Right Wing fruitcake Sean Hannity attempted to elevate poor persecuted Sarah from bullied school into a saint Joan of Arc martyr effigy!
You would think these pair of hypocritical liars and loons were beyond parody; but John Stewart proves that wrong!
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What science says about religious conversion
Conversion
For many, religious experiences lead to religious conversion. While conversion need not stem from such an experience, per se, many convertees have cited religious awakenings as leading to a new spiritual perspective. But while science accepts a religious experience/conversion relationship, conversion alone is often attributed to other causes: preexisting psychological disturbances (as cited by Freud), bad parenting, low self-esteem, an escape from a perceived reality that has proved insupportable, or an attempt to resolve unconscious inner conflicts. And more often than not, there seems to have existed a “burning desire to know, to find answers, to embark on a kind of search . . .” which the Buddhists refer to as “great doubt.” But, this raises the question as to what spawns this desire in the first place. Does it arise from the creative imagination? Does it lie in common, human curiosity? Is it an irresistible urge spurred by the God-spot?
The Convertee Profile
Psychological data suggests that although “melancholics” and unstable introverts are most susceptible to stress and most likely to undergo dramatic religious conversion, stable extraverts and introverts are more likely to retain new beliefs after conversion. Studies show that among those with spiritual beliefs, maturity of personality goes with the attitude of religion which is undogmatic and nonrestrictive, and more interested in seeking the truth behind religious teachings. (These findings seem to support renowned psychologist Maslow’s assertion that ‘self-realization’ is hindered by involvement in religious beliefs that traditionally go unchallenged.) Therefore statistically, conversion is seen far more often among middle-aged and older adults.
Conversion and Acceptance of Supernatural Events
Historically, religion has been linked to the supernatural and the acceptance of supernatural events. So the next question of interest is whether religious individuals (especially converts and those experiencing religious occurrences) are more likely to accept the possibility of supernatural events-even if they break the laws of science. Studies show that this question may best be addressed from an examination of predisposed childhood beliefs and experiences-which set the stage for future spiritual experiences or conversions. In a study by German psychologist Friedemann Thun (a recognized expert in interpersonal and intrapersonal communication conducted) in 1959, five areas of spiritual belief were identified in children 6-10: mystical thinking, readiness for religion, capacity for religious experiences, a dependence for religious ideas upon influential others, and changeableness. Thun’s conclusions highlighted either the “road to religious maturity” or to “neurotic self-defense or indifference,” suggesting that mystical thinking is a childish way of misinterpreting the world, a form of thinking normally left behind. When it is not, the door to believing in the supernatural is left open-and sometimes supported by further religious experiences.
http://www.helium.com/items/1972905-what-science-say-about-religious-conversion
Stephen chatting (below) on the “The Importance of Unbelief”
The Annual Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism is presented at Harvard University each year by the Harvard Secular Society on behalf of the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard and the American Humanist Association. Selected by a committee of 20-30 Harvard students each year, this award is given to a figure greatly admired by our students and community for both artistic and humanitarian reasons.
Now in its fifth year, the HSS Cultural Humanism committee has chosen Stephen Fry based on what they feel is an outstanding contribution to Humanism in popular culture.
Actor, author, comedian, and outspoken Humanist, Fry has worked for three decades in film and theater. Well known for his exploration of the US in Fry in America, Fry has also starred alongside Hugh Laurie (A Bit of Fry and Laurie and Jeeves and Wooster) and in a variety of other award-winning films including V for Vendetta, Wilde, Alice in Wonderland, and his own documentary The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive. Fry has more than two million followers on Twitter.
The award ceremony will take place Tuesday, February 22 at 8 pm and will feature a performance by Fry.
Previous winners of the Cultural Humanism Award are, in 2007, novelist Sir Salman Rushdie, in 2008, punk rock star Greg Graffin (of the band Bad Religion and the UCLA Faculty of Biology), in 2009, writer/ director/producer Joss Whedon (“Buffy,” “Angel,” Firefly,” “Dollhouse”) and in 2010 Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, the hosts of The MythBusters.
The chief rabbi’s immoral stance on donor cards
Orthodox Jews should be free to make their own decisions about what constitutes death
The debate on Jewish organ donation was reignited this week with a statement on what constitutes death according to religious law (halacha). In what is a very important debate, a lot of misunderstandings of what the rabbinical authorities are arguing about are being confused, so I am writing this to clarify what is going on and explain why I am upset at the decision of Lord Sacks, the chief rabbi.
The issue of organ donations within the Jewish community was pushed back into the front pages after the footballer Avi Cohenhad an accident and his family went against his wishes and decided not to donate his organs. He had been a proud organ donor-card holder in Israel, where there is a major issue of getting people to donate their organs due to the religious complexities around the issues.
The commandments of saving a life (pikuach nefesh) trumps almost all others and what to do when a family member is dying is a particularly tense time where religious guidance is sought. The high stakes involved, as well as the sanctity of the body in Jewish law, means that this issue is of vital importance.
The chief rabbi was not saying to Jews not to donate their organs. On the contrary: he was encouraging them to do so. You can read his clarification here. In the case where someone needs a kidney or any other non-life-threatening donation (for the donor) there is no issue, you should be encouraged to donate your organ. The debate flows around what counts as death in Jewish law. Is it at the point of irreversible cessation of the heartbeat occurs (when the heart stops) or irreversible cessation of autonomous breathing (brain-stem death)? The chief rabbi’s position is that it is when your heart stops. The difference means that if you are brain dead and on a respirator you would not be allowed to donate vital organs. If your heart stops you would be allowed to donate everything.
What the chief rabbi is asking for is that the current donor cards make this difference so that people can donate when their heart stops but not if they are only brain dead. He is asking that before the organs are removed, a rabbinical authority is consulted.
Why I and others are very upset is because the chief rabbi has said that halachic organ donor cards are also unacceptable: “At this point, however, since the National Registry system is not set up to accommodate halachic requirements, donor cards (even those purporting to be halachic) are unacceptable.”
This has upset a lot of other Orthodox rabbinical authorities. While the chief rabbi and his bet din might decide that brain-stem death does not constitute halachic death, there are Orthodox authorities who argue that it does. These include the chief rabbinate of Israel and Rav Moshe Tendler. Tendler is a rosh yeshiva at Yeshiva University and a professor of biology not to mention the son-in-law of the late Rav Moshe Finestein z’hl, one of the most important rabbinical authorities of the past century and allowed his son in law to take a lead on these issues.
The halachic organ donor cards allows the donor to choose under which conditions (either brain death or heart failure or both) they would wish to donate.
The argument between the Hods (Halachic Organ Donor Society) and the office of the chief rabbi has become quite heated and is featured in this week’s Jewish Chronicle. They are upset as there is a major dispute among different rabbis over what constitutes death. Rather than acknowledging the dispute and giving people the option within the UK to choose which they would rather follow, the office of the chief rabbi has said that he only accepts heart failure and will not accept brain death. While this is one opinion, it is not the only opinion and to ignore those of rabbinical authorities who are also medical experts really upsets me.
Medical ethics on this level is very complex and is definitely something that not every communal rabbi will have an expertise on. What the chief rabbi has done by not allowing these halachic organ donor cards is to take the decision over whether brain-stem death will allow you to donate your organs away from Orthodox Jews in his jurisdiction – even though Orthodox Jews in America and Israel can have a choice.
The chief rabbi may be a moral philosopher but he is not a medical expert, while he is entitled to support the view that only heart failure counts as death, to make this the only view that the Orthodox community in the country can subscribe to is unfair and in my view immoral.
I still cannot see what would be the issue with the halachic organ donor cards and to impose a singular view is removing the choice for Orthodox families at a very tough time
Tread lightly—this video is truly depressing.
“Yo, God, it’s me, Bill. Can you explain how the tides work?”
Today David Silverstein, president of the American Atheist Group went on the Bill O’Reilly show to debate whether god is real and whether religion is valid. O’Reilly gave him a golden hail-mary opportunity to absolutely blow his argument off the map and wipe that smug look off his face, and Silverstein blew it.
Explaining that his religious faith springs from the mysteries of nature that are unexplainable by modern science, O’Reilly said: ““I’ll tell you why [religion is] not a scam, in my opinion. Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that. You can’t explain why the tide goes in.”
Even more amazing than Bill O’Reilly not knowing that the tides are caused by the moon’s orbit is the fact that the atheist guy didn’t know it either! Silverstein was left to retort, “It doesn’t matter if I can’t explain it—that doesn’t mean that an invisible magic man in the sky is doing it,” his high school science (or was it middle school?) apparently failing him.
The moon, dude. The moon. Nothing so frustrating as seeing Bill O’Reilly so close to getting eviscerated, and without a rational human being in sight to put him in his place.
I guess it wasn’t meant to be this time—like the 1986 Red Sox. Just wait, O’Reilly—we rationalists will get you one of these days.
Interview here:-
When Religious Pandering Goes Too Far?
I’m used to politicians pandering to religious Americans.
There’s more of them, so there are more votes to be gained by speaking their “language.” That coupled with the fact that President Obama is a Christian just meant we could expect a lot of religious references in his speech in Tucson, Arizona yesterday.
There is nothing I can say that will fill the sudden hole torn in your hearts. But know this: the hopes of a nation are here tonight. We mourn with you for the fallen. We join you in your grief. And we add our faith to yours that Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the other living victims of this tragedy pull through.
As Scripture tells us:
There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy place where the Most High dwells.
God is within her, she will not fall;
God will help her at break of day.
…
But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized – at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do – it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.
Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding. In the words of Job, “when I looked for light, then came darkness.” Bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.
…
May God bless and keep those we’ve lost in restful and eternal peace. May He love and watch over the survivors. And may He bless the United States of America.
I’m sure a lot of you feel it’s too much. He shouldn’t have made any religious references at all and this was overkill.
But somehow, none of those passages fazed me. They went in one ear and out the other. I’m so used to hearing them by now, I feel almost immune to them.
Until I heard the President talk about Christina Taylor Green, the 9-year-old girl who died in the shooting. Obama spoke about her in some detail early in his speech, and then at the end of it, he said this:
If there are rain puddles in heaven, Christina is jumping in them today.
Ugh…
No. There are no rain puddles in heaven. Christina is not jumping in them. Hell, there’s not even a heaven in the first place.
I hate this idea that we have to create imaginary memories for people who die young, as if we couldn’t find anything happier to remember them by during their lifetimes. For all the joy Christina surely provided her family with during her life, Obama chose instead to invoke this fake scenario that I feel cheapens her memory.
I realize I’m probably overreacting. This was one line in a very long (and honestly beautiful) speech.
It just rubbed me the wrong way. I don’t know if I’m alone in this.
How One Paragraph in a Single Speech Has Skewed the Eisenhower Record
Wednesday 19 January 2011
by: Ira Chernus, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis
Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower pictured in his Army uniform. Eisenhower delivered a farewell address fifty years ago about the dangers of the military-industrial complex. (Photo: US Army)
The fiftieth anniversary of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address and its famous warning about the military-industrial complex presents progressives with a dilemma. They can continue the popular trend of claiming Eisenhower as a prophetic voice against militarism and for peace. Or they can set aside that manufactured image and get Eisenhower straight: they can talk about him and his policies accurately, with analysis based on research straight from the original source documents, and straighten out the distorted image the peace movement has propagated for so long. But they cannot do both, since the image so directly contradicts the reality.
It’s not an easy choice. The fictional Eisenhower, supposedly dead-set against wasteful spending on military (especially nuclear) armaments, has been a powerfully effective poster boy for the peace movement. After all, how could the war hawks argue with a beloved Republican war hero? The image of Eisenhower as the “man of peace” is so useful that I almost hate to burst the bubble.
