to Limbaugh, they thought they were dictating the agenda. Watching Fox News, they though they reflected the mainstream. And reading right-wing blogs, they thought they had killed health care reform.

Wrong, wrong, and wrong. It was the sudden and rude realization that, instead, they'd spent the past few months trapped inside an echo chamber, I think, that created the volcanic and unhinged response we've seen play out in recent days. It's the kind of childish and hysterical reaction I didn't think we'd ever witness from a major political movement.

Indeed, imagine if this is how progressives and Democrats had behaved during the run-up to the Iraq war, the last time the country found itself in this kind of national public policy "debate." Imagine if the liberal pundits and opinion makers had reacted to the prospect of war not with thoughtful anti-war analysis (analysis that, it turned out, was dead on), but instead opted for tantrums and shameful vitriol, the way right-wing pundits have in recent days and weeks.

For instance, imagine if the anti-war movement, and its highest-profile media supporters, had attacked military families whose sons and daughters were fighting in Iraq as the invasion unfolded. That kind of abhorrent behavior would have been universally condemned as just being beyond the pale. Yet last week, as its opposition to reform grew increasingly futile, the GOP Noise Machine dedicated lots of time and energy to mocking and attacking cancer-stricken patients, as well as a motherless 11-year-old boy who had the audacity to speak out in favor of health care reform.

Limbaugh's immortal words to the boy: "Your mom would have still died, because Obamacare doesn't kick in until 2014."

To me, the attacks indicated a withering of the right-wing media's shrinking moral compass, not to mention common sense. (Mocking the seriously ill is a winning political strategy?) It was another tell-tale sign of the unfolding, and unstoppable, nervous breakdown.

Because how else do you describe this kind of erratic, disturbed behavior? And it's worth repeating: This wasn't coming from minor, fringe players. It's been coming from the supposed leading lights of the conservative media; leading lights who, blinded by paranoia, have suffered a collective collapse and can no longer make sense of their surroundings.

Where are the tea partiers protesting Wall Street?

2010-05-08T13:14:00.000-05:00

We're down to the wire here on financial reform. I can't think of a better time to put pressure on Wall Street and Washington to make sure there is adequate regulation to ensure that we never have another bailout. The AFL-CIO is about to have a protest at Wall Street on April 29th. Great, that makes sense. I'm sure the right-wing groups who are also upset about the bailouts will join them.

If you remember, the Tea Parties were originally formed to protest the bailouts. They were so mad at the Wall Street bankers who destroyed the economy and then took our hard earned money for their efforts.

So, they will take this opportunity, of course, to launch their own protest of Wall Street. They will protest the TARP money, the easy credit, the lack of regulation, the wild risk taking and the excessive bonuses paid with taxpayer money. They're really going to take the fight to them.

Just kidding. They're not going to do anything. They're going to sit out this fight on financial reform and put absolutely no pressure on Wall Street at all. Because they are tools easily manipulated by right-wing organizations funded by corporate America.

I really feel sorry for them. They're dupes. They think they are so fiercely independent when in fact they are the most easily manipulated people in the country. All that anger toward the power establishment and what happened? They were used by that same establishment to fight against health care reform and to try to protect the health insurance companies. Suckers.

Now, when it's time to fight the financial companies, where are they? Nowhere to be found. Why? Because FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity didn't organize any bus rides to Wall Street. They didn't manufacture the outrage they did in protecting the health care companies. They used the Tea Party protestors for their own purposes and then left them on the side of the road, only to be picked up again when they need to protect another company or industry.

I issued a challenge back in January to the Tea Party organizers to rally against Wall Street or even against the Obama administration (Tim Geithner in particular) for being too soft on them. And what's happened since then? Nada. Zilch. Zippo.

So, I was proven right -- they're never, ever going to protest Wall Street because they are ignorant dupes being led by the nose by their corporate overlords. And they think they're so tough and independent-minded. What a farce. The whole movement is a sad joke being played on its own members.

On The Young Turks we talked to former vice presidential nominee for the Libertarian Party, Wayne Allyn Root. He has spoken at countless Tea Party protests and considers himself a part of the movement. In the interview below, count how many times I asked him where the Wall Street protests were and how many times he evaded, dodged and ducked the question. That's because there are no such protests and there never will be:

How the GOP gets away with it

2010-05-08T13:12:00.001-05:00

It's pretty simple: They repeat the same thing over and over until everyone gets tired of correcting them
By Gene Lyons

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

Has the Republican Party gone completely off into Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, or have its leading spokesmen simply decided to mimic the party's entertainment wing: trusting its loyal audience to believe even the most brazen falsehoods, and, equally important, to remember nothing?

Does unwillingness to engage reality signal an acceptance of minority status, or merely disdain for the GOP base?

After all, you can trick a cow with an empty feed bucket once or twice. By the third try, it won't even look at you.

GOP savants act as if Republican voters are more easily guided.

Consider Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. For weeks, McConnell has been trying to prevent action on pending financial-reform legislation by claiming that it would lead to "endless taxpayer bailouts of Wall Street banks."

In reality, the proposed law would do exactly the opposite: liquidating failed investment firms' assets through a process like the one used by the FDIC to shut down insolvent savings banks. Management would be fired and shareholders given nothing until creditors had been paid. Wall Street firms would be required to pay into a fund underwriting the arrangement. Taxpayer dollars wouldn't be used.

Even Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who helped draft the legislation, has pointedly contradicted McConnell's mischaracterization. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has characterized it as "possibly the most dishonest argument ever made in the history of politics."

(Really, professor? More dishonest than Hitler's "stab in the back" charge that Jews and Socialists conspired to make Germany lose World War I? More dishonest than the Tonkin Gulf resolution that dragged the United States into Vietnam?)

Even so, Krugman's hyperbole is understandable. Say what you will about academia, in professorial debate so blatant a misrepresentation would be seen as a shameful confession of weakness. Somebody who can't win an argument without resorting to a simple "black is white" lie gets as little respect as he deserves.

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Elsewhere, Krugman puts the question in an appropriately Orwellian context: "Has there ever been a time in U.S. political history," he asks, "when one of the two major political parties was so addicted to doublethink, so committed to pretending that it's advocating the opposite of its actual agenda?"

Specifically, McConnell came up with the "bailout" fiction immediately after meeting with Wall Street high-rollers who a) want to keep placing risk-free bets with other people's money; and b) certainly don't want to pay for what amounts to bankruptcy insurance. Sympathetic to the McDuck point of view, McConnell evidently figures that if he can stall the bill for a while, he can get Uncle Scrooge (and eventually himself) a better deal.

Blogger Matt Yglesias fears that such tactics do nothing but work. "True or false," he writes, "the overwhelming evidence is that the media gets bored with these fact checks very quickly and that if you just put your head down and charge forward, you come out a couple of weeks later back into 'he said, she said' territory. The only real test for whether or not lying works is whether or not you can bring your ideological fellow travelers along. Will Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck echo your line? Will the Weekly Standard and National Review? Will the bulk of your legislative caucus? The answers are yes, yes, and yes."

Actually, we're already there. Just watch. Virtually every TV report on the financial-regulation bill you see will feature a sound bite from McConnell, who'll continue to shill for Citibank and Goldman Sachs while pretending to defend the little guy. Bailout, bailout, bailout. The fact that he's engaging in pure doublespeak is highly unlikely to be mentioned. Instead, you'll likely see a snippet from a Democrat making the opposite claim. For an awful lot of viewers, that's like flipping a coin.

For Fox News viewers and Limbaugh listeners, it's actually easier than that. Conditioned by decades of propaganda about liberal media bias, many react with overt hostility to any and all information from other sources. I must get 50 angry e-mails a week calling me a liar for citing some easily verifiable fact at odds with right-wing doctrine.

Recently, certain conservative intellectuals have begun to worry about whether this hasn't left the movement flying blind. "One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement," writes Cato Institute's Julian Sanchez, "is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross-promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted."

The movement, hell. It's making the whole country as dumb as a brontosaurus in a blizzard. Because reality eventually asserts itself.

Tea party fraud

2010-03-25T18:11:00.000-05:00

The GOP's "small government" tea party fraud

By Glenn Greenwald

There's a major political fraud underway: the GOP is once again donning their libertarian, limited-government masks in order to re-invent itself and, more important, to co-opt the energy and passion of the Ron-Paul-faction that spawned and sustains the "tea party" movement. The Party that spat contempt at Paul during the Bush years and was diametrically opposed to most of his platform now pretends to share his views. Standard-issue Republicans and Ron Paul libertarians are as incompatible as two factions can be -- recall that the most celebrated right-wing moment of the 2008 presidential campaign was when Rudy Giuliani all but accused Paul of being an America-hating Terrorist-lover for daring to suggest that America's conduct might contribute to Islamic radicalism -- yet the Republicans, aided by the media, are pretending that this is one unified, harmonious, "small government" political movement.

The Right is petrified that this fraud will be exposed and is thus bending over backwards to sustain the myth. Paul was not only invited to be a featured speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference but also won its presidential straw poll. Sarah Palin endorsed Ron Paul's son in the Kentucky Senate race. National Review is lavishly praising Paul, while Ann Coulter "felt compelled [in her CPAC speech] to give a shout out to Paul-mania, saying she agreed with everything he stands for outside of foreign policy -- a statement met with cheers." Glenn Beck -- who literally cheered for the Wall Street bailout and Bush's endlessly expanding surveillance state -- now parades around as though he shares the libertarians' contempt for them. Red State's Erick Erickson, defending the new so-called conservative "manifesto," touts the need for Congress to be confined to the express powers of Article I, Section 8, all while lauding a GOP Congress that supported countless intrusive laws -- from federalized restrictions on assisted suicide, marriage, gambling, abortion and drugs to intervention in Terri Schiavo's end-of-life state court proceeding -- nowhere to be found in that Constitutional clause. With the GOP out of power, Fox News suddenly started featuring anti-government libertarians such as John Stossel and Reason Magazine commentators, whereas, when Bush was in power, there was no government power too expanded or limitless for Fox propagandists to praise.

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This is what Republicans always do. When in power, they massively expand the power of the state in every realm. Deficit spending and the national debt skyrocket. The National Security State is bloated beyond description through wars and occupations, while no limits are tolerated on the Surveillance State. Then, when out of power, they suddenly pretend to re-discover their "small government principles." The very same Republicans who spent the 1990s vehemently opposing Bill Clinton's Terrorism-justified attempts to expand government surveillance and executive authority then, once in power, presided over the largest expansion in history of those very same powers. The last eight years of Republican rule was characterized by nothing other than endlessly expanded government power, even as they insisted -- both before they were empowered and again now -- that they are the standard-bearers of government restraint.

What makes this deceit particularly urgent for them now is that their only hope for re-branding and re-empowerment lies in a movement -- the tea partiers -- that has been (largely though not exclusively) dominated by libertarians, Paul followers, and other assorted idiosyncratic factions who are hostile to the GOP's actual approach to governing. This is a huge wedge waiting to be exposed -- to explode -- as the modern GOP establishment and the actual "small-government" libertarians that fuel the tea party are fundamentally incompatible. Right-wing mavens like Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin and National Review are suddenly feigning great respect for Ron Paul and like-minded activists because they're eager that the sham will be maintained: the blatant sham that the modern GOP and its movement conservatives are a coherent vehicle for those who believe in small government principles. The only evidence of a passionate movement urging GOP resurgence is from people whose views are antithetical to that Party. That's the dirty secret which right-wing polemicists are desperately trying to keep suppressed. Credit to Mike Huckabee for acknowledging this core incompatibility by saying he would not attend CPAC because of its "increasing libertarianism."

These fault lines began to emerge when Sarah Palin earlier this month delivered the keynote speech to the national tea party conference in Nashville, and stood there spitting out one platitude after the next which Paul-led libertarians despise: from neoconservative war-loving dogma and veneration of Israel to glorification of "War on Terror" domestic powers and the need of the state to enforce Palin's own religious and cultural values. Neocons (who still overwhelmingly dominate the GOP) and Paul-led libertarians are arch enemies, and the social conservatives on whom the GOP depends are barely viewed with greater affection. Sarah Palin and Ron Paul are about as far apart on most issues as one can get; the "tea party movement" can't possibly be about supporting each of their worldviews. Moreover, the GOP leadership is currently promising Wall Street even more loyal subservience than Democrats have given in exchange for support, thus bolstering the government/corporate axis which libertarians find so repugnant. And Coulter's manipulative claim that she "agrees with everything [Paul] stands for outside of foreign policy" is laughable; aside from the fact that "foreign policy" is a rather large issue in our political debates (Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan, Iran, Russia), they were on exactly the opposite sides of the most intense domestic controversies of the Bush era: torture, military commissions, habeas corpus, Guantanamo, CIA secrecy, telecom immunity, and warrantless eavesdropping.

Part of why this fraud has been sustainable thus far is that libertarians -- like everyone who doesn't view all politics through the mandated, distorting, suffocating Democrat v. GOP prism -- are typically dismissed as loons and nuts, and are thus eager for any means of achieving mainstream acceptance. Having the GOP embrace them is one way to achieve that (Karl Rove: some "see the tea party movement as a recruiting pool for volunteers for Ron Paul's next presidential bid . . . . The Republican Party and the tea party movement have many common interests"). Additionally, just as the Paul-faction of libertarians is in basic harmony with many progressives on issues of foreign policy and civil liberties, they do subscribe to the standard GOP rhetoric on domestic spending, social programs and the like.

But that GOP limited government rhetoric is simply never matched by that Party's conduct, especially when they wield power. The very idea that a political party dominated by neocons, warmongers, surveillance fetishists, and privacy-hating social conservatives will be a party of "limited government" is absurd on its face. There literally is no myth more transparent than the Republican Party's claim to believe in restrained government power. For that reason, it's only a matter of time before the fundamental incompatibility of the "tea party movement" and the political party cynically exploiting it is exposed.

Nothing there

2010-03-25T18:10:00.000-05:00

"Filegate" judge: There's no there there -- and never was
At long last, federal Judge Royce Lamberth dismisses "Filegate." Let's not forget the fraud's keenest promoters
By Joe Conason

"Filegate" is a term that always deserved scare quotes, because the putative scandal concerning the misuse of FBI files in the Clinton White House was so clearly, from its very beginning in 1996, no scandal at all. But the obvious absence of any credible evidence that Bill or Hillary Clinton or any of their employees or associates had ordered up such files, or committed any abuse of them, did nothing to dissuade mainstream media, right-wing outlets, or Republican politicians from hysterically promoting the pseudo-scandal.

Today it is amazing to recall how significant this nothingness was once deemed to be, with nightly coverage on network newscasts. On Capitol Hill, Sen. Orrin Hatch demanded a fingerprint analysis to determine whether Hillary Clinton had touched the files (she hadn't) while lengthy investigations got under way in the Senate, the House and the Office of the Independent Counsel led by Kenneth Starr. Bob Dole, the Republican presidential candidate in 1996, compared "Filegate" with Nixon's Watergate scandal and asked: "Where's the outrage?"

Yesterday the last wheeze of hype was squeezed from that old controversy, when U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth dismissed the remaining civil lawsuit against former Clinton administration officials in the FBI files affair. Brought by eccentric attorney Larry Klayman, who became a favorite of cable television and conservative funders during the Clinton era, those costly lawsuits were described in the judge's decision as essentially baseless.

Summing up his findings, Lamberth wrote: "After years of litigation, endless depositions, the fictionalized portrayal of this lawsuit and its litigants on television, this court is left to conclude that with the lawsuit, to quote Gertrude Stein, 'there's no there there.'" A Reagan appointee once lauded by Klayman himself as "this great jurist," he showed a talent for understatement when he noted that "after ample opportunity," the plaintiffs "have not produced any evidence of the far-reaching conspiracy that sought to use intimate details from FBI files for political assassinations that they alleged. The only thing that they have demonstrated is that this unfortunate episode -- about which they do have cause to complain -- was exactly what the defendants claimed: a bureaucratic snafu."

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The judge's decision specifically exonerated the remaining civil defendants, former White House officials Craig Livingstone and Bernard Nussbaum. Perhaps forgotten now, they -- along with Hillary Clinton, the supposed mastermind of "Filegate" -- were accused of felonies by top Republicans on Capitol Hill and maligned countless times by right-wing figures in the media and many mainstream journalists as well.

Of Livingstone, a low-level White House official who resigned immediately when he learned that FBI background summaries had been mishandled, the judge wrote: "There has been no evidence that Craig Livingstone sought to obtain the plaintiffs' FBI summary background reports for any improper purpose, political or otherwise." Concerning Nussbaum, an honorable attorney who also left the White House under a cloud, Lamberth noted, "There has been no evidence that Mr. Nussbaum made these requests himself and as the court has noted earlier, there has been no evidence presented that there was a conspiracy to request the plaintiffs' summary background reports for political purposes, let alone that Mr. Nussbaum was involved in it." In short, Nussbaum was wholly innocent even of responsibility for the "bureaucratic snafu."

In passing, the judge also mentioned his opinion of the House Government Operations Committee report on "Filegate," compiled when Congress was in the hands of Republicans who believed that their purpose in Washington was solely to obstruct the Clinton administration, mainly by concocting and conducting bogus investigations. (Their history of irresponsibility and frivolousness offer a preview of the Republican agenda should they win control next fall.) Lamberth wrote that the House report was inaccurate and not "sufficiently trustworthy" to be relied upon for factual information, and therefore "inadmissible" as evidence in the case.

Now that the moldy remnants of "Filegate" have at last been properly trashed, can anything relevant be learned from its distasteful history? Certain of the most assiduous promoters of the phony scandal are dead or retired from public life. But others are still around, exaggerating in the same old style when attacking the Obama White House, ACORN, and Democrats in Congress. So the pronouncements of all those responsible for pushing the bogus FBI file controversy are forever subject to the deepest doubt. Googling the term "Filegate" brings up stories that should embarrass the Wall Street Journal editorial page; the Media Research Center, whose chief wingnut Brent Bozell continued to flog this discredited fake as late as November 2007; National Review Online; WorldNetDaily; Fox News Channel, then in its noisome infancy; and indeed, nearly every other organ-grinder and kazoo-blower of the Republican noise machine.

It took Judge Lamberth a long time to say so, but when these people (and their gullible friends in the mainstream media) cry scandal, it is safe to assume that there is no there there.

deem and pass

2010-03-25T18:09:00.000-05:00

The impeccable bipartisan pedigree of "deem and pass"
Pelosi's plan outrages Republicans, but they used "deem and pass" well over a hundred times
By Joe Conason

When congressional Republicans predict ominously that Democratic deployment of a self-executing rule (or "deem-and-pass") will encourage them to engage in similar behavior someday, they forget to mention how many times they’ve already done it.

For the sake of anyone troubled by the ranting over this trivial matter, the historical record is indisputable. During the years when the Republicans controlled the House, they set records for the use of such "rarely used" maneuvers. Although their bogus sanctimony should no longer surprise anyone, the utter fraudulence of these latest outbursts has been held up to deserved ridicule by impeccably nonpartisan and even conservative sources. On the American Enterprise Institute blog, for instance, congressional expert Norm Ornstein writes:

Any veteran observer of Congress is used to the rampant hypocrisy over the use of parliamentary procedures that shifts totally from one side to the other as a majority moves to minority status, and vice versa. But I can’t recall a level of feigned indignation nearly as great as what we are seeing now from congressional Republicans and their acolytes at the Wall Street Journal, and on blogs, talk radio, and cable news. It reached a ridiculous level of misinformation and disinformation over the use of reconciliation, and now threatens to top that level over the projected use of a self-executing rule by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In the last Congress that Republicans controlled, from 2005 to 2006, Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier used the self-executing rule more than 35 times, and was no stranger to the concept of "deem and pass."

That strategy, then decried by the House Democrats who are now using it, and now being called unconstitutional by WSJ editorialists, was defended by House Republicans in court (and upheld). Dreier used it for a $40 billion deficit reduction package so that his fellow GOPers could avoid an embarrassing vote on immigration.

To be fair, Ornstein prefers the "regular order" and thus won’t endorse the use of a self-executing rule by the Democrats to pass health care reform. "But even so," he asks, "is there no shame anymore?"

For those who wish we could all just get along, the use of the self-executing rule is among the few things that can be honestly called "bipartisan." So says Donald Wolfensberger, who served on the Republican staff of the House Rules Committee for nearly two decades and as its chief of staff during the 104th Congress, after Newt Gingrich became speaker, in a brief but detailed column that he wrote for Roll Call.

He also posted that essay on the Web site of the Woodrow Wilson Center, where he runs the Congress Project:

When Republicans were in the minority, they railed against self-executing rules as being anti-deliberative because they undermined and perverted the work of committees and also prevented the House from having a separate debate and vote on the majority’s preferred changes. From the 95th to 98th Congresses (1977-84), there were only eight self-executing rules making up just 1 percent of the 857 total rules granted. However, in Speaker Tip O’Neill’s (D-Mass.) final term in the 99th Congress, there were 20 self-executing rules (12 percent). In Rep. Jim Wright’s (D-Texas) only full term as Speaker, in the 100th Congress, there were 18 self-executing rules (17 percent). They reached a high point of 30 under Speaker Tom Foley (D-Wash.) during the final Democratic Congress, the 103rd, for 22 percent of all rules.

When Republicans took power in 1995, they soon lost their aversion to self-executing rules and proceeded to set new records under Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). [Naturally, Gingrich can now be seen everywhere on cable television complaining about such mischief.] There were 38 and 52 self-executing rules in the 104th and 105th Congresses (1995-1998), making up 25 percent and 35 percent of all rules, respectively. Under Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) there were 40, 42 and 30 self-executing rules in the 106th, 107th and 108th Congresses (22 percent, 37 percent and 22 percent, respectively). Thus far in the 109th Congress, self-executing rules make up about 16 percent of all rules.

Wolfensberger was inspired by a 2006 episode when the Republican majority -- in order to secure their own loophole-ridden, watered-down version of ethics and lobbying reform -- used not just one but three self-executing rules on a single bill.

Those convoluted moves were necessary to remove previously approved provisions that would have mandated disclosure of lobbyists’ contacts with members and staff, and lobbyists’ solicitation and transmission of campaign contributions to candidates, as well as a third amendment ordering the Government Accountability Office to study lobbyist employment contracts.

Four years ago is not ancient history. The same Republican leaders now roaring furiously about the self-executing rule were in the GOP leadership that used it so vigorously when they held power, including, of course, John Boehner. If we add up Wolfensberger’s numbers, Boehner’s team used the self-executing rule -- which he now denounces as a "twisted scheme" -- well over 100 times.

Greenwald

2010-03-25T18:08:00.000-05:00

Rampant patriotism breaches on America's right
Glenn Greenwald

During the Bush years, the Bush-following Right's Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, frequently accused opponents of the Iraq War of being "unpatriotic," endangering the Troops, and committing treason: "They're not so much 'antiwar' as just on the other side," he often wrote. Today, the same Glenn Reynolds wrote (emphasis added):

If I were the Israelis, not only would I bomb Iran, but I'd do so in such a way as to create as much trouble for China, Russia, Europe and the United States as possible.

Calling on a foreign country to act in a way that creates "as much trouble as possible" for your own country seems to be the very definition of being "on the other side," does it not? (and his cover sentence -- "Are the Israelis less obnoxious than me? I guess we’ll find out soon enough . . . ." -- changes nothing). That's especially true since the action Reynolds is endorsing -- Israel's bombing of Iran -- likely would, according to America's top military official, directly result in the deaths of American soldiers:

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen, warned last Thursday that an Israeli attack on Iran might lead to escalation, undermine the region's stability and endanger the lives of Americans in the Persian Gulf "who are under the threat envelope right now."

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By Reynolds' own standards, blithely endorsing such outcomes would seem, definitively, to place one "on the other side." But over the last week, as the U.S./Israel dispute has blossomed, the American Right generally has engaged in much conduct that they have always denounced as disloyal and treasonous. Almost unanimously, they have adopted what Jeanne Kirkpatrick famously condemned as a "Blame America First" attitude, with super-patriots such as National Review and Charles Krauthammer, among many others, heaping all blame on America and siding with the foreign government. According to these Arbiters of Patriotism, this dispute is The Fault of America; indeed, when it comes to American conflicts with Israel generally, as Kirkpatrick put it in her famous refrain: "somehow, they always Blame America First."

Along those lines, the Anti-Defamation League's Abraham Foxman yesterday formally condemned Gen. David Petraeus for warning that Israel's conflict with the Palestinians increases anti-American hatred and endangers American troops due to a "perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel." Foxman attacked Petraeus' remarks as "dangerous and counterproductive" -- and, indeed, they are: "dangerous and counterproductive," that is, for those (like Foxman and the neocon Right) who want the U.S. to blindly support Israeli actions even when doing so directly harms American interests. As Andrew Bacevich explained in Salon yesterday, the fact that Petraeus has now linked U.S. support for Israel to harm to U.S. interests will make it impossible for Israel-centric neocons to stigmatize that linkage ever again, and is thus "likely to discomfit those Americans committed to the proposition that the United States and Israel face the same threats and are bound together by identical interests." Isn't it Barack Obama's overriding duty as Commander-in-Chief to listen to his military commanders and take aggressive action against anything which undermines America's war effort and Endangers the Troops -- including Israel's settlement expansions?

Beyond that, wasn't it only recently that attacking Gen. David Petraeus the way the ADL has done was deemed so unpatriotic that it merited formal, bipartisan Congressional condemnation? As Joan Walsh proposed yesterday, shouldn't Congress now be preparing to condemn the ADL and Foxman for their attack on Petraeus, launched at him as he commands brave American men and women in harm's way, fighting for our country? After all, Petraeus is responsible for the safety of those troops and is trying to alert government leaders about policies which endanger those troops and undermine the American war effort. What kind of person would attack Gen. Petreaus for doing that, all in the name of serving the interests of a foreign government? One hasn't seen attacks on Gen. Petraeus this vicious since he condemned torture and called for the closing of Guantanamo, thereby provoking the unhinged wrath of America's Right.

And then we have what I thought was the patriotic standard that one should not attack the President in his conduct of foreign policy during a time of war. What happened to Joe Lieberman's solemn 2005 warning that "in matters of war we undermine presidential credibility at our nation’s peril"? This is the same Joe Lieberman who, along with his conjoined twin, John McCain, this week went to the Senate floor to rail against President Obama for the crime of Excess Criticism of Israel. Isn't Al Qaeda going to be emboldened if they see the Commander-in-Chief being weakened and attacked by these U.S. Senators as inept and our country riddled with internal divisions of this sort? That was the argument made by these same right-wing super-patriots for years (and, indeed, is now being echoed -- not ironically but earnestly -- by their mirror images on the dissent-hating, Beltway version of the "Left," such as Newsweek's Jonathan Alter). But for the neocon Right, that uber-patriotic standard seems to have been suspended as of January 20, 2009, and (like so many standards) is revoked altogether when it comes to Israel.

Whatever else is true, the American Right is now openly siding with a foreign government against their own, and bitterly Blaming America for these problems. They're protecting this foreign government's actions even though our top Generals say those actions undermine our war effort and directly endanger American troops. They're advocating policies -- such as the Israeli bombing of Iran -- which America's Joint Chiefs Chairman has gravely warned will seriously impede our wars and lead to the deaths of our soldiers. They're demeaning the top American General with command responsibility for two theaters of war. And, in a Time of War, they're attacking the President of the United States, the Commander-in-Chief -- and relentlessly depicting him as weak and inept -- all because he's prioritizing American interests over those of a foreign country. All of that seems to severely breach the standards of Patriotism they have long advocated and which have long prevailed, to put that rather mildly.

* * * * *

Perhaps most notably, all of this is taking place as a new poll of Israelis finds that "a sweeping majority of Israelis think [Obama's] treatment of [their] country is friendly and fair"; "most Israelis don't believe politicians who call Obama anti-Semitic or hostile to Israel"; and "more [Israelis] said Netanyahu's behavior [in this conflict] was irresponsible than said he acted responsibly." Put another way, the American neocon Right is demanding a level of American loyalty to Israel far higher than Israelis themselves expect, and (as usual) the American neocon Right is far more blindly supportive of the Israeli Government than Israelis themselves are.

Zogby

2010-03-25T18:06:00.000-05:00

James Zogby
Frightening GOP Behavior
Before dashing off to celebrate a hard fought victory in achieving health care reform, it is important to reflect on a deeply disturbing aspect of the debate that I believe spells danger ahead.

A Republican talking point repeated ad nauseam during yesterday's debate pounded on the theme that they, and they alone, had the right to speak for "the will of the American people." This took different forms: "the American people have spoken," or "you (Democrats) are ignoring/imposing your views on the American people" or "the American people have sent a message," etc. All making the same point -- that the GOP speaks for the American people.

Of course, the American people have spoken, and in November 2008 elected a Democratic White House and Senate and House of Representatives. But, elections and the workings of our democracy including the idea that the losing party respect the outcome of elections appear to be alien concepts to today's GOP.

The idea that the minority party represents the "will of the people" (not some of the people, but "the people") is the seedling of a totalitarian mindset. In this mindset -- democracy doesn't matter, ideas are not to be discussed, and opposing views are not to respected. What matters is that they alone have truth, they alone are metaphysically connected to the "mind of the people" can interpret their will, and because they have truth and speak for the people, others represent a threat and must be silenced and stopped.

