Puke Watch

The Conservatives under Bush screwed you but you seem too blind to understand it.
Taxes are lower then they have been in many a year. How did you do during the Clinton years?

Well I am glad to hear you arent the jealous type (though your diatribe seemed to suggest otherwise),
so maybe you will stop talking about my money which you know ZERO about. Talk about
people "who have eyes on others" That certainly sounds like you with regard to me.

Sorry but you just dont see who has screwed you and the middle class for the last 10 years or more.
There will always be some hypocrites on the right and the left. No surprise there. i get angry about
those who refuse to pay their fair share. Most are Republican. One just has to witness the Republicans
refusal to cut ethanol subsidies, subsidies for hedge funders, subsidies for owners of private jets,
subsidies for oil companies, and tax cuts for those making extremeley high saleries who have made out extremely well of late.

The comment about seeing "shit" is just way off base. Sorry thats how you see me.

Have a good 4th of July weekend.

John Dean knows how to get rid of Clarence Thomas (but doesn't think it's going to happen)‏
John Dean

For good reason, there has been serious hand-wringing over what to do about the ethical lapses of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The fact that Supreme Court justices are exempt from the code of ethical conduct which applies to the rest of the federal judiciary; the problem of bringing a sitting justice before the Congress to question the conduct of a constitutional co-equal; the reality that justices cannot easily defend themselves against news media charges; the defiant, in-your-face posture of Thomas—the list goes on but it need not. There is clear precedent for how to deal with the justice. Thomas could be forced off the bench.

As the associate deputy attorney general in President Richard M. Nixon’s Department of Justice, I was there when Assistant Attorney General William Rehnquist outlined how to remove a Supreme Court justice who had engaged in conduct not quite as troublesome as that of Thomas. Rehnquist, of course, would later become chief justice of the United States. His memorandum providing the process for the Department of Justice to proceed against then Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas remains solid precedent and the way to deal with Clarence Thomas. But before looking at the solution, I should explain the problem.

To begin with, there is absolutely no question in my mind that Thomas lied his way onto the Supreme Court in 1991 when he deniedAnita Hill’s chargesthat he had sexually harassed her and some of his other subordinates. If anyone needs proof, please examine the reporting of Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, authors of “Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas,”which sets forth the case against Thomas with an abundance of clear and convincing evidence (not to mention the evidence corroborating Hill that Joe Biden, then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, withheld).

The way Thomas reached the court is important for two reasons. First, there was once a time when those sitting on our highest bench would never do anything to tarnish the court, and this factors into both his conduct and the chances of his removal. Secondly, Thomas’ deceit during his confirmation hearing has overshadowed all of his behavior since he arrived on the court.

Thomas fooled no one when he dissembled in 1991. Those who embrace his consistently radical conservative voting record often overlook how he arrived on the high court, and a few supporters and admirers even defend him by diminishing the significance of his persistently questionable behavior. Those who are unhappy with Thomas as a justice, not to mention his aggressive polarization of the court, find that he has simply lived down to his standards as a scoundrel and fabulist. No one is particularly surprised that his behavior as a justice just keeps sinking lower and lower, constantly reaching new bottoms. (For a catalog that samples Thomas’ failings, see The Reid Report.)

Many Supreme Court justices enjoy the company of well-off social friends. Few justices have significant wealth, and since their pay is so lowrelative to their stature, almost all live quite modestly. There is nothing wrong with justices having a few friends who can occasionally provide an especially pleasant social interlude while seeking nothing other than making life a bit more pleasant for these dedicated public servants. In fact, I have friends who socialize with justices. I can assure you they are all extremely sensitive to the nature of these relationships and would never exploit the friendships.

Thomas and his friends have no such compunctions. Maybe the way Thomas arrived on the court explains why he operates at the outer edges of court propriety, if not beyond. Maybe because he is held in such low esteem by so many on the bench and at the bar he simply does not care. As his book showed, he is a bitter man. The Washington Post notedthat he used his 2007 memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son,” to “settle scores,” while “scathingly condemning the media, the Democratic senators who opposed his nomination to the Supreme Court, and the ‘mob’ of liberal elites and activist groups that he says desecrated his life.” In short, he sees himself as a victim, so his actions may be his own private revenge. However, for those who have followed his career, as I have, it was not surprising to see the latest revelation in The New York Times, which reports again about Thomas’ “friendship” with Harlan Crow, a Dallas real estate magnate and big-time benefactor of conservative causes.

This relationship is deeply conflicted because Crow’s financial and political interests are frequently before the Supreme Court. Nonetheless, Crow continues to bestow endless gifts and favors on Thomas or fund matters of serious interest to the justice, such as giving Thomas a $19,000 Bible that once belonged to Frederick Douglass, donating $175,000 to finance a library project dedicated to Thomas in Savannah, Ga., and, as was recently revealed, providing not less than $2.8 million to acquire and preserve a crab and oyster cannery near Thomas’ childhood home in Pinpoint, Ga., a project that is operating under Thomas’ supervision.

One suspects this is but the tip of the iceberg because Thomas’ wife, Virginia (known as Ginni), is a Crow-funded conflict of interest with whom the justice literally sleeps. Ginni is not merely a foot-stomping, full-throated tea party activist, but she is a highly paid lobbyist. According to congressional information, in the past few years she has earned some $700,000 for her tea party work. In addition, Crow reportedly provided Ginni Thomas some $500,000 to start her tea party group, Liberty Central, which pays her so well. Ginni Thomas openly lobbies issues that have or will come before the Supreme Court, such as health care reform.

When 74 Democratic members of Congress requested that Justice Thomas disqualify himself from any ruling on the new health care reform law, which is making its way toward the Supreme Court thanks in part to the efforts of the tea party and Ginni Thomas to have that law ruled unconstitutional, he ignored the request. This is his standard operating procedure. Thomas simply is not troubled by those who are concerned that a justice and his wife directly and indirectly receive financial benefits from “a friend” with both financial and political interests before the court.

The question is what can be done about this problem. Early this year, U.S. Rep. Christopher Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, introduced the proposed Supreme Court Transparency and Disclosure Act of 2011 (H.R. 862). When introducing this legislation, which would extend to Supreme Court justices the code of professional conduct that applies to all other federal judges, Murphy cited the conflict of interest and political actions of Justice Clarence Thomas. Recently, the bill received a glimmer of press attention as a result of Thomas’ latest reported shenanigans, and the website Daily Kosis collecting signatures for a petition supporting Murphy’s proposal. In fact, the proposal in the GOP-controlled House of Representatives is the proverbial snowball in hell. Nothing is going to come of it, even if Daily Kos collects 100 million signatures. Plus, the proposal is laden with seriousconstitutional questions and problems. At the top of that list is the likelihood that the Supreme Court would declare it unconstitutional if it were adopted.

There is a way, nonetheless. As a young official in Nixon’s Department of Justice—and, I must admit, with some amazement—I watched a Republican Justice Department and a conservative attorney general go after a liberal Supreme Court justice with remarkable success. Robert Shogan, a former Los Angeles Times and Newsweek reporter, recounted much of the story in “A Question of Judgment: The Fortas Case and the Struggle for the Supreme Court.”I filled in a few missing pieces when I wrote “The Rehnquist Choice.”Rehnquist in those days was the head of the Office of Legal Counsel and prepared a detailed memorandum for Attorney General John Mitchell explaining how to undertake an action that had never before been done, namely for the Justice Department to start a criminal investigation of a sitting justice, not based on hard information but rather based mainly on speculation of a worst-case scenario, i.e., assuming gifts and favors were bribes.

With the Rehnquist memo in hand, Mitchell arranged a secret meeting with then Chief Justice Earl Warren, and told Warren that if Fortas did not resign from the court the Justice Department was going to launch an investigation of Fortas’ dealing with a financier, Louis Wolfson, then recently convicted of securities violations, because of Wolfson’s earlier gifts to his friend Fortas and Fortas’ wife. The case against Fortas was weak, yet Mitchell was more than bluffing. He was prepared to have a grand jury determine whether there was a fire amid the smell of smoke. When Fortas, a formidable legal mind, tested the bluff, Mitchell upped the stakes. He passed the word that he was going after Fortas’ wife, Carol Agger, a highly successful tax law specialist, as well as Fortas’ former law partner, Paul Porter. Mitchell said that he was considering reopening a grand jury proceeding that had cleared both Agger and Porter regarding a case disposed of years earlier. This, too, bordered on being a trumped-up charge, but an attorney general can make good on a bluff and actually convene a grand jury. That was not necessary. Rather than put his wife and former partner through the agony, or tarnish the court by the very fact of such a proceeding, Fortas resigned.