On balance, though, I think that fiction does more harm than good. It distorts our picture of the early cold war years and prevents us from learning valuable lessons that an accurate history of that time can teach us. So, it’s healthy to see a small debate about Eisenhower triggered by this anniversary because some of the contributors give us a more honest understanding of this president who has had such a huge lasting influence.
And even if you’ve read the most accurate op-eds of the last few days, believe me, you haven’t heard anywhere near the whole story. I offered the most accurate history I could in the three books I wrote on Eisenhower, who once summed up his philosophy when he told the British ambassador that he would “rather be atomized than communized.” In writing those books, I saw over and over again how Eisenhower put his anticommunist ideology above human life.
He maintained elaborate plans for fighting a nuclear war. Though he was never eager for that war, he was absolutely prepared to start it if he believed the Soviets were about to destroy the “free world” in any way. “Shoot your enemy before he shoots you,” he told his advisers, and “hit ’em … with everything in the bucket.” He insisted that, with the right planning, the US could “pick itself up from the floor” and win the war as long as only 25 or 30 American cities got “shellacked” and nobody got too “hysterical.”
(You can read a detailed summary of what I learned about Eisenhower and nuclear weapons here.)
The loudest voice in the current debate is James Ledbetter, an economics journalist who has just published a well-timed book on the farewell address. In a New York Times op-ed, Ledbetter stresses the point that everyone stresses: Ike was indeed worried about excessive military spending. What Ledbetter, like all the members of the “I Like Ike” club, ignores is that Eisenhower spent eight years approving an enormous and unnecessary buildup of the nation’s military arsenal.
Melvin A. Goodman, a columnist for Truthout, falls into the same trap when he claims that, “Eisenhower ignored the hysteria of the bomber and missile gaps in the 1950’s, as well as the unnecessarily heightened concerns about US security” in a number of government reports, and “stood alone in countering America’s infatuation with military power.”
Would that it were true. In fact, Ike presided over by far – and that’s an understatement – the largest nuclear buildup in US history, going from a few hundred warheads when he took office to nearly 20,000 by the time he left. He also approved the deployment of a vast array of new kinds of weapons and delivery systems, including the intercontinental ballistic missiles that made it possible to obliterate the Soviet Union and China in a single day.
True, he didn’t give the Pentagon everything they wanted, but most of the time he bitched and moaned about the cost and then approved new weapons anyway – especially if they were nuclear. When Goodman writes, “Eisenhower understood that it was the military-industrial complex that fostered an inordinate belief in the omnipotence of American military power,” he misses the crucial point. The president, too, believed that the US could be, and had to be, omnipotent in military power. That’s why he kept approving all of those weapons of overkill even though he understood the economic risks.
Ledbetter rightly describes Eisenhower as “a lifelong opponent of what he called a ‘garrison state,’ in which policy and rights are defined by the shadowy needs of an all-powerful military elite.” Ledbetter, like most writers, misses the key point here. Ike opposed the garrison state for the same reason he worried about the military budget: it would restrict the freedom of wealthy capitalists to get richer. (Though he was never a very wealthy capitalist, most of his friends were.)
The president, who was seen in his day as a limited intellect, actually had a somewhat sophisticated economic analysis, all based on a boundless fear of anything that would hamper the growth of free-market capitalism. He loved nukes precisely because they were so cheap, giving “more bang for the buck.” He was convinced that more nukes, like the cold war itself, meant more protection for free enterprise.
Eisenhower managed to mislead so many because of the vast disjuncture between his peace-oriented rhetoric and his huge military buildup. An Eisenhower fan who gets tripped up by the rhetoric, understandably enough, is his granddaughter Susan Eisenhower. In a Washington Post op-ed, she explains quite rightly that her grandfather’s concern about excessive military spending began long before the farewell address. She casts it as “the bookend” to his first major foreign policy speech as president, “A Chance for Peace,” where he warned eloquently of the military and economic dangers of the burgeoning nuclear arms race.
“But pulling these quotes out of context, as we like to do, misses the reprehensible context of the speeches in which they originated,” as David Swanson notes on Truthout. The “Chance” speech was a propaganda piece through and through, designed to calm the fears of his Western European allies that the US was itching for a nuclear fight (which would take place on European soil). Though Ike insisted on his nation’s desire for peace, most of the speech was a call for the Soviet Union to show an equal desire – by totally capitulating to the US on every major issue of conflict. Eisenhower knew perfectly well that this speech could never ease cold war tensions. That was never its intent.
Nearly eight years later, as Swanson points out, in the farewell address, Eisenhower still “claimed eternal innocence for the United States in foreign affairs” and blamed all the dangers of the nuclear arms race completely on the Soviets. “He maintained the same set of lies that allowed for the military industrial complex to grow into something today that probably didn’t penetrate his worst nightmares.”
In fact, for eight years, while he talked so believably about his desire for peace, Ike made sure that disarmament talks with the Soviets would bear no fruit, mainly because he was convinced, as he told an aide, that “you can’t trust them when they are talking nice, and you can’t trust them when they are talking tough.” Nothing could change his mind; mistrust and hatred of communism were the bedrock of his faith.
Ledbetter also gets caught in the gap between rhetoric and policy when he speculates that, “Eisenhower would likely have been deeply troubled, in the past decade, by the torture at Abu Ghraib, the use of martial authority to wiretap Americans without warrants and the multiyear detention of suspects at Guantanamo Bay without due process.”
I’ve read thousands of pages of private letters, memos and minutes of meetings and conversations recording Eisenhower’s words. If he had any concern about such abuses, he kept them to himself. In fact, Eisenhower approved the overthrow of democratically elected governments in Iran and Guatemala, putting in place cruel dictatorships that held power by massively abusing human rights every day. (Though few Americans remember the violation of democracy in Iran, you can bet most Iranians are still well aware of it.) He was willing to do anything to defeat “the reds.”
Ledbetter’s book, despite its apparent praise for Eisenhower, may provide more of a glimpse of historical reality. David Greenberg, who has read and blurbed an advance copy, writes accurately in Slate that, “Eisenhower’s fears about standing military power never outweighed his conviction that it was necessary.” Then he quotes the book: Ike was, “by any definition, a leading figure in that [military-industrial] complex.” In fact, he started promoting closer ties between the military and corporate America when he was still a young officer in the late 1920’s, and he never stopped.
As Greenberg rightly says, “the cult around Ike’s farewell address” has “misleadingly recast Eisenhower – a lifelong internationalist and military man [and commie-hater, he might have added] – as a veritable peacenik.” And it has misleadingly cast blame for war on the military corporations, as if the American public’s acquiescence had nothing to do with it.
Greenberg adds that Eisenhower’s “warnings about military overreach were couched, it’s usually forgotten, in passages insisting on the need for a military of unprecedented size.” The famous final warning about the military-industrial complex is the best example: It was immediately followed by words that are typically ignored: “We recognize the imperative need for this development [of the complex]…. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action” because the communist threat “promises to be of indefinite duration.”
“Indefinite duration.” That’s the most crucial and ignored point about Eisenhower’s lasting influence. Every time he talked about his longing for peace, he also told the nation that we had to prepare more for war because we had entered an endless “age of peril.” (“This phrase of not an instant but an age of peril – I like that fine,” he told the speechwriter who coined it.)
The influence of that constantly repeated warning lasted throughout the cold war era and far beyond. For sixty years or more, we have lived in a national insecurity state. It has been easy for presidents to persuade the public that we must fight because some enemy is out there ready to destroy us, that we are wholly innocent, that they are evildoers who have no comprehensible grievance against us, they just hate our freedoms.
With his frightening words and his massive nuclear buildup, Eisenhower did more than any other president to create the irrational age of peril that is still with us. The US government is still claiming total innocence in world affairs, still insisting that people who would attack us have no motive but sheer evil and still putting forth plans to survive nuclear attack – as long as nobody gets too “hysterical.”
The current debate about Eisenhower is healthy if it brings out the honest reality of a president who is now especially widely admired in progressive peace circles. Knowing the facts, it should make us wonder how less-admirable presidents talked and thought about nuclear weapons and war. It should remind us how easily presidents can create images that mask profoundly important truths. It should also warn us how easily peace progressives can promote those images and unwittingly serve the warmongering policies that they mean to oppose.
By Heather
Despite some brow-beating from CNN’s John King, Tennessee Rep. Steve Cohen didn’t back down or apologize for his statements on the House floor that the lie by Republicans that the Affordable Care Act is a “government takeover” of health care is similar to the techniques used Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
Dem Rep: No apology for saying GOP mendacity is worthy of Goebbels:
Uh oh. Dem Rep. Steve Cohen has no intention to apologize for insisting in a controversial broadside on the House floor that GOP lies on health reform are worthy of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. In a lively interview with me just now, he doubled down on the claim — hard.
“I don’t think calling out liars is uncivil,” Cohen told me. “No reason to apologize. You have a duty to respond. if they were telling the truth and I said they were lying, then I would apologize,” Cohen continued, referring to Republicans.
In case you missed, it, on the House floor last night Cohen unleashed a head-turning series of claims, arguing that the “government takeover” claim by Republicans is “a big lie, just like Goebbels.” He added: “The Germans said enough about the Jews and the people believed it — and you had the Holocaust.”
Conservatives have expressed outrage today and demanded that Dems condemn the comment, but Cohen has no intention of backing off. In our interview he rejected the idea that he had compared Republicans to Nazis.
“I said Goebbels lied about the Jews, and that led to the Holocaust,” Cohen said. “Not in any way whatsoever was I comparing Republicans to Nazis. I was saying lies are wrong…I dont know who got everybody’s panties in a wad over this statement.”
Cohen insisted that the invocation of Goebbels was legit, given the larger context: He said that Repubicans had, in fact, repeatedly used a big-lie technique on health care.
“There have been so many lies about the health care bill,” Cohen said, citing “death panels,” the GOP rejection of the Congressional Budget Office’s finding that repealing reform would hike the deficit, and the claim that health reform represents a “government takeover.”
“You can’t stop them from saying that lie,” Cohen said of the “government takeover” line. “It’s their mantra. They go to bed with it. They do Yoga with it.”
As one would expect, this has the right wingers going crazy. I think most liberals who follow politics were already more than aware of the amount of propaganda we’re being exposed to from Republicans and their enablers in the corporate media without Rep. Cohen pointing it out to us. I also don’t believe he meant to literally call Republicans Nazis by giving some historical context to the tactics they’re employing. Here are Rep. Cohen’s remarks on the House floor.
UPDATE: Cenk Uygur weighed in on Rep. Cohen’s statements on The Young Turks as well. While I can understand criticism of Cohen’s remarks as hyperbolic, that doesn’t mean his point about the propaganda and how dangerous it is for society isn’t truthful. Cenk has more on the feigned outrage and extreme hypocrisy we’re seeing from the right on this.
UPDATE 2: Rep. Cohen defended his remarks on Anderson Cooper’s show as well and explained that in no way was he trying to literally call the Republicans Nazis. He also said even though he was right to say what he did, he won’t be bringing it up again again. I won’t be surprised if we see him a apologize if the brow beating continues.
That said, I’ve really got to wonder what kind of shelf life this latest dust up has because I’m not quite sure either the Republicans or our corporate media want to go there if you really want to get into a prolonged discussion about how terrible both have been with propagandizing the public in America. You can make a lot of other comparisons to other propaganda campaigns and what the Republicans have been doing and they’re not a whole lot more flattering than the Goebbels analogy.
I’m pretty sure that’s a topic our corporate media would rather not spend a lot of time covering due to the fact that our they have been complicit in promoting the GOP’s lies and propagandizing the public as well, but who knows. I guess we’ll see how this gets spun shortly and to what degree.
