The Two Faces Of Mitt Romney | The Rise of ROMDROID


The Two Faces Of Mitt Romney | The Rise of ROMDROID

 

Polling Shows Romney With Big Lead in Florida


Polling Shows Romney With Big Lead in Florida
Newt cratering
Nate Silver is now projecting mega-millionaire Mitt Romney to win the Florida GOP primary; Newt Gingrich’s surge has evaporated.

Is it another case of the dreaded Sarah Palin Kiss of Death?

Man Whore Endorses Male Harlot | The Cain-Gingrich Endorsement


The Republican “family values” team of liars, cheats, philanderers, crooks, adulterers and whores are joining forces to save America from moral decline. Praised be Jebus!

The Cain-Gingrich Endorsement
The loonier far right celebrities are lining up to show their support for Newt GingrichChuck Norris, Sarah Palin, and now Mr. 999, Herman Cain.

WEST PALM BEACH — Herman Cain will be a surprise guest at tonight’s Lincoln Day Dinner at the Kravis Center to endorse Newt Gingrich, the Palm Beach Post has confirmed.

Ron Paul Signed Off On Racist Newsletters | Ron Paul’s Newsletters Best Loved by Neo-Nazis and Jew-Hating Extremists


Ron Paul Signed Off Racist Newsletters | Ron Paul’s Newsletters Best Loved by Neo-Nazis and Jew-Hating Extremists
WaPo: Ron Paul Signed Off On Racist 1990s Newsletters
Ron Paul’s newsletter problem gets worse, but Paulians won’t care
The Washington Post has new information today on Ron Paul’s racist, antisemitic newsletters; a former secretary in the company that produced the newsletters says Ron Paul was fully aware of their content: Ron Paul signed off on racist 1990s newsletters, associates say.

Ron Paul, well known as a physician, congressman and libertarian , has also been a businessman who pursued a marketing strategy that included publishing provocative, racially charged newsletters to make money and spread his ideas, according to three people with direct knowledge of Paul’s businesses.

The Republican presidential candidate has denied writing inflammatory passages in the pamphlets from the 1990s and said recently that he did not read them at the time or for years afterward. Numerous colleagues said he does not hold racist views.

But people close to Paul’s operations said he was deeply involved in the company that produced the newsletters, Ron Paul & Associates, and closely monitored its operations, signing off on articles and speaking to staff members virtually every day.

“It was his newsletter, and it was under his name, so he always got to see the final product. . . . He would proof it,’’ said Renae Hathway, a former secretary in Paul’s company and a supporter of the Texas congressman.

And there’s more; Paul apparently made a deliberate effort to peddle his newsletters to racists and extremists, using the mailing list of a notorious antisemitic newspaper published by Holocaust denier Willis Carto:

Ed Crane, the longtime president of the libertarian Cato Institute, said he met Paul for lunch during this period, and the two men discussed direct-mail solicitations, which Paul was sending out to interest people in his newsletters. They agreed that “people who have extreme views” are more likely than others to respond.

Crane said Paul reported getting his best response when he used a mailing list from the now-defunct newspaper Spotlight, which was widely considered anti-Semitic and racist.

This comes as absolutely no surprise, but I predict it will have no impact on Ron Paul’s popularity. Anyone who still supports this creepy old crypto-racist has either found a way to rationalize this stuff, or has no problems with it.

The Skewed “Values” of The American Religious Reich


Newt Gingrich’s Crackpot Anti-Muslim Conspiracy Theories


Newt Gingrich’s Anti-Muslim Conspiracy Theories
Crazy bigoted fear-mongering
Via:-Charles Johnson

With all the focus on Newt Gingrich’s race-baiting and “big ideas,” one thing that hasn’t gotten much notice yet: his outrageous anti-Muslim statements.

There’s a reason why Newt was scheduled to speak at hate group leader Pamela Geller’s “Ground Zero Mosque” demonstration in New York, and there’s a reason why she endorses him for President. On this subject, Gingrich sounds exactly like Geller.

Here’s Gingrich today on The Janet Mefferd Show, explaining that the Obama administration, the Justice Department, secular judges, “religious bigots who want to drive Christianity out of public life,” and “elites” are conspiring with the “Organization of Islamic Countries” to advance the cause of radical Islam.

Newt Gingrich with hate group leader Pamela GellerGingrich: Well, I think that we have to really, from my perspective you don’t have an issue of religious tolerance you have an elite which favors radical Islam over Christianity and Judaism. You have constant pressure by secular judges and by religious bigots to drive Christianity out of public life and to establish a secular state except when it comes to radical Islam, where all of the sudden they start making excuses for Sharia, they start making excuses that we really shouldn’t use certain language. Remember, the Organization of Islamic Countries is dedicated to preventing anyone, anywhere in the world from commenting negatively about Islam, so they would literally eliminate our free speech and there were clearly conversations held that implied that the US Justice Department would begin to enforce censorship against American citizens to protect radical Islam, I think that’s just an amazing concept frankly.

Here are a couple of facts to counteract this bizarre fear-mongering conspiracy theory that Newt’s parroting directly from Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer:

First, Gingrich has the name of the organization wrong; it’s the Organization of the Islamic Conference (which shows the depth of Gingrich’s knowledge). (Update: recently changed to “Organization of Islamic Cooperation.”)

Second, the Obama administration has come out strongly against OIC-sponsored UN resolutions barring the defamation of religion. The idea that the Justice Department is going to start “enforcing censorship” against people who criticize Islam is just … stupid.

Newt is spouting a cartoon-like version of the reality, with Muslims as the boogeymen, and the right wing eats this stuff up.

Republican Dominated Indiana State Senate Committee Votes for Creationism in Schools


Republican Dominated Indiana State Senate Committee Votes for Creationism in Schools
Yes, it never dies
By freetoken

Creationism, that zombie of the American political scene, rises again — this time in Indiana:

An Indiana Senate committee on Wednesday endorsed teaching creationism in public schools, despite pleas from scientists and religious leaders to keep religion out of science classrooms.

Senate Bill 89 allows school corporations to authorize “the teaching of various theories concerning the origin of life” and specifically mentions “creation science” as one such theory.

State Sen. Scott Schneider, R-Indianapolis, who voted for the measure, said if there are many theories about life’s origins, students should be taught all of them.

[…]

The Republican-controlled Senate Education Committee nevertheless voted 8-2 to send the legislation to the full Senate.

Here’s the substance of the text of the bill:

[EFFECTIVE JULY 1, 2012]: Sec. 18. The governing body of a school corporation may require the teaching of various theories concerning the origin of life, including creation science, within the school corporation.

Anyone who has followed this issue in the US can tell right away that even if this bill passed the Indiana Senate, and was eventually signed by the Governor of Indiana, that a federal judge would strike it down right away as unconstitutional (with much precedent in the US court system.)

Yet the creationists still try, over and over.

And, to simply use the phrase “creation science” uncritically informs us of how anti-scientific the authors of that bill are.

The Chairman of the committee was one of the original authors, and given that 4 more signed on as co-authors pretty much guaranteed it would get through the committee.

The State senator mentioned in the news article is one of the co-authors, Scott Schneider, has introduced or co-authored several bills, many of which are close to the heart of the tea-partying and creationists/home-schooling groups. For instance, he’s introduced bills on Right To Work, on controlling sexually explicit material, and so forth. He also works the Tea Party circuit for political support.

Sen. Schneider is also a well known anti-abortionist and a favorite of the Indiana Right to Life organization, and last year helped spearhead an effort to defund any organization in IN that performed abortions.

So we see that the stereotype is reinforced – tea party, creationism, anti-abortion – they are all part of the same stew that is today’s Republican party.

Jewish ‘Assassinate Obama’ Proponent Tearful On-Air Apology: ‘Call Me Naive’


Adler’s Tearful On-Air  Apology: ‘Call Me Naive’

By J.J. Goldberg

Andrew Adler, owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, appears on a  local cable program to apologize for his recent  column proposing that Israel assassinate President Obama. It’s a  wrenchingly, gruesomely compelling scene of a broken man who plainly has no idea  how he got himself in this mess.

I was basically writing the column to draw, you know, draw interest I guess  to the Iranian situation and to get people’s reaction to it, and like in no  ways, means or form to advocate anything… I just felt I was doing my job as an  editor – an owner and publisher, to get the readers to wake up to what’s  happening with Iran and Israel and the nuclear situation…

That’s actually a bit disingenuous. What he wrote in the column was, “You  have got to believe, as I do, that all options are on the table.” In other  words, I mean what I say. On the other hand, he repeats this idea over and over,  that it was just a thought exercise, and you get the impression that he has  convinced himself he didn’t mean it.

Call me stupid, call me naïve, call me morally insane, whatever words you  want to apply… It’s storming outside as we speak and I’ve always felt that when  a storm happens, that God’s angry with me.

Still. “The intentions were good, to get more people involved, to promote  Israel’s side.” How could that be a bad thing?

One of the most intriguing threads is his recollection of his January 15  interview with Israel’s deputy consul general in Atlanta. Toward the end, he  says, “she wanted to talk about Iran”:

I forget what she said, but it wasn’t a pleasant ending if we don’t wake up  to what’s happening.

Again, as I wrote in my  post last night, this is the end result of a campaign of incitement. The  very healthy instinct among American Jews to want the best for Israel is  exploited, fed with a deliberately exaggerated sense of threat and  vulnerability, until anything seems imaginable. Let’s be clear: there is a real  threat. But it’s less than it was a generation ago. And yet it seems that as the  threat declines, the rage grows.

Most of us don’t cross the line, but there’s always someone who will. The  interviewer alludes to that when she suggests to Adler that “some might be  reminded” by his column of what happened to Yitzhak Rabin. His response is a  befuddled: “True – I wasn’t – to look back on it, I screwed up.”

I’m at a loss as to what tomorrow will bring, what time will bring, what the  next five minutes will bring. It’s something I’ll have to live with for the rest  of my life. … I deserve the repercussions. All can say is, I am devastated, I’m  stunned. I want to go to Israel. I probably won’t be welcome there now. I want  to go anywhere in the Jewish community, people will look at me like I did — … To  think that I could lose everything is devastating.

Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/forward-thinking/150155/#ixzz1kXWeOBAy

Fetus Fetish | The Christian Reich’s Phoney Abortion Politics Furthering Misogyny and Patriarchy


Fetus Love: Christian Right‘s Abortion Politics Furthers Patriarchy
Anti-Choice Politics is More About Oppressing Women than Loving Fetuses

By , About.com Guide

Conservative Christians in America can exhibit a strange obsession with fetuses. They appear to be willing to sacrifice any level of women’s personal autonomy and civil rights in the “interests” of the fetus, even though similar measures would not be taken to protect the interests of a fully-grown and conscious adult human in analogous circumstances. Perhaps this is because their agenda is less about the alleged interests of the fetus and more about promoting a patriarchal culture where women are kept subordinate.

