Myths Both Parties Want to Maintain Through the Presidential Election

Ed Krayewski|Aug. 16, 2012 Reason.com

To those NOT enamored by Teams Blue and Red, the rhetorical gymnastics performed in the run-up to a presidential election can be daunting. Yet underneath the hyper-partisan back and forth is an uncomfortable truth: a lot of what both sides are saying on the campaign trail is complete bullshit. Previously I broke down four misperceptions about Barack Obama some of his supporters advance. Some political misperceptions, however, are beneficial to partisans on both sides of the aisle, albeit for different reasons. Here are four myths that both the Democrats and the Republicans want to keep in circulation until the November election.




Paul Ryan Is a Deficit Reducing Fiscal Hawk
In the selection of Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney’s running mate, we had the opportunity to witness the creation of a bipartisan myth in overdrive. In this case, the myth was that Paul Ryan was a fiscal hawk, a libertarian, even an extremist. Anyone who’s given the Paul Ryan budgets serious study knows that none of this true. Nick Gillespie noted earlier this year that Ryan’s latest budget runs a deficit of $1.2 trillion, while the president’s ran a deficit of $1.3 trillion. What’s $100 billion between friends? By 2022, the Ryan budget envisions the federal government spending 4.9 trillion dollars. As Gillespie points out, though the Ryan budget doesn’t deny the massive debt problem facing America, it’s “weak tea” considering it does nothing to shrink annual deficits, and in fact doesn’t even try to balance the budget at all in the next 10 years. Yet Romney selected Ryan to energize the small government and Tea Party base, and President Barack Obama has decided to pin his campaign’s hope on painting his opponents as extremists, so playing on the misperceptions of Paul Ryan as a fiscal hawk is politically beneficial to both sides.
NEXT: Did you hear about Obama's amnesty?




Barack Obama Is Pro-Amnesty
While the DREAM Act languished in both the Democrat- and the Republican-controlled House as well as the Democratic Senate, even when Democrats held a 60-vote filibuster proof majority in that chamber, the Obama Administration hit record-breaking deportations rates and resisted reform of detention practices. Yet since President Obama announced temporary relief for some young people threatened by deportation a few months ago, his disenchanted Latino base has largely been re-invigorated. The unilateral presidential action also made passing immigration reform in Congress that much harder. But you wouldn’t think the president’s record was so muddied based on the rhetoric surrounding it. House Judiciary Committee Chair Lamar Smith (R-Texas), called Obama’s limited waiver via executive order an “amnesty.” A simple Google search will reveal Smith's not alone in characterizing Obama’s move that way. At the other end of the spectrum, the Obama campaign’s “Truth Team”—normally quick to spin any dissenting political opinion as factually untrue—debunked the myth of the Obama amnesty just once, a full nine months before the president’s executive order. In the meantime, “Latinos for Obama” even created an infographic claiming Mitt Romney would “repeal the DREAM Act,” almost as if the president and Democrats had actually passed it, beefing up their pro-immigration bona fides.
NEXT: Dude, our president is a peacemaker, he even got a prize for it!

 


Mitt Romney Is More Pro-War than Barack Obama
President Obama was announced as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize just 10 short months after taking office. Amazing, right? Why did the Norwegians award our president this prize? "[F]or his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." Specifically, the committee cited our newly-minted president’s efforts to reach out to the Muslim world. The president admitted he didn’t think he deserved the award, adding, “but I also know that this prize reflects the kind of world… all Americans want to build, a world that gives life to the promise of our founding documents.” What has Obama done since then? By the end of 2009, there had already been more drone strikes in Pakistan than under the last four years of the Bush administration. A New York Times expose of the president’s drone war revealed that the Obama administration considered conversations within the executive branch about the justification for ordering drone killings as sufficient to meet the constitutional due process standard. So much for the promise of our founding documents. Obama also sent U.S. military forces to help bombard Libya during its civil war, violating the constitutional limits on war making. The war in Afghanistan, of course, continues bloodily, and though many believe the war in Iraq has ended, that’s not completely true either. Not exactly a peacemaker. Reason has repeatedly explained how Obama’s foreign policy mirrors George W. Bush’s while various foreign policy analysts have noted that Obama and Romney’s foreign policy plans are pretty much the same. Even on the issue of Iran, the difference between Obama and Romney has been described as more a difference in style than substance. Yet both Obama apologists and Romney boosters will claim a substantive difference in foreign policy, one that paints Romney as the more warmongering candidate and Obama as “weak” on foreign policy.
NEXT: Only Romney can stop Obamacare, right?




Mitt Romney is Opposed to Government Intervention in Health Care, Like Obamacare!

When it comes to health care reform, the motto of the Tea Party has been “repeal Obamacare,” but for Mitt Romney it’s “repeal and replace.” But replace with what? Romney defended his own government intervention in health care in Massachusetts, Romneycare, in a similar way to Obama’s defense of Obamacare. An MIT professor who helped formulate Romneycare and advised Democrats on Obamacare noted many similarities between the two laws. The president himself identifies the Massachusetts law as a blueprint for his own program (though as Romney notes, he was never consulted for his expertise by the Obama administration). Recently, Romney was the target a vicious attack ad trying to connect him, through his work at Bain Capital, to a woman who lost her health insurance and died of cancer. Romney’s chief spokesperson, Andrea Saul, didn’t rebut the attack by pointing out the glaring inconsistencies of the narrative, but instead noted that had the woman lived in Massachusetts when Romneycare was in effect, she would’ve never lost her health insurance. Not exactly the kind of defense a candidate opposed to even more government intervention in an already heavily-regulated health care market would give. The comment drew calls for Saul’s resignation, but she remains on Team Mitt.

At the same time, the Obama campaign uses the threat of the repeal of Obamacare to marshal support for the president. Just this week, the first lady framed the debate over Obamacare as a question of health, asking an audience “Do we want these reforms to be repealed? …Or do we want the people we love to have the care they need? That’s the choice we face.” Although Romney may bank on the unpopularity of Obamacare, especially among the conservative grassroots, he’s never repudiated the idea of government intervention in the health care market. He even went so far as to tout the Israeli government's intervention in health care as an aspirational model. But what if Romney is actually sincere about repealing Obamacare, and the “replace” part of his mantra is just him trying to play both sides like politicians are wont to do? In June, The New Yorker laid out what it would take to repeal Obamacare and why a President Romney wouldn’t be able to do it. The most compelling point? Republicans are highly unlikely to get the 60 votes in the Senate needed to repeal the law.