Glenn Beck And Sean Hannity Dropped From Philadelphia Radio Station
Yesterday, hate radio hosts Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity had their nationally syndicated radio shows dropped from WPHT in Philadelphia, which is the second radio station to drop both of the conservative commentators. The moves were scheduled back in November 2010, and Marc Rayfield, market manager for CBS Radio in Philadelphia and senior vice president, said that WPHT wants to become “more of a locally based station.”
Just weeks ago, Beck was dropped from WOR in New York, but the most recent cancellation in Philadelphia hurts Beck even more. Beck got his start in Philadelphia, and many of his radio staffers still live in Philly, including Beck’s side-kick Stu. Immediately after being dropped yesterday, Beck dropped all affection for the city where he got his start, saying, “Philly sucks”:
“You know the killing streets right there in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia?” Beck told his producer. “You know how Philadelphia is not a place you want to be?” he added. “I’ll put you on a hidden cam and put you downtown at 6, 7 o’clock at night.” He could not believe his producer would be brave enough to walk around Center City at night. “Philly sucks,” Beck then said.
Last October, Hannity was dropped from KSL Radio in Utah, which is managed by Deseret Media Companies (DMC), a for-profit arm of the Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. According to reports, Hannity’s drop in Utah may have been due to a clash between DMC’s “Mission Statement,” which calls for the declaration of “light and knowledge” along with the advancement of “integrity, civility, morality, and respect for all people,” and Hannity’s constant lack of civility.
WPHT reportedly dropped both Beck and Hannity because they wanted more local talk content, but the most recent cancellations may be part of a pattern in which advertisers and broadcasters have become wary over the rhetoric spouted by hate radio. Color of Change reports that, so far, 81 companies have quit advertising on Beck’s Fox News show and Media Matter reports 100, including a list of those who haven’t withdrawn their advertisements.
Crazy for God Author has a few words regarding the theo-cons
January 16th, 2011 by Dave Gamble
Frank Schaeffer, son of the famous evangelical, appears here being interviewed by Rachel Maddow about the poll that discovered that 1 in 3 of NJ Conservatives truly believe that Obama is the Anti-Christ.
We apparently have a sub-culture of belief that rejects facts and embraces beyond-crazy.
To be quite frank, this is a complete social disaster … facts are not relevant to these folks, and what is truly scary is that there are no republicans with a sufficient quantity of backbone and integrity to stand up and oppose this utter insanity.
If you’re interested – as well as frequently amused – at the insane and jaw dropping rhetoric, insanities and antics of the American Right Wing, you might get a giggle as well as insight of their crackpot tactics and modus operandi from this piece we came across over at LGF, exposing the silly capers and nut bag antics of a Right Wing buffoon and mega gronk cllaed Jim Hoft:-
When Dim Bulbs Attack (or, A Confederacy of Dunces)
Charles Johnson
Wingnuts • Sun Jan 16, 2011 at 8:45 am PST • Views: 4,753
Imagine my surprise. Instead of retracting his monumentally dumb post claiming that the White House flashed “applause” signs at the Tucson memorial, Jim “Dim” Hoft goes on the attack — and it’s just as lame and dishonest as the stupid post he refuses to correct.
Hoft’s weird fantasy: Figures. Charles Johnson’s Crackpot Hero Arrested For Threatening to Kill Tea Party Leader on National TV.
What a shock.
Yesterday Charles Johnson was praising this far left crackpot for blaming conservatives for the Tuscon shootings.
(One more time: The tea party had nothing to do with the shootings. The shooter was an insane left-wing pothead.)Flash Forward 24 Hours—
Today that same freak was arrested and charged with with threats and intimidation and disorderly conduct.
Violent crackpot Eric Fuller was arrested for threatening to kill a tea party leader live on national TV.
Don’t worry, Charles. I won’t smear Mr. Fuller.
I promise.UPDATE: Fuller will undergo a psychiatric evaluation.
Charles is still on the loose.
To “prove” that Eric Fuller is my “hero,” Hoft takes a screenshot of my post. Apparently he believes I might delete this damning evidence of my idolization of Eric Fuller. Here it is:
Notice anything missing from that post? For example, any hint of “praise” for Fuller? Hoft is either too dim-witted to realize that his own screenshot puts the lie to his false claims, or he just doesn’t care.
In Hoft’s exceedingly vague right wing fantasy world, citing a news article and reporting it straight is exactly the same as “praise.” (And by the way, my prediction in that last sentence was proven true, as the right wing blogosphere immediately started attacking Mr. Fuller after his statement.)
And when Eric Fuller was charged with disorderly conduct for threatening a Tea Party leader (who, it should be noted, tried to blame the Tucson shootings on Giffords’ “lack of security”), I reported that too, long before Hoft got around to it.
Hoft knows he’s blatantly lying; he was just throwing out some more red meat to his equally dumb readers, and they respond in his comments with a predictable torrent of abuse and insults toward me, which has seriously hurt my feelings. (Now I must weep bitter tears.)
This is Jim Hoft’s modus operandi (look it up, Jim). When I pointed out last January that he used an anti-gay, antisemitic Bulgarian conspiracy site as a news source, Hoft responded by accusing me of “supporting child porn in schools.” That’s how Hoft rolls, and the right wing blogosphere rolls right along with him.
I notice that Hoft is no longer writing for the right wing Catholic site First Things. Did he finally get to be too insane even for them?
John Pilger‘s Investigation Into the War on WikiLeaks and His Interview With Julian Assange
Friday 14 January 2011
Founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange. (Photo: Ben Bryant / Flickr)
The attacks on WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, are a response to an information revolution that threatens old power orders in politics and journalism. The incitement to murder trumpeted by public figures in the United States, together with attempts by the Obama administration to corrupt the law and send Assange to a hell-hole prison for the rest of his life, are the reactions of a rapacious system exposed as never before.
In recent weeks, the US Justice Department has established a secret grand jury just across the river from Washington in the eastern district of the state of Virginia. The object is to indict Assange under a discredited espionage act used to arrest peace activists during the First World War, or one of the “war on terror” conspiracy statutes that have degraded American justice. Judicial experts describe the jury as a “deliberate set up,” pointing out that this corner of Virginia is home to the employees and families of the Pentagon, CIA, Department of Homeland Security, and other pillars of American power.
“This is not good news,” Assange told me when we spoke this past week, his voice dark and concerned. He says he can have “bad days – but I recover.” When we met in London last year, I said, “You are making some very serious enemies, not least of all the most powerful government engaged in two wars. How do you deal with that sense of danger?” His reply was characteristically analytical. “It’s not that fear is absent. But courage is really the intellectual mastery over fear – by an understanding of what the risks are and how to navigate a path through them.”
Regardless of the threats to his freedom and safety, he says the US is not WikiLeaks’ main “technological enemy.” “China is the worst offender. China has aggressive, sophisticated interception technology that places itself between every reader inside China and every information source outside China. We’ve been fighting a running battle to make sure we can get information through, and there are now all sorts of ways Chinese readers can get on to our site.”
It was in this spirit of “getting information through” that WikiLeaks was founded in 2006, but with a moral dimension. “The goal is justice,” wrote Assange on the homepage, “the method is transparency.” Contrary to a current media mantra, WikiLeaks material is not “dumped.” Less than one percent of the 251,000 US embassy cables have been released. As Assange points out, the task of interpreting material and editing that which might harm innocent individuals demands “standards [befitting] higher levels of information and primary sources.” To secretive power, this is journalism at its most dangerous.
On 18 March 2008, a war on WikiLeaks was foretold in a secret Pentagon document prepared by the “Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch.” US intelligence, it said, intended to destroy the feeling of “trust,” which is WikiLeaks’ “center of gravity.” It planned to do this with threats to “exposure [and] criminal prosecution.” Silencing and criminalizing this rare source of independent journalism was the aim: smear the method. Hell hath no fury like imperial Mafiosi scorned.
Others, also scorned, have lately played a supporting part, intentionally or not, in the hounding of Assange, some for reasons of petty jealousy. Sordid and shabby describe their behavior, which serves only to highlight the injustice against a man who has courageously revealed what we have a right to know.
As the US Justice Department, in its hunt for Assange, subpoenas the Twitter and email accounts, banking and credit card records of people around the world – as if we are all subjects of the United States – much of the “free” media on both sides of the Atlantic direct their indignation at the hunted.
“So, Julian, why won’t you go back to Sweden now?” demanded the headline over Catherine Bennett’s Observer column on 19 December, which questioned Assange’s response to allegations of sexual misconduct with two women in Stockholm last August. “To keep delaying the moment of truth, for this champion of fearless disclosure and total openness,” wrote Bennett, “could soon begin to look pretty dishonest, as well as inconsistent.” Not a word in Bennett’s vitriol considered the looming threats to Assange’s basic human rights and his physical safety, as described by Geoffrey Robertson QC, in the extradition hearing in London on 11 January.
In response to Bennett, the editor of the online Nordic News Network in Sweden, Al Burke, wrote to the Observer explaining, “plausible answers to Catherine Bennett’s tendentious question” were both critically important and freely available. Assange had remained in Sweden for more than five weeks after the rape allegation was made – and subsequently dismissed by the chief prosecutor in Stockholm – and that repeated attempts by him and his Swedish lawyer to meet a second prosecutor, who reopened the case following the intervention of a government politician, had failed. And yet, as Burke pointed out, this prosecutor had granted him permission to fly to London where “he also offered to be interviewed – a normal practice in such cases.” So, it seems odd, at the very least, that the prosecutor then issued a European arrest warrant. The Observer did not publish Burke’s letter.
This record straightening is crucial because it describes the perfidious behavior of the Swedish authorities – a bizarre sequence confirmed to me by other journalists in Stockholm and by Assange’s Swedish lawyer Bjorn Hurtig. Not only that, Burke cataloged the unforeseen danger Assange faces should he be extradited to Sweden. “Documents released by WikiLeaks since Assange moved to England,” he wrote, “clearly indicate that Sweden has consistently submitted to pressure from the United States in matters relating to civil rights. There is ample reason for concern that if Assange were to be taken into custody by Swedish authorities, he could be turned over to the United States without due consideration of his legal rights.”
These documents have been virtually ignored in Britain. They show that the Swedish political class has moved far from the perceived neutrality of a generation ago and that the country’s military and intelligence apparatus is all but absorbed into Washington’s matrix around NATO. In a 2007 cable, the US Embassy in Stockholm lauds the Swedish government dominated by the conservative Moderate Party of Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt as coming “from a new political generation and not bound by [anti-US] traditions [and] in practice a pragmatic and strong partner with NATO, having troops under NATO command in Kosovo and Afghanistan.”
The cable reveals how foreign policy is largely controlled by Carl Bildt, the current foreign minister, whose career has been based on a loyalty to the United States that goes back to the Vietnam War when he attacked Swedish public television for broadcasting evidence that the US was bombing civilian targets. Bildt played a leading role in the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a lobby group with close ties to the White House of George W. Bush, the CIA and the far right of the Republican Party.
“The significance of all this for the Assange case,” notes Burke in a recent study, “is that it will be Carl Bildt and perhaps other members of the Reinfeldt government who will decide – openly or, more likely, furtively behind a façade of legal formality – on whether or not to approve the anticipated US request for extradition. Everything in their past clearly indicates that such a request will be granted.”
For example, in December 2001, with the “war on terror” under way, the Swedish government abruptly revoked the political refugee status of two Egyptians, Ahmed Agiza and Mohammed al-Zari. They were handed to a CIA kidnap squad at Stockholm airport and “rendered” to Egypt, where they were tortured. When the Swedish ombudsman for justice investigated and found that their human rights had been “seriously violated,” it was too late.