It would be unusual, if not impossible, for people to adopt political positions in isolation, which is to say without those positions being interdependent with a variety of other political positions. Even if this might be true with a few individuals, it’s not true of entire political movements. Attempts to explain or understand the anti-choice movement in America requires us to therefore take into consideration positions on contraception, feminism, marriage equality, rape, women in the workforce, religious dogmas on the roles of women, welfare spending, education policies, and so forth.

In Sacred Choices: The Right to Contraception and Abortion in Ten World Religions, Daniel C. Maguire writes:

There is ample reason to say that this newborn love of fetuses is but a cover for the patriarchal fear of the free woman who is appearing in our day. Can we really believe that patriarchal Catholics, patriarchal Protestants, and patriarchal Muslims, after centuries of warring with one another, are suddenly and stunningly bonded by fetus-love? […]
What lurks beneath family value rhetoric on the right — among Protestants and Catholics — is a kind of sweet love ethic that loses sight of social justice and the needs of the common good. This makes the right the darling of the harsher modes of capitalism. The suppression of social conscience and concern for the poor that is masked by family value piety, really intends, in [Beverly] Harrison’s [former professor of Christian Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York] view, “to make Christianity the ‘handmaiden’ of ‘the Market God’ who brooks no rivals.”

So-called “family values” are really the faith-based “values” of rigidly defined gender roles — not just in the family, but also in the workplace, politics, culture, and society generally. These are the “values” of white, Christian men retaining public positions of privilege, power, and dominance while women are relegated to more private and hidden positions where whatever “power” or “skills” they are allowed to exercise are automatically devalued. No matter how much some may protest that the role of housewife and mother are critical for the future of society, for example, men who choose to adopt such roles are derided and their masculinity is questioned.

Glorifying the fetus is an effective tactic in promoting a patriarchal agenda because it allows people to subordinate women’s autonomy and civil rights without admitting that that’s what they are doing. They can claim altruistic motives on behalf of the fetus in a manner that is analogous to how more general civil rights are narrowed on the basis of calls to “protect the children” from some amorphous threat. So long as somewhere, somehow, some child may be threatened, it’s acceptable for the basic liberties and civil rights of everyone to be constrained.

In both cases, it is clear that concern for the children or the fetuses isn’t really motivating them because all their “concern” seems to end once we stop talking about limiting the rights of others as part of the protection efforts. If you try to turn the conversation towards increased food assistance, better education, environmental cleanups, and so forth, suddenly you’re a socialist who is trying to inappropriately infringe on the economic liberties of the wealthy.

This is also why contraception is becoming a focus of concern by the same people: contraception allows women to avoid becoming pregnant and thereby becoming subject to fetus-based restrictions on female autonomy. A woman who chooses when and if she becomes pregnant is a woman exercising personal autonomy and personal choices, precisely what theses religious conservatives oppose. No fetus even exists yet, so obviously the opposition to contraception isn’t motivated by a desire to defend one. Instead, it’s motivated by a desire to create more fetuses and thus create more situations where women can be denied the ability to exercise personal autonomy.

It’s not just female autonomy that is targeted by religious conservatives,. All autonomy is subject to attack because personal, human autonomy means having the ability to act contrary to the will of God. Autonomy is simply another label for blasphemy and apostasy as far as some Christian Nationalists are concerned. It’s not a coincidence that the most frequent targets of censorship or other restrictions on civil liberties are also often the ones which create the most consternation for devout religious believers.

It’s theoretically possible to favor criminalizing abortions while opposing the establishment of a stronger faith-based patriarchy throughout politics and culture, but working for the former in today’s political context means helping people who are working for the latter. It’s a bit like someone favoring a national fingerprint and DNA database of all citizens while opposing the establishment of a fascist or dictatorial government. Sure, it’s theoretically possible, but even in the current climate supporting the former means making the latter much more likely; in a climate where there is a large, powerful political movement trying to achieve the latter, no one pushing the former could legitimately feign ignorance or innocence.

So regardless of how strongly they protest their opposition to patriarchy and faith-based oppression of women, anyone who supports restrictions on or the criminalization of abortion is objectively aiding and abetting precisely those goals. Politically speaking, what’s the difference between them and someone who does indeed actively desire those goals?

Newt Gingrich | Dangerous Right Wing Freakshow


Via:-|Noam Sheizaf

Newt Gingrich: The most dangerous man in DC

There won’t be a real difference between another Obama term and a possible Romney presidency. But Gingrich – with his ties to the Israeli right, destructive track record from the 1990s and very personal connection to Netanyahu – could turn out to be a real nightmare

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. More electable than Romney (photo: Gage Skidmore / CC-BY-SA-3.0)

Watching the American primaries makes for a mix of fun and moments of deep anxiety. Most of the time it’s like a good sports match, but every now and then you are reminded that the identity of the winner might have a real and clear impact on your life. After all, Israel has stopped being a foreign affairs issue in Washington a long time ago. Our very local politics are part of the strange and unpredictable American culture war; and – to quote Dimi Reider – our policies are often shaped by the myths, values and fears of people living far-far away.

After signaling Israel as a topic through which they can score easy points against the administration, the Republicans are engaged in an all-out competition over who is more Zionist. Some of the ideas they are promoting would put them in the hard right in Israel, somewhere between the radical settlers and the heirs of Kahane. Often, they simply betray a very misinformed and shallow view of the political reality. For example, even a right-wing Israeli government would hesitate before following Rick Santorum’s advice to annex the West Bank, since it would constitute a formal adoption of apartheid.

The two remaining viable candidates, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, are more knowledgeable and less prone to statements whose meaning they don’t fully understand.

Romney is a careful man. Seeing himself as the “inevitable” candidate, he is careful not to box himself in positions that could make his life as president harder. The former governor hasn’t committed to moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem; he has refrained making degrading remarks like the one Gingrich made about the Palestinians, or from advocating ethnic cleansing like Mike Huckabee.

I would even go so far as to say that I don’t see a great difference between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Except for a brief moment in the first year of his presidency, Obama has continued with the approach of previous administrations, providing a diplomatic umbrella for the Israeli occupation while trying – with varying degrees of success – to somewhat slow settlement construction.

President Romney is likely to continue this path, while advocating the renewal of the “peace process” on Israel’s terms. One could even argue that a “moderate” Republican president would actually help progressives by forcing the Democrats to attack the administration’s Middle East policy from the left – something they are reluctant to do now. But even if you don’t buy this, given the last three years, there is little reason to believe that Romney would be that different from Obama or George W. Bush on the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

Newt Gingrich as the American Ariel Sharon

Newt Gingrich is a different story. Gingrich – a personal friend of Benjamin Netanyahu and a protégé of right-wing gambling billionaire Sheldon Adelson – is a real supporter of the settlements and the occupation; his views of the Palestinians are as distorted as they come; and he has shown his inclination to be more “pro-Israel” than Israelis themselves, when he helped Netanyahu in the 1990s in his efforts against the Rabin government and the peace process.

America’s current policies are bad enough, but Gingrich is smart enough, well-connected to the Israeli right and ruthless enough to cause way more damage than any other president we have seen. Other candidates – especially those on the evangelical right – seem to be just saying anything that sounds conservative on the Israeli issue. If elected, their inflammatory statements will have to meet the test of political reality. Newt, on the other hand, seems to mean what he is saying. His madness is all too real. By following one of his “out-of-the-box” ideas, he will set the region on fire.

The common wisdom is that Gingrich is unelectable. I find this to be only half true. Of the two leading Republican candidates, I think Gingrich is the more dangerous one. He is the one who could lose big time, but also pull a stunning upset against a sitting president. Romney, on the other hand, seems like the guy who would finish an honorable second.

I shared this thought with some American friends and they all dismissed it, saying that the Democrats would thank their lucky stars if Gingrich were to beat Romney. Perhaps. But to me, Gingrich seems like the American Ariel Sharon – an unelectable, unpopular politician, who came back from the political desert to lead his party due to unique circumstances, and during the time of national crisis was able to change the national conversation and win elections in a landslide.

Ariel Sharon was a corrupt outsider with a strange personal history and a reputation for dark backroom deals – but ironically, at a certain point all this played in his favor: Nothing his political rivals threw at him helped, because the public had already heard all the allegations – and more – against him. Israeli voters, made anxious by the second Intifada, were ready to give Sharon a shot. Wouldn’t the American public do the same during the worst economic crisis in almost a century?

The prospect of Newt Gingrich in the White House and Benjamin Netanyahu (or Lieberman?) in the Prime Minister’s Office, unlikely as it may seem now, is something that could keep me up at night.

Read Also: 2012: Netanyahu’s shadow war for the GOP begins? The strategic use of the “anti-Israeli” label in US politics

IDF soldiers: Problem in West Bank isn’t Palestinains, it’s Jews


IDF soldiers: Problem in West Bank isn’t Palestinains, it’s Jews
‘Our purpose there is to protect the Jews, but they generate many of the problems. It’s very confusing,’ says combat soldier discharged last year.

By Gili Cohen

Recent attacks by right-wing extremists on Israel Defense Forces soldiers in the West Bank are just one manifestation of the violence to which many have been subjected during their service in recent years. Both regular and reserve soldiers, including junior officers, spoke about the complicated situation they find themselves in: having to protect the settlers while at the same time being attacked by them.

“Our purpose there is to protect the Jews, but they generate many of the problems. It’s very confusing,” said Nadav Bigelman, a combat soldier who was discharged last year.

Nadav Bigelman of Haifa. ‘It’s the same people who bring you cake at 2 A.M.’
        Photo by: Abdulla Shama
“You understand pretty quickly what is going on, but it’s not so clear what you are supposed to do about it,” he said. “We never received an order telling us what to do when a Jewish boy throws stones at a Palestinian. Are we allowed to detain him or not? There’s a gap between the battalion commander‘s instructions and what happens on the ground.

“It’s the same people who bring you cake when you’re on guard at 2 A.M.,” he added. “What, are you going to arrest their kid when he throws stones the next day?”

As Haaretz reported on Thursday, the “new instructions” the prime minister issued this week to deal with Jewish rioters in the West Bank had for the most part already been in force on paper. But authority to act in principle does not always translate into clear orders out in the field. What counts there are the personal relations between settler leaders and IDF commanders.

