Monday, January 14, 2013 8:04:41 AM
Our States Remain United
Official White House Response to
Peacefully grant the State of Louisiana to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government. and 8 other petitions
By Jon Carson
Thank you for using the White House's online petitions platform to participate in your government.
In a nation of 300 million people -- each with their own set of deeply-held beliefs -- democracy can be noisy and controversial. And that's a good thing. Free and open debate is what makes this country work, and many people around the world risk their lives every day for the liberties we often take for granted.
But as much as we value a healthy debate, we don't let that debate tear us apart.
Our founding fathers established the Constitution of the United States "in order to form a more perfect union" through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government. They enshrined in that document the right to change our national government through the power of the ballot -- a right that generations of Americans have fought to secure for all. But they did not provide a right to walk away from it. As President Abraham Lincoln explained in his first inaugural address [ http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln1.asp ] in 1861, "in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual." In the years that followed, more than 600,000 Americans died in a long and bloody civil war that vindicated the principle that the Constitution establishes a permanent union between the States. And shortly after the Civil War ended, the Supreme Court confirmed [ http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0074_0700_ZO.html ] that "[t]he Constitution, in all its provisions, looks to an indestructible Union composed of indestructible States."
Although the founders established a perpetual union, they also provided for a government that is, as President Lincoln would later describe [ http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/gettyb.asp ] it, "of the people, by the people, and for the people" -- all of the people. Participation in, and engagement with, government is the cornerstone of our democracy. And because every American who wants to participate deserves a government that is accessible and responsive, the Obama Administration has created a host of new tools and channels to connect concerned citizens with White House. In fact, one of the most exciting aspects of the We the People platform is a chance to engage directly with our most outspoken critics.
So let's be clear: No one disputes that our country faces big challenges, and the recent election followed a vigorous debate about how they should be addressed. As President Obama said the night he won re-election, "We may have battled fiercely, but it's only because we love this country deeply and we care so strongly about its future."
Whether it's figuring out how to strengthen our economy, reduce our deficit in a responsible way, or protect our country, we will need to work together -- and hear from one another -- in order to find the best way to move forward. I hope you'll take a few minutes to learn more about the President's ideas [ http://www.whitehouse.gov/ ] and share more of your own [ http://www.whitehouse.gov/engage ].
Jon Carson is Director of the Office of Public Engagement
The above response applies to the following 9 petitions
Deport Everyone That Signed A Petition To Withdraw Their State From The United States Of America.
29,650 Signatures
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/deport-everyone-signed-petition-withdraw-their-state-united-states-america/dmQl1bXL
Peacefully grant the State of S.C. to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government.
26,104 Signatures
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/peacefully-grant-state-sc-withdraw-united-states-america-and-create-its-own-new-government/KL6qrls8
Peacefully grant the State of North Carolina to withdraw from the United States and create its own NEW government
31,835 Signatures
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/peacefully-grant-state-north-carolina-withdraw-united-states-and-create-its-own-new-government/rx1KDYTs
Peacefully grant the State of Alabama to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government.
31,597 Signatures
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/peacefully-grant-state-alabama-withdraw-united-states-america-and-create-its-own-new-government/2TvhJSSC
Peacefully grant the State of Tennessee to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government.
32,694 Signatures
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/peacefully-grant-state-tennessee-withdraw-united-states-america-and-create-its-own-new-government/7xsNwkJ8
Peacefully grant the State of Georgia to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government.
33,828 Signatures
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/peacefully-grant-state-georgia-withdraw-united-states-america-and-create-its-own-new-government/pgJ9JLY3
Peacefully grant the State of Florida to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government.
37,014 Signatures
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/peacefully-grant-state-florida-withdraw-united-states-america-and-create-its-own-new-government/D87Rv7yJ
Peacefully grant the State of Texas to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government.
125,746 Signatures
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/peacefully-grant-state-texas-withdraw-united-states-america-and-create-its-own-new-government/BmdWCP8B
Peacefully grant the State of Louisiana to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government.
38,991 Signatures
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/peacefully-grant-state-louisiana-withdraw-united-states-america-and-create-its-own-new-government/1wrvtngl
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/our-states-remain-united [evidently released 1/11/13 ( http://www.buzzfeed.com/zekejmiller/white-house-responds-to-secession-petitions )]
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Obama Threat: Michigan Man's Alleged Remarks Of Assassination Alert Secret Service
U.S. Secret Service agents hold open the door as President Barack Obama steps out of his vehicle to board Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base, Md., Monday, Dec. 10, 2012, as he travels to Michigan to visit the Daimler Detroit Diesel plant in Redford, Mich. A Michigan man allegedly made a death threat against Obama in January, the latest of many recent intimidating statements his Secret Service staff has investigated since winning reelection.
(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
Posted: 01/11/2013 1:38 pm EST | Updated: 01/11/2013 1:53 pm EST
An alleged threat against President Obama has brought the scrutiny of the U.S. Secret Service down on a resident of Clinton Township, Mich. A Comerica Bank employee told local police that he overheard the 57-year-old man tell another customer on Jan. 2 that he wanted the president to be assassinated [ http://clintontwp.patch.com/articles/clinton-twp-man-s-obama-comments-brought-to-attention-of-secret-service ], reports Clinton Township Patch.
The source also said he heard the man say that he knew of some people willing to drive him to Washington D.C. to “get the job done,” according to a police report cited by Patch. When questioned about the incident by Clinton Township police, the man denied the allegations and said he was simply voicing his unhappiness with President Obama's policies. Police notified the Secret Service, who are expected to handle any additional investigation.
Another Michigan man, James Allen Myers of Dearborn Heights, was recently charged for making racially-charged threats against Obama [ http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130110/METRO01/301100480 ] and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
The 37-year-old, who is a registered sex offender, made several calls in December to the FCC and the National Geographic Channel. In one, he reportedly said, "I'm gonna hang our. . .president from a tree outside the White House with a burning cross and a swastika on the lawn," the Detroit News reports.
Unfortunately for the president, these incidents are far from isolated.
After Obama was reelected, the Secret Service investigated a 22-year-old California woman who wrote a Facebook post about Obama [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/09/denise-helms-california-woman-hopes-obama-is-assassinated_n_2104184.html ] using a racial slur and adding “Maybe he will get assassinated this term.”
A Florida man who also used Facebook to post a threatening comment about the president [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/15/christopher-castillo-obama-facebook_n_2137360.html ] in November was arrested after the Secret Service investigated.
The same month, the Secret Service arrested 20-year-old Mitchell Kusick of Denver for threatening to kill the president during a visit to Colorado [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/20/corrected-denver-man-accu_n_2162312.html ]. A federal judge later ruled that Kusick, who also made threats to kill children trick-or-treating on Halloween, was mentally ill and had to remain in custody.
In 2010, a 47-year-old New Orleans man was sentenced to eight years in prison total for threatening President Obama [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/12/john-turnpaugh-man-who-se_n_573145.html ] and additional charges related to the possession of marijuana and firearms.
After taking office President Obama became the target of about 30 death threats a day [ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/5967942/Barack-Obama-faces-30-death-threats-a-day-stretching-US-Secret-Service.html ], according to the book In the President's Secret Service.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/obama-threat-michigan-clinton-township_n_2456971.html [with comments]
===
Revolutionary Language
The New York Times
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Published: January 11, 2013
Listen closely.
That sound you hear is the sound of a cultural paranoia by people who have lost their grip on the reins of power, and on reality, and who fear the worst is coming.
And they are preparing for it, whatever it may be — a war, a revolution, an apocalypse.
These extremists make sensible, reasonable gun control hard to discuss, let alone achieve in this country, because they skew the conversations away from common-sense solutions on which both rational gun owners and non-gun owners can agree.
These people, a vocal minority, have extreme fears — gun confiscation, widespread civil instability, a tyrannical government — from which they are preparing to defend themselves with arsenals of weapons and stockpiles of ammunition.
If you pay attention to the right-wing’s rhetoric, you can hear a string of code words that feed the fears of these people and paralyze progress.
A collection of conservative groups have declared Jan. 19, during the weekend celebrating President Obama’s inauguration and Martin Luther King’s Birthday, as Gun Appreciation Day.
In a press release, the event chairman, Larry Ward, said, “The Obama administration has shown that it is more than willing to trample the Constitution to impose its dictates upon the American people.”
Using the word “dictates” is a subtle, but intentional, effort to frame the president as dangerous.
Andrew P. Napolitano, a Fox News analyst, said in a video [ http://gretawire.foxnewsinsider.com/open-thread/judge-napolitano-wants-to-know-2/ ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpYTzvY1ZFs , at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=83346853 )] posted Thursday on the network’s GretaWire blog: “Here’s the dirty little secret about the Second Amendment, the Second Amendment was not written in order to protect your right to shoot deer, it was written to protect your right to shoot tyrants if they take over the government. How about chewing on that one.”
He went even further in a piece [ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jan/10/the-right-to-shoot-tyrants-not-deer/ ] in The Washington Times, saying that the Second Amendment “protects the right to shoot tyrants, and it protects the right to shoot at them effectively, with the same instruments they would use upon us.”
Who are Napolitano’s tyrants here? Is this government takeover theoretical, imminent, in progress or a fait accompli?
Ward went so far as to say on CNN [ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/01/11/gun-appreciation-day-chairman-slavery-wouldnt-have-happened-if-slaves-were-armed/ ]: “I believe that Gun Appreciation Day honors the legacy of Dr. King.” He continued: “The truth is, I think Martin Luther King would agree with me if he were alive today that if African-Americans had been given the right to keep and bear arms from Day 1 of the country’s founding, perhaps slavery might not have been a chapter in our history. And I believe wholeheartedly that it’s essential to liberty.”
Set aside, if you can, what would most likely be King’s horror at the association, and look at that language. Pay particular attention to the suggestion that guns are an essential guard against slavery’s resurgence in this country. And who would be the slaves and who the enslavers?
As the Southern Poverty Law Center said in a Spring 2012 report [ http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2012/spring/the-year-in-hate-and-extremism ], the number of so-called patriot groups surged after Barack Obama was first elected president.
“The swelling of the Patriot movement since that time has been astounding,” the report said. “From 149 groups in 2008, the number of Patriot organizations skyrocketed to 512 in 2009, shot up again in 2010 to 824, and then, last year, jumped to 1,274 [ http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2012/spring/active-patriot-groups-in-the-united-states ].”
(According to the center, “Generally, Patriot groups define themselves [ http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2012/spring/active-patriot-groups-in-the-united-states ] as opposed to the ‘New World Order,’ engage in groundless conspiracy theorizing, or advocate or adhere to extreme antigovernment doctrines.”)
The center also points out [ http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/ideology/patriot-movememnt ]: “Fears of impending gun control or weapons confiscations, either by the government or international agencies, also run rampant in antigovernment circles. As a result, many antigovernment activists believe that being well armed is a must. The militia movement engages in paramilitary training aimed at protecting citizens from this feared impending government crackdown.”
That’s why it is both shocking and predictable that James Yeager, the C.E.O. of a Tennessee company that trains civilians in weapons and tactical skills, posted a video online Wednesday (since removed but still viewable at rawstory.com [ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/01/10/unhinged-tactical-response-ceo-threatens-to-start-killing-people-over-obamas-gun-control/ (about a third of the way down in the post to which this is a reply)]) saying he was going to start killing people if gun control efforts moved forward. He said, and I quote:
“I’m telling you that if that happens, it’s going to spark a civil war, and I’ll be glad to fire the first shot. I’m not putting up with it. You shouldn’t put up with it. And I need all you patriots to start thinking about what you’re going to do, load your damn mags, make sure your rifle’s clean, pack a backpack with some food in it and get ready to fight.”
