Successful labor sit-in with support of Occupy
This is old news as the Internet flies, but it's still worth noting.
Some of you may remember the case of Republic Windows and Doors. This was a company outside Chicago that in 2008 closed its factory without the legally-required notice to its 250 employees - which also meant denying them the severance, accrued vacation time, and temporary health benefits to which they were entitled.
Instead of passively accepting this like good little drones were supposed to, the workers, members of the United Electrical Workers, occupied the plant, refusing to leave. In one of those happy unusual occasions, the sit-in caught the attention of the media and the public, attention that got intensified when it was revealed that the reason the plant was closing was that Bank of America, which just a few days earlier had received $25 billion in bailout funds from the federal government, had cut off the company's credit line.
After six days, the workers won: BoA agreed to renew the credit line so the company could pay the workers what it owed them. What’s more, a new company, Serious Energy, bought the factory and pledged to rehire all of the fired workers. Serious began production with a fraction of the former workforce, hoping that business would soon pick up. But it didn't.
The union agreed the company wasn't doing well, but was still blindsided by the company's announcement on February 23 that the company wqs closing immediately. When the union said it wanted time to find a buyer for the factory so workers would not lose their jobs, the company refused.
So the plant is closing. Again. So what's the good news?
The good news is that "it's déjà vu all over again." There was another sit-in at the plant, this one aided by outside support from Occupy Chicago, which organized media coverage, food for occupiers of the plant, and a presence on the street outside that dissuaded - and I mean dissuaded, not blocked - the police from arresting the union members inside the plant. In less than 24 hours, an agreement had been reached for the plant to remain open an additional 90 days to give time to find a buyer or for the workers to buy it themselves.
By the way, members of the union credited the involvement of Occupy for the quick resolution, saying the corporation "panicked" when they heard Occupy Chicago was present and quickly came to an agreement.
Sources:
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/28/a_famous_chicago_factory_gets_occupied/singleton/
Thursday, March 08, 2012
Left Side of the Aisle #47
This week:
- Successful labor sit-in with support of Occupy
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/28/a_famous_chicago_factory_gets_occupied/singleton/
- The misogyny of Rush Limbaugh and the right
http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/05/us/rush-limbaugh-controversy/?hpt=us_c2
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jFiPtzocCbofU5cdW6KdeLyNfYUQ?docId=ec713c2ef94740deb6bfbaa254e69d86
http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/03/rush-limbaugh-apology-falling-on-deaf-ears.php
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/03/03/a_statement_from_rush
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/03/02/the_democrats_are_desperate_obama_calls_sandra_fluke_the_30_year_old_victim
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/03/05/why_i_apologized_to_sandra_fluke
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush_Limbaugh%E2%80%93Sandra_Fluke_controversy
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/03/sc_county_gop_if_youve_had_pre-marital_sex_you_can.php?ref=fpb
- Outrage of the Week: the travails of the rich
http://www.care2.com/causes/is-it-time-to-take-pity-on-the-rich.html
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-29/wall-street-bonus-withdrawal-means-trading-aspen-for-cheap-chex.html
- Eric Holder says PHC* can order you to be killed
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/03/holder_executive_branch_reviews_of_targeted_killings_count_as_due_process.php?ref=fpa
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/03/guest-post-attorney-general-holder-says-murder-is-legal.html
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2012/03/eric-holder-targeted-killing
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/eric-holder-drone-speech-7124146
- RIP Scroogle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroogle
http://searchengineland.com/scroogles-gone-heres-who-still-offers-private-searching-112275
http://searchengineland.com/scroogle-org-is-gone-forever-says-site-owner-112245
Monday, March 05, 2012
On Lush Dimblah, who I never wanted to have to mention
This is going to be on the upcoming show but I figured I'd mention it here now.
So Rust (not a typo - a reference to the contents of his skull) has offered what some folks unfamiliar with the concept of "dictionary" are calling an "apology." Others have covered this more than adequately, but I had a few quick thoughts that I haven't noted elsewhere (although maybe I just haven't looked in the right places).
1. If nothing else, it's gratifying to see that the "I was joking! Jeez! Doncha have a sense of humor?" crap won't - or at least won't always - fly anymore. That line has served as a Get Out of Jail Free card for all sorts of racist and sexist crap for far too long.
2. "Thirty years old, a student at Georgetown Law, who admits to having so much sex that she can't afford it anymore," he said. "She's having sex so frequently that she can't afford all the birth-control pills that she needs." What the hell? Is Limburger really as abysmally ignorant as he comes on? Can any grown man be so uninformed, so totally out of the loop (and his mind), such a total twit as to think, as he apparently does, that the cost of birth control pills is directly related to how much sex you've having? The rational mind reels.
3. He also groused that his failing in his three days of vituperation - excuuuse me, "humor" - was that he "became like the people we oppose." That is, us. Now, it is true that those of us on the left can't claim we don't engage in name-calling - consider this post, for example - even though our name-calling in many cases would better be called mockery than name-calling.
No matter. The thing is, there is an important difference: When we go after people, it is all but exclusively the famous, the rich, the powerful, while all too often the right goes after people like Sandra Fluke: an ordinary private individual of no particular power or influence of who you would likely still be unaware if Darrell Issajerk had had the minimal brains required to allow her to testify in the first place. The language used by the opposing forces may often enough be similar - but the status of the targets is not.
4. This has been mentioned but I think not often or loud enough: How in blazes did requiring insurance companies to cover contraceptive care become "a new welfare program?" How did that become some kind of taxpayer subsidy for sex?
5. Last but by no means least, an urgent message to the entire left half of the American political spectrum and most particularly to those who could actually be called progressive (rather than liberals re-branding themselves as "progressives" because they wanted to scuttle like the political cowards they are from the mean ol' righties going on about "the L-word"): Stop playing by the right wing's rules! Stop accepting their framing of the issue!
What raises this here is that much of the response on the left - I was going to say "defense of Sandra Fluke" but then I realized that there actually has been little of that because she did nothing requiring defending - but much of the response from the left has revolved around "Limbaugh doesn't understand that some medical conditions can require birth control for the woman's health." That's quite true, but it has a flaw: It essentially concedes that wanting birth control in order to have sex without fear of pregnancy is something bad or shameful or in some way should not be addressed if not avoided entirely.
Screw that! (A particularly appropriate epithet in this case.) So the right wing charge is that women are sexually active and get birth control to avoid getting pregnant? So freaking what? What, is this Armageddon? Are we going to see plagues of locusts? Are the mountains going to tremble, is the sky going to rip open, are the seas going to boil? Women want to have sex! Oh, the horror, the horror! Let there be wailing, gnashing of teeth, and rending of garments!
Yeah, we know the right has hang-ups about sex. No news there. But for that very reason, we should not let them even implicitly set the grounds for debate such that we limit ourselves to "birth control can be medically necessary for some conditions." I said here just two days ago that part of the reason right wing ideas get mainstreamed is that the rightists often enough will say what they want without mouthing platitudes while too often we're too concerned with what sounds good but not too dramatic - which frequently means "nice" - right now.
So to any rightist who goes about birth control and "morality," I say - and we all should say - "fuckin' A! Because fuckin' women got just as much fuckin' right to fuckin' as fuckin' men do. And it's a fuckin' disgrace that you fuckin' fuckers are still trying to fuck with that. Fuck off."
So Rust (not a typo - a reference to the contents of his skull) has offered what some folks unfamiliar with the concept of "dictionary" are calling an "apology." Others have covered this more than adequately, but I had a few quick thoughts that I haven't noted elsewhere (although maybe I just haven't looked in the right places).
1. If nothing else, it's gratifying to see that the "I was joking! Jeez! Doncha have a sense of humor?" crap won't - or at least won't always - fly anymore. That line has served as a Get Out of Jail Free card for all sorts of racist and sexist crap for far too long.
2. "Thirty years old, a student at Georgetown Law, who admits to having so much sex that she can't afford it anymore," he said. "She's having sex so frequently that she can't afford all the birth-control pills that she needs." What the hell? Is Limburger really as abysmally ignorant as he comes on? Can any grown man be so uninformed, so totally out of the loop (and his mind), such a total twit as to think, as he apparently does, that the cost of birth control pills is directly related to how much sex you've having? The rational mind reels.
3. He also groused that his failing in his three days of vituperation - excuuuse me, "humor" - was that he "became like the people we oppose." That is, us. Now, it is true that those of us on the left can't claim we don't engage in name-calling - consider this post, for example - even though our name-calling in many cases would better be called mockery than name-calling.
No matter. The thing is, there is an important difference: When we go after people, it is all but exclusively the famous, the rich, the powerful, while all too often the right goes after people like Sandra Fluke: an ordinary private individual of no particular power or influence of who you would likely still be unaware if Darrell Issajerk had had the minimal brains required to allow her to testify in the first place. The language used by the opposing forces may often enough be similar - but the status of the targets is not.
4. This has been mentioned but I think not often or loud enough: How in blazes did requiring insurance companies to cover contraceptive care become "a new welfare program?" How did that become some kind of taxpayer subsidy for sex?
5. Last but by no means least, an urgent message to the entire left half of the American political spectrum and most particularly to those who could actually be called progressive (rather than liberals re-branding themselves as "progressives" because they wanted to scuttle like the political cowards they are from the mean ol' righties going on about "the L-word"): Stop playing by the right wing's rules! Stop accepting their framing of the issue!
What raises this here is that much of the response on the left - I was going to say "defense of Sandra Fluke" but then I realized that there actually has been little of that because she did nothing requiring defending - but much of the response from the left has revolved around "Limbaugh doesn't understand that some medical conditions can require birth control for the woman's health." That's quite true, but it has a flaw: It essentially concedes that wanting birth control in order to have sex without fear of pregnancy is something bad or shameful or in some way should not be addressed if not avoided entirely.
Screw that! (A particularly appropriate epithet in this case.) So the right wing charge is that women are sexually active and get birth control to avoid getting pregnant? So freaking what? What, is this Armageddon? Are we going to see plagues of locusts? Are the mountains going to tremble, is the sky going to rip open, are the seas going to boil? Women want to have sex! Oh, the horror, the horror! Let there be wailing, gnashing of teeth, and rending of garments!
Yeah, we know the right has hang-ups about sex. No news there. But for that very reason, we should not let them even implicitly set the grounds for debate such that we limit ourselves to "birth control can be medically necessary for some conditions." I said here just two days ago that part of the reason right wing ideas get mainstreamed is that the rightists often enough will say what they want without mouthing platitudes while too often we're too concerned with what sounds good but not too dramatic - which frequently means "nice" - right now.
So to any rightist who goes about birth control and "morality," I say - and we all should say - "fuckin' A! Because fuckin' women got just as much fuckin' right to fuckin' as fuckin' men do. And it's a fuckin' disgrace that you fuckin' fuckers are still trying to fuck with that. Fuck off."
Saturday, March 03, 2012
Left Side of the Aisle #46 - Part 5
Outrage of the Week: The Supreme Court appears ready to rule that corporations can't be held responsible for the role crimes against humanity in other countries because they are not "individuals."
On Tuesday, February 28, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a lawsuit accusing the multinational oil corporation Royal Dutch Shell of involvement in gross abuses of human rights.
In the 1990s, Shell and some other firms wanted to do oil exploration in the Niger River delta. People in the region, fearing the inevitable environmental damage, resisted. Shell and others apparently enlisted the Nigerian military dictatorship in suppressing that resistance. The plaintiffs are relatives of seven Nigerians who were killed in the resulting violence.
The suit was filed under the Alien Tort Statute, a US law dating back to 1789 which in essence says that a foreign national can sue you here for violations of international law. In a way, it resembles the legal principle in criminal law of "universal jurisdiction," where certain crimes under international law are considered an affront to all and everywhere, not just to those within the country where the crime occurred.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs say the charges of torture, prolonged arbitrary detention, extrajudicial executions, and other crimes against humanity clearly fit the purpose of the Alien Tort law - a tort being a civil, as opposed to a criminal, wrong.
During the oral arguments, the conservatives on the Court seemed to be looking for ways to dismiss the suit without considering the merits. For example, Sam Alito asked what this has to do with the US - even though the law does not require such a connection.
Anthony Kennedy, for his part, groused that "No other nation in the world permits" lawsuits charging corporations with complicity in crimes against humanity - even though, if memory serves, in death penalty cases Kennedy has said that he doesn't care what courts in other countries say.