A reservist platoon commander who served in the South Hebron Hills about three months ago said he had discussed the possibility of friction between settlers and Palestinians with his commanders beforehand. But nothing prepared him for the confrontation at the Mitzpeh Eshtamoa outpost, where settlers and Palestinians were in a face-off over grazing ground.

“We stood as a buffer between the Palestinian shepherds and the settlers and they [the settlers] started arguing with us,” he related. “They said awful things to me: ‘[Ariel] Sharon evacuated Gaza, he got what was coming to him, don’t worry, God will see to you too. Why do you come for reserve duty? You’re a disgrace as soldiers.’ They ranted and raved. We didn’t know what to do, we were in shock. We thought the problem would be with the Palestinians, but the problem is with the Jews.

“There were 15 settlers swearing at us, not three. This is an entire community whose agenda is to treat soldiers like that. Even the chief security officer told us, ‘listen, that’s the way it is. In a few days they’ll puncture my car tires.’

“These guys [the settlers] are out of control. I guard them, I’m responsible for protecting them and I know one day they’ll sabotage my car. That’s what is going on here,” the reservist concluded.

A junior officer serving in the West Bank now said “the clashes with [settlers] are mainly at the checkpoints. They come to the checkpoints a lot and it’s beneath their dignity to wait like others, so they break through and drive on. Not many harass us, but when the moment comes to inspect them, they humiliate us. They don’t understand we’re doing security work. They’re not all like that, but the clashes with Jews at checkpoints are much worse than they are with Palestinians.”

The situation in the West Bank has turned upside down, he said. “We used to have a code for Palestinians throwing stones. Today it’s been reversed to indicate Jews are throwing stones at Palestinians.”

Bigelman, today a researcher for the Breaking the Silence organization, served in Hebron in 2008. At the time he kept a “Hebron diary” documenting settlers’ violent activities, from stone throwing to cursing Palestinians, tourists and left-wing activists. One day a settler attacked his battalion commander during an argument and tore his epaulets off.

“That’s the clearest example,” Bigelman said. “Here is a man who is sacrificing his life for them. Suddenly they don’t like something he does, and that’s the way they react?

“And if it happens to your commander, what does it say about you? That you can’t do anything. You hate it. You hate being there. You know whom you’re protecting but you don’t understand why you have to pay such a price for it.”

Republican Gomorrah | Jane Smiley Reviews


Jane Smiley Reviews “Republican Gomorrah

By Max
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley on Republican Gomorrah: Terrific...but appalling.Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley on Republican Gomorrah: “Terrific…but appalling.”

Jane Smiley’s review, from the Huffington Post:

About twenty years ago, I read an article about a death row inmate who had shot a clerk in a convenience store. The way the murder was presented by the man on death row was mysterious–his hand just rose up and the gun went off. Shooting the clerk in the face in the midst of a robbery wasn’t in fact his fault. He never said, “I shot a man.” It just happened.

I thought of that man while reading Max Blumenthal’s terrific, but also, of course, appalling new book, Republican Gomorrah. Apparently there isn’t a single person in the present incarnation of the Republican party who does anything. Things happen–God does it. Satan does it. No Republican is an agent of his or her own success or failure, sin or redemption. It just happens.

The consequences of this lack of responsibility are there for all to see–screaming threats, guns at rallies, unhinged behavior every time a Republican doesn’t feel the way he or she wants to feel, absolute sense of powerlessness leading directly to an absolute will to power. Because that was the thing that struck me about the murderer in the 7-11–he had the power and in his own last moments, the clerk knew it. But the killer, no matter how well armed, never felt it.

Republican Gomorrah is a frightening book because it is clear to all of us on the outside that the various Republican operatives who surround James Dobson and his ilk have no consciences and will stop at nothing. They invoke the name of God for purposes that shame God absolutely–hurting, destroying, maiming, and damning others who either don’t accept their beliefs or don’t acknowledge their power and righteousness. Of course that is frightening.

 

But Blumenthal’s cast of characters, beginning with Dobson and his prodigal son, Ryan, and including John Hagee, Sarah Palin, Ralph Reed, Charles Colson, Judith Reisman, Christina Regnery, Donald Wildmon, et al. strike the reader as above all else very small–egocentric, narrow minded, uneducated, selfish, and resentful. Each of these qualities is destructive in and of itself. The combination is turning out to be coercive. Even those of us who are immune to the emotions these people play upon are getting more and more nervous about the power that they wish to exert.

Blumenthal does two things that no one else I have read manages to do–the first of these is that he organizes the network. He shows how Ted Bundy is connected to James Dobson is connected to Gary Bauer is connected to Erik Prince is connected to Ralph Reed is connected to Jack Abramoff is connected to Tom Delay is connected to Tony Perkins is connected to David Duke is connected to Mel Gibson, and so forth, and in the course of tracing these connections, he informs us, or reminds us, of the crimes and misdemeanors these people have committed.

Two of my favorites are James Dobson’s son Ryan’s messy divorce (Dad seems to have paid the settlement–did he not dare to discipline? Or did he discipline too much?) and David Vitter’s habitual recourse to a brothel in New Orleans where Republicans “wanted to be spanked and tortured and wear stockings–Republicans have impeccable taste in silk stockings” (the madam is talking about men). Republican Gomorrah is full of crimes–both those we’ve already heard of, such as Abramoff’s and Ted Haggard’s, and those we haven’t (there is good evidence that Texas billionaire T. Cullen Davis, funder of the right wing Council For National Policy, ordered hits on his estranged wife, and succeeded in murdering his step-daughter and the wife’s boyfriend).

This aspect of the book reminds me of a Scottish novel called The Private Memoirs And Confessions Of A Justified Sinner by James Hogg, in which, once a man believes he is among the saved, he can commit any sin he wants to and be sure he will go to heaven. Once Davis was “saved,” for example, he said, “My goal is to get to heaven. I’ll do anything it takes to get there, and I’m not going to let anything stand in my way.” He must have thought getting to heaven was just another power play.

And power plays are the key to right wing psychology. Right wing psychology is the other thing that Blumenthal has to offer. At the periphery of this world is your run-of-the-mill bully, a man like Jack Abramoff, whose brutality is well remembered by his high school classmates, but who sang like a bird once he was caught. At the center of is James Dobson, a much more destructive figure than Abramoff, who advocates, in the strongest terms, child beating, and not only child-beating, but dog-beating. At one point he brags about going after the family canine (who weighed twelve pounds) and engaging in “the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast.” As for children, the goal is to keep beating the child until “he wants(s) to crumple on the breast of his parent.” In other words, Dobson is a proud sadist who thinks sadism is kind of funny, and who, over the years, has successfully advocated sadism as the only workable form of child-rearing.

It order to understand the deeply disturbing effect Dobson and his theories have had on our culture, Blumenthal cites Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, about the psychology of Nazism and authoritarianism, and Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer. Insofar as he finds the documentation, Blumenthal points out how many of these powerful Evangelical Christians were beaten and abused as children (including Dobson). It’s a high number. The beatings, often arbitrary, cruel, and frequent, were then, in many cases, backed up with constant lessons about God–that he is arbitrary, that he is cruel, that he demands obedience above all things, and that he surpasseth understanding. The point of these exercises is to establish the powerlessness of the child, his shame and guilt as a worthless sinner, and his absolute fear of thinking for himself. He will then take his place in the hierarchy and thereby reinforce the existence of the hierarchy.

Blumenthal goes pretty far with this psychology, but, in my view, not far enough. I’m sure he was reared by liberal parents, who gave him a sense of responsibility, curiosity, and autonomy, and since he is only in his thirties, I don’t think that he really empathizes with the tortured and damaged souls that he has been interviewing and watching for the last few years. I don’t think he understands their fear–how deep it is, how constant it is, and how arousing it is. I don’t think, in fact, that Max Blumenthal looks within and sees evil. I think he looks within, and says, “I’m okay; you’re okay.” That’s the goal of liberal parenting, and as we can tell by statistics he cites concerning unwed pregnancy, divorce, and occurrence of STDs, liberal parenting works–atheists and agnostics, for example, have a much lower rate of divorce than Evangelicals, and states that have sex education in the schools, rather than abstinence-only education, have lower rates of teen pregnancy.

But a child who is beaten enough eventually comes to understand two things above all–that the world makes no sense (and so why try to make sense of it?) and that the world is so dangerous that to be oneself, or even to try to figure out what oneself might be, is a death-defying exercise. There is safety only in two things–conforming to a group and, as a part of that group, dominating and even destroying other groups. The rules of the group can be anything at all, as long as the members of the group abide by them. And other groups have to abide by them, too, or the painful and arbitrary rules that group abides by are meaningless. The beaten child’s sense of terror can only be assuaged by evanescent feelings of power, because in relation to his parents and to God, he is defined as powerless. When he “crumples” on the “loving” breast of his parent (and in my view a person who administers a beating to a living being who is 1/16th his size doesn’t know what love is) he accepts his powerlessness and he also accepts that power is what defines this life. That’s where your freedom and mine come in.

Many of the Evangelicals Blumenthal discusses are Christian Dominionists–that is, they differ from the Taliban only in their choice of doctrine. Their uses of that doctrine (to dehumanize women and other groups, to never share power, to control every aspect of every life within their power, and to create society as a steeply hierarchical structure with them at the top) are those of the Taliban.

It’s an eye-opener to read about R.J. Rushdoony, son of Armenian immigrants who fled the Armenian genocide of 1915. You would think that a man whose family escaped mass murder would go on to espouse peace, love, and understanding, but Rushdoony went the other way, taking literally the 613 laws in the Book of Leviticus. In his book, The Institutes of Biblical Law, he advocates capital punishment for “disobedient children, unchaste women, apostates, blasphemers, practitioners of witchcraft, adulterers,” and homosexuals. Gary North, the Presbyterian Christian Reconstructionist, is his son-in-law, and, while not backing down on the mass death penalty, advocates stoning rather than burning at the stake, because stoning is cheaper (and of course that is a factor, because there would be a lot of people to exterminate). As for who would be doing the killing (of you and me, if they could catch us), well, Christians would, but not because they wanted to. Ever unable to accept responsibility, they assign agency to God, who wants us killed, who will beat us until we “crumple” on his “loving” breast, a God who has given us all sorts of talents, skills, and interests, but is, like these Christian Dominionists, interested only in power. I believe his motto is “Adore me or I will hurt you.”

Can you believe in a God so small? When I was a parent of young children, I, too, got frustrated, and I, too, thought a spanking might be a good thing. I soon realized that my motives for administering physical punishment were highly suspect–more anger and frustration than care for the child or knowledge about effective methods. I then saw a show about child-rearing, in which a woman who firmly believed in child-beating aroused far more resistance in her beaten daughter, and had much more family disruption, than the parents who ignored the tantrum and then used the technique of redirection to train their toddlers. Works with horses, dogs, and other animals, too. It was then I decided that if I, in my human weakness, could put two and two together concerning free will and proper behavior, surely God could, also. I didn’t want to believe in a God who was a smaller being than myself. And I don’t.