Again, calling the “patriots” to arms is, I think, no accident.
Chew on that.
*
Related News
Gun Control Group Urges Expanded Background Checks (January 12, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/us/politics/gun-control-group-urges-expanded-background-checks.html
Related in Opinion
Dick Cavett: Back When I Was Packing (January 11, 2013).
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/back-when-i-was-packing/
Joe Nocera: How to Shoot a Gun (January 12, 2013).
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/opinion/nocera-how-to-shoot-a-gun.html
Room for Debate: What the Fight Over Guns Is Really About (January 6, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/01/06/what-the-fight-over-guns-is-really-about/
*
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/opinion/revolutionary-language.html [with comments]
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Radical right: “We’ll start killing people” if Obama enacts gun control
(Credit: Chantal de Bruijne [ http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-309916p1.html ] via Shutterstock)
On Wednesday, a Tennessee weapons instructor's crazed YouTube rant went viral. More terrifying? He's not alone
By Mark Potok, Southern Poverty Law Center
Friday, Jan 11, 2013 11:51 AM CST
This article was originally published [ http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2013/01/11/yeager-not-alone-radical-right-reacts-to-gun-control/ (with comments)] by The Southern Poverty Law Center.
When Tennessee weapons instructor James Yeager threatened Wednesday [ http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2013/01/10/weapons-instructor-for-police-threatens-to-start-killing-people/ ] to “start killing people” if President Obama moved ahead on gun control, his infuriated rant went national, with dozens of media outlets and blogs expressing amazement.
In thousands of comments about Yeager’s YouTube video and another video [ http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2013/01/10/tennessee-weapons-instructor-eases-up-sort-of/ ] the unrepentant Tactical Response CEO posted yesterday, Americans wondered if Yeager was breaking the law, or mentally ill, or a perfect example of the need for gun control. “Amazing, really,” wrote a commenter on the Hatewatch blog. “Simply amazing. These people are certifiably insane.” Said another, “These are the words of a real terrorist.” And a third wondered, “Can’t he be arrested for this?”
But the truth is that the death threats from Yeager — a man who is a former police chief, protective services contractor in Iraq, and owner of two companies that provide tactical weapons and training to police and military units — are not unique. Although Yeager said it more clearly than most, and with more profanity, the far right in America generally is reacting to the prospect of gun control with hysteria.
Yeager may well have been set off in the first place by the online Drudge Report, which earlier Wednesday compared the administration to Hitler and Stalin for considering using executive orders to facilitate some gun control measures. But Matt Drudge’s was the only the latest in a series of furious attacks from the political far right.
The League of the South [ http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/groups/league-of-the-south ], a white supremacist secessionist group based in Alabama, on Wednesday said that “the biggest threat is the U.S. government itself” and described the Obama administration as “a criminal regime.” “Those in positions of power who exceed the limits of lawful authority ought to be made to live in mortal fear of their transgressions,” league president Michael Hill [ http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/profiles/michael-hill ] said.
A day later, Terry Jones, the Muslim-bashing Florida preacher whose burning of the Koran set off violence [ http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2011/04/01/enraged-by-florida-pastor-afghan-crowds-kill-foreigners/ ] in the Middle East, sounded similar. “Every generation needs a revolution,” Jones said. “We must resist the disarming of the American people, if necessary, with violent aggressive opposition. The tree of liberty must be, from time to time, refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
Chuck Baldwin [ http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/profiles/chuck-baldwin ], a Montana leader of the antigovernment “Patriot” movement and a pastor, wrote last week, and reiterated yesterday, that semi-automatic weapons were essential to preserve “freedom” and prevent “tyranny.” “Ladies and gentlemen, whatever the consequences might be, and whatever anyone else does or doesn’t do, I am prepared to become an outlaw over this issue! I don’t know how to say it any plainer: I will not register my firearms, and I will not surrender my firearms.” He went on to say that any confiscation attempt would result in a “revolution.”
It wasn’t only acknowledged radicals reacting. In Wyoming, a state where guns are very much a part of life for many, lawmakers have sponsored a bill that would ensure that “any federal law which attempts to ban a semi-automatic firearm or to limit the size of a magazine of a firearm or other limitation on firearms in this state shall be unenforceable in Wyoming.” Of course, this kind of attempt to “nullify” federal laws dates back to the Civil War and is generally unconstitutional.
Yeager found a virtual cheering section on the radical racist right as well. “He is saying what needs saying and is ready to rock,” wrote “Fred O’Malleu” on the neo-Nazi Vanguard News Network Internet forum. Elsewhere, he added: “He is saying what we should all be saying, LOUD AND FUCKING CLEAR!! … You fucking idiots, if you let them get away with this shit, you have no life left anyway.”
“A line must be drawn in the sand, a small spark could set off the power keg of patriots lets hope it blows sky high,” wrote another commenter on Stormfront, which is the world’s largest white supremacist Web forum. “I see Civil War II on the horizon,” said another. A third commenter, “Rosalynn,” put it like this: “We’ve been putting every extra penny aside to buy more ammunition and hopefully in the next couple of weeks we will also be able to purchase a few more firearms. They can kiss my white butt if they think they are getting any of our guns.”
Copyright © 2013 The Southern Poverty Law Center
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/11/radical_right_well_start_killing_people_if_obama_enacts_gun_control/ [with comments]
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The Hitler gun control lie
Gun rights activists who cite the dictator as a reason against gun control have their history dangerously wrong
By Alex Seitz-Wald
Friday, Jan 11, 2013 12:35 PM CST
This week, people were shocked [ http://washingtonexaminer.com/journalists-react-in-shock-to-drudge-report-header-featuring-hitler-and-stalin/article/2518041 ] when the Drudge Report posted a giant picture of Hitler over a headline speculating that the White House will proceed with executive orders to limit access to firearms. The proposed orders are exceedingly tame [ http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2013/01/09/what_crazy_fascist_executive_orders_might_obama_use_to_take_away_your_freedoms.html ], but Drudge’s reaction is actually a common conservative response to any invocation of gun control.
The NRA [ http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-01-10/news/ct-perspec-0110-nra-20130111_1_gun-control-gun-rights-gun-owners ], Fox News [ http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/01/10/guns-and-freedom/ ], Fox News (again) [ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/07/fox_news_guest_compares_gun_control_to_nazi_germany/ ], Alex Jones [ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2259303/Piers-Morgan-Alex-Jones-says-CNN-looked-like-Hitlers-bunker.html ], email chains [ http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/01/drudge-hitler-stalin-guns/60784/ ], Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/06/joe-the-plumber-blames-the-holocaust-on-gun-control ], Gun Owners of America [ http://www.prisonplanet.com/larry-pratt-slams-piers-morgan-over-sham-gun-control-argument.html ], etc., all agree that gun control was critical to Hitler’s rise to power. Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership [ http://jpfo.org/ ] (“America’s most aggressive defender of firearms ownership”) is built almost exclusively around this notion, popularizing posters [ http://shop.jpfo.org/cart.php?m=product_detail&p=78 ] of Hitler giving the Nazi salute next to the text: “All in favor of ‘gun control’ raise your right hand.”
In his 1994 book [ http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Crime-Freedom-Wayne-LaPierre/dp/0895264773 ], NRA head Wayne LaPierre dwelled on the Hitler meme at length, writing: “In Germany, Jewish extermination began with the Nazi Weapon Law of 1938, signed by Adolf Hitler.”
And it makes a certain amount of intuitive sense: If you’re going to impose a brutal authoritarian regime on your populace, better to disarm them first so they can’t fight back.
Unfortunately for LaPierre et al., the notion that Hitler confiscated everyone’s guns is mostly bogus. And the ancillary claim that Jews could have stopped the Holocaust with more guns doesn’t make any sense at all if you think about it for more than a minute.
University of Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt explored this myth in depth in a 2004 article published in the Fordham Law Review [ http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4029&context=flr ; http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4031&context=flr ]. As it turns out, the Weimar Republic, the German government that immediately preceded Hitler’s, actually had tougher gun laws than the Nazi regime. After its defeat in World War I, and agreeing to the harsh surrender terms laid out in the Treaty of Versailles, the German legislature in 1919 passed a law that effectively banned all private firearm possession, leading the government to confiscate guns already in circulation. In 1928, the Reichstag relaxed the regulation a bit, but put in place a strict registration regime that required citizens to acquire separate permits to own guns, sell them or carry them.
The 1938 law signed by Hitler that LaPierre mentions in his book basically does the opposite of what he says it did. “The 1938 revisions completely deregulated the acquisition and transfer of rifles and shotguns, as well as ammunition,” Harcourt wrote. Meanwhile, many more categories of people, including Nazi party members, were exempted from gun ownership regulations altogether, while the legal age of purchase was lowered from 20 to 18, and permit lengths were extended from one year to three years.
The law did prohibit Jews and other persecuted classes from owning guns, but this should not be an indictment of gun control in general. Does the fact that Nazis forced Jews into horrendous ghettos indict urban planning? Should we eliminate all police officers because the Nazis used police officers to oppress and kill the Jews? What about public works — Hitler loved public works projects? Of course not. These are merely implements that can be used for good or ill, much as gun advocates like to argue about guns themselves. If guns don’t kill people, then neither does gun control cause genocide (genocidal regimes cause genocide).
Besides, Omer Bartov, a historian at Brown University who studies the Third Reich, notes that the Jews probably wouldn’t have had much success fighting back. “Just imagine the Jews of Germany exercising the right to bear arms and fighting the SA, SS and the Wehrmacht. The [Russian] Red Army lost 7 million men fighting the Wehrmacht, despite its tanks and planes and artillery. The Jews with pistols and shotguns would have done better?” he told Salon.
Proponents of the theory sometimes point to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as evidence that, as Fox News’ Judge Andrew Napolitano put it [ http://www.scribd.com/doc/79328777/It-is-Dangerous-to-Be-Right-When-the-Gov-Andrew-P-Napolitano ], “those able to hold onto their arms and their basic right to self-defense were much more successful in resisting the Nazi genocide.” But as the Tablet’s Michael Moynihan [ http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/119543/gun-control-and-the-holocaust ] points out, Napolitano’s history (curiously based on a citation of work by French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson) is a bit off. In reality, only about 20 Germans were killed, while some 13,000 Jews were massacred. The remaining 50,000 who survived were promptly sent off to concentration camps.
Robert Spitzer, a political scientist who studies gun politics and chairs the political science department at SUNY Cortland, told Mother Jones’ Gavin Aronsen that the prohibition on Jewish gun ownership was merely a symptom, not the problem itself. “[It] wasn’t the defining moment [ http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/01/hitler-stalin-gun-control ] that marked the beginning of the end for Jewish people in Germany. It was because they were persecuted, were deprived of all of their rights, and they were a minority group,” he explained.
Meanwhile, much of the Hitler myth is based on an infamous quote falsely attributed to the Fuhrer, which extols the virtue of gun control:
This year will go down in history! For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!
The quote has been widely reproduced in blog posts and opinion columns about gun control, but it’s “probably a fraud and was likely never uttered,” according to Harcourt. “This quotation, often seen without any date or citation at all, suffers from several credibility problems, the most significant of which is that the date often given [1935] has no correlation with any legislative effort by the Nazis for gun registration, nor would there have been any need for the Nazis to pass such a law, since gun registration laws passed by the Weimar government were already in effect,” researchers at the useful website GunCite note [ http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcbogus.html ].