Revealingly, he also said in the opening moments of the oral arguments that nothing in international law "recognizes corporate responsibility" for human rights abuses, echoing the argument of the lawyer for the Shell Oil that it couldn't be held responsible because treaties refer to “individual liability” and, well, corporations are not "individuals," are they, and in fact echoing the argument before it was made.
The other right wingers on the Court appeared inclined to agree with that claim.
So what does this mean? It means that when in the case of Citizens United it was of benefit to corporations to be "persons," with first amendment rights that enable them to drown the political process in unlimited amounts of cash, then the Supreme Court finds they are persons. But in this case, when it's of benefit to corporations to not be persons so they can avoid responsibility for their greedy and bloody participation in crimes against humanity, then the court finds that they are not persons.
And despite legalistic nit-picking and parsing about how "if you really understood the law you would see the two are completely different," blah blah etc., etc., the fact remains that's exactly what this means.
That is our Supreme Court - and it is the Outrage of the Week.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/27/corporate-personhood-supreme-court-alien-tort-statute_n_1305226.html
http://www.vanguardngr.com/2012/02/us-supreme-court-tackles-shell-on-human-rights-abuses/
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-court-torture-20120229,0,1578783.story
On Tuesday, February 28, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a lawsuit accusing the multinational oil corporation Royal Dutch Shell of involvement in gross abuses of human rights.
In the 1990s, Shell and some other firms wanted to do oil exploration in the Niger River delta. People in the region, fearing the inevitable environmental damage, resisted. Shell and others apparently enlisted the Nigerian military dictatorship in suppressing that resistance. The plaintiffs are relatives of seven Nigerians who were killed in the resulting violence.
The suit was filed under the Alien Tort Statute, a US law dating back to 1789 which in essence says that a foreign national can sue you here for violations of international law. In a way, it resembles the legal principle in criminal law of "universal jurisdiction," where certain crimes under international law are considered an affront to all and everywhere, not just to those within the country where the crime occurred.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs say the charges of torture, prolonged arbitrary detention, extrajudicial executions, and other crimes against humanity clearly fit the purpose of the Alien Tort law - a tort being a civil, as opposed to a criminal, wrong.
During the oral arguments, the conservatives on the Court seemed to be looking for ways to dismiss the suit without considering the merits. For example, Sam Alito asked what this has to do with the US - even though the law does not require such a connection.
Anthony Kennedy, for his part, groused that "No other nation in the world permits" lawsuits charging corporations with complicity in crimes against humanity - even though, if memory serves, in death penalty cases Kennedy has said that he doesn't care what courts in other countries say.
Revealingly, he also said in the opening moments of the oral arguments that nothing in international law "recognizes corporate responsibility" for human rights abuses, echoing the argument of the lawyer for the Shell Oil that it couldn't be held responsible because treaties refer to “individual liability” and, well, corporations are not "individuals," are they, and in fact echoing the argument before it was made.
The other right wingers on the Court appeared inclined to agree with that claim.
So what does this mean? It means that when in the case of Citizens United it was of benefit to corporations to be "persons," with first amendment rights that enable them to drown the political process in unlimited amounts of cash, then the Supreme Court finds they are persons. But in this case, when it's of benefit to corporations to not be persons so they can avoid responsibility for their greedy and bloody participation in crimes against humanity, then the court finds that they are not persons.
And despite legalistic nit-picking and parsing about how "if you really understood the law you would see the two are completely different," blah blah etc., etc., the fact remains that's exactly what this means.
That is our Supreme Court - and it is the Outrage of the Week.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/27/corporate-personhood-supreme-court-alien-tort-statute_n_1305226.html
http://www.vanguardngr.com/2012/02/us-supreme-court-tackles-shell-on-human-rights-abuses/
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-court-torture-20120229,0,1578783.story
Left Side of the Aisle #46 - Part 4
Bradley Manning has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Bradley Manning, the US Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, appeared before a military judge at Fort Meade near Baltimore on February 24 to hear the formal reading of the charges against him. If convicted at his coming court-martial on all 22 counts, he could face life in prison.
He chose to defer his plea and a decision for trial by judge or jury until the case is continued in a couple of weeks.
The idea that the whole thing is a sham, a kangaroo court, was given credence by the insistence of the judge that she had no prior knowledge of the case whatsoever beyond Manning's name and that the case involved classified material.
On the other hand, someone not so reticent about their knowledge of the case is Barack Obama, who declared last April that Manning was guilty, that he "broke the law." So much for innocent until proven guilty for our Constitutional lawyer prez.
However, I really said all that to give me the excuse to say this: Bradley Manning is among this year's nominees for the Nobel Peace Prize. I really doubt he'll win - for one thing, there are 230 other nominees - but frankly I really hope he does.
Sources:
http://www.inthesetimes.com/ittlist/entry/12788/bradley_manning_arraignment/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/feb/24/bradley-manning-quest-for-justice
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/27/nobel-peace-prize-2012-nominees_n_1303614.html
http://rt.com/news/manning-nobel-peace-prize-631/
Bradley Manning, the US Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, appeared before a military judge at Fort Meade near Baltimore on February 24 to hear the formal reading of the charges against him. If convicted at his coming court-martial on all 22 counts, he could face life in prison.
He chose to defer his plea and a decision for trial by judge or jury until the case is continued in a couple of weeks.
The idea that the whole thing is a sham, a kangaroo court, was given credence by the insistence of the judge that she had no prior knowledge of the case whatsoever beyond Manning's name and that the case involved classified material.
On the other hand, someone not so reticent about their knowledge of the case is Barack Obama, who declared last April that Manning was guilty, that he "broke the law." So much for innocent until proven guilty for our Constitutional lawyer prez.
However, I really said all that to give me the excuse to say this: Bradley Manning is among this year's nominees for the Nobel Peace Prize. I really doubt he'll win - for one thing, there are 230 other nominees - but frankly I really hope he does.
Sources:
http://www.inthesetimes.com/ittlist/entry/12788/bradley_manning_arraignment/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/feb/24/bradley-manning-quest-for-justice
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/27/nobel-peace-prize-2012-nominees_n_1303614.html
http://rt.com/news/manning-nobel-peace-prize-631/
Left Side of the Aisle #46 - Part 3
Everything You Need to Know: What's wrong with our national discussion of gun violence in just three sentences.
Everything you need to know in three sentences about what's wrong with our attitudes about the roots of violence:
1. A teenager shot up a school cafeteria in suburban Cleveland this past Monday, killing two and wounding three others.
2. I read a number of mainstream media accounts of that tragedy, including from USA Today, the Associated Press, the New York Times, CNN, Reuters, CBS, the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, and even one from the Seattle Times on several other school-related gun incidents this year.
3. Not one of those accounts included the phrase, or anything even related to the phrase, "gun control."
And that is everything you need to know.
Sources:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-02-27/ohio-school-shooting/53267688/1?csp=34news
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hztXIBuN1ZWUvDZBE7Pq41lejdLw?docId=2c15575fa3a34a4a91bd90b0dc0eaf44
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/us/fatal-school-shooting-in-chardon-ohio-suspect-is-arrested.html
http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/27/us/ohio-school-shooting-witness/
http://www.cleveland.com/chardon-shooting/index.ssf/2012/02/parents_of_teen_accused_of_sho.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/28/us-shooting-ohio-urgent-idUSTRE81Q1AD20120228
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57386080/suspect-in-deadly-ohio-school-shooting-idd/
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2017613184_ohio28.html
Everything you need to know in three sentences about what's wrong with our attitudes about the roots of violence:
1. A teenager shot up a school cafeteria in suburban Cleveland this past Monday, killing two and wounding three others.
2. I read a number of mainstream media accounts of that tragedy, including from USA Today, the Associated Press, the New York Times, CNN, Reuters, CBS, the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, and even one from the Seattle Times on several other school-related gun incidents this year.
3. Not one of those accounts included the phrase, or anything even related to the phrase, "gun control."
And that is everything you need to know.
Sources:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-02-27/ohio-school-shooting/53267688/1?csp=34news
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hztXIBuN1ZWUvDZBE7Pq41lejdLw?docId=2c15575fa3a34a4a91bd90b0dc0eaf44
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/us/fatal-school-shooting-in-chardon-ohio-suspect-is-arrested.html
http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/27/us/ohio-school-shooting-witness/
http://www.cleveland.com/chardon-shooting/index.ssf/2012/02/parents_of_teen_accused_of_sho.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/28/us-shooting-ohio-urgent-idUSTRE81Q1AD20120228
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57386080/suspect-in-deadly-ohio-school-shooting-idd/
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2017613184_ohio28.html
Left Side of the Aisle #46 - Part 2
The Virginia state Senate killed the "personhood" bill and passed the bill forcing women to have an ultrasound before they can terminate their pregnancy. How the right wing mainstreams extremism.
Last week, in an unexpected move, the Virginia state Senate killed the state's "personhood" bill.
That bill would have conferred the status of "personhood" on what the right wing keeps calling and for some reason the media keeps parroting "unborn children," including not only fetuses but embryos and even zygotes.
Let's get something straight: There is no such thing as an "unborn child." If it's not born, it's not a child. Calling a fetus an unborn child makes precisely as much sense as calling a caterpillar an unborn butterfly, a tadpole an unborn frog, or an acorn an unborn oak tree.
I can understand a pregnant woman and her partner thinking of her fetus as an "unborn child," establishing the emotional connection to what will be, if all goes as hoped, their child. But we can't let that emotional tie be the basis for a legal meaning and we can't let it cloud the scientific reality. There is no such thing as an unborn child.
The bill had already passed the House of Delegates and was expected to pass the Senate on a tie-breaking vote, but to the surprise of many, the Senate agreed to a motion to put the whole thing off until next year.
While clearly a victory, this doesn't mean the idea is dead - it could drag its zombie butt out of the grave next year. But it is a victory.
At the same time, it's rather a bitter victory, because the Virginia legislature has passed that bill you heard about that would require women seeking to terminate their pregnancy to have an ultrasound - apparently because the thinking was that pregnant women, the poor ignorant dears, need to have what it means to be pregnant explained to them.
Amendments that would have made the procedure optional, forced insurers to cover it or the state to pay for it, and would have exempted women who had no insurance coverage all were defeated. So not only does the woman have to undergo an additional and unnecessary medical procedure, she has to pay for it entirely out of pocket.
This is also the bill that in its original form required an intravaginal ultrasound - and that's exactly what you think it is - in cases where the fetus was too undeveloped for a regular ultrasound to be revealing.
In the face of understandable outrage, the bill's sponsor supposedly amended the bill to remove the state mandate for the intravaginal ultrasound - but left in the requirement for the information it would yield, leaving doctors in the position of either forcing women to undergo the procedure, forcing them to wait until later in the pregnancy, not getting the information, thus violating the law and risking prosecution and loss of their licence, or simply refusing to perform the procedure altogether. That is, the mandate to force women to submit or else had simply been shifted from the state to the doctor. For the women, it was no change at all.
Still, the failure of the wingnuts to force through yet another restriction on women's choices - the "personhood" bill - is a victory and should be embraced as such. And it has some significance because of the fact that it comes amid a flurry of state-level proposals on reproductive rights, where we find ourselves having to re-argue issues that rational people thought had been settled long ago.
So bear in mind that when I talk here about reproductive rights, I'm not just talking about abortion, I'm talking about birth control.
I mentioned this two weeks ago, noting that advocates of choice have long insisted that abortion was only the opening salvo in an assault on women's rights and that increasing restrictions on abortion would be followed by attacks on contraception. A lot of folks laughed at them for that, but that's exactly what we're seeing now. The religious fanatics have never forgotten the not-so-long-ago good old days when contraception was illegal even for married couples - and the right wing fanatics eager to exploit them for their own ends have happily joined in the effort to roll back time.
Just consider the response to that federal mandate that employees of religious-affiliated employers must have access to contraception coverage in their health insurance even as those employers do not have to pay for it. That move - of course - generated howls of phony, carefully orchestrated, ginned-up outrage that this is an attack on religious freedom, indeed on the very concept of religion. Because it is an attack on religion to say that a Catholic school can't interfere with the ability of a Jewish employee to obtain birth control by forcing them to pay for it entirely out of pocket.