The implications for the Assange case are clear. Both men were removed without due process of law and before their lawyers could file appeals to the European Human Rights Court and in response to a US threat to impose a trade embargo on Sweden. Last year, Assange applied for residency in Sweden, hoping to base WikiLeaks there. It is widely believed that Washington warned Sweden through mutual intelligence contacts of the potential consequences. In December, prosecutor Marianne Ny, who reactivated the Assange case, discussed the possibility of Assange’s extradition to the US on her web site.
Almost six months after the sex allegations were first made public, Assange has been charged with no crime, but his right to a presumption of innocence has been willfully denied. The unfolding events in Sweden have been farcical, at best. The Australian barrister James Catlin, who acted for Assange in October, describes the Swedish justice system as “a laughing stock … There is no precedent for it. The Swedes are making it up as they go along.” He says that Assange, apart from noting contradictions in the case, has not publicly criticized the women who made the allegations against him. It was the police who tipped off the Swedish equivalent of the Sun, Expressen, with defamatory material about them, initiating a trial by media across the world.
In Britain, this trial has welcomed yet more eager prosecutors, with the BBC to the fore. There was no presumption of innocence in Kirsty Wark’s “Newsnight” court in December. “Why don’t you just apologise to the women?” she demanded of Assange, followed by: “Do we have your word of honour that you won’t abscond?” On Radio 4’s “Today” program, John Humphrys, the partner of Bennett, told Assange that he was obliged to go back to Sweden “because the law says you must.” The hectoring Humphrys, however, had more pressing interests. “Are you a sexual predator?” he asked. Assange replied that the suggestion was ridiculous, to which Humphrys demanded to know how many women he had slept with.
“Would even Fox News have descended to that level?” wondered the American historian William Blum. “I wish Assange had been raised in the streets of Brooklyn, as I was. He then would have known precisely how to reply to such a question: ‘You mean including your mother?'”
What is most striking about these “interviews” is not so much their arrogance and lack of intellectual and moral humility; it is their indifference to fundamental issues of justice and freedom and their imposition of narrow, prurient terms of reference. Fixing these boundaries allows the interviewer to diminish the journalistic credibility of Assange and WikiLeaks, whose remarkable achievements stand in vivid contrast to their own. It is like watching the old and stale, guardians of the status quo, struggling to prevent the emergence of the new.
In this media trial, there is a tragic dimension, obviously for Assange, but also for the best of mainstream journalism. Having published a slew of professionally brilliant editions with the WikiLeaks disclosures, feted all over the world, The Guardian recovered its establishment propriety on 17 December by turning on its besieged source. A major article by the paper’s senior correspondent Nick Davies claimed that he had been given the “complete” Swedish police file with its “new” and “revealing” salacious morsels.
Assange’s Swedish lawyer Hurtig says that crucial evidence is missing from the file given to Davies, including “the fact that the women were re-interviewed and given an opportunity to change their stories” and the tweets and SMS messages between them, which are “critical to bringing justice in this case.” Vital exculpatory evidence is also omitted, such as the statement by the original prosecutor, Eva Finne, that “Julian Assange is not suspected of rape.”
Having reviewed the Davies article, Assange’s former barrister James Catlin wrote to me: “The complete absence of due process is the story and Davies ignores it. Why does due process matter? Because the massive powers of two arms of government are being brought to bear against the individual whose liberty and reputation are at stake.” I would add: so is his life.
The Guardian has profited hugely from the WikiLeaks disclosures, in many ways. On the other hand, WikiLeaks, which survives on mostly small donations and can no longer receive funds through many banks and credit companies thanks to the bullying of Washington, has received nothing from the paper. In February, Random House will publish a Guardian book that is sure to be a lucrative best seller, which Amazon is advertising as “The End of Secrecy: the Rise and Fall of WikiLeaks.” When I asked David Leigh, the Guardian executive in charge of the book, what was meant by “fall,” he replied that Amazon was wrong and that the working title had been “The Rise (and Fall?) of WikiLeaks.” “Note parenthesis and query,” he wrote, “Not meant for publication anyway.” (The book is now described on the Guardian web site as “WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy.”) Still, with all that duly noted, the sense is that “real” journalists are back in the saddle. Too bad about the new boy, who never really belonged.
On 11 January, Assange’s first extradition hearing was held at Belmarsh Magistrates Court, an infamous address because it is here that people were, before the advent of control orders, consigned to Britain’s own Guantanamo, Belmarsh prison. The change from ordinary Westminster magistrates’ court was due to a lack of press facilities, according to the authorities. That they announced this on the day Vice President Joe Biden declared Assange a “high tech terrorist” was no doubt coincidental, though the message was not.
For his part, Assange is just as worried about what will happen to Bradley Manning, the alleged whistleblower, being held in horrific conditions which the US National Commission on Prisons calls “tortuous.” At 23, Private Manning is the world’s pre-eminent prisoner of conscience, having remained true to the Nuremberg principle that every soldier has the right to “a moral choice.” His suffering mocks the notion of the land of the free.
“Government whistleblowers,” said Barack Obama, running for president in 2008, “are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal.” Obama has since pursued and prosecuted more whistleblowers than any other president in American history.
“Cracking Bradley Manning is the first step,” Assange told me. “The aim clearly is to break him and force a confession that he somehow conspired with me to harm the national security of the United States. In fact, I’d never heard his name before it was published in the press. WikiLeaks technology was designed from the very beginning to make sure that we never knew the identities or names of people submitting material. We are as untraceable as we are uncensorable. That’s the only way to assure sources they are protected.”
He adds: “I think what’s emerging in the mainstream media is the awareness that if I can be indicted, other journalists can, too. Even the New York Times is worried. This used not to be the case. If a whistleblower was prosecuted, publishers and reporters were protected by the First Amendment that journalists took for granted. That’s being lost. The release of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, with their evidence of the killing of civilians, hasn’t caused this – it’s the exposure and embarrassment of the political class: the truth of what governments say in secret, how they lie in public; how wars are started. They don’t want the public to know these things and scapegoats must be found.”
What about the allusions to the “fall” of WikiLeaks? “There is no fall,” he said. “We have never published as much as we are now. WikiLeaks is now mirrored on more than 2,000 websites. I can’t keep track of the of the spin-off sites: those who are doing their own WikiLeaks … If something happens to me or to WikiLeaks, ‘insurance’ files will be released. They speak more of the same truth to power, including the media. There are 504 US embassy cables on one broadcasting organisation and there are cables on Murdoch and Newscorp.”
The latest propaganda about the “damage” caused by WikiLeaks is a warning by the US State Department to “hundreds of human rights activists, foreign government officials and business people identified in leaked diplomatic cables of possible threats to their safety.” This was how The New York Times dutifully relayed it on 8 January, and it is bogus. In a letter to Congress, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has admitted that no sensitive intelligence sources have been compromised. On 28 November, McClatchy Newspapers reported, “US officials conceded they have no evidence to date that the [prior] release of documents led to anyone’s death.” NATO in Kabul told CNN it could not find a single person who needed protecting.
The great American playwright Arthur Miller wrote: “The thought that the state … is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.” What WikiLeaks has given us is truth, including rare and precious insight into how and why so many innocent people have suffered in reigns of terror disguised as wars and executed in our name; and how the United States has secretly and wantonly intervened in democratic governments from Latin America to its most loyal ally in Britain.
Javier Moreno, the editor of El Pais, which published the WikiLeaks logs in Spain, wrote, “I believe that the global interest sparked by the WikiLeaks papers is mainly due to the simple fact that they conclusively reveal the extent to which politicians in the West have been lying to their citizens.”
Crushing individuals like Assange and Manning is not difficult for a great power, however craven. The point is, we should not allow it to happen, which means those of us meant to keep the record straight should not collaborate in any way. Transparency and information, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, are the “currency” of democratic freedom. “Every news organisation,” a leading American constitutional lawyer told me, “should recognize that Julian Assange is one of them and that his prosecution will have a huge and chilling effect on journalism.”
My favorite secret document – leaked by WikiLeaks, of course – is from the Ministry of Defense in London. It describes journalists who serve the public without fear or favor as “subversive” and “threats.” Such a badge of honor.
John Pilger, Australian-born, London-based journalist, film-maker and author. For his foreign and war reporting, ranging from Vietnam and Cambodia to the Middle East, he has twice won Britain’s highest award for journalism. For his documentary films, he won a British Academy Award and an American Emmy. In 2009, he was awarded Australia’s human rights prize, the Sydney Peace Prize. His latest film is “The War on Democracy.”
LGF reports:-
Veteran Wounded in Tucson Shootings Blames Palin, Beck, and Angle
Eric Fuller, the 63-year old veteran shot twice last Saturday in the attack that critically injured Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, said today that he blames the violent rhetoric of people like Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Sharron Angle.
“It looks like Palin, Beck, Sharron Angle and the rest got their first target,” Eric Fuller said in an interview with Democracy NOW.
“Their wish for Second Amendment activism has been fulfilled — senseless hatred leading to murder, lunatic fringe anarchism, subscribed to by John Boehner, mainstream rebels with vengeance for all, even 9-year-old girls.”
Now watch as Andrew Breitbart, Jim Hoft, and the rest of the right wing blogosphere go into overdrive to smear Mr. Fuller.
– January 13, 2011
The Roman Catholic Diocese of St. Petersburg is again being forced to respond to allegations of misconduct in its clerical ranks.
Thursday, a representative of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, held a news conference in front of the diocese’s headquarters to talk about a $75,000 settlement with an alleged victim of sexual abuse by a longtime priest. The group also spoke about alleged abuse by two other priests who are now dead. The three priests, the group said, all served at Christ the King Catholic Church in Tampa.
SNAP, which claims membership of more than 10,000 in the United States, Canada, Mexico and Europe, also addressed the ongoing controversy at the Cathedral School of St. Jude in St. Petersburg. Parents are upset about the way they say a priest handled the sacrament of confession with their children in the weeks leading up to Christmas.
Diocese spokesman Frank Murphy confirmed a $75,000 settlement in July to man who claimed he was abused by Monsignor Norman Balthazar, who was working at Christ the King at the time of the abuse in 1980.
“We don’t know that anything did occur,” Murphy said.
“But yet they paid $75,000,” countered Martha Jean Lorenzo, the Tampa representative of SNAP, at the news conference.
“Given the cost of investigation and legal fees and you’re dealing with someone who wants to settle, it is easier to provide a settlement,” Murphy said.
Between 1996, when Bishop Robert N. Lynch took over the diocese, and 2006, the diocese paid out $2.8 million in settlements. Some of that was covered by insurance, Murphy said.
SNAP accused Lynch of keeping silent about allegations against Balthazar and the settlement. Murphy said that since the alleged abuse happened to an adult, not a child, the diocese did not have to make it public.
MORE: http://www.tampabay.com/news/religion/catholic-diocese-forced-to-deal-with-more-allegations/1145359
– January 12, 2011
A new, one-hour documentary, “Ted Haggard: Scandalous,” tells the story of the evangelical pastor who admitted to an affair with a male prostitute in 2006.
“Ted Haggard: Scandalous,” which airs Jan. 16 on TLC, follows Haggard, his wife, Gayle, and their five children as they launch a new church in Colorado Springs, Colo., where Haggard had been a pastor of mega New Life church and president of the National Association of Evangelicals. The family left Colorado Springs in 2006, after allegations that Haggard had paid a male prostitute for sex for three years and purchased crystal methamphetamine from him.
Friday, January 14, 2011
Preacher implicated in torture
“OKAKU – A 33-year-old woman and her 15-year-old daughter were seriously injured after their relatives allegedly tortured them with an electrical wire that they connected to a car battery with the intention to extract a confession from them about a cellphone that had gone missing from the culprits.