“As for Stalin,” Bartov continued, “the very idea of either gun control or the freedom to bear arms would have been absurd to him. His regime used violence on a vast scale, provided arms to thugs of all descriptions, and stripped not guns but any human image from those it declared to be its enemies. And then, when it needed them, as in WWII, it took millions of men out of the Gulags, trained and armed them and sent them to fight Hitler, only to send back the few survivors into the camps if they uttered any criticism of the regime.”
Bartov added that this misreading of history is not only intellectually dishonest, but also dangerous. “I happen to have been a combat soldier and officer in the Israeli Defense Forces and I know what these assault rifles can do,” he said in an email.
He continued: “Their assertion that they need these guns to protect themselves from the government — as supposedly the Jews would have done against the Hitler regime — means not only that they are innocent of any knowledge and understanding of the past, but also that they are consciously or not imbued with the type of fascist or Bolshevik thinking that they can turn against a democratically elected government, indeed turn their guns on it, just because they don’t like its policies, its ideology, or the color, race and origin of its leaders.”
Copyright © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/11/stop_talking_about_hitler/ [with comments]
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Allen West: Gun Control Is 'Your Index Finger'
By Paige Lavender
Posted: 01/12/2013 3:48 pm EST | Updated: 01/12/2013 4:26 pm EST
Former Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) said gun control [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/gun-control/ ] comes down to the finger you pull the trigger with, calling the larger discussion on gun violence part of a "political agenda."
"This is your gun control, this finger right here -- your index finger," West said in an interview [ http://www.newsmax.com/US/west-gun-control-laws/2013/01/11/id/471052 (video embedded)] with Newsmax TV. "Nothing happens with that gun until you put that finger into the trigger well and you pull it. So my concern is that we’re not talking about the real issue, we’re talking about a political agenda."
West's comments come in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/sandy-hook-elementary-school-shooting/ ], where 20 first-graders and several teachers were killed. West said "we should start first and foremost" with mental health issues rather than gun control, claiming Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter, had "parental problems."
This isn't the first time West has argued against the gun control debate. At a campaign stop in 2010, West suggested [ http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/allen-west-also-blames-gun-control-for-the-holocau ] gun control was to blame for the Holocaust.
"In 1930, there was a gentleman in Germany who took away private gun ownership and you know what happened to that population," West said. "You must be well informed and well armed, because this government we have right now is a tyrannical government."
On Tuesday, Vice President Joe Biden will issue a sweeping series of recommendations on gun policy. HuffPost's Sam Stein reported earlier [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/joe-biden-gun-control-background-checks_n_2458633.html ]:
Multiple sources close to the talks tell The Huffington Post that the vice president will make universal background checks for all gun purchases the "top priority" of his suggestions. The idea has broad support among politicians in the wake of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, as well as backing from some traditionally pro-gun rights voices. The clearest sign that background checks will be the centerpiece of the Biden recommendations, however, is that a number of gun control advocacy groups have also deemed it such, as opposed to focusing their efforts on higher-profile measures, such as those that would limit the types of guns available for purchase.
That said, those measures will also likely end up in Biden's set of recommendations as well, according to an administration official. The White House pushed back Friday morning on reports that it is shying away from including some form of an assault weapons ban in its final legislative push out of concern that it was too heavy a lift through Congress.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/12/allen-west-gun-control_n_2463956.html [with embedded video of the West interview on Newsmax TV, and comments]
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Joe Miller, Alaska Tea Party Favorite, Wore Bulletproof Vest After GOP Senate Primary Win, Informant Says
Former U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller leaves his celebration headquarters on Nov. 2, 2010, in Anchorage, Alaska.
01/11/2013
WASHINGTON -- Alaska Tea Party favorite Joe Miller wore a bulletproof vest the night he beat Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) to become the Republican Party's 2010 Senate nominee, his former private security guard told The Huffington Post.
"As we're finding out that he's winning, I'm in the bathroom putting a bulletproof vest on the guy," William Fulton said in one of several interviews this week. Describing Miller as "paranoid," Fulton said the underdog conservative was afraid he'd be targeted at election headquarters in Anchorage on that August night. "It was fucking ridiculous."
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/joe-miller-alaska-bulletproof-vest_n_2444137.html [with comments]
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How Bill Fulton Infiltrated Alaska's Right Wing As An FBI Informant
Bill Fulton, right, pictured with Sally Heath, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's mother.
01/11/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/bill-fulton-alaska-fbi-informant_n_2456883.html [with comments]
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Sales of Guns Soar in U.S. as Nation Weighs Tougher Limits
At a gun store in Casper, Wyo., late last month, a wall that typically displays about 25 military-style rifles was almost bare.
Alan Rogers/Casper Star-Tribune, via Associated Press
Brooke Stallings, co-owner of Atlas Tactical, handles an assault rifle for sale in her store near Newport, Va. in December.
Matt Gentry/The Roanoke Times, via Associated Press
By MICHAEL COOPER
Published: January 11, 2013
As Washington focuses on what Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will propose next week to curb gun violence, gun and ammunition sales are spiking in the rest of the country as people rush to expand their arsenals in advance of any restrictions that might be imposed.
People were crowded five deep at the tiny counter of a gun shop near Atlanta, where a pastor from Knoxville, Tenn., was among the customers who showed up in person after the store’s Web site halted sales because of low inventory. Emptying gun cases and bare shelves gave a picked-over feel to gun stores in many states. High-capacity magazines, which some state and federal officials want to ban or restrict, were selling briskly across the country: one Iowa dealer said that 30-round magazines were fetching five times what they sold for just weeks ago.
Gun dealers and buyers alike said that the rapid growth in gun sales — which began climbing significantly after President Obama’s re-election and soared after the Dec. 14 shooting at a school in Newtown, Conn., prompted him to call for new gun laws — shows little sign of abating.
December set a record for the criminal background checks performed before many gun purchases, a strong indication of a big increase in sales, according to an analysis of federal data by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun industry trade group. Adjusting the federal data to try to weed out background checks that were unrelated to firearms sales, the group reported that 2.2 million background checks were performed last month, an increase of 58.6 percent over the same period in 2011. Some gun dealers said in interviews that they had never seen such demand.
“If I had 1,000 AR-15s I could sell them in a week,” said Jack Smith, an independent gun dealer in Des Moines, referring to the popular style of semiautomatic rifle that drew national attention after Adam Lanza used one to kill 20 children and 6 adults at a Newtown school. “When I close, they beat on the glass to be let in,” Mr. Smith said of his customers. “They’ll wave money at me.”
Mr. Smith said many people were stocking up on high-capacity magazines in anticipation that they might be banned. Two weeks ago, he said, a 30-round rifle magazine was $12, but it now fetches $60. Popular online retailers were out of many 20- and 30-round rifle magazines.
In Washington, Mr. Biden said the task force he leads is “shooting for Tuesday” to make its recommendations to President Obama about preventing gun violence. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, one of the nation’s leading gun control groups, said its top priority was to close the loopholes that currently allow 40 percent of gun sales to be made without background checks.
Some groups that support gun control urged the White House not to focus too much energy on an assault weapons ban, which they said could be hard to persuade Congress to pass. Officials at Third Way, a left-leaning research group in Washington, urged the president to save his political capital for higher-priority goals like universal background checks and cracking down on gun trafficking.
Outside Greta’s Guns, a gun store in Simi Valley, Calif., about an hour northwest of downtown Los Angeles, several customers said that they opposed any assault weapons ban, but would support more thorough background checks.
George Gray, 60, who said that he already owned “more arms than arms to bear them,” said that he was in favor of more background checks. “If you own a weapon, you should be stable,” said Mr. Gray, who said he had come from Los Angeles to buy a gun for his daughter. “You should be accountable for your actions. I don’t mind stricter background checks. What we’ve done with the mental health in this country — these people used to get care and were in facilities. And in most of these instances, it’s been people with mental problems.”
Some customers at Greta’s said that they wanted to buy guns before any new gun control measures made it more difficult. Bob Davis, 64, said that he wanted a new pistol. “They want to take guns out of citizens’ hands,” he said. “So as a consequence I ordered a gun. And they’re not going to be able to get me a gun for like six months, because of the backlog. They can’t make guns fast enough.”
The gun industry expected a surge in sales even before the Newtown shooting [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/school_shootings/index.html ]. Gun sales rose after President Obama was first elected in 2008, and many manufacturers expected an increase in gun sales in the event of his re-election. “We believe the continued economic uncertainty and the outcome of the 2012 presidential election is likely to continue to spur both firearms and ammunition sales,” the Freedom Group, which owns Bushmaster, the company that makes the rifle used in Newtown, wrote in a financial report on the quarter that ended Sept. 30.
The possibility that the federal assault weapons ban — which lasted from 1994 to 2004 — might be reinstated was enough to spur sales of semiautomatic rifles with military-style features.
Dale Raby, who manages one of two Gus’s Guns shops in Green Bay, Wis., said his inventory of guns and ammunition was almost cleaned out, and that most of the interest was in AR-15-style rifles.
“I had almost fistfights over the remaining inventory of that type gun,” he said.
Joel Alioto, 44, an Iraq war veteran who lives in the area, said he recently sold an AR-15 rifle at a gun show for $1,700, more than three times what he had paid for it. “I think the shooting in Connecticut was a terrible thing,” said Mr. Alioto, who is unemployed. “But before the shooting the gun was worth 500 bucks. I don’t think I did anything wrong. I wanted to get my teeth done, get a computer and pay for my first year of Bible college.”
Brad Williamson, one of the owners of Quint’s Sporting Goods in Saraland, Ala., said the waiting lists for some products are double what they normally are — especially for guns that are mentioned in the gun control debate. “Whenever there’s a blip on the news about a particular model, the next day people want to come in wanting whatever they named,” he said. “When Biden makes his recommendation next week, you’re going to see another surge.”
At Georgia Arms in Villa Rica, Ga., west of Atlanta, the ammunition business was brisk, with dozens of the yellow bins that usually held ammunition empty. The Rev. Laurence Hesser, a pastor at Memorial United Methodist Church near Knoxville, stopped by because he had been unable to buy ammunition on the shop’s Web site, which halted sales because inventory was so low.
He likened the current run on ammunition to the rush to buy Twinkies last year after its maker, Hostess Brands, announced it was closing. “It’s the same thing,” he said. “When you are threatened with the possibility that you are going to lose something, you get a bunch of it.”
Reporting was contributed by Kim Severson in Villa Rica, Ga.; Trip Gabriel in New York; Ian Lovett in Simi Valley, Calif.; Campbell Robertson in New Orleans; and Michael D. Shear in Washington.
*
Related
Gun Control Group Urges Expanded Background Checks (January 12, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/us/politics/gun-control-group-urges-expanded-background-checks.html
Lawmaker Seeks Public Reply on Guns (January 12, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/us/politics/in-california-lawmaker-seeks-public-response-on-guns.html
Tough Path Seen by Obama on Ban of Assault Weapons (January 11, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/us/politics/biden-to-meet-with-gun-advocates-including-nra.html
*
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/us/as-us-weighs-new-rules-sales-of-guns-and-ammunition-surge.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/us/as-us-weighs-new-rules-sales-of-guns-and-ammunition-surge.html?pagewanted=all ]
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Who killed Keith Ratliff, YouTube’s “gun nut” celeb?
(Credit: YouTube)
The weapons enthusiast was shot surrounded by guns in Georgia, and no one knows how or by whom
By David Daley
Friday, Jan 11, 2013 12:32 PM CST
The gun enthusiast with the 11th most popular channel on YouTube [ http://vidstatsx.com/youtube-top-100-most-subscribed-channels ] — who insisted everyone has the right to an assault weapon under the Second Amendment — was shot and killed in what’s been described as his Georgia “weapons development and testing facility” last week.