The parallels of the Thomas and Fortas behavior is striking. The recent New York Times article strongly suggests that Thomas has failed to file required annual financial statements. He has failed to do this in the past, claiming it an oversight. The line between gifts and bribes in these circumstances is as fine as a hair on a frog’s back. One suspects Thomas and his wife would not do well with close scrutiny. The Rehnquist memo, sitting in the files of the Office of Legal Counsel, provides the precedent to undertake such a federal investigation of both Clarence and Ginni Thomas. Does anyone who follows politics not believe that if the situations were reversed and Republicans found one of the Democrats on the Supreme Court engaging in similar behavior they would not employ the Fortas option? Of course they would.

There are two problems with this strategy. First, the Democrats would never do to Thomas what Republicans did to Fortas. For the Republicans, seats on the Supreme Court are worth whatever it takes to get them. They play hardball. For Democrats, well, they play beanbag over judicial appointments. Democrats are willing to toss a few stingers, but never do they truly want to hurt anyone. They cannot help it that they are nice people, and ruthlessness does not work for them. This is why a minority of Republicans in the United States can control the overwhelming majority of Democrats and independents who lean left.

Second problem, Thomas would fight to his last breath to keep his seat. He would claim the Fortas option was an attack on the court—for he already makes a similar claim when anyone is critical of his conduct. If Harlan Crow’s gifts and favors were given with a wink and nod, and in fact turned out to be bribes, and this could be proved to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, and Thomas were convicted, I believe that rather than resign he would demand an impeachment proceeding to remove him from the court. Unlike in the case of Abe Fortas, who had deep concern for the court, it is not difficult to believe that Clarence Thomas cares only about Clarence Thomas. There is also the reality that as long as Republicans control the House of Representatives there will never be an impeachment of Thomas. Should Democrats regain control of the House, well, Democrats don’t play hardball.

In short, nothing is going to happen to Clarence Thomas. No one is going to truly challenge his conduct, and he will sit on the Supreme Court until he feels like leaving.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/...homas_20110628

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John Dean has written a book, Conservatives Without Conscience, that I have read. The behavior of Thomas is another example of what kind of people tend to be conservatives.

Angry, self-righteous, defiant, authoritarian, indifferent to other points of view, intolerant and without empathy are a few of these characteristics. Democrats in this essay, as described by Dean, parallel what I have said about them; they are simply not built the same.

And that is the problem. No real opposition to the viciousness of conservatives. Their policies are not right for the country and polls show the majority of the country don't want them. But they win, not because of support, but because they are vicious and stop at nothing. John Dean has said it many times. Others have said too.

Believe it.

A startling number of white-power candidates are seeking public office. Eve Conant reports on their under-the-radar strategy and David Duke’s White House flirtation.

Add to the growing list of candidates considering a bid for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012 America’s most famous white-power advocate: David Duke.

A former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, member of the Louisiana House of Representatives and Republican executive-committee chairman in his district until 2000, Duke has a significant following online. His videos go viral. This month, he’s launching a tour of 25 states to explore how much support he can garner for a potential presidential bid. He hasn’t considered running for serious office since the early '90s, when he won nearly 40 percent of the vote in his bid for Louisiana governor. But like many “white civil rights advocates,” as he describes himself to The Daily Beast, 2012 is already shaping up to be a pivotal year.

Former (and current) Neo Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Confederates, and other representatives of the many wings of the “white nationalist” movement are starting to file paperwork and print campaign literature for offices large and small, pointing to rising unemployment, four years with an African-American president, and rampant illegal immigration as part of a growing mound of evidence that white people need to take a stand.

Most aren’t winning—not yet. But they’re drawing levels of support that surprise and alarm groups that keep tabs on the white-power movement (members prefer the terms “racial realist” or “white nationalist”). In May, the National Socialist Movement’s Jeff Hall hit national headlines in a bizarre tragedy: his murder, allegedly at the hands of his 10-year-old son. But before his death, he had campaigned for a low-level water board position in Riverside, California. The swastika-wearing plumber who patrolled the U.S. border paramilitary-style walked away with almost 30 percent of his community’s vote. “That’s a sizable amount of the vote for a person running openly as a Neo Nazi,” says Marilyn Mayo, co-director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. While Hall’s political future—and life—has been cut short, Mayo points out that we should expect more white supremacist hopefuls next year.

Mayo and others date the current spike to 2008, and the election of the country’s first African-American president (an historic marker accompanied by a surge in the percentage of U.S. children born to minorities in 2008—48 percent, compared to 37 percent in 1990). “The immediate reaction after Obama was elected was of rage. They feel if a black man can get elected to office, why can’t someone who represents white interests?” Just a few weeks after Obama’s election, Duke gathered followers in Memphis to expressly strategize what to do next. The solution? If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.


Billy Roper, at the White Heritage Days Festival (left) on September 18, 2004. Former Ku Klux Klan leader and congressional candidate David Duke speaks on "Meet the Press." March 28, 1999 (right)., Photos from left: David S. Holloway / Getty Images; Richard Ellis / Getty Images

What followed in 2010, say extremism watchers, was the biggest electoral push by white supremacists in years. “We’ve seen increasing numbers of white supremacists and others on the radical right running for electoral office for several years now and we likely had more in the last election than in any other in recent memory,” says Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Although extremely few of these people are elected, especially if their views become known during the campaign, the fact that there are so many openly running for public office reflects the growth of white nationalism over the last 10 years.”

Potok’s group tracked 23 candidates in 2010 with radical right-wing views, nine of whom they described as white supremacists or white nationalists. (The others had extreme immigration and world-conspiracy views but did not specifically have links to white organizations.) One candidate, the neo-Confederate Loy Mauch, won a seat in the Arkansas House of Representatives, and another, James C. Russell, who has denounced interracial marriage, garnered 37 percent of the vote in his quest for the New York House of Representatives. Some candidates benefited from a new umbrella organization—the A3P, or American Third Position—which was launched in 2010 by a handful of wonkish-looking professors and corporate lawyers to, as they wrote in their mission statement, “represent the political interests of White Americans.” One of their political hopefuls, Atlee Yarrow, who has filed paperwork to run for Florida governor in 2014, says the Southern Poverty Law Center has listed A3P as a hate group “but it has open membership that mirrors the NAACP. They can have identity politics, but if white people do, it’s considered racist.”

“Many of our people are involved in the Tea Party,” says Black. “But much of their leadership is skittish when it comes to talking about racial realities. The Tea Party is a healthy movement but many are too conditioned to run like scared rabbits when called racists.”

” Disappointed with Ron and Rand Paul and other leaders who they feel are close, but not close enough, to their views—the A3P has fielded candidates like Harry Bertram, who ran for the West Virginia board of education last fall, pulling down 14 percent of the vote. He’s now angling for governor. “My platform is conservative like the Tea Party but more racialist inclined,” Bertram says. Another A3P candidate won 11 percent of the vote in a recent run for a seat in the New Hampshire House of Representatives. Those numbers are small, but hardly laughable, especially for a new group explicitly running on a white-interest ticket. “We’re just beginning,” says board member Jamie Kelso, who says the group’s platform includes a complete moratorium on immigration. “But we’re filling a void.”

Some candidates for 2012 are already filling paperwork. “White people need to wake up to the fact that we’re becoming a minority in our country,” says John Abarr, a 41-year-old former organizer for the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, has filed to begin raising money for Montana’s lone U.S. House seat. He’s not worried that the Republican Party isn’t backing him: “I don’t think public opinion is all that much against us. Montanans are independent thinkers.” His key platform? Abolish the Fed, raise the military age to 21 to stop what he calls the “barbaric” practice of sending teenagers to war, end the death penalty, legalize marijuana (he doesn’t smoke or drink himself), establish a 5 percent flat tax, and help whites by fighting entitlements (like affirmative action and immigration) that he says favor minorities. He describes the Klan as a Christian, white civil-rights organization, and glosses over the brutality that has earned the group its bad name. “I can’t agree with lynching anybody for any reason, but that was a different time in our history.” He adds: “We already have a black president, and I’m not sure when we’ll have a white president elected again.”