Barack Obama’s foreign policy is not as destructive as George W. Bush's was (or Mitt Romney's would be).
During his 2008 campaign, Barack Obama leveraged his outspoken opposition to the Iraq War (while in the Illinois State Senate) to appeal to anti-war voters. To hear Mitt Romney tell it, Obama’s foreign policy hasn’t been sufficiently militaristic. This while a list of presidential accomplishments recently released by a Democratic group is riddled with the people killed while Obama has been commander in chief. Even as Joe Biden is calling Mitt Romney’s foreign policy weak, and mocking the sensible sounding idea of “subcontract[ing] our foreign policy to some expert at the State Department” (as opposed to the CIA or DoD, Joe?), the left continues to portray Romney as being more neo-conservative than Obama, the very president that neo-con leader Bill Kristol has claimed as one of his own. The truth is Romney would probably fit right in with Obama’s cabinet when it comes to making foreign policy decisions, and Obama’s foreign policy itself is a natural extension of President George W. Bush’s.


Barack Obama’s immigration policies are compassionate and humane.
 Obama's pro-immigration reform supporters were already growing disenchanted with Obama when he announced temporary relief for some young people threatened by deportation. While the move is expected to help thousands of people begin to normalize their legal status in the country, it comes as part of a broader approach from this president that has included record-breaking deportations rates and resistance to detention reform. Nevertheless, the “temporary stop gap measure” may have been enough to renew enthusiasm for Obama among Latinos and other pro-immigration voters, even while the unilateral action by the president makes efforts to pass immigration reform in Congress that much harder. Nor did Obama spend any political capital on immigration reform early in his presidency, even though Democrats held both chambers at the time, with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.


Obama’s support for gay marriage is groundbreaking.
When President Obama came out last month and staked a position on same-sex marriage that, as critics noted, Dick Cheney held back in 2004, it was nonetheless heralded as a grand moment in the gay rights struggle. Newsweek even dubbed Obama America’s “first gay president,” burying James Buchanan deeper into the nation's historical closet. What did Obama do to earn such accolades from supporters? Although he voiced support for same-sex marriage early in his political career, as president Obama waited until the day after North Carolina voters amended their Constitution to prohibit same-sex unions before telling ABC News about his personal support for gay marriage. While the president has instructed the Justice Department to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act in federal court, both the president and his aides have indicated that Obama sees gay marriage as an issue best left up to the states. Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson, on the other hand, supports the right to gay marriage on a federal level.




Barack Obama will end the war on drugs, eventually.
This is the most pervasive and consistent fantasy about former pot-smoker Barack Obama espoused by his supporters. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell went so far as to say that Obama legalizing drugs after the election is the “204th reason to vote for President Obama.” While Mitt Romney might be the kind of neighbor to tell you to extinguish your joint on the beach, Barack Obama is the kind of president that doesn’t understand the economic benefit of marijuana legalization and, more important, who has ramped up federal raids on medical marijuana clinics operating legally under state law, whose government seeks life sentences for medical marijuana dispensary owners whose activities are too profitable, and who refuses to allow any discretion in the execution of a deadly and never ending drug war. Obama is a drug warrior, plain and simple.

Parallel Earth: The Nominee

The New Totalitarianism of Surveillance Technology

Friday, August 17, 2012 by The Guardian/UK
If you think that 24/7 tracking of citizens by biometric recognition systems is paranoid fantasy, just read the industry newsletters

by Naomi Wolf

 

A software engineer in my Facebook community wrote recently about his outrage that when he visited Disneyland, and went on a ride, the theme park offered him the photo of himself and his girlfriend to buy – with his credit card information already linked to it. He noted that he had never entered his name or information into anything at the theme park, or indicated that he wanted a photo, or alerted the humans at the ride to who he and his girlfriend were – so, he said, based on his professional experience, the system had to be using facial recognition technology. He had never signed an agreement allowing them to do so, and he declared that this use was illegal. He also claimed that Disney had recently shared data from facial-recognition technology with the United States military.

Yes, I know: it sounds like a paranoid rant.

Except that it turned out to be true. News21, supported by the Carnegie and Knight foundations, reports that Disney sites are indeed controlled by face-recognition technology, that the military is interested in the technology, and that the face-recognition contractor, Identix, has contracts with the US government – for technology that identifies individuals in a crowd.

Fast forward: after the Occupy crackdowns, I noted that odd-looking CCTVs had started to appear, attached to lampposts, in public venues in Manhattan where the small but unbowed remnants of Occupy congregated: there was one in Union Square, right in front of their encampment. I reported here on my experience of witnessing a white van marked "Indiana Energy" that was lifting workers up to the lampposts all around Union Square, and installing a type of camera. When I asked the workers what was happening – and why an Indiana company was dealing with New York City civic infrastructure, which would certainly raise questions – I was told: "I'm a contractor. Talk to ConEd."

I then noticed, some months later, that these bizarre camera/lights had been installed not only all around Union Square but also around Washington Square Park. I posted a photo I took of them, and asked: "What is this?" Commentators who had lived in China said that they were the same camera/streetlight combinations that are mounted around public places in China. These are enabled for facial recognition technology, which allows police to watch video that is tagged to individuals, in real time. When too many people congregate, they can be dispersed and intimidated simply by the risk of being identified – before dissent can coalesce. (Another of my Facebook commentators said that such lamppost cameras had been installed in Michigan, and that they barked "Obey", at pedestrians. This, too, sounded highly implausible – until this week in Richmond, British Columbia, near the Vancouver airport, when I was startled as the lamppost in the intersection started talking to me – in this case, instructing me on how to cross (as though I were blind or partially sighted).

Finally, last week, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg joined NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly to unveil a major new police surveillance infrastructure, developed by Microsoft. The Domain Awareness System links existing police databases with live video feeds, including cameras using vehicle license plate recognition software. No mention was made of whether the system plans to use – or already uses – facial recognition software. But, at present, there is no law to prevent US government and law enforcement agencies from building facial recognition databases.

And we know from industry newsletters that the US military, law enforcement, and the department of homeland security are betting heavily on facial recognition technology. As PC World notes, Facebook itself is a market leader in the technology – but military and security agencies are close behind.

According to Homeland Security Newswire, billions of dollars are being invested in the development and manufacture of various biometric technologies capable of detecting and identifying anyone, anywhere in the world – via iris-scanning systems, already in use; foot-scanning technology (really); voice pattern ID software, and so on.

What is very obvious is that this technology will not be applied merely to people under arrest, or to people under surveillance in accordance with the fourth amendment (suspects in possible terrorist plots or other potential crimes, after law enforcement agents have already obtained a warrant from a magistrate). No, the "targets" here are me and you: everyone, all of the time. In the name of "national security", the capacity is being built to identify, track and document any citizen constantly and continuously.