This was a major concern last summer as violent demonstrators disrupted "town meetings" -- with angry chanting mobs claiming to represent the "will of the people" arrayed against the elected Congresspeople and their constituents who had freely assembled to discuss issues. The mobs didn't come to discuss or even debate. They were mobilized to disrupt discussion and silence debate.

Listening to the rhetorical excesses of last summer's demonstrators, or those who mobilized to chant slurs at Democrats over the weekend, or to the radio and TV personalities who incite with hate and fear ("that we are losing our country"), or the GOP Congressional leadership who charge much the same and incite in similar ways -- I hear echoes of last century's history. The behavior fits a frightening pattern and ought to be of concern.

Frum - GOP speechwriter

2010-03-25T18:05:00.000-05:00

GOP Applies for Health Care for Self-Inflicted Wounds
Putting all your eggs in one basket is a good thing when it's Easter. In politics, though? Not so much.

The Republican Party put all its eggs in the "Tear Down President Barack Obama and Defeat Health Care Reform" basket. This was a questionable action at best. At worst, they could end up breaking their own kneecaps.

Unanimously fighting health care reform was questionable at best because few in America didn't think the health care system had to be fixed in at least some way.

But at worst - yipes.

Yipes, because the President of the United States won the election campaigning on it. Both houses of Congress won majorities campaigning on it. And from the start, polls showed that the majority of the public wanted some kind of health care reform. Including a public option.

Yet in the face of all this, the Republican Party in Congress put every single one of its fragile eggs in a single basket and chose to unanimously fight health care reform.

The bill contained over 200 Republican proposals, and Republicans still unanimously voted against it.

The GOP was simply going to do whatever they could - unanimously - to defeat health care reform and bring down President Obama. Turn "Yes, We Can" into "No, He Can't." Republicans didn't just want the seats a party out of power traditionally picks up in an off-year election. They wanted it all. Majorities in 2010. The White House in 2012. At any cost. They got greedy. They were going all in - holding just a lowly pair of threes. Everything in one basket, no matter how flimsy that basket was.

Blinded by hatred, fear and pure politics, Republicans saw only their improbable reward. They ignored the profound risk.

No doubt the Republican Party thought things were going well. They had road blocks all over health care reform. They broke the Democrats' 60-vote super majority. Polls showed the American public unhappy with gridlock in Washington, unhappy too with the health care bill - as presented to them by the GOP Message Machine.

All the eggs were in one basket.

And the basket crumbled. And all the eggs crashed.

The problem is that Republican leadership believed their own lies. They forgot that they knew there weren't actually Death Panels in the bill, that it was still illegal to get federally-funded abortions, that everyone can really keep their private insurance, that the new proposals actually brought deficit down - by eventually trillions of dollars. And forgot that the public was, in fact, for health care reform. And for the public option.

When polls showed that Americans were unhappy with the health care reform bill, GOP leadership forgot that some were unhappy because It Didn't Go Far Enough. And others were unhappy because they simply didn't understand the bill. When similar polls explained the bill, the results showed that the public was... in favor of it! Just like at the beginning.

But more, Republicans thought they had an ace up their sleeve. They ignored that they didn't even have a sleeve.

Republicans thought that once the health care reform bill passed, they could campaign on repealing it. "It" being a bill the American public supported. Because it improved their health care. Republicans thought this plan was A Winner.

Winner?

Imagine giving a new kidney to someone, and then later saying, "We'd like it back."

Campaigning on repealing health care reform would be like campaigning to repeal Social Security, Medicare or Civil Rights. Even the most radically-reactionary Republicans aren't foolish enough to do that.

Once people have health care reform - even many who were against the bill - they will be loathe to give it up. Benefits will be seen immediately. Like reduced costs of prescription medication. Like small businesses getting tax credit. Covering all children. Not allowing insurance companies to drop you because you got sick. Like letting young people stay on their parent's policy until they're 26. Right now, this year. Give that up? Take back health care reform, once someone has it? Republicans actually, really, seriously want to campaign on this.

And so they may well have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

Where once the GOP saw dreams of a majority in November, they may be lucky now to squeak by with that traditional handful of new seats.

You see, that whole "gridlocked Congress" and "Democrats had a majority and couldn't get anything done" thing - it's now gone. Out the window. The Democrats broke the Republican-forced gridlock. They passed the first-ever, comprehensive health care reform bill. By themselves. With no Republican support.

Republicans had a chance to claim a share of the reform. But they cut themselves out. By choice. They never even offered an alternate bill! Because they were putting all their eggs in one basket.

And the basket crumbled.

The public will now see the Democrats as alone being able to provide deeply-needed reform. And the public will now see the Republicans as the block that wants to take it away.

While Republicans are campaigning to repeal health care reform, Democrats will make the case, "Yes, the bill isn't perfect. So, elect more Democrats to get the improvements and also get the public option. That you want. If you elect Republicans, they will take away what you now have - they've told you so!"

But it's actually worse than that for Republicans. Because Republicans, who are usually so good at coming up with fake catch-phrases like "Death Taxes" made their biggest gaffe of all. Gargantuan.

You see...for the past year, Republicans have called this bill (say it all together now) - "ObamaCare."

Health care reform is now known to everyone - thanks to Republican Talking Points - forevermore as ObamaCare.

They gave President Barack Obama full name credit.

ObamaCare. ObamaCare. ObamaCare. ObamaCare.

Care.

President Barack Obama - cares.

And the Republican Party is the one who told you, who drilled it deep into your consciousness.

And the Republican Party in its blocking unanimity released Barack Obama. Faced with the reality of zero Republican support, the president finally took to the road and energized the Democratic Party. And energized himself. He kept his word to the public. He got a health care bill. And "Yes, we can" was proven. His Gallup poll numbers have already improved seven points.

The Republicans did it all to themselves. They put all their eggs in one basket. And in the end, the eggs were rotten. And the basket crumbled.

Bye Bayh

2010-02-17T16:37:00.001-06:00

Why do Republicans hate America? They spent eight years under “w” destroying our security, our honor to the Constitution and the economy and now that Obama was elected they decided why not continue by preventing him and the incompetent Democratic Congress from doing anything positive.

They think the public won’t notice that they have obstructed and stymied everything the supermajority attempted to do. The sad thing is they’re probably right. I agree that the Democrats in Congress are pathetic. With a huge supermajority they should be able to ram anything they want through but they are too weak of will to do it. Even though I totally disagreed with what “w” and the repus did in their years at least the Democrats helped them push through all their policies. They were truly bipartisan and if they didn’t go along with “w” the repus and media would claim the Dems were unpatriotic and anti-American. Why don’t they do that to the Republicans today?

Unlike the Dems under “w” the Repus march in lock step to stop anything Obama wants like healthcare reform. Do you honestly think that if the Republicans had a 60 vote majority in the Senate and the big majority in the House that the Democrats would, as a group without dissent, block what they insisted on doing? The facts bear out the truth of the matter.

Republicans have brought this country to a standstill so that no progress can be made to resolve the economic problems we face. They just want political advantage rather than to help the people of this country who are suffering. They are repus first and

Americans second. They rail and vote against deficit spending for stimulus to pull us out of the near depression they caused and then when defeated on the bill they fight tooth and nail for the stimulus money for their state. How hypocritical is that?

Newt and the repus did the same to Clinton in the 90’s by shutting down the government and they are doing it again now. The public wants healthcare reform and a big jobs creation bill but Republicans are preventing it from happening. Millions of people are without any or very little coverage and millions will go bankrupt even with insurance if they encounter a major illness. Do the Republicans care? Of course not. Their only concern is to take away a person’s right to sue for malpractice but their message to those without is tough luck. They only represent the insurance and pharmaceutical companies and the people secure enough to have good jobs with healthcare already. Their message is “Deal with it losers.” That is not what the American public wants regardless what FOX frauds tell you.

The Republicans don’t represent the average person in America. They never have and never will. They represent the powerful corporate and wealthy interests and if they gain a majority, expect the same that we got during “w’s” two terms. They are not populists. They are corporatists just like many of the conservative Democrats like Evan Bayh. I’m glad to see him go. I just wish more conservative Dems would also resign to let real populists take their place. Tea baggers claim to be just that but they are being used as usual by hypocrite Republicans. I am an independent and I wish we had more truly independent politicians that aren’t bought and paid for by lobbyists from corporate America. If something doesn’t change soon we will all be knee-deep in rancid repu tea bags

Whiners

2010-02-17T16:36:00.000-06:00

Objective observations over the last several months only confirm the well known truth that right-wing conservatives are much more adept at whining about political issues than actually doing anything constructive about them. Ever since President Obama took office from the most pathetically incompetent president and pathologically demented vice president of the last century, all right-wingers can do is practice revisionist history and pretend their policies and actions had nothing to do with the mess Obama inherited.

Right wingers complain that Obama is increasing the deficit as though doing nothing is the desired answer to righting our economic quagmire. If "w" would have left Obama with a huge budget surplus and healthy economy the way Clinton did for him rather than two wars, the largest deficit and worst economy since the great depression they may have a legitimate complaint but they ignore reality as usual. Like most delusional right-wingers, their mouths are bigger than their brains. They can go on FOX TV and rail against the evil liberals all they want but when it comes to actually governing right-wingers have no clue. They continue to claim that torture is no big deal but won't be water-boarded themselves and put their money where their big mouths are. What happened to that tough-guy attitude? Remember "Bring it on?" Why not bring on the water-boarding for right-wing right-to-life terrorists here in America? After the last eight years right-wingers have proven they can't govern and have no logical or rational ideas about how to correct this country's problems. Their endless lies and fear-mongering over the last 8 years got us nowhere. The public knows how pathetically bankrupt of answers they truly are. They won't even give Obama a couple of years to enact what needs to be done before they try to destroy him and pray for his failure. When the roles were reversed eight years ago they claimed anyone not fully supporting "w" was unpatriotic and un-American. How pathetically hypocritical is that in light of their actions since January?

Their leaders are blow-hard drug-addict talk show clowns and they demagogue the issues adinfinitum. They practice hate-speech toward their opponents and distort the issues then stand back and claim their violent incitement (by calling doctors "baby killers") of the easily manipulated low-intelligence-violent-NRA-faction-white-supremacist mentality in our society, had nothing to do with the murder of said doctor. It is one thing for an individual to be against something that they think is wrong or sinful. If you are against it, don't do it; that's what I do. But it's another to force your religious views on others that disagree with you and then contribute to the climate of violence that leads to their killing.

When is someone in the Republican party going to stand up to these insane religious extremists in their party who feel it is their duty to kill anyone that doesn't agree with them in the name of God? That sounds like the Taliban or Al Qeada. I am disgusted by continuously hearing Christians say they are glad a doctor was killed for doing his job or that homosexuals and illegal immigrants deserve to die. That is sick. You can't force others to follow your religion through the law. Try reading the U.S. Constitution. It is none of my business what a citizen does with their body or what they and their doctor decide is best for the health and life of their patients. When doctors are intimidated, threatened and killed for practicing legally under the law and it is condoned by the police and politicians then anarchy rules. That is not liberty. That is religious tyranny, a Theocracy, or as our founders feared, the End of the American Constitutional Republic. Keep our civil Constitution and government separate from religious megalomaniacs and institutions that desire to destroy our freedoms by forcing religious uniformity through a Fundamentalist Theocracy.

the 4th 09

2010-02-17T16:35:00.000-06:00

For all the local FOX right-wingers that respond to my comments like Pavlov's dog, I don't think you understand what the definition of freedom and liberty truly is. Why is it that you insist on dictating your views of morality on to other freedom loving Americans that don't see things as you do? It was my understanding that traditional conservatives thought the government should stay out of the personal lives of its citizens. I know that is what liberals like me believe. When it comes to my personal life and religious convictions the government should mind their own business. I don’t need the government in my bedroom or doctor’s office with me. Somehow FOX right-wingers think that it is their duty to impose their religion and morality on all citizens through the law. You can be a religious extremist all you want. You’re free to do that but don't try to force me to adhere to your religion. That, by definition is not liberty or freedom. That is a "Forced Theocracy".

I choose to live by my own religious convictions and will not yield to the government forcing someone else's on me through the law. Now that is real freedom and liberty as elaborated in the Constitution. This country guarantees freedom of, for and from religion. Our Constitution is a secular document and was never intended to be used as a tool or weapon by any particular religion to force their beliefs on others. I thank God for this great country of ours and for the genius of our founders to keep government and religion separate. That is what makes both religion and our government in America free and dynamic. Don't succumb to FOX right-wing dictator totalitarianism and arrogant talk show sycophant mentality. Read, study and understand the U.S. Constitution thoroughly. It puts any right-wing blow-hard talk show host to shame.

Happy 4th of July to all freedom and liberty - loving Americans

Two Ways of Looking at It

2010-02-17T16:34:00.000-06:00

Based on what I hear from my local right-wing friends there are definitely two totally different ways of looking at current events. One is from the standpoint of inhabitants of planet Foxoid and the other is from normal people back here on earth. In delusional Foxoid world President Obama stole the election and is intent on destroying America, bankrupting our capitalist system and the Christian religion. To those of us here on mother earth President Obama is an intelligent and honorable American, duly elected overwhelmingly, trying his best to help restore our economy, rebuild our integrity and improve our international standing throughout the world.

On planet Foxoid President Obama’s birth certificate proves he wasn’t born in America, is a Socialist, and is a 2nd Amendment hating atheist who will not rest until all that is good and righteous in America has been eliminated. The rest of us think that adhering to the Constitution and respecting our laws are what good citizens and leaders strive to do. Doctor killing and liberal hating Foxoidians believe that Obama is the antithesis of morality in all respects while rational people think a man who loves his wife and children and has his mother-in-law living with him in the White House, is the epitome of real family values.

Why inhabitants of planet Foxoid are so paranoid of a good man who is attempting to straighten out the horrendous mess of terrorism acts ignored, two wars (one which was based on lies), endless debt and an economic depression that was thrust upon the country by a group of irresponsible ultra-conservative neo-con sycophants, is beyond me.

But for the good common sense of the average voting citizens of planet earth we could well be in the grasp of an ever expanding cosmic vacuum black hole of debt and death led by a novice Alaskan barracuda beauty queen that winks and flirts her way into a right-wing, talk-show Foxoidian political utopia. Thank goodness a supreme power is watching out for us and keeping us from going completely out of political orbit. The change we need won’t come over night but at least we are headed in the right direction now. Give change a chance.

GOP tactics

2010-02-17T16:31:00.000-06:00

What is it about today’s Republicans that cause them to give up on reasoned debate and instead just distort and lie concerning the issues? The issues should be debated on merit, not lies. Case in point is the Health Care Bill presently in Congress. The ignorance and histrionics surrounding this issue is typical of right-wing talk show methods. It is a fact that Rush, FOX news and the like control and lead conservative Republican thought in this country. No right-thinking Republican elected official will dare contradict anything said by right-wing media sources for fear of national humiliation on the airwaves. How many Republican politicians have gone on Rush’s program and apologized on bended knees for having the audacity to disagree with his views? It’s a sad day in American politics when an unelected drug-addicted blow-hard talk show host runs one of our two major political parties but that is the case in today’s essentially all-white rural fundamentalist Southern regional Republican Party cult.

Republicans are in such disarray and have no constructive ideas on how to resolve the myriad of problems they created over the last eight years that their only recourse is to just try to destroy and obstruct any effort put forth by our President to resolve them. The ignorance by which they do this is astounding. The Democrats should stop trying to compromise with them and just create their own program. It is futile to try and work with a group that is dead set against any health care plan. One comment from a recent Republican critic said, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” as though he had no idea that Medicare was a government program. That ignorant view is much like driving cross country to protest the highway system. The heath care insurance and pharmaceutical industry are so desperate to derail the health care program they have resorted to the same scare tactics and lies they used in 92 and the 60’s against Medicare and Medicaid programs. It’s interesting to note that the administrative costs of private insurance companies are 20% while the administrative cost for Medicare is only 3%. Now, you tell me which one is more efficient and cost effective.

Not to be outdone by the health insurance industry, politicians like Sara Palin and other simple-minded Republicans have hysterically claimed that the government will force death panels and make euthanasia mandatory for the elderly and disabled. That is the most blatant lie perpetrated so far but the conspiracy theorists on the right fall for this kind of tactic every time. When you can’t win the debate on the facts just lie, demagogue and scare people that don’t know any better. They continuously do this on issues like abortion and the Presidents birth certificate. Anti-abortion extremists act as though abortion wasn’t even around until 1973, ignoring the fact that countless women were maimed and died from back-alley botched abortions for decades prior to 1973. That is why it was legalized in the first place. Another lie perpetrated by the right is that the government funds abortions. This is a blatant lie but it doesn’t keep right-wing zealot nutcases from repeating it ad infinitum. Are these the kind of people you want dictating to you and your doctor if you can use birth control pills or not? On the one hand they are against abortion for any and all reasons and on the other they rail against welfare mothers who live off the government by having child after child irresponsibly. They cater to illogical reactionaries and paranoid NRA types.

These right-wing Republican domestic terrorists incite violence in unstable people and that is why so many doctors and leaders from their ideological enemy’s lists are threatened and killed with guns or anthrax. For a political party that still insists Saddam was involved in 911 and that he had weapons of mass destruction what else do you expect? Until right-wingers address the issues honestly and stop all the lying and scare tactics they don’t deserve to be taken seriously. Otherwise they should be called what they are. Dare I say it? Ignorant and dishonest. 2nd letter below

Huckabee is doing nothing else but bashing Obama and, by extension, American foreign policy while on foreign soil. And that's quite obviously precisely how it's being perceived by the Israeli press.

But in branding what I wrote as "not just inaccurate -- it is a purposed lie," Huckabee doesn't even bother to address his Obama-bashing comments which I cited.

Huckabee doesn't even bother to address his Obama-bashing comments which I cited. Instead, he simply attributes the argument to "some in the left wing of the press" (an odd way to describe the conservative Jerusalem Post) and then assumes (correctly) that his followers will do the rest of the work: anything that doesn't come out of the collective mouth of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh is presumptively false.

The Republican base lives in its own alternative, (planet) or insular reality and any unpleasant or negative facts can be waved away not by refuting them, but by attributing them to the work of "the liberal media."

His denial is totally incoherent and substance-free -- it just tosses around the word "lie" and "left-wing press" without addressing any of the evidence I cited -- but in the warped right-wing cocoon he inhabits that is all that is necessary to dispense with facts. That's why roughly 30% of the country lives in its own world and possesses its own set of realities.

Criticizing American foreign policy while on Foreign Soil) which the Right has long insisted was a terrible sin:

Remember the Dixie Chicks in London or Al Gore in Saudi Arabia or Obama in Europe? They called all three of the above mentioned treasonous. How quickly the right forgets its patriotic principals. Why is no one on the right condemning Huckabee?

2nd letter

It’s so interesting to watch and listen to right-wing extremists at Town Hall meetings and those writing conspiracy theory op-eds with ridiculous references to Nazi’s these days. I noticed a crippled lady with a life threatening disease struggle to stand up talking about how she had been consistently denied insurance coverage by her private insurance company countless times and had exhausted her life savings. So many people that are fortunate enough to even have private insurance have also been dropped because of their condition and most can’t get private insurance because of pre-existing conditions. The tragedy of this story is that while the women struggles to stand with her crutches and tell her story another loud mouth tea bagger nut-case behind her a few rows back screams, her face distorted and ugly in it's anger, ignorance and selfishness, "I shouldn’t have to pay for your health care!" And these are normal, patriotic, "concerned" citizens?”

Tell me our present system is not a sick health care policy. It is what those who are against Obama’s plan want to continue. Doing nothing is not an option. These right-wing protesters are the ones lying, abusing disabled people, hanging people in effigy, destroying property, depicting Obama as Hitler and making death threats while ignoring essential medical needs of fellow citizens. These are the kinds of people Republicans are counting on to destroy Obama’s health care plans by lying to them and provoking them with fear mongering about death panels and forced euthanasia. Our present Medicare system doesn’t require that and the proposed system doesn’t either. Purposely lying about the proposed health care insurance system is sick and so is our political discourse today.

Health Care lies

2010-02-17T16:29:00.000-06:00

I keep hearing how GOP lawmakers are lying about and provoking their less discerning constituents by claiming America will become Socialist if we have a health care system that allows for a public option. Many tea baggers claim they want the same excellent health-care our Congressmen have and nothing less. Well, if going to a government run hospital is so horrible why do all these Republicans that rail against it go to the very hospitals they want you to reject? Case in point: Mitch McConnell went to Bethesda Naval Hospital for a very successful elective coronary artery bypass and he didn’t have to wait. He received the best care available. John McCain had surgery at Bethesda for a cancerous melanoma. No problems. Kit Bond, senator from Missouri, went to Bethesda for hip replacement surgery. Great results! He received the best care possible. No complains from him about government run health-care. George Voinovich, senator from Ohio went to Bethesda for heart surgery and a pacemaker. Perfect outcome. No complaints. Most all government officials use government run hospitals for the best care available.

And last but not least when a grad student at a town hall meeting told G.O.P. Chairman Michael Steele that his mother couldn’t afford medication and recently died of cancer, Steele turned his back to him and the crowd of right-wingers cheered and applauded. That says a lot about who really cares about your welfare and health concerns. Politicians saying one thing and doing another and the GOP Chairman and his sycophants ignoring those Americans in need of basic health care. Now who do you trust to do what’s best for the American public? The very poor have Medicaid. Veterans have veteran’s healthcare. The retired have Medicare. The employed have private healthcare. Those who are in need are the working poor who work in jobs that don’t provide health coverage, the unemployed / laid off and their children. Since when did America reject anyone as being undeserving of the basic needs of life as listed in the Declaration of Independence?

Malignant

2010-02-17T16:27:00.000-06:00

After reading the predictable Republican comments toward my letter recently, it seems that some local conservatives are in denial about their plight in today’s political wilderness. After eight years of total failure in governing both at the executive and legislative level they can’t even admit their countless errors. I sit and listen to Republican leaders like Rudolf Giuliani and Dick Cheney lie with impunity about there being no terrorist attacks during their eight years in charge, yet they ignore the fact that they were responsible for the worst terrorist attack in American history on 911, and numerous terrorist killings from doctor murders to anthrax poisonings and shoe bombers on U.S. planes and soil. This doesn’t even include the endless bombings of Americans worldwide by terrorists over the last eight years. Neo-Cons orchestrated the collapse of our capitalistic economic system by blowing the Clinton surplus, conducting two wars on credit cards, spending needlessly with borrowed money for bridges to nowhere and refusing to regulate or offer any oversight of our banks and financial institutions. This has resulted in the worst economic decline in the last century yet they now whine constantly about the Obama team’s effort to correct these problems and get people back to work. Right-wingers would apparently prefer that Obama do nothing in response to the problems they inherited and just allow the economy to tank into a full-blown depression so they can use it in their political attacks as a means of getting elected.

To listen to my critics’ complaints, their aloof, pompous and erudite attitudes show they are detached from reality when it comes to those citizens who have no jobs or medical coverage. Could it be that is why less than 20% of our population identify themselves as Republicans? Is it any surprise that Republicans have done nothing constructive during Obama’s first year in office? They have not cooperated in any way with the new president and have voted in lock step against everything he has proposed. They are the epitome of obstructionism and seek only to gain partisan political power rather than do anything that will help Americans in their time of need. They only represent corporate and moneyed interests yet claim to be common populists. They claim not to be racists but have no black Congressmen and always vote against any minority helping bills. They walk in lock step to Fox and Rush propaganda but don’t even blush when they claim “Fair and balanced reporting.” They try to savage Senator Harry Reid and claim his recent comments were much worst than Trent Lott’s wish that the famous racist, Strom Thurman would have been elected president. That’s just a pathetically ridiculous comparison. I think most African Americans care more about what a politician does for them than any misspoken comments and on that count Republicans are very much lacking. If hypocrisy were a disease they would have a terminal malignancy.

Real or No (t) Real?

2010-02-17T16:24:00.000-06:00

As an independent, I for one am happy to see that Senator Kennedy’s old seat has gone to the challenger in Massachusetts. It’s about time the Dems wake up to what working class people want in this country. Hopefully Obama will learn a lesson from it. It will be interesting to see if Mr. Brown will actually be an “independent and different kind of Republican” or the same old corporate, McConnell-like sycophant who cow tows to the whims of any big money interest typical of DC Repus. If not he will be gone in two years when he is up for reelection.

Prior to Obama we had eight years of nothing but incompetence, lying, unregulated greed and needless war. I expect Obama to change more of the way Washington operates in his remaining 3 years. He has only been there for one year and has had some good successes but I feel he has been way too accommodating to corporate interests and Wall Street bankers. Now that he is listening to Paul Volcker on financial matters rather than Tim Geitner, hopefully he will reinstitute the Glass Segal Act so the “too big to fail” Banks will be reigned in and kept from practicing the same high-risk financial games with derivatives that got us into the horrible mess that Bush allowed during his time in office. That brought us to the brink of a world-wide depression and employment is still suffering terribly because of Republican irresponsibility.

The Dems have also failed in delivering health care so far because of corporate interest and political games played by conservatives in their own party. Why the unemployed and those who have no health insurance can’t be added to Medicare I can’t understand. It is shameful that thousands of people die every day as a result of having no medical insurance in this country. We can’t continue to go on as we have in the past. Health care is costing a larger percentage of families budgets each year and it must be contained. At least the Dems have tried to resolve the issue. Republicans did nothing under Clinton and Bush and have been nothing but obstructionists under Obama. They stopped reform in all areas. They could care less about those without health insurance. They only think of the haves and ignore the have-nots. The conservative Supreme Court also helps corporate and repu interests by allowing unlimited spending by business on political campaigns.

Until the Democratic Party becomes what it has always claimed to be; a party for the average person they will flounder. They are just Republican-lite in many ways. If Obama can become more of a populist I think he can succeed in doing what he said he wanted to do but in this country nothing happens without money behind it. Selling out to corporate interests will be viewed as moving to the Right and help him succeed but he will lose the hearts of those who believed he was different than other politicians. We’ll see. If he moves to help working people who really need it, the loss in Massachusetts will have been worth it.

Mythological Politics

2010-02-17T16:19:00.000-06:00

The key to understanding the populist right's accusations that Obama is a socialist

By Michael Lind

The tea party movement may have been started by Washington lobbyists, but it has tapped into a powerful strain of American political culture — a strain that has always presented an obstacle to reform in the United States.

American political culture was British before it was American. During the English civil war of the 17th century, two themes crystallized — and have influenced American public discourse to this day. One was the idea of the Ancient Constitution. The other was the idea of the True Religion.

Many British opponents of the Stuart monarchs claimed that they were defending an ancient, unwritten English constitution against corruption in the service of tyranny. Sometimes this ancient constitution was identified with the laws of the Anglo-Saxon King Alfred, and contrasted with the "Norman yoke" imposed on freedom-loving English people by William the Conqueror and his despotic successors after the Norman invasion of Britain in 1066. As history, this was nonsense, but as political mythology this narrative had enormous appeal. History was viewed as a gradual decline into tyranny, a long fall following a golden age of English liberty in the distant past.

This myth of primordial English liberty rhymed neatly with radical Protestantism. According to dissenting Protestants, the true church was the earliest church. Christianity had been corrupted over time, and Reformation required a restoration of the early, pure practices and beliefs of the apostles.

Put the myths of the ancient constitution and the early church together, and you have a view of history as decline from an original state of perfection, in politics and also in religion. Innovation is equated with tyranny in politics and heresy in religion. Virtue consists of defending what is left of the old, more perfect system and, if possible, restoring the original government or church. Progress is redefined as regress — movement away from the wicked present toward the pure and uncorrupted past.

This way of thinking is more or less extinct in Britain, its original home, but it became an important part of the political culture of the British North American colonies that won their independence from the mother country. Having become Americans, the former British colonists found it easy to replace the ancient constitution of the virtuous Anglo-Saxons with the 1787 constitution of the virtuous Founding Fathers, who were quickly elevated to the status of demigods like the legendary King Alfred.

Anglo-American Protestants viewed Catholicism as the chief enemy of the "true religion" of Protestant Christianity well into the 20th century, and some still do. But in the mythology of the reactionary right, the United Nations has long since replaced the Vatican as the center of global conspiracies, and the alleged Catholic threat to Protestantism has been replaced by the alleged "secular humanist" threat to the "Judeo-Christian tradition."

This is the key to understanding the otherwise inexplicable accusations by the populist right that Barack Obama is a socialist or fascist or whatever, as well as fantasies about a global secular humanist conspiracy. We are dealing with a mythological mentality, based on simple and powerful archetypes. Contemporary figures and current events are plugged into a framework that never changes. "King Charles (or King George) is threatening the rights of Englishmen" becomes "Barack Obama is promoting socialism" — or fascism, or monarchism, or daylight saving time.

As in other cases of mythological politics, like messianic Marxism, this kind of thinking is resistant to argument. If you disagree, then that simply proves that you are part of the conspiracy. Inconvenient facts can be explained away by the true believers. It's hard to come up with arguments that would persuade people who think that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are totalitarians to change their mind.