Martha Hamutenya from Omakolombongo village of Okaku Constituency and her daughter, Indila Ikumwa, were treated at Oshakati Intermediate Hospital with burnt wounds last week.The two were tortured by their relatives allegedly on the verbal instructions of Hamutenya’s aunt who is also a preacher at the Anglican Church. The relatives allegedly accused the mother and daughter of having stolen a cellphone. Three relatives, a woman and two men, were arrested and charged with assault with intent to cause grievous bodily harm.
Wednesday 12 January 2011
by: Sahar Aziz, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
Jared Lee Loughner’s mug shot, released by Pima County. Arizona, 1/10/2011
How many more members of Congress have to be victims of politically motivated violence before we acknowledge terrorism is defined by the act and not the identity of the actor? Any person who “use[s] violence (or the threat of violence) against civilians in order to attain goals that are political or religious or ideological in nature … through intimidation or coercion or instilling fear” is a terrorist.
While clearly suffering from some sort of mental disorder, Jared Lee Loughner was motivated to some extent by anti-government politics. Had his name been Mohammed, we would be talking about homegrown terrorism, not gun control or mental illness.
The tragic shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is a wakeup call that religious profiling does not work. While our nation was obsessed with Muslim “homegrown terrorism,” Loughner stealthily planned his terrorist scheme.
It is no secret that since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the FBI has focused its anti-terrorism efforts on Muslims. Traveler watch lists have grown exponentially, primarily with Muslim and Arabic names. Internet web sites and chat rooms with expressions of political dissent coupled with Islamic rhetoric are presumably under vigilant surveillance. More recently, Muslim youth have become ensnared in sting operations as part of a zealous preventative campaign. So much so that civil rights groups claim the tactics may cross into unlawful entrapment.
To be sure, Muslims engaged in illegal terrorist activity should be investigated and prosecuted accordingly. But with its investigative authorities broadened after 9/11, why didn’t the FBI stop Loughner before he shot a Congresswoman in the head, killed six civilians, including a federal judge and nine-year-old girl, and injured 17 people?
In light of the FBI’s recent stings of Muslim terrorist suspects that involved months of surveillance, undercover operations and careful execution, where was the FBI when Loughner was plotting his murderous scheme? Did they fail to discover his plot because he did not fit the “profile” of a Muslim terrorist?
But Loughner is not the first time the FBI dropped the ball on countering homegrown terrorism. In February 2010, Joseph Stack flew an airplane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, to protest tax laws and the IRS’s order for him to pay his taxes. Prior to his crime, he publicly expressed his intent to protest the tax laws through violence. In the end, his terrorist act killed a federal employee and veteran. Had the plane crashed into the building a different time of the day, hundreds of IRS employees could have been killed.
In another troubling case in 2008, the FBI was apparently unaware of James Cummings’ preparation of a dirty bomb. Only after the police investigated his shooting by his abused wife did the FBI discover that Cummings’ house had a cache of radioactive materials suitable for building a “dirty bomb.” In addition to literature on how to build dirty bombs and various radioactive materials, the FBI found evidence linking Cummings to white supremacist groups and his ardent admiration of Adolf Hitler. Fortunately for the prospective victims of his dirty bomb, he was unable to murder and terrorize an unknown number of people.
As our law enforcement fixates on young Muslim males in the legitimate goal to stop domestic terrorism, those outside the profile execute their terrorist acts undetected. Thus, it should come as no surprise that when law enforcement misguidedly focus their resources investigating individuals and communities based on ineffective racial or religious profiles, they miss the Loughners of the world.
The rise in terrorist plots by right-wing extremists is not accidental. Ever since Barack Obama’s historic election, there has been a troubling proliferation of armed right-wing groups. Many of the groups question the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency and by extension anyone supporting Obama’s policies. Indeed, Giffords was among numerous elected officials subjected to threats because she voted for health care reform, pejoratively coined “Obamacare.”
The violence in Arizona appears to be the latest episode in this troubling growth of right-wing violent extremism. It is a tragic reminder of the perils of focusing on only one particular religious, racial or ethnic group when countering homegrown terrorism. For the sake of our collective safety, not to mention our civil liberties, let’s hope our government never forgets this basic fact.
Tuesday, 11 January 2011
AFP
The discovery is based on more than eight months of data collected by the Kepler spacecraft (Source: NASA)
Hot stuff NASA has spotted a tiny, rocky planet about the size of Earth doing a speedy orbit of a star outside our solar system, the space agency has announced.
The exoplanet, named Kepler-10b, is the smallest-ever planet discovered outside our solar system, but its scorching temperatures are too hot for life.
The planet, which was located by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft findings, is described in a paper to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.
It is about 1.4 times the size of Earth and spins around its star more than once a day, an orbit much too close for life to survive.
“Kepler-10b is definitely NOT in the habitable zone as we define it. The dayside temperature of the planet is expected to be higher than 2500°F (1371°C)”, says NASA expert Natalie Batalha. “That’s hot enough to melt iron.”
“It wouldn’t be a very nice place for organisms like those on Earth to live. Carbon-based chemistry wouldn’t thrive there. Molecules comprising RNA and DNA couldn’t stay intact in such extreme temperatures.”
The planet completes a full orbit once every 0.84 days, and is 23 times closer to its star than Mercury is to the Sun.
According to Dr Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA, the discovery is promising even though no life could exist there.
“The discovery of Kepler 10-b is a significant milestone in the search for planets similar to our own,” says Hudgins.
“Although this planet is not in the habitable zone, the exciting find showcases the kinds of discoveries made possible by the mission and the promise of many more to come,” he said.
The new planet has a mass 4.6 times that of the Earth, and an average density of 8.8 grams per cubic centimetre, similar to an iron dumbbell, says NASA.
Batalha, a professor at San Jose State University and deputy science team lead for NASA’s Kepler Mission, says there is evidence of another potential planet in the same star system, but little is yet known about it.
“There is actually already a very compelling signature of another potential planet in this system,” says Batalha.
“There is a transit event that recurs once every 45 days and is suggestive of a planet a bit larger than two times the radius of the Earth.”
Kepler is NASA’s first mission in search of Earth-like planets orbiting suns similar to ours.
It launched in 2009, equipped with the largest camera ever sent into space – a 95-megapixel array of charge-coupled devices – and is expected to continue sending information back to Earth until at least November 2012.
The space telescope is searching for planets as small as Earth, including those orbiting stars in a warm, habitable zone where liquid water could exist on the surface of the planet.
NASA defines the habitable zone, in part, to have a temperature below the boiling point of water and higher than the freezing point.
Kepler is not equipped to detect signs of life, such as the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere, but mainly aims to locate Earth-size planets outside our solar system
News from Toronto:
Several protesters were arrested and a police officer sent to hospital with a broken rib after a protest against a right-wing British organization in Toronto Tuesday night.
The protest was sparked by a meeting to hear a webcast of a speech by the founder of the English Defence League… The meeting at the Zionist Centre was organized by the Jewish Defence League, to hear a live speech broadcast via the Internet, from English Defence League founder Stephen Lennon, who goes by the name Tommy Robinson.
An earlier report has some background:
Meir Weinstein, national director of JDL Canada, said he was visiting Israel when he met someone connected to Mr. Lennon. The two later got acquainted on the phone.
Back in 2009 I noted that the EDL-linked Casuals United website had included a prominent link to the Jewish Defense League in the USA – however, this was taken down shortly after I noticed it. Nachum Shifren, the California-based “Surfing Rabbi” who addressed the EDL in London in October, used to be JDL founder Meir Kahane’s driver, although he was “excommunicated” from the JDL in 2005 for supporting Pat Buchanan. Israeli flags have been prominently dispalyed at EDL events, both to counter accusations of neo-Nazism and as a sign of vicarious identification with the country and its conflicts.
Kahane, of course, is remembered as a belligerent extremist, and Kahanist groups have been associated with acts of violence. Weinstein, however, has tried to create an impression of distance – as was explained in a Canadian radio report in 2009:
Bernie McNamee: There’s another twist tonight in the George Galloway saga. The controversial British MP was refused entry to Canada because of his alleged support for the Palestinian militant group Hamas. Now it turns out the man claiming credit for tipping off immigration officials is Meir Weinstein. Galloway’s supporters say Weinstein himself was a spokesperson for a Jewish extremist group on Canada’s list of banned terrorist organizations. Our security correspondent Bill Gillespie has the story.
[Bill Gillespie] …In 1994 he was identified in a Canadian Press article as a spokesperson for the Kach Party, also known as Kahane Chai. A Kach member in Israel had just massacred more than 50 Palestinian worshippers. Weinstein refused to condemn the attack. He doesn’t deny making the statement but he denies ever being a member of Kach.
Meir Weinstein: I’ve never been a member of Kach or Kahane Chai.
According to reports from the time, Weinstein stated that “our organization does not condemn the attack. It condemns the Israeli government for not providing adequate protection for settlers.” Another JDL spokesman, Brett Stone, has since said that the massacre had been “preventive measure” that had “saved lives”.
Gillespie: Canada, the US, and the European Union later put Kach and Kahane Chai on their list of banned terrorist organizations. Weinstein denies any connection between Kach and his present group, the Jewish Defence League of Canada. But left-wing bloggers who support Galloway point out that the logos of both groups – a clenched fist in an embedded Star of David – are almost identical. Weinstein says Kach stole the logo from the JDL.
Meir Weinstein: Um, that’s the logo of the Jewish Defence League so they took it from the Jewish Defence League but again I don’t dictate to them what they’re going to do or anything like that.
Gillespie: But bloggers also discovered a link on Weinstein’s Facebook page to a chat group called “Death to Arabs”. Weinstein says the link was sent to him in Hebrew and he added it not knowing what it said. He has since deleted it. But despite his best efforts he didn’t succeed in keeping Galloway from his speaking engagements in Canada.
This exchange has been transcribed a Canadian blogger named Firebrand, who adds some pertinent and mocking commentary:
Kach stole the JDL’s logo? Come on Meir, why not give the actual explanation which is that the JDL was founded in 1968 in New York by Meir Kahane who moved to Israel in 1971 where he founded the Kach Party a few years later…. As for there being no connection between Kach, Kahane Chai and the JDL – that’s just a bald-faced lie. Apart from having the same founder and leader in the person of Kahane, even after Kahane’s death his successor as JDL leader, Irv Rubin, raised funds for Kach/Kahane Chai and promoted the terrorist group.
…Weinstein has been an observant Jew, by his reckoning, since the late 1970s and even claims to have served in the Israeli military but he can’t read Hebrew? I have to give him credit though, this was somewhat more believable than Weinstein’s original explanation which was that the Iranians somehow planted the link on his page.
Meir Weinstein is also known under other names: he was born as Marvin Weinstein, and he has also used the names Meir Halevi and Meir HaLevi Weinstein; a 2002 posting on Kahane.org mentions “Meir HaLevy from the Kahane Movement in Toronto” as due to take part in an “Annual Kahane Memorial Dinner”. This website was run by Michael Guzovsky (numerous spelling variations), and was closed down in 2003 after Kahane Khai was designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by US authorities; various court documents about this can been seen at Kahane Net. Guzovsky has featured on this blog previously: he later moved to the West Bank, and, as Yekutel Ben Yaacov, he enjoys friendly links with WorldNetDaily‘s “Jerusalem correspondent” Aaron Klein (Klein’s whitewashing of the Israeli far-right is notorious).
Firebrand also draws attention to a blog called BigCityLib, which tells us that the JDL’s recent EDL event was also supported by a group called Canadian Hindu Advocacy; the group’s director, Ron Banerjee, is an enthusiast both of Israel and of the BJP, and he and Weinstein appear to be long-standing allies. According to Banerjee:
…the Hindu pro-Zionist movement includes the main opposition political party (BJP) and affiliated social service organizations (VHP, RSS) with an estimated 50 million members. This constitutes the world’s largest concentrated block of Zionist support on the planet.