Keith Ratliff died, according to reports [ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/11/keith-ratliff-youtube-shot-georgia-murder-guns-fpsrussia/1826545/ ], from a single shot to the head — but the murder weapon can’t be found, and there was no sign of a struggle.
And all that has confused police in Georgia — who have called his death a homicide — and Ratliff’s millions of fans and followers, who have poured out sadness and confusion on Twitter [ https://twitter.com/search?q=keith%20ratliff ] and Facebook that he was not able to fight back and defend himself.
As USA Today reports [ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/11/keith-ratliff-youtube-shot-georgia-murder-guns-fpsrussia/1826545/ ], Ratliff’s brother, Kelly, told an Atlanta TV station [ http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/police-investigate-death-popular-youtube-channel-o/nTqpg/ ] that “For him not to pull out that gun and try to defend himself, he had to feel comfortable around somebody. Either that or he was ambushed.”
But as the Huffington Post reports [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/10/keith-ratliff-gun-advocate-dead_n_2448175.html ], the Georgia Bureau of Investigation says there was no sign of a struggle at the Carnesville, Ga., store where Ratliff repaired firearms. (He was registered with the ATF.)
It was online, however, that Ratliff was a celebrity within the gun-rights movement. His YouTube channel, FPS Russia [ http://www.youtube.com/user/FPSRussia ], has almost 3.5 million subscribers, according to the New York Times [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/us/keith-ratliff-gun-enthusiast-of-fpsrussia-is-shot-to-death.html ], and has been viewed some 500 million times. FPS stands for first-person shooter; the Russia refers to partner Kyle Myers, who plays a character in the videos who speaks with a Russian accent.
Lots of things blow up in the videos, as USA Today notes [ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/11/keith-ratliff-youtube-shot-georgia-murder-guns-fpsrussia/1826545/ ]: “The zany videos demonstrate the firepower of various weapons, usually in a dramatic fashion that involves dummies or objects being blown up.” Those objects might be bales of hay, or photos of Justin Bieber [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GH3MLmvhuCA (next below)].
In a recent “gun control rant” on his personal YouTube page [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8z_5YJ0gbw (next below)],
According to the Times [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/us/keith-ratliff-gun-enthusiast-of-fpsrussia-is-shot-to-death.html ], “Keith Ratliff loved guns. He built his own rifles. He kept bullets in his car’s cup holder. And on the rear window he slapped a sticker of the Starbucks Coffee mermaid firing two pistols. ‘I [heart] Guns and Coffee,’ it read.”
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/11/who_killed_keith_ratliff_youtubes_gun_nut_celeb/ [the last video at the end, as embedded without mention in the text, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXONItsEU7E ; with comments]
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Erik Rush: 'The Obama Administration or One of Its Surrogates is Responsible for [Keith] Ratliff's Death'
Submitted by Brian Tashman on Friday, 1/11/2013 11:30 am
WorldNetDaily columnist [ http://www.wnd.com/author/erush/ ] and Fox News regular [ http://mediamatters.org/search/index?qstring=%22erik+rush%22+%22fox%22&x=0&y=0 ] Erik Rush today is suggesting [ http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/52325 ] that President Obama may be behind the recent murder [ http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/professed-gun-nut-keith-ratliff-found-fatally-shot-head-article-1.1237250 ] of gun enthusiast Keith Ratliff. Rush admits that while he has “no proof” besides his own “inclination,” the extremist writer claims Obama helped kill Ratliff as just “the first of many such executions that will take place in order to silence individuals whom the government deems a threat to their oligarchical collectivist agenda.”
On January 3, Keith Ratliff, a 32 year-old firearms enthusiast, was found fatally shot in the head in his Carnesville, Georgia home. Police are investigating the case as a homicide. Ratliff’s YouTube channel for fellow firearm enthusiasts was ranked as one of the top 10 channels on YouTube, with 3.4 million subscribers and more than 537 million views.
Although I have no proof, my inclination is to suspect that the Obama administration or one of its surrogates is responsible for Ratliff’s death, the first of many such executions that will take place in order to silence individuals whom the government deems a threat to their oligarchical collectivist agenda.
…
The only people upon which Americans can depend will be each other, private organizations, and a few intrepid state and county officials. Days ago, Sheriff Denny Peyman of Jackson County Kentucky said that his office “will not comply with any federal action which violates the United States Constitution or the Kentucky Constitution which I swore to uphold.”
We can be encouraged by such gestures, but we must also bear in mind that the White House’s gun-grabbing plan is but one component in the larger agenda to transform America, as it were. Barack Obama is indeed playing a significant part in this tragic comedy, but he only wishes to see America brought down; whether it is by Islamofascists, communism, economic upheaval, or a misadventurous asteroid matters little to him, in my view.
If that of which informed conservative and libertarians are already aware is deeply disturbing, Obama’s designs, and measures which his administration have already set into motion behind the scenes will truly chill the blood. God Willing, these will also come to light before it is too late.
Whether there is still time to implement effective remedies to them remains to be seen.
*
Related Items
Erik Rush: 'Supernatural Evil' and 'Mind-Control' Behind Rise of the Left
1/10/13 @ 11:50
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/rush-evil-mind-control-behind-rise-left
Erik Rush: Obama Bringing About the Apocalypse
1/4/13 @ 1:35
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/erik-rush-obama-bringing-about-apocalypse
Erik Rush Suggests Founders Would Hang 'Evil' Obama for Seeking to 'Enslave Us'
1/2/13 @ 4:30
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/erik-rush-suggests-founders-would-hang-evil-obama-seeking-enslave-us
WND Floats Armed Resistance to Obama Administration
12/20/12 @ 12:15
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/wnd-floats-armed-resistance-obama-administration
WND: Gun Violence part of Obama's Marxist Plot
12/6/12 @ 11:30
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/wnd-gun-violence-obamas-marxist-plot
*
© 2013 People For the American Way
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/erik-rush-obama-administration-responsible-ratliffs-death
===
James Yeager, CEO Who Threatened To 'Start Killing People' Over Gun Control, Backpedals... Sort Of
Posted: 01/11/2013 10:23 pm EST | Updated: 01/12/2013 10:10 am EST
The Tennessee CEO who said in a YouTube video earlier this week that he would "start killing people [ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/01/10/unhinged-tactical-response-ceo-threatens-to-start-killing-people-over-obamas-gun-control/ (about a third of the way down in the post to which this is a reply)]" if current gun control efforts went "one inch further" walked back his original statement [ http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/01/just_watch_this.php ] during an interview with Nashville's WSMV-TV on Friday.
Insisting that he had no imminent plans to open fire on anyone -- while also falsely claiming that he never used the phrase "start killing people" -- Tactical Response CEO James Yeager said that he was simply "angry" when he filmed the original video about encroachments on his 2nd Amendment "birthright."
However, Yeager's damage-control effort hit a snag when asked to elaborate on his fervent devotion to the Bill of Rights. Pressed by the interviewer to identify the conditions under which he would consider taking up arms, Yeager named "outright gun confiscation" as an example, leading to the following exchange:
INTERVIEWER: The attention-getter is saying that you're going to shoot some people.
YEAGER: Right.
INTERVIEWER: And when I hear you, I'm thinking, if someone comes to confiscate guns at your house, you're going to open fire on them?
YEAGER: Yes, yes.
INTERVIEWER: Go through that again?
YEAGER: If somebody comes to take my guns, I will shoot them.
Coincidentally, Yeager's handgun carry permit was suspended [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/james-yeager-ceo-start-killing-people-gun-permit_n_2459456.html ] by the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security on Friday. The department's commissioner explained that the decision was based on "material likelihood of risk of harm to the public."
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/james-yeager-gun-ceo_n_2460452.html [with comments]
===
The psychological and public health benefits of gun ownership
Jan. 9, 2013: Daniel White of Estes Park, Colo., waves a placard at a pro-gun rally as the Colorado Legislature opened its general session across the street in the State Capitol in Denver.
(AP)
FILE: March 7, 2012: Gun owners and supporters participate in an Illinois Gun Owners Lobby Day rally at the Illinois State Capitol in Springfield.
(AP)
By Dr. Keith Ablow [gesundheit!]
Published January 12, 2013
FoxNews.com
Those who advocate gun control measures as solutions to tragedies like those in Newtown, Connecticut and Aurora, Colorado seem to be ignoring the fact that the perpetrators of the carnage in those towns were severely psychiatrically ill and could have chosen other lethal means to cause just as many deaths.
Explosives are one obvious example.
In 1995, Timothy McVeigh used explosives to kill 168 people at the Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. Between 1978 and 1995, Ted Kaczynski used homemade bombs delivered by mail to kill 3 people and severely injure 23 others. Back in 1982, 12 people, including a 12-year-old girl, died when someone (who has never been apprehended) poisoned Tylenol capsules with potassium cyanide.
Sadly, I could cite dozens of examples.
But, equally important, gun control advocates also ignore the potential widespread psychological harm that disarming Americans could cause.
As Thomas Jefferson wrote to his nephew Peter Carr in 1785, "A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives a moderate exercise to the Body, it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence to the mind . . . "
The right to bear arms is a critical component of feeling competent and autonomous as individuals, rather than relying on the goodwill of a super-powerful, unassailable government.
A disarmed population is, by definition, a population that has completely ceded the power to defend its homes against local, state or federal authorities. This implies a level of trust much more consistent with that which children have for parents than that which thinking adults have for the institutions they have created to perform vital functions like defending the nation, keeping the peace, maintaining schools and providing clean water.
A disarmed population is allowed the toxic luxury of feeling as though our way of life and our safety from oppression comes without the tremendous responsibilities and moral complexities of wielding force. The same people who passively pay taxes that put tanks on the streets and fighter jets in the skies over our enemies' nations can cringe at the idea of owning guns themselves — projecting their survival instincts onto an all-powerful father figure (the state).
History is replete with examples of cultures in which taking guns away from law-abiding citizens foreshadowed catastrophic abuses of the power thereby invested in government. One need look no further than Nazi Germany.
While gun control advocates point not only to episodes of terrible violence, but also to the toll of accidental deaths and murders involving firearms, I believe such tragedies highlight the need for citizens to take more personal responsibility for the handguns they own, not any justification for them to be infantilized by banning them from owning handguns at all.
It may well be that putting more—not fewer—guns in the hands of law-abiding American men and women and training them to safely store those guns would actually be one immediate way to immunize the population from feeling like potential victims of the Adam Lanzas and James Holmes among us.
It may be that putting more—not fewer—guns in the hands of law-abiding American men and women would be a way of immunizing them from feeling like passive participants in history and in safeguarding what we value about our way of life.
The psychological truth is that every gun privately and legally owned in America is a tiny impediment to the citizenry assuming a docile, nearly delusional perspective that the world will always be predictable, that one's home and loved ones will always be safe and that government will always tend toward light and never toward darkness.
Dr. Keith Ablow [gesundheit!] is a psychiatrist and member of the Fox News Medical A-Team.
©2013 FOX News Network, LLC
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/01/12/psychological-and-public-health-benefits-gun-ownership/
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Alex Jones On HuffPost Live: 'YOU'RE IN DANGER! YOU'RE IN DANGER!'
By Jack Mirkinson
Posted: 01/11/2013 5:06 pm EST | Updated: 01/11/2013 6:15 pm EST
Alex Jones, the radio host whose tussle with Piers Morgan was felt 'round the world [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/08/alex-jones-piers-morgan-guns_n_2429161.html ], appeared on HuffPost Live [ http://live.huffingtonpost.com/#r/segment/alex-jones-piers-morgan-gun-control/50e4588278c90a7ebd000109 ] on Friday to talk about the fallout from his interview.