Nevertheless, progressives cannot cede the high ground of debate over first principles to this kind of reactionary, paranoid populism and fight instead in the swampy terrain of utilitarian social science. In a debate for the hearts and minds of the American people, Ron Paul will defeat Peter Orszag every time.

Against this backward-looking version of Americanism, rooted in early modern British fantasies about the ancient constitution and true religion, progressives must deploy a counter-narrative that is equally rooted in American values. The ideas of natural rights and popular sovereignty are, if anything, more fundamental to American political culture than the idea of political or religious golden ages in an idealized past. But natural rights and popular sovereignty can be invoked on behalf of reform. The history of basing civil rights on natural rights is one of improvement over time, not one of decline. The abolition of slavery by the 13th Amendment and the nationalization of civil rights by the 14th improved the U.S. Constitution, and Franklin Roosevelt's notion of economic rights marks a further advance.

Likewise, the idea of popular sovereignty, though it dates back to John Locke in the 17th century, need not inspire reactionary reverence for existing institutions, much less a desire to restore an alleged golden age. On the contrary, the sovereign people have the right to remake their political and social order every generation or two, in order to achieve their perennial goals in changing conditions.

This was the view of Abraham Lincoln, who said in his Second Annual Message to Congress: "As our case is new, we must think anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country." And it was the view of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 in his Commonwealth Club Address: "Faith in America, faith in our tradition of personal responsibility, faith in our institutions, faith in ourselves demand that we recognize the new terms of the old social contract."

At the high level of public philosophy, the debate between the tea party right and progressives boils down to this: Do we think that fidelity to our predecessors means mindlessly doing what they did in their own time, even though times have changed? Or do we think that we should act as they would act, if they lived in the 21st century and had learned from everything that has happened in America and the world in the past 200 years?

To put it another way: The American Revolution was a beginning, not an end. The real equivalents today of the American revolutionaries are those who view the republic, not as an 18th-century utopia to be restored with archaeological exactitude, but as a work in progress to which every generation of Americans can contribute.

Let the debate begin.

Michael Lind is policy director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation

Reform or Else

2009-12-05T11:09:00.001-06:00

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: December 3, 2009

Health care reform hangs in the balance. Its fate rests with a handful of “centrist” senators — senators who claim to be mainly worried about whether the proposed legislation is fiscally responsible.

Skip to next paragraph But if they’re really concerned with fiscal responsibility, they shouldn’t be worried about what would happen if health reform passes. They should, instead, be worried about what would happen if it doesn’t pass. For America can’t get control of its budget without controlling health care costs — and this is our last, best chance to deal with these costs in a rational way.

Some background: Long-term fiscal projections for the United States paint a grim picture. Unless there are major policy changes, expenditure will consistently grow faster than revenue, eventually leading to a debt crisis.

What’s behind these projections? An aging population, which will raise the cost of Social Security, is part of the story. But the main driver of future deficits is the ever-rising cost of Medicare and Medicaid. If health care costs rise in the future as they have in the past, fiscal catastrophe awaits.

You might think, given this picture, that extending coverage to those who would otherwise be uninsured would exacerbate the problem. But you’d be wrong, for two reasons.

First, the uninsured in America are, on average, relatively young and healthy; covering them wouldn’t raise overall health care costs very much.

Second, the proposed health care reform links the expansion of coverage to serious cost-control measures for Medicare. Think of it as a grand bargain: coverage for (almost) everyone, tied to an effort to ensure that health care dollars are well spent.

Are we talking about real savings, or just window dressing? Well, the health care economists I respect are seriously impressed by the cost-control measures in the Senate bill, which include efforts to improve incentives for cost-effective care, the use of medical research to guide doctors toward treatments that actually work, and more. This is “the best effort anyone has made,” says Jonathan Gruber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A letter signed by 23 prominent health care experts — including Mark McClellan, who headed Medicare under the Bush administration — declares that the bill’s cost-control measures “will reduce long-term deficits.”

The fact that we’re seeing the first really serious attempt to control health care costs as part of a bill that tries to cover the uninsured seems to confirm what would-be reformers have been saying for years: The path to cost control runs through universality. We can only tackle out-of-control costs as part of a deal that also provides Americans with the security of guaranteed health care.

That observation in itself should make anyone concerned with fiscal responsibility support this reform. Over the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office has concluded, the proposed legislation would reduce, not increase, the budget deficit. And by giving us a chance, finally, to rein in the ever-growing spending of Medicare, it would greatly improve our long-run fiscal prospects.

But there’s another reason failure to pass reform would be devastating — namely, the nature of the opposition.

The Republican campaign against health care reform has rested in part on the traditional arguments, arguments that go back to the days when Ronald Reagan was trying to scare Americans into opposing Medicare — denunciations of “socialized medicine,” claims that universal health coverage is the road to tyranny, etc.

But in the closing rounds of the health care fight, the G.O.P. has focused more and more on an effort to demonize cost-control efforts. The Senate bill would impose “draconian cuts” on Medicare, says Senator John McCain, who proposed much deeper cuts just last year as part of his presidential campaign. “If you’re a senior and you’re on Medicare, you better be afraid of this bill,” says Senator Tom Coburn.

If these tactics work, and health reform fails, think of the message this would convey: It would signal that any effort to deal with the biggest budget problem we face will be successfully played by political opponents as an attack on older Americans. It would be a long time before anyone was willing to take on the challenge again; remember that after the failure of the Clinton effort, it was 16 years before the next try at health reform.

That’s why anyone who is truly concerned about fiscal policy should be anxious to see health reform succeed. If it fails, the demagogues will have won, and we probably won’t deal with our biggest fiscal problem until we’re forced into action by a nasty debt crisis.

So to the centrists still sitting on the fence over health reform: If you care about fiscal responsibility, you better be afraid of what will happen if reform fails.

Repus Gone Mad!

2009-11-16T17:20:00.000-06:00

For right-wing Republicans, the presidency of George W. Bush began as a dream come true. People calling themselves "conservatives" ran everything in Washington. Even before the GOP won both houses in 2002, Congress gave Bush everything he asked for. Republican apparatchiks controlled every agency from the Pentagon to the Treasury Department. Fox News savants expressed intermittent outrage that dissent was permitted. Rush Limbaugh's interviews of Dick Cheney sounded like a high-school girl gushing over the Jonas Brothers.

To rational minds, the resultant disaster could hardly have been more comprehensive: a lagging economy (the worst job creation since Hoover), yawning budget deficits (Bush doubled the national debt in eight years); two unfinished wars, costing thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars -- one completely unnecessary, the other so forgetfully prosecuted that Gen. Stanley McChrystal warns the United States and NATO could yet lose it.

Meanwhile, if Pakistani terrorists had done to New Orleans what Bush's hapless FEMA appointees did after Katrina, he'd have invaded Iran. Staffing regulatory agencies with See-No-Evil disciples of Ayn Rand made them feckless spectators of the banking crisis that damn near destroyed the nation's financial system, dragging the economy into the deepest recession since (again) Herbert Hoover.

·Continue Reading

By the time the make-believe cowboy retired not to Photo-Op Ranch, but to the Dallas suburbs, his approval ratings hovered in the mid-20s. That they were so high testified to GOP team spirit. But what on earth were Republicans smoking?

Courtesy of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rep. Michele Bachmann, Limbaugh and a passel of pusillanimous GOP congressmen, we're definitely finding out. With the alternatives being rethink or go crazy, much of the GOP base has chosen the comforts of delusion.

Bachmann's recent Tea Party gathering on the Capitol steps provided a veritable carnival sideshow of politically deranged crackpots and loons. The throng was bused to Washington by Americans for Prosperity, one of those Scrooge McDuck-style outfits dedicated to preserving every nickel the rugged individualists who founded it inherited from their daddies.

Crazy has a pedigree: The founder of Koch Industries, the Wichita oil and gas conglomerate behind it, also helped found the John Birch Society. His sons also support Washington's Cato Institute, whose "resident scholars" churn out screeds favoring McDuckism, global-warming denial, etc. It's basically a term-paper-writing service for tycoons.

Prominent among the throng at Bachmann's gathering were persons expressing every form of Obama mania extant: questioning the president's citizenship, depicting him as Little Black Sambo, and equating him to such innovators in the art of governance as Adolf Hitler and Mao Tse-Tung. One guy held a sign proclaiming that "Obama 'takes his orders' from the Rothschilds," making him simultaneously a Nazi and a member of the Worldwide Jewish Conspiracy. It must have been a lively bus trip.

Froot Loops at the Tea Party was hardly news. Rational citizens noticed that even as Bachmann's legions were marching, Obama announced that both the American Medical Association and the AARP had endorsed the administration's healthcare legislation.

Unfortunately, virtually the entire House Republican leadership was outside on the Capitol steps pandering to the throng: Minority Leader John Boehner, whip Eric Cantor of Virginia, Roy Blunt of Missouri, Mike Pence of Indiana, etc. Needless to say, the Texas delegation was there with spurs on.

Last time I checked, Cantor professed to be a Jew. Directly in front of the podium where he spoke, a protester held a sign reading "National Socialist Health Care -- Dachau, Germany 1945," over a large photograph of stacked naked corpses at a Nazi death camp. Sheer political pornography: equating health-insurance reform with the worst crime in human history. This from the party that went into paroxysms of phony outrage whenever some publicity-seeking nonentity like professor Ward Churchill said Americans had it coming on 9/11.

Personally, I'm fed up with these ritual demands for apology. What's a forced apology worth anyway? Besides, it's not me Cantor shamed; it's himself. He did give a TV interview regretting the Dachau image, but he complained that Democratic extremism had driven the Tea Partiers to it, poor things.

Currently, the GOP's de facto leaders are Beck and Limbaugh, ex-disc jockeys peddling half-baked conspiracy theories for fun and profit. Every day, I get earnest communications from citizens who wouldn't know a derivative from a dog biscuit asserting that Barney Frank and mighty ACORN brought down Citigroup and Bank of America. People who couldn't find Nebraska on a world map are certain that global warming's a left-wing hoax.

Meanwhile, Michelle Bachmann, a smarter, better-educated (her crazy comes in paragraphs) and more photogenic Sarah Palin, is definitely somebody to watch. The big question is whether indulging lunacy will do more damage to the Republican Party or the country. Nobody familiar with 20th-century history can be entirely confident that reason will prevail. In troubled times, even great nations can go stark, raving mad.

© 2009, Gene Lyons

What's the difference?

2009-11-16T17:17:00.001-06:00

The Jerusalem District Prosecutor's Office on Thursday charged alleged Jewish terrorist Yaakov (Jack) Teitel with two murders, three attempted murders and other acts of violence.

"It was a pleasure and an honor to serve my God," said Teitel at the Jerusalem courthouse. "I have no regret and no doubt that God is pleased."

Teitel also denied recent reports that he had operated as an undercover Shin Bet agent. .. . The indictment also lists Teitel's efforts for more than a decade to harm Arabs, gays and lesbians, leftists, police officers and messianic Jews.

From Terror in the mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence:

Are there any broad lessons to be drawn from these acts of religion-inspired terrorism? Do they tell us anything about Judaism or Christianity itself? How about other similar examples from both religions?

Joe Lieberman and others have called for investigations into why an Islamic extremist was allowed to remain in the U.S. military. Earlier this year, it was documented how white supremacists and Neo-Nazis were being allowed to openly serve in the U.S. military, likely due to recruitment shortages for our various wars. A former Blackwater employee alleges that CEO Erik Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's company -- responsible for horrific massacres of civilians -- "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life." Numerous reports have documented that Christian fanaticism is rampant in the U.S. military, including high-pressure evangelizing both within the military and in Muslim countries we occupy, and even violence justified by religious doctrine. Also it has been documented that groups within the military have emerged that view allegiance to Christianity as superior to allegiance to the Constitution or orders from superiors. [The Israeli military is burdened by the same problem: "Recent reports of atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers in the course of the intervention in Gaza have described the incitement of conscripts and reservists by military rabbis who characterized the battle as a holy war for the expulsion of non-Jews from Jewish land" and religious soldiers who refuse to follow orders to evict settlers because they perceive their religious duties as paramount.] Will Joe Lieberman's "investigations" include these problems? Should they? If not it would display the hypocrisy of Judeo-Christian political extremism which is so rampant in today’s America and Israel.

Lunatic Beck's guru conclusion

2009-09-17T18:42:00.001-05:00

In 1981, Skousen published "The 5,000 Year Leap," the book for which, thanks to Beck, he is now best known. But it wasn't that Skousen book that made the biggest headline in the 1980s. Toward the end of Reagan's second term, Skousen became the center of a minor controversy when state legislators in California approved the official use of another of his books, the 1982 history text "The Making of America." Besides bursting with factual errors, Skousen's book characterized African-American children as "pickaninnies" and described American slave owners as the "worst victims" of the slavery system. Quoting the historian Fred Albert Shannon, "The Making of America" explained that "[slave] gangs in transit were usually a cheerful lot, though the presence of a number of the more vicious type sometimes made it necessary for them all to go in chains."

Skousen spent the 1990s in semi-retirement. He spoke occasionally around the country and welcomed visiting politicians to his Salt Lake City home on Berkeley Street. His death in January 2006 was little noticed outside Mormon circles. If LDS members debated his legacy, it was in mostly hushed tones. But by then, he was already poised for a posthumous revival.

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

Glenn Beck's first public reference to anything Skousen seems to have occurred in 2003. In his memoir-cum-manifesto, "The Real America," was a chapter titled "The Enemy Within." It consisted of a list titled "Communist Goals of 1963." The list was originally published in Skousen's 1958 book "The Naked Communist," and was submitted to the Congressional Record by Florida Rep. Albert Herlong Jr., whom Beck identifies as the author. Beck asked readers of "The Real America" to ponder Skousen's list, then "check off" those goals already achieved by America's new enemies within. Replacing communists in Beck's view: "liberals, special-interest groups, [and] the ACLU."

It would be another few years before Beck really started boosting for Skousen's books. Apparently, around about 2007, a friend of Beck's sent him "The 5,000 Year Leap." In the column linked here, Canadian newspaper columnist Nigel Hannaford says the friend was a Toronto lawyer. Paul Skousen, Skousen's son, endorsed the outlines of the tale to Salon by e-mail, without giving dates: "As I understand it, Glenn Beck was given a copy of FYL by a friend in Canada. When Beck read it, suddenly the effusive and disembodied principles of freedom that he had been trying to dig up and put together all came together and he could make sense of them. He was so excited about the clarity it brought that he began mentioning it on his show."

Whatever the circumstances, Beck really began touting Skousen in the latter half of 2007. The first brief mention of Skousen in the online archives of Beck's radio show is Sept. 24, 2007. Less than two months later, Beck interviewed conservative pundit David Horowitz on his radio program. He asked him, "Have you ever read any Skousen? Have you read -- do you remember 'The Naked Communist'? I went back and reread that, it was printed in the 1950s. I reread that recently. You look at all the things the communists wanted to accomplish. It's all been done." Horowitz agreed.

The very next week, Bill Bennett appeared on Beck's radio program and received the same question. "Are you familiar with Skousen?" asked Beck. When Bennett replied yes, Beck gushed. "He's fantastic," he said. "I went back and I read 'The Naked Communist' and at the end of that Skousen predicted [that] someday soon you won't be able to find the truth in schools or in libraries or anywhere else because it won't be in print anymore. So you must collect those books. It's an idea I read from Cleon Skousen from his book in the 1950s, 'The Naked Communist,' and where he talked about someday the history of this country's going to be lost because it's going to be hijacked by intellectuals and communists and everything else. And I think we're there."

Beck continued to mention the book during 2008, but his Skousen obsession really kicked in as the 912 concept began to take shape. Even before Obama's inauguration, Beck had a game plan for a movement with Skousen at the center. On his Dec. 18, 2008, radio show, one month before Obama took office, Beck introduced his audience to the idea of a "September twelfth person."

"The first thing you could do," he said, "is get 'The 5,000 Year Leap.' Over my book or anything else, get 'The 5,000 Year Leap.' You can probably find it in the book section of GlennBeck.com, but read that. It is the principle. Please, No. 1 thing: Inform yourself about who we are and what the other systems are all about. 'The 5,000 Year Leap' is the first part of that. Because it will help you understand American free enterprise … Make that dedication of becoming a Sept. 12 person and I will help you do it next year."

By then, the Skousen family was ready to respond to the Beck-inspired demand. "We as a family," Paul Skousen told Salon, "were preparing to publish another edition, so I contacted his office with the request that Glenn write a foreword. He was gracious and kind and did just that. That is the version we're now publishing.

According to James Pratt of PowerThink Publishing, publishers of the new 30th anniversary edition of "Leap," which has the Beck foreword, it was intended to replace the version that the Beck show was already touting via links on its Web site. Pratt claimed in an e-mail to Salon that the previous version was not authorized by the family. "It was presumed by Mr. Beck and staff that copyright authority was in effect with that edition, and as an author I must say, I had also assumed the same thing ... I was more than a little surprised this was going on, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of copies."

PowerThink secured the agreement of the Skousen family to create the current edition of "The 5,000 Year Leap," which was first published on March 1, 2009. Pratt says that a federal lawsuit "is in process, to secure the copyright authority in an 'authoritative' way" to stop anyone but PowerThink from publishing the book.

In March, with the new book available, Beck invited Skousen's nephew Mark onto his Fox show, where the two men discussed splitting up the United States. (Mark would later say that between commercials, Beck told him that a friend had sent him "Leap" and that the book "changed his life.") A week later, Beck issued his famously maudlin announcement introducing the 912 Project. The teary-eyed performance was accompanied by a clarion call for all 912ers to buy " Leap." "I beg you to read this book filled with words of wisdom which I can only describe as divinely inspired," wrote Beck in his introduction to a recent edition. The result has been a publishing earthquake: More than 250,000 copies have been sold in the first half of 2009. James Pratt, the book's publisher, says Beck "has done more to bring the work of Dr. Skousen to light than any other individual in America today."

"The 5,000 Year Leap" is not the only Skousen title to find new life on the 912 circuit. The president of the National Center for Constitutional Studies, Dr. Earl Taylor Jr., is currently touring the country offering daylong seminars to 912 chapters based on Skousen's "Making of America." For $25, participants will receive a bagged lunch and stories about America's religious Founders and their happy slaves. An ad for Taylor's "Making of America" seminar, currently featured on the Web site of the Tampa 912 Project, claims that Skousen's book is "considered a great masterpiece to Constitutional students [and is] the 'granddaddy' of all books on the United States Constitution."

Like so much declaimed by W. Cleon Skousen and his 21st century acolyte Glenn Beck, this last statement is fantasy. But it is also a profitable and popular one. In coming to terms with a movement that has an ever more tenuous relationship with accepted fact, we relearn that perennial lesson grasped even by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Fantasies can have serious consequences.

Cleon Skousen was a right-wing crank whom even conservatives despised. Then Beck discovered him

By Alexander Zaitchik

Beck's Influence continued

2009-09-17T18:37:00.001-05:00

How did Skousen become an expert on communism? He claimed, as his apologists still do, that his years with the FBI exposed him to inside information. He also boasted that he worked closely with J. Edgar Hoover. But both claims are open to question. Skousen's work at the Bureau was largely administrative, according to Ernie Lazar, an independent researcher of the far right who has examined Skousen's nearly 2,000-page FBI file. "Skousen never worked in [the domestic intelligence division] and he never had significant exposure to data concerning communist matters," says Lazar.

Skousen also trumpeted the insight he says he gained researching "The Naked Communist." But this research was as shaky as his résumé. Among the theories Skousen charged a healthy fee to discuss was the alleged treason of FDR advisor Harry Hopkins. According to Skousen, Hopkins gave the Soviets "50 suitcases" worth of info on the Manhattan Project, along with nearly half of the nation's supply of enriched uranium. This he told thousands of audiences across the country, sometimes giving five speeches a day.

When Skousen's books started popping up in the nation's high-school classrooms, panicked school board officials wrote the FBI asking if Skousen was reliable. The Bureau's answer was an exasperated and resounding "no." One 1962 FBI memo notes, "During the past year or so, Skousen has affiliated himself with the extreme right-wing 'professional communists' who are promoting their own anticommunism for obvious financial purposes." Skousen's "The Naked Communist," said the Bureau official, is "another example of why a sound, scholarly textbook on communism is urgently and badly needed."

Two years on the circuit made Skousen a nationally known figure. Aligned with the Birchers and Schwarz, he also founded his own Utah-based far-right organization, the All-American Society. Here's how Time magazine described the outfit in a December 1961 feature on what it called the "rightwing ultras":

The All-American Society, founded in Salt Lake City, has as its guiding light one of the busiest speakers in the rightist movement: W. Cleon Skousen, a balding, bespectacled onetime FBI man who hit the anti-Communist circuit in earnest in 1960 after being fired from his job as Salt Lake City's police chief ("He operated the police department like a Gestapo," says Salt Lake City's conservative Mayor J. Bracken Lee). Skousen freely quotes the Bible, constantly plugs his book, The Naked Communist, [and] presses for a full congressional investigation of the State Department.

By 1963, Skousen's extremism was costing him. No conservative organization with any mainstream credibility wanted anything to do with him. Members of the ultraconservative American Security Council kicked him out because they felt he had "gone off the deep end." One ASC member who shared this opinion was William C. Mott, the judge advocate general of the U.S. Navy. Mott found Skousen "money mad ... totally unqualified and interested solely in furthering his own personal ends."

When Skousen aligned himself with Robert Welch's charge that Dwight Eisenhower was a "dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy," the last of Skousen's dwindling corporate clients dumped him. The National Association of Manufacturers released a statement condemning the Birchers and distancing itself from "any individual or party" that subscribed to their views. Skousen, author of a pamphlet titled "The Communist Attack on the John Birch Society," was the nation's most prominent Birch defender.

Skousen laid low for much of the '60s. But he reemerged at the end of the decade peddling a new and improved conspiracy that merged left with right: the global capitalist mega-plot of the "dynastic rich." Families like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds, Skousen now believed, used left forces -- from Ho Chi Minh to the American civil rights movement -- to serve their own power.

In 1969, a 1,300-page book started appearing in faculty mailboxes at Brigham Young, where Skousen was back teaching part-time. The book, written by a Georgetown University historian named Carroll Quigley, was called "Tragedy and Hope." Inside each copy, Skousen inserted handwritten notes urging his colleagues to read the book and embrace its truth. "Tragedy and Hope," Skousen believed, exposed the details of what would come to be known as the New World Order (NWO). Quigley's book so moved Skousen that in 1970 he self-published a breathless 144-page review essay called "The Naked Capitalist." Nearly 40 years later, it remains a foundational document of America's NWO conspiracy and survivalist scene (which includes Skousen's nephew Joel).

In "The Naked Communist," Skousen had argued that the communists wanted power for their own reasons. In "The Naked Capitalist," Skousen argued that those reasons were really the reasons of the dynastic rich, who used front groups to do their dirty work and hide their tracks. The purpose of liberal internationalist groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations, argued Skousen, was to push "U.S. foreign policy toward the establishment of a world-wide collectivist society." Skousen claimed the Anglo-American banking establishment had a long history of such activity going back to the Bolshevik Revolution. He substantiated this claim by citing the work of a former Czarist army officer named Arsene de Goulevitch. Among Goulevitch's own sources is Boris Brasol, a pro-Nazi Russian émigré who provided Henry Ford with the first English translation of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

"The Naked Capitalist" does not seem like a text that would be part of the required reading list on any reputable college campus, but some BYU professors taught it out of allegiance to Skousen. Terrified, the editors of Dialogue: The Journal of Mormon Thought invited "Tragedy and Hope" author Carroll Quigley to comment on Skousen's interpretation of his work. They also asked a highly respected BYU history professor named Louis C. Midgley to review Skousen's latest pamphlet. Their judgment was not kind. In the Autumn/Winter 1971 issue of Dialogue, the two men accused Skousen of "inventing fantastic ideas and making inferences that go far beyond the bounds of honest commentary." Skousen not only saw things that weren't in Quigley's book, they declared, he also missed what actually was there -- namely, a critique of ultra-far-right conspiracists like Willard Cleon Skousen.

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Skousen was unbowed. In 1971, he founded the Freeman Institute, a research organization devoted to the study of the super-conspiracy directed by the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. (The institute later changed its name to the National Center for Constitutional Studies, which has offices in Malta, Idaho, and continues to publish Skousen's books, including Glenn Beck's favorite work of history, "The 5,000 Year Leap.")

By the end of the 1970s, the death of Skousen's biggest allies within the Mormon church hierarchy cleared the way for an official disavowal of his work. In 1979, LDS church president Spencer W. Kimball issued an order to every Mormon clergyman in the U.S. stating "no announcements should be made in Church meetings of Freemen Institute lectures or events that are not under the sponsorship of the Church. [This] is to make certain that neither Church facilities nor Church meetings are used to advertise such events and to avoid any implication that the Church endorses what is said during such lectures."

Skousen may have been too extreme for the Quorum of the Twelve in Salt Lake City, but he soon found rehabilitation on the intellectual margins of Reagan's Washington. In 1980, Skousen was appointed to the newly founded Council for National Policy, a think tank that brought together leading religious conservatives and served as the unofficial brain trust of the new administration. At the Council, Skousen distinguished himself by becoming an early proponent of privatizing Social Security. He also formed relationships with other evangelical church leaders and aligned the LDS church with an increasingly religious GOP.

"Skousen worked to change Mormonism from a new and unique American-born faith into an evangelical form of fundamentalist Christianity," says Rob Lauer, a leader of the Reform Mormonism movement. "By arguing that biblical principles were the basis of the U.S. government, he was among those most responsible for the LDS church becoming part of the religious right political establishment over the past 25 years."

Lunitic Beck's Radical Morman Influence

2009-09-17T18:34:00.002-05:00

Sept. 16, 2009 | On Saturday, I spent the afternoon with America's new breed of angry conservative. Up to 75,000 protesters had gathered in Washington on Sept. 12, the day after the eighth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, sporting the now familiar tea-bagger accoutrements of "Don't Tread on Me" T-shirts, Revolutionary War outfits and Obama-the-Joker placards. The male-skewing, nearly all-white throng had come to denounce the president and what they believe is his communist-fascist agenda.

Even if the turnout wasn't the 2 million that some conservatives tried, briefly, to claim, it was still enough to fill the streets near the Capitol. It was also ample testament to the strength of a certain strain of right-wing populist rage and the talking head who has harnessed it. The masses were summoned by Glenn Beck, Fox News host and organizer of the 912 Project, the civic initiative he pulled together six months ago to restore America to the sense of purpose and unity it had felt the day after the towers fell.

In reality, however, the so-called 912ers were summoned to D.C. by the man who changed Beck's life, and that helps explain why the movement is not the nonpartisan lovefest that Beck first sold on air with his trademark tears. Beck has created a massive meet-up for the disaffected, paranoid Palin-ite "death panel" wing of the GOP, those ideologues most susceptible to conspiracy theories and prone to latch on to eccentric distortions of fact in the name of opposing "socialism." In that, they are true disciples of the late W. Cleon Skousen, Beck's favorite writer and the author of the bible of the 9/12 movement, "The 5,000 Year Leap." A once-famous anti-communist "historian," Skousen was too extreme even for the conservative activists of the Goldwater era, but Glenn Beck has now rescued him from the remainder pile of history, and introduced him to a receptive new audience.

Anyone who has followed Beck will recognize the book's title. Beck has been furiously promoting "The 5,000 Year Leap" for the past year, a push that peaked in March when he launched the 912 Project. That month, a new edition of "The 5,000 Year Leap," complete with a laudatory new foreword by none other than Glenn Beck, came out of nowhere to hit No. 1 on Amazon. It remained in the top 15 all summer, holding the No. 1 spot in the government category for months. The book tops Beck's 912 Project "required reading" list, and is routinely sold at 912 Project meetings where guest speakers often use it as their primary source material. At one 912 meet-up I attended in Florida, copies were stacked high on a table against the back wall, available for the 912 nice price of $15. "Don't bother trying to get it at the library," one 912er told me. "The wait list is 40 deep."

What has Beck been pushing on his legions? "Leap," first published in 1981, is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology. As such, it is an early entry in the ongoing attempt by the religious right to rewrite history. Fundamentalists want to define the United States as a Christian nation rather than a secular republic, and recast the Founding Fathers as devout Christians guided by the Bible rather than deists inspired by the French and English philosophers. "Leap" argues that the U.S. Constitution is a godly document above all else, based on natural law, and owes more to the Old and New Testaments than to the secular and radical spirit of the Enlightenment. It lists 28 fundamental beliefs -- based on the sayings and writings of Moses, Jesus, Cicero, John Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith -- that Skousen says have resulted in more God-directed progress than was achieved in the previous 5,000 years of every other civilization combined. The book reads exactly like what it was until Glenn Beck dragged it out of Mormon obscurity: a textbook full of aggressively selective quotations intended for conservative religious schools like Utah's George Wythe University, where it has been part of the core freshman curriculum for decades (and where Beck spoke at this year's annual fundraiser).