The ray of hope in Blumenthal’s book is that the right-wingers he talks about tend to be so psychologically unstable that they don’t have much staying power–think Ted Haggard. But they have numbers. The bad thing about that is that they could take control. The defeat of Sarah Palin, Conrad Burns (R-MT), George Allen (R-VA), Rick Santorum (R-PA), James Talent (R-MO), and Mike DeWine (R-OH) brought us “back from the brink” according to the website Theocracy Watch. But only back from the brink. The good thing is that they would not be able to maintain what we call a government for very long (see George W. Bush). The bad thing is that they would destroy the country as we know it while they were trying. If I take the long view, well, I think, Stalinism lasted about 25 years, Nazism 12. The Iranian Mullahs have been at it for 30 years. Russia and Germany survived, Iran might, as well. But generations were lost in all these places. And Stalin and Hitler didn’t have nuclear weapons.

I think about the 22-year-old clerk in that convenience store, looking down the barrel of that pistol. He probably had no idea that his killer had no sense of agency, hardly even knew what he was doing, was seeing his hand as separate from himself. But I have to feel sorry for the killer, too, subject to feelings that he could not label that were terrifying and overpowering. I bet he was beaten, shamed, and neglected as a child. I bet, afterward, he wished someone, somehow, had stopped him.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/republican-gomorrah_b_290293.html

The World War on Democracy


World War on Democracy

by: John Pilger, Truthout  | News Analysis

B-1B Lancer Bombers on a runway at Diego Garcia, November, 2001, during the bombing campaign in Afghanistan. (Photo: Senior Airman Rebeca M. Luquin, U.S. Air Force)

Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was the embodiment of people’s resistance to the war on democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos islanders, a tiny creole nation located midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean.

The camera panned across thriving villages, a church, a school, a hospital, set in a phenomenon of natural beauty and peace. Lisette remembers the producer saying to her and her teenage friends, “Keep smiling girls!”

Sitting in her kitchen in Mauritius many years later, she said, “I didn’t have to be told to smile. I was a happy child, because my roots were deep in the islands, my paradise. My great-grandmother was born there; I made six children there. That’s why they couldn’t legally throw us out of our own homes; they had to terrify us into leaving or force us out. At first, they tried to starve us. The food ships stopped arriving [then] they spread rumours we would be bombed, then they turned on our dogs.”

In the early 1960s, the Labour government of Harold Wilson secretly agreed to a demand from Washington that the Chagos archipelago, a British colony, be “swept” and “sanitised” of its 2,500 inhabitants so that a military base could be built on the principal island, Diego Garcia. “They knew we were inseparable from our pets,” said Lisette, “When the American soldiers arrived to build the base, they backed their big trucks against the brick shed where we prepared the coconuts; hundreds of our dogs had been rounded up and imprisoned there. Then they gassed them through tubes from the trucks’ exhausts. You could hear them crying.”

Lisette and her family and hundreds of islanders were forced onto a rusting steamer bound for Mauritius, a distance of 2,500 miles. They were made to sleep in the hold on a cargo of fertilizer: bird shit. The weather was rough; everyone was ill; two women miscarried. Dumped on the docks at Port Louis, Lisette’s youngest children, Jollice and Regis, died within a week of each other. “They died of sadness,” she said. “They had heard all the talk and seen the horror of what had happened to the dogs. They knew they were leaving their home forever. The doctor in Mauritius said he could not treat sadness.”

This act of mass kidnapping was carried out in high secrecy. In one official file, under the heading, “Maintaining the fiction,” the Foreign Office legal adviser exhorts his colleagues to cover their actions by “re-classifying” the population as “floating” and to “make up the rules as we go along.” Article 7 of the statute of the International Criminal Court says the “deportation or forcible transfer of population” is a crime against humanity. That Britain had committed such a crime – in exchange for a $14 million discount off an American Polaris nuclear submarine – was not on the agenda of a group of British “defence” correspondents flown to the Chagos by the Ministry of Defence when the US base was completed. “There is nothing in our files,” said a ministry official, “about inhabitants or an evacuation.”

Today, Diego Garcia is crucial to America’s and Britain’s war on democracy. The heaviest bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan was launched from its vast airstrips, beyond which the islanders’ abandoned cemetery and church stand like archaeological ruins. The terraced garden where Lisette laughed for the camera is now a fortress housing the “bunker-busting” bombs carried by bat-shaped B-2 aircraft to targets in two continents; an attack on Iran will start here. As if to complete the emblem of rampant, criminal power, the CIA added a Guantanamo-style prison for its “rendition” victims and called it Camp Justice.

What was done to Lisette’s paradise has an urgent and universal meaning, for it represents the violent, ruthless nature of a whole system behind its democratic façade, and the scale of our own indoctrination to its messianic assumptions, described by Harold Pinter as a “brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.” Longer and bloodier than any war since 1945, waged with demonic weapons, a gangsterism dressed as economic policy and sometimes known as globalization, the war on democracy is unmentionable in Western elite circles. As Pinter wrote, “it never happened even while it was happening.” Last July, American historian William Blum published his “updated summary of the record of US foreign policy.” Since the Second World War, the US has:

  1. Attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of them democratically elected.
  2. Attempted to suppress a populist or national movement in 20 countries.
  3. Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
  4. Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.
  5. Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.

In total, the United States has carried out one or more of these actions in 69 countries. In almost all cases, Britain has been a collaborator. The “enemy” changes in name – from communism to Islamism – but mostly it is the rise of democracy independent of Western power or a society occupying strategically useful territory, deemed expendable, like the Chagos Islands.

The sheer scale of suffering, let alone criminality, is little known in the West, despite the presence of the world’s most advanced communications, nominally freest journalism and most admired academy. That the most numerous victims of terrorism – Western terrorism – are Muslims is unsayable, if it is known. That half a million Iraqi infants died in the 1990s as a result of the embargo imposed by Britain and America is of no interest. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured as a weapon of Western policy (“Operation Cyclone”) is known to specialists, but otherwise suppressed.

While popular culture in Britain and America immerses the Second World War in an ethical bath for the victors, the holocausts arising from Anglo-American dominance of resource-rich regions are consigned to oblivion. Under the Indonesian tyrant Suharto, anointed “our man” by Thatcher, more than a million people were slaughtered. Described by the CIA as “the worst mass murder of the second half of the 20th century,” the estimate does not include a third of the population of East Timor, who were starved or murdered with Western connivance, British fighter bombers and machine guns.

These true stories are told in declassified files in the Public Record Office, yet represent an entire dimension of politics and the exercise of power excluded from public consideration. This has been achieved by a regime of noncoercive information control, from the evangelical mantra of consumer advertising to sound bites on BBC news and, now, the ephemera of social media.

It is as if writers as watchdogs are extinct, or in thrall to a sociopathic zeitgeist, convinced they are too clever to be duped. Witness the stampede of sycophants eager to deify Christopher Hitchens, a war lover who longed to be allowed to justify the crimes of rapacious power. “For almost the first time in two centuries,” wrote Terry Eagleton, “there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the Western way of life.” No Orwell warns that we do not need to live in a totalitarian society to be corrupted by totalitarianism. No Shelley speaks for the poor; no Blake proffers a vision; no Wilde reminds us that “disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue.” And, grievously, no Pinter rages at the war machine, as in “American Football”:

Hallelujah. Praise the Lord for all good things … We blew their balls into shards of dust, Into shards of fucking dust …

Into shards of fucking dust go all the lives blown there by Barack Obama, the Hopey Changey of Western violence. Whenever one of Obama’s drones wipes out an entire family in a faraway tribal region of Pakistan, or Somalia, or Yemen, the American controllers in front of their computer-game screens type in “Bugsplat.” Obama likes drones and has joked about them with journalists. One of his first actions as president was to order a wave of Predator drone attacks on Pakistan that killed 74 people. He has since killed thousands, mostly civilians; drones fire Hellfire missiles that suck the air out of the lungs of children and leave body parts festooned across scrubland.

Remember the tear-stained headlines when Brand Obama was elected: “momentous, spine-tingling”: The Guardian UK. “The American future,” wrote Simon Schama, “is all vision, numinous, unformed, light-headed …” The San Francisco Chronicle’s columnist saw a spiritual “lightworker [who can] usher in a new way of being on the planet.” Beyond the drivel, as the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg had predicted, a military coup was taking place in Washington, and Obama was their man. Having seduced the anti-war movement into virtual silence, he has given America’s corrupt military officer class unprecedented powers of state and engagement. These include the prospect of wars in Africa and opportunities for provocations against China, America’s largest creditor and new “enemy” in Asia. Under Obama, the old source of official paranoia Russia, has been encircled with ballistic missiles and the Russian opposition infiltrated. Military and CIA assassination teams have been assigned to 120 countries; long-planned attacks on Syria and Iran beckon a world war. Israel, the exemplar of US violence and lawlessness by proxy, has just received its annual pocket money of $3 billion together with Obama’s permission to steal more Palestinian land.

Obama’s most “historic” achievement is to bring the war on democracy home to America. On New Year’s Eve, he signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a law that grants the Pentagon the legal right to kidnap both foreigners and US citizens and indefinitely detain, interrogate and torture, or even kill them. They need only “associate” with those “belligerent” to the United States. There will be no protection of law, no trial, no legal representation. This is the first explicit legislation to abolish habeas corpus (the right to due process of law) and effectively repeal the Bill of Rights of 1789.

On 5 January, in an extraordinary speech at the Pentagon, Obama said the military would not only be ready to “secure territory and populations” overseas, but to fight in the “homeland” and provide “support to the civil authorities.” In other words, US troops will be deployed on the streets of American cities when the inevitable civil unrest takes hold.

America is now a land of epidemic poverty and barbaric prisons: the consequence of a “market” extremism which, under Obama, has prompted the transfer of $14 trillion in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall Street. The victims are mostly young jobless, homeless, incarcerated African-Americans, betrayed by the first black president. The historic corollary of a perpetual war state, this is not fascism, not yet, but neither is it democracy in any recognizable form, regardless of the placebo politics that will consume the news until November. The presidential campaign, says The Washington Post, will “feature a clash of philosophies rooted in distinctly different views of the economy.” This is patently false. The circumscribed task of journalism on both sides of the Atlantic is to create the pretence of political choice where there is none.