And it's not just the Catholic bishops who continue to pompously bloviate about their "deep moral concerns" about contraception - as if they had any standing to have moral concerns about anything after enabling pedophiles for decades. Nor is it just the most obviously loopy groups like the American Family Association or the most obviously wacko politicians like Rick IShouldBeInASanitarium and Newt Grinch who blather, froth, and rant about a non-existent "war on Christianity" - it's also ones like our own Senator Scat Brown, who has a radio ad going on about how that federal insurance mandate is an assault on religious freedom.
In some cases, such as Scat Brown's, the driving force at least appears to be blatant political opportunism, the old tradition of abandoning any trace of self-respect in order to suck up to a potential voting block. But for others it is quite literally a matter of conviction - they literally believe that church law should inform if not outright determine public law.
For the obvious example we go back to Rick IShouldBeInASanitarium, who first attacked President Hopey-Changey a couple of weeks ago on the grounds that the legendary Mr. O did not address world problems through the lens of a Biblical theology and then followed that up a week later by declaring that the separation of church and state is not absolute because while religion is to be free of the government, the government is not to be free of religion - or, to use Ricky boy's revealing term, the government is not to be free of "the church."
To make sure that no one could misunderstand him, he doubled down on his declaration from last fall. He said he had read John Kennedy's 1960 speech where JFK went before an audience of I think if was Baptists to assure them that he would not take orders from the Pope - which was a real concern for some at the time, they really thought that having a Catholic as president would mean the Pope would be determining US government policy - and that he did believe in separation of church and state. Rickyboy said that made him "want to throw up."
What's important here is to realize that even though he tried to walk back the "throw up" comment, he means it. This is not pandering. In fact, the walk back was more pandering than the original statement.
And this guy has been winning elections. Even after more attention has been paid to his extremism, he nearly won Michigan and is ahead in some states for "Super Tuesday." Now, I don't think he has any real chance of winning the GOPper nomination and even if he did, he has no chance in hell of winning the general election. And frankly, I don't think he thinks he has a chance, either, for reasons I'll get to. The important point is that he has shown that there is a real constituency, in the US, today, for this kind of religious extremism.
Several days ago, columnist David Sirota had a piece referring to progressives who think that the longer the dragged-out GOPper primaries continue, the better for progressives because it shows people how nuts the right wing is. Hang on, he suggested, not so fast.
The problem, as he sees it - and I agree or I wouldn't be bringing this up - is that the longer the primaries go on, the longer that very extremism is on display, the longer the wildly reactionary nitwit ideas are bandied about, the longer the jaw-dropping inanities get spewed, then by that very same token the longer that very same inane, reactionary, extremism is given a mainstream platform, is treated as a collection of serious positions that deserve serious response from other candidates, and so the more it becomes part of normal political discourse in the country and society.
On some TV show or another, I saw a couple of progressives asked about this and they both dismissed it out of hand, embracing precisely the sort of "everyone will see the GOPpers are nuts" happy-talk group-think that Sirota questioned. But their failing was that they were thinking strictly in terms of Republican prospects in the 2012 presidential election. Sirota was looking beyond that: In his conclusion, he said this may help in the short term, but what about the long haul.
We've seen this over and over - this is how reactionary ideas get mainstreamed: Some flake like Rick IShouldBeInASanitarium spouts off and just keeps spouting off until what he's saying just doesn't sound so weird anymore, if only because it's familiar. After a while, some not-quite-as-flaky wingnuts pick up on the ideas and amplify them and eventually instead of being dismissed as they deserve, they wind up getting treated as legitimate positions deserving of reasoned discussion.
Sirota refers to the Goldwater Principle, which for those of you too young to remember, refers to the GOPper presidential campaign of right-winger Barry Goldwater in 1964. He lost so badly to Lyndon Johnson that there was a question if the Republican party itself could survive. The Goldwater principle suggests that while he lost that election, the attention given to his ideas helped permanently shift what constitutes the “center” of our public debate to the right.
For my part, I've been talking about this literally for three decades. I call such races "successful losses" - I can cite several - and I have talked about them here before.
The thing is, everyone would agree that the political debate is this country has moved way over to the right over the past decades. And this is how it works - this is how it's done. This is how right-wing ideas move from the margin to the center, from mocked to mainstream, from spooky to serious, from ridiculed to reasonable. Birth control is just the latest example.
Go back to Goldwater - in 1964 he lost so badly people wondered if the GOP could survive as an institution. Four years later, Richard Nixon was elected. Richard Nixon, who now would be regarded as too liberal to get the GOPper nomination. And twelve years after that, Ronald Reagan was elected and GOPpers got control of the Senate for the first time in nearly 30 years.
Our political debate has moved far enough to the right that, as Sirota notes, Witless Romney can call Rick IShouldBeInASanitarium "Big Labor’s favorite senator" without being laughed off the political stage.
And it happens because the right wing has the confidence and the patience to say what it really means, what it really wants, for the sake of long-term victory. This is why I don't think Rick IShouldBeInASanitarium actually thinks he can win the presidency. Maybe he dreams of it, I'm sure he does, but I doubt he honestly believes he can win - he may be a flake but he's not a dope: He can read the numbers.
The thing is, he's not thinking 2012. He's thinking 2016. He's thinking 2020. He's thinking about how he can move the debate while what passes for most of the left in this country can't seem to think past the inaugural parade in January 2013. The fact is, the right wing thinks strategically, something at which we have failed miserably - and we ignore that reality at our peril.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/23/virginia-personhood-bill-defeated-senate_n_1297463.html
http://ideas.time.com/2012/01/30/birth-control-could-it-be-illegal-again/
http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/afa-obama-war-on-christians-a-battle-between-freedom-and-tyranny-equal-to-1776-revolution/politics/2012/02/28/35471
http://www.necn.com/02/28/12/Va-Senate-panel-kills-Medicaid-abortion-/landing_politics.html?&apID=fdd68d8674c54e57b05ed7ff69ef33fb
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57386357-503544/santorum-argues-for-religion-in-government/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/26/santorum-church-and-state_n_1302246.html?ref=mostpopular
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3460_162-57381029/santorum-obamas-worldview-upside-down/
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/22/the_danger_of_an_endless_gop_primary/singleton/
http://uspolitics.about.com/od/usgovernment/l/bl_party_division_2.htm
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2007/06/electioneering-chapter-three.html
Last week, in an unexpected move, the Virginia state Senate killed the state's "personhood" bill.
That bill would have conferred the status of "personhood" on what the right wing keeps calling and for some reason the media keeps parroting "unborn children," including not only fetuses but embryos and even zygotes.
Let's get something straight: There is no such thing as an "unborn child." If it's not born, it's not a child. Calling a fetus an unborn child makes precisely as much sense as calling a caterpillar an unborn butterfly, a tadpole an unborn frog, or an acorn an unborn oak tree.
I can understand a pregnant woman and her partner thinking of her fetus as an "unborn child," establishing the emotional connection to what will be, if all goes as hoped, their child. But we can't let that emotional tie be the basis for a legal meaning and we can't let it cloud the scientific reality. There is no such thing as an unborn child.
The bill had already passed the House of Delegates and was expected to pass the Senate on a tie-breaking vote, but to the surprise of many, the Senate agreed to a motion to put the whole thing off until next year.
While clearly a victory, this doesn't mean the idea is dead - it could drag its zombie butt out of the grave next year. But it is a victory.
At the same time, it's rather a bitter victory, because the Virginia legislature has passed that bill you heard about that would require women seeking to terminate their pregnancy to have an ultrasound - apparently because the thinking was that pregnant women, the poor ignorant dears, need to have what it means to be pregnant explained to them.
Amendments that would have made the procedure optional, forced insurers to cover it or the state to pay for it, and would have exempted women who had no insurance coverage all were defeated. So not only does the woman have to undergo an additional and unnecessary medical procedure, she has to pay for it entirely out of pocket.
This is also the bill that in its original form required an intravaginal ultrasound - and that's exactly what you think it is - in cases where the fetus was too undeveloped for a regular ultrasound to be revealing.
In the face of understandable outrage, the bill's sponsor supposedly amended the bill to remove the state mandate for the intravaginal ultrasound - but left in the requirement for the information it would yield, leaving doctors in the position of either forcing women to undergo the procedure, forcing them to wait until later in the pregnancy, not getting the information, thus violating the law and risking prosecution and loss of their licence, or simply refusing to perform the procedure altogether. That is, the mandate to force women to submit or else had simply been shifted from the state to the doctor. For the women, it was no change at all.
Still, the failure of the wingnuts to force through yet another restriction on women's choices - the "personhood" bill - is a victory and should be embraced as such. And it has some significance because of the fact that it comes amid a flurry of state-level proposals on reproductive rights, where we find ourselves having to re-argue issues that rational people thought had been settled long ago.
So bear in mind that when I talk here about reproductive rights, I'm not just talking about abortion, I'm talking about birth control.
I mentioned this two weeks ago, noting that advocates of choice have long insisted that abortion was only the opening salvo in an assault on women's rights and that increasing restrictions on abortion would be followed by attacks on contraception. A lot of folks laughed at them for that, but that's exactly what we're seeing now. The religious fanatics have never forgotten the not-so-long-ago good old days when contraception was illegal even for married couples - and the right wing fanatics eager to exploit them for their own ends have happily joined in the effort to roll back time.
Just consider the response to that federal mandate that employees of religious-affiliated employers must have access to contraception coverage in their health insurance even as those employers do not have to pay for it. That move - of course - generated howls of phony, carefully orchestrated, ginned-up outrage that this is an attack on religious freedom, indeed on the very concept of religion. Because it is an attack on religion to say that a Catholic school can't interfere with the ability of a Jewish employee to obtain birth control by forcing them to pay for it entirely out of pocket.
And it's not just the Catholic bishops who continue to pompously bloviate about their "deep moral concerns" about contraception - as if they had any standing to have moral concerns about anything after enabling pedophiles for decades. Nor is it just the most obviously loopy groups like the American Family Association or the most obviously wacko politicians like Rick IShouldBeInASanitarium and Newt Grinch who blather, froth, and rant about a non-existent "war on Christianity" - it's also ones like our own Senator Scat Brown, who has a radio ad going on about how that federal insurance mandate is an assault on religious freedom.
In some cases, such as Scat Brown's, the driving force at least appears to be blatant political opportunism, the old tradition of abandoning any trace of self-respect in order to suck up to a potential voting block. But for others it is quite literally a matter of conviction - they literally believe that church law should inform if not outright determine public law.
For the obvious example we go back to Rick IShouldBeInASanitarium, who first attacked President Hopey-Changey a couple of weeks ago on the grounds that the legendary Mr. O did not address world problems through the lens of a Biblical theology and then followed that up a week later by declaring that the separation of church and state is not absolute because while religion is to be free of the government, the government is not to be free of religion - or, to use Ricky boy's revealing term, the government is not to be free of "the church."
To make sure that no one could misunderstand him, he doubled down on his declaration from last fall. He said he had read John Kennedy's 1960 speech where JFK went before an audience of I think if was Baptists to assure them that he would not take orders from the Pope - which was a real concern for some at the time, they really thought that having a Catholic as president would mean the Pope would be determining US government policy - and that he did believe in separation of church and state. Rickyboy said that made him "want to throw up."
What's important here is to realize that even though he tried to walk back the "throw up" comment, he means it. This is not pandering. In fact, the walk back was more pandering than the original statement.
And this guy has been winning elections. Even after more attention has been paid to his extremism, he nearly won Michigan and is ahead in some states for "Super Tuesday." Now, I don't think he has any real chance of winning the GOPper nomination and even if he did, he has no chance in hell of winning the general election. And frankly, I don't think he thinks he has a chance, either, for reasons I'll get to. The important point is that he has shown that there is a real constituency, in the US, today, for this kind of religious extremism.
Several days ago, columnist David Sirota had a piece referring to progressives who think that the longer the dragged-out GOPper primaries continue, the better for progressives because it shows people how nuts the right wing is. Hang on, he suggested, not so fast.
The problem, as he sees it - and I agree or I wouldn't be bringing this up - is that the longer the primaries go on, the longer that very extremism is on display, the longer the wildly reactionary nitwit ideas are bandied about, the longer the jaw-dropping inanities get spewed, then by that very same token the longer that very same inane, reactionary, extremism is given a mainstream platform, is treated as a collection of serious positions that deserve serious response from other candidates, and so the more it becomes part of normal political discourse in the country and society.