For most of the chat, Jones was relatively restrained — a far cry from the high-decibel ranter who shouted at Morgan about the Second American Revolution. Towards the end, though, he regained his old spark with a tirade that truly has to be seen to be believed.
After quoting liberally (and loudly) from the famed "mad as hell" speech from "Network," Jones began going on a wide-ranging monologue that encompassed everything from drone wars and curtailments on privacy to more boutique topics.
"Learn about the New World Order!" he said at one point. "Learn about eugenics and the cancer viruses and the vaccines! Learn about the GMO's designed to sterilize you!"
He then held up a book called "Ecoscience," and took his shouting to a new level. A rough transcript follows:
"THEY'VE GOT POISON IN THE WATER! POISON IN THE WATER! THIS IS A NORMAL RESPONSE TO THIS! THIS IS HOW THEY SHOULD HAVE RESPONDED TO HITLER! YOU'RE IN DANGER! YOU'RE IN DANGER! YOU'RE IN DANGER, EVERYBODY WATCHING! THEY CONTROL BOTH PARTIES! YOU'RE IN DANGER! WAKE UP! GET OUT OF YOUR TRANCE! THEY SHOULD HAVE RESISTED HITLER LIKE THIS!"
The interview ended there.
Watch the full segment at HuffPost Live [ http://live.huffingtonpost.com/#r/segment/alex-jones-piers-morgan-gun-control/50e4588278c90a7ebd000109 ].
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/alex-jones-youre-in-danger-huffpost-live_n_2459055.html [with the relevant portion of the linked full segment embedded, and comments]
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Alex Jones: Glenn Beck Is 'Despicable,' Stole My Work (VIDEO)
Posted: 01/11/2013 5:43 pm EST | Updated: 01/11/2013 6:16 pm EST
Alex Jones hit back at Glenn Beck during an appearance on HuffPost Live on Friday [full segment at http://live.huffingtonpost.com/#r/segment/alex-jones-piers-morgan-gun-control/50e4588278c90a7ebd000109 ], alleging that Beck has taken credit for his work and calling him "despicable."
Jones, a radio host, recently directed a pro-gun tirade [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/08/alex-jones-piers-morgan-guns_n_2429161.html ] at Piers Morgan on CNN. After seeing the rant, Beck called Jones "a fascist [ http://www.glennbeck.com/2013/01/08/crazy-person-alex-jones-rants-and-raves-on-cnn/ ]," among other things. When asked to respond to Beck's comments, Jones did not hold back.
"Glenn Beck has basically taken my research... five years ago, he said everything I talked about was a lie," he said. "He's taken the stuff that I put out, that's true, re-worked it, re-engineered it, neoconned it and then rolled it out later so he's mad that I'm getting on hundreds of stations, he's mad that I'm getting attention."
"I'm not here trying to be numero uno like Glenn Beck," Jones added. "I'm here trying to save our Bill of Rights and Constitution."
He pushed back against Beck's other claims about his work, and tore into Beck's attempt to rebrand The Blaze [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/09/glenn-beck-relaunching-the-blaze-again_n_2438890.html?ir=Media ] as a "libertarian" network. Beck is "not consistent," Jones blasted. "And he really disdains his audience and he's another despicable person just like Piers Morgan."
This was before Jones capped his HuffPost Live appearance with yet another angry monologue [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/alex-jones-youre-in-danger-huffpost-live_n_2459055.html (just above)]. He was cut off after yelling, "YOU'RE IN DANGER! WAKE UP! GET OUT OF YOUR TRANCE! THEY SHOULD HAVE RESISTED HITLER LIKE THIS!"
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/alex-jones-glenn-beck-fascist_n_2459117.html [with the relevant portion of the linked full segment embedded, and comments]
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Sweeping new gun laws proposed by influential liberal think tank
By Philip Rucker
Saturday, January 12, 3:16 PM
With President Obama readying an overhaul of the nation’s gun laws [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-house-weighs-broad-gun-control-agenda-in-wake-of-newtown-shootings/2013/01/05/d281efe0-5682-11e2-bf3e-76c0a789346f_story.html ], a liberal think tank with singular influence throughout his administration is pushing for a sweeping agenda of strict new restrictions on and federal oversight of gun and ammunition sales.
The Center for American Progress is recommending 13 new gun policies to the White House — some of them executive actions that would not require the approval of Congress — in what amounts to the progressive community’s wish list.
CAP’s proposals — which include requiring universal background checks, banning military-grade assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips and modernizing data systems to track gun sales and enforce existing laws — are all but certain to face stiff opposition from the National Rifle Association and its many allies in Congress.
Obama, as well as Vice President Biden, who is leading the administration’s gun violence task force [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-house-insists-obama-will-push-for-assault-weapons-ban/2013/01/11/55b6e032-5c05-11e2-88d0-c4cf65c3ad15_story.html ], has voiced support for many of these measures. Yet it is unclear which policies he ultimately will propose to Congress. Biden is planning to present his group’s recommendations [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-cites-broad-agreement-on-universal-background-checks-for-gun-sales/2013/01/10/2369cc6c-5b4b-11e2-9fa9-5fbdc9530eb9_story.html ] to Obama this Tuesday.
CAP’s recommendations, presented Friday to White House officials and detailed in an 11-page report [ http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/civil-liberties/report/2013/01/13/49510/preventing-gun-violence-in-our-nation/ ] obtained by The Washington Post, establish a benchmark for what many in Obama’s liberal base are urging him to do [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-campaign-for-tougher-gun-laws-obama-and-allies-work-to-tilt-public-opinion/2013/01/09/64b07be0-5a8c-11e2-9fa9-5fbdc9530eb9_story.html ] following last month’s massacre at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.
“There’s nothing here that interferes with the rights of people to have a gun to protect themselves,” CAP President Neera Tanden said. But, she added, “We have daily episodes where it seems that guns are in the wrong hands, and that’s why we think it’s important that the president acts.”
On Monday, Tanden will moderate a public discussion with three Democrats who have played leading roles in the gun debate: Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who in the Clinton White House helped get the 1994 assault weapons ban passed; Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), who helped author that bill as a House member; and Rep. Mike Thompson (Calif.), who chairs the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force.
One of CAP’s suggestions to toughen federal regulation of gun sales is to make the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which is currently an agency within the Department of Justice, a unit of the FBI. CAP says absorbing the ATF into the FBI would better empower the ATF to combat gun crime and illegal trafficking.
“It is a beleaguered agency lacking leadership and resources,” said Winnie Stachelberg, senior vice president of CAP. “It needs to be a well-functioning federal law enforcement agency, and we need to figure out ways to ensure that happens.”
CAP’s top recommendation is to require criminal background checks for all gun sales, closing loopholes that currently enables an estimated 40 percent of sales to occur without any questions asked. The organization also wants to add convicted stalkers and suspected terrorists to the list of those barred from purchasing firearms.
CAP is urging the Obama administration to back Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s assault weapons ban proposal. The California Democrat wants to prohibit the sale, transfer, importation and manufacturing of military-style assault weapons and ammunition magazines that carry more than 10 bullets.
The group also suggests requiring firearms dealers to report to the federal government individuals who purchase multiple semi-automatic assault rifles within a five-day period. Current law requires reporting multiple purchases of handguns, but not semi-automatic assault rifles.
CAP also wants the administration to free public health research agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to study the impact of gun violence on injuries and deaths. For years, lawmakers, urged by the NRA, have placed so-called riders on spending bills that restrict these and other agencies from conducting such research.
© 2013 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/sweeping-new-gun-laws-proposed-by-influential-liberal-think-tank/2013/01/12/65192d26-5c2a-11e2-9fa9-5fbdc9530eb9_story.html [with comments]
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NRA President David Keene Rejects Outline Of White House Gun Control Recommendations
Vice President Joe Biden speaks during a meeting with representatives from the video game industry in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House complex in Washington, Friday, Jan. 11, 2013. Biden is holding a series of meetings this week as part of the effort he is leading to develop policy proposals in response to the Newtown, Conn., school shooting.
(AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
By Sabrina Siddiqui
Posted: 01/13/2013 9:55 am EST | Updated: 01/13/2013 11:21 pm EST
WASHINGTON -- Just two days before Vice President Joe Biden delivers a comprehensive set of recommendations on gun policy, National Rifle Association President David Keene rejected the reported outline of suggestions Sunday and dismissed any ban on assault weapons or high-capacity magazines as a non-starter.
"We don't think any of those things work," he said in appearance on CNN's "State of the Union [ http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2013/01/13/exp-sotu-nra-pres-david-keene-response-to-wh-task-force-biden.cnn (video embedded; transcript http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1301/13/sotu.01.html ]." "You should absolutely be able to compromise on things that accomplish the purpose. Our objection to those things is that they interfere with people's rights without doing anything to solve the problem."
Biden on Tuesday is expected to issue a series of proposals to address gun violence, in response to last month's shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Based on initial reports, the White House will make more comprehensive background checks a priority [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/joe-biden-gun-control-background-checks_n_2458633.html ] and continue to push for the reinstatement of an assault weapons ban.
But despite having an NRA representative present for a meeting with the vice president last week, Keene doesn't foresee his organization and the White House reaching an agreement on how to proceed.
On Sunday, he called for a greater focus on mental health and said those who are mentally ill and potentially dangerous should be placed on a list of people prohibited from purchasing firearms. He did not raise the NRA's initial suggestion to place armed guards in schools [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/21/nra-press-conference_n_2346382.html ] across the country, which was not only met with widespread criticism but has also proven to be ineffective [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/21/columbine-armed-guards_n_2347096.html ] in prior mass shootings.
The NRA president predicted a difficult road ahead for those pursuing a ban on assault weapons and said he believed he had enough support to prevent such legislation from passing.
"They are not going to be able to get an assault weapons ban through Congress," Keene said, adding that even outlawing high-capacity magazines would be difficult. "The fact is that we live in a society where first of all, we have constitutional rights, and secondly, there are millions upon millions of Americans who value the rights that they have under the Second Amendment and who are involved in the shooting sports or use firearms for self-defense, and we think that they will be heard."
But while an assault weapons ban remains a divisive issue on Capitol Hill, several of its opponents have said they could get behind action on high-capacity magazines [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/joe-biden-gun-control-background-checks_n_2458633.html ]. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) called high-capacity magazines "a whole different issue," while Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.), who has enjoyed a lifetime "A" rating from the NRA, said he would be "willing to listen to the possibility of the capacity of a magazine."
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/13/nra-gun-control_n_2467081.html [with embedded video of Keene on CNN, and comments]
===
Legally Make your own Gun
Click here to get started.
http://www.aresarmor.com/install/ecom-catshow/hmg.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30i_6awxEG4
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Make a Working GUN using a 3D Printer! 100% Legal. Amature GunSmith Makes an AR-15 Rifle
Make a Working GUN using a 3D Printer! 100% Legal. Amature GunSmith Makes an AR-15 Rifle
From pediatric prosthetics to drugs and guitars, 3-D printing is already revolutionizing the way we use, make and think about a plethora of products.
Now, a firearms enthusiast is claiming to have added yet another thing to the list: a functional AR-15 rifle, which he made at home using a 3-D printer and gun blueprints downloaded from the Internet.
Last month, Extreme Tech reported that amateur gunsmith Michael Guslick had managed to "construct and shoot a pistol partly made out of plastic, 3-D printed parts."
Guslick, an engineer who operates under the moniker 'HaveBlue,' had previously announced in an online forum that he had successfully fired 200 rounds from his custom-made, 3-D printed .22 caliber pistol. The pistol was partially made out of plastic, having been created from a 3-D printed lower receiver and a commercial upper receiver.