The same shadow is across Britain and much of Europe, where social democracy, an article of faith two generations ago, has fallen to the central bank dictators. In David Cameron’s “big society,” the theft of 84 billion pounds in jobs and services even exceeds the amount of tax “legally” avoid by piratical corporations. Blame rests not with the far right, but a cowardly, liberal political culture that has allowed this to happen, which, wrote Hywel Williams in the wake of the attacks on 9/11, “can itself be a form of self righteous fanaticism.” Tony Blair is one such fanatic. In its managerial indifference to the freedoms that it claims to hold dear, bourgeois Blairite Britain has created a surveillance state with 3,000 new criminal offenses and laws: more than for the whole of the previous century. The police clearly believe they have an impunity to kill. At the demand of the CIA, cases like that of Binyam Mohamed, an innocent British resident tortured and then held for five years in Guantanamo Bay, will be dealt with in secret courts in Britain “in order to protect the intelligence agencies” – the torturers.

This invisible state allowed the Blair government to fight the Chagos islanders as they rose from their despair in exile and demanded justice in the streets of Port Louis and London. “Only when you take direct action, face to face, even break laws, are you ever noticed,” said Lisette. “And the smaller you are, the greater your example to others.” Such an eloquent answer to those who still ask, “What can I do?”

I last saw Lisette’s tiny figure standing in driving rain alongside her comrades outside the Houses of Parliament. What struck me was the enduring courage of their resistance. It is this refusal to give up that rotten power fears, above all, knowing it is the seed beneath the snow.


 John PilgerJohn 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.”

 

Gingrich Demands Yahoo Hooters As Backup


Gingrich Can’t Debate Without a Bunch of Hooting Yahoos to Back Him Up
Newt pouts, threatens to skip debates
Via Charles Johnson

Newt Gingrich is raging at the media again, for shutting down the hooting yahoos who would normally cheer his far right race-baiting: Gingrich Threatens to Skip Debates if Audiences Can’t Participate.

Mr. Gingrich clearly noticed something was off, too. “We’re going to serve notice on future debates,” he told Fox. “We’re just not going to allow that to happen. That’s wrong. The media doesn’t control free speech. People ought to be allowed to applaud if they want to.”

For a self-proclaimed constitutional expert and historian, Newt Gingrich has a very weird concept of “free speech.”

But since Gingrich is touting himself as the only candidate who can debate Obama, he should be aware that cheers and applause are forbidden in debates during the general election, by order of the Commission on Presidential Debates. Maybe he should skip those too.

How Prayer Really Works


The Power of Prayer
prayer
This simple chart provides a fairly accurate description of why prayer serves no real purpose. Assuming that the god at which religious believers are directing their prayers has some sort of plan for them, as most Christians insist, prayer is either redundant or futile. If one’s prayer happens to coincide with the will one one’s preferred god, it ends up being redundant. On the other hand, if one’s prayer conflicts with the will of one’s preferred god, it ends up being futile. In either case, prayer serves no purpose.
I should note one important omission from the chart. Prayer, even if it has no purpose in the sense described by the chart might temporarily make a believer feel better. For this reason, one could argue that temporary self-soothing is the only purpose that could be served by prayer.

Romney Attacks Gingrich’s Record of Ethics Violations, Lobbyist Work


Romney Attacks Gingrich’s Record of Ethics Violations, Lobbyist Work
Expect more race-baiting too
Why did it take Mitt Romney so long to bring up Newt Gingrich’s record of ethics violations? Mitt Romney: Newt Gingrich is a ‘failed leader,’ ‘disgrace’.

As the GOP’s anointed successor, Romney got overconfident and relaxed on these issues, while Newt Gingrich skillfully played on the race grievances of the GOP base. Now Romney is struggling to get back on even footing with someone he didn’t think would be competition.

ORMOND BEACH, Fla. — Mitt Romney landed here Sunday with a simple message: Newt Gingrich is a failure and a fraud. And a disgrace. And a hapless showman.

Standing under a brilliant orange Florida sunset, Romney delivered his longest sustained critique of the South Carolina primary winner to date — ticking through a list as if he were reading off Gingrich’s Wikipedia page, and undercutting each item as he got to it.

“Speaker Gingrich has also been a leader,” the former Massachusetts governor said. “He was a leader for four years as speaker of the House. And at the end of four years, it was proven that he was a failed leader and he had to resign in disgrace. I don’t know whether you knew that, he actually resigned after four years, in disgrace.

Romney continued: “He was investigated over an ethics panel and had to make a payment associated with that and then his fellow Republicans, 88 percent of his Republicans voted to reprimand Speaker Gingrich. He has not had a record of successful leadership.”

Then Romney got into Gingrich’s post-congressional career.

“Over the last 15 years since he left the House, he talks about great bold movements and ideas,” he told the crowd of several hundred people gathered at a building materials company here. “Well, what’s he been doing for 15 years? He’s been working as a lobbyist, yeah, he’s been working as a lobbyist and selling influence around Washington.”

Romney Dives Into Racist Sewer With Gingrich


Mitt Romney Joins the Race-Baiters
This is what he has to do to win
What can you even say about this? Mitt Romney clearly understands that the GOP base is responding to Gingrich’s ugly race-baiting, so he’s jumping right into the sewer with Newt.

TPM’s Benjy Sarlin is at a Romney Rally in Ormond Beach, Florida and tweets that the former Gov. said “I think it’s time we had someone in the White House who knows how to create jobs because he’s had a job.”

The Republican Party is sick to its core.

UPDATE at 1/22/12 9:37:39 pm

Here’s why Mitt Romney is diving into the gutter with Newt Gingrich: according to the latest Insider Advantage polling in Florida, he’s behind Gingrich by nine points.

Newt Gingrich – 34.4 % Mitt Romney – 25.6 %

More Ron Paul Craziness


Video: Ron Paul Gives Speech on Civil War in Front of Giant Confederate Flag
One of the remaining Republican Presidential candidates spouts Civil War revisionism, standing in front of a Dixie flag
Here’s Ron Paul in a video recently posted at YouTube by one of his fans, explaining why the South was the right side in the Civil War — in front of a huge Confederate flag.

Any more questions about Ron Paul?

(h/t: Andrew Kaczynski.)

Note: in the comments for the video at YouTube, I noticed that Ron Paul followers were urging that the video be deleted before it could damage Paul’s reputation any further — so I downloaded a copy just in case.

UPDATE at 1/20/12 5:05:50 pm

And another crazy new story about the Crazy Uncle: Ron Paul Was Implicated In Attempted White Supremacist Island Invasion | News One.

In 1981, a lawyer tried to subpoena Ron Paul to testify in the trial of Don Black, a Grand Wizard for the Ku Klux Klan who would later go on to found the white supremacist, neo-Nazi website, Stormfront. Black was charged along with two other Klansmen with planning to violently overthrow the small Caribbean country of Dominica in what they called “Operation Red Dog.” While a judge refused to subpoena Paul, Don Black would come back to haunt him many years later.

In 1981 a group of American and Canadian white supremacists lead by Klansman and mercenary, Michael (Mike) Perdue planned on taking over a small West Indian country called Dominica by overthrowing the government and Prime Minister Eugenia Charles and restoring its previous prime minister, Patrick Johns into power. The group planned to create an Aryan paradise in Dominica and make money through casinos, cocaine and brothels.

On the day the group of white supremacists were supposed to travel to Dominica, they were arrested by ATF agents and were found with over thirty automatic weapons, shotguns, rifles, handguns, dynamite, ammunition, a confederate flag and a Nazi flag. The plan would be dubbed “The Bayou Of Pigs” after the failed invasion of Cuba.

The leader of the group, Michael Perdue, would plead guilty to planning the coup and turned state’s evidence. Perdue would testify that several other people helped organize and fund the coup and that two Texas politicians were aware of the plan. Among those Perdue implicated were infamous white supremacist, David Duke, former Texas Governor, John Connally and Congressman, Ron Paul whom he claimed knew about the plot. Connally was credited with helping Paul win his first congressional election.

A judge refused to subpoena Paul and Connally despite the fact that Perdue had claimed that both of them were aware of the plot.

Jewish Extremist Promotes Obama Assassination


Like fundi Islamist, Catholic, White Supremacist, Christian fascist and racist fanatics, certain Right Wing fanatic Jews also have an extremist bee in their bonnet with president Barack Obama and seek his murder.

As one Blog noted, “Who the fuck are these people? Where do they think that they fit into the “Land of the Free” ”

Gawker

Newspaper Editor: Israel Should Consider Assassinating Obama [UPDATE]

Newspaper Editor: Israel Should Consider Assassinating Obama [UPDATE]

Andrew Adler, the owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, a weekly newspaper serving Atlanta’s Jewish community, devoted his January 13, 2012 column to the thorny problem of the U.S. and Israel’s diverging views on the threat posed by Iran. Basically Israel has three options, he wrote: Strike Hezbollah and Hamas, strike Iran, or “order a hit” on Barack Obama. Either way, problem solved!

Here’s how Adler laid out “option three” in his list of scenarios facing Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu (the column, which was forwarded to us by a tipster, isn’t online, but you can read a copy here):

Three, give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place, and forcefully dictate that the United States’ policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies.

Yes, you read “three” correctly. Order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel’s existence. Think about it. If I have thought of this Tom Clancy-type scenario, don’t you think that this almost unfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel’s most inner circles?

Another way of putting “three” in perspective goes something like this: How far would you go to save a nation comprised of seven million lives…Jews, Christians and Arabs alike?

You have got to believe, like I do, that all options are on the table.

It’s hard to tell whether or not Adler is just some crank. But the Atlanta Jewish Times, which he purchased in 2009, appears to be a real community newspaper. It was founded in 1925 and, according to Wikipedia, claims a circulation of 3,500 and staff of five. To judge from its web site, it’s a going concern.

A nervous Adler told me over the phone that he wasn’t advocating Obama’s assassination by Mossad agents. “Of course not,” he said.

But do you think Israel should consider it an option? “No.”

But do you believe that Israel is in fact considering the option in its most inner circles? “No. Actually, no. I was hoping to make clear that it’s unspeakable—god forbid this would ever happen. I take it you’re quoting me?”

Yes. “Oh, boy.”

When I asked Adler why, if he didn’t advocate assassination and didn’t believe Israel was actually considering it, he wrote a column saying he believed that the option was “on the table,” he asked for a minute to compose himself and call me back. He did a few moments later, and said, “I wrote it to see what kind of reaction I was going to get from readers.”

And what was the reaction? “We’ve gotten a lot of calls and emails.”

Nothing from the Secret Service, though. Yet.