On some TV show or another, I saw a couple of progressives asked about this and they both dismissed it out of hand, embracing precisely the sort of "everyone will see the GOPpers are nuts" happy-talk group-think that Sirota questioned. But their failing was that they were thinking strictly in terms of Republican prospects in the 2012 presidential election. Sirota was looking beyond that: In his conclusion, he said this may help in the short term, but what about the long haul.
We've seen this over and over - this is how reactionary ideas get mainstreamed: Some flake like Rick IShouldBeInASanitarium spouts off and just keeps spouting off until what he's saying just doesn't sound so weird anymore, if only because it's familiar. After a while, some not-quite-as-flaky wingnuts pick up on the ideas and amplify them and eventually instead of being dismissed as they deserve, they wind up getting treated as legitimate positions deserving of reasoned discussion.
Sirota refers to the Goldwater Principle, which for those of you too young to remember, refers to the GOPper presidential campaign of right-winger Barry Goldwater in 1964. He lost so badly to Lyndon Johnson that there was a question if the Republican party itself could survive. The Goldwater principle suggests that while he lost that election, the attention given to his ideas helped permanently shift what constitutes the “center” of our public debate to the right.
For my part, I've been talking about this literally for three decades. I call such races "successful losses" - I can cite several - and I have talked about them here before.
The thing is, everyone would agree that the political debate is this country has moved way over to the right over the past decades. And this is how it works - this is how it's done. This is how right-wing ideas move from the margin to the center, from mocked to mainstream, from spooky to serious, from ridiculed to reasonable. Birth control is just the latest example.
Go back to Goldwater - in 1964 he lost so badly people wondered if the GOP could survive as an institution. Four years later, Richard Nixon was elected. Richard Nixon, who now would be regarded as too liberal to get the GOPper nomination. And twelve years after that, Ronald Reagan was elected and GOPpers got control of the Senate for the first time in nearly 30 years.
Our political debate has moved far enough to the right that, as Sirota notes, Witless Romney can call Rick IShouldBeInASanitarium "Big Labor’s favorite senator" without being laughed off the political stage.
And it happens because the right wing has the confidence and the patience to say what it really means, what it really wants, for the sake of long-term victory. This is why I don't think Rick IShouldBeInASanitarium actually thinks he can win the presidency. Maybe he dreams of it, I'm sure he does, but I doubt he honestly believes he can win - he may be a flake but he's not a dope: He can read the numbers.
The thing is, he's not thinking 2012. He's thinking 2016. He's thinking 2020. He's thinking about how he can move the debate while what passes for most of the left in this country can't seem to think past the inaugural parade in January 2013. The fact is, the right wing thinks strategically, something at which we have failed miserably - and we ignore that reality at our peril.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/23/virginia-personhood-bill-defeated-senate_n_1297463.html
http://ideas.time.com/2012/01/30/birth-control-could-it-be-illegal-again/
http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/afa-obama-war-on-christians-a-battle-between-freedom-and-tyranny-equal-to-1776-revolution/politics/2012/02/28/35471
http://www.necn.com/02/28/12/Va-Senate-panel-kills-Medicaid-abortion-/landing_politics.html?&apID=fdd68d8674c54e57b05ed7ff69ef33fb
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57386357-503544/santorum-argues-for-religion-in-government/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/26/santorum-church-and-state_n_1302246.html?ref=mostpopular
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3460_162-57381029/santorum-obamas-worldview-upside-down/
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/22/the_danger_of_an_endless_gop_primary/singleton/
http://uspolitics.about.com/od/usgovernment/l/bl_party_division_2.htm
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2007/06/electioneering-chapter-three.html
Left Side of the Aisle #46 - Part 1
The DOJ will no longer defend laws banning veterans' benefits to spouses in same-sex couples.
Earlier this month, the Obama Administration took another step toward acceptance of same-sex marriage. The Department of Justice announced it will no longer defend legislation in court banning same-sex couples from receiving military and veterans benefits.
Attorney General Eric Holder said that the legislative record of the infamous Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, contains no rationale for providing veterans' benefits to opposite-sex veteran couples while denying them to legally married same-sex spouses of veterans.
Holder further argued that DOMA and other provisions of US law that deny federal benefits to both civilian and veteran same-sex couples are unconstitutional when applied to same-sex couples who are legally married.
The statement comes in response to a lawsuit filed in Massachusetts by the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. It comes a year after Holder said the DOJ would no longer defend the main section of DOMA because it was unconstitutional when subjected to the standard of heightened judicial scrutiny applied to laws discriminating on the basis of race and gender; "heightened judicial scrutiny" being a legal term meaning such laws must have must stronger justification than other laws if they are to survive legal challenge.
While this well might give courts some encouragement in finding that laws discriminating against same sex couples fail the test of constitutionality, it of course sparked spluttering, frothing outrage from the denizens of the dark side, a place impervious to fact, logic, and simple human decency.
As an example of a denizen of the dark side, we can go to Republican presidential candidate Rick IShouldBeInASanitarium, who recently invoked Rule #10 on my list of tactics right-wingers use to avoid responsibility and actual debate. Rule #10 is "Accuse the accuser."
He told a bunch of fellow mouth-breathers at a campaign stop in Michigan that liberals are the real bigots in the debate over same-sex marriage. As proof, he quoted the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision upholding a lower-court ruling that California's PropHate banning same-sex marriage in the state is unconstitutional. He said that ruling was tantamount to the court saying, "If you believe marriage is between a man and a woman, it is either because you are a hater or a bigot."
Um, yes - that's exactly what it means.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/17/military-benefits-same-sex-couples_n_1285382.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57386357-503544/santorum-argues-for-religion-in-government/
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/01/rules-all-of-them-so-far.html
Earlier this month, the Obama Administration took another step toward acceptance of same-sex marriage. The Department of Justice announced it will no longer defend legislation in court banning same-sex couples from receiving military and veterans benefits.
Attorney General Eric Holder said that the legislative record of the infamous Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, contains no rationale for providing veterans' benefits to opposite-sex veteran couples while denying them to legally married same-sex spouses of veterans.
Holder further argued that DOMA and other provisions of US law that deny federal benefits to both civilian and veteran same-sex couples are unconstitutional when applied to same-sex couples who are legally married.
The statement comes in response to a lawsuit filed in Massachusetts by the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. It comes a year after Holder said the DOJ would no longer defend the main section of DOMA because it was unconstitutional when subjected to the standard of heightened judicial scrutiny applied to laws discriminating on the basis of race and gender; "heightened judicial scrutiny" being a legal term meaning such laws must have must stronger justification than other laws if they are to survive legal challenge.
While this well might give courts some encouragement in finding that laws discriminating against same sex couples fail the test of constitutionality, it of course sparked spluttering, frothing outrage from the denizens of the dark side, a place impervious to fact, logic, and simple human decency.
As an example of a denizen of the dark side, we can go to Republican presidential candidate Rick IShouldBeInASanitarium, who recently invoked Rule #10 on my list of tactics right-wingers use to avoid responsibility and actual debate. Rule #10 is "Accuse the accuser."
He told a bunch of fellow mouth-breathers at a campaign stop in Michigan that liberals are the real bigots in the debate over same-sex marriage. As proof, he quoted the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision upholding a lower-court ruling that California's PropHate banning same-sex marriage in the state is unconstitutional. He said that ruling was tantamount to the court saying, "If you believe marriage is between a man and a woman, it is either because you are a hater or a bigot."
Um, yes - that's exactly what it means.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/17/military-benefits-same-sex-couples_n_1285382.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57386357-503544/santorum-argues-for-religion-in-government/
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/01/rules-all-of-them-so-far.html
Left Side of the Aisle #46
This week:
- The DOJ will no longer defend laws banning veterans' benefits to spouses in same-sex couples.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/17/military-benefits-same-sex-couples_n_1285382.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57386357-503544/santorum-argues-for-religion-in-government/
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/01/rules-all-of-them-so-far.html
- The Virginia state Senate killed the "personhood" bill and passed the bill forcing women to have an ultrasound before they can terminate their pregnancy. How the right wing mainstreams extremism.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/23/virginia-personhood-bill-defeated-senate_n_1297463.html
http://ideas.time.com/2012/01/30/birth-control-could-it-be-illegal-again/
http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/afa-obama-war-on-christians-a-battle-between-freedom-and-tyranny-equal-to-1776-revolution/politics/2012/02/28/35471
http://www.necn.com/02/28/12/Va-Senate-panel-kills-Medicaid-abortion-/landing_politics.html?&apID=fdd68d8674c54e57b05ed7ff69ef33fb
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57386357-503544/santorum-argues-for-religion-in-government/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/26/santorum-church-and-state_n_1302246.html?ref=mostpopular
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3460_162-57381029/santorum-obamas-worldview-upside-down/
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/22/the_danger_of_an_endless_gop_primary/singleton/
http://uspolitics.about.com/od/usgovernment/l/bl_party_division_2.htm
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2007/06/electioneering-chapter-three.html
- Everything You Need to Know: What's wrong with our national discussion of gun violence in just three sentences.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-02-27/ohio-school-shooting/53267688/1?csp=34news
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hztXIBuN1ZWUvDZBE7Pq41lejdLw?docId=2c15575fa3a34a4a91bd90b0dc0eaf44
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/us/fatal-school-shooting-in-chardon-ohio-suspect-is-arrested.html
http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/27/us/ohio-school-shooting-witness/ -- cnn
http://www.cleveland.com/chardon-shooting/index.ssf/2012/02/parents_of_teen_accused_of_sho.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/28/us-shooting-ohio-urgent-idUSTRE81Q1AD20120228
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57386080/suspect-in-deadly-ohio-school-shooting-idd/
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2017613184_ohio28.html
- Bradley Manning has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
http://www.inthesetimes.com/ittlist/entry/12788/bradley_manning_arraignment/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/feb/24/bradley-manning-quest-for-justice
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/27/nobel-peace-prize-2012-nominees_n_1303614.html
http://rt.com/news/manning-nobel-peace-prize-631/
- Outrage of the Week: The Supreme Court appears ready to rule that corporations can't be held responsible for the role crimes against humanity in other countries because they are not "individuals."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/27/corporate-personhood-supreme-court-alien-tort-statute_n_1305226.html
http://www.vanguardngr.com/2012/02/us-supreme-court-tackles-shell-on-human-rights-abuses/
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-court-torture-20120229,0,1578783.story
Monday, February 27, 2012
Left Side of the Aisle #45 - Part 6
And Another Thing: Seeds of past livesLook at this picture.
It's a plant. Its scientific name is Silene Stenophylla. It's a live plant, fertile, with lacy white flowers and viable seeds. It was grown from seeds from immature fruit found in a squirrel's burrow containing various fruit and seeds. What makes this burrow and these particular seeds and this particular plant special is that burrow had been frozen in the Siberian permafrost for over 30,000 years.
This is the oldest plant ever to be regenerated by more than an order of magnitude: The previous oldest seeds to produce a viable plant were - by comparison in this context - "only" 2000 years old. These seeds are 15 times older.
This is not only major cool, no pun intended, it shows that ancient life forms, ancient DNA, can survive intact in the ice for thousands, even tens of thousands, of years - shades of the X-Files - which in turn opens up the possibility of resurrecting other life forms.
The fact that these seeds were found in the same strata as bones of large mammals, not only including such as bison, horse, and deer, but also mammoth and wooly rhinoceros, has got some people dreaming of the possibility of resurrecting - that is, having actual, live, walking around, eating, drinking - wooly mammoths.
That's not possible now - the necessary cloning technology is still iffy and we lack the intact DNA - so no, there's no Jurassic Park on the horizon, even the dim horizon, even if you ignore the slight time differential between mammoths and dinosaurs of about, oh, 60 million years. But is it in the foreseeable future to have a live mammoth walking around? Depending on the breaks - and finding a big enough sample of intact DNA may be the biggest hurdle - but depending on the breaks? Yes, it is possible. And that - again no pun intended - is really cool.
Oh, and one other quick thing, another anniversary which I missed: Monday, February 20, was the 50th anniversary of the day John Glenn took off to become the first American to orbit the Earth.
It's sometimes hard to think that only 7-1/2 years later, July 20, 1969, the first human walked on the Moon.
Sources:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j6vshXWgZSUj3pLD2sLNWJlHSFnQ?docId=CNG.8e6d7b5da9fa2c8e49617bdada3627df.251
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/02/21/russians-resurrect-30000-year-old-frozen-flower/
http://www.foxnews.com/topics/science/national-academy-of-sciences.htm#r_src=ramp
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jJp_vTdRhyEZc6s084rTPSA4z5AA
Left Side of the Aisle #45 - Part 5
Occupy
I have not talked about Occupy for some time now - I did get in that one quick mention last week, which I will get back to, but I did want to spend a little more time on the subject of the movement.