The revealing boosterism of a trade magazine like Homeland Security Newswire envisions endless profits for the surveillance industry, in a society where your TV is spying on you, a billboard you drive by recognizes you, Minority Report style, and the FBI knows where to find your tattoo – before you have committed any crime: "FBI on Track to Book Faces, Scars, Tattoos", it notes; "Billboards, TVs Detect your Faces; Advertisers Salivate", it gloats; "Biometric Companies See Government as the Driver of Future Market Growth", it announces. Indeed, the article admits without a blush that all the growth is expected to be in government consumption, with "no real expectation" of private-sector growth at all. So much for smaller government!

To acclimate their populations to this brave new world of invasive surveillance technologies, UK Prime Minister David Cameron and and his Canadian counterpart, Stephen Harper, both recently introduced "snoop" bills. Meanwhile, in the US – "the land of the free" – the onward march of the surveillers continues apace, without check or consultation.

Corporations Can't Pledge Allegiance

Friday, August 17, 2012 by Huffington Post

by Frances Moore Lappé

 

Outcries against the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, extending corporations' 1st Amendment rights, point to many advantages giving corporations the edge over natural persons: "Limited liability" protects company owners from personal responsibility for business debts; and corporations are virtually immortal -- a big advantage. Mostly, though, critics point out the obvious: that a corporation's resources -- Exxon Mobil earns $1,300 per second -- typically dwarf those of ordinary mortals.

But whatever one's stand on "free speech rights" for corporations, what seems inarguable is that once the Court -- notably in its 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision -- began conflating spending and speech corporations and the wealthiest among us have been the big winners. Their vast resources enable them to morph into ear-shattering bullhorns drowning out regular citizens.

And, from this thought, I'm compelled to ask the "tree falling in the forest" question: Do I still have free speech if no one even knows I'm speaking because a tiny minority of "corporate voices" can produce a cacophony so loud that it cancels out the sound of mine?

Put another way, without any recognition of a right to be heard, does our 1st Amendment lose its power to protect the interchange of ideas -- foundational to democracy -- and permit instead the transformation of public discourse into a one-way gusher from the most powerful?

Earlier Courts took this danger seriously. In 1969, for example, in a decision written by moderate justice Byron White, the Supreme Court noted in Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC that: "It is the purpose of the 1st Amendment to preserve an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail, rather than to countenance monopolization of that market..."

To me -- and, I believe, our Founders -- democracy depends, moreover, on citizens' right not just to be heard but a corollary, a right to hear diverse points of view necessary to make informed choices. In 1787 Thomas Jefferson wrote that "[T]he basis of our governments...[is] the opinion of the people..." and stressed therefore that we must "give them full information of their affairs thro' the channel of the public papers, & to contrive those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people..."

Jefferson believed so strongly in the importance of a citizenry informed by diverse views that he continued: "[I]f it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers & be capable of reading them."

Today, remaining true to Jefferson's insight, many Americans appropriately assail China and other totalitarian regimes for denying precisely such freedom of access to information.
If, in our Founders' vision, a Republic depended on the capacity of educated citizens for reasoned consideration over public matters, then surely "spending as speech" is a body blow to our Republic.

And there's more to weigh here, for just as corporations are not natural persons, neither are they, nor can they be, citizens.

By their legal structure, corporations have no loyalty to our country. Between 2009 and 2011, for example, thirty-five big U.S.-based multinational companies, including Wal-Mart Stores, International Paper Co., and Honeywell International Inc., added jobs much faster than others. But nearly three-fourths were overseas, noted the Wall Street Journal last spring. Additionally, "at least 60 percent" of U.S. corporate cash stockpiles are now held abroad.

Corporations' loyalty is not to the American worker or to the broader community but to shareholders, wherever they be.

So of course corporations cannot pledge allegiance to the United States of America. With the exception of the several hundred firms now incorporated as "Benefit Corporations," legally obligated to serve the community's wellbeing, corporations' charters commit them to the opposite: to narrow self-seeking.

Thus, while most Americans recoil at the idea of "corporate personhood" because of the obvious power corporations enjoy compared to living-breathing mortals, just as important may be their differing responsibilities. And, I don't mean only the obvious, that citizens but not corporations are obliged to vote and required to serve on a jury and respond to a military draft. I mean something broader: Our Founders envisioned a Republic of citizens committed to, and capable, of participating in self-government.

They emphasized that such self-government could only work as we humans, flawed as we are, cultivate certain Republican "virtues" -- especially the capacity to consider not merely one's own personal gain but to protect democracy itself.

They grasped that self-government could only survive as long as we citizens --in step with the Founders' wisdom in creating a federal structure of countervailing powers -- work to keep concentrated power in check. Jefferson put the danger colorfully: "If once they [citizens] become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, judges and governors shall all become wolves."

Thus, what the Supreme Court betrays in its 2010 Citizens United's decision, and previous rulings affording corporations personhood rights, is our Founders' concept of citizenship, and thus democratic self-government itself.

Surely, given today's crises from poverty to climate chaos, we can't wait for a constitutional amendment to put corporations in their place. We must build toward that goal, I agree, but we must work for change we can effect now.

As citizens We have power to begin to check the political power of corporations -- holding elected officials accountable for requiring transparency regarding a corporation's political spending by passing the DISCLOSE Act and the Shareholder Protection Act. We can vote for those committed to creating a system of citizen and/or public-funded elections so that candidates can win public office without depending on corporate coffers.

For our rights as citizens to hear diverse views, we can also call for a reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, in place from 1949 to 1987, that obliged those holding licenses to public airwaves to "operate in the public interest and to afford reasonable opportunity for the discussion of conflicting views of issues of public importance."

In so doing, we will be reviving the very best in the never-finished journey of our Republic. Claiming our first responsibility as citizens seeking the common good, we can refuse to allow our voices to be drowned out by private entities seeking only the corporate good.

Stumbling Towards Nuclear War?

Is Washington Deaf As Well as Criminal?

by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

 

The morons who rule the American sheeple are not only dumb and blind, they are deaf as well. The ears of the american “superpower” only work when the Israeli prime minister, the crazed Netanyahu, speaks. Then Washington hears everything and rushes to comply.

Israel is a tiny insignificant state, created by the careless British and the stupid Americans. It has no power except what its American protector provides. Yet, despite Israel’s insignificance, it rules Washington.

When a resolution introduced by the Israel Lobby is delivered to Congress, it passes unanimously. If Israel wants war, Israel gets its wish. When Israel commits war crimes against Palestinians and Lebanon and is damned by the hundred plus UN resolutions passed against Israel’s criminal actions, the US bails Israel out of trouble with its veto.

The power that tiny Israel exercises over the “worlds’s only superpower” is unique in history. Tens of millions of “christians” bow down to this power, reinforcing it, moved by the exhortations of their “christian” ministers.