UPDATE: Adler has told JTA that he “regrets” the column and plans to publish an apology. Oh, and the Secret Service says it will “make all appropriate, investigative follow-up in regard to this matter,” according to ABC News.

[Image via Getty]

For God So Loved the 1 Percent …


For God So Loved the 1 Percent …
By KEVIN M. KRUSE

Princeton, N.J.

IN recent weeks Mitt Romney has become the poster child for unchecked capitalism, a role he seems to embrace with relish. Concerns about economic equality, he told Matt Lauer of NBC, were really about class warfare.

“When you have a president encouraging the idea of dividing America based on the 99 percent versus 1 percent,” he said, “you have opened up a whole new wave of approach in this country which is entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God.”

Mr. Romney was on to something, though perhaps not what he intended.

Holly Gressley

The concept of “one nation under God” has a noble lineage, originating in Abraham Lincoln’s hope at Gettysburg that “this nation, under God, shall not perish from the earth.” After Lincoln, however, the phrase disappeared from political discourse for decades. But it re-emerged in the mid-20th century, under a much different guise: corporate leaders and conservative clergymen deployed it to discredit Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

During the Great Depression, the prestige of big business sank along with stock prices. Corporate leaders worked frantically to restore their public image and simultaneously roll back the “creeping socialism” of the welfare state. Notably, the American Liberty League, financed by corporations like DuPont and General Motors, made an aggressive case for capitalism. Most, however, dismissed its efforts as self-interested propaganda. (A Democratic Party official joked that the organization should have been called “the American Cellophane League” because “first, it’s a DuPont product and, second, you can see right through it.”)

Realizing that they needed to rely on others, these businessmen took a new tack: using generous financing to enlist sympathetic clergymen as their champions. After all, according to one tycoon, polls showed that, “of all the groups in America, ministers had more to do with molding public opinion” than any other.

The Rev. James W. Fifield, pastor of the elite First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, led the way in championing a new union of faith and free enterprise. “The blessings of capitalism come from God,” he wrote. “A system that provides so much for the common good and happiness must flourish under the favor of the Almighty.”

Christianity, in Mr. Fifield’s interpretation, closely resembled capitalism, as both were systems in which individuals rose or fell on their own. The welfare state, meanwhile, violated most of the Ten Commandments. It made a “false idol” of the federal government, encouraged Americans to covet their neighbors’ possessions, stole from the wealthy and, ultimately, bore false witness by promising what it could never deliver.

Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, Mr. Fifield and his allies advanced a new blend of conservative religion, economics and politics that one observer aptly anointed “Christian libertarianism.” Mr. Fifield distilled his ideology into a simple but powerful phrase — “freedom under God.” With ample support from corporate patrons and business lobbies like the United States Chamber of Commerce, his gospel of godly capitalism soon spread across the country through personal lectures, weekly radio broadcasts and a monthly magazine.

In 1951, the campaign culminated in a huge Fourth of July celebration of the theme. Former President Herbert C. Hoover and Gen. Douglas MacArthur headlined an organizing committee of conservative all-stars, including celebrities like Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan, but largely comprising business titans like Conrad Hilton, J. C. Penney, Harvey Firestone Jr. and J. Howard Pew.

In an extensive public relations campaign, they encouraged communities to commemorate Independence Day with “freedom under God” ceremonies, using full-page newspaper ads trumpeting the connection between faith and free enterprise. They also held a nationwide sermon contest on the theme, with clergymen competing for cash. Countless local events were promoted by a national “Freedom Under God” radio program, produced with the help of the filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille, hosted by Jimmy Stewart and broadcast on CBS.

Ultimately, these organizers believed that they had made a lasting impression. “The very words ‘freedom under God’ have added to the vocabulary of freedom a new term,” they boasted. Soon the entire nation would think of itself as “under God.” Indeed, in 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower presided over the first presidential prayer breakfast on a “government under God” theme and worked to promote public religiosity in a variety of ways. In 1954, as this “under-God consciousness” swept the nation, Congress formally added the phrase to the Pledge of Allegiance.

In the end, Mr. Romney is correct to claim that complaints about economic inequality are inconsistent with the concept of “one nation under God.” But that’s only because the “1 percent” of an earlier era intended it that way.


Kevin M. Kruse, an associate professor of history at Princeton, is the author of the forthcoming “One Nation Under God: Corporations, Christianity, and the Rise of the Religious Right.”

Christian Terrorists Continue to Attack America


Christian Terrorists Continue to Attack America

By

Bobby Joe Rogers has been charged by police in Florida with firebombing a family planning clinic. If Rogers had been a Muslim who firebombed a synagogue, he’d be immediately branded a Muslim terrorist, leading to even more calls for profiling of Muslims in America.

Because Bobby Joe Rogers is a white Christian, though, no one in law enforcement will label his actions what they clearly are: violent Christian terrorism.

“Rogers admitted to intentionally setting fire to the clinic due to his strong disbelief in abortion,” the affidavit stated, and “he stated (he) was further fueled when he recently witnessed a young female entering the clinic while he was sitting amongst anti-abortion protesters.”

The two-story clinic had been attacked before.

It was bombed on Christmas Day in 1984, and in 1994 a doctor and a volunteer who escorted patients to and from the clinic were shot to death as they arrived. The gunman, Paul Hill, was executed in 2003. Pensacola was the site of other abortion-related violence in 1993 when Dr. David Gunn was shot and killed at another clinic by an abortion protester.

Source: The Washington Post

Terrorism is something that abortion providers have to contend with on a daily basis. It’s not “Islamofascists” who are responsible for that terrorism, though. It’s not strange, foreign, brown-skinned people who force abortion providers to work behind bullet-proof glass, wear bullet-proof vests, and hire bodyguards. No, it’s good, God-fearing, white Christians who are committing terrorism in America. And on a regular basis, too.

But of course the legal system in this country won’t treat them as terrorists and won’t even label their actions as terrorism. That’s how successful their terrorism has been: they have cowed the government into denying that the terrorism is even being committed in the first place.

At the same time, though, they have also cowed the government into treating similar acts from other groups as so “different” that they can’t be handled by the regular criminal justice system. American Christians are thus, in a sense, far more successful at their terrorism than Muslim militants in the Middle East have been.

Nazis, Racists, Bigots and Theocrats For Ron Paul


Ron Paul has a lot of racist supporters, including white supremacist website Stormfront, conspiracy theorist group the John Birch Society and neo-Confederates who believe that the South was right during the civil war. And the support is mutual. While Paul would like you to believe that his connection to racism ended with his newsletters, he has continued to address this group well into the 21st century. Take a look at Ron Paul’s top 10 most-racist supporters.

10. Willis Carto

Willis Carto is a holocaust denier, Hitler admirer and a white supremacist.  A former campaigner for segregationist candidate George Wallace, Carto founded the National Alliance with William Pierce, the author of the “Turner Diaries,” which is credited for inspiring Timothy McVeigh. Carto founded the Populist Party in 1984 and ran David Duke as a presidential candidate.  Carto also founded the American Free Press, which is labeled as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), where Paul’s column runs. Paul has not sued Carto for running his column or explained how it wound up in a white supremacist publication. The New York Times writes that Paul used the subscription list to a white supremacist publication of Carto’s to solicit donations.

9. Chuck Baldwin

Chuck Baldwin is a neo-Confederate New World Order conspiracy theorist who praises the confederacy and  its leaders, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, and calls the Civil War the “War of Northern Aggression.” Baldwin writes a weekly column on the white supremacist site Vdare and is a proud supporter of American militia movements. Baldwin is also an Islamaphobe and homophobe.

Not only did Baldwin endorse Paul for president in 2007, but Paul returned the favor, endorsing Baldwin, who he calls his “friend,” for president in 2008. While Paul was quick to criticize Michele Bachmann for her Islamaphobia, he has said nothing about Baldwin’s, the man he endorsed for president. Here are some choice quotes from Baldwin:

I believe homosexuality is moral perversion and deserves no special consideration under the law. I believe the South was right in the War Between the States, and I am not a racist. I believe there is a conspiracy by elitists within government and big business to steal America’s independence. The Muslim religion has been a bloody, murderous religion since its inception.

8. Don Black

Don Black is a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, a current member of the American Nazi Party, and the owner and operator of the white supremacist site Stormfront. Black regularly organizes “money bombs” for Ron and Rand Paul and has even taken a picture with Ron Paul, who refused to return donations from Black and Stormfront even with the political tradition of not accepting donations from people who seem unfit. Black, who was sentenced to three years in jail for trying to overthrow the Caribbean country of Dominica in 1981, supports Paul through his Twitter account and on message boards for Stormfront.

Black told the New York Times that it was Paul’s newsletters that inspired him to be a supporter:

That was a big part of his constituency, the paleoconservatives who think there are race problems in this country.

7. Lew Rockwell

Lew Rockwell is a close friend and adviser of Paul’s who served as his congressional chief of staff between 1978 and 1982, worked as a paid consultant for Paul for more than 20 years, and was an editor and alleged ghost writer for his racist newsletters. Rockwell formed the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, which Paul still has a close working relationship with.

The Ludwig Von Mises Institute is listed by the SPLC as a neo-Confederate organization. They also add that Rockwell said that the Civil War “transformed the American regime from a federalist system based on freedom to a centralized state that circumscribed liberty in the name of public order” and that the Civil Rights Movement was the  “involuntary servitude” of (presumably white) business owners. Rockwell was listed as one of the racist League of the South’s founding members but denies membership. Rockwell regularly posts articles on his website, attacking a New World Order conspiracy.

6. David Duke

David Duke is a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and candidate for Governor of Louisiana. Duke is also a New World Order conspiracy theorist who believes that Jews control the Federal Reserve. On his website, Duke proudly boasts about the endorsements and kind words that Paul gave him in his newsletters and in turn endorses Paul for president:

Duke’s platform called for tax cuts, no quotas, no affirmative action, no welfare, and no busing… To many voters, this seems like just plain good sense. Duke carried baggage from his past, the voters were willing to overlook that. If he had been afforded the forgiveness an ex-communist gets, he might have won. …David Broder, also of the Post and equally liberal, writing on an entirely different subject, had it right: ‘No one wants to talk about race publicly, but if you ask any campaign consultant or pollster privately, the sad reality that a great many working-class and middle class white Americans are far less hostile to the rich and their tax breaks than they are to the poor and minorities with their welfare and affirmative action programs.” Liberals are notoriously blind to the sociological effects of their own programs. David Duke was hurt by his past. How many more Dukes are waiting in the wings without such a taint?