In other words, the main body of the gun was made of plastic and printed at home. Guslick told The Huffington Post that he had obtained gun blueprints from a website before using his 3-D printer to print the component. To complete the weapon, he then combined it with off-the-shelf metal parts.
Guslick said that the resulting gun was a success.
"Everything ran just as it should, magazine after magazine," Guslick described in a blog post. "To be honest, it was acting more reliably than a number of other .22 pistols I've shot."
The 3-D printed AR-15 lower receiver and an earlier 75 percent scale version, which Guslick said he printed as an initial feasibility test
Guslick said he then adapted what he had created to make an AR-15 -- a semiautomatic rifle.
Guslick said that creating his own rifle -- which incidentally was the same model used by alleged Aurora gunman James Holmes -- "wasn't that difficult."
The 3-D printed lower receiver assembled into a functioning .22 caliber pistol
However, Guslick said that though early testing of the rifle proved that it worked, it still had some minor feed and extraction problems that needed to be sorted out, Popsci notes.
Though various news sources have reported that the gun enthusiast's homemade weapon is the "world's first 3-D printed gun," Guslick was quick to point out that this is not the case.
"Firearms manufacturers have been doing exactly that for prototyping and testing for many years, and I'm certain many hobbyists have used 3-D printed gun parts as well," he told HuffPost.
However, he added that his gun is -- to the best of his knowledge -- the "first 3-D printed firearm to actually be tested" in a non-commercial setting.
News of Guslick's creation has provoked a number of discussions about gun control laws and the future of gun use and manufacturing in this country and elsewhere -- with some commenters saying that 3-D printers could now allow just about anyone to assemble a completed gun from mail-order parts without government licensing or registration.
Others have pointed out that Guslick only used a 3-D printer to create one component of the rifle and that an all-plastic, functioning assault weapon is probably not in our near future.
For his part, Guslick said he's been surprised by all the media attention and insists that the creation of a 3-D printed firearm is not cause for alarm.
"In the end, 3-D printing an AR-15 lower receiver and assembling it into a functional gun is unremarkable on a technical level, yet a curious novelty on a legal level," he said.
"[And] yes, though such tools are equally available to criminals as well, I cannot foresee criminals turning to 3-D printing as an avenue to obtain illicit arms when the black market continues to serve as a far simpler means of acquisition -- and does not require any level of technical acumen."
Ultimately, Guslick said he hopes his 3-D printed creation does not take away from the many possibilities that 3-D printing has for our future.
"3-D printing will change our perception of mass production, with products being made more economically, not to mention locally. Similarly, 3-D printing will expand to help redefine ergonomics as more of the items we use everyday will not just be designed for 'humans' but for 'individuals,'" he said.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqzJlBcCsow
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Armed Janitors Approved By Montpelier, Ohio, School Board To Stop School Shootings
01/12/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/armed-janitors-approved-school-shootings_n_2458167.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
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David Dewhurst, Texas Lieutenant Governor, Calls For State-Funded Weapons Training For Teachers
01/11/13
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/david-dewhurst-texas-teachers_n_2458527.html [with comments]
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Niwot High School 'Hit List' Closes Colorado School Amid Bomb Threat
01/11/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/niwot-high-school-hit-lis_n_2456251.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
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David Barton Explains The Second Amendment
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/david-barton-explains-second-amendment
David Barton says the Founders crafted the Second Amendment (aka, "the biblical right of self defense" to ensure that citizens had access to the same firepower as any government.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zpqTThbLOo
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Think Again: More Tea Party Fiction
David Barton is the author of The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson.
January 10, 2013
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/media/news/2013/01/10/49318/think-again-more-tea-party-fiction/
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Barton: 'Hate is a Virtue' and 'We're Going to be Intolerant of Liberalism'
Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on Wednesday, 1/2/2013 12:23 pm
On yesterday's broadcast [ http://www.wallbuilderslive.com/listen.asp?cs=high&mf=wma&fileName=WBLive2013-01-01 ] of "WallBuilders Live," David Barton and Rick Green were discussing a column by right-wing blogger John Hawkins titled "5 Ways Liberalism Destroys Virtue [ http://townhall.com/columnists/johnhawkins/2012/07/13/5_ways_liberalism_destroys_virtue/page/full/ ]" and it prompted Barton to lay out a rambling and rather incoherent theory about how hate is a virtue while tolerance is a sin, eventually culminating in the declaration that Christians have got to be "intolerant of liberalism":
[audio embedded]
I wrote this down recently and I'm thinking about it as a name for a book; if not the name for a book, this is definitely something that we have to at least get in our thinking. So let me throw out the thought that I had here, this is just throwing out the title for a book:
When tolerance is a sin and hate is a virtue.
I throw that out because we're getting to the point where tolerance is a bad thing and hate is a good thing. And let me define that: we're told in, I believe it's Proverbs 4:13, it says "the fear of the Lord is to hate evil." Which means that if I'm going to stand for what God stands for, there's some certain things I have to hate: I have to hate evil, I have to hate murder - well no, you can't hate, that's a bad thing ... no, hate is a good thing!
I mean hating Nazis, that's a good thing. And people say "well, you hate their philosophy, you don't hate the people." No, I hate people who want to kill other people and I'm sorry that they're killing others but the guys who were on the Nazi trials at the end, I'm sorry, I just hate what they did. Alright, I love them as a person, yes Jesus died for them, I understand, but I hate certain things.
So we've got to get to the point where tolerance is seen as a sin because we're tolerating a lot stuff that destroys our families, that destroys our own character and we can't tolerate that stuff. We have to get back to the point where hate is a virtue, at least certain kinds of hate. The fear of the Lord is to hate evil and we need to have a hatred of things and get off this fence of having no passion about anything. You know, I tolerate anything, I'm not going to have a passion good or bad, I'm not going to hate anything ... We just can't do that and we've got to get back to that same type of intolerance, that we're going to be intolerant of liberalism.
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12/18/12 @ 1:50
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/barton-show-me-bible-and-i-will-be-concerned-about-it
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1/3/13 @ 10:30am
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/wnd-roberts-should-refuse-swear-obama
Tea Party Nation: Obama 'Hates America'
1/3/13 @ 3:25pm
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/tea-party-nation-obama-hates-america
Geller: 'How Long do Jews have in Obama's America?'
1/2/13 @ 3:05pm
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/geller-how-long-do-jews-have-obamas-america
Swanson: Obama's Reelection 'Solidified our Doom' and Empowered 'Softy-Wofty, Weeny Socialists'
1/3/13 @ 1:30pm
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/swanson-obama-reelection-solidified-our-doom
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© 2013 People For the American Way
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/barton-hate-virtue-and-were-going-be-intolerant-liberalism
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Texas Has Created a Costly Roadmap for Defunding Planned Parenthood
.jpg)
Allison Joyce/Getty Images
Molly Redden
January 11, 2013 | 12:00 am
Since 2010, nine states have tried to strip funding from their local Planned Parenthood chapters. Not three years later, almost all of their schemes have been laughed out of court. In the cases of Arizona, Indiana, and Texas, where legislatures and governors had tried to bar the federally approved provider from participating in state Medicaid, judges ruled that states simply can't do that [ http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/abortion/264439-efforts-to-cut-state-funding-for-planned-parenthood-fall-short ] and expect to receive federal dollars. The governor of one of those states, however, decided that if federal rules won’t allow him to defund Planned Parenthood, so be it. He would achieve his goal by forfeiting hundreds of millions of federal dollars in Medicaid tagged for women's health care.
That governor, of course, is Rick Perry of Texas. Since fading from our national memory as the presidential candidate who couldn’t remember [ http://www.mediaite.com/tv/at-gop-debate-rick-perry-cant-remember-third-agency-he-would-end-as-president/ ] the Department of Energy, Perry has gone home to oversee the dissolution of what was once a decent health-care partnership with the federal government, the Women's Health Program. Its replacement, an entirely state-run and -funded program of the same name, launched January 1 with rules that exclude Planned Parenthood [ http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/12/31/judge-allows-ban-on-funds-to-planned-parenthood/ ]. As a result, Texas is no longer eligible to receive the $200 million–plus a year that Medicaid provided to Texas to care for low-income women, a fact that doesn't bother Perry one whit.
Perry hasn't won outright; Planned Parenthood has filed lawsuits in state and federal court, and a state court will decide Friday whether to grant an injunction that would temporarily protect Planned Parenthood’s local funding. But Perry's success thus far is instructive to other conservatives looking to give Planned Parenthood the boot. (It's not clear who might be the first to reprise the fight, although a Planned Parenthood official said the organization is keeping a fretful eye on onetime antagonist Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker [ http://www.jsonline.com/business/123166483.html ].) With that in mind, and with the far-right dream of defunding Planned Parenthood alive and well, it’s worth examining just what Texas has sacrificed with all those federal dollars—and what kind of a public health mess it has on its hands as a result.
The costs are stark. One-quarter of Texas women are uninsured [ http://www.texmed.org/Template.aspx?id=5519 ], and the Women’s Health Program was a reliable way to cover at least some of their needs. But by freezing Planned Parenthood out of the program last week, Texas has forced more than 50,000 of them to search for a new primary care doctor within the Women’s Health Program—and it is not at all clear that the system has the capacity to reabsorb them. Planned Parenthood accounted for about half of Women’s Health Program services [ http://www.austinchronicle.com/blogs/news/2012-09-21/consider-the-source-crisis-pregnancy-center-transforms-into-womens-health-program-provider/ ] last year—mostly in the form of cancer, diabetes, and STI treatment, plus high blood pressure screenings, contraception dispersement, and annual checkups. In many parts of Texas, Planned Parenthood served half of all low-income women enrolled in the Women’s Health Program; in certain areas [ http://s3.amazonaws.com/static.texastribune.org/media/documents/GWU_WHP_study.pdf ], that number was as high as 80 percent. And having rejected Medicaid, which provided about $9 to the Women’s Health Program for every $1 the state spent, Texas is now challenged to come up with about $200 million for the program over the next five years. (One proposal is to make up the gap through Medicaid fraud penalties, but the state's method for collecting these is dubious and under heavy fire [ http://www.texmed.org/Template.aspx?id=25964 ]). All this has taken place at a time when Republican legislators have already slashed the family-planning budget by two-thirds [ http://www.texasobserver.org/one-year-later-cuts-to-womens-health-have-hurt-more-than-just-planned-parenthood/ ]. “This is Rick Perry versus Texas women, literally,” a Planned Parenthood official told me.
For its part, the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC), which administers the Women’s Health Program and wrote rules to exclude Planned Parenthood at Perry’s behest, disputes that shedding Planned Parenthood has created a problem. In a media blitz begun this week, its officials are touting a survey of state-approved providers who say they have more than enough capacity to serve Planned Parenthood’s former patients. But Texas reporters have called [ http://www.wacotrib.com/news/185863732.html ] alternative providers listed by the HHSC and found that many are not actually participating in the Women’s Health Program or are not accepting new clients. State Rep. Donna Howard, a Democrat from Austin, and her staff have placed a few such calls, too. “We’ve been told that providers are no longer there, that they don’t take Medicaid, a wide variety of answers,” she said. The website, she added, lists an assortment of providers who perform important auxiliary services—like radiologists, anesthesiologists, and endoscopic physicians—but don’t provide the primary care that would replace a visit to Planned Parenthood. “It’s very confusing.”