Few Pakistani politicians have had the courage to oppose blasphemy laws so openly and brazenly as Punjab Governor Salman Taseer, who was assassinated this week by a member of his own security detail for his political stance.
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Last man standing?
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Sydney, Australia
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Ironically, this extremism was Taseer’s undoing. He was shot by a member of his own security detail. The assassin reportedly told investigators that he killed Taseer due to the politician’s opposition to Pakistan’s blasphemy laws.
Taseer was a complex political figure. His political mentor was the father of Benazir Bhutto, who was executed after a show trial conducted by a US-backed military dictator. Years later, Taseer served as a minister in a caretaker government appointed by another US-backed military dictator. General Pervez Musharraf, who many Pakistanis not-so-affectionately label as “Busharraf”, appointed Taseer as governor of Punjab in 2008.
Many Western observers describe Taseer as “a liberal politician”. In a sense, he was more liberal than other members of Pakistan’s wealthy elite. He belonged to the ruling Pakistan People’s Party of the late Benazir Bhutto. He opposed various religiously inspired provisions of the Pakistan Criminal Code that entered the statute books during Bhutto’s reign and which she did not oppose to gain support from religious parties.
These provisions included laws that made it an offence to engage in acts deemed blasphemous. The laws typically were used against members of Pakistan’s religious minorities. Among the most vulnerable minorities are the Sikhs. Before Pakistan was carved out of colonial India in 1947, Punjab was a land where followers of many faiths flourished. Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh faith, emerged from this area. Punjab is the final resting place to numerous Sufi Muslim saints, and was also where any number of less orthodox Muslim sects were born.
The partition of India saw a splitting of Punjabi society. Millions of Sikhs and Hindus rushed in one direction to the Indian side of the border, while millions of Muslims rushed in the other direction. A million people of all faiths lost their lives. One Sikh who managed to escape was Amarjit Singh who was to become a brigadier in the Indian army. Amarjit’s daughter Tavleen Singh became a respected Indian journalist. In 1980, she had an affair with Taseer and they had a son named Aatish, who was reared in his mother’s Sikh household in Delhi.
In his 2009 book Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands, Aatish Taseer writes that his father’s version of Islam was less about religious observance and more a kind of pan-Muslim nationalism. Certainly, Salman Taseer preferred to keep his relationship with an Indian Sikh journalist and his illegitimate child secret given the effects such a scandal would have on his political career.
At the same time, he championed the rights of Christian and other minorities and openly took on the powerful religious parties that backed blasphemy laws. Over the years, these laws have been used to harass and victimise Pakistani Christians. Among them is Aasia Bibi, a 45-year-old Christian mother of five from rural Punjab, who is in custody for alleged blasphemy against the prophet Muhammad. Her supporters claim that the allegations arose from personal disputes with other women in her village.
Taseer and his daughters visited Aasia Bibi after she had been in custody for some 18 months. He described Aasia Bibi’s punishment as “harsh and oppressive” and appealed to the Pakistani President for a pardon. Taseer also described the prosecution of poor members of religious minorities as a mockery of Pakistan’s Islamic heritage.
Few Pakistani politicians have had the courage to oppose such laws so openly and brazenly. Religious law has become a tool of state-sanctioned oppression of the most vulnerable of all faiths. Congregations of attention-seeking imams join forces with corrupt police to arrest and even kill alleged blasphemers on the flimsiest of evidence. Personal scores and commercial disputes are dealt with in this irrational manner.
Pakistan’s religious right, along with their supporters in the small business sector, had called for Taseer to be sacked. Pakistan’s The News International reported that 100 activists from the Tehrik Tahaffuz-e-Khatm-e-Nabuwat (Movement for the Preservation of the Doctrine of Finality of Prophethood) rallied and cheered after Taseer’s slaying. They carried placards and handed out sweets.
On New Year’s Eve, Taseer sent this message into Twitterspace: “I was under huge pressure sure 2 cow down b4 rightest pressure on blasphemy. Refused. Even if I’m the last man standing”. It remains to be seen whether any other politician will be brave enough to stand in the way of Pakistan’s religious right.
As Catholic theocon fascists ally with Xtian and Jewish extremists to instigate oppressive neo-blasphemy laws throughout the world, with cruel and karmic irony, the same religionists have become victims of blasphemy laws themselves!
This, demonstrated by the woeful tale of a Roman Catholic woman Aasia Bibi, sentenced to death on the mere whiff of so-called blasphemy, languishing in prison and targeted for assassination by insane, religious zombies.
Dumb as mud, ignorant, illiterate fanatics claiming to be the workers and conscience of a supreme mind.
Militants planning to launch suicide attack at Aasia Bibi’s prison, intelligence reports say.
LAHORE: A group of militants is planning to launch a suicide attack at the prison where Christian blasphemy convict Aasia Bibi is being held, according to an intelligence report issued last week, The Express Tribune has learnt.
Aasia Bibi is being kept in the Sheikhupura district Jail, where the Punjab police and jail authorities have beefed up security following this report and the murder of former Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer. The terrorist group, according to the intelligence report, calls itself “Moaviya group”.
According to official figures, 131 people are being held in jails across Punjab on blasphemy charges. Eleven of them have been sentenced to death, including Aasia Bibi.
As many as 35 people, who were accused of committing blasphemy or defending them, have been killed between 1990 and 2011, including Taseer. They were all killed in either extra judicial killings or found dead in prison under dubious circumstances.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 6th, 2011.
Lee Fang of Think Progress was able to surprise David Koch after the swearing-in of his newly-minted House of Representatives last week for this impromptu man-on-the-street interview. The interview is posted in three parts, but Part One captures just how arrogant, uppity, and callous this man is. The other guy is Tim Phillips, who desperately tries to become a human shield for that most dangerous thing of all: the interview.
You have to watch the video to really catch the ebullience Koch has for his new Congress. He’s nearly beside himself with joy.
TP: Hi sir, I’m Lee Fang. I’m with the blog ThinkProgress. I’m just asking what you’re expecting from the new Congress under Speaker Boehner?
KOCH: Well, cut the hell out of spending, balance the budget, reduce regulations, and uh, support business.
PHILLIPS: Hey David, Lee here is a good blogger on the left, we’re glad to have him–TP: Just a quick interview. Are you proud of what Americans for Prosperity has achieved this year?
KOCH: You bet I am, man oh’ man. We’re going to do more too in the next couple of years, you know.
TP: What are you planning on doing. What are your goals?
KOCH: I just told you what we hope the Congress will do and AFP is going to support that.
[…]
TP: I’m curious to know, Mr. Koch, are you proud of what the Tea Party movement and what they’ve achieved in the past years–
KOCH: Yeah. There are some extremists there, but the rank and file are just normal people like us. And I admire them. It’s probably the best grassroots uprising since 1776 in my opinion.
This interview was done long before the events of Saturday unfolded. But Koch’s casual toss-off of the “extremists” in the Tea Party is telling, particularly given the strenuous denials we’re all hearing now. Like the way his ‘grass roots’ characterization seems to affirm astroturf as an organic thing, at least in the mind of David Koch? And hey — it’s totally fine with Koch to have an extremist or two in the mix as long as the whole thing is dag-gone grassrootsy and populated with “normal people like [him].” Funny thing. I haven’t met even one single normal person in my entire life who is also a billionaire who spends millions and millions trying to defeat political opponents. But that’s just me, I guess.
Let’s consider those few “extremists”. We have extremist Sharron Angle, with her “2nd Amendment remedies.” Then there’s “extremist” Sarah Palin, loading and reloading. Then there’s lower-profile but still destructive extremists like Dana Loesch and Bill Hennessy. If this video isn’t bone-chilling and visceral evidence of extreme speech and views, I’m not sure what is.
Maybe David Koch wants to rethink his characterization of them as grass roots. I’m more inclined to think of them as “dry brush”. The kind that ignites and destroys everything in its path.
The rest of Fang’s interview can be viewed here and here.
The crusading triangle of cruelty between Islam, Christianity and Judaism is now being played out in an important but esoteric dispute in the UN.
This time, we atheists are really the good guys.
According to an article in The Age by religion editor Barney Zwartz, for more than a decade, there has been a UN debate about the criticising of faith. The 56-member Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) wants the freedom to have its way with its critics. The OIC is comfortable allowing sovereign nations to have a role in stamping out such criticism.
The debate concerns a proposed resolution denouncing the ‘‘defamation of religion’’. In 2009, after 10 years of debate, a resolution was carried in the UN Human Rights Commission with the OIC countries gaining support from Latin America, Africa and others. The resolution exhorts member states to respect the practices of faith. It expressly condemns Islamophobia. This all sounds innocuous enough, but it is a de facto licence for followers of any faith to embark on unspeakable barbarity and intolerance. The non-binding resolution would sanction the enforcement of religious rules of blasphemy and apostasy, which will reap a bitter harvest.
The West (mostly), the Christians (mostly) and the Jews oppose it for it is seen as free go at ‘‘convert-or-be-killed’’ programs. Mind you, these programs were well-tested by the Spanish Inquisition, but that was a long time ago. An opposition Christian group has arisen in the West known as Open Doors. This group, hailing from the US, documents the appalling atrocities visited upon Christians in Islamic and other countries. The martyr de jour is Asia Bibi, a Christian believer in Pakistan sentenced to death on charges of blaspheming Islam’s prophet. Of course, the question surrounding this group is where were they when the Serbian Orthodox were targetting Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s? This does somewhat tarnish the credibility of the followers of Christ. The ultimate irony is that some elements in the Orthodox Church support the Islamic line of the defamation-of-religions issue. In the history of human conflict, were there ever two more paradoxical bedfellows?
This did not, however, deter The Age from denouncing the UN resolution. The logic of the editorial was hard to fault but for the historical hypocrisy of the West lecturing the nations of Islam on tolerance. In these debates, who says it is often more relevant than what is said. Logic always defaults to politics. When I encounter a Christian group that has emerged from the US such as Open Doors, my suspicious mind immediately leaps to suspicious (perhaps ill-informed) conclusions. I think evil. Imagine what the Islamic world thinks?
The godless approach, too, might lack some credibility with the supporters of this defamation position because we are the hated apostates. But at least the godless are consistent. Atheism has for several centuries railed against the rules of blasphemy. About one in three of the boring books we write for the few readers who buy them, is about blasphemy for it is such an anathema. If a faith wants to get nasty with its critics, all it does is deem the words and actions to be blasphemous and bloody vengeance is then legitimate.
Blasphemy can include the criticism of religious beliefs and practices or even mere irreverence. In Leviticus 24:16 it is punishable by death. The carnage caused by enforcement of blasphemy would be magnified if it was used by nation states to suppress diversity of views. Blasphemy is distinct from apostasy, which is the formal renunciation of faith. Sadly I am both a blasphemer and an apostate.
Atheists have a stark choice. We could fondly observe the inter-faith brutality and seek to profit from the irrational rivers of blood that flow. Surely, there is no greater voice for godlessness than the screaming voices of those tormented in the name of God. Or we could use our tiny voice to broker sense in the world.
The UN defamation of religions resolution offends me. There is an historic antipathy that atheism has for blasphemy and apostasy. It immediately makes reasonable the suspending of civil order and empowers theocratic nation states to let slip the dogs of intolerance.
So what are we to do? Clearly, Christians do not have clean hands in this debate as indicated previously.