“Duke lost the election,” it said, “but he scared the blazes out of the Establishment.” In 1991, a newsletter asked, “Is David Duke’s new prominence, despite his losing the gubernatorial election, good for anti-big government forces?” The conclusion was that “our priority should be to take the anti-government, anti-tax, anti-crime, anti-welfare loafers, anti-race privilege, anti-foreign meddling message of Duke, and enclose it in a more consistent package of freedom.”

Duke also gave advice to Paul on his website, saying:

What must Paul do to have any real chance of winning or making a bigger impact? I think he should do exactly what I did in Louisiana, and for Ron Paul to follow exactly the same advice Ron Paul gave in his newsletters for others, take up my campaign issues with passion and purpose.

Could it be that Paul is taking Duke’s advice by hiding the racist “baggage from his past” in a more consistent package of “freedom?”

5. Thomas DiLorenzo

Thomas DiLorenzo is another neo-Confederate who believes the South was right in the the civil war and that Abraham Lincoln was a wicked man who destroyed states’ rights. DiLorenzo is listed as an affiliated scholar with the racist League of the South, which promotes segregation and a new southern secession. Paul invited DiLorenzo to testify before congress about the Federal Reserve and is close friends with Paul and works for the Ludwig Von Mises Instiute. Paul cited DiLorezno’s book when telling Tim Russert that the North should not have fought the Civil War.

4. James Von Brunn

James Von Brunn was a white supremacist and anti-Semite who opened fired at the Holocaust museum, killing an African-American security guard. Von Brunn was an avid Paul supporter who posted a message on the Ron Paul Yahoo Group, saying, “HITLER’S WORST MISTAKE: HE DIDN’T GAS THE JEWS.” In 1983, Von Brunn was convicted of kidnapping members of the Federal Reserve Board, a common target of Paul’s, and was sentenced to six years in prison.Von Brunn died while awaiting sentencing for his crime.

3. William Alexander “Bill” White

Bill White is a neo-Nazi who is a former member of of the neo-Nazi group the National Socialist Movement and founder of his own Nazi group, the National Socialist Worker’s Movement. He has called for the lynching of the Jena 6 and the assassination of NAACP leaders. White previously campaigned for Pat Buchanan and the Reform party. This year, White was convicted of threatening a juror but then freed by a judge who called the threats free speech. White is a former Ron Paul supporter who became disenfranchised with Paul, when a Paul spokesman called white supremacy “a small ideology.” Here is what White wrote about Paul on a popular white supremacist website:

I have kept quiet about the Ron Paul campaign for a while, because I didn’t see any need to say anything that would cause any trouble. However, reading the latest release from his campaign spokesman, I am compelled to tell the truth about Ron Paul’s extensive involvement in white nationalism.

Both Congressman Paul and his aides regularly meet with members of the Stormfront set, American Renaissance, the Institute for Historic Review, and others at the Tara Thai restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, usually on Wednesdays. This is part of a dinner that was originally organized by Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis and Joe Sobran, and has since been mostly taken over by the Council of Conservative Citizens.

I have attended these dinners, seen Paul and his aides there, and been invited to his offices in Washington to discuss policy.

For his spokesman to call white racialism a “small ideology” and claim white activists are “wasting their money” trying to influence Paul is ridiculous. Paul is a white nationalist of the Stormfront type who has always kept his racial views and his views about world Judaism quiet because of his political position.

I don’t know that it is necessarily good for Paul to “expose” this. However, he really is someone with extensive ties to white nationalism and for him to deny that in the belief he will be more respectable by denying it is outrageous – and I hate seeing people in the press who denounce racialism merely because they think it is not fashionable

Bill White, Commander American National Socialist Workers Party

Ron Paul has not sued White for libel, which would be in his rights to do if White’s statement’s were lies. White is out of jail and has not lost credibility in the white supremacist world, writing for the neo-Nazi website the American Free Press and the same paper that used to carry Paul’s column.

2. Richard Poplawski

Richard Poplawski is a neo-Nazi from Pittsburgh who regularly posted on the neo-Nazi website Stormfront. Poplawski would post videos of Ron Paul talking about FEMA camp conspiracy theories with Glenn Beck.

Polawski was afraid of a government conspiracy to take away people’s guns and wound up killing three police officers who came to his house after his mother made a domestic dispute call.

1. Jules Manson

Jules Manson was a failed politician from Carson, Calif. Mason was also a big Paul supporter who would write, “I may be an athiest, but Ron Paul is my God,” on Paul’s website. Manson would also write, “Assassinate that n*gger and his family of monkeys,” of President Barack Obama.

This is not guilty by association. Ron Paul has spread white supremacy on conspiracy theories for years in his newsletters. The racism and conspiracy theories have driven some people to violence. Not only have Ron Paul’s racist supporters endorsed him and his views, he has endorsed them through his positions on the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement, without disavowing the support he gets from racists. This is guilt by racism.

Newt Gingrich’s Wife a Whore Says Religious Reich Leader James Dobson


With the American Religious Reich cuddling up to gay-hating, woman-hating, sodomy-obsessed Catholic fascist Rick Santorum, comes the inexorable fundi demonisation of potetional GOP presidential contenders.

We already know that the GOP’s Dominionist wing wants to re-criminalize homosexuality and control the wombs of every woman in America, but we can now officially say that slut-shaming is part of the evangelical belief system political calculus as well.

James Dobson, the decrepit founder of Focus on the Anus Family was one of the fundie luminaries invited to a Texas ranch with 15o other fundie “big thinkers” (I use that term very loosely) to figure out who they were going to back as the anti-Romney. They settled on Santorum as their man, but the real news is what Dobson said in ruling out Newt “serial adulterer” Gingrich. (The Politico):

“Dobson first talked about how great Santorum is,” recalled one source, who had first-hand knowledge of Dobson’s comment. “(He said) ‘I want to tell you that I’ve gotten to know Karen (Santorum) and she is just lovely. She set aside two professional careers to raise these seven children. She would make a fabulous first lady role model. And Newt Gingrich’s wife, she was a mistress for 8 years.”

Another source confirmed the account, and said Dobson concluded the sentiment about Callista Gingrich with, “Who do you want as your first lady?

“It was like a chill (set into) the room,” said one source.

The last time I checked, it takes two to tango, and Gingrich’s “Little Newt” was slutting around with Calista before she joined him in holy matrimony. How come that bit of business doesn’t come under fire in the House of Dobson?

The GOP is completely out-of-control when it comes to misogyny in this election cycle. It’s so bad that I don’t expect Newt — who is pandering to the hard right with every ounce of his being — will even bother to publicly defend his wife on this front.

Jewish ‘Taliban’ On The Rise | Turning Tel Aviv Into ‘Teheran’


The Growing Influence of the Ultra-Orthodox in Israel

By Juliane von Mittelstaedt

Photo Gallery: Battle for the Soul of Israel

Einat Keinan / DER SPIEGEL

Veiled women, radical rabbis and gender segregation: Israel is facing a rise in the influence of ultra-Orthodox Jews. Their efforts to impose a strictly conservative worldview have led to growing tensions with the country’s secular society. A resolution to the conflict is vital for Israel’s future.

Read More:-

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,808252,00.html

Ron Paul Lied Again | More Deranged, Racist Ron Paul Newsletters Released by TNR


More Deranged, Racist Ron Paul Newsletters Released by TNR
“Only 8 to 10 sentences?”
 By Charles Johnson
Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul continues to evade responsibility for the ugly, deranged newsletters he sold for many years; recently he claimed that “only 8 to 10 sentences were offensive,” out of all these newsletters.

This, dear readers, is what is commonly known as “an outright lie.” And today The New Republic demonstrates just how blatant a lie, by publishing many more pages from the newsletters. Far from being taken out of context, the craziness you’ve already heard about was Ron Paul’s stock in trade; this is how he made (by some reports) millions of dollars.

TNR Exclusive: More Selections From Ron Paul’s Newsletters.

The newsletters repeatedly defended and expressed support for a variety of prominent racists. The May 1990 Political Report cited Jared Taylor, a prominent eugenics advocate. The July 1994 Survival Report again cited the “criminologist Jared Taylor.”

The newsletters warned repeatedly of “race war.” The June 1990 Political Report carried an item entitled, “Race War?” which claimed that said war was on the horizon because of “the victimization mentality created by the civil rights movement, where every black failure is a white crime. If there is indeed this sort of trouble ahead, it is just another reason why every honest American should be armed.” The August 1990 Political Report claimed that “we’ve got a potential race war.” The December 1990 Investment Letter reported that “Abortion is rampant, race war is heating up, AIDS is spreading, and inflation is wiping out the middle class.”

The September 1992 edition of the Political Report wrote of a supposed spate of bank robberies this way: “Today, gangs of young blacks bust into a bank lobby firing rounds at the ceiling.” It also said that “We don’t think a child of 13 should be held as responsible as a man of 23. That’s true for most people, but black males age 13 who have been raised on the streets and who have joined criminal gangs are as big, strong, tough, scary and culpable as any adult, and should be treated as such.”

A January 1993 Survival Report item headlined “Poor Marge Schott!” defended the former Cincinnati Reds owner, who was “being crucified” after she referred to her own players as “million dollar niggers,” said that “sneaky goddamn Jews are all alike” and “only fruits wear earrings,” and claimed that Hitler was an initially positive force for Germany.

The March 1994 Survival Report warned of a “South African Holocaust.” It said, “Quite frankly, I cannot see how South Africa is going to escape a blood bath.” In June 1994—two months after South Africa’s first democratic election—an item headlined, “There Goes South Africa,” claimed that “Mandela is trying to appear as a moderate, and indeed he may be as the Red ANC goes.” The newsletter advocated a separate state for whites in South Africa, writing, “If everyone accepts the notion that a homeland can be created for the Palestinians, I wonder why no consideration is given by world opinion leaders to a similar situation for the whites in South Africa, as they have requested.”

Racism was not the only ugliness Ron Paul peddled; he also traded in conspiracy theories, anti-government militancy, and antisemitism:

A letter on congressional letterhead, dated August 30, 1979, from Paul thanked a Mr. Amos W. Bruce for “the copy of the article in The American Mercury and the copies of your essays. I found them all very interesting.” The American Mercury was an anti-Semitic magazine owned by Willis Carto, one of America’s most notorious holocaust deniers and the founder of The Liberty Lobby. The issue of The American Mercury Paul praised included essays entitled, “You Can’t Escape the Kosher Food Tax,” “Are You Ready for the White Man’s Doomsday,” and “Racism – Black African Style.”

Is it just a coincidence that Ron Paul’s star is rising in the Republican Party at this moment in time?