Another self-described blue-collar, pro-white candidate is The Nationalist Party of America’s Billy Roper. After a long career in neo-Nazi organizations and failing spectacularly in his bid for Arkansas governor in 2010, Roper and a fellow “White Aryan” veep candidate are promising on their 2012 website to continue the fight “for the civil rights of Americans of European ancestry.” Now supported by the A3P, he ran as a write-in candidate for governor, he says, to learn the ropes for 2012. He’s faced censorship, and has come to see it as a political plus. “Let’s just say Facebook wasn’t founded by the Irish. Hundreds of white nationalists like myself have had our pages and profiles deleted, disabled, or frozen. It teaches newcomers that censorship really does exist, and just hardens our resolve.”

One key precinct for politically minded white-rights activists: Stormfront, the nation’s largest white-supremacist website, where thousands of “racial realists” talk about everything from homeschooling and the news to uniting into a single party. Stormfront founder and radio host Don Black tells The Daily Beast the strategy is to start from the ground up, “where we have a chance of winning. It’s impossible to get into the Senate or Congress but state legislatures or smaller offices can work.” Black says the Tea Party’s influence spurred hopes among his ideological soulmates—but that the initial excitement has given way to a realpolitik sense that the Stormfront crowd will have to go it alone. “Many of our people are involved in the Tea Party,” says Black. “But much of their leadership is skittish when it comes to talking about racial realities. The Tea Party is a healthy movement but many are too conditioned to run like scared rabbits when called racists.”

No office is too small. The Neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement’s “Sergeant” Harriet Paletti in Wisconsin, a bubbly working mom with three kids, only takes off her swastika when she’s at work. She’ll be running for her district’s alderman position in 2012 and has just sent in her résumé to the mayor of New Berlin, hoping to fill a seat on either the Crime Prevention Committee, Police and Fire Commission, or the Parks and Recreation Board. “These are volunteer positions which of course will boost my political résumé when I begin my campaign in late 2012.” If and when elected, she says she’ll represent everyone in her mostly white district, regardless of color. She just doesn’t believe in intermingling in private life, part of what she calls a “natural law of self segregation.”

Another NSM leader, Brian Culpepper, says his chapter in Tennessee may openly field a candidate for the state and U.S. House of Representatives. Culpepper describes himself as a “realist,” saying he prefers sneaking candidates into office under the radar rather than openly flouting the white-rights agenda. The same is true of the United Klans of Tennessee, which says it has several mayors and county commissioners serving who do not openly identify as Klan members. “We insert ourselves into the infrastructure of other established parties due to the bias against us and the difficulty of third parties getting ballot access,” says Culpepper. Unlike other Neo-Nazis in his group, these ones are not on NSM rosters and “have hair, no ink, no piercings, and increasingly are college-degreed” says Culpepper, who says he is also a “suit and tie” guy and does not favor bomber jackets. Some Neo-Nazis have also quietly been joining national campaigns and offices to start sharpening their political teeth, he claims. “We have people working with the most recent incoming class of freshmen in the House,” says Culpepper. “And they don’t even know it.”

A Duke candidacy could have a galvanizing effect. He has been living in Europe in recent years, but maintains a high profile—and stokes his fan base--online. Duke says there is nothing wrong with a white political bloc. “I have no hatred of anyone,” Duke says. “Just a love of my heritage and values.”

http://org2.democracyinaction.org/di...EA7mU2EY2OflPu

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Is this the future of our country?

What party do these people belong to? What is the name of their political persuasion? Oh, yeah,...

Read this and follow the story as it unfolds. If he goes down, the world will be a better place. And to those that have always defended his companies here, know who he really is and how he operates.
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Adele M. Stan / AlterNet

4 Ways the Murdoch Scandal Points To Rot at the Top

Gag money, lies, political warfare and conflicts of interest are all in a day's work at Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

It started with a phone-hacking scandal at a British tabloid, but the scandal now engulfing Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation empire encompasses several of his newspapers, including the once-venerable U.K. paper, the Sunday Times, and points to malfeasance by Murdoch's top lieutenant, Les Hinton, the former executive chairman of News International who is now based in New York in his current role as CEO of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal. News International is the News Corp division that comprises all of Murdoch's British papers.

Although yesterday's revelations are rich in new details, those details simply reinforce a narrative that has long defined the company ethos of News Corp, an ethos we describe in four points:

* The targeting of Rupert Murdoch's political enemies
* Lying to public officials in official investigations
* Buying the silence of troublesome employees
* Lack of full disclosure of conflicts of interest

First, a Little Backstory

Sunday the scandal exploded once again as the Guardian -- the liberal U.K. paper that has doggedly reported this scandal as it has unfolded over the course of six years -- reported that Hinton may have lied to the British parliament about the number of people involved in the News of World phone-hacking schemes. (AlterNet's reporting on the scandal has raised questions about Hinton's role.) Then the Guardian revealed that the Sunday Times, another News International paper, targeted former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown using similarly underhanded tactics, such as having a private investigator pose as Brown in a phone call to Brown's bankers in order to obtain confidential information about the politician's personal finances. The targeting of Brown took place while Hinton manned the helm of News International.

While Hinton told parliament in 2007, just months before he was rewarded with his current post in New York, that the News of the World phone-hacking practices were limited to the actions of a single reporter and the hacker he hired, the Guardian today brought to light an internal News International investigation that suggested the practice was widespread at the paper. Hinton was among those to whom the memos detailing the findings were made available at the time of the investigation.

The phone-hacking part of the scandal, you'll recall, was first exposed years ago when it was revealed that News of the World, the British tabloid shuttered yesterday by Murdoch, had hired investigators to hack into the voice mail accounts of celebrities and aides to the royal family in order to glean fodder for the gossipy pieces that sold newspapers. But when, last week, the Guardian revealed that News of the World had used similar practices to feed its sensational coverage of a teenage murder victim -- even erasing the victim's voice-mails in order to make room for any new info that might have poured into her mailbox -- the British public turned on its most-read newspaper. A subsequent revelation that News of the World also hacked the voice-mail accounts of victims of the London subway terrorist bombings in 2007 further disgusted the public.

Then there are pay-offs to British law enforcement for information on people the newspapers were looking to find dirt on, payments that may also have yielded a less-than-thorough investigation of the phone-hacking scandal when it initially broke six years ago.

While the tactics of News International papers exposed by the Guardian may represent the most extreme manifestations of the ethical breaches and general malfeasance of News Corporation outlets, a similar pattern of pay-offs, prevarication and political sliming pervades the whole company, including at some of its big U.S. holdings such as Fox News, HarperCollins and the Wall Street Journal. (Four ways explained on next page.)

1. Targeting Murdoch's political enemies. While many newspaper moguls advance their political point of view on their editorial pages, Murdoch's minions are known to launch jihads against their boss' liberal political opponents. Murdoch is not a newspaperman with a political point of view; he's a right-wing political force who owns a number of very powerful media properties.

On Hinton's watch, the Sunday Times targeted Labour Party official Gordon Brown over the course of 10 years, both during Brown's long tenure as chancellor of the exchequer (the British equivalent of the U.S. treasury secretary) and his shorter stint as prime minister. The Guardian reports that as early as 2000, a "blagger" working on behalf of the Times posed as Brown in calls to the Abbey National Bank in a scam to get information about the chancellor's personal finances.

Also suspect, according to the Guardian, is the manner in which News International papers came to know of the cystic fibrosis diagnosis of one of Brown's children just hours after the Browns received the diagnosis, as well as the paper's reporting years earlier that Brown's daughter was dying of a brain hemorrhage. The Guardian also found that the paper had assistance from a police officer in its targeting of Brown and two Labour Party members of parliament.

Here in the U.S., the Wall Street Journal, under Hinton's watch, apparently sanctioned the involvement of an editorial board member in a political crusade to unseat Democrats in Wisconsin and elsewhere, via a program designed to indoctrinate employees of privately held businesses to vote against Democrats in the 2010 elections. As AlterNet reported in partnership with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute, the Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore made numerous appearances on behalf of employers at workplaces in Wisconsin and elsewhere to persuade workers that Democratic policies would ultimately cost them their jobs.