Because contrary to what you would probably gather from our major media, the Occupy movement is not dead, not by a long shot. It's just no longer concentrated in encampments in big and medium-sized cities. Which means its not as media-friendly, there are fewer convenient shots of a mass of tents or clouds of tear gas, so much of the media lost interest.
Bu there are still encampments out there, and cities and towns continue to look for ways to make them go away and shut up. For example, the city of Boise, Idaho has had an encampment for the past couple of months. It turns out that camping on public grounds was not illegal - so what did the city just do? It passed a new emergency law to ban camping on public grounds in order to shut down that city's encampment. You don't like the encampment? Throw it out. It's not illegal? Change the law.
So yes, it's true there are a lot fewer high-profile encampments. But an important part of the reason is that Occupy has diffused through those cities, it has spread to the suburbs and even to rural areas. The people are still out there, still demonstrating, still on the streets, still sitting-in, still lobbying, still petitioning, still calling legislators, still carrying it on in whatever way they as individuals feel they can.
Firedoglake has a program of which you likely know, called Occupy Supply. People donate money to supply various occupations with needed equipment, which included not only for example electronic gear but even more often things like gloves and boots and insulated tents to deal with the winter. The point here is that they had a big tent that they were going to donate to one Occupy chosen from among those nominated by visitors to the website, that is, from people interested in Occupy Supply. A base requirement was that the Occupy group either had to have an on-going encampment or at least recent activity - that is, it had to be a live group. The initial list of Occupy groups with such on-going activities was posted on January 31 - and it contained over 150 locations.
Just this past week, in what shows the variety of approaches being taken,
- hundreds of occupy folks and prison reform activists joined forces outside the gates of San Quentin State Prison, rallying around a charge that state sentencing laws are too strict and calling for an end to solitary confinement, the death penalty, and to children being tried as adults;
- some Occupy Oakland protesters were arrested for disrupting a foreclosure sale and later tht same day some others forced a branch of a bank to close early in the face of a protest of a different foreclosure, this one of an woman who had been trying without success to get a loan modification;
- and a group calling itself Occupy the SEC sent a 325-page letter with detailed public comments about the proposed Volcker rule regulating certain bank transactions.
More locally, Occupy Providence, which voluntarily shut down after the city met its demand for a homeless day center, has re-emerged as Occupy URI, with a teach-in and a tent on the campus quad planned for later in the month along with plans for actions as part of Occupy Rhode Island Campuses, a new coalition of five colleges and universities in the state. And there has apparently been some discussion among a number of occupy groups about moving physical occupations onto colleges - the idea being, more or less, if you can't settle in the streets, camp on the campus.
Oh, and Occupy Maine now has a TV show. Welcome to Public Access TV, Occupy Maine.
What's more, on Wednesday, February 29, 60 cities across the country will see nonviolent actions with an overall target of at ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the right-wing outfit that brings corporations and other right-wing interests together with state legislators to provide model legislation the latter can bring home to push in order to advance the reactionary agenda.
But leave all that aside: If you really want to know about the impact of a movement, don't look at its supporters - look at its enemies.
I mentioned this last week but it bears repeating: On January 30, Just before the Florida primary, Newt Grinch accused Witless Romney of being a tool of Wall Street and said that big banking firms like Goldman Sachs are “rigging the game.” He even claimed that the negative ads run against him were financed by Wall Street outfits, including Goldman Sachs. Just think of what it means for the impact of Occupy when Newt Grinch thinks it's to his benefit to call a fellow GOPper a tool of Wall Street.
Not enough? How about the fact that Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan-Chase who has made a career of late out of hyperbolic, hyperventilating attacks on any attempts to regulate the banks, recently said we absolutely should raise taxes on the rich, adding "I don't think people should be able to pass unlimited amounts on to their kids." So much for the "death tax."
Still not enough? How about the fact that a week ago last Friday, February 17, the Wall Street Journal said in an editorial that the only real way to prevent a repeat of the wild irresponsible financial speculation and wrongful behavior that resulted in the meltdown that produced the particular mess we are currently in is for, quoting here, "a Congressional plan either for allowing large banks to fail or for breaking them up."
You got that right: The Wall Street Journal wants to break up the banks.
But if you're still not convinced, this should be the clincher. Consider a recent column by one Judith Samuelson. She is the Executive Director of the Aspen Institute's Business and Society Program, and this is one example among many from a variety of people. In that column, Samuelson said that Occupy should "help give visibility to ideas that move beyond vilifying 'corporations' and 'capitalism' and begin to focus on the incentives and policies that create sub-optimal results from business and capital markets." In other words, she thinks Occupy should focus on smoothing off a couple of the rough edges of capitalism.
That is a way to measure impact: When you have a movement that has come to the point where so many people from across the political spectrum feel entitled and even obliged to offer their sage advice on what that movement should do now, especially when that advice mostly involves how to "tone down" your message and become "serious," you know you have something with power.
Sources:
http://articles.boston.com/2012-02-05/yourtown/31027801_1_corporate-influence-political-reform-sign
http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2012/01/31/a-list-for-journalists-who-think-that-occupy-is-dead/
http://www.ktvb.com/home/Occupy-Boise-has-until-Monday-to-pack-up-camp-139885993.html
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/02/21/occupy-protesters-rally-against-prison-conditions/
http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_20014051
http://business.time.com/2012/02/20/occupy-the-sec-moving-from-the-campsite-to-the-weeds-of-regulatory-reform/?iid=biz-main-lede
http://www.scribd.com/doc/81484886/Occupy-the-SEC-Comment-Letter-on-the-Volcker-Rule
http://www.wgme.com/template/inews_wire/wires.regional.me/2d40a6b6-www.wgme.com.shtml
http://www.occupymetv.org/
http://www.wpri.com/dpp/news/local_news/south_county/south-kingstown-students-faculty-establish-occupy-uri
http://articles.boston.com/2012-02-20/news/31080426_1_homeless-day-center-students-campus-quad
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/20/occupy-movement-targets-corporate-interest-group
http://www.browndailyherald.com/campuses-collaborate-in-r-i-occupy-movement-1.2700276#.T0SmNfUZcnc
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-01-30/gingrich-dubs-romney-wall-street-elite-before-florida-vote.html
http://therealnews.com/t2/component/hwdvideoshare/?task=viewvideo&video_id=73058
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-abrams/wall-street-tax-_b_1275348.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-paul/volcker-rule_b_1287957.html?ref=business
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/judith-samuelson/in-phase-2-occupy-movement_b_1283195.html?ref=business
I have not talked about Occupy for some time now - I did get in that one quick mention last week, which I will get back to, but I did want to spend a little more time on the subject of the movement.
Because contrary to what you would probably gather from our major media, the Occupy movement is not dead, not by a long shot. It's just no longer concentrated in encampments in big and medium-sized cities. Which means its not as media-friendly, there are fewer convenient shots of a mass of tents or clouds of tear gas, so much of the media lost interest.
Bu there are still encampments out there, and cities and towns continue to look for ways to make them go away and shut up. For example, the city of Boise, Idaho has had an encampment for the past couple of months. It turns out that camping on public grounds was not illegal - so what did the city just do? It passed a new emergency law to ban camping on public grounds in order to shut down that city's encampment. You don't like the encampment? Throw it out. It's not illegal? Change the law.
So yes, it's true there are a lot fewer high-profile encampments. But an important part of the reason is that Occupy has diffused through those cities, it has spread to the suburbs and even to rural areas. The people are still out there, still demonstrating, still on the streets, still sitting-in, still lobbying, still petitioning, still calling legislators, still carrying it on in whatever way they as individuals feel they can.
Firedoglake has a program of which you likely know, called Occupy Supply. People donate money to supply various occupations with needed equipment, which included not only for example electronic gear but even more often things like gloves and boots and insulated tents to deal with the winter. The point here is that they had a big tent that they were going to donate to one Occupy chosen from among those nominated by visitors to the website, that is, from people interested in Occupy Supply. A base requirement was that the Occupy group either had to have an on-going encampment or at least recent activity - that is, it had to be a live group. The initial list of Occupy groups with such on-going activities was posted on January 31 - and it contained over 150 locations.
Just this past week, in what shows the variety of approaches being taken,
- hundreds of occupy folks and prison reform activists joined forces outside the gates of San Quentin State Prison, rallying around a charge that state sentencing laws are too strict and calling for an end to solitary confinement, the death penalty, and to children being tried as adults;
- some Occupy Oakland protesters were arrested for disrupting a foreclosure sale and later tht same day some others forced a branch of a bank to close early in the face of a protest of a different foreclosure, this one of an woman who had been trying without success to get a loan modification;
- and a group calling itself Occupy the SEC sent a 325-page letter with detailed public comments about the proposed Volcker rule regulating certain bank transactions.
More locally, Occupy Providence, which voluntarily shut down after the city met its demand for a homeless day center, has re-emerged as Occupy URI, with a teach-in and a tent on the campus quad planned for later in the month along with plans for actions as part of Occupy Rhode Island Campuses, a new coalition of five colleges and universities in the state. And there has apparently been some discussion among a number of occupy groups about moving physical occupations onto colleges - the idea being, more or less, if you can't settle in the streets, camp on the campus.
Oh, and Occupy Maine now has a TV show. Welcome to Public Access TV, Occupy Maine.
What's more, on Wednesday, February 29, 60 cities across the country will see nonviolent actions with an overall target of at ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the right-wing outfit that brings corporations and other right-wing interests together with state legislators to provide model legislation the latter can bring home to push in order to advance the reactionary agenda.
But leave all that aside: If you really want to know about the impact of a movement, don't look at its supporters - look at its enemies.
I mentioned this last week but it bears repeating: On January 30, Just before the Florida primary, Newt Grinch accused Witless Romney of being a tool of Wall Street and said that big banking firms like Goldman Sachs are “rigging the game.” He even claimed that the negative ads run against him were financed by Wall Street outfits, including Goldman Sachs. Just think of what it means for the impact of Occupy when Newt Grinch thinks it's to his benefit to call a fellow GOPper a tool of Wall Street.
Not enough? How about the fact that Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan-Chase who has made a career of late out of hyperbolic, hyperventilating attacks on any attempts to regulate the banks, recently said we absolutely should raise taxes on the rich, adding "I don't think people should be able to pass unlimited amounts on to their kids." So much for the "death tax."
Still not enough? How about the fact that a week ago last Friday, February 17, the Wall Street Journal said in an editorial that the only real way to prevent a repeat of the wild irresponsible financial speculation and wrongful behavior that resulted in the meltdown that produced the particular mess we are currently in is for, quoting here, "a Congressional plan either for allowing large banks to fail or for breaking them up."
You got that right: The Wall Street Journal wants to break up the banks.
But if you're still not convinced, this should be the clincher. Consider a recent column by one Judith Samuelson. She is the Executive Director of the Aspen Institute's Business and Society Program, and this is one example among many from a variety of people. In that column, Samuelson said that Occupy should "help give visibility to ideas that move beyond vilifying 'corporations' and 'capitalism' and begin to focus on the incentives and policies that create sub-optimal results from business and capital markets." In other words, she thinks Occupy should focus on smoothing off a couple of the rough edges of capitalism.
That is a way to measure impact: When you have a movement that has come to the point where so many people from across the political spectrum feel entitled and even obliged to offer their sage advice on what that movement should do now, especially when that advice mostly involves how to "tone down" your message and become "serious," you know you have something with power.