But more interesting than the contents of "The 5,000 Year Leap," and more revealing for what it says about 912ers and the Glenn Beck Nation, is the book's author. W. Cleon Skousen was not a historian so much as a player in the history of the American far right; less a scholar of the republic than a threat to it. At least, that was the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which maintained a file on Skousen for years that eventually totaled some 2,000 pages. Before he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen's own Mormon church publicly distanced itself from the foundation that Skousen founded and that has published previous editions of "The 5,000 Year Leap."

As Beck knows, to focus solely on "The 5,000 Year Leap" is to sell the author short. When he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen had authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets on the Red Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing, and Mormon end-times prophecy. It is a body of work that does much to explain Glenn Beck's bizarre conspiratorial mash-up of recent months, which decries a new darkness at noon and finds strange symbols carefully coded in the retired lobby art of Rockefeller Center. It also suggests that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange place.

Willard Cleon Skousen was born in 1913 to American parents in a small Mormon frontier town in Alberta, Canada. When he was 10 his family moved to California, where he remained until he shipped off to England and Ireland for Mormon missionary work. In 1935, after graduating from a California junior college, the 23-year-old Skousen moved to Washington, where he worked briefly for a New Deal farm agency. He then began a 15-year career with the FBI, also earning a law degree from George Washington University in 1940. His posts at the FBI were largely administrative and clerical in nature, first in Washington and later in Kansas.

After retiring from the FBI in 1951, Skousen joined the faculty of Brigham Young University, the Latter-day Saints university in Utah. He then enjoyed a tumultuous four years as chief of police in Salt Lake City. During his tenure he gained a reputation for cutting crime and ruthlessly enforcing Mormon morals. But Skousen was too earnest by half. The city's ultraconservative mayor, J. Bracken Lee, fired him in 1960 for excessive zeal in raiding private clubs where the Mormon elite enjoyed their cards. "Skousen conducted his office as Chief of Police in exactly the same manner in which the Communists operate their government," Lee wrote to a friend explaining his firing of Skousen. "The man is a master of half-truths. In at least three instances I have proven him to be a liar. He is a very dangerous man [and] one of the greatest spenders of public funds of anyone who ever served in any capacity in Salt Lake City government."

During his stint as police chief, Skousen began laying the groundwork for his future career as a professional anti-communist. He published a bestselling expose-slash-history called "The Naked Communist." In the late '50s, America's far right began to bubble with organizations peddling stories about the true state of the Red Menace. Groups like the Church League of America and the John Birch Society organized to channel, feed and satisfy Cold War paranoia. Members of these groups were the original postwar "domestic right-wing extremist threat." Then as now, they were very much on the government's radar.

After his firing from the police force, Skousen became a star on the profitable far-right speakers circuit. He worked for both the Bircher-operated American Opinion Speakers Bureau and Fred Schwarz's Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. The two groups competed in describing ever more terrifying threats posed by America's enemies, foreign and domestic. As the scenarios became more and more outlandish, the feds grew concerned. In an internal memo, the FBI described Skousen's friend and employer Fred Schwarz as "an opportunist," the likes of which "are largely responsible for misinforming people and stirring them up emotionally ... Schwartz [sic] and others like him can only do the country and the anticommunist work of the Bureau harm."

Lunitic Beck

2009-09-17T18:34:00.000-05:00

Government Hospitals

2009-09-02T14:51:00.000-05:00

Can conservatism be saved from the Birthers?

2009-09-02T12:44:00.001-05:00

Fifty years ago, while he was in the process of founding modern conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr. decided it was important not to let just anyone into the movement's tent. Calling them a “menace” to the conservative movement, Buckley launched an attack on the John Birch Society, the paranoid far-right group that accused President Eisenhower, along with virtually everyone else in the U.S. government, of being a communist agent.

As Buckley ally Russell Kirk remarked, “Eisenhower isn’t a communist. He’s a golfer.” Deploying the weight of his magazine, National Review, Buckley succeeded in driving the Birchers from mainstream conservatism. “There are bounds to the dictum, Anyone on the right is my ally,” he editorialized, accusing the Birchers of hurting the cause of anti-communism.

All this business with Buckley and the Birchers might have seemed like dead history for a long time. After all, how could you have Bircher-style paranoia without communists to be freaked out about? But speaking of communism, Karl Marx -- excuse me -- He Who Must Not Be Named once wrote that history repeats itself. Events happen twice, wrote Marx: The first time as tragedy, and the second time as farce.

Which brings us to the blog-world replay of the Buckley-Bircher showdown. Two days ago, explicitly citing the example of Buckley, Jon Henke of the blog TheNexRight.com decided that it was time to evict the Birthers from the conservative movement, along with their main publication, WorldNetDaily.

Responding to WND favorite --and major-league paranoid -- Jerome Corsi’s conspiracy theories about President Obama and concentration camps, Henke wrote:

No respectable organization should support the kind of fringe idiocy that WND peddles. Those who do are not respectable. I think it's time to find out what conservative/libertarian organizations support WND through advertising, list rental or other commercial collaboration (email me if you know of any), and boycott any of those organizations that will not renounce any further support for WorldNetDaily.

The folks at WND, unsurprisingly, didn’t take the news of their expulsion lying down. Joseph Farah, the editor in chief, more or less called Henke a bullying, dishonest nobody. WND readers also seem to have flooded Henke’s in box with vitriolic e-mails calling him a communist and other nasty names.

Henke deserves applause for facing his party's demons, but at the same time, this whole business is a little dispiriting -- farcical, one might say. His Web site, TheNextRight.com, is no National Review. Hitherto, Henke and his co-bloggers have been mainly concerned with effective use of Twitter in campaigns, and similar tactical minutiae. Worse, WorldNetDaily and the Birthers actually enjoy much more widespread credibility than their 1950s forerunners.

While William F. Buckley was able to secure a denunciation of the John Birch Society by leading conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater, it’s been awfully hard to wring the same sort of disavowal of the Birthers out of any number of Republican officials. As the Web site Right Wing Watch points out, WorldNetDaily and Farah are actually pretty well networked in with mainstream Republicans. And, as poll after poll shows, shocking numbers of people -- particularly conservative people -- seem to buy the basic Birther argument about the president.

So applause to Henke, but this fight is going to need some bigger guns. Maybe he can get Jonah Goldberg to say, “Obama isn’t a fascist. He plays basketball.” But don't hold your breath.

― Gabriel Winant

Back to the Welfare Queen Ploy

2009-08-31T09:58:00.001-05:00

After the election, the "welfare" treatment of Obama's tax policies was echoed by similar conservative rhetoric about proposals to help homebuyers getting hammered by the mortgage and real estate collapse. Most famously, CNBC financial reporter Rick Santelli became a right-wing folk hero for a rant about the injustice of being asked to help the "losers" who took out mortgages they should have known they couldn't pay. This was at about the same time as Republican members of Congress began handing out copies of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," with its prophecy of a dystopic society in which socialist "looters" and Christian "altruists" had brought the United States to its knees, and some conservative agitators began urging "productive" Americans to emulate Rand's plutocratic heroes by "going Galt" and refusing to contribute to the welfare state. The "tea party" movement that ramped up in opposition to Obama's economic stimulus proposals was heavily freighted with this sort of revolt-of-the-producers attitude.

Unsurprisingly, the new "welfare queen wedge" esposed by GOP chairman Steel has been very evident in the opposition to healthcare reform, even before Michael Steele made it clear that "socialism" for "the greatest generation" was worth defending so long as it wasn't extended to the currently uninsured.

Health Care Fit for Animals

2009-08-27T10:37:00.001-05:00

NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Opponents suggest that a “government takeover” of health care will be a milestone on the road to “socialized medicine,” and when he hears those terms, Wendell Potter cringes. He’s embarrassed that opponents are using a playbook that he helped devise.

“Over the years I helped craft this messaging and deliver it,” he noted.

Mr. Potter was an executive in the health insurance industry for nearly 20 years before his conscience got the better of him. He served as head of corporate communications for Humana and then for Cigna.

He flew in corporate jets to industry meetings to plan how to block health reform, he says. He rode in limousines to confabs to concoct messaging to scare the public about reform. But in his heart, he began to have doubts as the business model for insurance evolved in recent years from spreading risk to dumping the risky.

Then in 2007 Mr. Potter attended a premiere of “Sicko,” Michael Moore’s excoriating film about the American health care system. Mr. Potter was taking notes so that he could prepare a propaganda counterblast — but he found himself agreeing with a great deal of the film.

A month later, Mr. Potter was back home in Tennessee, visiting his parents, and dropped in on a three-day charity program at a county fairgrounds to provide medical care for patients who could not afford doctors. Long lines of people were waiting in the rain, and patients were being examined and treated in public in stalls intended for livestock.

“It was a life-changing event to witness that,” he remembered. Increasingly, he found himself despising himself for helping block health reforms. “It sounds hokey, but I would look in the mirror and think, how did I get into this?”

Mr. Potter loved his office, his executive salary, his bonus, his stock options. “How can I walk away from a job that pays me so well?” he wondered. But at the age of 56, he announced his retirement and left Cigna last year.

This year, he went public with his concerns, testifying before a Senate committee investigating the insurance industry.

“I knew that once I did that my life would be different,” he said. “I wouldn’t be getting any more calls from recruiters for the health industry. It was the scariest thing I have done in my life. But it was the right thing to do.”

Mr. Potter says he liked his colleagues and bosses in the insurance industry, and respected them. They are not evil. But he adds that they are removed from the consequences of their decisions, as he was, and are obsessed with sustaining the company’s stock price — which means paying fewer medical bills.

One way to do that is to deny requests for expensive procedures. A second is “rescission” — seizing upon a technicality to cancel the policy of someone who has been paying premiums and finally gets cancer or some other expensive disease. A Congressional investigation into rescission found that three insurers, including Blue Cross of California, used this technique to cancel more than 20,000 policies over five years, saving the companies $300 million in claims.

As The Los Angeles Times has reported, insurers encourage this approach through performance evaluations. One Blue Cross employee earned a perfect evaluation score after dropping thousands of policyholders who faced nearly $10 million in medical expenses.

Mr. Potter notes that a third tactic is for insurers to raise premiums for a small business astronomically after an employee is found to have an illness that will be very expensive to treat. That forces the business to drop coverage for all its employees or go elsewhere.

All this is monstrous, and it negates the entire point of insurance, which is to spread risk.

The insurers are open to one kind of reform — universal coverage through mandates and subsidies, so as to give them more customers and more profits. But they don’t want the reforms that will most help patients, such as a public insurance option, enforced competition and tighter regulation.

Mr. Potter argues that much tougher regulation is essential. He also believes that a robust public option is an essential part of any health reform, to compete with for-profit insurers and keep them honest.

As a nation, we’re at a turning point. Universal health coverage has been proposed for nearly a century in the United States. It was in an early draft of Social Security.

Yet each time, it has been defeated in part by fear-mongering industry lobbyists. That may happen this time as well — unless the Obama administration and Congress defeat these manipulative special interests. What’s un-American isn’t a greater government role in health care but an existing system in which Americans without insurance get health care, if at all, in livestock pens.

Mainstream Media Cowards

2009-08-27T09:42:00.001-05:00

But here's the big thing about "mainstream" journalism and what Ambinder calls "information asymmetry." Upton Sinclair said it best: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Furthermore, the safest place during a stampede is the middle of the herd. Establishment journalists with mortgages, car payments and children in private schools saw what happened to the Dixie Chicks. Why couldn't it happen to them? (The job I got fired from that month wasn't paying my bills.) The United States had been attacked. Feelings ran high, especially in New York and Washington.

What did it matter if we killed the wrong Arabs, so long as Arabs were being killed? In Thomas Friedman's immortal words, "We hit Iraq because we could. That's the real truth."

Under oath to a Senate committee, Condi Rice told a barefaced whopper about the Aug. 6, 2001, CIA terrorism briefing that Bush blew off. Media insiders pretended not to notice. Bush made a slapstick skit of searching under his Oval Office desk for Iraqi WMDs. The press laughed on cue. He claimed that Saddam Hussein forced him to invade Iraq by expelling U.N. arms inspectors. (In reality, Bush made them leave.) Pundits praised his charm.

Long under siege for "liberal bias," media careerists now find themselves confronted with people they see as passionate amateurs. True, fearless scrappers like my friend Joe Conason have always been around, and somebody like Paul Krugman -- a world-class economist who doesn't care what, say, MSNBC's Chris Matthews thinks of him -- can be very annoying.

But what's really driving these jokers up the wall is economic and intellectual competition from the Internet: people with first-class minds and a passion for truth that some of them can barely remember.

© 2009 Gene Lyons. Distributed by Newspaper Enterprise Association

from Glenn Greenwald - In America "the Law is King"

2009-08-25T13:34:00.001-05:00

Thomas Paine v. the Right's torture defenders

GOP Congressman Peter King -- the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee -- had this rancid outburst today in Politico regarding Eric Holder's decision to investigate whether laws were broken by the Bush administration's torture:

"It’s bullshit. It’s disgraceful. You wonder which side they’re on. [It's' a] declaration of war against the CIA, and against common sense. . . . When Holder was talking about being 'shocked' [before the report's release], I thought they were going to have cutting guys' fingers off or something -- or that they actually used the power drill. . . "

Pressed on whether interrogators had actually broken the law, King said he didn't think the Geneva Convention "applies to terrorists."

Never mind that the Supreme Court in Hamdan ruled exactly the opposite: that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions applies to all detainees, including accused Terrorists. Never mind that the War Crimes Act makes it a felony to inflict "prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from . . . the threat of imminent death; or the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering. . . ." and that these acts are therefore criminal whether or not King likes them.

Never mind that scores of people have died -- not merely been threatened with death -- in American custody as a result of "interrogation tactics." Never mind that Ronald Reagan signed the Convention Against Torture which compels the U.S. to prosecute anyone authorizing torture; that the Treaty proclaims that "no exceptional circumstances whatsoever . . . may be invoked as a justification of torture"; and that Reagan himself said the Treaty "will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today." And most of all, never mind that King has no idea whether these people are actually "terrorists" because the people we tortured were never given trials, never proven to have done anything wrong, and in many cases were -- as federal courts have repeatedly found and as the CIA IG Report itself recognized -- completely innocent.

My email inbox and comment section are filled with King-like accusatory sentiments that to oppose Torture is to defend Terrorists, because Terrorists deserve to be tortured, and that to oppose their abuse is to be treasonous because it's terrible to care if Terrorists are abused, etc. etc. In his "1795 essay", which he entitled Dissertations on First Principles of Government, Thomas Paine wrote this as his last paragraph:

An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

Can that be any clearer? Of course, Paine also wrote in Common Sense that "so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king" and "in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other." And in his Dissertations, he also wrote:

The executive is not invested with the power of deliberating whether it shall act or not; it has no discretionary authority in the case; for it can act no other thing than what the laws decree, and it is obliged to act conformably thereto. . . .

For anyone who believes in the basic principles of the founding, the fact that these acts of torture are illegal -- felonies -- ought to end the discussion about whether they were justified.

Few things are more repellent than watching the contemporary Right in America invoke the principles of the Founders -- in general -- to justify their warped and lawless authoritarianism. But nothing is more repulsive than watching them pretend that Thomas Paine -- of all people -- has anything to do with them (Glenn Beck actually wrote his most recent book based on the explicit pretense that he is the modern day Paine). Any casual reading of Paine makes clear that, today, he would be so far on what is deemed the "left" side of the spectrum that you'd be unable to find him. Paine is nothing but what Joe Klein refers to as a "crazy civil liberties absolutist" and what Rush Limbaugh similarly calls "far, fringe, lunatic kooks, far left radical lunatic fringe."

The Right today argues that condemning torture is wrong because the people who were tortured were just Terrorists -- barely human -- and they deserve no defense, not even the force of law. Thomas Paine argued as a first principle that those devoted to liberty "must guard even his enemy from oppression." Could the contrast be any more stark?

-- Glenn Greenwald

What do right-wingers and Republicans have against our Constitution and the laws on which this country is founded?

They are the principals on which we were founded and live by, not some pie in the sky, feel good convictions to be used only when it's convenient. Real patriots understand that the Law is King in America. We are not a country of monarchs and flesh and blood King's but of the suprimacy of the Law! That is what separates us from the rest of the governments of the world. People like "w", Cheney and all their pathetic sychophants still don't understand what the Constitution is all about. It is why we are the greatest nation on earth. If they don't want to support that they need to leave and start their own country somewhere else. They are not patriots. They are lawless frauds who have no basis or pricipal on which to stand. The U.S. Constitution is our King!

Right-wing Town Hall nut cases

2009-08-10T14:51:00.000-05:00

It’s so interesting to watch and listen to right-wing extremists at Town Hall meetings and those writing conspiracy theory op-eds with ridiculous references to Nazi’s these days. I noticed a crippled lady with a life threatening disease struggle to stand up talking about how she had been consistently denied insurance coverage by her private insurance company countless times and had exhausted her life savings. So many people that are fortunate enough to even have private insurance have also been dropped because of their condition and most can’t get private insurance because of pre-existing conditions. The tragedy of this story is that while the women struggles to stand with her crutches and tell her story another loud mouth tea bagger nut-case behind her a few rows back screams, her face distorted and ugly in it's anger, ignorance and selfishness, "I shouldn’t have to pay for your health care!" And these are normal, patriotic, "concerned" citizens?”

Tell me our present system is not a sick health care policy. It is what those who are against Obama’s plan want to continue. Doing nothing is not an option. These right-wing protesters are the ones lying, abusing disabled people, hanging people in effigy, destroying property, and making death threats while ignoring essential medical needs of fellow citizens. These are the kinds of people Republicans are counting on to destroy Obama’s health care plans by lying to them and provoking them with fear mongering about death panels and forced euthanasia. Our present Medicare system doesn’t require that and the proposed system doesn’t either. Purposely lying about the proposed health care insurance system is sick and so is our political discourse today.

Distort

2009-08-10T12:38:00.002-05:00

Planet Foxoid

2009-07-31T07:33:00.002-05:00

4th

2009-07-10T08:02:00.001-05:00

For all the local FOX right-wingers that respond to my comments like Pavlov's dog, I don't think you understand what the definition of freedom and liberty truly are. Why is it that you insist on dictating your views of morality on to other freedom loving Americans that don't see things as you do? It was my understanding that traditional conservatives thought the government should stay out of the personal lives of its citizens. I know that is what liberals like me believe. When it comes to my personal life and religious convictions the government should mind their own business. I don’t need the government in my bedroom or doctor’s office with me. Somehow FOX right-wingers think that it is their duty to impose their religion and morality on all citizens through the law. You can be a religious extremist all you want. You’re free to do that but don't try to force me to adhere to your religion. That, by definition is not liberty or freedom. That is a "Forced Theocracy".

I choose to live by my own religious convictions and will not yield to the government forcing someone else's on me through the law. Now that is real freedom and liberty as elaborated in the Constitution. This country guarantees freedom of, for and from religion. Our Constitution is a secular document and was never intended to be used as a tool or weapon by any particular religion to force their beliefs on others. I thank God for this great country of ours and for the genius of our founders to keep government and religion separate. That is what makes both religion and our government in America free and dynamic. Don't succumb to FOX right-wing dictator totalitarianism and arrogant talk show sycophant mentality. Read, study and understand the U.S. Constitution thoroughly. It puts any right-wing blow-hard talk show host to shame.

Happy 4th of July to all freedom and liberty - loving Americans

Contribute to murder

2009-06-04T16:03:00.001-05:00

Objective observations over the last several months only confirm the well known truth that right-wing conservatives are much more adept at whining about political issues than actually doing anything constructive about them. Ever since President Obama took office from the most pathetically incompetent president and pathologically demented vice president of the last century, all right-wingers can do is practice revisionist history and pretend their policies and actions had nothing to do with the mess Obama inherited.

Right wingers complain that Obama is increasing the deficit as though doing nothing is the desired answer to righting our economic quagmire. If "w" would have left Obama with a huge budget surplus and healthy economy the way Clinton did for him rather than two wars, the largest deficit and worst economy since the great depression they may have a legitimate complaint but they ignore reality as usual. Like most delusional right-wingers, their mouths are bigger than their brains. They can go on FOX TV and rail against the evil liberals all they want but when it comes to actually governing right-wingers have no clue. They continue to claim that torture is no big deal but won't be water-boarded themselves and put their money where their big mouths are. What happened to that tough-guy attitude? Remember "Bring it on?" Why not bring on the water-boarding for right-wing right-to-life terrorsts here in America? After the last eight years right-wingers have proven they can't govern and have no logical or rational ideas about how to correct this country's problems. Their endless lies and fear-mongering over the last 8 years got us nowhere. The public knows how pathetically bankrupt of answers they truly are. They won't even give Obama a couple of years to enact what needs to be done before they try to destroy him and pray for his failure. When the roles were reversed eight years ago they claimed anyone not fully supporting "w" was unpatriotic and un-American. How pathetically hypocritical is that in light of their actions since January?

Their leaders are blow-hard drug-addict talk show clowns and they demagogue the issues adinfinitum. They practice hate-speech toward their opponents and distort the issues then stand back and claim their violent incitement (by calling doctors "baby killers") of the easily manipulated low-intelligence-violent-NRA-faction-white-supremacist mentality in our society had nothing to do with the murder of said doctor. It's one thing for an individual to be against something that they think is wrong or sinful. If you are against it, don't do it; that's what I do. But it's another to force your religious views on others that disagree with you and then contribute to the climate of violence that leads to their killing.

When is someone in the Republican party going to stand up to these insane religious extremists in their party who feel it is their duty to kill anyone that doesn't agree with them in the name of God? That sounds like the Taliban or Al Qeada. I am disgusted by continuously hearing Christians say they are glad a doctor was killed for doing his job or that homosexuals and illegal immigrants deserve to die. That is sick. You can't force others to follow your religion through the law. Try reading the U.S. Constitution. It is none of my business what a citizen does with their body or what they and their doctor decide is best for the health and life of their patients. When doctors are intimidated, threatened and killed for practicing legally under the law and it is condoned by the police and politicians then anarchy rules. That is not liberty. That is religious tyranny, a Theocracy, or as our founders feared, the End of the American Constitutional Republic. Keep our civil Constitution and government separate from religious megalomaniacs and institutions that desire to destroy our freedoms by forcing religious uniformity through a Fundamentalist Theocracy.

Specter a liberal? Ha!

2009-04-28T16:23:00.003-05:00

All one has to do to see how far the Republican party has moved to the extreme-right over the last 30 years is to read some recent citizen opinions from our local paper. These so-called typical conservatives are about as extreme right-wing as one could be on the political spectrum but relative to today's deminished and intellectually bankrupt Republican Party, they are in the mainstream. No one could imagine 30 years ago that a real conservative like Arlen Specter would become a Democrat because he wasn't far right enough for the party's mainstream voter but that is where the Republican Party finds its self today. They are just a minor regional Southern Party that stands for the most extreme right-wing positions that the rest of America can not embrace. They are comprised primarily of narrow-minded fundamentalist evangelical gay haters, abortion clinic bombers/doctor killers and NRA extremists who 30 years ago would be listed as anti-government, paramilitary (Timothy McVeigh type) militia nut cases. They say they are against government intervention in the personal lives of its citizens yet when in power they seek to impose their personal religion and morals on Terri Shiavo-like families all across America. They don't understand the distinction between having personal religious beliefs and forcing their own morality onto others through the law. Don't they understand that they need to stay out of other peoples personal lives? It's none of their business what medical decisions a woman or family and their doctor make. They think they are morally superior to all others and insist on impeaching a president for a private affair yet ignore leaders who lie routinely about starting wars, torture, spying on Americans, violation of the Constitution and bankrupting the Country needlessly while giving endless billions to bankers and more tax breaks to make the rich richer. That tells you a lot about their moral and ethical values. The reason their numbers are dwendling is because they find new reasons to exclude people from their party daily rather than reasons to embrace and encompass more diversity and difference of opinions. That type of attitude does not bode well for growing a party. It is a recipe for a dying and corrupt organization. It appears their prognosis for the future is very negative because they are too arrogant to acknowledge any faults. Maybe they should go back and reread the views and opinions of our Country's forefathers. Todays Republicans are so far off what Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson believed this country stood for they would accuse our Country's founders of being socialist radicalss. When your party politcal leaders are shallow and intellectual light-weights such as "w", Rove, Cheney, Palin and blow-hard talk show hosts like Rush, Hannity, O'Reilly, etc. what do you expect the followers to consist of? Take a look at who makes up the neo-conservative Republican Party locally by reading their letters to the editor and you have your answer. That's how uneducated Southern states like Kentucky end up with pathetic leaders like Mitch McConnell and Jim Bunning. The Democrat Party is the moderate party in America today. They represent all America, not just a southern region of bitter whites clinging to their guns and outmoded views of prejudiced fundamentalist religion. It's obvious the right-wing bitter clingers in Pennsylvania didn't weild the kind of influence and votes they thought they did or else they would still have a Republican Senator named Specter. I think many stubborn like minded Southern bitter-clingers have the same lesson to learn in the coming years. They are just too arrogant to admit they don't represent the typical moderate cross-section of America that rejected the pathetic Bush/Cheney politcies and voted for Obama. They will learn though because the voting process is teaching them a hard lesson. The question is, "will they listen?" They will have to "CHANGE" or die. It's as simple as that. And to top it all off, Al Franken will have the last laugh when Sen. Coleman concedes to him later on the Minnesota election results. Poetic justice don't ya think? Republicans keep reeping what they sow. Biblical analogies always seem to fit perfectly when dealing with Republicans now don't they? What's a bitter right-winger to do these days? Ask Karl Rove or Rush. They always have the answer. They believe the answer is to purge the Republican Party of all moderates and leave only the most radical right-winger kool-aide drinkers. Yeah, that's the answer. Keep getting smaller in number, more idealistically pure and politically irrelavent. Yeah, keep following that road down to oblivion. That will solve all their problems. Ha! Give them enough rope and they'll hang themselves every time. I love it! This couldn't happen to a better group of political clowns.

Shame on

2009-04-23T11:00:00.002-05:00

The shame Bush and Cheney brought to America in their inhuman embrace of torture is disgusting. I don’t expect right-wingers to show any morality or ethical judgment on topics like this. They have lied and repeat today the lies they started in the bush years. How many times have I heard Rush, Cheney and the rest of the right-wing Fox low-brows minimize the effect of torture techniques and claim that water boarding is not torture? “w” even pointed his finger, looked straight in the camera and lied by saying, “I did not torture those trrrrrists” and “America does not torture” as well as the countless other lies he repeated time and time again while in office. The memos just released to the public prove that “w” Cheney and their legal yes men violated the sixth amendment to the Constitution, treaties, military codes of conduct and the Geneva Convention. America has regarded torture as unconstitutional and illegal since 1789. That is an irrefutable fact and up until Bush that was one thing that set America apart from other nations.

These bush sycophants always claim that terrorists don’t deserve anything other than torture and that it is the only way to get good information from them. That again is fallacious and is the only excuse they can give for their crimes. Yes, they are crimes and those politicians, lawyers and judges in the bush administration that gave the orders and created the justifications for it are no better than the common criminals we see in County jail today. Actually, the experts in intelligence and getting information from prisoners know that torture is the least helpful way to obtain accurate and verifiable intelligence. Many of these professionals know that torture does not work but it makes people like Cheney and other hypocrite macho frauds feel like it does. It’s the same kind of mentality that stresses brute violence over wisdom and honor. You see it every day in inter-city gangs, NRA guns fanatics and paramilitary (Timothy McVeigh- like) violent anti-government groups.

One terrorist prisoner who was interrogated by professional CIA experts gave all the information he had but Cheney, Rumsfeld and the like wanted him water boarded 83 times and tortured anyway. He gave up much more information but it was all false. You see torture does not yield good intelligence. The tortured will say anything just to stop the torture. It is not effective and doesn’t provide accurate information. That is why experts refuse to endorse torture. What you see on TV’s 24 show is just fiction.

I for one would be happy to water board anyone that thinks it is not torture. Come on Rush, Hannity, Cheney. You clowns were never in the military and don’t know the first thing about these issues. Let me teach you something. I have witnessed one who claimed that he could take 15 seconds of water boarding and he didn’t last 5 seconds. He was one of those blowhards that said anyone could take it for 15 seconds but he doesn’t think so anymore. The military knows the truth and that is why they refused to do it. Bush had his legal yes men twist and distort the law into lies in order to force the CIA to do it. They should be tried for these crimes the same as Nazi war criminals were tried for much less torture crimes. What I have described here is called “Treason.”

The final reason for America not to torture is because when we torture prisoners it gives our enemies the justification to torture American captives. When you stoop to the level of the uncivilized you are subject to the same actions directed back at you. America stood on the moral high ground for over 213 years until Bush and Cheney came to DC. Shame on them and shame on America for ignoring their crimes. You can’t sweep these crimes under the rug.

These guys need to be prosecuted to show America does not endorse these criminal actions.
Now I know Obama will not take any serious action against Bush/Cheney right now because he doesn’t want to deal with all the sensation it would cause within republican circles and across America but some fair and balanced independent objective prosecutor (like Ken Starr maybe) should start actions against these treasonous criminals that just happen to be x-politicians. I know treason is not a big deal to Fox right-wingers the way a sexual affair was but something must be done in order to honor the rule of law once again in this country. If not, then let all the petty criminals out of jail today.