Fox News has made no secret of its intimidation of perceived political enemies. During Amanda Terkel's tenure at ThinkProgress, the blog of the liberal Center For American Progress Action Fund, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly dispatched his producers to tail Terkel as she set out on vacation in 2009, and confronted her once she reached her destination.

2. Lying to public officials. There is enough circumstantial evidence to suggest that lying to public officials who are conducting investigations is part of the News Corp ethos. Les Hinton's testimony before the British Parliament -- in which he said that phone-hacking at News of the World was practiced only by a single reporter, despite an internal investigation that suggested otherwise -- echoes, notes Media Matters' Eric Boehlert, advice allegedly given by Fox News chief Roger Ailes to Judith Regan, then an editor at Murdoch's book-publishing company, HarperCollins.

At the time, Bernard Kerik, who had served as New York City police commissioner under former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, had been nominated to the post of Homeland Security secretary by President George W. Bush. In the vetting process, investigators planned to interview Judith Regan, who had had an affair with Kerik. Revelation of the affair would have spoiled the nomination for Kerik and cast Ailes' friend Giuliani, who was floating a presidential bid, in a bad light. In a lawsuit against her employer, Regan alleged that a News Corp executive told her to lie to investigators. An investigation by the New York Times concluded that Roger Ailes was that executive.

3. Paying off troublesome employees to buy their silence. When Clive Goodman, the News of the World reporter who covered the royal family, lost his job after his arrest on phone-hacking charges, he began legal proceedings against his former employer, claiming he had been wrongfully dismissed. Les Hinton had told parliament that Goodman was the "lone reporter" responsible for the newspaper's phone-hacking scandal. Were Goodman to appear in court to tell the phone-hacking story he knew, it's likely that a whole lot of other people -- maybe even Andy Coulson, the paper's editor who would go on to become communications director for Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron -- would likely have been implicated. So News International bought his silence for an undisclosed sum.

When Judith Regan was canned from HarperCollins for her relationship with Bernard Kerik, she, too, prepared to take the matter to court -- which would have exposed Fox News chief Roger Ailes as the guy who told her to lie to the feds. Court documents as prepared asserted that Regan had a recording of the phone call in which Ailes told her to fib about her affair with Kerik. Regan's threats of a lawsuit earned her a cool $10.75 million, according to the New York Times, in exchange for her silence. That took place in 2007, right around the time that Goodman received his own gag money.

4. Lack of full disclosure. There's a fundamental tenet of journalism known as full disclosure, which requires a journalist to report any potential or apparent conflict of interest he or she may have in reporting a story. (For instance, if I report a story on Transportation Security Administration airport screeners, I must tell you that from 2002 - 2005, I worked for the labor union that was organizing those screeners.) In Murdochland, however, that tenet is routinely disregarded.

As noted by Media Matters' Boehlert, it took the Wall Street Journal until today to report that its very own CEO played a role in the Murdoch scandal. In the AlterNet/Investigative Fund investigation of Wall Street Journal editorial board member Stephen Moore, we found that Moore received at least $180,000 in speaking fees from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which is chaired by David Koch, without making full disclosure when he quoted Americans for Prosperity officials in his columns, or when he was asked to discuss the group's political activities in his guise as a pundit. When we asked Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot for comment, he referred our query to the director of communications for Dow Jones, who reports to Les Hinton.

Time to end the timidity

Until this recent explosion of Murdochgate, Labour Party officials in Britain were notoriously timid about taking on the Murdoch machine, even as it mowed down allies. Democrats and good-journalism groups (with the exception of Media Matters, which is now the subject of a Fox News assault on its non-profit status) have also been reluctant to confront the malevolent mogul, despite the culture of corruption that encompasses his news properties and the many ways he has contributed to the destruction of American political culture.

This scandal has him weakened. If there was ever a time to fight back, it's now.

http://act.alternet.org/go/9033?akid...018.8-w0pu&t=6
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Murdoch is scum!

Just two weeks after he seconded Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's dire warnings about the August 2 deadline to raise the U.S debt ceiling, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor walked out of the budget talks aimed at reaching a bipartisan compromise over deficit reduction. Like Arizona GOP Senator Jon Kyl, Cantor shifted the burden to Speaker John Boehner, Senate Minority Mitch McConnell and President Obama to "get over this impasse on taxes."

For his part, McConnell promised that no deal to end the GOP's hostage taking of the U.S. economy will include tax hikes. But while McConnell boasted that "If they couldn't raise taxes when they owned the government, you know they can't get it done now," left unsaid was the inconvenient truth that the nation's mounting debt is largely attributable to wars, a recession and tax policies put in place under his party's watch.

Here, then, are 10 things the GOP doesn't want you to know about the debt:

1. Republican Leaders Agree U.S. Default Would Be a "Financial Disaster"
2. Ronald Reagan Tripled the National Debt
3. George W. Bush Doubled the National Debt
4. Republicans Voted Seven Times to Raise Debt Ceiling for President Bush
5. Federal Taxes Are Now at a 60 Year Low
6. Bush Tax Cuts Didn't Pay for Themselves or Spur "Job Creators"
7. Ryan Budget Delivers Another Tax Cut Windfall for Wealthy
8. Ryan Budget Will Require Raising Debt Ceiling - Repeatedly
9. Tax Cuts Drive the Next Decade of Debt
10. $3 Trillion Tab for Unfunded Wars Remains Unpaid

http://org2.democracyinaction.org/di...NJOjwe5qiXb%2B

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Each one of these points is fully explained with references at the link. If you are interested in understanding the vile manipulation that conservatives are using to force their ideology on the country, check it out.

Thanks for that information Atypical.

The Tea Party doesn't care if it has to destroy the United States in order to grab the levers of GOP machinery.

Adele M. Stan
July 23, 2011

For many, it's a head-scratcher. Don't those Republicans see the danger in their hardline stand against allowing the U.S. government to borrow the money it needs to continue operating? GOP members of Congress not only insist on tying any deal for raising of the debt ceiling to a deficit-reduction scheme, they are demanding that such a scheme not raise a dime of revenue -- not even from the wealthiest Americans, who are still basking in their Bush-era tax-cuts. On Friday, House Speaker John Boehner walked out of debt-limit talks with President Barack Obama, even after Obama offered the speaker a plan that would have made $650 billion in cuts to safety net programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

But, really, Boehner had no choice but to walk out -- if he wants to continue on as speaker, that is. The Obama deal, you see, included the elimination of certain tax breaks for the rich, and the closing of corporate tax loopholes, the president told reporters. And Boehner is on notice from the Tea Partiers within the ranks of the GOP that no means of increasing revenue is acceptable, not even for the easing of America's economic woes. Hot on Boehner's heels is the ambition of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

There's a temptation, when assessing the showdown over the debt ceiling that is bringing the United States to the brink of defaulting on its debt, to view the confrontation in terms of Republicans vs. Democrats, liberals vs. conservatives, Obama vs. Boehner.

What we're really witnessing, though, is a ruthless power-grab by the architects of the Tea Party movement for control of the Republican Party. And if they have to destroy House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, to do it, they will. Heck, if they have to destroy the United States in order to grab the levers of GOP machinery, they will, content in the knowledge that, as elites, they will have first pick of the spoils.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the newfound love between Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity (AFP), the Tea Party organization founded by David Koch, and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., the Tea Party-allied second-in-command of the House of Representatives. Cantor has made a specialty of undercutting his own speaker's negotiating power as Boehner tries to cut a deal with the president.

When, two weeks ago, Vice-President Joe Biden and GOP leaders were close to making a deal that would have given in to Republican demands for budget cuts, Cantor refused to go along because the deal included some tax increases. By walking out of the talks, Cantor won the hearts of Tea Party leaders, and, many said, a shot at the speaker's job. For if Cantor can prevent Boehner from brokering a deal with the president, the logic goes, the speaker could be so weakened as to lose his footing as the House Republicans' top man. That would leave Cantor positioned to step in.

Cantor's intransigence led Tim Phillips to laud Cantor in an interview he gave to Major Garrett in the Atlantic. "He has clearly emerged as the conservative on free-market economic issues," Phillips told Garrett. "Cantor's become the 'go-to' guy. There's no question about that."