Sources:
http://articles.boston.com/2012-02-05/yourtown/31027801_1_corporate-influence-political-reform-sign
http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2012/01/31/a-list-for-journalists-who-think-that-occupy-is-dead/
http://www.ktvb.com/home/Occupy-Boise-has-until-Monday-to-pack-up-camp-139885993.html
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/02/21/occupy-protesters-rally-against-prison-conditions/
http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_20014051
http://business.time.com/2012/02/20/occupy-the-sec-moving-from-the-campsite-to-the-weeds-of-regulatory-reform/?iid=biz-main-lede
http://www.scribd.com/doc/81484886/Occupy-the-SEC-Comment-Letter-on-the-Volcker-Rule
http://www.wgme.com/template/inews_wire/wires.regional.me/2d40a6b6-www.wgme.com.shtml
http://www.occupymetv.org/
http://www.wpri.com/dpp/news/local_news/south_county/south-kingstown-students-faculty-establish-occupy-uri
http://articles.boston.com/2012-02-20/news/31080426_1_homeless-day-center-students-campus-quad
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/20/occupy-movement-targets-corporate-interest-group
http://www.browndailyherald.com/campuses-collaborate-in-r-i-occupy-movement-1.2700276#.T0SmNfUZcnc
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-01-30/gingrich-dubs-romney-wall-street-elite-before-florida-vote.html
http://therealnews.com/t2/component/hwdvideoshare/?task=viewvideo&video_id=73058
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-abrams/wall-street-tax-_b_1275348.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-paul/volcker-rule_b_1287957.html?ref=business
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/judith-samuelson/in-phase-2-occupy-movement_b_1283195.html?ref=business
Left Side of the Aisle #45 - Part 4
Outrage of the Week: attacking Miranda
You know the famous Miranda warning, the "you have the right to remain silent and so on" warning. It grew out of a 1966 SCOTUS decision that involved police questioning of a man named Ernesto Miranda. Despite claims it would "tie the hands" of police and lead to mountains of crime and crooks getting off on technicalities if cops couldn't beat a supposed "confession" out of someone, the fact is most all police forces now live quite comfortably with it and in fact crime has gone down in the years since.
Even so, there have been a number of attempts to cut down the scope or the requirements of the warning, and those have met with some success in the courts. The big issue is that you don't need to be read your rights until you are "in custody," which has come to be understood in a legal sense as the point at which a reasonable person would think they cannot end the questioning and leave.
Okay. There is this guy named Randall Lee Fields. He was in prison on a 45-day sentence for disturbing the peace. During that time, a jail guard and some sheriff's deputies took him from his cell to a conference room. Deputies told him - supposedly several times - that he was free to leave at any time.
They then questioned him for seven hours about a charge he had sexually assaulted a minor. Fields eventually confessed and was charged and convicted of criminal sexual assault. He was sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison.
He appealed the use of his confession on the grounds he was never given his Miranda rights on the sexual assault charge. The district court and then the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati both agreed, throwing out confession and conviction, ruling it is required that police read inmates their Miranda rights anytime they are isolated from the rest of the inmates in situations where they would be likely to incriminate themselves.
(This does not mean he couldn't be re-tried, the prosecution just couldn't use his confession.)
On February 21, the Supreme Court, by a 6-3 vote, overturned that decision and reinstated the conviction. The Court ruled that despite being in prison, Fields was not in "custody" as defined by Miranda and therefore there was no need to tell him his rights.
Writing for majority, Justice Sam Alito said that "Imprisonment alone is not enough to create a custodial situation within the meaning of Miranda." He argued that questioning an inmate doesn't bring the "shock" of arrest that free people experience, that there is also no hope for a quick release if the inmate talks to police, like there would be for a free person, and there is also no chance of a lighter sentence or any type of reprisal for not talking because the person is already in prison.
So what Alito argued - and five of these great legal minds, supposedly the best legal minds of our nation, agreed with him - is if you're in jail for disturbing the peace, there is no "shock" involved in being presented with a charge of sexual assault of a minor, that there is no essential difference between 45 days and 15 years, and that a prisoner, alone in a room with a prison guard and a couple of cops, feels completely free to leave that room, go back to their prison cell at any time with no fear whatsoever of any sort of reprisal.
These people are idiots! And their decision is the Outrage of the Week.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/21/supreme-court-miranda-rights-interrogations_n_1291232.html
The case is Howes v. Fields, 10-680
You know the famous Miranda warning, the "you have the right to remain silent and so on" warning. It grew out of a 1966 SCOTUS decision that involved police questioning of a man named Ernesto Miranda. Despite claims it would "tie the hands" of police and lead to mountains of crime and crooks getting off on technicalities if cops couldn't beat a supposed "confession" out of someone, the fact is most all police forces now live quite comfortably with it and in fact crime has gone down in the years since.
Even so, there have been a number of attempts to cut down the scope or the requirements of the warning, and those have met with some success in the courts. The big issue is that you don't need to be read your rights until you are "in custody," which has come to be understood in a legal sense as the point at which a reasonable person would think they cannot end the questioning and leave.
Okay. There is this guy named Randall Lee Fields. He was in prison on a 45-day sentence for disturbing the peace. During that time, a jail guard and some sheriff's deputies took him from his cell to a conference room. Deputies told him - supposedly several times - that he was free to leave at any time.
They then questioned him for seven hours about a charge he had sexually assaulted a minor. Fields eventually confessed and was charged and convicted of criminal sexual assault. He was sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison.
He appealed the use of his confession on the grounds he was never given his Miranda rights on the sexual assault charge. The district court and then the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati both agreed, throwing out confession and conviction, ruling it is required that police read inmates their Miranda rights anytime they are isolated from the rest of the inmates in situations where they would be likely to incriminate themselves.
(This does not mean he couldn't be re-tried, the prosecution just couldn't use his confession.)
On February 21, the Supreme Court, by a 6-3 vote, overturned that decision and reinstated the conviction. The Court ruled that despite being in prison, Fields was not in "custody" as defined by Miranda and therefore there was no need to tell him his rights.
Writing for majority, Justice Sam Alito said that "Imprisonment alone is not enough to create a custodial situation within the meaning of Miranda." He argued that questioning an inmate doesn't bring the "shock" of arrest that free people experience, that there is also no hope for a quick release if the inmate talks to police, like there would be for a free person, and there is also no chance of a lighter sentence or any type of reprisal for not talking because the person is already in prison.
So what Alito argued - and five of these great legal minds, supposedly the best legal minds of our nation, agreed with him - is if you're in jail for disturbing the peace, there is no "shock" involved in being presented with a charge of sexual assault of a minor, that there is no essential difference between 45 days and 15 years, and that a prisoner, alone in a room with a prison guard and a couple of cops, feels completely free to leave that room, go back to their prison cell at any time with no fear whatsoever of any sort of reprisal.
These people are idiots! And their decision is the Outrage of the Week.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/21/supreme-court-miranda-rights-interrogations_n_1291232.html
The case is Howes v. Fields, 10-680
Left Side of the Aisle #45 - Part 3
"Terrorist" hackers
There are disturbing signs that US intelligence forces have come to regard the loosely affiliated group of hackers known as Anonymous as terrorists.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Director of the National Security Agency, one Gen. Keith Alexander, has told various "high-level audiences" that Anonymous will soon have the capability to cause a power outage through a cyberattack. Meanwhile, "US intelligence officials" lumped Anonymous with al-Qaeda and Chinese and Russian cyberspies as some sort of newfangled cyber "axis of evil."
Ominously, those same officials have taken to referring to Anonymous as "a stateless group" - which in intelligence-ese usually refers to terrorist organizations.
Apparently Wikileaks is not the only group to be regarded as mortal threat to American way of secrecy. Uh, I mean life. Of secrecy.
Sources:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/who-do-you-trust-less-the-nsa-or-anonymous/253399/
There are disturbing signs that US intelligence forces have come to regard the loosely affiliated group of hackers known as Anonymous as terrorists.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Director of the National Security Agency, one Gen. Keith Alexander, has told various "high-level audiences" that Anonymous will soon have the capability to cause a power outage through a cyberattack. Meanwhile, "US intelligence officials" lumped Anonymous with al-Qaeda and Chinese and Russian cyberspies as some sort of newfangled cyber "axis of evil."
Ominously, those same officials have taken to referring to Anonymous as "a stateless group" - which in intelligence-ese usually refers to terrorist organizations.
Apparently Wikileaks is not the only group to be regarded as mortal threat to American way of secrecy. Uh, I mean life. Of secrecy.
Sources:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/who-do-you-trust-less-the-nsa-or-anonymous/253399/
Left Side of the Aisle #45 - Part 2
Stampeded to war on Iran
I talked last week about how we are being lied, manipulated, and stampeded into a war with - or, more exactly, a war on - Iran. Well, here we go again.
On February 16, Senators Joe Lieberman, Lindsey Graham, and Robert Casey introduced a resolution that would give us big shove down road to war. It is a "Sense of the Senate" resolution that would move the goalposts on what would justify a war.
The "red line" is the informal reference to the line which, if crossed by Iran, could trigger a US military strike. The Obama administration has said that what's unacceptable - where the "red line" is - is for Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. This resolution wants the "red line" to be at Iran having "a nuclear weapons capability." That is, Iran doesn't have to develop nuclear weapons in order to provoke US attack, it doesn't even have to be trying to build one, it merely has to have the hypothetical ability to build one if it ever chose to do so - an ability by some accounts it already has.
This resolution has 36 co-sponsors, including 15 Democrats - and among the GOPpers is our own Scott Brown, our supposed "moderate" senator.
A Sense of the Senate resolution is in effect an expression of opinion; it is not legally binding. But such resolutions, especially when pushed, as this one was, by the notorious and powerful pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, often return as binding legislation - and Senators usually find it difficult to vote against what you already said should be done.
Sources:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/02/aipacs-push-toward-war/253358/
I talked last week about how we are being lied, manipulated, and stampeded into a war with - or, more exactly, a war on - Iran. Well, here we go again.
On February 16, Senators Joe Lieberman, Lindsey Graham, and Robert Casey introduced a resolution that would give us big shove down road to war. It is a "Sense of the Senate" resolution that would move the goalposts on what would justify a war.
The "red line" is the informal reference to the line which, if crossed by Iran, could trigger a US military strike. The Obama administration has said that what's unacceptable - where the "red line" is - is for Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. This resolution wants the "red line" to be at Iran having "a nuclear weapons capability." That is, Iran doesn't have to develop nuclear weapons in order to provoke US attack, it doesn't even have to be trying to build one, it merely has to have the hypothetical ability to build one if it ever chose to do so - an ability by some accounts it already has.
This resolution has 36 co-sponsors, including 15 Democrats - and among the GOPpers is our own Scott Brown, our supposed "moderate" senator.
A Sense of the Senate resolution is in effect an expression of opinion; it is not legally binding. But such resolutions, especially when pushed, as this one was, by the notorious and powerful pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, often return as binding legislation - and Senators usually find it difficult to vote against what you already said should be done.
Sources:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/02/aipacs-push-toward-war/253358/
Left Side of the Aisle #45 - Part 1
Citizens United hits Montana
The Supreme Court has handed another big victory to corporations wanting to control the outcome of election campaigns.
In December, the Montana state supreme court upheld a century-old state law banning independent corporation campaign spending in state elections. The law was passed in wake of clear proof of the copper barons in the state trying to quite literally buy elections. That is, the idea damage from money in politics was not a hypothetical, it was based on experience.
The US Supreme Court has now suspended that decision pending a ruling on whether the Montana law violates the notorious Citizens United decision. The result is that corporations can now spend as much as they want in Montana for the June 5 presidential primary as well as the November elections, since no one expects a Supreme Court decision will come down before then.
A bitterly amusing footnote is that article that served as the source for this said the Court's order "cleared the way for corporations, unions and other groups to spend unlimited amounts of money on ads and other political activities." Right, like unions and corporations are on equal footing here.
And in another, this one a revealing, footnote: You know all those Super-Pacs raising all that unlimited money in this year's presidential race? According to an analysis of their financial reports by USA Today, just under 25% of the entire amount raised by all of them has been put up by precisely five incredibly rich people.
Dallas industrialist Harold Simmons has donated $14.4 million; Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam put up $10M (and Adelson says he's ready to put up tens of millions more); Houston home builder Bob Perry came up with $3.6 million, and Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist and co-founder of PayPal, donated $2.6 million, a mere piker in this crowd.
Sources:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/02/18/supreme-court-allows-montana-corporation-election-spending/
The case is American Tradition Partnership v. Attorney General of Montana, No. 11-A762
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/story/2012-02-21/super-pac-donors/53196658/1
The Supreme Court has handed another big victory to corporations wanting to control the outcome of election campaigns.
In December, the Montana state supreme court upheld a century-old state law banning independent corporation campaign spending in state elections. The law was passed in wake of clear proof of the copper barons in the state trying to quite literally buy elections. That is, the idea damage from money in politics was not a hypothetical, it was based on experience.
The US Supreme Court has now suspended that decision pending a ruling on whether the Montana law violates the notorious Citizens United decision. The result is that corporations can now spend as much as they want in Montana for the June 5 presidential primary as well as the November elections, since no one expects a Supreme Court decision will come down before then.