For anyone of my right-wing friends who still doesn’t believe water boarding is torture I will be more than happy to demonstrate on you.

Treason!

2009-03-03T19:02:00.001-06:00

I know it’s not politically correct at this critical time in our country’s economic crisis to look back at the last eight dark years of Constitutional crimes but Treason cannot be ignored. With the release of the secret Bush Administration Justice Department legal decrees it should be apparent to even right-wing sycophants that “w” violated the very Constitution he swore to uphold. He knowingly chose to circumvent the basic tenants of the U.S. Constitution by committing crimes of violating the 1st, 4th and 5th amendments. He put in place the authority of the military to imprison U.S. citizens for years without any charges or evidence being brought against them and habeas corpus was viewed as a trivial inconvenience. Now we know why even the very conservative John Ashcroft threatened to resign and expose the extreme Constitutional violations that were taking place under the “w” administration.

In essence “w” and Dick Cheney secretly put in place a dictatorship that was not accountable to any other branch of the government or law. Knowing that the next administration would stop the illegal activities when they were exposed, in October of 2008 the presidents’ legal counsel (Chief Stephen Bradbury) abruptly issued a memo withdrawing the legal opinions. They had put in place unlimited presidential power and the Bill of Rights was suspended even on American soil. If you don’t believe me just read it yourself. It is out for public viewing thanks to our present Justice Department public servants. These actions are known as TREASON.

The media was and still is complicit in covering up these crimes but thanks to the ACLU the requests for the documents were shown the light of day. Obama does not want to pursue justice for these crimes because his plate is full trying to undue all the endless messes the last administration left for him but hopefully an independent counsel will be allowed to pursue charges against these criminals.

I remember when 911 happened and all the right-wing politicians and evangelists were claiming it was a result of our country’s sinfulness. Well maybe they should make the same claim today by saying our present dilemma and problems are a result of the past administration’s sins and crimes against the Constitution and American citizens. Endless lies and denials, needless wars, turning surpluses into huge deficits, hundreds of thousands of dead civilians, no oversight or regulation of Wall St, Enron and the Bernie Maddoffs of America; I guess Rev Wright was right on target when he said, “the chickens have come home to roost.” It’s a good thing we didn’t privatize Social Security eh? To top it all off Rush (the head of the Republican Party) and his ditto-heads think the public should ignore these facts and blame it all on President Obama after one month in office.

These same Rush followers practice revisionist history and ignore historical facts by claiming FDR caused the great depression to continue with his actions. To just scream “Socialism” and wish for Obama’s failure then whine about using the same old ineffective trickle-down tax cut voodoo for the wealthiest and false capitalism infallibility claims that got us into this situation, will not solve anything. You know Obama is now our “War-time President.” Can you imagine a large public figure wishing for “w’s” failure after one month in office? You couldn’t even question the last administration’s actions without being called unpatriotic.

Surely American’s have wised up to the lies, theatrics and tactics of right-wingers during the last eight years of incompetence. The drug-addicted, blow-hard Rush is an infection the Republicans must deal with before his vial disease of endless one-sided propagandizing spreads and they lose all credibility with regular working people. He is a multi-millionaire accountable to no one. He lies from one day to the next on his show and gets away with it because he controls the message and the microphone three hours a day. Countless politicians he has supported over the years have failed for numerous reasons. What does he do? He just turns on them (w) and claims they weren’t real Conservatives anyway then goes on to the next ambitious republican sucker he can manipulate and cower into submission and public apology like the head of the RNC (Michael Steele). You can never please a know-it-all opportunist like that. He has no real friends because he will sacrifice anyone to make himself appear correct and a winner. It’s all about him and his ego and there is no room for anyone else or opinion in his world.

Rush calls people who have lost their jobs or homes “losers” that need to be weeded out by those who have money because they are weak. It is the natural order of life to the wealthy. He and his ilk believe in social Darwinism and have no concern for the least of these in our society that are suffering under our present conditions. That is the kind of cowardly con-artist that is running the Republican Party. What a joke he is and they are for humoring him.

I too am suffering with a crippled 401K but I just don’t have any sympathy for all the corrupt CEO’s and bankers that have given Capitalism a bad name. They deserve what is happening to them but average honest working Americans don’t. Wall Street needs a good enema! Then hopefully they will put honorable people in place to run the institutions the way they need to be run; with responsibility, accountability to the law and integrity. It won’t happen overnight but anything worth doing right is worth taking time on. The age of overnight get rich quick scams are over. Do it right this time by the law and under the Constitution. That is what has made America great and we will be stronger for it. Give the President and our representatives your prayers and support.

Bipartisan?

2009-02-19T14:44:00.002-06:00

How does President Obama become bipartisan when the other party spits in his face? Republicans apparently don’t realize why they lost and lost big in November of last year. Their 8 years of unproductive tax cuts for the wealthy policies and free-market laissez-faire non-leadership brought our economy to the brink of destruction under the incompetent George W. Bush and the corrupt big spending Republicans. Now the Republicans think that the public will forget all about their hypocrisy towards what they say should be done to correct the massive economic mess they caused and what they actually do when they are in power. Since the election and their decisive defeat they have shown that all they can do is obstruct any attempts to put our country back on the right track. Not one Republican voted for the House stimulus bill and only three moderate Northeastern repus in the Senate version. To show you how universal the appeal of the stimulus bill is the National Chamber of Commerce and most all corporations support it.

Obama should stop wasting his time trying to compromise with today’s Republicans. They and their unquestionable drug addicted, unelected blow-hard leader, Rush, don’t want Obama to succeed in his efforts to salvage our economy because it would validate the publics’ belief that democratic policies are historically best for the country (businesses and individuals) as a whole and that Republicans only respond to corporate and wealthy supporters wishes. Just look at the stock market and employment figures over the last one hundred years if you don’t believe me. The last eight years have once again proven that the free market does not have magic answers to all economic problems and when they have no oversight they can and will steal and defraud the public blind.

First and foremost President Obama wants to put four million people back to work then generate the cash flow to stimulate our banking and investment industry. People come first and a job for every able bodied person takes priority. To listen to right-wingers on the radio and TV one would think that conservatives believe the unemployed deserve every bad thing that happens to them. They laugh at and mock the least of our citizens. It never seems to be a problem for right-wingers until they become unemployed or bankrupt themselves. Then it’s a different matter all together. It’s like global warming deniers mocking the world-wide climate truth just because it snowed in their little corner of the subdivision yet the polar ice caps keep melting. Tunnel vision is very deceiving. The problems we face are much bigger than what small-minded ditto-heads can see from their back doors. Open your mind and look at issues through others eyes and circumstances. We are our brother’s keeper and you may be one in need next month. Republicans are much better at criticizing and obstructing than they are at actually governing. They need to realize that most people have pretty good memories and they won’t forget who caused this mess and who is actually trying to fix it in a constructive way.

I hope Obama realizes he can’t be bipartisan when the other side is only going to obstruct his efforts to succeed. He needs to do what he is doing unapologetically and tell the repus to “Bring it on!” They have no answers, only whining.

No mention of largest tax cut in history

2009-02-19T14:44:00.001-06:00

I've noticed not one republican politcian, FOX media outlet or right-wing talk-show host has mentioned that Obama's stimulus/job creation bill contains the LARGEST TAX CUT IN HISTORY! Why is that? One third of the bill is all tax cuts. Obama has beaten the repugs at their own tax cut game and now they are on record voting against the LARGEST TAX CUT IN HISTORY! Wow. The repubulican strategy is to just obstruct any effort to deal with our country's problems in a constructive way. No wonder they lost in November. They have proven they have no ideas or solutions, just the same old whining incompetence from being political victims. When are they going to stop taking all their positions and ideas from that loser drug addict, Rush?

Comical

2009-02-19T14:43:00.001-06:00

It's comical to watch the very Congressional Republicans who campaigned and unanimously voted against Obama's stimulus bill now turn around and fight for the money. Even though some Republican governors who have White House ambitions say they don't want the money for their states, they know their state's legislature can overrule them and accept it anyway. How hypocritical is that? Their protests and whining was all just an act premised on Rush-think. How can they be taken seriously?

Amusement

2008-12-15T14:19:00.004-06:00

I have followed with hysterical amusement the seemingly endless fact-denying irrational reasoning of local right-wingers since the November election results came in and it confirms my understanding of them. Even though Henderson was won by Obama, local neo-cons as a group can’t acknowledge reality any better today than they did six months ago. They are so absorbed in their fantasy world of Fox and Rush lies they don’t even comprehend that their eight year neo-con wet-dream-team of “w” & Cheney has been repudiated. Their compassionate conservatism mirage has been tossed into the waste bin of failed GOP history along with Nixon’s Watergate legacy and Reagan/Bush’s Iran/Contra - balanced budget/read my lips, no new taxes mantra.
Colin Powell and other reasonable Republicans tried to warn them of their limited appeal to a moderate and more ethnically diverse population so what did the GOP do? They played to only the most radical of evangelicals and NRA conspiracy theorists. They are so tone deaf to their political plight their answer for the next election is to become even more right-wing and only focus on Southern and sparsely populated western states; this after eight years of terrorist attacks, needless war, debt tripling, and economic destruction to the extent not seen since the depression of last century. All this followed a gift given from Clinton with the largest surplus in history. The revisionist history lies have been coming non-stop from the Whitehouse and the right-wing media ever since they were whipped in November. They just keep trying to deflect blame for every Republican disaster onto that skirt-chasing hound-dog genius Bubba. Their legacy is so obscene even the shoe throwing Iraqi man was disgusted. If we could let the public pay $5 each for the right to throw our shoe at “w” or Cheney we could probably pay off the debt he created. Bin Laden laughs with impunity at “w” every time he mentions Saddam knowing that he had nothing to do with 911. Bush foolishly took the Iraq bait and America’s economy has been brought to its knees yet Osama lives on.
The old adage of, “when given lemons; make lemonade” was turned on its head and reversed. “W” made rancid garbage juice from the sweet nectar of Clinton prosperity. Bush and the Republicans are responsible for the present conditions because they presided over removing needed regulations from banking and investments and changed the personal bankruptcy laws that have created the present mortgage insolvency crisis. They have socialized Wall Street, banking and the Pharmaceutical industry then try to place the blame on others. Fox media echo chamber partisans play right along with the program of lies. No wonder this part of the country is so ill-informed politically. They only believe the revisionist history that is stuffed down their throats daily from right-wing media whores who laugh at them all the way to the bank. No liberal wants the fairness doctrine to come back and no one has mentioned it. Right-wing media actually creates more liberals and moderates than it does conservatives. Their endless lies, false logic and pathetic reasoning recruited many to the side of sanity as the last election proved. I know it did me.
The Republicans left in DC after the election have learned nothing. They are so bent on losers revenge and cheap Chinese Wal-Mart products they insist on destroying American auto unions and a quarter of our manufacturing base while assisting foreign auto industries and oil companies in taking over and sending more American dollars back to Japan, Germany, Korea, China and the mid-east. The stock market is just a reflection of this administration’s failures. Good thing we didn’t privatize social security, eh? The next few years are going to be ugly. Good luck Barack. With the GOP obstructing all your efforts you’ll need some prayer. Of course without Bush in office the GOP will certainly not provide the cooperation and respect to the president that they demanded while “w” was there. Just remember on January 20, 2009 Obama will be our new “war-time President.” Do you think they will reciprocate in kind? Barack won’t claim to be God’s chosen one the way “w” and his followers did and he also won’t blame his failures on being God’s will the way “w” has. Our government is a secular civil institution and real leaders will take responsibility for their decisions whether it be good or bad. After the last eight years all I can say is, “God help us.”

Positive

2008-11-19T11:06:00.001-06:00

In the past I have been criticized for not being very positive in my observations relative to our outgoing president "w" and his side-kick "Big Time" Cheney. I must say that my actions never came close to the vitriol and vituperative hate expressed by right-wingers toward probably the best president we had over the last sixty years; Bill Clinton. There are very few reasonable people who wouldn't jump at the chance to have Clinton back in office or trade places with our country's economic circumstances in the 90's with those of today.

My what a difference eight years makes. I can think of very few things I agreed with that "w" did during his time in office but since the most recent election I can honestly say thanks. Without his efforts the results of this election would never have happened. He was the best player on our team. He proved beyond any doubt that the republican party was completely inept at governing and that their ideas are pathetically impotent. With a base of rabid right-wing fundamentalist evangelicals like James Dobson, and others ready to impose their vindictive religion on all Americans what did you expect from a country founded on the personal freedoms of a secular Constitution? Their party is in shambles and they have no respected leaders ready to pick up the pieces. Try starting over with a new party based on the principals of the U.S. Constitution.

Without a nemesis to attack or impeach, as they had in the 90's, they seem to be lost in the wilderness of one-sided FOX news and right-wing talk-show ineptitude. Liberals had so many legitimate reasons to impeach w & cheney but chose not to waste the country's time the way the repus did in 99. This election impeached just about all deserving republicans anyway; without a doubt. The country has spoken. I just wonder if republicans are listening? With "w's" approval ratings the lowest in history I look forward to hearing from bush after he goes back to Crawfish, Texas and tells his one-sided story with Hannity or Rush. "W" was asked to write an autobiography but has declined. He said he didn't know that much about cars. That just about sums it up doesn't it?

So long and thanks again for bringing intelligence and competence back to D.C. It seems appropriate that the racist G.O.P. would be responsible for having a black president have to come in and pick up their trash and clean up all the messes they made. The only good side for Obama is that the only way he has to go is up. Minorities have had to live with arrogant, self-entitled, and elitist conservatives for over 200 years. It's about time things change. And once again, thanks "w;" Mission accomplished!

Content of Character

2008-11-14T14:40:00.003-06:00

I am proud to say that it was a privilege to have been able to vote for Barack Obama in this historic election of 2008. I am one of the 33% of whites in the South that have that distinction. Outside the south whites voted for Obama at around 43%. White people did not elect Obama. People of color elected Obama. Our demographics have changed in this country and it will never again be like it was before. Whites can not dictate who is elected soley based on color. He wasn't elected because he was half-white and half-black. It was because he was the most capable and intelligent candidate with the best ideas and policies.

The fact that he was even able to be in a position to become president as the candidate of the Democratic Party in this country is in itself historic. Growing up in Henderson in the fifties and sixties I would have never thought this day would come in my lifetime but it did and it shows that our country has truly matured and we are the nation that our Constitutional founders envisioned. Kentucky has always been about thirty years behind the times culturally and politically but I have hope that our newer generation will not cling to the old racial stereotypes and prejudices of the past.

Race was primary to most people I spoke to in this area about the presidential election even though economics, war and bush incompetence were the primary issues the rest of the country focused on. It's interesting that this is the first time whites and all peoples of color have had the option to vote for someone other than two white men and with one exception, elect someone other than a white, Protestant man.

Can white people (WASP's) put themselves in the position of people of color, women or a minority religion and try to understand the feelings minorities have every four years when there is a presidential election? What if whites could only choose between two black female Jewish candidates every election in their life? How would that make you feel? Which one of these candidates is going to respect who I am and not resent me for my color, sex or religion? Think about what that means to the mindset of the electorate.

Yes, America has changed and for the good. Hopefully we can continue to judge people as Martin Luther King said, "not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Our ugly racial, sexist and religious history is still not totally healed but it has come a long way from the days of old. I am proud to be a part of that change. Our Constitution provides the basis for change and liberty for all through the process of voting. Never take it for granted. That is what makes America the greatest nation on earth.

Now What?

2008-11-07T16:11:00.000-06:00

Well the election is finally over and I for one am glad. The G.O.P. is at a crossroads. They were on top of the world eight years ago, controlling every part of our national government. Now they have nothing. After 911 America was willing to do most anything “w” asked. What happened? They divided us rather than inspiring us the way Obama has. The G.O.P. can either repudiate the old divisive Bush tactics used to split America into the un-Americans and the real-Americans or they can change by accepting reality.
Kentucky, as usual, is behind the times along with the rest of the South in their misunderstanding and prejudice relative to what has transpired over the last 40 years since Nixon’s Southern strategy was initiated. Our backwards-thinking electorate is still vulnerable to the reactionary non-issues that have dictated how we have voted for poor candidates. All a candidate has to do is campaign on guns, God, gays and race then they will be elected.
Your guns are not going to be taken away so just let that fear go. It’s not going to happen. God was in business a long time before our politicians started taking credit for defending her. These same politicians keep trying to make more laws because God wasn’t very effective at eliminating the particular sins they weren’t real fond of. Can’t we all just agree that we and the government have no right to impose our personal religious views and morality on others? It’s none of your business. Those issues are better off left between you and God, not the government. The issue of racism is the elephant in the room that Southern conservatives still won’t let go. Grow up!
Why not let the divisive failed Republican Party die a quiet death and start a new party? I’m an independent liberal and I’d be willing to help. Open your mind. How about a party that is fiscally conservative (not like the present Bush administration, more like Clinton’s) and is socially moderate (one that accepts immigrants and individual religious freedom from government intrusion into private moral, weapons and medical matters)? How does that sound bitter-clingers? Why can’t we all get along? To get out of the hole “w” has dug us we will have to. Like President Obama says, “There is no red America or blue America, We are all Americans.” Try acting like it.

Aborted

2008-09-23T18:27:00.002-05:00

To say that Sarah Palin and so many other fundamentalist evangelical right-wingers are against abortion is the biggest lie I've heard lately. They are totally for aborting their childrens minds by insisting they not believe in science, logic or global warming. They abort the brains of their children every day they instill ignorance and denial of reality in their kids. When they claim that God makes them speak in tongues, tells them how to vote or that the earth is only 6,000 years old they are commiting infanticide of the mind. An aborted mind is a terrible thing to waste.

It's seems very odd to me that Palin cares more about rapist rights more than she does about the girl that is raped. She charges the woman that is raped a couple thousand dollars for the medical and DNA exam in the emergency room then insists that if she is pregnant with the rapists child that she has to carry the fetus to birth. She wants to deny and criminalize the right of a raped women to terminate the pregnancy from the result of a rape. That's just the kind of logic and religious ignorance we need in the White House. Making raped women pay for their rape kit and put them in prison when they choose to terminate their pregnancy by a violent rapist. I wonder if she would still support that if one of her daughters were raped?

Abort the mind but save the rapists' fetus. Sounds like a winning bumper sticker campaign strategy to me. What will the right-wingers come up with next?

Enough!

2008-09-22T07:25:00.000-05:00

How many times have you heard right-wing Bush apologists and ditto-heads claim that the Republican Party is the only party of real American values? Now that “w” has cemented his legacy as the most incompetent and corrupt administration in U.S. history he now steals the 08 campaign limelight from McSame and the “earmark queen” Sarah Palin by destroying capitalism and replacing it with the “Corporate Welfare State.”

Never again will you have to listen to right-winger co-workers rail about welfare mothers and irresponsible wasteful spending liberals after the last eight years. Their conservative ideology has been completely repudiated and they have absolutely no credibility left. Katrina and Iraq were just a warm up pitch for this economic failure. These right-wing conservatives have socialized every facet of our country. America should now be called “United People’s Yellow Republic of RWall Street” (UPYRRS). How quickly blind FOX/ditto-head partisans forget the savings and loan failures and deficits of the Reagan/Bush years. McCain and Bush’s little brother were right in the middle of it so of course Daddy Bush had to do what he always does for his boys. Cover up their screw ups. Even then the taxpayers had to bail out corrupt bankers who got in over their heads then Clinton paid off the Reagan/Bush massive debt and passed a huge surplus on to w. Now we have a repeat but on a much larger scale.

Conservatives always say that the little people need to show more personal responsibility for their mistakes but when Wall Street gets into trouble they immediately run to the Federal government to pay for their corporate golden parachutes and mahogany lined 401K’s. How about the government bailing you out of your mortgage debt or credit card bills? Dream on suckers. As if a three trillion dollar needless war wasn’t enough debt for the Chinese to finance us with we now have more trillions piled on the backs of our children’s future to pay for today’s hypocrite Republican sins.

Never again should America show them any confidence or support their pathetically scandalous Party. They have betrayed the public trust and should have to pay the highest price: banishment from the political landscape. They need to dissolve their party and let honest intellectual people with integrity start a new one. Today’s Republican Party is just a composite of brain dead, single issue extremist robots with tunnel vision that range from NRA goons to evangelical haters that blaspheme the name of the Lord by using Jesus Christ as a political pawn in their power hungry Pharisee games. Their actions are unforgivable and they should pay dearly. Rove thinks he has trumped the feminists by putting a pretty face on their same tired old Republican lies with Sarah Palin in tow. It makes the slimy lies go down easier when you have a hot chick swinging on that brass GOP hypocrite pole at the Republican convention’s gentleman’s club. But the fact remains.

Republicans have squandered America’s good will, treasure, the blood of honorable soldiers and gullible patriots over the last eight years. They don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt for one more day. Don’t forget how they have mocked working people over the years and stolen the pensions and healthcare from honest humble hardworking families all while they rape the coffers of corporations and our government treasury. They will continue to do this as long as the citizens allow it. Surely America will finally face up to the corruption that is the Republican Party of today.

We need to apply real checks & balances that are integral to the U.S. Constitution to assure that the abuses of the last eight years will never again happen. George “w” Bush and his neo-con-men have hijacked the soul of what makes America the envy of the world. They have stolen our goodness, honesty, integrity and the very heart of our Constitution in which we were founded. Impeachment is too good for them. Bush and Cheney should be in prison. Just look at where we were in the 90’s and compare it with where we are today. I don’t want any more GOP commercials with promises, plans, attacks and excuses from Republicans. All I want is an apology for what they have done to this country then they need to get out of the way. Let the adults take over. Enough is enough.

Interesting

2008-09-12T16:49:00.001-05:00

I find it interesting that all the right-wing evangelicals at the Republican Baptist Convention overwhelmingly want Sarah Palin to be the next most powerful person in the world yet these same people wouldn’t consider a woman as a Deacon in their Church because having a woman in a position of authority over a man is not Biblical in their narrow view. How do they ignore all the obvious contradictions between their religious beliefs and political beliefs? They would probably call the one they claim to worship the biggest terrorist loving liberal socialist on earth if he returned today. These are the same religious extremists that say a woman should be quiet and do as they are told and that their place is in the home caring for their children, especially sick children, under the authority of their husband. The true test of Fox Republican NRA right-wing political and religious believers would be how they would respond if a Democrat woman such as Mrs. Palin and her family were to seek the same office. I think we already know the answer to that one now don’t we? What hypocrites they are when it comes to the plank in their own eye.

Seriously?

2008-09-03T12:09:00.001-05:00

What was McCain thinking by nominating Sarah Palin for Vice President? I am more qualified to be a heart beat away from the Presidency than she is and that's not saying much. McSame's senile brain and judgment is so clouded that he can't discern the difference between a hot Alaska Momma and hot Salami sandwich. The true test on issues like this is to just imagine if the Dems had done something similar and what the Repu Party, Fox News and all the ditto-heads would say. Can you imagine?
Republicans should never again claim they are against affirmative action after choosing yet another token minority similar to Harriet Miers and Clarence Thomas. How stupid does he think women are? Does he really believe Hillary supporters will vote for any woman even though that woman is the exact opposite of Hillary on the issues? That's an insult to all women. Couldn't he find a qualified woman in the Republican party? If his judgment is so pathetic that he had three months to come up with someone and settled for Palin then God help us if he becomes President. Just imagine what he would do in a real crisis under real pressure. His staff has said he insisted on wanting to nominate Joe Lieberman for VP but Rove and others in the party rebelled so for spite and with his hot temper he decided at the last minute to choose Palin, sight unseen. Wow! How comfortable do you feel with that kind of logic and temperament in the White House? After the last eight incompetent and tragic years of death, debt and lies we don't need another term of hot headed ignorance and anger dragging us down any further in the viper pit of Iraq War insanity? We can do better than this. The Republicans have been spinning this joke nomination so hard since last Friday they caused another hurricane to develop in the Gulf. Get ready for another "culture wars convention" this week just like they had in 92 with Pat Buchanan leading the way. Republicans always claim they are morally superior to others and this year is no exception. They embrace the mantle of the self-righteous party of God by touting laws that prove their Godly values but what will the log-cabin Republicans say if they attempt that ploy again? From what I've seen of McCain and Palin's families I think they will be on the Jerry Springer show real soon dukin it out with their relatives. I thought Bush/Cheney were the most undignified group of low-lifes I'd ever seen in the White House but compared to this pair Bill Clinton looks like Abraham Lincoln. Please help us Obama!

And the Trailor Park Trash Vote Goes To ---- Palin/McSame!

2008-09-01T12:14:00.003-05:00

It looks like Palin's daughter will be on Jerry Springer pretty soon. In order to refute the report that Palin's four month old down-syndrone baby is her daughter's and not hers the Palin/McCain people have said that Palin's 17 year old unmarried daughter is five months pregnant. Wow, I guess there isn't much to do in Alaska on those long cold nights but bump ugly's with a hot eskimo dude. Did the McSame people even think to vet this white trash family? She needs to be on the front pages of the National Enquirer with Britany Spears sister. What next, Palin has bigfoot in her garage freezer? This is too funny. Can you say "self destruct"?

Creationism of a Hurricane by Palin Spinning

2008-09-01T10:40:00.003-05:00

The creation of mighty hurricanes in the Gulf this month has been caused by all the right-wing spinning of Gov Palin's qualifications and experience in my opinion. Talk about hot air and global warming cause and effect. Ha! Al Gore is having the last laugh. After all the republican demogagory over the years against quotas and affirmative action now they have been born again as liberal fema-nazis by nominating a totally unqualified woman for VP. Isn't that the definition of a token? Talk about irresponsible. If Hillary had a four month old down sydrone baby and chose to ignore its needs and instead run off for a political campaign 18 hours a day what do you think all the self-righteous ditto-heads would have to say? The hypocrisy of this campaign is beyond discription. They think women are so ignorant that they will ignore the fact that Palin is the total opposite of Hillary on the issues. They think that women will vote for a woman based soley on the fact that she has breasts. It's the same kind of insult to blacks that republicans showed when they said Clarence Thomas was the most qualified person for the Supreme Court. Ignore the fact that he was against everything that 99% of blacks are for. They just nominated a token black and thought the black population would swallow it hook, line and sinker. How stupid do they think the American people are?

After all the Republican Party of today is the Biblical pharasee party of Jesus' time. Politics to them is all about personalities and self-righteous piety. They always claim their candidates are morally superior and that they are the party of God. They will stand on the street corner of FOX TV and pray the loudest and preach the longest that they represent God's will and that everyone else is hell-bound. While campaigning earlier this year Giuliani couldn't say a sentence without envoking 911. Biden jokingly said that Rudy always used a noun, a verb and 911 when answering any question. That's how little they regard the intellect of the American citizen. Not to be outdone when asked any difficult question like, "how many mansions and million dollar parking lots do you own" McCain's response is always a noun, a verb and I was a POW. That's his get out of jail free card. When he doesn't want to answer he just changes the subject to being a POW forty years ago. This from the same repu Party that mocked John Kerry's heroism and injuries by wearing purple band-aids on their fingers at their last Swift-Boat repu convention. Now that Palin is on board with McSame she is using the same tactic. When asked any legitimate question about her understanding of foreign affairs or the Iraq War all she has to do is bring up the fact that she is morally superior because she has a down-syndrone four month old baby. If being president was soley based on whether you had been a POW or mother of a sick child then there would still be many more qualified persons to choose from than McSame/Palin but for Pharisees all that matters is that they are supposedly morally superior and ignore the issues and consequences of choosing another four years of incompetent leadership. This country can't take another four years of what we've had during the last eight.

It seems like poetic justice that on the anniversary of Katrina, Gulf hurricanes cause the Republican National Convention to be curtailed. Using the logic of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell it appears that God is punishing Republicans for their sins. Remember back during the 2004 pre-election period when hurricanes threatened Florida? Bush had so many crates and truckloads of supplies at the ready for brother Jebs state of Florida because he was relying on those very important votes a month later but one year after his relection during hurricane Katrina w was celebrating McSame's birthday in Arizona by partying and joking about being on vacation while ignoring New Orleans' historic disaster just like he did during the month before 911. His incompetent actions in the aftermath of Katrina are the perfect representation of the failure of this administration in virtually every area. It is earily similar to his pathetic management of the war in Iraq and how the simplist detail like providing adequate armour and bullet proof vests for our troops and their mobile equipment was botched. "w" and
Cheney have caused the death and maiming of countless numbers of people in a needless war that he lied his way into and still hasn't done anything about Bin Laden and McSame has voted with him 95% of the time. Doesn't that give you a confident feeling?

If you think Palin is the most qualified person to be President of the United States in the event that McSame dies then you need to vote for them. Has America learned anything from the last eight years? This election will give us that answer. God help us.

for Rush and his ditto-heads

2008-08-19T18:06:00.001-05:00

Whoso mocketh the poor reproacheth his Maker: and he that is glad at calamities shall not be unpunished.”
-Proverbs 17:5

from Jack Cafferty

2008-08-19T17:35:00.001-05:00

Russia invades Georgia and President Bush goes on vacation. Our president has spent one-third of his entire two terms in office either at Camp David, Maryland, or at Crawford, Texas, on vacation.