Netanyahu lusts for war against Iran. He strikes out against all who oppose his war lust. Recently, he called Israel’s top generals “pussies” for warning against a war with Iran. He regards former Israeli prime ministers and former heads of the Israeli intelligence service as traitors for opposing his determination to attack Iran. He has denounced America’s servile president Obama and america’s top military leader for being “soft on Iran.” The latest poll in Israel shows that a solid majority of the Israelis are opposed to an Israeli attack on Iran. But Netanyahu is uninterested in the opinion of Israeli citizens. He has Washington watching his back, so he is war mad. It is a mystery why Israelis put Netanyahu in public office instead of in an insane asylum.

Netanyahu is not alone. He has the american neoconservatives in his corner. The american neoconservatives are as crazed as Netanyahu. They believe in nuclear war and are itching to nuke some Muslim country and then get on to nuking Russia and China. It is amazing that no more than two or three dozen people have the fate of the entire world in their hands.

The Democratic Party is helpless before them.

The Republican Party is their vehicle.

The Russians, watching Netanyahu push Washington toward dangerous confrontations keep raising their voices about the danger of nuclear war.

On May 17 Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev warned the West against launching “hasty wars,” which could result “although I do not want to scare anyone” in “the use of a nuclear weapon.”

On November 30 of last year the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Russia warned of nuclear war with NATO. General Nikolai Makarov said that NATO’s eastward expansion meant that the risk of Russia coming into conflict with NATO had “risen sharply.” General Makarov said, “I do not rule out local and regional armed conflicts developing into a large-scale war, including using nuclear weapons.”

Here is Russian president Medvedev (currently the prime minister) describing the steps toward nuclear war that Russia has taken pushed by the crazed warmongers in Washington wallowing in their insane hubris:

With regard to the American missile bases on Russia’s borders, “I have made the following decisions. First, I am instructing the Defense Ministry to immediately put the missile attack early warning radar station in Kaliningrad on combat alert. Second, protective cover of Russia’s strategic nuclear weapons will be reinforced as a priority measure under the program to develop our air and space defenses. Third, the new strategic ballistic missiles commissioned by the Strategic Missile Forces and the Navy will be equipped with advanced missile defense penetration systems and new highly-effective warheads. Fourth, I have instructed the Armed Forces to draw up measures for disabling missile defense system data and guidance systems.

These measures will be adequate, effective, and low-cost. Fifth, if the above measures prove insufficient, the Russian Federation will deploy modern offensive weapon systems in the west and south of the country, ensuring our ability to take out any part of the US missile defense system in Europe. One step in this process will be to deploy Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad Region. Other measures to counter the European missile defense system will be drawn up and implemented as necessary. Furthermore, if the situation continues to develop not to Russia’s favor, we reserve the right to discontinue further disarmament and arms control measures.”

Russian president Vladimir Putin has said, as politely as possible, that the US seeks to enslave the world, that the US seeks vassals, not allies, that the US seeks to rule the world and that the US is a parasite on the world economy. It would be difficult for an informed person to take exception with Putin’s statements.

Putin told the politicians in Washington and Western and Eastern European capitals that surrounding Russia with anti-ballistic missiles “raises the specter of nuclear war in Europe.” Putin said that the Russian response is to point nuclear armed cruise missiles, which cannot be intercepted by anti-ballistic missiles, at the US missile bases and at European capitals. The American move, Putin said, “could trigger nuclear war.”

Putin has been trying to wake up the American puppet states in Europe at least since February 13, 2007. At the 43rd Munich Conference on Security Policy, Putin said that the unipolar world that Washington was striving to achieve under its banner, “is a world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.”

That has certainly happened to the US which now has a police state as thorough-going as Nazi Germany. And even better armed: http://rt.com/usa/news/dhs-ammo-rounds-security-560/print/

Putin went on to tell his European audience that in Russia, “we are constantly being taught about democracy. But for some reason those who teach us do not want to learn themselves.” Instead, Putin said, “we are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basis principles of international law. And independent legal norms are, as a matter of fact, coming increasingly closer to one state’s legal system. One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, Who likes this? Who is happy about this?”

People are not happy, Putin said, because they don’t feel safe. Not to feel safe “is extremely dangerous. It results in the fact that no one feels safe. I want to emphasize this–no one feels safe!” The result, Putin said, is “an arms race.”

Putin politely unbraided the Italian defense minister, a person owned by Washington, for suggesting that NATO or the EU could take the place of the UN in justifying the use of force against sovereign countries. Putin took exception to the idea that Washington could use its puppet organization or its puppet states to legitimize an act of US aggression. Putin stated flatly: “The use of force can only be considered legitimate if the decision is sanctioned by the UN.”

Putin went on to discuss the forked tongue of Washington. Reagan and Gorbachev had firm agreements, but Reagan’s successors put “frontline forces on our borders. . . . The stones and concrete blocks of the Berlin Wall have long been distributed as souvenirs. But we should not forget that the fall of the Berlin Wall was possible thanks to a historic choice – one that was also made by our people, the people of Russia – a choice in favor of democracy, freedom, openness and a sincere partnership with all the members of the big European family. And now they are trying to impose new dividing lines and walls on us – these walls may be virtual but they are nevertheless dividing ones that cut through our continent. And is it possible that we will once again require many years and decades, as well as several generations of politicians, to dissemble and dismantle these new walls.”

Putin’s speech of more than 6 years ago shows that he has Washington’s number. Washington is The Great Pretender, pretending to respect human rights while Washington slaughters Muslims in seven countries on the basis of lies and fabricated intelligence. The american people, “the indispensable people,” support this murderous policy. Washington uses the status of the dollar as reserve currency to exclude countries that do not do Washington’s bidding from the international clearing system.

Washington, awash in hubris like Napoleon and Hitler before they marched off into Russia, has turned a deaf, dumb, and blind ear to Putin during the entirety of the 21st century. Speaking on May 10, 2006, Putin said: “We are aware of what is gong on in the world. Comrade wolf [the US] knows whom to eat, he eats without listening, and he’s clearly not going to listen to anyone.”

“Where,” Putin asked, is Washington’s “pathos about protecting human rights and democracy when it comes to the need to pursue its own interests?” For Washington, “everything is allowed, there are no restrictions whatsoever.”

China also has caught on. Now the hubris that drives Washington toward world hegemony confronts two massive nuclear powers. Will the criminal gang in Washington drive the world to nuclear extinction?

Washington, thinking that it owns the world, has imposed more unilateral sanctions on Iran without any basis in any recognized law. The imposed sanctions are nothing but Washington’s assertion that its might is right.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said that Washington could stick its sanctions up its ass. “We consider efforts to impose internal American legislation on the entire world completely unacceptable.”