A bitterly amusing footnote is that article that served as the source for this said the Court's order "cleared the way for corporations, unions and other groups to spend unlimited amounts of money on ads and other political activities." Right, like unions and corporations are on equal footing here.
And in another, this one a revealing, footnote: You know all those Super-Pacs raising all that unlimited money in this year's presidential race? According to an analysis of their financial reports by USA Today, just under 25% of the entire amount raised by all of them has been put up by precisely five incredibly rich people.
Dallas industrialist Harold Simmons has donated $14.4 million; Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam put up $10M (and Adelson says he's ready to put up tens of millions more); Houston home builder Bob Perry came up with $3.6 million, and Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist and co-founder of PayPal, donated $2.6 million, a mere piker in this crowd.
Sources:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/02/18/supreme-court-allows-montana-corporation-election-spending/
The case is American Tradition Partnership v. Attorney General of Montana, No. 11-A762
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/story/2012-02-21/super-pac-donors/53196658/1
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Left Side of the Aisle #45
This week:
- Quick hit one: Citizens United
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/02/18/supreme-court-allows-montana-corporation-election-spending/
American Tradition Partnership v. Attorney General of Montana, No. 11-A762
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/story/2012-02-21/super-pac-donors/53196658/1
- Quick hit two: Iran
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/02/aipacs-push-toward-war/253358/
- Quick hit three: Terrorist hackers
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/who-do-you-trust-less-the-nsa-or-anonymous/253399/
- Outrage of the Week: Attacking Miranda
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/21/supreme-court-miranda-rights-interrogations_n_1291232.html
The case is Howes v. Fields, 10-680
- Occupy
http://articles.boston.com/2012-02-05/yourtown/31027801_1_corporate-influence-political-reform-sign
http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2012/01/31/a-list-for-journalists-who-think-that-occupy-is-dead/
http://www.ktvb.com/home/Occupy-Boise-has-until-Monday-to-pack-up-camp-139885993.html
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/02/21/occupy-protesters-rally-against-prison-conditions/
http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_20014051
http://business.time.com/2012/02/20/occupy-the-sec-moving-from-the-campsite-to-the-weeds-of-regulatory-reform/
http://www.scribd.com/doc/81484886/Occupy-the-SEC-Comment-Letter-on-the-Volcker-Rule
http://www.wgme.com/template/inews_wire/wires.regional.me/2d40a6b6-www.wgme.com.shtml
http://www.occupymetv.org/
http://www.wpri.com/dpp/news/local_news/south_county/south-kingstown-students-faculty-establish-occupy-uri
http://articles.boston.com/2012-02-20/news/31080426_1_homeless-day-center-students-campus-quad
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/20/occupy-movement-targets-corporate-interest-group
http://www.browndailyherald.com/campuses-collaborate-in-r-i-occupy-movement-1.2700276#.T0SmNfUZcnc
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-01-30/gingrich-dubs-romney-wall-street-elite-before-florida-vote.html
http://therealnews.com/t2/component/hwdvideoshare/?task=viewvideo&video_id=73058
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-abrams/wall-street-tax-_b_1275348.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-paul/volcker-rule_b_1287957.html?ref=business
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/judith-samuelson/in-phase-2-occupy-movement_b_1283195.html?ref=business
- And Another Thing
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j6vshXWgZSUj3pLD2sLNWJlHSFnQ
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/02/21/russians-resurrect-30000-year-old-frozen-flower/
http://www.foxnews.com/topics/science/national-academy-of-sciences.htm#r_src=ramp
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jJp_vTdRhyEZc6s084rTPSA4z5AA
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Left Side of the Aisle #44 - Part 6
Quick thought on Occupy
So much I've wanted to talk about and just haven't had time. I've been wanting for weeks to talk about events in Egypt and Syria. I've been wanting to talk about the economy and particularly about the deal with the banks about their foreclosure fraud. It's been weeks since I mentioned Occupy.
But I did want to get in this one thing about the impact of Occupy. A couple of weeks ago, just before the Florida primary, Newt Grinch accused Witless Romney of being a tool of Wall Street and said he - Grinch - would stop firms like Goldman Sachs Group from "rigging the game."
When someone like him resorts to that kind of language thinking it will help him, you know there is something going on.
Sources:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/gingrich-labels-romney-wall-street-050100578.html
So much I've wanted to talk about and just haven't had time. I've been wanting for weeks to talk about events in Egypt and Syria. I've been wanting to talk about the economy and particularly about the deal with the banks about their foreclosure fraud. It's been weeks since I mentioned Occupy.
But I did want to get in this one thing about the impact of Occupy. A couple of weeks ago, just before the Florida primary, Newt Grinch accused Witless Romney of being a tool of Wall Street and said he - Grinch - would stop firms like Goldman Sachs Group from "rigging the game."
When someone like him resorts to that kind of language thinking it will help him, you know there is something going on.
Sources:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/gingrich-labels-romney-wall-street-050100578.html
Left Side of the Aisle #44 - Part 5
Hypocrisy of Obama supporters
Finally, another sort of hypocrisy, this one of valuing political expediency and party loyalty over human rights and basic decency. And while that sounds like an all-but-routine denunciation of the right wing, in this case it's not.
During the Bush years, liberal democrats and supposedly progressive activists screamed (and legitimately so) about how George Bush - Shrub - was undermining American values and shredding the Constitution. Barack Obama - President Hopey-Changey - campaigned on how just awful all that was and how he was going to change all that. That was not just a single plank in his platform, it was central to his campaign.
But once in office he went back on almost everything he said. His administration not only endorsed the Bush regime's arguments on how national security trumps all, it went beyond it, refusing to prosecute Bush administration crimes up to and including open admissions of approving torture from Bush and "The Big" Dick Cheney themselves, expanding executive power, broadening claims justifying official secrecy, pushing for renewal of expiring Traitor Act provisions, intensifying the technically secret drone war in Pakistan, expanding the ability of government to spy on our communications, allowing the FBI additional powers to poke, prod, pry, and probe into our privacy, waging an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, seeking to destroy WikiLeaks, and allowing the torture of Bradley Manning.
Sometimes the extensions of individual, even monarchical, powers are even more shocking:
In the case of Libya, Obama not only ignored the War Powers Act, he deliberately thumbed his nose at the very idea of Congress having any say at all on if, when, where, or even why American military forces would be employed. He essentially said "It's my Air Force and I'll do whatever I want with it."
He has endorsed the power of presidents to imprison anyone, even American citizens taken on American soil, indefinitely without charge, trial, or any legal rights whatsoever based solely on that president's own unchallengeable claim that the person - the disappeared person - was in some way connected to "terrorism." But don't worry, Howard Dean is safe.
And he declared for himself the power to order the extra-judicial murder of anyone, even American citizens, anywhere in the world, on the basis of that same sort of unchallengeable claim - while refusing to reveal whatever legal argument has been invented by his administration to claim that power. But again, Rudy Guiliani need have no fears.
And how has all that been treated by far too much of what passes for the left in this country? Beyond a few quiet grumbles about how there might be some legitimate criticism on the matter, it has mostly been silence. A silence most recently demonstrated and punctuated by a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
According to that poll, fully 77% of self-identified liberal Democrats endorse the use of drones in Pakistan and elsewhere - that is, they endorse the secret and illegal CIA war. What's more, 55% still approve of them even when the targets are identified as American citizens.
And what about that symbol of Bush-era undermining of human and constitutional rights, Guantanamo Bay prison? Iin February, 2009, shortly after Obama was inaugurated and a time when he was still talking about closing the prison, a Pew Research poll showed that 64% of Democrats supported closing it down; I think we can safely assume the portion of liberal dems who felt that way was even higher. But in the new Washington Post-ABC News poll, 53% of liberal Democrats now approve of his decision to keep it open.
This is more evidence, if it was even needed, of hypocrisy on a grand scale, a scale that envelops an entire political party and even more importantly, envelops far too many of the very people who denounced the immorality and illegality of the Shrub years but now find that the chant of "elect more Democrats" silences the whisper of conscience.
The evidence says that for a large segment of self-proclaimed liberals and progressives, the old right-wing charge that their opposition to George Bush was based on political expediency rather than actual commitment rings true and I say that these people, these hypocrites, these trimmers whose morality depends on whether the president has a D or an R after the name do not deserve to be listened to, do not deserve even to be believed when, quoting Glenn Greenwald,
And yet we must struggle on. We have to keep on trying. There is a reason my blog is subtitled "Surviving a Dark Time." Far too many believed - and have convinced themselves - that the darkness lifted in January 2009. They were wrong.
Sources:
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/08/repulsive_progressive_hypocrisy/singleton/
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/08/libya-here.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/05/little-more-bad-news-so-is-this.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/06/third-footnote-to-preceding.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/06/why-previous-post-matters.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/aclu-sues-to-force-release-of-drone-attack-records/2012/02/01/gIQArL6xhQ_story.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/poll-finds-broad-support-for-obamas-counterterrorism-policies/2012/02/07/gIQAFrSEyQ_story.html
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1893/poll-patriot-act-renewal
http://equalityanddemocracy.org/?p=89
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1125/terrorism-guantanamo-torture-polling
Finally, another sort of hypocrisy, this one of valuing political expediency and party loyalty over human rights and basic decency. And while that sounds like an all-but-routine denunciation of the right wing, in this case it's not.
During the Bush years, liberal democrats and supposedly progressive activists screamed (and legitimately so) about how George Bush - Shrub - was undermining American values and shredding the Constitution. Barack Obama - President Hopey-Changey - campaigned on how just awful all that was and how he was going to change all that. That was not just a single plank in his platform, it was central to his campaign.
But once in office he went back on almost everything he said. His administration not only endorsed the Bush regime's arguments on how national security trumps all, it went beyond it, refusing to prosecute Bush administration crimes up to and including open admissions of approving torture from Bush and "The Big" Dick Cheney themselves, expanding executive power, broadening claims justifying official secrecy, pushing for renewal of expiring Traitor Act provisions, intensifying the technically secret drone war in Pakistan, expanding the ability of government to spy on our communications, allowing the FBI additional powers to poke, prod, pry, and probe into our privacy, waging an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, seeking to destroy WikiLeaks, and allowing the torture of Bradley Manning.
Sometimes the extensions of individual, even monarchical, powers are even more shocking:
In the case of Libya, Obama not only ignored the War Powers Act, he deliberately thumbed his nose at the very idea of Congress having any say at all on if, when, where, or even why American military forces would be employed. He essentially said "It's my Air Force and I'll do whatever I want with it."
He has endorsed the power of presidents to imprison anyone, even American citizens taken on American soil, indefinitely without charge, trial, or any legal rights whatsoever based solely on that president's own unchallengeable claim that the person - the disappeared person - was in some way connected to "terrorism." But don't worry, Howard Dean is safe.
And he declared for himself the power to order the extra-judicial murder of anyone, even American citizens, anywhere in the world, on the basis of that same sort of unchallengeable claim - while refusing to reveal whatever legal argument has been invented by his administration to claim that power. But again, Rudy Guiliani need have no fears.
And how has all that been treated by far too much of what passes for the left in this country? Beyond a few quiet grumbles about how there might be some legitimate criticism on the matter, it has mostly been silence. A silence most recently demonstrated and punctuated by a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
According to that poll, fully 77% of self-identified liberal Democrats endorse the use of drones in Pakistan and elsewhere - that is, they endorse the secret and illegal CIA war. What's more, 55% still approve of them even when the targets are identified as American citizens.
And what about that symbol of Bush-era undermining of human and constitutional rights, Guantanamo Bay prison? Iin February, 2009, shortly after Obama was inaugurated and a time when he was still talking about closing the prison, a Pew Research poll showed that 64% of Democrats supported closing it down; I think we can safely assume the portion of liberal dems who felt that way was even higher. But in the new Washington Post-ABC News poll, 53% of liberal Democrats now approve of his decision to keep it open.
This is more evidence, if it was even needed, of hypocrisy on a grand scale, a scale that envelops an entire political party and even more importantly, envelops far too many of the very people who denounced the immorality and illegality of the Shrub years but now find that the chant of "elect more Democrats" silences the whisper of conscience.