Things were not always so chummy between Phillips and Cantor. When Cantor first ran for Congress in 2000, Garrett reports, Phillips, then a consultant to the George W. Bush campaign, opposed him. Phillips helped set up a group called the Faith and Family Alliance, which sent out campaign mailers and issued robo-calls against Cantor calling Cantor's primary opponent, Stephen Martin, "the only Christian in the race." (Cantor is Jewish.) Cantor squeaked out a win with a 263-vote margin, and set out to make friends with the right.

The election of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008 breathed new life into the institutional right, which created the Tea Party movement on the winds of racial resentment and the economic distress that came with the 2007 bursting of the housing bubble, and the September 2008 stockmarket crash. Cantor, then House Minority Whip, wasted no time cashing in, even meeting in 2009, as AlterNet reported, with a neo-Confederate Virginia group, the Constitutional Sovereignty Alliance, to receive a letter from its Virginia Sovereignty March delegation.

As the August 2 deadline looms for avoiding default on the U.S. government debt, the GOP Tea Party Caucus in the House pushed through a plan for raising the debt ceiling called "Cut, Cap and Balance," which would deeply cut government spending, even on social safety net programs, cap government spending and send a balanced-budget constitutional amendment to the states for ratification. The Washington Post's Ezra Klein and Dylan Matthews write that the plan:

...would increase the debt ceiling in exchange for $111 billion in immediate cuts next year, statutory caps on spending, and a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution that includes a spending cap of 18 percent of the previous year's GDP and would require supermajorities to raise taxes or increase the debt ceiling. If the amendment was ratified, spending would have to drop to its lowest levels since the 1950s -- despite the fact that we now have Medicare, Medicaid, more seniors, etc. -- and taxes would be almost impossible to raise. The White House has promised to veto the bill, saying that deficit reduction does not require changes to the Constitution, and that the cuts involved are draconian.
On Friday, when Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., that chamber's Tea Party kingpin, attempted to put the measure before the Democratic-controlled body, Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., was having none of it. No sooner was the measure tabled than AFP president Tim Phillips, Eric Cantor's champion, sent out an email to his activists decrying Reid's halting of the bill, and encouraging recipients to click through to a Web-form email instructing members of Congress to reject any deal that includes tax increases.

Note that it was not Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who put the Cut, Cap and Balance deal up for consideration. Thanks to the power of such Tea Party astroturf groups as Americans for Prosperity and Dick Armey's FreedomWorks, McConnell leads only at the mercy of DeMint and his merry band of Tea Party allies, who threaten to launch primary challenges to any Republican Senate candidate who doesn't toe their line. It's a lesson Cantor has taken to heart, doubtlessly observing that while the House Tea Party caucus does not comprise a majority, it does have enough members to deprive the speaker of a majority on any measure behind which its members unite. Like DeMint's cadre of fellow travelers in the Senate, theirs is the power of "no."

Today in the Washington newspaper the Hill, an op-ed penned by Jenny Beth Martin and Mark Meckler of the Tea Party Patriots threw down the gauntlet at the feet of any lawmaker who might be inclined to raise a tax or two in order to prevent any further collapse of the economy that is almost sure to come if a debt-ceiling deal eludes the August 2 deadline. They also took a swipe at Boehner:

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) found time to commend the president for making the case to raise the debt ceiling, saying on July 11: “I would agree with the president that the national debt limit must be raised. I'm glad he made the case for it today.”
It is clear they are not serious about cutting wasteful spending or they would have found a way to do it. When a family is on the brink of bankruptcy and can't make ends meet, what do they do? They cut back on their spending. It's very simple.

Tea Party Patriots is a "grassroots" group founded by FreedomWorks, which is led by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas. (FreedomWorks was also founded with Koch money, although both the organization and Koch say they have parted ways.) Armey earns a total of $500,000 per year from FreedomWorks and its foundation. It's doubtful his family has any trouble making ends meet. But if the cost of pushing Boehner from the speaker's podium in favor of Cantor (or another player more to his liking) is the economic calamity that would almost certainly result if the U.S. government fails to meet its obligations, he probably won't mind a bit. Your family might face financial disaster, but Dick Armey, Tim Phillips and David Koch will still be sitting pretty.

The House speaker has clearly gotten the message. He may not be a Tea Partier himself, but he stands ready to do the bidding of movement leaders. With the debt-limit talks having failed at the executive level, only Congress can provide a solution. And in the House, the Tea Party caucus still carries the power of "no."

http://act.alternet.org/go/9438?akid...018.ERuMr5&t=3

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Power - Ideology - Greed - Lack Of Empathy - Hatred - Indifference to Reality - Absoloute Disregard For The Country And Its People.

These are the things that conservatives, especially tea-brained ones, care about.

Pukes doesn't begin to describe them. This is a family show.

Although I do not follow or consider the Tea Party, Thomas Jefferson himself once said,

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." (Letter to William Stephens Smith, 1787)

"What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that the people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them." (Letter to William Stephens Smith, 1787

"I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms are in the physical." (Letter to James Madison, 1787)

"A little rebellion now and then . . . is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government." (Letter to James Madison, 1787)

Maybe, just maybe, this tea party is GOOD for America. They certainly are "rebellious". They certainlly challenge the status quo.

Incidents serve as wake-up call for security services that may have underestimated threat of domestic radicals.

By NICHOLAS KULISH
The New York Times

BERLIN — The attacks in Oslo on Friday have riveted new attention on right-wing extremists not just in Norway but across Europe, where opposition to Muslim immigrants, globalization, the power of the European Union and the drive toward multiculturalism has proven a potent political force and, in a few cases, a spur to violence.

The success of populist parties appealing to a sense of lost national identity has brought criticism of minorities, immigrants and in particular Muslims out of the beer halls and Internet chat rooms and into mainstream politics. While the parties themselves generally do not condone violence, some experts say a climate of hatred in the political discourse has encouraged violent individuals.

Story: Norway police free detainees, no link to attacks

“I’m not surprised when things like the bombing in Norway happen, because you will always find people who feel more radical means are necessary,” said Joerg Forbrig, an analyst at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin who has studied far-right issues in Europe. “It literally is something that can happen in a number of places and there are broader problems behind it.”

Last November a Swedish man was arrested in the southern city of Malmö in connection with more than a dozen unsolved shootings of immigrants, including one fatality. The shootings, nine of which took place between June and October 2010, appeared to be the work of an isolated individual. More broadly in Sweden, though, the far-right Sweden Democrats experienced new success at the polls. The party entered Parliament for the first time after winning 5.7 percent of the vote in the general election last September.

The bombing and shootings in Oslo also have served as a wake-up call for security services in Europe and the United States that in recent years have become so focused on Islamic terrorists that they may have underestimated the threat of domestic radicals, including those upset by what they see as the influence of Islam.

Video: Norway in mourning, searching for answers (on this page)

In the United States the deadly attacks have reawakened memories of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, where a right-wing extremist, Timothy J. McVeigh, used a fertilizer bomb to blow up a federal government building, killing 168 people. That deadly act had long since been overshadowed by the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

According to Mr. Forbrig, isolated right-wing groups in Europe would rise up and then quickly disappear from the ’60s into the ’90s. But in recent years far-right statements have appeared to lose much of their post-World War II taboo even among some prominent political parties.

A combination of increased migration from abroad and largely unrestricted movement of people within an enlarged European Union, such as the persecuted Roma minority, helped lay the groundwork for a nationalist, at times starkly chauvinist, revival.

Groups are gaining traction from Hungary to Italy, but it is particularly apparent in northern European countries that long have had liberal immigration policies. The rapid arrival of refugees, asylum seekers and economic migrants, many of them Muslims, led to a significant backlash in places like Denmark, where the Danish People’s Party has 25 out of 179 seats in Parliament, and the Netherlands, where Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom won 15.5 percent of the vote in the 2010 general election.

Mr. Wilders famously compared the Koran, the holy book of Islam, to Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” Both the Danish and Dutch right-wing parties are backing precarious minority governments while not directly participating by having ministers, and inching toward mainstream acceptance in the process.

End of multiculturalism?

Friday’s attacks were swiftly condemned by leaders from across the political spectrum in Europe. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel was particularly sharp in speaking out against what she called an “appalling crime.” The sort of hatred that could fuel such an action, she said, went against “freedom, respect and the belief in peaceful coexistence.”