Washington will do what it can to assassinate Putin and effect regime change through the Russian “opposition” that Washington funds. Failing that, Washington’s pursuit of world hegemony has run up against a brick wall. If the fools in Washington with their hubris-inflated egos don’t back off, that mushroom cloud they have been warning about will indeed blossom over Washington.

Democrats In Bed With Corporations

Still think the Democrats are better than the Republicans? They are exactly the same: corrupt corporatists.--jef

NDAA: The Important Lawsuit that No One is Talking About

Truthdig, August 10, 2012

 

Despite a mainstream media blackout on the topic, the alternative media is abuzz with this week’s hearing on the constitutionality of the clearly unconstitutional NDAA.  In case you don’t remember, section 1021 of the NDAA, which Obama signed into law on December 31 of last year, allows the government to lock up U.S. citizens indefinitely without a trial.  At the time of signing, Obama penned a pathetic letter to many of his outraged supporters where he basically said he signed it but he won’t use it.  Thanks pal!

In any event, the Administration is showing its true colors by appealing an injunction that judge Katherine Forrest issued against it in May.  The injunction was in response to the lawsuit filed by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges and others.  While the NDAA clearly vaporizes the 5th and 6th Amendments of the Constitution, the real target is the 1st Amendment.  By having a law on the books that allows the government to arbitrarily lock anyone up and throw away the key, the government is actually trying to instill enough fear in people that they self-censor speech and become too afraid to criticize the criminal elite political and economic oligarchy.

Tangerine Bolen is one the lead plaintiffs in the suit against the government and she penned a powerful piece for the UK’s Guardian.  Here are some key quotes:

I am one of the lead plaintiffs in the civil lawsuit against the National Defense Authorization Act, which gives the president the power to hold any US citizen anywhere for as long as he wants, without charge or trial.

In a May hearing, Judge Katherine Forrest issued an injunction against it; this week, in a final hearing in New York City, US government lawyers asserted even more extreme powers – the right to disregard entirely the judge and the law. On Monday 6 August, Obama’s lawyers filed an appeal to the injunction – a profoundly important development that, as of this writing, has been scarcely reported.

Judge Forrest had ruled for a temporary injunction against an unconstitutional provision in this law, after government attorneys refused to provide assurances to the court that plaintiffs and others would not be indefinitely detained for engaging in first amendment activities. At that time, twice the government has refused to define what it means to be an “associated force”, and it claimed the right to refrain from offering any clear definition of this term, or clear boundaries of power under this law.

This past week’s hearing was even more terrifying. Government attorneys again, in this hearing, presented no evidence to support their position and brought forth no witnesses. Most incredibly, Obama’s attorneys refused to assure the court, when questioned, that the NDAA’s section 1021 – the provision that permits reporters and others who have not committed crimes to be detained without trial – has not been applied by the US government anywhere in the world after Judge Forrest’s injunction.

Full article here.

How Corporate America Made Slaves of the Young

It’s Just Business

Posted on Aug 9, 2012 By Christian Neumeister

Companies across the nation are gleefully denying interns fair wages for their work, in flagrant violation of long-standing labor law, and have the nerve to tell the world they are doing these people a favor.

Huge numbers of college students and recent graduates in a tight labor market are too scared to ask for compensation. Consequently, many interns must work for years in unpaid positions to build their résumés while depending on their parents for financial support. Not only do unpaid internships stop some from paying down a collectively exploding student debt, they compound the economical class differences between those who can afford to work for free and those who can’t. 

This exploitative practice has evolved over the generations since the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938 and a 1947 Supreme Court ruling about railroad trainees that officially defined unpaid internships; that ruling was mostly ignored by businesses, and today’s systemic abuse of interns eventually developed.

Now, a disturbing percentage of U.S. companies accepts as routine the illegal work of unpaid interns. One of the legal challenges to the abuse is a class-action lawsuit against the Hearst Corp. being pressed by the New York employment law firm Outten & Golden on behalf of interns who claim they were improperly denied wages and benefits at 19 of Hearst’s magazines. The law firm is pursuing two other corporations on similar grounds, Fox Searchlight and television’s “The Charlie Rose Show.”

In the suit against Hearst, the principal complainant, a former intern at Harper’s Bazaar, says she often worked 40 hours a week without pay or benefits. Hearst’s lawyers maintain that the corporation can lose in the proceeding only if the court reads the law in “a novel and rigid way.”
 
The corporation’s lawyers, by in effect admitting that a “rigid” reading of the law could vindicate the interns’ charges, suggest there is validity to the widespread charges that the letter of the law is being ignored in the American marketplace. Indeed, any objective analysis of unpaid internships in the U.S. points to illegal exploitation not only in the journalism industry but in almost every other business sector as well.

This prevailing, callous attitude toward interns was affirmed in a July 11 article in Forbes—Kate Harrison’s “Why Interns Are Your New Best Friends,” which offers tips on how businesses can best use interns. However welcome those tips may be to companies, the Forbes piece fails to address the basic issues that afflict unpaid internships. 

Interns, few of whom receive a paycheck or benefits, can be found performing a wide variety of duties, including data entry, filing, writing copy and running social media campaigns. The use of interns for such tasks was popularized in the fashion and telecommunications industries and has since spread to nearly every other area of business. These unpaid workers are desperate to make industry contacts and build their résumés, and fear of creating a bad name for themselves usually keeps them from complaining about how they are treated. 

Because of the informality of the arrangement, statistics about U.S. internships are sparse. The Department of Labor estimates that between 1 million and 2 million Americans work as interns, and Robin Richards, the CEO of Internships.com, says that only about 34 percent of those listed on his website are paid. Statistics compiled by Business Insider indicate that 75 percent of students at four-year colleges have had an internship and that corporations save almost $2 billion each year through internships. 

The reality is that interns perform many important day-to-day corporate operations, especially the most monotonous work. One summer intern contacted by Truthdig left a major human rights advocacy group after just a week when she realized she would be performing only “mundane tasks such as editing grammar mistakes for papers, running errands for the boss and waiting on others everyday.” “I wanted an internship that can heighten my skills, not simply buying groceries for a wine and cheese party,” she said in an email interview. 

The prevalence of unpaid internships means that the usual employment path for service workers has disappeared. Gone are the days when young workers could walk from their college graduation into an entry-level position in a mailroom or running copy at a small newspaper. Now, a graduate’s career may hang on landing an impressive internship through the connections of relatives, friends or former teachers. It may take years of internships before a person can find a paid position with career potential. In the meantime, homeownership—a major part of the economic engine—and marriage may have to be delayed. Unpaid internships ultimately work to the detriment of both the interns and the overall economy.