The evidence says that for a large segment of self-proclaimed liberals and progressives, the old right-wing charge that their opposition to George Bush was based on political expediency rather than actual commitment rings true and I say that these people, these hypocrites, these trimmers whose morality depends on whether the president has a D or an R after the name do not deserve to be listened to, do not deserve even to be believed when, quoting Glenn Greenwald,
they want to pretend to oppose civilian slaughter and civil liberties assaults when perpetrated by the next Republican President.Greenwald also notes that 35% of liberal democrats say they oppose Obama's destructive and dangerous policies of the sort I've run through here. But while that is, as he says, "a non-trivial amount," it still marks us - those of us for who opposition to illegal wars and extra-judicial murder is a matter of conviction, not convenience - it marks us as a minority of all liberals who are a minority of the country as a whole. We are a minority of a minority.
And yet we must struggle on. We have to keep on trying. There is a reason my blog is subtitled "Surviving a Dark Time." Far too many believed - and have convinced themselves - that the darkness lifted in January 2009. They were wrong.
Sources:
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/08/repulsive_progressive_hypocrisy/singleton/
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/08/libya-here.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/05/little-more-bad-news-so-is-this.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/06/third-footnote-to-preceding.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/06/why-previous-post-matters.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/aclu-sues-to-force-release-of-drone-attack-records/2012/02/01/gIQArL6xhQ_story.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/poll-finds-broad-support-for-obamas-counterterrorism-policies/2012/02/07/gIQAFrSEyQ_story.html
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1893/poll-patriot-act-renewal
http://equalityanddemocracy.org/?p=89
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1125/terrorism-guantanamo-torture-polling
Left Side of the Aisle #44 - Part 4
Everything You Need to Know: How the right wing thinks of you
This is Everything You Need to Know in two sentences.
There is a new proposal circulating that would do an end run around the electoral college in order to guarantee that the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote will win the election.
Republicans and other right-wingers are against it on the grounds that winning the presidency by popular vote amounts to "mob rule."
And that is everything you need to know.
Sources:
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/07/the_gops_nightmare_voting_scenario/
This is Everything You Need to Know in two sentences.
There is a new proposal circulating that would do an end run around the electoral college in order to guarantee that the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote will win the election.
Republicans and other right-wingers are against it on the grounds that winning the presidency by popular vote amounts to "mob rule."
And that is everything you need to know.
Sources:
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/07/the_gops_nightmare_voting_scenario/
Left Side of the Aisle #44 - Part 3
Hypocrisy on "terrorism" prosecutions
This is not a new story, it first circulated late last summer, but I was unaware of it until recently (I was alerted to it by Glenn Greenwald, from whose work much of the following comes) and it’s on-going.
The Mojahedin-e Khalq, or Warriors of God, usually known by its abbreviation MEK, is an Iranian group that is on the State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. It's more like a cult than a movement, with its central fantasy of overthrowing Iran marked by a focus on total devotion to its leaders, Maryam and Massoud Rajavi, the former of who apparently regards herself as the rightful president of Iran.
A recent report by NBC news quotes two American officials as saying MEK was behind the string of murders of Iranian nuclear scientists since 2010, the most recent of which occurred in January.
Whatever you think of the group in particular or the State Department list in general, the fact remains that providing such a group with "material support" is a felony. And a number of people have been convicted on exactly that basis despite having the most tenuous connections to a terrorist group. Just a few recent examples:
In 2009 a satellite TV salesman on Staten Island was sentenced to five years in federal prison merely for including a Hezbollah TV channel as part of the satellite package he sold to customers.
Last July, a 22-year-old former Penn State student named Emerson Winfield Begolly was indicted for posting comments on a “jihadist” Internet forum including a comment that appeared to praise the shootings at a Marine Corps base.
In September, Jubair Ahmad, a 24-year-old Pakistani legal resident living in Virginia, was indicted for a 5-minute YouTube video critical of US actions and policy in the Muslim world on the grounds that he allegedly discussed the video in advance with the son of a leader of a group labeled as terrorist.
On December 20, Sudbury, Massachusetts resident Tarek Mehanna was convicted of material support of terrorism "for posting pro-jihadist material on the internet" - that is, strictly for what he wrote.
One person who was ultimately acquitted was Sami Omar al-Hussayen, a Saudi Arabian graduate student who was indicted on a charge of providing material aid simply by maintaining a website with links to supposedly "jihadist" sites.
How far can this go? Pretty damn far: The Humanitarian Law Project wanted to advise the Kurdistan Workers' Party, the PKK - which is on the US terrorist list - on how to file human rights complaints with the UN and on conducting peace negotiations with the Turkish government. That is, it wanted to advise the PKK on alternatives to violence.
In June 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that the government could ban that as "material support of terrorism" on the grounds that the government's interest in denying the "terrorist" group legitimacy outweighed any constitutional considerations. Put another way, the Court found that the government could have a legitimate interest - one strong enough to overrule any Constitutional rights - a legitimate interest in keeping terrorist groups from learning about alternatives to terrorism.
Why am I going through this history? This is why:
A rather large number of prominent political figures from both parties - including Michael Mukasey, Andy Card, Tom Ridge, Rudy Giuliani, Howard Dean, Ed Rendell, Bill Richardson, and Wesley Clark - have been paid tens of thousands of dollars by the MEK to speak in its support. The MEK is, again, listed as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the State Dept.
Not only have they been paid by the group to advance its cause and urge it be removed from that list, they have openly acknowledged repeatedly meeting with its leaders.
How much more obvious could "material support for a terrorist group" be - especially considering that in the Humanitarian Law Project case SCOTUS ruled that even peaceful advocacy on behalf of such a group is criminal if done in "coordination" with that group. And these people are being paid by, and meeting with the heads of, the MEK, which is pretty damn clear evidence of coordination.
So what possible justification can there be for Rudy Giuliani, Howard Dean, and the rest to be walking around free, collecting their fat terrorist paychecks, making speeches, going on TV, going to their fancy parties, and all the rest, while people you never heard of face years in prison for far less?
The question answers itself: People you never heard of. They will be investigated, they will be indicted, they will be prosecuted, they will be sent to prison - but Tom Ridge? Wesley Clark? The very idea of prosecuting such well-connected people is unthinkable. It can't even be broached. It would never occur to anyone in authority.
It's hard to imagine anything that could more clearly illustrate the fundamental moral corruption at the heart of our so-called justice system: the unknown go to prison; the elite go to parties. It's not new - there are many variations on the image of the law as being like a spider's web that can catch a fly but is easily broken through by a bird, some of those images quite old - but that makes it no less of an outrage.
Oh, and one more thing: That same NBC news report I mentioned at the top also quoted those two officials as saying that the MEK "is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service" - which would make Israel, by definition, a state sponsor of terrorism.
But that's okay, it seems, because the MEK's terrorism is aimed at Iran. So in addition to everything else, Giuliani, et. al. are safe because they're working for the "good" terrorists, the terrorists who are on our side, the terrorists whose terrorism is good terrorism because we don't like the people these terrorists intend to terrorize.
Sources:
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/10/israel_mek_and_state_sponsor_of_terror_groups/singleton/
http://www.state.gov/j/ct/rls/other/des/123085.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/opinion/sunday/an-iranian-cult-and-its-american-friends.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
http://ccrjustice.org/holder-v-humanitarian-law-project
http://www.latitudenews.com/story/tarek-mehanna-suburban-teenager-accused-terrorist/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holder_v._Humanitarian_Law_Project
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/12/us-iran-azerbaijan-idUSTRE81B0OS20120212
http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/38692.html
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061212175748AAwUwoq
This is not a new story, it first circulated late last summer, but I was unaware of it until recently (I was alerted to it by Glenn Greenwald, from whose work much of the following comes) and it’s on-going.
The Mojahedin-e Khalq, or Warriors of God, usually known by its abbreviation MEK, is an Iranian group that is on the State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. It's more like a cult than a movement, with its central fantasy of overthrowing Iran marked by a focus on total devotion to its leaders, Maryam and Massoud Rajavi, the former of who apparently regards herself as the rightful president of Iran.
A recent report by NBC news quotes two American officials as saying MEK was behind the string of murders of Iranian nuclear scientists since 2010, the most recent of which occurred in January.
Whatever you think of the group in particular or the State Department list in general, the fact remains that providing such a group with "material support" is a felony. And a number of people have been convicted on exactly that basis despite having the most tenuous connections to a terrorist group. Just a few recent examples:
In 2009 a satellite TV salesman on Staten Island was sentenced to five years in federal prison merely for including a Hezbollah TV channel as part of the satellite package he sold to customers.
Last July, a 22-year-old former Penn State student named Emerson Winfield Begolly was indicted for posting comments on a “jihadist” Internet forum including a comment that appeared to praise the shootings at a Marine Corps base.
In September, Jubair Ahmad, a 24-year-old Pakistani legal resident living in Virginia, was indicted for a 5-minute YouTube video critical of US actions and policy in the Muslim world on the grounds that he allegedly discussed the video in advance with the son of a leader of a group labeled as terrorist.
On December 20, Sudbury, Massachusetts resident Tarek Mehanna was convicted of material support of terrorism "for posting pro-jihadist material on the internet" - that is, strictly for what he wrote.
One person who was ultimately acquitted was Sami Omar al-Hussayen, a Saudi Arabian graduate student who was indicted on a charge of providing material aid simply by maintaining a website with links to supposedly "jihadist" sites.
How far can this go? Pretty damn far: The Humanitarian Law Project wanted to advise the Kurdistan Workers' Party, the PKK - which is on the US terrorist list - on how to file human rights complaints with the UN and on conducting peace negotiations with the Turkish government. That is, it wanted to advise the PKK on alternatives to violence.
In June 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that the government could ban that as "material support of terrorism" on the grounds that the government's interest in denying the "terrorist" group legitimacy outweighed any constitutional considerations. Put another way, the Court found that the government could have a legitimate interest - one strong enough to overrule any Constitutional rights - a legitimate interest in keeping terrorist groups from learning about alternatives to terrorism.
Why am I going through this history? This is why:
A rather large number of prominent political figures from both parties - including Michael Mukasey, Andy Card, Tom Ridge, Rudy Giuliani, Howard Dean, Ed Rendell, Bill Richardson, and Wesley Clark - have been paid tens of thousands of dollars by the MEK to speak in its support. The MEK is, again, listed as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the State Dept.
Not only have they been paid by the group to advance its cause and urge it be removed from that list, they have openly acknowledged repeatedly meeting with its leaders.
How much more obvious could "material support for a terrorist group" be - especially considering that in the Humanitarian Law Project case SCOTUS ruled that even peaceful advocacy on behalf of such a group is criminal if done in "coordination" with that group. And these people are being paid by, and meeting with the heads of, the MEK, which is pretty damn clear evidence of coordination.
So what possible justification can there be for Rudy Giuliani, Howard Dean, and the rest to be walking around free, collecting their fat terrorist paychecks, making speeches, going on TV, going to their fancy parties, and all the rest, while people you never heard of face years in prison for far less?
The question answers itself: People you never heard of. They will be investigated, they will be indicted, they will be prosecuted, they will be sent to prison - but Tom Ridge? Wesley Clark? The very idea of prosecuting such well-connected people is unthinkable. It can't even be broached. It would never occur to anyone in authority.
It's hard to imagine anything that could more clearly illustrate the fundamental moral corruption at the heart of our so-called justice system: the unknown go to prison; the elite go to parties. It's not new - there are many variations on the image of the law as being like a spider's web that can catch a fly but is easily broken through by a bird, some of those images quite old - but that makes it no less of an outrage.
Oh, and one more thing: That same NBC news report I mentioned at the top also quoted those two officials as saying that the MEK "is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service" - which would make Israel, by definition, a state sponsor of terrorism.
But that's okay, it seems, because the MEK's terrorism is aimed at Iran. So in addition to everything else, Giuliani, et. al. are safe because they're working for the "good" terrorists, the terrorists who are on our side, the terrorists whose terrorism is good terrorism because we don't like the people these terrorists intend to terrorize.
Sources:
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/10/israel_mek_and_state_sponsor_of_terror_groups/singleton/
http://www.state.gov/j/ct/rls/other/des/123085.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/opinion/sunday/an-iranian-cult-and-its-american-friends.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
http://ccrjustice.org/holder-v-humanitarian-law-project
http://www.latitudenews.com/story/tarek-mehanna-suburban-teenager-accused-terrorist/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holder_v._Humanitarian_Law_Project
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/12/us-iran-azerbaijan-idUSTRE81B0OS20120212
http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/38692.html
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061212175748AAwUwoq
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