Story: Cops: Norway gunman claims he acted alone

Yet some of the primary motivations cited by the suspect in Norway, Anders Behring Breivik, are now mainstream issues. Mrs. Merkel, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Prime Minister David Cameron in Britain all recently declared an end to multiculturalism. Multiculturalism “has failed, utterly failed,” Mrs. Merkel told fellow Christian Democrats last October, though stressing that immigrants were welcome in Germany.

Perhaps the most surprising about-turn came in Britain, a country that has long considered itself among the most immigrant-friendly in Europe until a series of coordinated bomb attacks in London six years ago. In one of his most noticed speeches, Mr. Cameron told the Munich security conference in February that the country’s decades-old policy of multiculturalism had encouraged “segregated communities” where Islamic extremism can thrive.

France, a fiercely secularist state where all religion is banned from the public sphere, was long isolated and berated for its staunch opposition to the laissez-faire of multiculturalism. Girls who show up in public schools there with the Muslim headscarf are suspended, as are teachers or any other employees in the public sector.

If Mr. Sarkozy appeared to soften his understanding of official secularism, or “laïcité” earlier in his political career, even toying with the idea of affirmative action, he has recently scrambled to backtrack. He held a nationwide debate on “national identity” last year and earlier this year banned Muslim full-face veils like niqab, as well as the burqa.

That hasn’t stopped the far-right National Front, now led by Marine Le Pen, the daughter of its founder, to surge in opinion polls, with some surveys predicting that she might make it into next year’s presidential runoff. She compared Muslims praying in the streets outside overcrowded mosques to the Nazi occupation, and decries the European Union and the euro.

Earlier this month the daily newspaper Berliner Zeitung reported that neo-Nazis were attacking the offices of the far-left Left Party with increasing frequency. In the former East German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, statistics showed that there were 30 such attacks in the first half of 2011 compared to 44 attacks in all of 2010.

Story: Norway survivor: 'I heard people begging for their lives'
Watchful eye on extremists

Due to its Nazi past, Germany keeps a watchful eye on right-wing extremists, and the parties of the far right have a hard time gaining traction, with no representatives in Parliament. In Finland, the True Finns, a populist nationalist party founded in 1995, became the third largest party represented in the Finnish Parliament after winning 19 percent of the vote in April. And Norway’s Progress Party, a right-wing populist party, is the second largest in the country, winning 23 percent of the vote in the last parliamentary election in September 2009.

“The Norwegian right-wing groups have always been disorganized, haven’t had charismatic leaders or the kind of well-organized groups with financial support that you see in Sweden,” said Kari Helene Partapuoli, director of the Norwegian Center against Racism. “But in the last two or three years our organization and other antifascist networks have warned of an increased temperature of debate and that violent groups had been established.”

But neither does Norway exist in a vacuum. Its right-wing scene is connected to the rest of Europe through the Internet forums where hate speech proliferates and through right-wing demonstrations that draw an international mix of participants.

“This may be the act of a lone, mad, paranoid individual,” said Hajo Funke, a political scientist at the Free University in Berlin who studies rightist extremism, referring to the right-wing fundamentalist Christian charged in connection with the killings, “but the far-right milieu creates an atmosphere that can lead such people down that path of violence.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43871088...ew_york_times/

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One event does not a trend make.

But read this article and others and see the common elements. Hatred against government, multiculturalism and note the other right-wing ingredients. See anything interesting?

The vicious rightwing here has the same concerns. They kill US for those concerns! Remember the Oklahoma bombing?

The government a few months ago here publicized a report that indicated, after research, that rightwing cretins were our most important domestic crime concern. Conservatives, predictably, grew 'angry'. How dare you sully our ideologies as being hateful and dangerous, they said. The report was squelched.

We don't govern here for everyone and let the facts be discussed no matter who gets burned. No, we put our finger in the air and see if there are any objections to the truth. If there are, we water-down the truth or delete it.

And who owns the best methods of spreading propaganda? Why conservatives, of course.

There is no opposition party in this country to fight against right-wing threats. Whores all, for the most part.

It's over folks. Remember to look over your shoulder when you go out. The 'patriots' are coming.

Sunday 24 July 2011
by: Frank Schaeffer, AlterNet | News Analysis

The Norwegian police on Saturday charged a 32-year-old man, whom they identified as a Christian fundamentalist with right-wing connections, over the bombing of a government center and a shooting attack on a nearby island that together left at least 91 people dead.

In my new book "Sex, Mom and God"

I predicted just such an action. I predicted that right wing Christians will unleash terror here in America too. I predict that they will copy Islamic extremists, and may eventually even make common cause with them.

There is a growing movement in America that equates godliness with hatred of our government in fact hatred of our country as fallen and evil because we allow women choice, gays to marry, have a social safety net, and allow immigration from other cultures and non-white races.

According to the Guardian

newspaper, the killer wrote:

"Today's Protestant church is a joke," he wrote in an online post in 2009. "Priests in jeans who march for Palestine and churches that look like minimalist shopping centres. I am a supporter of an indirect collective conversion of the Protestant church back to the Catholic."

It seems Anders Behring Breivik longed for a "pure" and ultra conservative religion. He was a man of religious conviction, no liberals with their jeans need apply! Liberals beware.

Norway is just a first taste of what will happen here on a larger scale.

A History of Violent Action

There is a history to the far right, religious right extremism on the rise today, extremism so extreme that in its congressional manifestation it is risking the good faith and credit of the US in the debt calling fiasco. The Tea Party activists also want purity of doctrine.

My family was part of the far right/violent right's rise in the 1970s and 80s when we helped create the "pro-life" movement come into existence that in the end spawned the killers of abortion providers. These killers were literally doing what we'd called for.

The terror unleashed on Norway - and the terror now unleashed by the Tea Party through Congress as it holds our economy hostage to extremist "economic" theories that want to destroy our ability to function -- is the sort of white, Christian; far right terror America can expect more of.

The "Christian Brotherhood"

Call this the ultimate "Tea Party" type "answer" to secularism, modernity, and above all our hated government. Call this the Christian Brotherhood. From far right congress people, to far right gun-toting terror in Norway and here at home, our own Western version of the Taliban is on the rise.

Foreigners, visitors from another planet and Americans living in a bubble of reasonable or educated people might not know this but the reality is that the debt ceiling confrontation is by, for and the result of America's evangelical Christian control of the Republican Party.

It is the ultimate expression of an alternate reality, one that has the mistrust of the US government as its bedrock "faith," second only to faith in Jesus.

To understand why an irrational self-defeating action like destroying the credit of the USA might seem like the right thing to do you have to understand two things: that the Republican Party is now the party of religious fanatics and that these fanatics -- people like Michele Bachmann -- don't want to work within our system, they want to bring it down along the lines of so-called Christian "Reconstruction." (See my book for a full account of what this is.)

In the scorched-earth era of the "health care reform debates" of 2009 and beyond, Evangelicals seemed to believe that Jesus commanded that all hospitals (and everything else) should be run by corporations for profit, just because corporations weren't the evil government. The right even decided that it was "normal" for the state to hand over its age-old public and patriotic duties to private companies -- even for military operations ("contractors"), prisons, health care, public transport, and all the rest.

Private "Facts"

The Religious Right/Far Right et al. favored private "facts," too.

They claimed that global warming wasn't real. They asserted this because scientists (those same agents of Satan who insisted that evolution was real) were the ones who said human actions were changing the climate. Worse, the government said so, too!

"Global warming is a left-wing plot to take away our freedom!"

"Amtrak must make a profit!"

There is an indirect but deadly connection between the "intellectual" fig-leaf providers/leaders like my late father and periodic upheavals like the loony American Right's sometimes-violent reaction to the election of Barack Obama, killings in Norway and what the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party is about to do to us in forcing a default on our loans, and thus destroying the US economy in a way bin Laden could only have dreamed of doing.

No, your average member of some moronic gun toting Michigan militia is not reading books by my late father Francis Schaeffer where he called for the overthrow of the government because of Roe v Wade and the legalization of abortion. Nor have they heard of people like Robert George. And the killer in Norway may or may not have read my father's books.

But Michele Bachmann is reading my father's books. And she was trained in far right Reconstructionist theory at the Oral Roberts law school by one of Dad's followers.

Bachmann says she got into politics because of reading my father's work. And she is one of his extremist followers.