His time away from the Oval Office included the month leading up to 9/11, when there were signs Osama bin Laden was planning to attack America, and the time Hurricane Katrina destroyed the city of New Orleans.

Sen. John McCain takes weekends off and limits his campaign events to one a day. He made an exception for the religious forum on Saturday at Saddleback Church in Southern California.

I think he made a big mistake. When he was invited last spring to attend a discussion of the role of faith in his life with Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, McCain didn't bother to show up. Now I know why.

It occurs to me that John McCain is as intellectually shallow as our current president. When asked what his Christian faith means to him, his answer was a one-liner. "It means I'm saved and forgiven." Great scholars have wrestled with the meaning of faith for centuries. McCain then retold a story we've all heard a hundred times about a guard in Vietnam drawing a cross in the sand.

Asked about his greatest moral failure, he cited his first marriage, which ended in divorce. While saying it was his greatest moral failing, he offered nothing in the way of explanation. Why not?

Don't Miss
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Jack's book: "It's Getting Ugly Out There"
Analysis: Is McCain finding his way on faith?
Throughout the evening, McCain chose to recite portions of his stump speech as answers to the questions he was being asked. Why? He has lived 71 years. Surely he has some thoughts on what it all means that go beyond canned answers culled from the same speech he delivers every day.

He was asked "if evil exists." His response was to repeat for the umpteenth time that Osama bin Laden is a bad man and he will pursue him to "the gates of hell." That was it.

He was asked to define rich. After trying to dodge the question -- his wife is worth a reported $100 million -- he finally said he thought an income of $5 million was rich.

One after another, McCain's answers were shallow, simplistic, and trite. He showed the same intellectual curiosity that George Bush has -- virtually none.

Where are John McCain's writings exploring the vexing moral issues of our time? Where are his position papers setting forth his careful consideration of foreign policy, the welfare state, education, America's moral responsibility in the world, etc., etc., etc.?

John McCain graduated 894th in a class of 899 at the Naval Academy at Annapolis. His father and grandfather were four star admirals in the Navy. Some have suggested that might have played a role in McCain being admitted. His academic record was awful. And it shows over and over again whenever McCain is called upon to think on his feet.

He no longer allows reporters unfettered access to him aboard the "Straight Talk Express" for a reason. He simply makes too many mistakes. Unless he's reciting talking points or reading from notes or a TelePrompTer, John McCain is lost. He can drop bon mots at a bowling alley or diner -- short glib responses that get a chuckle, but beyond that McCain gets in over his head very quickly.

I am sick and tired of the president of the United States embarrassing me. The world we live in is too complex to entrust it to someone else whose idea of intellectual curiosity and grasp of foreign policy issues is to tell us he can look into Vladimir Putin's eyes and see into his soul.

George Bush's record as a student, military man, businessman and leader of the free world is one of constant failure. And the part that troubles me most is he seems content with himself.

He will leave office with the country $10 trillion in debt, fighting two wars, our international reputation in shambles, our government cloaked in secrecy and suspicion that his entire presidency has been a litany of broken laws and promises, our citizens' faith in our own country ripped to shreds. Yet Bush goes bumbling along, grinning and spewing moronic one-liners, as though nobody understands what a colossal failure he has been.

I fear to the depth of my being that John McCain is just like him.

"The Greatest"

2008-08-16T14:57:00.000-05:00

You know, its interesting the kind of reasoning and logic some people employ in their racist observations concerning this election. I had a Fox right-winger tell me that all blacks will vote for Obama just because he’s black; not because he is qualified. I said, “That’s not true at all.” In just about every presidential election I can remember around 90% of African-Americans vote for the Democrat because it is in their interest to vote for the party and candidate that supports their interest. It’s like saying people who work for Military Defense Contractors always vote for the white guy just because he’s white. No, it’s because it is in their interest to vote for the Republican candidate and his party which always supports war and the endless spending on the international killing machine we call the corporate military industrial complex.
There are many blacks who will vote for the white Republican candidate because it is in their interest to do that. They may be black oil executives, black Enron type CEO’s, black conservative Supreme Court Justices, black Fox news anchormen or black millionaire sports figures. But for around 90% of most hard working African Americans and regular white, tan, yellow, red and brown people that work for a living it is in their best interest to vote for a candidate that will represent them and their interests and that will be a Democrat. Don’t try to make African-Americans out to be racists in reverse. They are no different than white people. They usually vote their personal interest.
The fact that Obama was tops in his class at Harvard and McCain was 4th from the bottom in his class at the Naval Academy should have much more to do with how people view them than their skin color. McCain and Mitch McConnell represent all the corruption, mistakes and endless spending of the past Republican Congress. They voted with “w” over 95% of the time. Enough said. After the ignorance of leadership over the last eight years we need someone who has the intelligence to lead in a positive and enlightened way. This country can’t endure another four years of war, debt and misery. We need a leader to change our direction and one we can believe in. Obama is the man who will be to American politics what Cacius Clay / Ali was to boxing forty years ago. There will be no stopping “the Greatest leader” of this century! Bring him on!

In response to swilson and many other NRA nuts

2008-08-08T12:14:00.000-05:00

I would like to point out some very inaccurate statements made by Steve Wilson in his letter to
the editor last week concerning my comments on handguns. His quote from the National Safety Council was actually propaganda from the National Rifle Association. The following is actually from the National Safety Council: “Keeping a handgun in the home for self-defense places a gun owner and his/her family in great jeopardy.” Residents of homes where a gun is present are five times more likely to experience a suicide and three times more likely to experience a homicide than residents of homes without guns. Additionally, a gun kept in the home is 43 times more likely to kill a member of the household, or friend, than an intruder and more children younger than 10 are killed by guns than by poison or electrocution.” Also Mr. Wilson’s comments concerning Washington D.C. crime rates from 1976 to 1991 don’t simply reflect a correlation based solely on the handgun ban. The major contributing factor causing the increase was drugs and unemployment. You notice that the rate went down when Clinton came into office and back up when “w” took over. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
Mr. Wilson goes on to state that America is the 24th most violent country in the world but based on all factors such as Wars, violent crimes, violent media/TV/Movies/Video games, sports, the NRA and military weapons of mass destruction say otherwise. America’s huge military industrial complex builds and sells millions of tons of weapons to other countries around the world. We are far and away the most violent and violence supporting country in the world, hands down.
Typical of most right-wing NRA hand-gun addicts, they continuously distort the facts and misrepresent the truth. Mr. Wilson ended his tirade by supposedly quoting Thomas Jefferson. I’m sorry but Thomas Jefferson never wrote that. Cesare Beccaria wrote the quote from his Essay on Crime and Punishment. One must be very discerning and skeptical when reading comments from NRA advocates as recent letters demonstrate. My letter to the editor two weeks ago never said I was against the possession of shotguns, rifles or handguns. My issue was concerning the danger of handguns and community handgun bans. The U.S. Constitution does not guarantee the “right” to own any type of weapon to all citizens. It states the “militia’s” right to bear arms and the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently agreed with that view until the present Bush Court ignored precedent and erred.
Finally, the gun lust that many bitter NRA handgun extremists possess is very disturbing to me. It’s as though their paranoia has overtaken their logic and common sense. They accuse anyone that doesn’t acquiesce to their views to be un-American and unpatriotic. I find that very queer. My security is in Lord. Not a weapon. Until our country faces the root causes of crime we will continue to succumb to the mentality of extremists and those politicians who cling to violence and war as the answer to all our problems. God help us!

Mid-evil

2008-08-08T12:13:00.000-05:00

Well another one of my observations triggered Pavlov’s ( and Charleston Heston’s) dog again. All I have to do is state a simple common sense and reasonable idea and right-wingers go into Grand mal seizures with all their infantile NRA propaganda dogma. What else do you expect from the likes of rural Henderson’s die-hard gun-lust lovers. What is it about handguns that turn seemingly normal citizens into rabid hydrocephalic circus freaks on steroids? Is it that handguns give a sense of superiority or in some way make them more sexually virile? I always thought that chicks dug the good looking guy, the intelligent guy or the wealthy guy. That always worked for me. Ha! Well at least I didn’t have to pack a 357 in order to get my wife. I guess the NRA fellas need to compensate somehow for all their obvious inadequacies. Now excuse me. I’m late for my GQ cover photo and my broker tells me he’d like me to teach a class on macro economics and the statistical probability of handgun owners having an IRA large enough to purchase an accidental life insurance policy, suicides not covered of course but murder is triple indemnity. I don’t put my faith in a gun. The love of Jesus is all the blessed assurance I need in this world. You gun guys seriously need to lighten up and get a life. Now get on your knees and pray before I go mid-evil on you.

Handguns

2008-08-08T12:12:00.000-05:00

Isn't it ironic that more handgun deaths are attributed to owners committing suicide than from any other cause and that doesn't even include all the accidental handgun deaths? I listen to NRA handgun extremists claims of self protection from criminals and all the while they are the very ones they should be afraid of. Paranoia is a common malady of most right-wing gun nuts. They live in fear of some imaginary intruder or a black helicopter government agent coming into their home and yet the most dangerous villain they will ever meet is the guy they see in the mirror each morning. Handgun advocates insist they need concealed weapon laws to keep the wild-west under control but these lenient laws enacted in Kentucky certainly haven't prevented horrible acts of violence in our own community. Handguns are not the answer to our societies' thirst for blood and vengeance. Violence only begets more violence. I am an avid hunter and gun owner but handguns don't serve as a necessary requirement for reasonable sportsmen. A shotgun will serve to protect homeowners much better than a handgun and self-inflicted deaths and accidents will be next to nothing. Use some common sense. I hear so many immature handgun owners making macho comments like, "let them try that when I'm around and I will blow them away with my 357." Handguns are only good for one thing; to kill people. More handguns in the hands of irresponsible and unreasonable reactionary people are not the answer. If handguns are more available maybe we should outlaw testosterone. I doubt there have been many mass murders with knifes. Of course criminals will always have handguns but these same criminals were typically good law abiding citizens the day before they committed their crimes. They are the same citizens demanding more lenient gun laws. It's a vicious circular argument that gets you nowhere. The police see the violent results and that is why they support stronger handgun laws. Our right-wing Supreme Court strikes down handgun bans and they are the same irrational court that allows serial rapist priests and other child rapists to avoid the death penalty. Where's the logic and common sense in that? With leadership and rulings like that is it any surprise America is the most violent country on the face of the earth?

Pray

2008-06-25T12:41:00.001-05:00

Yes, my hometown is where six people died last night because of a job related argument. Please be in prayer for all the families involved.

HOW TRUE!

2008-06-25T12:40:00.000-05:00

By Frank Schaeffer

Senator Obama just took another giant step toward winning the presidency. Actually, someone who considers himself a sworn enemy of Senator Obama took the step for him. Dr. Dobson of the Focus On the Family radio program (and evangelical media empire) has aired a program in which he attacks Senator Obama, the Senator's theology and his credentials as a Christian. With enemies like this Senator Obama doesn't need friends.

No, I'm not talking about Dobson energizing liberal Democrats. I'm talking about Dobson energizing his fellow evangelicals to vote for Senator Obama.

I first met Dobson when I was on his program back in the early eighties. At that time I too was an evangelical right wing agitator. I describe my encounter with Dobson and my journey from the heart of the Republican/evangelical right to sanity in my book CRAZY FOR GOD-How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back.

In the bad old days Dobson gave away 150,000 copies of a shrill bestseller evangelical screed of mine called A Time For Anger. (There was a lot more money in the God business than working as a legitimate author let me tell you! If any of my novels made the kind of money my evangelical books did I'd be set! ) Along with my late evangelical leader father Francis Schaeffer, like Dobson we were busy welding the evangelicals and the Republican Party into what amounted to a new party of soft theocracy. I changed my mind and got out in the mid eighties. But I have plenty of friends still in the evangelical movement, and they say unequivocally that Dobson's time has passed.

Dobson is one of the Evangelical religious right old guard. He's to the right what Nader is to the left. Like the late Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and others Dobson has alienated as many evangelicals -- let alone moderate Christians -- as he's inspired. In fact, ever since he tried to get Richard Cizik, vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) fired last year Dobson has found himself painted into a reactionary corner. Many evangelicals still fear him and so won't denounce his posturing power-plays but they also despise him.

Cizik is the future of evangelicalism. Dobson is the past. Cizik is a strong environmentalist advocate on the issue of global warming. Dobson tried to get the board of the National Association of Evangelicals to fire Cizik because of that fact. Dobson said that Cizik's environmental beliefs ran counter to what Dobson thought was in George Bush's best interests. He also said that the environment distracts from the favorite issues Dobson raises most of his funds on: abortion and gay bashing. But Dobson failed. The board of the NAE rejected Dobson's power play, for the same reason many evangelicals will reject his telling them how to vote this year. Dobson also failed in stopping John McCain (who failed to kiss Dobson's ass sufficiently) from becoming the Republican nominee.

If you're one of many Americans who thinks that the war in Iraq was a mistake or believe that the Republicans have run the economy into the ground or think that perhaps the chaos George Bush unleashed in our foreign affairs has something to do with the price of gas at the pump... then you have Dr. Dobson to thank -- personally. No one worked harder to get Bush elected then reelected. Dobson delivered his millions of dupes. But now many of them see through him and like most Americans, are appalled by Bush.

Nevertheless Dobson has -- for eight years -- been George W. Bush's personal shill. In return Dobson has had ego-stoking "access" to the White House, or rather to the lackeys in the White House laughing at him but charged with stroking Dobson and the other pompous asses masquerading as religious leaders.

But the new generation of evangelicals is sick of being labeled as backward rednecks because of their association with fossils like Dobson. There are many evangelicals like Cizik too who are not all about homophobia, nationalism, war-without-end and American exceptionalism or the Republican Party. Like Cizik they believe that the America has a responsibility to do something about global warming, poverty, AIDS, human trafficking and other issues. They see through Dobson and the other so-called pro-life leaders, who have actually done nothing to reduce abortion. In fact Dobson has increased abortions because of his "abstinence only" crusade.

As a result of his power grabs and bullying of other evangelicals, not to mention his telling people how to vote and pointing them to the failed W, Dobson & Co. have zero credibility with a growing number of otherwise conservative evangelicals who happen--this year--to be looking favorably at Senator Obama's holistic Christian-based world view. Unlike Dobson they like Obama's theology just fine.

All that was missing to put the frosting on the Obama cake was for Dobson to attack him. For Obama to win all he needs to do is peel off a chunk of heretofore solid evangelical Republican votes. Dobson just handed Obama those votes.

Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of "CRAZY FOR GOD-How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back"

Bereft of Ideas

2008-06-23T16:37:00.000-05:00

The GOP is bereft of ideas and chances to redeem itself this election. All of theirs have failed so the only tactic they have left is to attack and smear Obama with guilt by association, false rumors and gossip. I thought most people had wised up long ago to how the GOP dirty tricks swift-boat boys operated but at each election they just keep going after the same old gullible segment of the population that wants to believe the worst lies about others. I was hoping McCain would be different since the Bush/Rove attack machine had subjected him to their slander and lying push polls during the 2000 primary election but I guess he thinks the only way for him to win is to resort to the same against Obama. So much for integrity. The best they can do is go after Obama's pastor as though the former Episcopalian-McCain's newly adopted fundamentalist Southern Baptist religion doesn't have nutty preachers too, like Hitler loving John Hagee and Ron Parsley. If every Catholic left their Church because of all the priest on child sex abuse cases there would be no more Catholic Church. Why the hypocrisy by the GOP toward Rev Wright? These Appalachian right-wing conservatives are just desperate to tar and feather Obama for whatever reason they can dream up. Pretty pathetic, eh? Let them cling to their hatred, racism and bitterness. It's all they have to hold onto since their GOP political saviors have been discredited during the last eight years and failed at every neo-con wet-dream Cheney and his coven of Constitution killers could attempt. Haters never win but they seem to be very successful in republican politics. It seems that to many NRA right-wingers, their guns are phallic symbols that represent their inadequacies. The bigger and deadly their guns the more macho they feel. Too bad they can't debate and reason based on facts and reality rather than on paranoia and anger. I too am an avid hunter and gun owner but I don't allow it to take over my common sense and objectivity. What is it about NRA extremists that causes them to shun logic and Constitutional realities? How can average working people vote against their own financial self interests by supporting politicians that always vote against helping them? These politicians feel like they have a free pass just because they always vote for even the most extreme pro-hand gun law? (i.e. Mitch McConnell) I expect McCain to embrace these extremists in his quest to be "w's" version of the compassionate dictator of middle earth America. Just watch out for all the smoke and mirrors because they are going to use copious amounts to obscure their many neo-con failures. You might even see McCain pandering to all the Ky, Tenn, and West Virginia Hillary lovers by wearing a pink pantsuit on the campaign trail. I wouldn't put it past him. Hell knows there is no furry like a log-cabin conservative scorned.

Presidents

2008-06-06T07:08:00.000-05:00

In America's history we have had a handicapped president, a bachelor president, a Catholic president and a retarded president. Don't you think its time for a half African and half Kansas president? Senator Obama is just what our country needs at this time in history. He's intelligent, independent and isn't owned by right-wingers and oil corporations. If you liked the last eight insane years of death, war, endless spending / debt, torture, fuel price gouging, with countless deadly lies, cover-ups and Constitutional destruction, vote for McCain and nothing will change. If you want a voice for average Americans, both Clintons in critical governmental roles, some political sanity, fiscal accountability, reason and responsibility in policies, then vote for Barack Obama. If you think Clinton played dirty politics with Obama just wait and see what the Republicans are going to do to him. Don't fall for repu lies, ugly distortions and diversion of blame for all their failures. Stay out of the right-wing Rovian "dirty politics" gutter and support a good man who will bring back pride in being an American and living by the principals of the Constitution. Prove that racism is a thing of the past and justice is blind. Show the world that we truly believe and practice what our Constitution declares. Vote for competent leadership and a new direction not the same old failed ideas of the Bush/Cheney party. Vote Obama. He encompasses the best of what America stands for.

Twisted Logic

2008-06-06T07:04:00.000-05:00

I find it hilarious how right-wingers use such tortured and twisted logic to justify their racism and sexism relative to their political candidates. They always claim that it's not that they don't want a woman or black as president, yet they can't get them to run. I wonder why? Right-wingers claim Condi Rice and Colin Powell are more qualified than many Dem candidates, so what's the problem? Could it be they know a black man or woman would have no chance to get the nomination much less win the general election in their biased party? After all, the only way they can get blacks to serve in the Republican party is to appoint them because they can't get elected. If political beliefs were the standard then Clarence Thomas would run for president. He is more right-wing than "W," but he would have no chance in the Republican party of today.
Alan Keyes is a good example of the futility of a black conservative in the Republican party. The only thing he can win is a right-wing talk show. I can only remember one conservative black (rich Oklahoma football hero, J.C. Watts) who was elected in the Republican party, and he resigned in frustration. Is that a coincidence? If right-wingers really represented minorities they would change their political positions to reflect it, but that is not going to happen in the WASP party of big money and materialism that has a history of being anti-civil rights and runs campaigns by demonizing blacks.
Just wait for all the racist ads in this year's election. We've had but a sample in North Carolina already and even here in Kentucky with our Republican Rep. Geoff Davis calling Obama, "boy." When Republican presidential candidates get less than 10 percent of the black vote in elections one would think they might say to themselves, "Hey, maybe we need to change a little to accommodate the political views of minorities." Instead they always come back with, "We don't need blacks anyway; they'll come around to our viewpoint eventually." Who needs minorities when you have a super-majority of southern bigots? That's the view that has worked for right-wingers in the past, and it will probably continue to work for them in the future.

Black?

2008-06-05T15:55:00.000-05:00

Why is it that future President Obama, is always referred to as black? He is as much a white man as he is black. Just because he is half black does not make him any more black than white. How many white people are pure white? Very few I imagine. People are a composite of many relatives that come before them. This country is truly a melting pot and I am proud of the fact that we are slowly coming to see that a person’s color has no bearing on their potential success. I have Indian, Cajun, Irish, British and who knows what else in my heritage. Does that make me better or worse than any other American? Of course it doesn’t. John McCain is so white he could be called an albino but we don’t do that. Why the double standard? Obama wants to be a healer and someone who will try to bring different people together. I can think of no one better able to do that. He has grown up in two different worlds with two different sets of grandparents and world views. Who better to actually be able to bridge the divide between our country’s racist history? I hope and pray that the public doesn’t let their prejudice get in the way of actually hearing what Obama is saying and campaigning for. He is a historic candidate, not because of his color but because he actually wants to bring all Americans together. I hope he chooses the Republican, Chuck Hagel as a running mate to show he means what he says. I am an independent and I too want to see a real uniter, not a partisan divider like we had over the last eight years leading this country. Our country desperately needs someone like that at this time in our history.

Facts are facts

2008-06-05T15:53:00.000-05:00

In response to a couple of frustrated and misinformed local right-wingers concerning my letters, the facts certainly don’t get in my way of observing that republicans have (zero) elected officials in the U.S. Congress. That is not speculation. That is a FACT! It is beyond statistical probability and any reasonable judgment that this fact is anything but the result of blatant racism on the part of the Republican Party. Repus don’t support the election of black politicians. They don’t give them the money, party support or legislative bills needed in order to win over the black population. Since the 60’s when the voting rights act was passed by a Democratic Congress and a Democratic President, the repus have pursued Nixon’s southern strategy (i.e. Kevin Phillips) of ignoring the black voter and embracing the reactionist southern racist. That is a far cry from what Lincoln envisioned. It is obvious these young right-wing letter writers have no clue as to the reality of the civil rights struggle that actually transpired in the 60’s. They only rely on the biased FOX network and other right-wing talk show blow-hards for their history information all based around Reagan worship. How tragic that the repu party continues to reject black voters and won’t even try to accommodate some of their concerns. The fact is that over 90% of blacks do not vote republican and over 98% of white republicans do not vote for blacks. That is not speculation. That is fact. Colin Powell was forced out of the Bush administration and he would have no chance going up against the neocons of the repu party today. He would have a better chance of running as a democrat and he knows it. Rice has been one of the worst Sec. of State and National Security directors in history. She will go down as the one who ignored the August 6 FBI memo warning of airplane attacks on American targets from 911. She is radioactive as far as repus are concerned. The repus know that their own party will not vote for a black presidential candidate. They can’t even get a U.S. Congressman elected much less a president so before right-wingers start attacking Obama in their ads as the next convict Willie Horton or a horny Tenn. Congressman Harold Ford remember that they are the ones who campaign on demonizing blacks. The proof is in the pudding and facts don’t lie. Zero repu blacks in Congress. That is not a coincidence. That is intentional. Don’t be fooled by their diversion tactics. Just look at their record. Over 80% of the U.S. population thinks we have been going in the wrong direction and only 25% think w is doing a decent job. Presently the American people support democrat policies and know that repus are responsible for our terrible situation economically, militarily and constitutionally. These are the facts and they are on Obama’s side.

3 Billion $ War

2008-03-27T17:23:00.000-05:00

Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel - Prize winning economist, has written a book that says if the Iraq War ended in the immediate future the cost to America would be greater than three trillion dollars. Do you know how many zeros that is? Try doing a cost benefit analysis on that you Harvard M.B.A. Republicans and see if Bear Stearns would give you a merit raise. Do you know what could be done with 3 trillion dollar$? It would fund Social Security and Medicare for 50 years and provide insurance coverage for 530 million people a year. Where are America's priorities? Have we gotten our money’s worth from the war yet? Did the war pay for itself with oil like "Big Time" Cheney claimed? Well in addition to making us less safe, creating more enemies of most of the world and driving gas prices to sights unseen it has bankrupted the U.S. Treasury, driven the value of the dollar to the lowest level in history, started a recession and put our economy and Constitution in the toilet. Four thousand U.S. soldiers dead, tens of thousands maimed, hundreds of thousands of civilians dead and counting in a needless war against a country that had nothing to do with 911. And Osama's Bin Losen who? As “w” says, “and it was all done without raising them dad-gum taxes,” Well, mission accomplished. The overdue master card debt bill will come soon enough. What a legacy. I can't wait for "w"s third term under a senile McCain.

Changing the Subject Again

2008-03-18T16:55:00.001-05:00

My how adroit right-wing republicans are at “smoke & mirrors” and changing the subject. Their party should be called the GOMP “Grand Old Magicians Party.” In the midst of one of the most serious financial crisis’ of our lifetime and with a futile and bottomless pit of wasted trillions of dollars and death on an endless war and corporate welfare bankrupting the U.S. Treasury and indebting our children’s future to Chinese slave-masters what are right-wingers concerned about? Obamas’ preacher, missing blond women and politicians’ sex-lives, that’s what. After decades of Republicans embracing and supporting nutty white fundamentalist preachers who rail about how God is punishing America through 911 because of gays, abortion, secular humanism and liberals and that the government should be overthrown by force then seized by God-fearing theocrats, one would think that what a preacher said wouldn’t surprise anyone. But according to right-wingers all the other REAL problems this country faces don’t matter. What’s important to them is that the subject has to shift from the infinite Republican “Bush failures” to scaring working folks enough to get them to vote against their own personal and financial interests. Dividing and conquering is the modus operandi Republicans use to win elections. They have used it to perfection for the last forty years. Do you think they will stop doing it now? Just listen to the right-wing media and you will perceive the obvious. Do you honestly think they would embrace a politician like Obama who encourages reconciliation and healing? Do you really think Bush would send the Federal Reserve in to bail you out if you lost your job or were going bankrupt the way they did Bear-Sterns? Don’t expect them to talk about the critical issues that face this country when they can inflame voters with irrelevant nonsense. When is this country and the media going to stop falling for their deception and tricks?

Straight from the Right-Wing Horse's Mouth

2008-03-17T17:46:00.000-05:00

When Senator Obama's preacher thundered about racism and injustice Obama suffered smear-by-association. But when my late father -- Religious Right leader Francis Schaeffer -- denounced America and even called for the violent overthrow of the US government, he was invited to lunch with presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush, Sr.

Every Sunday thousands of right wing white preachers (following in my father's footsteps) rail against America's sins from tens of thousands of pulpits. They tell us that America is complicit in the "murder of the unborn," has become "Sodom" by coddling gays, and that our public schools are sinful places full of evolutionists and sex educators hell-bent on corrupting children. They say, as my dad often did, that we are, "under the judgment of God." They call America evil and warn of immanent destruction. By comparison Obama's minister's shouted "controversial" comments were mild. All he said was that God should damn America for our racism and violence and that no one had ever used the N-word about Hillary Clinton.

Dad and I were amongst the founders of the Religious right. In the 1970s and 1980s, while Dad and I crisscrossed America denouncing our nation's sins instead of getting in trouble we became darlings of the Republican Party. (This was while I was my father's sidekick before I dropped out of the evangelical movement altogether.) We were rewarded for our "stand" by people such as Congressman Jack Kemp, the Fords, Reagan and the Bush family. The top Republican leadership depended on preachers and agitators like us to energize their rank and file. No one called us un-American.

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Consider a few passages from my father's immensely influential America-bashing book A Christian Manifesto. It sailed under the radar of the major media who, back when it was published in 1980, were not paying particular attention to best-selling religious books. Nevertheless it sold more than a million copies.

Here's Dad writing in his chapter on civil disobedience:

If there is a legitimate reason for the use of force [against the US government]... then at a certain point force is justifiable.

And this:

In the United States the materialistic, humanistic world view is being taught exclusively in most state schools... There is an obvious parallel between this and the situation in Russia [the USSR]. And we really must not be blind to the fact that indeed in the public schools in the United States all religious influence is as forcibly forbidden as in the Soviet Union....

Then this:

There does come a time when force, even physical force, is appropriate... A true Christian in Hitler's Germany and in the occupied countries should have defied the false and counterfeit state. This brings us to a current issue that is crucial for the future of the church in the United States, the issue of abortion... It is time we consciously realize that when any office commands what is contrary to God's law it abrogates it's authority. And our loyalty to the God who gave this law then requires that we make the appropriate response in that situation...

Was any conservative political leader associated with Dad running for cover? Far from it. Dad was a frequent guest of the Kemps, had lunch with the Fords, stayed in the White House as their guest, he met with Reagan, helped Dr. C. Everett Koop become Surgeon General. (I went on the 700 Club several times to generate support for Koop).

Dad became a hero to the evangelical community and a leading political instigator. When Dad died in 1984 everyone from Reagan to Kemp to Billy Graham lamented his passing publicly as the loss of a great American. Not one Republican leader was ever asked to denounce my dad or distanced himself from Dad's statements.

Take Dad's words and put them in the mouth of Obama's preacher (or in the mouth of any black American preacher) and people would be accusing that preacher of treason. Yet when we of the white Religious Right denounced America white conservative Americans and top political leaders, called our words "godly" and "prophetic" and a "call to repentance."

We Republican agitators of the mid 1970s to the late 1980s were genuinely anti-American in the same spirit that later Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (both followers of my father) were anti-American when they said God had removed his blessing from America on 9/11, because America accepted gays. Falwell and Robertson recanted but we never did.