Atheists, too, do not have clean hands — the behaviour of the big three, Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot, and other barbaric atheistic regimes have soiled our manual cleanliness. But atheists outside the context of communist nation states (you and me) do not have that baggage. We are even-handed in our disputation with the faiths of the world. But more important is that we can be the righteous gentiles of our era. It is our opportunity to work for the Christians, Jews and Muslims in the firing lines of fanatics even if we are not the main target of the persecution. Assistance for the outsider elevates the assister as much as the assisted.
Atheism is thus charged with a duty to oppose this UN dogma, which while non-binding now, is making the journey into a more legislative phase. We must try to hear the legitimate complaints of Islam about oppression in Europe. We must contest as the resolution moves through the labyrinthine UN processes.
Henry McDonald, Dublin
January 3, 2010
SECULAR campaigners in the Republic of Ireland defied a strict new blasphemy law that came into force on New Year’s Day by publishing a series of anti-religious quotations online and promising to fight the legislation in court.
The law, which was passed in July, means blasphemy in Ireland is now a crime punishable with a fine of up to 25,000 euros.
It defines blasphemy as ”publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters sacred by any religion, thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion, with some defences permitted”.
Justice Minister Dermot Ahern has said the law was necessary because while immigration had brought a growing diversity of religious faiths, the 1936 constitution only extended the protection of belief to Christians.
But Atheist Ireland, a group that claims to represent the rights of atheists, responded to the legislation by publishing 25 anti-religious quotations on its website, from figures including Richard Dawkins, Bjork and Frank Zappa.
Michael Nugent, the group’s chairman, said it would challenge the law through the courts if it was charged with blasphemy.
Mr Nugent said: ”This new law is both silly and dangerous. It is silly because medieval religious laws have no place in a modern secular republic, where the criminal law should protect people and not ideas. And it is dangerous because it incentives religious outrage, and because Islamic states led by Pakistan are already using the wording of this Irish law to promote new blasphemy laws at UN level.
”We believe in the golden rule: that we have a right to be treated justly, and that we have a responsibility to treat other people justly. Blasphemy laws are unjust: they silence people in order to protect ideas. In a civilised society, people have a right to express and to hear ideas about religion even if other people find those ideas to be outrageous.”
Mr Nugent said the group’s campaign to repeal the law was part of a wider battle to create a more secular republic. ”You would think that after all the scandals the Catholic Church endured in 2009, the introduction of a blasphemy law would be the last thing that the Irish state would be considering in terms of defending religion and its place in society.”
GUARDIAN
A classic example of right wing cognitive dissonance, from the site of raving freakazoid nut sandwich Glenn Beck:
Credit: StopBeck.And no, this is not a Photoshop. Here’s the background image at Glenn Beck’s site. It’s a random image, chosen from about 20 different backgrounds.
Notice that he has his finger on the trigger, violating the first rule of firearm safety.
UPDATE at 1/10/11 1:55:23 pm:
Unbelievable! They deleted the image. Oh no, that doesn’t look like a guilty conscience at all.
Unfortunately for Beck, I saved a copy before they threw it down the memory hole.
Click to enlargeMonday 10 January 2011
by: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t)
To: Palin-lovers, Fox “News,” the “mainstream” media, and the Far Right, et al.
From: William Rivers Pitt
Date: Monday 10 January 2011
Re: The blood on your hands
Dear “Patriots,”
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords isn’t much older than I am. She served in the Arizona State House of Representatives, and the Arizona State Senate, before being elected to three successive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. She once described herself as a “former Republican,” and is today considered a “Blue Dog” Democrat, meaning she holds a number of conservative political positions. This is not terribly surprising, given the generally conservative political bent of the state she has served for the last ten years. She was married four years ago to a space shuttle commander who had served as a Naval aviator, and who flew 39 combat missions in Desert Storm, before volunteering for astronaut training.
Last Wednesday, she was sworn in to her third term as the Representative for Arizona’s 8th congressional district. One of her first acts in the newly-minted 112th Congress was to read aloud from the House floor, in response to the Republican Party’s recitation of the Constitution, the following lines: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
She returned to Arizona not long after to assist in the implementation of that most vital of Constitutional principles, calling together a meeting of her constituents in a peaceable assembly so the citizens she represents could petition the government for a redress of grievances. Among the gathered crowd were a number of her staffers, a judge, and a nine-year-old girl named Christina-Taylor Green who was born on September 11, 2001.
And then all Hell broke loose.
A man named Jared Lee Loughner waded into the group and fired a bullet into Rep. Giffords’ skull at point-blank range, before turning his weapon on others in the crowd. Christina-Taylor Greene, who would have celebrated her tenth birthday on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, was shot in the chest and killed. The woman who brought her to the event was also shot. Gabriel Zimmerman, who served as Rep. Giffords’ director of community outreach, was also killed. He was 30 years old, and was recently engaged to be married. U.S. District Judge John Roll, who had served on the bench for twenty years, was also killed. Dorwin Stoddard, a church volunteer, died after putting his body between his wife and the hail of bullets. His wife was also shot. Two of Rep. Giffords’ constituents, Dorothy Morris and Phyllis Scheck, were also killed. All in all, 31 shots were fired before several brave souls tackled Loughner, disarmed him, and wrestled him to the ground.
At the time of this writing, Rep. Giffords is lying in a hospital bed in critical condition. The God you Bible-spewing frauds love to flog the rest of us with must have been in that supermarket crowd with her on Saturday, with His hand on her shoulder, because it is nothing short of a full-fledged miracle she survived at all. Doctors are actually cautiously optimistic that she will survive, though the degree to which she will ultimately recover is still sorely in doubt. She can respond to simple commands, according to her doctors, and is marginally able to communicate. If she survives her wound, it is wretchedly certain her life will never, ever be the same.
I just thought you should know a few things about the people you helped into their graves and hospital beds this weekend.
Yes, you.
You false patriots who bring assault rifles to political rallies, you hack politicians and media personalities who lied through your stinking teeth about “death panels” and “Obama is coming for your guns” and “He isn’t a citizen” and “He’s a secret Muslim” and “Sharia Law is coming to America,” you who spread this bastard gospel and you who swallowed it whole, I am talking to you, because this was your doing just as surely as it was the doing of the deranged damned soul who pulled the trigger. The poison you injected into our culture is deeply culpable for this carnage.
You who worship Jesus at the top of your lungs (in defiance of Christ’s own teachings on the matter of worship, by the way) helped put several churchgoers into their graves and into the hospital. You who shriek about the sanctity of marriage helped cut down a man who was about to be married. You who crow with ceaseless abandon about military service and the nobility of our fighting forces helped to critically wound the wife of a Naval aviator who fought for you in a war. You who hold September 11 as your sword and shield helped put a little girl born on that day into the ground.
You helped. Yes, damn you, you helped.
The “mainstream” media is already working overtime playing up the “Disturbed loner” angle with all their might. There is no doubt, from the available evidence, of Mr. Loughner’s transformation into a disturbed individual. But here’s the funny part: all the crazy crap he spewed, about the gold standard (a favorite of Glenn Beck, the master of Fox “News” fearmongering…so he can sell his gold scam to suckers) and government mind control and everything else before going on his rampage, is straight out of the Right-Wing Insanity Handbook. His personal YouTube ramblings were a mishmash of right-wing anti-government nonsense…the kind that attracts sick minds like Loughner, the kind that only reinforces their paranoia, the kind that finally pushes them over the brink and into the frenzy of violence that took place on Saturday. The kind that the likes of you have been happily spreading by the day.
He did not act alone. You were right there with him. You helped.
I’m talking to you, “mainstream” media people, who created this atmosphere of desperate rage and total paranoia out of whole cloth because of your unstoppable adoration for spectacle, and ratings, and because the companies that own your sorry asses agree with the deranged cretins you helped make so famous and powerful. It was sickeningly amusing on Sunday to watch Wolf Blitzer bluster and bluff on CNN about how the media owns no responsibility for this disaster. It was like watching a ten-year-old try to explain how a lamp got broken while he was running through the living room, but no, it wasn’t him. It was, in reality, a pathetic display…but that is what you generally get whenever Wolf is on your screen.
“Mainstream” news personalities like David Gergen and John King bent over backwards warning people not to blame Sarah Palin and her ilk for this calamity. It was a sick man who did this, they said. Bollocks to that. I hate to break this to the “mainstream” media know-betters, but words matter. When people like Palin spray the airwaves with calls to violence and incantations of imminent doom, people like Loughner are listening, and prepared to act. The “mainstream” media lets it fly without any questions or rebuttal, because it’s good for ratings, and here we are. Words matter. Play Russian Roulette long enough, and someone inevitably winds up dead.
Remember the run-up to the Iraq invasion, and the subsequent occupation? “WMD everywhere, al Qaeda connections to 9/11, plastic sheeting and duct tape because we’re all gonna die!” was the central theme of the majority of your broadcast schedule for years…until it was all proven to be a lie. You helped the liars, you were the liars, but you knew that. You also got your spectacle, and the corporations that own you got paid a king’s ransom, so everyone was happy, except the dead.
Tell me this is any different, I dare you. For the spectacle, the ratings and the pleasure of your owners, you ran names like “Sarah Palin” across the sky in lights, even after she should have faded into well-deserved obscurity, and helped this blister of right-wing rage fester until it finally burst. This was your show, and in perhaps the most wretched irony of all, I would bet all my worldly possessions that your ratings are through the roof right now. You got what you wanted. I hope you are pleased.
And yes, I’m talking to you, Sarah Palin, you unutterably disgusting fraud. You pulled it off your ridiculous website, but it’s out there: you put cross-hairs – literally, cross-hairs – on Rep. Giffords, you blithered about “reloading” instead of “retreating,” and you made this country more stupid and violent with every breath you took. Well, congratulations, you failure, you quitter, you inciter of mobs. You put the cross-hairs on her, and someone finally pulled the trigger. Run from it all you like, Lady MacBeth, but this blood will never be washed from your hands.
I’m talking to you, Sharron Angle, you walking punch-line, who talked about “Second Amendment remedies” being necessary if you didn’t get your way on health care reform during your failed Senate campaign.
I’m talking to you, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity, and Bill O’Reilly, and Michael Savage, and Ann Coulter, and Laura Ingraham, and to every other right-wing tripe-spewing blowhard blogger and Fox News broadcaster. I hope you are proud of yourselves, because this is the day you get to reap what you have been relentlessly sowing since you were forced to encompass the unmitigated outrage of a Black man winning the office of President of the United States.
That’s right, I said it. Anyone who thinks good old-fashioned American bigotry and racism are not the core motivation for a vast majority of these so-called “revolutionaries” should get their heads examined. You’ve heard of the “elephant in the middle of the room?” Well, this is the burning cross in the middle of the room, and no amount of spin will douse those flames.
I’m talking to you, Koch Brothers. Your money to create and spread this disease was well-spent; you now have one less Democrat in the House to worry about, at least for the foreseeable future. Congratulations, you un-American sacks of filth.
And I’m talking to each and every one of you who listened to these traitors and believed the nonsense they spewed at you for no other reason than to pick your pockets for campaign/organization contributions. I’m talking to you who wore your silly fatigues and carried your badly-spelled fact-deprived signs to protests with pistols on your hips and rifles on your shoulders. You who threw bricks through the windows of politicians you disagreed with. You who shot out the windows of Rep. Giffords’ office not even a year ago.
You worked very hard to create exactly this atmosphere in America, and now it has come to be. We have entered the age of the Wrath of Fools, and we now must again exist in an America where the word “assassination” has become all too relevant.
You helped this happen. You.
You know it. I know it. Have the guts to admit it, even if only to yourselves.
I know many Republicans and conservatives, and consider them to be dear friends. The single most influential person in my life (aside from my mother) was a rock-ribbed conservative Republican, and there is no person I respected more than him. I do not count these people, and those like them, among those whom I address here. They are as sickened and repulsed by you as I am.