How exactly did Texas get here? In part, of course, because of Planned Parenthood’s reputation as an abortion provider. In Texas, though, the arm of Planned Parenthood that provided health care services to poor women is separate, legally and administratively, from the one that performs abortions. Nonetheless, in 2011, according to an HHSC spokesperson, Perry and his attorney general, Greg Abbott, directed the HHSC to write into its laws language that would defund Planned Parenthood because it was an “affiliate” of the abortion provider of the same name. In fact, Planned Parenthood is so hated that the HHSC rules include a clause—that Planned Parenthood hopes will not pass judicial scrutiny—that dissolves the entire Women’s Health Program, serving 110,000 needy women, if a court ever allows Planned Parenthood to participate in the program. But the real genesis of the current crisis, Howard proposed, can be found in that August 2011 decision by a Republican-controlled legislature to solve a fiscal shortfall by cutting the family-planning budget [ http://www.texastribune.org/2011/08/15/day-15/ ] by two-thirds. The cuts had the effect of shuttering 60 clinics [ http://www.texasobserver.org/one-year-later-cuts-to-womens-health-have-hurt-more-than-just-planned-parenthood/ ] across the state that once provided everything from oral contraceptives to pap smears. As a result, said Howard, many rural and remote areas of Texas no longer have immediate access to female care providers. The unplanned pregnancies that will result from these cuts, moreover, are estimated [ http://www.texmed.org/Template.aspx?id=24707 ] to cost the state $231 million.
So there you have it. Politicians anywhere who are interested in defunding Planned Parenthood need only follow Texas' roadmap: Give up hundreds of millions of free federal money, launch their own state-run health care apparatus, and steel themselves for the cost of all the unwanted pregnancies that result. Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood is waiting for a court to decide if it can continue to serve Texas’s poor women. Speaking from the State House, Howard told me that her Republican colleagues in Austin are beginning to realize just how drastic those family-planning cuts were, especially now that the costs of resulting unwanted pregnancies are becoming clear. But whether there’s anything those remorseful legislators can do to stop Gov. Perry—“I don’t have a good answer for that right now,” she said.
Copyright 2013 The New Republic
http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/111812/texas-planned-parenthood-defund [with comments]
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Ken Cuccinelli: Opponents Of Obama Contraception Mandate Must Be Willing To 'Go To Jail'
By Nick Wing
Posted: 01/10/2013 6:10 pm EST | Updated: 01/10/2013 6:13 pm EST
Virginia Attorney General and GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli on Wednesday urged opponents of an Obamacare mandate on contraception coverage to dig in their heels, exercise civil disobedience and be prepared to "go to jail" for the cause.
Politico relays the exchange [ http://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/ken-cuccinelli-go-to-jail-to-fight-contraception-mandate-86028.html ] between Cuccinelli and Iowa-based radio host Steve Deace:
"You know, Abraham Lincoln has many good quotes, but one of them is ‘the best way to get rid of a bad law is to enforce it vigorously.' And here we're going to have an example of what tyranny means when it's played to its logical conclusion,” Cuccinelli said. "Because forcing business owners and businesses to do this is not consistent with our history of preserving religious liberty, one of the most important protections we have in this country."
Cuccinelli recounted an exchange with his own bishop in which he counseled the cleric to embrace civil disobedience: "My local bishop said, 'Well, you know I told a group I’m ready to go to jail.' And I said, 'Bishop, don't take this personally: You need to go to jail.'"
The attorney general's comment comes as the Christian conservative owners of Hobby Lobby have decided to defy [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/28/hobby-lobby-obamacare_n_2375041.html ] a federal mandate under President Barack Obama's health care reform law that requires businesses to offer employees health coverage that includes access to the morning-after pill.
The company's move was spurred by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor's denial of its request for an injunction while a lawsuit against the measure is pending. The decision could invite potential fines of up to $1.3 million per day.
Cuccinelli's conservative views and past action on women's issues [ http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2012/07/virginia_attorney_general_cuccinelli_blocks_health_board_on_abortion_clinic_regulations_.html ] have made him a popular target for protesters. Virginia Democrats recently criticized Cuccinelli [ http://articles.dailypress.com/2013-01-09/news/dp-nws-cuccinelli-women-wire-20130109_1_attorney-general-ken-cuccinelli-domestic-violence-victims-address-confidentiality-program ] after he emerged as one of three state attorneys general who declined to sign a letter urging Congress to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act.
And earlier this month, a group of demonstrators referring to themselves as the “Cooch Watch” planned a protest [ http://wtvr.com/2013/01/04/pro-choice-group-hold-protest-against-ken-cuccinelli/ ], vowing to "keep an eye" on the attorney general in the upcoming legislative session.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/10/ken-cuccinelli-contraception_n_2451289.html [with comments]
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Hobby Lobby Resists Obamacare Mandate, Plans To Delay Birth Control Coverage
Posted: 01/10/2013 11:27 pm EST | Updated: 01/11/2013 8:09 am EST
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — An attorney for Oklahoma City-based Hobby Lobby says the company has found a way to delay providing insurance coverage for emergency contraceptives as required under the federal health care law.
Peter Dobelbower said in a statement Thursday that the company will shift the plan year for employee health insurance that will delay by several months the Jan. 1 effective date of the requirement.
Hobby Lobby did not return phone calls seeking further comment.
Hobby Lobby sued to overturn the mandate on grounds that it violates the religious beliefs of founder and CEO David Green and his family. The Greens say requiring insurance for what is known as "morning-after" and "week-after" pills forces them to either violate their religious beliefs or face hefty fines.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor denied the companies' request for an injunction while the lawsuit is pending.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/hobby-lobby-obamacare-birth-control_n_2452885.html [with comments]
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Arielle and Shawnee McPhail, Lesbian Couple, Handed Anti-Gay Letter From Restaurant Owner
01/11/2013
The letter
reads as follows:
"God said in the last days that man and wom[a]n would be lover of self, more [than] the lover of God.
That man and woman would have unnatural [affection] for one another. Then, the coming of the Son of Man, who is Jesus. So please, look at your life. See how it hurt[s] everyone around you. And ask the Lord to open your eye[s] before it [is] to[o] late.
The Love of Christ
P.S. my daughter also was gay. It destroy[ed] her life and my grandson."
McGovern confirmed with NewsChannel 12 that he did give the couple that letter, out of love, and that he did something similar to another lesbian couple in the past.
McGovern said he wrote the letter because he did not approve of the McPhails kissing outside of his restaurant. But the couple denied doing it.
[...]
[ http://www.wcti12.com/news/Lesbian-couple-Restaurant-owner-hands-them-letter-condemning-homosexuality/-/13530444/18086232/-/n0mfvd/-/index.html (with embedded video report, and comments)]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/arielle-and-shawnee-mcphail-lesbian-couple-anti-gay-letter-restaurant-owner_n_2456093.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
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Pat Brady Resignation Flap: Illinois GOP Calls For Ouster Of Their Gay Marriage-Supporting Party Leader
State GOP Chairman Pat Brady rejected calls for his resignation after supporting same-sex marriage in Illinois--a direct contradiction of his party's platform.
01/12/2013
[...]
Marriage equality supporters in Illinois this week reintroduced legislation that would legalize same-sex marriage [ http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/lgbt/Illinois-marriage-bill-introduced-/41138.html ] in the state. Sponsors had hoped to pass the bill during the lame-duck session earlier this month, but say they ran out of time to do so, though it was advanced by the Senate Executive Committee for the first time. The Windy City Times reports that bill sponsors are still confident the bill will be approved yet this year, very possibly as soon as next month [ http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/lgbt/The-vote-on-equal-marriage-in-Illinois-many-ask-when/41143.html ].
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/12/pat-brady-resignation_n_2459147.html [with comments]
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The Burn: Westboro Baptist Church Protest
Episode 201 | Posted: 01/08/2013
Jeff Ross wishes that the Westboro Baptist Church would exercise their fifth amendment rights. (4:08)
Copyright © 2013 Comedy Partners
http://www.comedycentral.com/video-clips/ye76jv/the-burn-with-jeff-ross-westboro-baptist-church-protest [with comments]
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The End of Courtship?
Denise Hewett says hanging out has replaced dating.
January 11, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/fashion/the-end-of-courtship.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/fashion/the-end-of-courtship.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
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We are raising a generation of deluded narcissists
By Dr. Keith Ablow [gesundheit!]
Published January 08, 2013
FoxNews.com
A new analysis of the American Freshman Survey, which has accumulated data for the past 47 years from 9 million young adults, reveals that college students are more likely than ever to call themselves gifted and driven to succeed, even though their test scores and time spent studying are decreasing.
Psychologist Jean Twenge, the lead author of the analysis, is also the author of a study showing that the tendency toward narcissism in students is up 30 percent in the last thirty-odd years.
This data is not unexpected. I have been writing a great deal over the past few years about the toxic psychological impact of media and technology on children, adolescents and young adults, particularly as it regards turning them into faux celebrities—the equivalent of lead actors in their own fictionalized life stories.
On Facebook, young people can fool themselves into thinking they have hundreds or thousands of “friends.” They can delete unflattering comments. They can block anyone who disagrees with them or pokes holes in their inflated self-esteem. They can choose to show the world only flattering, sexy or funny photographs of themselves (dozens of albums full, by the way), “speak” in pithy short posts and publicly connect to movie stars and professional athletes and musicians they “like.”
Using Twitter, young people can pretend they are worth “following,” as though they have real-life fans, when all that is really happening is the mutual fanning of false love and false fame.
Using computer games, our sons and daughters can pretend they are Olympians, Formula 1 drivers, rock stars or sharpshooters. And while they can turn off their Wii and Xbox machines and remember they are really in dens and playrooms on side streets and in triple deckers around America, that is after their hearts have raced and heads have swelled with false pride for “being” something they are not.
On MTV and other networks, young people can see lives just like theirs portrayed on reality TV shows fueled by such incredible self-involvement and self-love that any of the “real-life” characters should really be in psychotherapy to have any chance at anything like a normal life.
These are the psychological drugs of the 21st Century and they are getting our sons and daughters very sick, indeed.
As if to keep up with the unreality of media and technology, in a dizzying paroxysm of self-aggrandizing hype, town sports leagues across the country hand out ribbons and trophies to losing teams, schools inflate grades, energy drinks in giant, colorful cans take over the soft drink market, and psychiatrists hand out Adderall like candy.
All the while, these adolescents, teens and young adults are watching a Congress that can’t control its manic, euphoric, narcissistic spending, a president that can’t see his way through to applauding genuine and extraordinary achievements in business, a society that blames mass killings on guns, not the psychotic people who wield them, and—here no surprise—a stock market that keeps rising and falling like a roller coaster as bubbles inflate and then, inevitably, burst.
That’s really the unavoidable end, by the way. False pride can never be sustained. The bubble of narcissism is always at risk of bursting. That’s why young people are higher on drugs than ever, drunker than ever, smoking more, tattooed more, pierced more and having more and more and more sex, earlier and earlier and earlier, raising babies before they can do it well, because it makes them feel special, for a while. They’re doing anything to distract themselves from the fact that they feel empty inside and unworthy.
Distractions, however, are temporary, and the truth is eternal. Watch for an epidemic of depression and suicidality, not to mention homicidality, as the real self-loathing and hatred of others that lies beneath all this narcissism rises to the surface. I see it happening and, no doubt, many of you do, too.
We had better get a plan together to combat this greatest epidemic as it takes shape. Because it will dwarf the toll of any epidemic we have ever known. And it will be the hardest to defeat. Because, by the time we see the scope and destructiveness of this enemy clearly, we will also realize, as the saying goes, that it is us.
Dr. Keith Ablow [gesundheit!] is a psychiatrist and member of the Fox News Medical A-Team.