* * * The most fundamental question in a discussion of any economic practice should be its legal status. Companies, interns, governments, universities and their respective lawyers differ widely in their interpretations of laws and rules related to internships. The Forbes article makes a great show of explaining the legal distinction between paid and unpaid internships. Harrison, after citing six criteria of the Labor Department for companies’ use of unpaid interns, notes that the federal government requires that any intern who produces “immediate advantage” to an employer be paid at least the legal minimum wage. “In other words,” she writes, “if you want interns to do data entry and coffee fetching, you’d better offer them minimum wage.” 

Although the Forbes article has a hyperlink to the Labor Department criteria, which appear in government documents under the heading “The Test for Unpaid Interns,” Harrison does not present them in full. Here they are:  

1. The internship, even though it includes actual operation of the facilities of the employer, is similar to training which would be given in an educational environment;
2. The internship experience is for the benefit of the intern;
3. The intern does not displace regular employees, but works under close supervision of existing staff;
4. The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern; and on occasion its operations may actually be impeded;
5. The intern is not necessarily entitled to a job at the conclusion of the internship; and
6. The employer and the intern understand that the intern is not entitled to wages for the time spent in the internship.

If those standards seem naive and a departure from contemporary practices, it may be because they were enacted in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. But nonetheless they are the law, regardless of how often businesses violate them. The primary message of the official standards is that an unpaid internship must stem from the good will of the employer, which must provide education to the intern and receive nothing in return.

These government criteria come with a caveat, however: The rules apply only to internships at for-profit organizations. There are exceptions for nonprofit and government work, in which interns can be called “volunteers” (those exceptions are currently under review by the Labor Department). But Chris Tilly, director of UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, does not absolve nonprofits from criticism. He maintains that nonprofits’ heavy use of unpaid interns, apart from having negative effects on the young employees, is detrimental to the organizations themselves. “Nonprofits need to be sustainable, which includes sustainable careers,” he said in a telephone interview. Unpaid internships, he pointed out, involve a quick turnover rate, which detracts from the viability of long-term positions at a nonprofit.

* * * Internship conditions vary considerably according to the size of the company involved. Whitney Green, a former executive of the Walt Disney Co., told Truthdig, “It’s work for a company to have to do it legitimately [employ interns]—you have to teach [them].” She went on to say that Disney has only two or three corporate internship slots and does pay its interns. Green noted that many smaller companies keep payrolls down by using unpaid interns in the production of low-budget films.

Here’s one example of how a small company—in this case a Brooklyn merchandiser—uses an intern to lower company costs. The unpaid employee, a junior at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California, said in an exchange of emails with Truthdig that he enjoys his job and that “while I get my fair share of ‘intern work,’ like making deliveries … using the subway or a minivan, I’ve also had my fair share of more substantial responsibilities: opening new accounts, negotiating deals with buyers, drafting applications for substantial grants, cleaning up and streamlining [the] sales database and managing a campaign to bring the product to college campuses.” Although he is benefiting from the work experience and isn’t complaining, an outside look reveals that the company is violating some of the criteria set by the Department of Labor.

Even though the particulars differ, it’s almost as if this intern’s employer had read Forbes’ article. Harrison, the writer, gives five ways that employers can benefit from interns, most of which fly in the face of her advice that businesses pay interns. For instance, her second tip: “Offloading: Even unpaid interns can take on some of the more time consuming tasks that every organization must deal with. …”

No, they can’t. The Department of Labor says so. Check out requirement No. 4 in the list above.

Assume that an unpaid intern is being used to operate a business’ social media campaign. Such a program clearly adds to the value of a company. If you want an unpaid intern to work on social media for your business, he or she must do it alongside a paid employee performing that function and must be in a position to learn about how a company uses social media. An unpaid intern working alone on social media is not in an educational environment; probably would be displacing an employee who would normally work on social media; and surely would produce immediate advantage for the employer. All of which violate the official criteria. 

Which brings us to a key question: How does an intern get fair compensation in today’s marketplace? Interns are usually desperate, and companies exploit that. Some employers feel that an unpaid intern has received enough reward by simply being hired, and they also play on the emotional pressure inherent in the arrangement—interns’ anxiety about asking for money.

* * * I myself am an intern, and when the time came during the hiring process for me to ask about compensation I hesitated to do so out of concern that I would immediately be shown the way to the door. I did ask, and I was not thrown out, but the fear is very real for prospective interns across the country.

Some might say I’ve been overly critical of the author of the Forbes article, Kate Harrison. After all, she does urge organizations to pay their interns. However, her article slyly perpetuates the idea that there’s a free lunch for companies. She calls interns the “best task force money can’t buy,” suggests that employers hire interns for second, out-of-office jobs like baby-sitting, and pitches interns as cheap guinea pigs, saying they “can allow you to test new ideas or programs at little or no cost.” In pushing its pro-business agenda, Forbes descends into hypocrisy.

The reason I have singled out the Forbes article is because the negative attitudes it has toward interns are not isolated. Many businesses share Harrison’s cost-minimizing approach, along with a casual willingness to ignore state and federal law.

Larger businesses, like NBA teams that have public relations interns, in most cases can afford to pay a few interns and thereby avoid the risk of public censure that might come from being sued over unpaid internships. 

Aware of that risk, many businesses at least make some attempt to meet the criteria for an unpaid internship. Usually, this consists of requiring an in-college intern to register for academic credit at the intern’s college or university. Many graduate programs require internships as part of routine coursework, and undergraduates can earn course credits through an independent study or a special internship class. Sixty percent of students report that their schools require internships for graduation, according to InternBridge.com. 

Awarding and institutionalizing academic credit as compensation for unpaid work acts as a seal of approval from colleges and universities that fosters the erroneous belief that academic credit alone satisfies the Labor Department’s requirements and ensures that the internship is educational.

Academic credit for the intern does not mean that the program is educational, and educational value is only one part of the Labor Department criteria; “academic credit alone does not guarantee that the employer is in compliance.” Under the law, internships with academic credit still must not produce any value for the organization and still must not replace any paid employees.

Despite a 2010 letter to the U.S. Labor Department from 13 college and university presidents claiming that “our institutions take great pains to ensure students are placed in secure and productive environments that further their education,” accountability for and enforcement of educational working conditions still vary greatly within and between schools. The letter urged Labor Department officials to ease regulations on unpaid internships, promising that schools could ensure the educational value of internships themselves.

UCLA’s Tilly points out that many schools are decentralized, meaning individual departments that issue the academic credits for internships have their own processes for ensuring that the positions are educational. Interns might write papers, submit reports, give presentations or do nothing whatsoever that could be evaluated, and their evaluators could be either department heads or graduate students, depending on the institution. Given the variations in quality of evaluation, neither employers nor colleges and universities can rightly claim that awarding academic credit accurately reflects educational value in an internship. 