My dad's books denouncing America and comparing the USA to Hitler are still best sellers in the "respectable" evangelical community and he's still hailed as a prophet by many Republican leaders. When Mike Huckabee was recently asked by Katie Couric to name one book he'd take with him to a desert island, besides the Bible, he named Dad's Whatever Happened to the Human Race? a book where Dad also compared America to Hitler's Germany.

The hypocrisy of the right denouncing Obama, because of his minister's words, is staggering. They are the same people who argue for the right to "bear arms" as "insurance" to limit government power. They are the same people that (in the early 1980s roared and cheered when I called down damnation on America as "fallen away from God" at their national meetings where I was keynote speaker, including the annual meeting of the ultraconservative Southern Baptist convention, and the religious broadcasters that I addressed.

Today we have a marriage of convenience between the right wing fundamentalists who hate Obama, and the "progressive" Clintons who are playing the race card through their own smear machine. As Jane Smiley writes in the Huffington Post "[The Clinton's] are, indeed, now part of the 'vast right wing conspiracy.' (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/im-already-against-the-n_b_90628.html )

Both the far right Republicans and the stop-at-nothing Clintons are using the "scandal" of Obama's preacher to undermine the first black American candidate with a serious shot at the presidency. Funny thing is, the racist Clinton/Far Right smear machine proves that Obama's minister had a valid point. There is plenty to yell about these days.

Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of "CRAZY FOR GOD-How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back

The $3Trillion WAR

2008-03-04T10:22:00.000-06:00

You have to read this:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2008/03/04/trillion_dollar_war/

Cowardly Conservatives

2008-02-29T19:10:00.001-06:00

Cowardly conservatives are the bane of the Republican Party. Many right-wingers talk tough but don’t live up to their words. That is why the public and even their own Repu party have rejected them. They are war-mongers but don’t really feel the need to join the military themselves. They would rather flame on the internet or right-wing radio/TV than actually take responsibility for their and w/cheney’s infinite failures. When will they have the courage to admit their voluminous tragic errors? They are like alcoholics or hypocrite gay preacher/politicians that never acknowledge their problems. They preach hell-fire and damnation to others but ignore the stud in their own eyes. They can never get any better without the honesty to own up to their destructive weaknesses. Denial, denial, and more denial is the state of the right-wing conservative movement in America today. True and honest conservatives like William F. Buckley and the late Barry Goldwater knew this and tried to warn discredited neo-cons but they rejected the honest assessment and even turned on the founding fathers of their movement. We are viewing the rotting corpse of right-winger wet-dreams and it’s getting ugly. Just a few short years ago they had the world in the palm of their hand with “w” and Cheney as their dictatorial leaders and a right-wing Congress and Supreme Court in lock-step but allowed the infected bile and Rovian paranoia of their cultish movement destroy any possible good will with the majority of Americans or rest of the world. The result: endless war, death, debt, greed and destruction everywhere. What a legacy.

For McCain & Russert some Hate-Preachers are OK!

2008-02-28T12:17:00.001-06:00

Glenn Greenwald

Some hateful, radical ministers -- white evangelicals -- are acceptable
One of this week's hysterical press scandals was that Minister Louis Farrakhan praised Barack Obama's candidacy even though Obama had previously denounced numerous Farrakhan remarks and the Obama campaign did nothing to seek out the Farrakhan praise. Nonetheless, Tim Russert demanded that Obama jump through multiple hoops to prove that he has no connection to -- and, in fact, "rejects" -- the ideas espoused by Farrakhan deemed to be radical and hateful.

Yesterday, though, the equally fringe, radical and hateful (at least) Rev. John Hagee -- a white evangelical who is the pastor of a sprawling "mega-church" in Texas -- enthusiastically endorsed John McCain. Did McCain have to jump through the same hoops which Russert and others set up for Obama and "denounce" Hagee's extremism and "reject" his support? No; quite the opposite. McCain said he was "very honored" to receive this endorsement and, when asked about some of Hagee's more twisted views, responded: "all I can tell you is that I am very proud to have Pastor John Hagee's support."

McCain's sainted supporter, Joe Lieberman, last year spoke to Hagee's group and lavished him with such obsequious praise that Lieberman actually compared Hagee, favorably, to Moses. Why is Louis Farrakhan deemed by our political establishment to be so radioactive as to not be fit for good company -- black candidates are required to repudiate his support even when they haven't sought it and denounce his views even when they've never advocated anything close to those views -- but John Hagee is a perfectly acceptable figure whom mainstream GOP politicians are free to court without any consequences or media objections?

Here is just a small sampling of the belief system of this welcomed McCain supporter:

* All Muslims are programmed to kill and we can thus never negotiate with any of them. From an NPR interview Hagee gave to Terry Gross in 2006:

TG: If you use the Bible as the basis for policy, is there any room for compromise? And if you use the bible as the basis for policy, should Muslims use the Koran as the basis for their policy, and then again, what possible basis is there for compromise at that point?

JH: There is really no room for compromise between radical Islam --

TG: I'm not talking about radical Islam. I'm just talking about Islam in general.

JH: Well Islam in general -- those who live by the Koran have a scriptural mandate to kill Christians and Jews.

* God caused Hurricane Katrina to wipe out New Orleans because it had a gay pride parade the week before and was filled with sexual sin. From the same interview:
JH: All hurricanes are acts of God, because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they were recipients of the judgment of God for that.

The newspaper carried the story in our local area, that was not carried nationally, that there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came. And the promise of that parade was that it would was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other gay pride parades.

So I believe that the judgment of God is a very real thing. I know there are people who demur from that, but I believe that the Bible teaches that when you violate the law of God, that God brings punishment sometimes before the Day of Judgment, and I believe that the Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.

* The End Times -- Rapture -- is imminent and the U.S. Government must do what it can to hasten it, which at minimum requires: (a) a war with Iran and (b) undying, absolute support for a unified Israel, including all Occupied Territories (hence, Joe Lieberman's love affair with them). From Christian Palestinian Daoud Kuttab in The New York Times (h/t PZ Meyers):
A small minority of evangelical Christians have entered the Middle East political arena with some of the most un-Christian statements I have ever heard. . . . [Rev.] Hagee, a popular televangelist who leads the 18,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, ratcheted up his rhetoric this year with the publication of his book, "Jerusalem Countdown," in which he argues that a confrontation with Iran is a necessary precondition for Armageddon (which will mean the death of most Jews, in his eyes) and the Second Coming of Christ. In the best-selling book, Hagee insists that the United States must join Israel in a preemptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God's plan for both Israel and the West.
Hagee believes that "the president's support for Israel fulfills a biblical injunction to protect the Jewish state," which "will play a pivotal role in the second coming." These views are not unrelated to Hagee's support for McCain. Quite the contrary; Hagee cited McCain's so-called "pro-Israel views," his belligerence towards Iran, and his social conservatism as reasons for the endorsement. And in critical contrast to Obama and Farrakhan, McCain actually seems to share some of Hagee's more twisted views, as evidenced by McCain's joyful singing about dropping bombs on Iran.

The GOP has long been given a pass on courting the most warped and twisted religious figures around. George Bush spoke regularly with Pat Robertson -- never once forced to "denounce" or "reject" him. In 2006, Rev. Hagee had a private meeting with uber-White House neocon (and convicted criminal) Elliot Abrams, who just happens to run Middle East policy in the Bush administration, and afterwards, Hagee gushed that he and Abrams (like he and Lieberman) shared similar views towards the Middle East: "we felt we were on the right track."

Watching the media's treatment of Farrakhan and Hagee, is it possible to imagine a more transparent, and grotesque, double standard? In the framework of the Russert-led establishment press, white evangelical Christians are, by definition, entitled to great respect no matter how radical, extreme and hateful their professed views are. These are, after all, religious Christians -- People of Faith -- and, as such, it is wrong, even bigoted, to suggest that they should be repudiated. There is nothing ever radical, hateful or dangerous about the views of white evangelical Christians like Hagee.

Thus, white evangelical Ministers are free to advocate American wars based on Biblical mandates, rant hatefully against Islam, and argue that natural disasters occur because God hates gay people. They are still fit for good company, an important and cherished part of our mainstream American political system. The entire GOP establishment is permitted actively to lavish them with praise and court their support without the slightest backlash or controversy. Both George Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert sent formal greetings to the 2006 gathering of Hagee's group.

By contrast, black Muslim ministers like Farrakhan, or even black Christian ministers like Rev. Jeremiah Wright, are held with deep suspicion, even contempt. McCain is free to hug and praise the Rev. Hagees of the world, but Obama is required to prove over and over and over and over that he does not share the more extreme views of black Ministers.

How come Tim Russert -- in all the times he sits and chats with Lieberman, McCain and various high Bush officials -- never reads all of the inflammatory, disgusting, crazed "Rapture-is-Coming/ All-Jews-will-Burn/ Kill-All-Muslims/ Hurricanes-are-Punishment-against-Gays" pronouncements from John Hagee and James Dobson and Pat Robertson and demand that John McCain and George Bush and Joe Lieberman "denounce" those views and "reject" their support? What's the difference, exactly?

UPDATE: As emaydon recalls in Comments, McCain supporter Rudy Giuliani, just a few months ago, stood on the same stage and gushed with gratitude over the endorsement by Rev. Pat Robertson of Giuliani's presidential bid.

That's the same Rev. Robertson who, among so many great things, said that Ariel Sharon's stroke was God's punishment for giving up Gaza and the 9/11 attack was divine retribution against America -- America's fault -- for tolerating gays, feminists and the ACLU. But Giuliani was the moderate, respectable candidate who was free to accept Robertson's endorsement, and Russert and his friends never demanded that he "reject" it.

UPDATE II: Although cavorting with the likes of Pat Robertson and John Hagee is perfectly acceptable in Russert World, Russert also demanded, back in January, 2006, that Obama opine on various controversial remarks from the highly influential political philosopher Harry Belafonte (h/t JKP1000):

MR. RUSSERT: I want to talk a little bit about the language people are using in the politics now of 2006, and I refer you to some comments that Harry Belafonte made yesterday. He said that Homeland Security had become the new Gestapo. What do you think of that?

MR. RUSSERT: Mr. Belafonte went to Venezuela, as you well know, some time ago and met with the Hugo Chavez, leader of that country, and said some things that obviously were noted in this country and around the world. Let’s listen, and come back and talk about it.

(Videotape, January 8, 2006) . . .

MR. RUSSERT: Is it appropriate to call the President of the United States "the greatest terrorist in the world"?

Obama is required to denounce certain people with whom he has no connection while the likes of Bush, McCain, Lieberman and Giuliani are free to associate themselves openly with the most extremist elements around.

UPDATE III: Here is the McCain campaign website proudly promoting a video of Rev. Hagee's reverent introduction of McCain, while McCain and wife Cindy stood proudly by, during the candidate's "No Surrender Tour":

During his remarks, Rev. Hagee denounced those "in Congress who whine about the cost of the war"; said we can't withdraw from Iraq because "Israel will be in greater danger than ever before," pointed out that "Allah [is Ahmadinejad's] God -- not ours"; and raved that McCain "is the leader and the [other candidates] are followers." Rev. Hagee concluded: "Without victory, there is no survival." McCain then went over to him and warmly shook his hand.

I Wonder!

2008-02-18T09:18:00.002-06:00

I find it hilarious how right-wingers use such tortured and twisted logic to justify their racism and sexism relative to their political candidates. They always claim that it’s not that they don’t want a woman or black as president yet they can’t get them to run. I wonder why? Right-wingers claim Condi Rice and Colin Powell are more qualified than many dem candidates so what’s the problem? Could it be they know a black man or woman would have no chance to get the nomination much less win the general election in their biased party? After all the only way they can get blacks to serve in the Republican party is to “appoint” them because they can’t get elected. If political beliefs were the standard then Clarence Thomas would run for president. He is more right-wing than “w” but he would have no chance in the Republican party of today. Alan Keyes is a good example of the futility of a black conservative in the repu party. The only thing he can win is a right-wing talk show. I can only remember one conservative black (rich Oklahoma football hero, J.C. Watts) that was “elected” in the repu party and he resigned in frustration. Is that a coincidence? I wonder why? Could it be because the repu party is racist or because they don’t represent the interests of average people and minorities? I wonder. If right-wingers really represented minorities they would change their political positions to reflect it but that is not going to happen in the WASP party of big money and materialism that has a history of being anti-civil rights and runs campaigns by demonizing blacks. Reagan started his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi. That is the town where the first black civil-rights worker was hung in the sixties. That sent a message to all right-wing racists that he was one of them. The symbolism of that was very clear and the South has gone repu ever since. Bush used Willie Horton to scare whitey in 88 and then paid blacks to stand on the stage and be on camera during political rally’s to give the impression they represent minorities. Every election year most all repu candidates start off by going to Bob Jones University in South Carolina to grovel at the feet of white religious and racist fundamentalists to show their prejudiced leanings. I wonder why a black man or liberal woman would not want to run as a republican presidential candidate. After all one would think the sky’s the limit in the GOP for ambitious minorities. I wonder. When Republican presidential candidates get less than 10% of the black vote in elections one would think they might say to themsleves, "hey, maybe we need to change a little to accomodate the political views of minorities." Instead they always come back with, "we don't need blacks anyway; they'll come around to our viewpoint eventually." Who needs minorities when you have a super-majority of southern bigots. That's the view that has worked for right-wingers in the past and it will probably continue to work for them in the future. I wonder why?

McCain's Divorce and Infidelities

2008-02-09T12:03:00.000-06:00

Before John McCain's tour of duty in Vietnam, he married Carol Shepp, a model from Philadelphia. On his 23rd bombing mission over North Vietnam in 1967, McCain was shot down and captured.

After his return to the states when released from prison he was yearning to make the grade of admiral, McCain enrolled in the National War College at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C. and underwent physical therapy in order to fly again. The Navy excused his permanent disabilities and reinstated him to flight status, effectively positioning him for promotion.

In his book, The Nightingale's Song, Robert Timberg chronicled McCain's post-Vietnam military assignments and some of his "adulterous" behavior leading to his divorce from Carol and marriage to Cindy Hensley.

Timberg wrote, "in the fall of 1974, McCain was transferred to Jacksonville as the executive officer of Replacement Air Group 174, the long-sought flying billet at last a reality. A few months later, he assumed command of the RAG, which trained pilots and crews for carrier deployments. The assignment was controversial, some calling it favoritism, a sop to the famous son of a famous father and grandfather [both were Navy admirals], since he had not first commanded a squadron, the usual career path."

While Executive Officer and later as Squadron Commander McCain used his authority to arrange frequent flights that allowed him to carouse with subordinates and "engage in extra-marital affairs." Such behavior was a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice rules against adultery and fraternization with subordinates..

Timberg wrote, "Off duty, usually on routine cross-country flights to Yuma and El Centro, John started carousing and running around with women. To make matters worse, some of the women with whom he was linked by rumor were subordinates . . . At the time the rumors were so widespread that, they became part of McCain's persona, impossible not to take note of."

In early 1977, Admiral Jim Holloway, Chief of Naval Operations promoted McCain to captain and transferred him from his command position "to Washington as the number-two man in the Navy's Senate liaison office. It wasn't long before the "fun loving and irreverent" McCain had turned the liaison office into a "late-afternoon gathering spot where senators and staffers, usually from the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, would drop in for a drink and the chance to unwind."

In 1979 at a military reception in Honolulu, McCain met Cindy Hensley, an attractive 25-year-old woman from a very wealthy politically-connected Arizona family. Cindy's father, Jim, founded the Hensley and Company, the nation's third-largest Anheuser-Busch distributor.

McCain described their first meeting, "She was lovely, intelligent and charming, 17 years my junior but poised and confident. I monopolized her attention the entire time, taking care to prevent anyone else from intruding on our conversation. When it came time to leave the party, I persuaded her to join me for drinks at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. By the evening's end, I was in love."

While still married to Carol, McCain began an adulterous relationship with Cindy. He married Cindy in May 1980 -- just a month after dumping Carol and securing a divorce. The newlyweds honeymooned in Hawaii.

McCain followed his young, millionairess wife back to Arizona where her father helped catapult McCain into politics,

Today, Cindy Hensley McCain is chairwoman of Hensley's board of directors. Hensley and Company financial reports show assets worth a minimum of $28 million for the McCains.

He sounds a lot like Clinton don't you think?

What's A Right-Winger To Do?

2008-02-08T15:55:00.000-06:00

What’s a right-winger to do? After almost three decades of right-wing conservative rule in Washington D.C. where are we? Mired in needless wars, economic meltdown, incompetent government management and endless debt, that’s where. Yes, conservatives have pretty much controlled all that has happened in D.C. since Reagan came to town in 1980. With the exception of some fiscal sanity under Clinton and Newt, it has been nothing but borrow and spend adnauseam. China owns us because they are the ones financing all of our spending on wars and tax cuts we can not afford. This will all come crashing down soon enough. Who is responsible? Reagan/Bush created the largest debt in U.S. history. During the first six years of w’s rule he and his right-wing McConnell Congress had free reign to do and spend as they saw fit and anyone that questioned was labeled a traitor. There were no checks and balances and “w” never vetoed any pork barrel spending his Congress sent him. Now that their policies and the resultant debt are really kicking in it will once again be the Democrats responsibility to fix it. I pity the mess the next president will face. It is not surprising that even Republicans reject right-wingers this year. After the last eight years they have been completely discredited. McCain will be the Republican nominee and right-wingers are livid but they have no one to blame but themselves. McCain is pals with Ed Kennedy and Feingold and has never seen a liberal cause he couldn’t embrace so who ever wins in November they will have one common distinction. They will all be to the left of our beloved Mitch “spend tax money for pork and votes” McConnell. I wonder if Right-wingers will mock McCain’s military service the way they did true war hero, John Kerry in 2004? Will they swift-boat him with blatant lies and hold up purple band aids on their fingers laughing at his purple-heart metals? That’s the kind of twisted mindset that passes for patriotic in right-wing circles. It’s going to be an interesting election and right-wing spin will be comical trying to paint McCain as one of them but you can count on one thing. Right-wingers will never vote for a black man or woman for president so a liberal vet will have to do. January 20, 2009 won’t be here any too soon? Bring it on!

What part of 'secular nation' don't we understand?

2008-01-28T18:35:00.000-06:00

By Charles C. Haynes
While American soldiers fight to establish a secular democracy abroad, many Americans want to create a Christian nation at home. Consider the finding of "State of the First Amendment 2007," a national survey released last week by the First Amendment Center. Significant numbers of Americans express support for government sponsorship of the majority religion, especially in public schools: 58% want teacher-led prayers in school classrooms, 43% endorse school holiday programs that are entirely Christian and devotional. 50% would allow public school teachers to teach the Bible as a "factual text" in history classes.

Despite the fact that all of the above are unconstitutional under current law, many people see nothing wrong - and much right - with school officials privileging or even endorsing the Christian faith. Transpose the location (or substitute another religion) and the result would surely be different. Would Americans support the creation of an Iraqi state where the majority Shiites imposed their prayers, religious celebrations, and scriptures on all Iraqi schoolchildren? Not likely. On the contrary, we send young Americans to fight for an Iraq where people of all faiths will be protected from state-imposed religion. Why? Because we understand that (however quixotic the quest) only a secular democracy in Iraq with no established faith will guarantee religious freedom - and end sectarian strife. Closer to home, however, many Americans seem to think our framers had another idea. According to the First Amendment poll, nearly two-thirds of Americans (65%) agree that our nation's founders intended the U.S. to be a Christian nation. Even more striking, 55% believe that the U.S. Constitution establishes a Christian nation. Now, its true that many (but not all) of our founders were Christians. And it's true that the Protestant majority dominated the nation's institutions for much of our early history. But the U. S. Constitution nowhere mentions God or Christianity, an omission that was widely criticized in 1787. In fact, the only mention of religion in the body of the Constitution (before the addition of the religious-liberty clauses of the First Amendment) is the "no religious test" for public office provision of Article VI. By ensuring that people of all faiths or none could hold office, the founders made clear their intention to found a secular republic committed to full religious freedom. Of course, people define "Christian nation" in various ways - ranging from a nation that reflects Christian virtues to a nation where the government promotes the Christian faith. But under any definition, the Constitution in no way establishes or creates a Christian nation. Some might argue that teacher - led prayers or nativity pageants in public schools are a far cry from the dangers of a Shiite (or Sunni) theocracy in Iraq. Perhaps. But the lesson of history is that when a majority uses the government to promote the majority religion, conflict and oppression inevitably follow. That brings me to the most disturbing finding of the First Amendment Center poll: 28% of Americans believe that "freedom to worship as one chooses" was never meant to apply to religious groups that the majority of the people consider "extreme or on the fringe." At various times in our history, that would have meant no religious freedom for Baptists, Roman Catholics or Mormon. Today it would deny liberty to any number of small or unpopular religious groups. Fortunately, our founders understood that the great danger of majority rule is majority denial of fundamental human rights. That's why they wisely put some rights - religious liberty first among them - beyond the reach of majority vote. The U. S. is not now and never has been a Christian nation in any official or legal sense of the term. It is precisely because we live in a secular democracy with First Amendment protections that Christians - and people of all faiths - have more freedom to practice their religion here than anywhere else on Earth.

Charles C. Haynes is senior scholar at the First Amendment Center, 1101 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, VA 22209
Web address: freedomforum.org

Bushinomics

2008-01-22T18:36:00.000-06:00

Well Bushinomic, tax cuts, easy credit, deficits and needless war are really starting to kick in now eh? That big surplus Bill Clinton gifted to "w" could come in handy today. Yes, this is the rainy day he and Al Gore were talking about saving for in 2000. I remember all the right-wingers a few years ago railing about how we should be allowed to play the stock market with our social security funds. How would you like to be retiring now that the market and your 401 portfolio has tanked? The stock market is about right where it was when George came into office in 2001. Do you feel confident that he has things under control? As much as he did during Katrina and Iraq? Mitch McConnell republicans and "w"s actions or inaction on budgetary problems and debt over the last seven years has manifested itself and those least able to swim the strong negative current will be the ones to suffer. Their answer; borrow billions of dollars more from China, add it to the national debt and give money away to the public in order to stimulate spending. That's the kind of economic brain power that got us into this situation. I doubt the wealthiest 10% that received the majority of the first needless tax cuts are going to be filing Chapter 13 too often in the coming months so don't shed too many tears for them. Bill Clinton inherited papa Bush's recession and he had the dicipline to pay off the Reagan/Bush deficits and balance the budget. Even during Clinton's internet bubble bust the overall economy was strong enough to withstand a recession. Now with "w" in charge we are looking at the second recession in as many terms and this one looks like a fatal one for many average people. Most working people's bubble bust every time they make a house payment, go to the doctor or grocery and fill up their vehicles at the gas pump. January 20, 2009 won't come any too soon for most people. Read my lips. Bring it on!

Ethics

2008-01-02T16:54:00.001-06:00

What’s the deal with Chinese business ethics? When one of their CEO’s is caught using cheap or dangerous materials to increase the profit line he commits suicide to show his regret and shame. When an American CEO is caught doing the same he bails out with his multi-million dollar golden parachute onto the isle of pleasure and entitlement. No need for shame. That is capitalism in its finest and most brazen glory, American style. Yeah I know environmental issues aren’t as important or critical to Chinese companies as they are to U.S. companies but don’t you just wish that our industrial leaders would take these problems as seriously as the Chinese toy maker that used lead paint on all the cheap imports to America.

But is it really that big a deal? I mean come on. I was raised on lead paint and lead gas and PCB’s and look at me now. Case closed. I remember playing with mercury and coating pennies with it. My buddies and I would take a hammer to a ball of mercury and wham it exploded everywhere. Cool eh? We thought so but that was before we knew the danger of it. If our country really wanted to get serious about environmental or white-collar crime all they would need to do is model themselves after the Chinese. If the CEO’s wouldn’t voluntarily do the deed then we would give them the rope or gun and force them to either donate all their ill-gotten cash to Michael Moore’s favorite liberal cause or eliminate their vile values from this world.

Now you say, “why so mean?” Hell to me would be an unending dream of listening to a repeating “w” speech about compassionate conservatism and not being able to wake up or run away. I’m against capital punishment but optional suicide is OK for these low life environmental criminal capitalists.

Right-Wing Huckabee Attacks

2008-01-02T11:13:00.000-06:00

I find it hilarious watching and listening to right-wing talk show hosts going after Rev. Mike Huckabee. They despise the fact that a backwoods Arkansas preacher is beating their party’s ordained corporate candidates. What a threat he is to the real conservatives in the repu party. Could it be the fact that Huckabee isn’t owned and controlled by corporations and big oil? Republicans have spent decades bribing right-wing evangelicals with issues on gays, abortion, evolution and prayer in school but never seem to come through on these issues. Republicans lose their grip on church-goers like Huckabee and his followers when they realize their real focus is on corporations and wealthy donors. Republicans use and abuse evangelicals to gain votes then ignore them. But the real heart of the party is money, war, corporations, cash, and more money. Unless Rev. Huckabee proves he will cow tow to the money changers in the corporate Republican Temple he doesn’t have a chance at the nomination. They will destroy him, which they have already started doing in the media. Just listen to rush and his right-wing corporate mouthpieces demonize Huckabee. Selling your religious soul to the Republicans runs you in the ditch. Then you marry them and life is never the same.

Secure?

2007-12-31T18:43:00.000-06:00

According to "w" the Iraq war was supposed to make things better in the Muslim world. After five tragic years of incompetent leadership from this administration the consequences are clear. Pakistan is a nation already coping with a rising terrorist threat and this increased instability only makes the whole area much more dangerous.
Al Qaeda and President Musharraf himself have been blamed for Bhutto's assasination. Regardless, what has transpired is a victory for Osama bin Laden, who called Bhutto a US political puppet. And who stands to gain the most from this unrest in Pakistan? That's right, Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Pakistan has nuclear weapons and would be the grand price Bin Laden has worked for all along. While "w" and Cheney have bankrupted our treasury and depleted our military with the needless illgotten Iraq war they have taken their eye off the real target. No, it's not Iran. It wasn't Iraq or Saddam. It is the nuclear weapons in Pakistan. We have known all along that Bin Laden was hiding on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan but our president has been so distracted in Iraq he has done nothing relative to finding Bin Laden. Now are we any better off seven years after 911? You decide. We have wasted our nations blood and treasure on a fools errand in the sands of Iraq and are worse off for having done it. Let's just pray that the next president has the intellegence and wisdom to conduct our country's security in a more sane and logical manner.

Faith Requires Freedom

2007-12-09T15:26:00.000-06:00

As much as our country’s founders abhorred any religious tests for public office, some presidential aspirants today are so pretentious in their Bible thumping ostentatious piety they have become obnoxious. Huckabee is so over the top that he truly believes his recent popularity in Iowa is an act of God. He has played the Jesus card to perfection just like “w” did. He has manipulated his evangelical Baptist bigot klan of Iowa into believing that Romney’s Church is a satanic cult. That is what it has come to in the republican party of today and now Romney is trying to out-Jesus Huckabee. We have seen the destruction inflicted on America and the world as a result of a dogmatic president who believes he was divinely chosen and that God urged him to start a war. Romney states that “freedom requires religion” but completely ignores the bloody history of his own Church being deprived of freedom and their lives at the hand of other American religious zealots. His statement is so patently false it doesn’t deserve refutation. Those countries that have separation of Church and State have the strongest organized religions. Why would we want to return to the religious repression of centuries ago? If Romney is going to attack humanists and secularists as “wrong,” then let him explain why they were so far ahead of his Church on the great moral questions of the last half century. They said God had cursed the world’s dark skin people and rejected the civil rights movement up until they were just recently forced to accept blacks as equals and allow them in their Church. Let Huckabee explain why he rejects evolution, believes the planet is less than 10,000 years old, and how that might influence his science policies as president. Would he apply the harsh Old Testament punishments for homosexuality and adultery?

These politicians often complain about the religious intolerance of secular liberals. But the truth is liberals have been far more tolerant of religious believers in office. They elected John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and now have Harry Reid, Senate majority leader which makes him the highest ranking Mormon officeholder in American history. I can’t see any prejudice about Reid’s religion. A secular society like ours doesn’t imply disrespect to religion. Our Constitution guarantees religious freedom through the establishment clause of the 1st Amendment which is the basis of the Separation of Church and State. But when candidates like Huckabee and Romney try to redefine it by claiming their faith gives them preeminence to power then someone needs to speak up.

FEAR!

2007-11-21T11:50:00.000-06:00

What is it about right-wingers that make them so fearful? They are always fearful of 911 and Communists, fearful of Muslims, fearful of atheists, fearful of a few hundred terrorists, fearful of Al Qaeda, fearful of gays, fearful of evolution and objective science, fearful of liberal veterans, fearful of anti-gun policemen and fearful of powerful women politicians as well as other assorted boogie men found around the world. Talk about paranoid. 911! Have they been smoking some of those funny smelling cigarettes? Why are they so afraid? Are they just cowards or truly intimidated by anyone with different opinions? Why do they always have to cling to a bogus enemy they can demonize? Are they so insecure in themselves and their cause that they have to have a nemesis to campaign against or blame for all the world’s problems? Boo 911! They are threatened by imaginary things like a war on Christmas, evil secular humanists, or attacks on marriage and family.