Non-Evangelicals with far right agendas like Robert George (I'll introduce him to you in a moment) have cashed in on the Evangelicals' like Bachmann's willingness to lend their numbers and influence to one "moral" anti-American crusade after another, or rather I should say, to one political crusade after another masquerading as moral crusades.

"Respectable" Far Right "Intellectuals"

For instance, conservative Roman Catholic Princeton University Professor of Jurisprudence Robert George is an antiabortion, anti-Obama, anti-gay-rights, and anti-stem-cell-research "profamily" activist, and he has found ways to effectively carry on the far right Reconstructionist agenda while denying any formal connection to it and taking the intellectual high road.

Take George's brainchild: the "Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience."

This was published in 2009 as an anti-Obama manifesto, and many far right Evangelical leaders signed on.

The "Manhattan Declaration" reads:

"We will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act . . . nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family. We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar's. But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God's."

In case you've never heard of George, he's been a one-man "brain trust" for the Religious Right, Glenn Beck, and the Far Right of the Republican Party as well as for the ultraconservative wing of the Roman Catholic Church. Here's how the New York Times introduced him to its readers:

"[Robert George] has parlayed a 13th-century Catholic philosophy [the natural law theory] into real political influence. Glenn Beck, the Fox News talker and a big George fan, likes to introduce him as "one of the biggest brains in America," or, on one broadcast, "Superman of the Earth." Karl Rove told me he considers George a rising star on the right and a leading voice in persuading President George W. Bush to restrict embryonic stem-cell research. . . . Newt Gingrich called him "an important and growing influence" on the conservative movement, especially on matters like abortion and marriage. "If there really is a vast right-wing conspiracy," the conservative Catholic journal Crisis concluded a few years ago, "its leaders probably meet in George's kitchen.""

Government is the Enemy

It's a question of legitimacy and illegitimacy.

What the Religious Right, including the Religious Right's Roman Catholic and Protestant enablers, did was contribute to a climate in which the very legitimacy of our government--is questioned as part of religious faith itself.

The "Manhattan Declaration" called laws with which its signers disagreed "edicts," thereby conjuring up images of dictators handing down oppressive rules, rather than legitimately elected democratic bodies passing legislation. In other words, when the Right lost in the democratic process, "other means" to undermine the law were encouraged. This is the language of revolution, not democracy.

The Far Right intellectual enablers began by questioning abortion rights, gay rights, school prayer rulings, and so forth. What they ended up doing was to help foster a climate in which--in the eyes of a dangerous and growing (mostly white lower class undereducated gun-toting) minority--the very legitimacy of the U.S. government was called into question, sometimes in paranoid generalities, but often with ridiculous specificity: for instance, in the persistent lie that President Obama was not a citizen or was a Muslim or that the Federal Reserve and/or United Nations were somehow involved in a plot to "take away our freedoms" or that sensible gun control equaled "tyranny."

Terror for Christ

It was in the context of delegitimizing our government that actions by domestic terrorists like Timothy McVeigh became thinkable. In 1993 McVeigh told a reporter, "The government is continually growing bigger and more powerful and the people need to prepare to defend themselves against government control."

Change a word or two and his words could have been lifted from my father's 1981 book A Christian Manifesto, or for that matter a few decades later, from statements by the so-called Tea Party or those by Michele Bachmann, or Robert George or his follower Glenn Beck.

In my father's book he called for the overthrow of the US government unless non-violent ways were found to overturn Roe v Wade. He compared America to Nazi Germany.

Note the ominous rhetorical shadow Dad's book cast over a benighted and divided American future, a future that produced the climate of hate that eventually spawned the murder of abortion providers such as Dr. George Tiller in Wichita in 2009 and the threat of destroying America's credit in an effort to literally defund the USA.

Here's a bit from Manifesto on how the government was "taking away" our country and turning it over to Liberals, codenamed by Dad as "this total humanistic way of thinking":

"The law, and especially the courts, is the vehicle to force this total humanistic way of thinking upon the entire population..."

And this:

"Simply put, the Declaration of Independence states that the people, if they find that their basic rights are being systematically attacked by the state, have a duty to try and change that government, and if they cannot do so, to abolish it."

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 its authority. And our loyalty to the God who gave this law then requires that we make the appropriate response in that situation."

In other words, Dad's followers were told that (1) force is a legitimate weapon to use against an evil government; (2) America was like Hitler's Germany--because of legal abortion and of the forcing of "Humanism" on the population--and thus intrinsically evil; and (3) whatever would have been the "appropriate response" to stop Hitler was now appropriate to do here in America to stop our government, which Dad had just branded a "counterfeit state."

Extremism is Next to Godliness

To understand the extremism coming from the right, the fact that there are members of Congress who seem to be genuinely mentally unhinged leading the charge on the debt ceiling, you need to understand that this hatred of all things government has theological roots that have nothing to do with facts.

Theology is -- by nature -- not about reason but about faith. If God's will is to be served then so be it if America is plunged into chaos! This debt ceiling fiasco is just another chapter in the "culture" wars.

The extreme language of Evangelical/"pro-life" rebellion has now been repackaged in the debt ceiling showdown. It is the language of religion pitted against facts.

And the anti-government charge is being led by people who are either true believers, thus unable to reason, or people catering to the true believers so that they can remain in the good books of the Tea Party, which is nothing more than the Evangelical far right repackaged and renamed.

Some people took the next step. The night of December 14, 2008, Bruce Turnidge was in handcuffs and sitting next to an FBI agent in Turnidge's farmhouse in Oregon. He was ranting about the "need" for militias and cursing the election of an African American president. Hours earlier, his son, Joshua, had been arrested for allegedly causing a fatal bomb explosion.

"Bruce started talking about the Second Amendment and citizens' rights to carry firearms," said George Chamberlin, the FBI agent. "Bruce talked at length that the government should fear the people and that the people should not fear the government."

In February 2010, a little more than a year after Obama's inauguration, Joseph Stack, a fifty-three-year-old software engineer, piloted a plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, and killed one man and injured several others.

Before killing himself, Stack posted an online suicide note railing against the federal government and expressing grievances similar to those Dad had enumerated.

A Facebook group celebrating Stack had thousands of members sign on almost instantly after he was "martyred for our freedoms," as one contributor called it. The site featured the Gadsden flag (the flag with the logo "Don't Tread On Me") and these words: "Finally an American man took a stand against our tyrannical government that no longer follows the constitution and turned its back on its founding fathers and the beliefs this country was founded on."

In March 2010 the so-called Hutaree Militia, a right-wing, biblically inspired fundamentalist group, was alleged to have hatched a plot to kill police officers. Members of this outfit had planned attacks on police officers as a way of acting out their hatred for the government as well as a way to launch the civil chaos "predicted" in so-called End Times biblical prophecies. The day the plotters were arrested, I checked their online homepage. Here's what I found as their mission statement (misspellings in the original post, which has since been taken down, as has the site):

"As Christians we all are a part of the Souls of the Body of Christ, the one true church of Christ. . . . This is the belief of the Hutaree soldier, as should the belief of all followers in Christ be."

The Black Man in the White House Drives the Right to Insanity

Following the election of our first black president, the "politics" of the Evangelical, Jewish, Roman Catholic, and Mormon Far Right was not the politics of a loyal opposition, but rather the instigation of revolution, which was first and best expressed by Rush Limbaugh when even before President Obama took office he said, "I hope Obama fails."

To the old-fashioned conservative mantra "Big government doesn't work," the newly radicalized Evangelicals (and their Roman Catholic and Mormon cobelligerents) added "The U.S. government is evil!"

And the very same community--Protestant American Evangelicals--who had once been the bedrock supporters of public education, and voted for such moderate and reasonable men as President Dwight Eisenhower, became the enemies of not only the public schools but also of anything in the (nonmilitary) public sphere "run by the government."

As they opened new institutions (proudly outside the mainstream), the Jesus Victims doing this "reclaiming" cast themselves in the role of persecuted exiles.

What they never admitted was that they were self-banished from mainstream institutions, not only because the Evangelicals' political views on social issues conflicted with most people's views, but also because Evangelicals (and other conservative religionists) found themselves holding the short end of the intellectual stick.

And yet having "dropped out" (to use a 1960s phrase), the Evangelicals nevertheless kept on demanding that regarding "moral" and "family" matters the society they'd renounced nonetheless had to conform to their beliefs.