Besides concerns about misrepresentations of the value of academic credit, there are strong societal and economic forces at work here. If wages represent the value of an employee’s work, an unpaid intern has no economic value. However, interns clearly are valuable to companies, illustrating an inconsistency in the market for workers derived from an intern’s lack of bargaining power. Internships demonstrate to employers a willingness to work for free, devaluing interns’ work for both the workers and potential future employers. If the résumé of a recent graduate is full of unpaid work, he or she well might be hired only for more unpaid internships or, if a real job is landed, be underpaid.

Only the well-off can afford to work without pay for two years after graduating, or for that matter during college summer breaks, and this bars even middle-class graduates from competing in job markets that look to internship experience. Such fundamental inequities in access worsen an already unfair system of wage denial.

However, interns can take heart; there are a variety of solutions available to them.
First among these is building awareness of interns’ legal status among colleges, employers and the interns themselves. If every student knew that many unpaid internships are illegal, students would have less fear that others would work for free if they themselves refused to do so. If businesses continued to participate in illegal unpaid internships, colleges and student groups could join forces to protect interns. Unpaid interns, made aware of their disenfranchisement, could organize, or join with existing labor groups such as the SEIU. (After all, wasn’t the labor movement’s primary goal fair wages and benefits for abused workers?)

Actual enforcement by state and federal governments would build awareness of interns’ rights as well. Jose Millan, former California labor commissioner, noted in a phone interview for this article that “any time there’s a scarcity of resources on a governmental level, it behooves [federal and state agencies] to pool resources and take on high-profile cases and publicize them.” The current method of enforcement based on individual complaints, he said, is ineffective because it is underfunded. Although prosecuting every case would be an overwhelming task, taking a few major cases and making examples of them would scare companies into compliance. Once most companies follow labor laws, a complaint system becomes workable.

It is a testament to moral blindness in our economic structure that companies can tell young workers they won’t be able to find work without a résumé built around what amounts to slave labor. The abuse of unpaid workers will continue until the government decides to enforce its own laws, or interns collectively realize the truth about their servitude and decide to take action—by organizing, by suing or by boycotting employers. Otherwise, improper unpaid internships will continue to the detriment of interns, schools and the entire country.
Ms. Harrison and Forbes, both complicit in this de facto serfdom, should own up to the sad reality they have helped perpetuate. Better yet, they should call for actions to remedy the problem and properly reward the interns so many companies depend on.

The Dispossessed Majority

Rule By Private Oligarchy

by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

 

The bumper sticker on the beat-up pickup truck read: “Friends don’t let friends vote Democrat.”
The driver was obviously not affluent.  Yet, despite all the news about mega-trillion dollar bankster bailouts, mega-million dollar bonuses for financial crooks, and unimaginable compensation packages for corporate CEOs who have moved middle class jobs out of America, something made the down-and-out pickup truck driver associate with the political party of the super-rich--who have done so much to ruin his life.

As I wondered at this strange alliance of the dirt poor with the mega-rich, I remembered that in 2004 Thomas Frank wondered about how the Republicans had managed to convince the poor to vote against their best interests. Frank’s answer, or part of his answer, is that the Republicans use “social issues,” such as gay marriage and Janet Jackson’s exposed nipple to work up indignation over the threat to moral values posed by liberal Democrats.

The working poor have been convinced by Republican propaganda that voting Democrat means giving the working poor’s tax dollars to the non-working poor, to providing medical care and schooling for illegal aliens, and being soft on terrorism.

To the pick-up truck driver, standing up for America means standing up for bankster bailouts and the military/security complex’s multi-trillion dollar wars.

The Karl Rove Dirty Tricks Team has honed the Republican propaganda. Republicans send each other via email an endless number of nonsense stories about Obama being a Muslim, about Obama being a Marxist, about Obama being a Manchurian Candidate turning America over to the New World Order or the United Nations, or to some other dastardly plotting organization.  But never is Obama accused of turning the US over to Wall Street, the military/security complex, or Israel.

There is never any citation or source for the accusations in the emails.  None are needed, because the words are what the Republicans want to hear. Ask them why Obama would be killing Muslims in seven countries if he was a Muslim, or why Wall Street and the military/security complex would put a Marxist in the White House, and they turn purple with rage. Just by asking the obvious questions instead of joining in the denunciations, a person confirms the propaganda that America is threatened by Obama dupes who won’t stand up for the country.

The non-affluent who rage about welfare, medicaid, Obamacare, and public schools can’t seem to put two and two together. The $750 billion TARP bankster bailout, a small part of the total and ongoing bailout, would have sufficed to cover any holes in these budgets for a long time. Instead, the money went to reward those who caused the financial crisis and threw millions of Americans out of their homes. As far as I know, the pickup truck driver is one of the dispossessed.

The same brainwashed Americans who rage against Obamacare and are lined up to vote for Romney are oblivious to the fact that Romney, while governor of the eastern liberal Democratic state of Massachusetts, had his version of Obamacare enacted at the state level.

The greatest irony about Obamacare is that it was written by the private insurance companies and diverts Medicaid and Medicare funds to their profits.  It is socialized medicine alright, but it is socialism for the private insurance companies.

All it took to convince Red staters to go along with the military/security complex squandering $6 trillion on the Iraq and Afghan wars was yellow ribbon decals and a slogan, “support the troops.”

Obama, Republicans claim, won’t stand up to Syria, or against Iran, or for Israel. But Republicans are proud when Romney goes to Israel to slither on his belly pandering to the crazed, blood-thirsty Israeli prime minister Netanyahu, who called Israeli top generals “pussies” for warning against attacking Iran.

Romney told Netanyahu, just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it; I am loyal to Israel.  Apparently, flag-waving Republican patriots are not bothered when their presidential candidate announces that as soon as he is in office he will turn over US foreign policy to Netanyahu and send more americans to death and bankruptcy for Netanyahu.

Karl Rove didn’t have any trouble at all in brainwashing red staters to support their own demise.  The pickup truck driver could just as well have sported a bumper sticker that read: “Don’t support a Democrat. He might do something for you.”

Yes, I know. It is almost as easy to beat up on Democrats. Bush and Cheney and their neocon hoodlums destroyed the Constitution and, thereby, America.  But the Democrats let them. It was Nancy Pelosi, who as Speaker of the House stridently declared Bush’s impeachment to be “off the table.”

Bush and Cheney unquestionably violated both US and international laws and the Constitution. Nancy Pelosi’s refusal to hold them accountable established the precedent that the executive branch is no longer accountable to law or to the Constitution.  In effect, the executive branch now comprises a dictatorship.  It acts outside of law and constitutional restraints.  On some issues it still has to consult with Congress or the courts, but as the executive branch’s power and audacity grows, consultation will become a formality and then drop away. Congress will have no more influence than the Roman senate under the empire, and courts will become stages for show trials.