This is not the end of the story, but is just the beginning. The good people of the United States of America, the true patriots, have finally seen you with your media-painted masks ripped off. They have seen what comes to pass when hate, venom, ignorance and violence goes unchecked and unanswered. You have been exposed, and the fact that it took such an unimaginably horrific act for that exposure to take place only increases the fierceness with which you will be answered. You will be repudiated, not with violence, but with the scorn and rejection you so richly deserve. Spin it as you will, scramble all you like. You are found out, and you have nowhere to hide.
Oh, P.S., if anyone reading this is operating under the delusion that the overheated right-wing rhetoric that went a long way towards almost getting Rep. Giffords killed, and had a strong hand in putting six people in the ground, is some sort of new Obama-era phenomenon, well…
“I tell people don’t kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus – living fossils – so we will never forget what these people stood for.”
– Rush Limbaugh, Denver Post, 12-29-95
“Get rid of the guy. Impeach him, censure him, assassinate him.”
– Rep. James Hansen (R-UT), talking about President Clinton
“We’re going to keep building the party until we’re hunting Democrats with dogs.”
– Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX), Mother Jones, 08-95
“My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building.”
– Ann Coulter, New York Observer, 08-26-02
“We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors.”
– Ann Coulter, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, 02-26-02
“Chelsea is a Clinton. She bears the taint; and though not prosecutable in law, in custom and nature the taint cannot be ignored. All the great despotisms of the past – I’m not arguing for despotism as a principle, but they sure knew how to deal with potential trouble – recognized that the families of objectionable citizens were a continuing threat. In Stalin’s penal code it was a crime to be the wife or child of an ‘enemy of the people.’ The Nazis used the same principle, which they called Sippenhaft, ‘clan liability.’ In Imperial China, enemies of the state were punished ‘to the ninth degree’: that is, everyone in the offender’s own generation would be killed and everyone related via four generations up, to the great-great-grandparents, and four generations down, to the great-great-grandchildren, would also be killed.”
– John Derbyshire, National Review, 02-15-01
“Two things made this country great: White men & Christianity. The degree these two have diminished is in direct proportion to the corruption and fall of the nation. Every problem that has arisen (sic) can be directly traced back to our departure from God’s Law and the disenfranchisement of White men.”
– State Rep. Don Davis (R-NC), emailed to every member of the North Carolina House and Senate, reported by the Fayetteville Observer, 08-22-01
I could go on, and on, and on, and on, but you get the gist.
Most Disrespectfully Yours,
William Rivers Pitt
At Talk to Action, the veteran watcher of white supremacist and anti-semitic groups Chip Berlet writes, The Becking of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. An excerpt:
| From a moral viewpoint Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is the victim of demagogues such as Glenn Beck and his allies at Fox News and in the Tea Party Movement. This is not about legal liability but about moral culpability. This is about a nation that has lost its moral compass.Some of us progressive writers have been warning about this dangerous trend for several years. This includes my colleagues Fred Clarkson, David Neiwert, Sara Robinson, John Amato, Adele Stan, and others. We blame right-wing demagogues like Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter and a culture that tolerates their vicious targeting of scapegoats.
Now the shootings have created a new word floating across cyberspace: “becking.” To be “becked” is to be held up as such an evil and destructive person that someone, somewhere, will interpret it as a call to eliminate that problem through violence. I made similar assertions after the murder of Dr. Tiller in a post at Religion Dispatches, “Who Will Rid Me of This Troublesome Doctor?”: Bill O’Reilly, King Henry II, and George Tiller” Here is what I wrote then: On the day Dr. Tiller died, May 31, 2009, Gabrielle Winant on Salon traced O’Reilly’s relentless campaign against the murdered doctor. Winant wrote that some of O’Reilly’s characterizations of Tiller replicated “ancient conservative, paranoid stories: a decadent, permissive and callous elite tolerates moral monstrosities that every common-sense citizen just knows to be awful. Conspiring against our folk wisdom, O’Reilly says, the sophisticates have shielded Tiller from the appropriate, legal consequences for his deeds.” So, concludes Winant: “O’Reilly didn’t tell anyone to do anything violent, but he did put Tiller in the public eye, and help make him the focus of a movement with a history of violence against exactly these kinds of targets.” The analysts at Media Matters for America have been forcefully arguing the case against the “Emerging Culture of Paranoia” and the role of “Right-Wing Media” in fostering a toxic climate in which violence is more likely. Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert, who suggested after the Tiller murder that “O’Reilly and Fox News will have more right-wing vigilantism to explain,” selected some of O’Reilly’s most egregious statements demonizing Dr. Tiller. … Hannah Arendt described the process of demagoguery leading to violence as it occurs in totalitarian regimes ranging from Hitler to Stalin. The demagogue frames the target, but leaves off a direct call for violence. But the message is clear. Unstable people often act first. Political ideologues, however, can be mobilized as the process continues to act as a group. Sara Robinson and I have been tracking the number of political murders since the inauguration of President Barack Obama. [See link below]. The people who “becked” Rep. Gabrielle Giffords began with a premise of dualism or Manicheaism, and then constructed a frame that uses demonization, scapegoating, and conspiracism to divide the world into a good ‘us’ and a bad ‘them’. … Following the shooting of Rep. Giffords we once again heard calls for civility and pundits pointing out that hateful rhetoric is aimed at Republicans and conservatives by Democrats and their lefty allies. This is true, and I do object to liberals who hurl buckets of mud as we on the left are being buried in an avalanche of shit from right-wing demagogues with national television and radio programs, websites, and newspaper columns. The comparison is true in the manipulated facts yet false in the claim of equivalence. Peter Daou writes about the bogus equivalency between right/left extremism in his post Gabriel Giffords and the rightwing hate machine.”The targeting of political scapegoats in our nation today is overwhelmingly coming from the Political Right. To claim otherwise is a lie easily debunked by even a modicum of research. A big lie. … We who must speak out are not faced with death here in our nation this week. We are faced with our visage in a moral mirror looking back at our conscience which is telling us that we must speak out against the crescendo of totalitarian demagoguery. We must oppose the becking of our society. How many more must die before we wake up and put a stop to this terrible trend? |
Another important read on this subject is the 18-month-old Tragedy At The Holocaust Museum: Stand Up To Terrorism by Sara Robinson.
See also Marta Evry’s The “Becking” Of America: How Right-Wing Media and Politicians Incite Violence at Venice for Change.
Assange ‘Rape’ Accuser Linked To Notorious CIA Operative
By David Edwards
One of the women that is accusing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of sex crimes appears to have worked with a group that has connections to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
James D. Catlin, a lawyer who recently represented Assange, said the sex assault investigation into the WikiLeaks founder is based on claims he didn’t use condoms during sex with two Swedish women.
Swedish prosecutors told AOL News last week that Assange was not wanted for rape as has been reported, but for something called “sex by surprise” or “unexpected sex.”
One accuser, Anna Ardin, may have “ties to the US-financed anti-Castro and anti-communist groups,” according to Israel Shamir and Paul Bennett, writing for CounterPunch.
While in Cuba, Ardin worked with the Las damas de blanco (the Ladies in White), a feminist anti-Castro group.
Professor Michael Seltzer pointed out that the group is led by Carlos Alberto Montaner who is reportedly connected to the CIA.
Shamir and Bennett also describe Ardin as a “leftist” who “published her anti-Castro diatribes (see here and here) in the Swedish-language publication Revista de Asignaturas Cubanas put out by Misceláneas de Cuba.”
Shamir and Bennett noted that Las damas de blanco is partially funded by the US government and also counts Luis Posada Carriles as a supporter.
A declassified 1976 document (.pdf) revealed Posada to be a CIA agent. He has been convicted of terrorist attacks that killed hundreds of people.
Ardin is “a gender equity officer at Uppsula University – who chose to associate with a US funded group openly supported by a convicted terrorist and mass murderer,” FireDogLake’s Kirk James Murphy observed.
In August, Assange told Al-Jazeera that the accusations were “clearly a smear campaign.”
“We have been warned that, for example, the Pentagon is planning on using dirty tricks to destroy our work,” Assange told the Swedish daily newspaper Aftonbladet.
The WikiLeaks founder said he was told to be careful of “sex traps.” Had Assange fallen for one of those traps? “Maybe. Maybe not,” he said.
Catlin observed that both Ardin and Sofia Wilén, the second accuser, sent SMS messages and tweets boasting of their conquests following the alleged “rapes.”
“In the case of Ardin it is clear that she has thrown a party in Assange’s honour at her flat after the ‘crime’ and tweeted to her followers that she is with the ‘the world’s coolest smartest people, it’s amazing!'” he wrote.
“The exact content of Wilén’s mobile phone texts is not yet known but their bragging and exculpatory character has been confirmed by Swedish prosecutors. Niether Wilén’s nor Ardin’s texts complain of rape,” Catlin said.
Ardin has also published a seven step guide on how to get revenge on cheating boyfriends.
When the charges were first leveled in August, Gawker raised doubts that Ardin was working for the CIA.
“If anything, Ardin’s outing tends to undercut Assange’s conspiracy theory that one of his accusers is a major figure on Sweden’s left fringe, freewheelingly indiscreet on her personal blog and, until her charges, an enthusiastic promoter of Assange’s visit to the country,” Gawker wrote.
After Interpol issued a digital “wanted” poster for Assange on Monday morning, an unnamed Scotland Yard source reportedly told Press Association it had been given the documents needed for the arrest. Police would not comment on the report publicly.
Several British news outlets speculated that Assange could be arrested as early as Tuesday.
On Monday evening, Mark Stephens, Assange’s London lawyer, was negotiating with British authorities over an arrest warrant they’d received from their Swedish counterparts. Assange has vowed to fight extradition.
ARE THEY SERIOUS?????
Jared Lee Loughner shot and wounded United States Congsswoman Gabrielle Giffords and twelve others and killed Federal Judge John McCarthy Roll and six others outside a Safeway in Tucson early Saturday, January Eighth, 2011.
Giffords had beaten the teabagger candidate, Jesse Kelly, to win her third term as a representative. Gabrielle Giffords’ office was also vandalized in March, just after health care reform was approved. Why is this important? Last March, Mike Vanderboegh boasted about his call to throw bricks through the local offices of representatives who voted for Health Care Reform. This message struck such a chord that he was invited to speak at the Open Carry rally in April. He’s trying to backpedal now, making the patently ridiculous claim that his call to violence was actually an action against this type of violence, but he’s trying to shove toothpaste back into the tube.
Giffords was also the member of Congress who read the First Amendment during the reading of the Constitution this past Thursday. Fate is not without a sense of irony.
Victim 9 yr old Christina Taylor Greene
Judge Roll was the target of a barrage of death threats in 2009, after he had ruled that a group of illegal immigrants could proceed with a multi-million dollar civil rights lawsuit against a state rancher. Gabe Zimmerman, Giffords’ aide and a nine-year old child who had recently been elected president of her school’s student council were also amongst the dead.
Loughner’s Youtube rants are–at best– incoherent and rambling; they display some of the same rudderless and agitated rhetoric that typified early missives from Francis E. Dec, who was suffering from a degenerating form of paranoid schizophrenia. He also posted a similarly rambling screed online, which can be read here.
Loughner apparently retains enough of his mental capabilities to invoke his right against self-incrimination, so we must wait for word on his motivations before we discover if he is “just another kook” or a symptom of something deeper. It is, however, not too much of a stretch to observe the connection between Loughner’s acts and the pathology of violence than infects the right wing.
This is a fine place to reprint a common sentiment around the ‘net today: If all muslims are branded as terrorists due to the acts of a tiny minority, why is it when white conservatives repeatedly do it, it’s just the act of lone nuts?
The Age of Blasphemy 