Christian Jihad

Another Far Right Roman Catholic ideologue (and also an academic) even wrote a book calling on Christians, Jews, and Muslims to join together in a jihad against the secular West. In Ecumenical Jihad: Ecumenism and the Culture War a former friend of mine, Peter Kreeft (a professor of philosophy at Boston College), called for "ecumenical jihad."

I met with Kreeft several times in my home in the 1980s and early 1990s while he was developing his "jihadist" ideas.

Kreeft's was not a plea for blowing people up, and his book was published pre-9/11.

His book was based on the fact that many believers in Roman Catholicism, Evangelical Protestantism, and Islam (at least in their fundamentalist forms) rejected the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Homosexuality is out, sex education is evil, and so on. Kreeft called on all believers to unite to overthrow "secularism" in the same anti-secular spirit that Robert George channeled a few years later when trying to undermine the Obama administration through his brainchild, the "Manhattan Declaration."

Kreeft called for an "alliance" of fundamentalist Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims to prosecute a culture war against what he viewed as the Western cultural elite. Ecumenical Jihad was dedicated to Richard John Neuhaus, the late Roman Catholic convert priest, and to Charles Colson (who later teamed up with George to author the "Manhattan Declaration").

The groups Kreeft, Colson, and Neuhaus had in mind to "bring together" in an ecumenical jihad were alienated Evangelicals, Orthodox Jews, and conservative Roman Catholics, to which Kreeft added Muslims (not that any actually signed on to his program as far as I know). These groups did not share each other's theology, but they had a deeper link: anger at the "victimhood" imposed on them by modernity.

Kreeft and Neuhaus were calling abortion murder. Thus, the logic of their argument was that of my father's, too: The U.S. government was enabling murder and was thus disparaged as a "regime," even a "counterfeit state," that needed to be overthrown.

A Willingness to Destroy America in Order to "Save" it

George and Colson and the others who wrote and then signed the "Manhattan Declaration" (like Kreeft before them) also called for fundamentalists to unite if need be for civil disobedience to stop the U.S. government from passing laws that did not comply with their religious "values" and/or to undermine those laws if they were enacted.

So if the U.S. government legalized gay marriage and thus "compelled" all Americans (including church groups) to recognize gay men and women's civil rights, the government need no longer be obeyed when those laws affected religious people who disagreed with them. The "Manhattan Declaration" called believers to "not comply." And just as Neuhaus dismissed the U.S. government as a "regime"--and my father did the same when saying the government was a "counterfeit state"--George and his co - signers also used dismissive and demeaning language about the U.S. government.

In a country awash in weapons and wallowing in the rhetoric of rebellion against an "evil" government, sporadic outbursts of murder tinged with political overtones seem as inevitable as they seem horribly "normal."

It doesn't seem like much of a stretch to foresee a day when a "secessionist" group and/or members of some "militia"--let alone one lone individual--will use their U.S. passports, white skins, and solid- citizen standing as a cover for importing a weapon of mass destruction to "liberate" the rest of us from our federal government's "tyranny" and/or to "punish" some city like New York, known as the U.S. "abortion capital" or San Francisco as the place that "those gays have taken over." And the possibility of an assassination in the same vein is a never-ending threat.

What we fear most from Islamist terrorists will be unleashed here as it was in Norway.

Terror is on the way on the way from our very own Christian and/or Libertarian "Tea Party" type activists inspired by right wing "Christian" intellectuals and political leaders like Bachmann who - after the killing starts -- will then disown them and express horror at their actions, actions that are in fact the logical extension of the anti-government rhetoric spewing from Congress and the religious right.
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The author's father was, perhaps, the most important christian leader of his time. The son knows of what he speaks.

See post 171 above to see how ignorant and stupid some are when they think that these dangerous types are good for the country.

Be careful out there.

Lynne Ferrari Blankenbeker, a Republican lawmaker in the New Hampshire Legislature, has taken union-bashing to a whole new level.

In a July 21 email obtained by Mother Jones, the New Hampshire state representative wrote to fellow legislators about a recent training stint with the Army at Fort Dix, in New Jersey. A military veteran who has served in the Middle East, Blankenbeker described learning to drive an Army Humvee wearing night-vision goggles. She also trained as a gunner, and had to this to say:

Today I got to be the gunner which was fun. The .50 cal is quite a gun! I was never ascared of the unions but they better not F#%k with me again!!! Just saying.

Blankenbeker did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Blankenbeker's relationship with unions in New Hampshire is a contentious one. The two-term representative, who represents parts of the city of Concord and says she's "generally against big government," has voted in support of right-to-work legislation, a direct affront to organized labor in the Granite State. Blankenbeker's legislative record reads like a union organizer's worst nightmare: She's backed lowering student drop-out age, opposed a minimum wage increase, and supported slashing taxes on business profits.

The president of the State Employees' Association, an affiliate of the national Service Employees' International Union, called for Blankenbeker's resignation just three months into the legislature's session for her anti-union votes. And SEA even set up a website, FireLynne.org, to push for Blankenbeker's ouster. "Your votes hurt the people who make our economy run," the site says. "We're tired of politicians making scapegoats of middle-class workers, like those who teach our children, plow our streets, and protect us during fires and emergencies."

Kurt Ehrenberg, political and legislative director with the New Hampshire AFL-CIO, said Blankenbeker's remark was "not surprising but unfortunate." He went on, "Rep. Blankenbeker has been part of this unprecedented assault on the New Hampshire middle class and working families."

Her union-threatening email isn't the first time Blankenbeker has stirred controversy with her remarks. In May, after President Obama announced the death of Osama bin Laden, Blankenbeker said there was a "possibility" that the Al Qaeda leader remained alive, joining a small band of "deathers" in questioning the terrorist leader's killing in Pakistan.

Nor is it the first time this year a political figure was caught threatening violence at unions and their supporters. During the mass protests in Madison, Wisconsin, in February, a deputy attorney general in Indiana named Jeff Cox wrote on Twitter that police should "use live ammunition" on protesters occupying the Wisconsin state capitol in protest of Republican Gov. Scott Walker's anti-union bill. Mother Jones broke the story of Cox's controversial tweet on a Wednesday morning; by Wednesday afternoon, Cox had been fired.

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/07/...-new-hampshire

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Years ago, there were 'some' moderates in the repub party. No more. It is a religious right-wing zealots home now.

The requirement to become a repub now is an IQ lower than your age. And vicious hatred toward anyone else but those of your own kind.

NEW YORK — A group of religious leaders filed a lawsuit Monday against a newly approved gay marriage law in New York state and hundreds of same-sex unions celebrated over the weekend.

New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms filed the lawsuit in state court in Livingston County where one of the plaintiffs, Reverend Jason McGuire, lives.

The lawsuit says it seeks to "preserve not only marriage as the union of one woman to one man, but also our constitutional liberties" which were allegedly violated by the voting procedures in the state assembly during approval of the law.

The group states that it was founded in 1982 by pastors "concerned about religious liberties and moral values in New York State."

New York City officials said 659 same-sex couples were married Sunday and that others who received their licenses will be wed in the coming weeks.

The state legislature voted June 24 to allow gay marriage, making it the sixth and most important US state to give the green light.


http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheRa...3/3zRyUpo3UOs/

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Time to read this - again.

God is not great : how religion poisons everything
Christopher Hitchens

"See post 171 above to see how ignorant and stupid some are when they think that these dangerous types are good for the country."

Ain't that a little bit of a stretch my friend? The terrorist from Norway was a Tea Partier? C'mon. That's so Hava-gafa-kasha like.

Speaking of posts, 176 reminded me of a story my mother told me when I visited her earlier this month. She's 77 now. This all came up when I showed her how to google, and of course she went back in time. Long story short; her dad operated a flooring shop, which was eventually unionized due in part to threats made to her father about his daughter. How f'ing special is that? You think I'm BS'ing you? She cried. You endorse that. Let me clarify - Atypical endorses threating teenage girls as a means to champion his cause. Atypical champions ruining small business's because that's what happened.

Have a nice day.

From #171

"Maybe, just maybe, this tea party is GOOD for America. They certainly are "rebellious". They certainlly challenge the status quo."

Right, what part of "maybe" confuses you?