Americans elected Obama president expecting that he would restore the rule of law. Instead, he codified the Bush regime’s transgressions and added some of his own.  No one of my generation could have imagined the president of the US sitting in the Oval Office signing off on lists of American citizens to be murdered without evidence or due process of law.

So which do you want?  The Republican panderer to the rich and Israel whose foreign policy is war or the Democrat panderer to the rich and Israel whose foreign policy is war?  As Gerald Celente wrote in the July issue of the Trends Journal, Americans “argue among themselves why their freak is better than the other freak. They will get angry with you if you call their freak a freak. They will actually fight and die to defend their freaks.”

It is extraordinary that millions of Americans actually believe fervently that it matters whether Romney freak or Obama freak gets elected. If americans had any sense, they would stay home and not vote. The 1% control the country, and the 99% had just as well own up to it and stay at home.  Nothing is going to change because of the ballot box.

What do you suppose the Ron Paul supporters will do?  Will they see Romney as the less socialist of the two and vote for the Republicans who stole the nomination from Ron Paul?  (Jaret Glenn, “How the GOP Establishment Stole the Nomination from Ron Paul,” published on August 6 on the OpEdNews website.

The US is ruled by a private oligarchy. The government is merely their front. The country’s resources are diverted to the pockets of Wall Street, the military/security complex, and to the service of greater Israel.  The oil, mining, timber, and agribusiness companies control the Environmental Protection Agency and the Forestry Service, which is why regulation only pertains to the small individual, while fracking, mountaintop removal mining, and pollution of air, water, and soil run wild.

The oligarchs have succeeded in making americans a dispossessed majority in their own country.  In November americans will again give their approval to one of the oligarchy’s two candidates.

Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal.

The Second Coming of the 10 Commandments Judges

 I know too many Christians who are fine upstanding, more or less rational folk  and I can't lump them in with these "neoChristians" who think a white Christ approves of war and being wealthy at the cost of more children living in poverty. Neo-Christians have taken Christ SO out of context that they've warped themselves into thinking warmongering, executions (pro-life or pro-death penalty? can't be both!), denying medical care to poor children and old folks--that these are Christian values. It would almost be worth going to hell to see the look on these people's faces when they realized just how fucked up is the situation they put themselves in by attempting to define the undefinable in their warped human terms. "Surprise! Jesus isn't a bigot, turns out he LOVES the brown people you want to torture and kill, he has no problems with gay people living happy healthy lives and raising children in loving homes, he hates money (remember his little tantrum at the temple? big clue!) and that every bad thing you ever did to anybody else, you also did to your boy, Jesus, there...in HIS own name! Yeah, work that out..."--jef

 

The Constitution vs. (neo)Christian Principles

by CHRISTOPHER BRAUCHLI

Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments, an’ a man can raise a thirst.
– Rudyard Kipling, Mandalay

It is sort of a second coming.  Not the kind you may have thought of at first.  It’s a second coming of state Supreme Court Justices.  I refer to the recent primary election in Texas, the home of Governor Rick Perry, the state with the most executions in the nation and the state where one in four residents manages to get by without health insurance (raises hand--jef). In the primary election that took place on July 31 to decide, among other things, who would be one of the new members of the Texas Supreme Court, Texas proved that it will not be outdone by Alabama.

Alabama conducted its primary election back in the spring of 2012and in that election demonstrated that Alabama is not only a God fearing state but a God promoting state.  In the March primary election, voters selected the Republican candidate to be the High Priest of the Alabama Supreme Court (or the Chief Justice as contemporary parlance would have it) and selected none other than Roy Moore.

Roy first became famous when, in 1997, as a state circuit court judge he hung a hand-carved wooden plaque of the Ten Commandments in his courtroom.  He refused a higher court order to remove it. In 2001 Roy was elected Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, a post he held until 2003 when he was removed by the Alabama Court of the Judiciary.  The removal occurred because six months after he became Chief Justice he supervised the construction and installation of a 5,280-pound granite monument to the Ten Commandments in the central rotunda of the State Judicial Building.  When the 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ruling of a lower court ordering removal of the monument, Chief Justice Moore refused and, as a result, both he and the monument were removed. In March 2012 he won the Republican primary contest in Alabama and is in a good position to regain the post from which he was removed 10 years earlier. Texas has now joined Alabama.

On July 31, 2012 a primary was conducted pitting Supreme Court Justice David Medina against Tea-Party backed John Devine.  A judicial contemporary of Roy Moore, John Devine was first elected as a trial court judge in 1995.  He won election at that time having campaigned on a platform of getting Christianity back into government (because they believe the world is 6000 years old, but they don't believe in the wall of separation--jef), describing himself as a “Christian Principles” candidate.  His campaign literature for the recent primary describes him as the “10 Commandments Judge” who “received national acclaim by refusing to remove a painting of the Ten Commandments from his courtroom and defeated a related lawsuit by liberal activists.”  (The reference to defeating a lawsuit is misleading.  The suit was brought by a party in a civil case who complained that hanging religious symbols in John’s courtroom could improperly influence those on the jury and, in addition, violated certain of the plaintiff’s other constitutional rights.  The case was dismissed when Judge Devine removed himself from the case in question thus rendering the complaint moot.)

Like Roy, John likes religious monuments.   When he assumed the bench in 1995, he and his clerk solicited funds to refurbish a monument that had sat outside the courthouse for more than 50 years.  It was originally erected by Star of Hope, a Christian Charity that provides food and shelter to indigents in honor of William Mosher, a prominent  Houston businessman and philanthropist who had been one of Star of Hope’s supporters.  Over time the monument was vandalized and the Bible was removed. Following his election to the bench and successful in his fund raising efforts, the monument was restored and the Bible placed atop the monument, surrounded by red neon lights.  A suit was brought to compel removal of the monument on the grounds that it violated the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.  The trial court agreed with the those seeking removal of the monument and, on appeal, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Court of Appeals concluded that a reasonable observer “would conclude that the monument, with the Bible outlined in red neon lighting, had evolved into a predominantly religious symbol. . . . This observer would conclude that Judge Devine and his allies essentially had commandeered the monument for religious purposes, and that the primary purpose of the monument had now become religious.”

With his primary victory, John is assured of a seat on the Texas Supreme Court, one of nine Justices to serve.  In Alabama Roy is also virtually assured of election.  (His opponent is a criminal defense lawyer who has unsuccessfully run for office 10 times and once said undocumented immigrants should be publicly executed.)

The selection of these two men is good news for those who think our courts should be guided by Christian principles.  It’s less good news for those who think they should be guided by constitutional principles.

(Christians who run for a political office which includes the responsibility of punishing criminals. Chistianity, which is based on forgiveness, is a punitive philosophy now. **SIGH**--jef)