Crazy Birther Kook Jerome Corsi Exposed As Plagiarist Fraud


Birther King Corsi Again Accused of Plagiarism
Between refining his farcical anti-Obama “birther” conspiracy theory, fear-mongering about a nonexistent planned merger between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, and groundlessly declaring that oil is not derived from living things and is therefore an infinite resource, right-wing attack dog Jerome Corsi is one busy dude.

The weight of these responsibilities seems to have become too much for the poor dear, who has reportedly compromised his normally impeccable ethics with a bit of plagiarism. On Dec. 19, Corsi published in WorldNetDaily (WND) an “exclusive” article titled “Obama’s legacy of broken promises – in Kenya.” Purportedly based on the results of a long-term research project headed by an unnamed former member of the Kenyan parliament, the article details Obama’s failure to come through on financial promises the president allegedly made to the Kenyan government, including the donation of money to improve the village in which his Kenyan relatives live.

Thing is, much of the “exclusive” reporting was apparently ripped off from prominent news sources, including a 2008 article from the London Evening Standard and a 2011 piece from Agence France-Press, the French wire service. The accusations of plagiarism were first raised by Barackryphal, a blog touting itself as “a skeptic’s guide to birtherism,” whose producers illustrated evidence of Corsi’s plagiarism in a helpful color-coded guide denoting which material was stolen from which source.

Much of the cribbed material is specifically credited to WND’s team of anonymous Kenyan researchers, while only three pieces of information are attributed to their proper source, the 2008 Evening Standard piece. (In case you were wondering why Corsi didn’t go to Kenya himself to track down some anti-Obama dirt, recall that the indefatigable birther in 2008 was deported from that country for failing to have proper authorization to undertake his investigation into supposed “details of secret deep ties” between Obama and certain Muslim politicians in Kenya.)

Barackryphal reports that Corsi failed to respond meaningfully to its queries about his sources, claiming that the WND-commissioned report is “proprietary” and declining to answer specific questions about when the alleged investigation took place or what other stories the supposed Kenyan source has contributed to. Yet the revelation of plagiarism apparently didn’t go unnoticed at the WND bunker: An editor’s note added to the top of the story says, “The following article is based on a paid, 8,000-word report by Kenyan researchers commissioned by WND. Unknown to WND, the report included unattributed references to a July 25, 2008, story by the Evening Standard of London. WND included a link to the 2008 story to back up the claims of the report, which WND believed was original. WND regrets the error.”

If this is true, it means that when preparing his article Corsi somehow failed to notice that the Evening Standard reporter had access to the exact same quotes as Corsi’s unnamed Kenyan source and in many cases mysteriously used identical language in the explanatory material that fills out the rest of the story. WND’s editorial note makes no mention of the content apparently burgled from Agence France-Press.

This isn’t the first time Corsi has been accused of plagiarism. In 2006, far-right blogger Debbie Schlussel accused him of copying parts of her columns and using them under his byline, noting that he had even replicated a typo in her original work. In one of the few Schlussel declarations with which Hatewatch is ever likely to agree, she wrote, “If he’s going to rip people off, he can at least get it right and not rip off my original mistakes.” WND appears to have since taken down the article in question.

Corsi made the reverse error in his latest article, Barackryphal points out; he misspelled the last name of one of the individuals whose quote he appears to have cribbed from Agence France-Presse’s 2011 article. In a follow-up post, Barackryphal also highlights numerous other (slightly less egregious) instances of apparent uncredited borrowing by WND columnists.

And so, it seems, WND and Corsi have no problem making up news to suit their far-right agenda but seemingly can’t generate adequate original material to back up the true stories they might wish to tell. In their through-the-looking-glass world of forged birth certificates, creeping Shariah, gay Nazis, and potential antichrists, that just about makes sense.

“Judenrat Jon” Stewart | Right Wing Loon Pamela Geller


Judenrat Jon” Stewart

Cross-posted from Tikkun Daily.

by David Harris-Gershon

When Jon Stewart is called a “smug, self-loathing Jew”   by a right-wing Jewish personality (who is often called upon by   conservative pundits to wax political), it’s tempting to dismiss the   comment as a disgusting tribal dig.

When Jon Stewart is called a Judenrat who “would have been first on line to turn over his fellow Jews in Poland and Germany”   by this same hawkish voice, it’s tempting – even though this voice has  a  visible platform – to just ignore the comment as the product of the   Republican, FOX-inspired echo chamber.

However, ignoring these comments wouldn’t just be dangerous,   it would be to allow a growing brand of hatred coursing through   America’s veins – produced on the fringes – to continue infecting our   public discourse (and public opinion) on matters both foreign and   domestic.

It’s a hate-filled islamophobia that masquerades as patriotic, as   anti-terrorism, as proudly American and Zionist (as though the two are   synonymous). It’s a brand of hatred that the current GOP seeks, a hatred it feels it needs, a hatred it foments for perceived political gain at great cost to civil society. And, as   much as it pains me as a progressive Jewish American to say, it’s a   hatred right-wing American Jews are often solicited to be spokespeople   for on venues like Fox News, with claims of anti-Semitism at the ready should they be critiqued by people such as, well, Jon Stewart.

 

So, wait – what happened to Jon Stewart, exactly? – you ask. Here is the context:

Jason Jones and The Daily Show crew produced this rather brilliant segment on how Broward County republicans orchestrated a campaign to block membership of a Muslim republican to   the Broward Republican Party’s executive committee. This was done with the help of the Muslim-hating group ironically called Americans Against Hate (headed by Joe Kaufman,   who is running against Debbie Wasserman Schultz for Congress).

The segment elicited this disgusting display from Pamela Geller:

This is not the first time that The Daily Show  made  fun of, ridiculed, and smeared proud Americans and passionate  zionists.  What’s he doing? And why? Does he know how much CAIR  raised for  their home office, Hamas, whose stated goal is to destroy  the Jewish  homeland, through the Holy Land Foundation? Stewart missed  his calling. He would have been first on line to turn over his fellow Jews in Poland and Germany. Smug self-loathing Jew.

Yes, Geller is a nut. And yes, this particular display has been   limited – so far – to her personal site. But Geller, just one of many   fringe figures who inexplicably get airtime aplenty, knows what she’s   doing. She knows the game: play the anti-Semitism card.

And not just any anti-Semitism card –  the self-hating-Jew card. And  she plays it against one of our country’s  most important media critics  and defenders of reason. Why? Because he  represents exactly what she  and her right-wing minions loathe: someone  willing to call out  islamophobia for what it is, even when promoted by  American Jews.

While it would be easy to dismiss all this due to the messenger, does   Jon Stewart shy away from railing against hatred and bigotry when it  is  perpetrated by the unhinged?

Nope.

And neither should we.

Muslim Ignoramus Attacks Unrepentant Blasphemer Salman Rushdie


Salman Rushdie brushes off call for festival ‘blasphemy’ ban

  • by: Amanda Hodge

AN Indian Muslim leader has demanded Salman Rushdie be banned from the country’s biggest literary festival, warning that an invitation to the novelist who endured a fatwa will add “salt to injury”.

The vice-chancellor of Darul Uloom Deoband, one of India’s most influential Islamic seminaries, has called on the government to deny the Indian-born writer a visa to attend the Jaipur Literary Festival over the insult caused to Muslims by his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses.

“I call upon the Muslim organisations of the country to mount pressure on the centre to withdraw the visa and prevent him visiting India, where community members still feel hurt owing to the anti-Islamic remarks in his writings,” Maulana Abul Qasim Nomani said this week.

“The Muslims cannot pardon him at any cost. If he visits India, it would be adding salt to the injuries of Muslims.”

More here:-

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/salman-rushdie-brushes-off-call-for-festival-blasphemy-ban/story-e6frg6so-1226242085384

Theocon Fascists Decide on Catholic Fanatic Rick Santorum as Their “Stop Romney” Nominee


Theocrats Decide on Rick Santorum as Their “Stop Romney” Nominee

Theocon fascists endorse Catholic fanatic Rick Santorum

Check it out at the New York Times.  The story quotes the usual suspects including the FRC’s Tony Perkins, who is well known for purchasing David Duke‘s mailing list.  The leading theocrats met in Texas to discuss stopping Romney’s campaign and coming to a consensus.  The theocrats were concerned about Newt Gingrich‘s multiple marriages and attacks on Bain Capital.

They really don’t have anywhere to go, since they will all suck it up and support Mitt Romney in the general anyway as Peter LaBarbera stated in a tweet:

.@lloydletta I’d vote for . But in primary we socialcon Repubs need to find a -life AND pro-freedom-to-oppose-homo’y cand.

It would have been funny to get the results of this if Michele Bachmann were still in the race.  Her campaign torpedoed even among the leviticus crowd.

Catholic Bigot Robert Spencer Scrutinised by Homeland Security


Department of Homeland Security Watches Twitter, Social Media and Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch, Right Wing Radicals Under the Microscope.

Posted: in Radical Anti-Muslim Bloggers Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, robert spencer and Marisol of Jihad Watch Tags: , , ,

Robert Spencer and Jihad Watch DHS Investigation.

Department of Homeland Security puts Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch and his right wing radical lunatic fringe under the microscope, see photo above.
(Reuters) – The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s command center routinely monitors dozens of popular websites, including Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, WikiLeaks, JIHAD WATCH and news and gossip sites and Drudge Report, according to a government document.
A “privacy compliance review” issued by DHS last November says that since at least June 2010, its national operations center has been operating a “Social Networking/Media Capability” which involves regular monitoring of “publicly available online forums, blogs, public websites and message boards.”
The purpose of the monitoring, says the government document, is to “collect information used in providing situational awareness and establishing a common operating picture.” The document adds, using more plain language, that such monitoring is designed to help DHS and its numerous agencies, which include the U.S. Secret Service.  (The U.S. Secret Service monitors the internet for death threats posted about Pres. Barack Obama).
CONTROVERSIAL SITES; On the list are Jihad Watch and Informed Comment, blogs that cover issues related to Islam through sharp political prisms, which have sometimes led critics to accuse the sites of political bias. MORE FROM THIS SOURCE
NY TIMES Published: July 24, 2011, Killings in Norway Spotlight Anti-Muslim Thought in U.S.. The man accused of the killing spree in Norway was deeply influenced by a small group of American bloggers and writers who have warned for years about the threat from Islam, lacing his 1,500-page manifesto with quotations from them, as well as copying multiple passages from the tract of the Unabomber.
Anders Behring Breivik, who is accused of bombing government buildings and killing scores of young people at a Labor Party camp. His manifesto, which denounced Norwegian politicians as failing to defend the country from Islamic influence, quoted Robert Spencer, who operates the Jihad Watch Web site, 64 times, and cited other Western writers who shared his view that Muslim immigrants pose a grave danger to Western culture. MORE FROM THIS SOURCE..