With another national election on the horizon I wonder what new threatening neurosis will overcome right-wingers. Watch Out 911! Could it be illegal Mexican immigrants or maybe gays again but more than likely the vast left wing conspiracy of smart women politicians and of course 911? Now that is a real threat to chicken hawk tough guys who have messed this country up in every possible way due to their stupid “bring it on” and “mission accomplished” attitude. There never seems to be a shortage of scary political monsters to frighten right-wingers into following a fear-mongering pied piper down the road to needless war, rendition, torture and the extinction of Constitutional guarantees. I just hope reasonable people see beyond the hate, fear, 911 and paranoia this time around.

I spoke to rush

2007-10-06T12:22:00.000-05:00

Yesterday at 12:22 I got through on Rush’s program I told him he was just whining because dems were playing the same game he has been for the last twenty years and he couldn’t handle it. Rush quickly talked over me, muted me and then hung up on me because he knew I was telling the truth. He tells only one side of the story and distorts what others say to present his lies and unbalanced propaganda. Poor wittle wush, ebwybody is picking on him. Even his pathetic little Congressional republican lap-boys were coming to his rescue to defend him because he had been caught in one of his own traps by slandering soldiers and generals as being treasonous or as phony soldiers. It’s ironic that chicken-hawk clowns, log-cabin republican perverts and drug addicts like Rush, Larry Craig and so many other right-wingers who have never worn the uniform will attack and accuse lifelong military personnel of being unpatriotic just because they disagree with this administration on their inept management of the war in Iraq.

General Wesley Clark criticized Rush because he attacked a brave Iraq war veteran’s criticism of “w” so Rush goes on his program and distorts the issue by saying Clark and liberals want to sensor him and remove his radio program from the public airwaves. He says that Clark didn’t even understand the Constitution and Rush’s right to free speech. Well as usual Rush was only telling a fraction of the truth. Clark and some Congressmen were saying that Rush should not be allowed to go on “the Armed Forces network” which is broadcast to the military overseas. He daily spouts his partisan lies and ispromoted by taxpayer money. The Armed Forces network is a government run network and as such should not be a partisan political arm of any party. They have many right-wing programs that day after day only represent one side of the political dialog. Why should our diverse military have to listen to only one side of the issues? It’s a stacked deck on it should not be allowed especially when right-wingers like Rush and Hannity consistently accuse democrat military men of being unpatriotic, treasonous and phony soldiers. Rush can say what ever he wants on his public network but don’t expect the government to endorse his one sided political views. Talk radio is one sided enough. They don’t need any more assistance from the government. Radio stations are owned by private corporations who have a political agenda to advance their right-wing views. Public air wave radio frequencies should represent the full spectrum of political thought since they are public airwaves. With the president having approval ratings in the twenties and obstructionist Congressional republicans having approval ratings at 11% I don’t think right-wing republican radio really represents the full public view of issues. The public air waves need to be taken back by the American people so they can reflect all the people and not just a small right-wing faction.

What started all this was the testimony of Gen. Petraeus to Congress last month on the status of the surge. President bush didn’t have the courage to go to Congress to defend his pathetic war plans so he sent a military general to be his political pawn hoping that Congress would not demand accountability and truth from a military man. “w” doesn’t have the courage to face the Congress and American people himself to account for this disaster so he sacrificed General Petraeus. That is the action of a coward and bush deserves to be criticized for that. The White House wrote the distorted report and General Petreaus did betray the public by trying to pass it off as truth and an accurate reflection of the situation in Iraq but he should never have been required to do what the president is responsible for doing. But that is typical of how this cowardly administration works.

I really go a kick out of "w" this week. In the last six years when Congress was controlled by Republicans and "w" was in the white house their deficit spending has destroyed the federal budget and sunk the national debt into depths unseen before so now since the Dems have taken control of Congress "w" wants to give the appearence that he is fically responsible. What a joke. The hole he has put us in will take a decade or more to dig out of and that is if we can get out of Iraq withing the next two years. Well, in order to try and prove how he wants to cut back on spending what does he choose to veto? The Children's medical insurance plan of course. Not something important like tax cuts for corporations, the top 1% of the wealthiest citizens or 10 more years of unneccessary war. Oh no, Insurance for children. Who needs that? It's such a wasteful and useless program. To add insult to injury bush lies about what the bill provides. Just like rush and many other right-wingers "w" tells half truths and then makes up the rest. He said the bill provides for children's insurance assistance for families that make up to $82,000.00 per year. That is a flat out complete lie. This bill had been written by the majority democrats in Congress and then altered by republicans to accommodate their and "w"s particular concerns. Everyone had contributed to it's creation and a consensus was reached then "w" wants to pull a reverse and veto it to prove his concern for deficites. This guy is a pathetic excuse for a leader or representative of America. The end of his term can not come too soon. He is a disgrace and a moral degenerate.

Get fooled again?

2007-09-24T16:55:00.000-05:00

Recently another in a long line of illogical, grossly biased and distorted political observations was submitted by a local right-wing partisan. He claimed that Democrats were the party of more government imposed on people’s lives but ignored the reality that today his party is the one guilty of exactly that. He must be living in the past of his sheltered existence or having substance induced flashbacks from the 70’s. This is 2007 and the present republican party is not the responsible Eisenhower GOP of the mid 1950’s. Barry Goldwater wouldn’t recognize what the GOP has deteriorated into today. My critic claimed that Rove should be praised for all his vicious “end justifies the means” political victories but failed to acknowledge that his dirty tricks and unethical tactics resulted in republican’s loosing both houses of congress and bush with the lowest approval ratings in modern history. If that is success I think I will pass. Rove is the chicken hawk who masterminded the defeat of triple amputee Viet Nam veteran (Max Cleland) and other honorable veterans by comparing him to Bin Laden. That’s typical of Rove’s character and he made a career with “w” of just that type of campaigning. Why not lump all democrats in with Al Qaeda and demonize all of them as enemies of America? That’s classic right-wing pathetic logic and people are wising up to it.
In case my critic wasn’t aware of it Congress is made up of 535 different members and there is only one president. Most reasonable people know the republicans are the obstructionists who are preventing dems from ending the war and balancing the budget. It’s apples and oranges. One can not compare approval ratings between those two but Bill Clinton had double the approval rating of bush even during his trumped up impeachment. It’s ironic that the so-called “conservative” Republican party of today, is the one that brought us the largest deficits in history, the most irresponsible out of control spending ever seen, misleading the country into a war we did not want or need, and endless government intervention into citizen’s private / religious lives and personal medical decisions (Terry Shiavo and many faith based initiatives as examples).
In six short years Bush and the Republican’s have created the largest government bureaucracy and debt in the history of this nation. Fact! They preach one thing and do the complete opposite just like many of their hypocritical sexually-perverted family-values leaders. What is it about right-wingers that make them think they can tell others how to live but can’t even live up to their own pathetic rantings? I for one am tired of their hypocrisy and self-righteousness. They need to stay out of other people’s business and stop claiming to be holier than thou. They have whined for generations that the media is biased against them so they start their foreign owned Fox media and have talk shows that are nothing but one-sided propaganda then smear any veteran who speaks against this administration and war as phony soldiers. Fox pundits and Rush claim that certain anti-war generals are treasonous to their country because they oppose our incompetent political efforts in Iraq. These right-wing media clowns have never worn the uniform. Who are they to criticize these generals?
Why should anyone believe anything right-wingers have to say? They have no credibility. Read Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan’s recent book about the lack of integrity of bush and the right-wing republican Congress’s budgetary / fiscal policies. He knows first-hand how irresponsible they were with taxpayer’s money during w’s tenure. Is it any wonder the country is in the mess it is in today? They can’t manage their own finances or morals so why should the American people trust them with managing the government? They have proven their incompetence and it knows no bounds. It will be a long time before the public will trust them again. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice; duh, I won’t get fooled again.

Tell the truth

2007-09-04T10:23:00.000-05:00

What is it about right-wingers that make them such hypocrites when it comes to certain issues? They spent years entrapping and impeaching Clinton for a consensual private affair but when it comes to their own affairs, gay or straight, they can’t handle the truth. How many right-wing republican family values preachers and politicians have been exposed for their own deviant behavior in the last ten years? It’s one thing to be guilty of this type of activity but it’s entirely another to be doing these things and at the same time campaigning, preaching and making careers railing against it. These politicians make law for 300 million U.S. citizens but can’t seem to come to terms with the fact that they are legislating against the reality of their own sex lives. A psychologist would tell you that it is based on self-hating, compensation and rationalization. How many of these right-wing hypocrites will continue to hide behind their own homophobic feelings by acting out against those who are open and honest about their sexuality? It explains why so many right-wingers are hate-filled against those that are just like themselves. This also explains why so many right-wingers profess to be super patriots but when it came time for them to serve in the military they became cowardly chicken-hawks. They are the first to condemn those against needless war but won’t act on their own convictions. Be careful around those who demonize gays or peacemakers and want to legislate against them. They are usually the very ones that are gay, cowardly or cheating on their wives themselves. Not that there is anything wrong with being gay. It’s not about the sex. It’s about the hypocrisy. The sooner they can be honest about themselves they can serve us in an honest way. When confronted with the reality of the hypocrisy of many in their own party most right-wingers ignore it and just attack Clinton as if what he did justifies anything their party does. How pathetically hypocritical is that? It’s the tactic of losers. They deserve to lose because of the blind hatred they have of their own sinful self. Until they can come to terms with that they don’t deserve to represent an honest and just public. Make log-cabin republicans proud. Tell the truth!

Prince of Darkness - Rove or Cheney? You decide

2007-08-14T12:11:00.000-05:00

Good Riddance Karl, king of republican chicken-hawk hypocrisy. Hear ye, Hear ye; Lock your doors because Rove will be out prowling the streets of America rather than the bowels of the White House underground bunker soon. It’s like a rat leaving a sinking ship. He couldn’t do any more damage to his party or country if he tried so why not leave before it all comes falling down. Bin Laden still at large; the largest deficit in history; lost both houses of Congress; treating the Constitution as toilet paper; making Christian republican’s ignore what Jesus taught when it came time for politics; President’s popularity lower than Nixon’s and his party in shambles. Mission accomplished I’d say. Much more of this and “w” couldn’t run for mayor of Crawford, Texas. This man along with Cheney, trumped the tragedy of 911 by convincing “w” to politicize and divide America rather than bring us together. He is finally cutting and running out on his failed dream of right-wing dictatorial utopia. So much for the “I’m a uniter not a divider” theme; He claimed that democrats were the enemy of America because they believed in the Constitution rather than Rove’s perverted view of unchallenged one-party rule. Only a degenerate could plot such a wicked political strategy as using a pre-emptive war against a nation that did nothing to us, for partisan purposes. After all war always works to stifle critics of a “wartime president” doesn’t it? Sulfuric acid can not wash the blood of countless Iraqis and Americans from their hands. Rove has narrowly avoided jail numerous times but I’m not worried. Even if he is indicted by a Grand Jury and convicted by his peers “w” will pardon him just as he did his other amoral enabler, Libby. The only question I have is since he is out of a job does this mean he will lose his health insurance?

Stronger government equals more freedom

2007-08-10T14:07:00.000-05:00

We interrupt today's edition of "As the Markets Fall" to savor a meditation on libertarianism by Harvard economist Dani Rodrik.

Since his debut as a blogger in April, Rodrik has established himself as one of true stars of the econoblogosphere: thoughtful, consistent and dogged in his determination to explain how he sees the world. But his belief that government can successfully intervene in an economy to assist development has made him a popular target for the libertarians who have long dominated Internet-mediated economic discourse.

So what are the deeper lessons? First, I am not as unconventional as I sometimes think I am. The real revolutionaries here are the libertarians. They envisage a real good world out there that looks like nothing we have now (or have ever had), and they want us to get there. Second, there are really deep philosophical differences here that have nothing to do with economics per se. Most importantly, I believe government can be a force for good; they do not. But third, libertarians hold on to their priors so strongly that they seem impervious to evidence. They shrug off the fact that there is more freedom and more wealth in those parts of the world where the government is stronger, not weaker. With respect to industrial policy proper, they refuse to engage with the fact that every nation that has grown rapidly has made use of it.

In this spirit, I would like to pose a question to any libertarians who are reading this. The big economic news so far this morning is that the Federal Reserve has announced it stands ready to inject as much "liquidity" into the banking system as necessary to keep markets from complete paralysis. The European Central Bank has been behaving similarly, as is Japan. What do libertarians think of central bank interventions of such a sort? The markets made their bed with risk. Shouldn't they pay the consequences?

-- Andrew Leonard

Shouted Down

2007-08-10T09:30:00.000-05:00

Recently three right-wing evangelicals started shouting down guest Hindu Chaplain Rajan Zed, as he began his opening Congressional prayer in the U. S. Capital. Religious figures from various Christian faiths have said the prayer in the past. Barry Lynn, executive director of religious watchdog group Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the protest showed the intolerance of the "religious right." They only want religious liberty and political favoritism for their particular beliefs. Our Constitution guarantees religious freedom for "all" religions but some right-wing groups don't actually believe this. They think Christianity is the only religion that qualifies under our Constitution. Religious prayers of any kind should not be given in our secular government but as long as one religion is allowed then all should be allowed. This is the reason the concept of separation of Church and state was created. The government should not be in the business of promoting any particular religion because it causes prejudice and anger between one religion and another. Could there be a better example than this? Tolerance is fundamental to our form of government. All people and their various religions are equal in the eyes of our constitution. When that principal falls so does our freedom.

Serious

2007-07-26T14:37:00.000-05:00

So called "Serious" People in the Beltway have given this country George Bush, Dick Cheney, the invasion of Iraq, ongoing support for the four-year occupation with no end in sight, a public that overwhelmingly believed that Saddam planned the 9/11 attacks, a complete assault on our Constitution with barely a peep of protest, a chronically lawbreaking government with no consequences, virtually absolute government secrecy, the collapse of America's moral standing around the world, and a new war with Iran that is just a small provocation away. Beltway Seriousness, know thee by the fruits you bear.

Freedom of Religion only for Christians

2007-07-16T07:29:00.000-05:00

Three people were arrested in the Senate visitor’s gallery Thursday for disrupting the chamber’s morning prayer, led for the first time by a Hindu clergyman.

As Rajan Zed, director of interfaith relations at a Hindu temple in Nevada, began to lead the brief prayer, two women and one man shouted, “This is an abomination,” according to the Associated Press.

Capitol Police Sergeant Kimberly Schneider tells CNN that the three were arrested in the Senate visitors’ gallery for “disruption of Congress.”

While their religion is not clear, one of the protesters told the Associated Press they were “Christians and patriots.”

On their Web site this week, the American Family Association criticized allowing a Hindu clergyman to deliver the prayer and urged supporters to call senators to ask the event be canceled.

But Tim Wildmon, the president of the American Family Association, told CNN he did not know the names of the people arrested, and said, “We didn’t organize or encourage anything like that.”

“We would not ever encourage shouting in the gallery like that, we asked people to contact their senators to show their disapproval,” he added.

Shortly after the incident, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on the floor, “If people have any misunderstanding about Indians and Hindus, all they have to do is think of Gandhi… who gave his life for peace.”

It was the first time the daily prayer that opens Senate proceedings was said by a Hindu chaplain.

Capitol police said two women and one man were arrested and charged with causing a disruption in the public gallery of the Senate. The three started shouting when guest Chaplain Rajan Zed, a Hindu from Nevada, began his prayer.

Religious figures from various faiths have said the prayer, which is normally recited by a Christian chaplain.

Barry Lynn, executive director of religious watchdog group Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the protest showed the intolerance of the "religious right."

"I don't think the Senate should open with prayers, but if it's going to happen, the invocations ought to reflect the diversity of the American people," Lynn said in a statement.

Zip It!

2007-07-10T10:23:00.000-05:00

Another Republican can’t keep his zipper zipped -
Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t much care what Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) does in his personal life. What he does in his bedroom is his business. But these aren’t quite normal circumstances.... The reason this is noteworthy has very little to do with a powerful politician carrying on extra-marital affairs, and everything to do with Vitter holding himself out as a virtuous family man, entitled to lecture those he deems immoral about “family values.” Stupidity is one thing; hypocrisy is another.

Accountable?

2007-07-03T12:21:00.000-05:00

People like Libby, Bush, Cheney and most other right-wingers don't go to prison and they don't go to the battlefield to shed blood. They are not answerable to anyone for anything, even treason. They are above the law. Did you hear that Paris? Eat your heart out. Join the GOP and you will get a "get out of jail free pass"

Pardon?

2007-07-03T12:10:00.001-05:00

If only Karla Faye Tucker had been a right-winger maybe "w" would have commuted her sentence. At least she was contrite and regretful for her crimes.

The Elite

2007-07-03T11:57:00.001-05:00

The political elite have a way of taking care of themselves. Just ask convicted felon, Libby Lewis. Cronyism anyone? Just one of over a thousand pardons and commutations "w" has given to his pals. Bush didn't even follow his own sentencing and pardoning guidelines for Libby. The full pardon will come in the not so distant future. If you are one of the right-wing choosen few there is nothing anyone can do to you just like all the Iran-Contra felons that were pardoned by Bush I for the crimes they committed with Reagan. Typical right-winger hypocrisy.

Short Memory

2007-07-02T11:29:00.000-05:00

What a short memory most right-wingers have. In the last six years they have dutifully protected their political sugar daddy, “George w” against all manner of criticism and accountability but now that his policies are coming home to roost they want to disclaim him. Any objective person could see years ago that he was the antithesis of a small government conservative. He has created a government bureaucracy and budget that would even cause Ted Kennedy to blush. He and Cheney ignore the foundations of the U.S. Constitution and are practicing unitary rule with no limits or oversight by any other supposedly equal branch of government. They have started an unprovoked and illegal war, ignored habeous corpus, stripped any independence from all government agencies, generated endless spending and debt, created huge government entitlement programs and thumbed their noses at anyone who dares to challenge them. Can you imagine if Clinton had tried to do any of these things while he was in office? But of course Clinton answered to a Republican Congress and there were checks and balances. Not until this year has Bush had any part of government not under his direct control. He rubber stamped every busted budget that his Republican Congress gave him and yet complains that spending is out of control. He created a new co-president position and Cheney is accountable to no one. He is more liberal in his actions than anyone since FDR. As any liberal dictator would do he vowed to see all his immigration critics at the signing of his new amnesty for alien’s bill but that hasn’t turned out so well for him. As he did with his prescription and energy bills he tried bribing as many republican congressmen as he could to get the bill pasted but his paranoid xenophobic ditto head supporters nixed the deal. Immigration is a hypocritical issue. People want cheap fruit, vegetables, lawn care, housekeeping and all other manner of grunt work but they don’t want to acknowledge those who do it. If U.S. citizens and employers were imprisoned for hiring illegal’s there would be no problem but we want it both ways and that is where reality meets “w” in the crosshairs. He can approve Paris Hilton and tomato-pickers being imprisoned but Libby and Bin Laden are still free. Where is the outrage?

Hypocrite Giuliani

2007-06-29T07:14:00.000-05:00

Rudy can fail
With his poll numbers sinking, Giuliani is blaming Bill Clinton for doing nothing about Islamic terrorists. But what did the former mayor do?
By Joe Conason
June 29, 2007 Rudolph Giuliani probably possesses many fine attributes, but originality isn't one of them. Stung by the revelation that James Baker III had essentially booted him off the Iraq Study Group because the New York mayor was too busy giving lucrative speeches to bother attending the group's sessions, he deployed a familiar Republican diversion.
He blamed Bill Clinton for 9/11.
With Giuliani's poll numbers declining and his front-runner status threatened by former Sen. Fred Thompson, he can't be blamed for wanting to change the subject, and his preferred topic is always 9/11, which allows him to remind everyone of his finest hour and to pose as the nation's potential savior in 2008. Speaking at Pat Robertson's Regent University June 26 -- where he also continued his servile pandering to the religious right -- Giuliani accused the former president of failing to confront the threat from Islamist terrorism, dating all the way back to the first bombing of the World Trade Center in February 1993.
"Islamic terrorists killed more than 500 Americans before Sept. 11," he intoned. "Many people think the first attack on America was on Sept. 11, 2001. It was not. It was in 1993 ... The United States government, then President Clinton, did not respond. Bin Laden declared war on us, [but] we didn't hear it." He went on to accuse all of the Democratic presidential candidates of being "in denial" about terrorism and wanting to "put the country in reverse to the 1990s." Democrats, he warned, "can't face this threat. They couldn't in the 1990s."
Now that belligerently partisan speech struck some reporters as a big contrast with remarks Giuliani made last September, when he piously urged everyone to refrain from blaming either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush for the 9/11 attacks. But as close observers of the former mayor can attest, what he really meant was that nobody else should place blame for 9/11 on Clinton. He reserved that privilege for himself, since he is, according to his own description, the man who knows more about the threat of terrorism than anyone else.
But let's forget Giuliani's hypocrisy and arrogance for a moment and simply dissect this specimen of demagogy lie by lie. It's a useful exercise, because we are sure to hear much more of the same from him before this campaign is over.
What does Giuliani mean when he says that President Clinton "did not respond" to the first bombing of the World Trade Center? At the time, there was no evidence linking Osama bin Laden, then still a fairly obscure Saudi millionaire, and al-Qaida scarcely existed. Former CIA director James Woolsey has said that the earliest inkling of any connection between bin Laden and the 1993 bombing came two years later. Until the FBI investigation resulted in the indictments of Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and his network, nobody knew for certain whether a terrorist group or a foreign state was responsible for the '93 attack.
So Clinton didn't "respond" by launching missiles or sending special forces because there was no proven target for that kind of military action. As a leading authority on terrorism, Giuliani ought to be aware of those very basic historical realities. But by saying that the Democrats couldn't face the threat of terrorism in the 1990s, he is suggesting that Clinton did nothing as president to confront Islamist violence. Not only is that implication false, but it turns a decade's history backward. Whenever Clinton behaved resolutely abroad, it was the Republicans who sought to weaken him -- and the United States -- with partisan assaults on his foreign and security policies.
When Clinton tried to sustain the U.S. mission in Somalia, for instance, Senate Republicans (including John McCain) cut off funding and demanded retreat. When Clinton struck al-Qaida installations in Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998, those same Republicans and their media allies complained that his actions were merely a "wag the dog" distraction from impeachment -- and later whined that he hadn't done enough to get bin Laden. Later still, they stopped worrying about bin Laden when the Bush administration decided to essentially give up on apprehending or killing the al-Qaida leader. That includes Giuliani, incidentally, who has never demanded that his friend Bush live up to the promise to get the terrorist chief "dead or alive."
The list of Clinton's actions against terrorism and specifically against al-Qaida is long; the list of his efforts to prepare domestically against a terrorist attack is even longer. He and his aides tried to warn the incoming Bush administration about al-Qaida's plans to attack the United States, but they were brushed aside, as were the study group led by former Sens. Gary Hart and Warren Rudman; Bush's own counterterrorism director, Richard Clarke; and CIA chief George Tenet.
As for Giuliani, what did he do after the '93 bombing? In their reporting for "Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11," journalists Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins went to great lengths to find out. The answer, they discovered, was that he did nothing. And he said nothing. After he was elected mayor later that year, he still did and said nothing about terrorism, a pattern of inaction and inattention that continued for years, even as the trials of the bombing perpetrators went on in his city -- and even as federal investigators uncovered terrorist plots to blow up the Hudson River tunnels and other major New York City targets.
Eventually, as Barrett and Collins reveal in their stunning book, Giuliani made a series of foolish, self-serving mayoral decisions that exacerbated the damage and deaths caused by the terrorists on 9/11. More recently, his stupidity and vanity almost led to the appointment of an unqualified felon named Bernard Kerik as America's secretary of homeland security.
It is Giuliani, not Clinton, who has the most to fear from an honest examination of what happened in 1993 and its aftermath. His presidential candidacy will implode on the day that Americans finally grasp the full truth about his performance as mayor.

Red State Update

2007-06-26T07:39:00.000-05:00

Now I know where all my critics get their pathetic information. Check out the "Red State Update" It is exactly the same propaganda that they try to push off on the public. It all makes sense now. These red-necks crack me up.

Great New Book and Web Sites

2007-06-13T09:18:00.000-05:00

Check these out:

http://www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org/

http://mainstreambaptist.blogspot.com/

http://www.au.org/site/PageServer

American? I don't think so.

2007-06-11T14:45:00.000-05:00

Calling yourself an American doesn’t make you an American any more than being born to Christian parents and claiming to be Christian. Biblical fundamentalists who place Old Testament law over Christ’s teachings aren’t necessarily Christian. They are frauds. If a person claims to be an American just because they were born in this country yet doesn’t believe in the Constitution and the spirit of our founder’s intent then they shouldn’t be called American; much less a patriot. Those who advocate torture, needless war, domestic spying, anti-immigration discrimination, unlimited weapons possession, the abolition of habeous corpus, and theocratic rule are the antithesis of a Constitutional American Patriot. Where do right-wingers stand relative to these issues? Do they deserve to be called Americans? What would our founders say? We need to reassess what is truly patriotic in this country. In today’s right-wing Fox America those who advocate taking Constitutional rights away from citizens are the ones who claim to be the patriots. They even have the nerve to suggest that those in the ACLU who represent and adhere to the Constitution are un-American. This country was founded on the Constitution and laws, not demagogic politicians and radio talk-show frauds. Those who claim otherwise are not true Americans. Don’t let right-wingers threaten and intimidate you into believing the Constitution is not relevant today. It is still as fundamental to our democracy as it was the day it was signed. Recent Federal court rulings nullifying most Bush unconstitutional actions confirm just how contemptuous this administration is of our Constitution. The public is starting to see through their web of lies about so-called unlimited executive powers. The military and all political officials swear to uphold the Constitution. Is it too much to ask for this administration to do the same? When right-wingers in this administration reject the Constitution they reject what America was founded on and they mock the soldiers that died defending it. Fireworks, car decals and flag waving are no substitute for Constitutional allegiance.

Tag-team

2007-06-11T08:16:00.001-05:00

To my local right-wing tag team critics I say, "Can't we all just get along?" I didn't address any comments in my recent letter to them but they seem to feel as though they are the defenders of the Fox propaganda machine so they respond like Pavlov's dog. Here is an idea I think we can all agree on regardless of political affiliation. In order to fulfill my bleeding-heart do-gooder liberal instincts to make the world a better place for all, I propose that we require all bathroom doors be installed swinging out so that you don't have to touch the bacterial laden handle as you leave. This one simple action will improve world-wide hygiene and very likely cut down on viruses passed on from one conservative to the next. I know the impact of this one simple change won't be as great as global warming science but at least it may help cut down on noxious green house gases eminating from right-wingers at their fair and balanced "stink tanks." Now how could a "fair and balanced" American find any fault in that?

Response to Right-winger attacks in local paper

2007-06-09T16:36:00.000-05:00

As usual my right-wing sycophant friends ignore facts and seem to be full of hot green-house gases. They rail about how "liberals" such as myself don't give any credit to this administration. Well that is exactly what I did. I gave them credit for creating the largest deficit in history just like Reagan did and for destroying the surplus and excellent financial condition the country was in when "w" came into office. I gave them credit for starting an unprovoked war against a nation that did nothing to us and for not directing their military efforts at finding Bin Laden. I gave them credit for ignoring the energy problem and for not responding to the disaster of Katrina. I blame "w" and the republicans for doing nothing to help alleviate the energy crisis. They wouldn't even demand an improvement of gas mileage standards on new vehicles or seriously encourage alternative technologies for cars and trucks. Going to war to take over an oil rich giant is this administrations answer to the energy problem. The oil industry whines about no new refineries but there is nothing keeping them from building as many as they want in Mexico or the tax sheltered Halliburton corporation's Cayman Islands just like all the rest of U.S. corporations do with their industries. They want high demand and low supply in order to maximize profits. It is basic economics but when commodities are manipulated this way it is the government's responsibility to respond to mediate the problem. When your leadership is bought and paid for by the oil industry what do you expect? Industry writes all the laws under this administration. They have proven themselves incompetent in all areas of governance. There is no disputing these facts.

My point was that the Gleaner published a piece which virtually plagiarized the spin put out by the Republican National Committee under the guise of journalism. It was not objective, factual or accurate. For local gullible Fox News / O'Rielly / Dittohead propaganda sponges who swallow every word and lie told to them by the right-wing media I guess it was too much to expect they could accept facts as reality. Such is the way of the modern day right-wing conservative. Being intellectually honest is not one of their strong points.
Some naive right-wingers even believe this administration hasn't politicized every department's staff of career administrators. Just ask Bush's own "Monica" Goodling, of the Justice department, about how partisan the federal prosecutors positions were. Monica's dress is stained with the fluid of careers of many good and honest prosecutors as a result of what "w's" obscene carnal actions did to them. Their crime was that they weren't aggressive enough at falsely prosecuting democrats right before elections. When 80% of the population, including republicans, say our country is going in the wrong direction and we need a change you know it isn't just partisan politics. It's reality. Right-wingers need to face it.