©2013 FOX News Network, LLC
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/01/08/are-raising-generation-deluded-narcissists/ [with embedded videos of Dr. Ablow [gesundheit!] speaking his wisdoms]
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Generation LGBTQIA
January 9, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/fashion/generation-lgbtqia.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/fashion/generation-lgbtqia.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
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Robertson: Women Usually to Blame for Troubled Marriages
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/robertson-troubled-hard-nosed-slatternly-women-ruining-marriages
Pat Robertson tells a viewer that the woman usually deserves to be blamed when a couple has marriage troubles.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuLBGUcR2b4
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Robertson Admits he Blew Election Prediction he Received from God
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/robertson-admits-blew-election-prediction
Romney-backer Pat Robertson at the beginning of the year said God told him who would win the presidential election, now admits he got it wrong.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF14lBHrQaU
===
Vatican Paper Criticizes Gay Adoption After Italy Ruling
Posted: 01/13/2013 6:27 am EST
VATICAN CITY, Jan 13 (Reuters) - The Vatican newspaper on Sunday stressed that children should be raised by a father and a mother after Italy's top appeals court granted a gay mother custody of her son, prompting a debate over gay adoption.
Italy's Court of Cassation on Friday rejected an appeal by a father who feared his son would not have a balanced upbringing if he lived with his mother and her female partner. The court ruled it was "mere prejudice" to think that a child could not be brought up normally by homosexual parents.
While gay rights group Arcigay hailed the decision as a "historic ruling" in Italy, where it is illegal for gay couples to adopt, Catholic leaders were quick to defend the traditional family unit.
L'Osservatore Romano, the 151-year-old mouthpiece of the Holy See, on Sunday ran an editorial which sought to play down the ruling of the court, saying that children often grow up in difficult circumstances without a mother or father.
"But no one believes that these situations should be created just because in some cases they don't cause damage," wrote Adriano Pessina, director of bioethics at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart.
"The human is the masculine and the feminine ... the monogamous family is the ideal place to learn the meaning of human relations and is the environment where the best form of growth is possible," he said.
He went on to reaffirm the Vatican's view that no one has the "right" to children that he said gay couples who want to adopt are claiming.
The debate flared up in Italy as hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Paris for a mass demonstration against President Francois Hollande's planned legalisation of same-sex marriage.
The Vatican has become increasingly vocal against gay marriage and adoptions in recent months. The pope strongly reaffirmed the Church's opposition to gay marriage in December, saying heterosexual marriage had an indispensable role in society.
(Reporting by Catherine Hornby; Editing by Alison Williams)
Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/13/vatican-gay-adoption-_n_2466541.html [with comments]
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Worlds collide over same-sex rights bill
A woman holds a placard reading "A real mother, a real father, a true marriage" during a demonstration against the Government's plan to legalise same-sex marriage and adoption for same-sex couples.
Photo AP
By Catherine Field
5:30 AM Saturday Jan 12, 2013
Ancient resentments and modern differences of opinion have emerged as France's Catholic Church fights a rearguard action against plans to let homosexuals and lesbians marry and adopt children.
The church is hoping hundreds of thousands will rally in Paris tomorrow, heaping pressure on the Socialist Government before the draft legislation is put to a parliamentary vote this month.
The law is a cornerstone of the election manifesto of President Francois Hollande, who declared it a vital step towards equality.
But it ran into furious opposition from the Catholic Church, which sees it as an assault on marriage and the family. In November, opponents to the bill staged demonstrations that gathered more than 100,000 people in half a dozen cities.
"The firm position we've taken on this legal change has caused many waves," Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois, 70, head of the Roman Catholic church in France, told bishops.
"The reactions to the bill range wider than we imagined and have revealed real unease among our fellow citizens. Denouncing the fraud of same-sex marriage does not prevent us from understanding the need homosexuals feel for recognition, a need that this supposed marriage will not satisfy."
The backstory to this is the French Revolution of 1789, which targeted the corruption and influence of the church just as much as the greed and tyranny of the aristocracy.
The inheritors of the secular crusade are Hollande's Socialists. Many harbour a suspicion of the Vatican and are fiercely proud of their party's role in a 1905 law that separated church and state, barring either side from interference.
Hollande, 58, is a father of four who never married their mother and now lives with his partner, a twice-divorced mother of three who supports same-sex marriage.
After November's rallies, Hollande sought to dial down the heat, insisting that the law would apply only to civil weddings and that mayors who were unhappy about carrying out the ceremony would not be obliged to do it, although he later retreated on the latter point.
Tensions have risen steadily as the bill heads towards the National Assembly. Last week, Education Minister Vincent Peillon warned France's state-supported Catholic schools not to discuss the gay-marriage debate with students because that would breach the country's deal on secularism, although some Catholic leaders slammed this as a gag on freedom of speech.
A Catholic high school in Normandy distributed an anti-gay marriage tract from a parents' association in its year-end students' reports, a move that brought leftist accusations of "proselytising".
Since 1959, Catholic schools have received government subsidies if they teach the state curriculum, appoint teachers who are state-trained and open their doors to children of all faiths. In return, the state pays the teachers' salaries.
This week the Vatican hailed "the courage" of France's bishops, saying they were "defending the heritage of humanity".
The impending protest - officially, at least - does not come under the Catholic Church's banner, although the church clearly supports it and is hoping for support from other conservative religions, including Muslims.
The Grand Rabbi has said Jews should "reflect" on the bill, for which he has expressed reservations, but has not called on them to take part in the rally.
Catholics argue that same-sex marriage breaches France's civil code, a charter of citizen's rights, "and to make the demonstration a religious matter could weaken it", says Monsignor Hyppolite Simon, deputy head of the French bishops' conference.
"We would be handing an argument to all those who say it is being driven by religious dogma."
Several special trains have been laid on from Bordeaux and Lyons and hundreds of buses have been organised to bring demonstrators from Catholic strongholds in northern France, Brittany and the western Vendee region.
Activists are hoping for a turnout in the hundreds of thousands. Only a big show of strength would give any hopes of scrapping the law, as Catholics did nearly 30 years ago when faced with Socialist plans to incorporate Catholic schools into the state education system.
Opinion polls indicate that many people in France back gay marriage or are indifferent to the fuss; and 60 per cent support same-sex marriage although many consider it a question of "secondary priority".
In contrast, less than 50 per cent support adoption rights for gays, which Hollande has bundled into the bill.
Last month, tens of thousands marched in Paris to support the Government's plans under the banner "Demonstration for Equality".
A similar split has developed in the main conservative party, the Union for a Popular Majority and in the far-right National Front, which said it was up to its own members and politicians to decide whether to take part in the demonstration.
*
Related
MP slams polygamy claim on gay bill
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10858223
Gay marriage protest converges on Eiffel Tower
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10858955
Vatican 'surprised' by credit card block
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10858965
Same-sex marriage ceremonies begin in Maryland
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10856921
*
© Copyright 2013, APN Holdings NZ Limited
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10858615
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Gay marriage opponents flood Paris
Women shout during a demonstration in Paris against plans to legalise gay marriage.
Source: AP
January 14, 20138:33AM
HUNDREDS of thousands of protesters have flooded the streets of Paris in protest at government plans to legalise gay marriage and adoption.
With the proposed legislation due to go before parliament at the end of this month, opponents travelled from all over France for a demonstration supported by leaders of the mainstream centre-right opposition, the Catholic Church and France's five-million-strong Muslim community.
Organisers of the 'demo for all' (a reference to the government's billing of its legislation as 'marriage for all') estimated attendance at 800,000, but the police suggested a figure of around 340,000 was nearer the mark.
The protesters hope their show of strength will put pressure on President Francois Hollande to review the plans or agree a referendum.
But the Socialist leader has made it clear he has no intention of dropping a promise he made in his election manifesto last year and to which he is personally committed.
Mr Hollande is already pencilled in to attend one of France's first gay marriages once the legislation is enacted later this year.
Despite months of protests, opinion polls have shown consistently that most voters support the right of homosexual couples to marry and a narrower majority favour granting them adoption rights.
The slim prospect of success did not appear to dampen the spirits of the protesters however as giant marches converged near the Eiffel Tower on Sunday after setting off from three different starting points.
Many of the protesters were accompanied by children, some of whom brandished placards exclaiming: "Born of a man and a woman." A more light-hearted banner proclaimed: "There are no eggs in the testicles."
Jacques Julien, 70, who had travelled from the Haute Loire region of central France, said he had voted for Mr Hollande but disagreed with the Socialist president's approach.
"A man and a woman, that is the basis of the family," he said. "I'm saying out loud what many people on the left think privately."
The movement against gay marriage has given France a new celebrity in the form of its public face, Virginie Tellenne, a Parisian socialite who goes by the name of Frigide Barjot.
Her assumed name - a play on the name of French film star Brigitte Bardot, a sex symbol in the 1960s - translates as Frigid Loony.
"The president must listen to us," Barjot said. "He must put this law on hold."
Copyright 2013 AFP
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/gay-marriage-opponents-flood-paris/story-e6frg6so-1226553271678
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Catholic League's Bill Donohue Suggests Obama Should Swear In On Marx's 'Das Kapital'
Bill Donohue appeared on CNN in 2012 to slam Obama's decision to support gay marriage. This week, Donohue published a news release [ http://www.catholicleague.org/should-obama-swear-on-das-kapital/ ] in which he suggested the president be sworn in on Marx's "Das Kapital" for his pro-gay views.
01/11/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/catholic-league-bill-donohue-obama-marx-das-kapital_n_2458579.html [with comments]
===
Colin Powell: GOP Holds 'Dark Vein Of Intolerance'
By Chris Gentilviso
Posted: 01/13/2013 12:26 pm EST | Updated: 01/13/2013 12:59 pm EST
Former Secretary Of State Colin Powell delivered some harsh words for the GOP as a whole on Sunday.
In an appearance on NBC's "Meet The Press [transcript and video http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/50447941/ns/meet_the_press-transcripts/t/january-colin-powell-cory-booker-haley-barbour-mike-murphy-andrea-mitchell/ (video embedded), via http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8987534/ns/meet_the_press-resources/t/meet-press-transcripts-resources-video/ ]," Powell noted that there is a "dark vein of intolerance in some parts of the party."
"What do I mean by that?," he explained. "What I mean by that is they still sort of look down on minorities."
Powell specifically pointed to October 2012 comments by former Alaska Gov. and Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin on the attacks in Benghazi, Libya [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/24/sarah-palin-obama-shuck-and-jive-benghazi_n_2010833.html ].
"When I see a former governor say that the president is 'shuckin' and jivin' -- that's a racial-era slave term," Powell said, referring to Palin's words on Obama's response.
Powell added that Republicans had become too preoccupied with the candidate-selection process, losing sight of the group's overall message.
"You've got to think first about what's the party actually going to represent," Powell said. "If it's just going to represent the far right wing of the political spectrum, I think the party is in difficulty. I'm a moderate, but I'm still a Republican."
Powell was the first African American to fill the role of Secretary Of State, serving under President George W. Bush [ http://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/people/powell-colin-luther ] from 2001-05. Despite maintaining his allegiance to the Republican Party, Powell has been an ardent supporter for President Barack Obama [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/25/colin-powell-endorses-obama_n_2011162.html ], giving him a 2008 vote and a 2012 endorsement.
"I think we ought to keep on the track we are on," said Powell in October 2012, commending Obama on the economy and Iraq War.
Top Mitt Romney surrogate John Sununu [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/26/john-sununu-colin-powell-endorsement_n_2020735.html ] turned heads after the announcement, suggesting that Powell's Obama endorsement was motivated by race. That statement prompted former Powell Chief Of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/26/lawrence-wilkerson-colin-powell-sununu_n_2027721.html ] to make Republican-Party comments similar in nature to Powell's Sunday remarks.
My party, unfortunately, is the bastion of those people -- not all of them, but most of them -- who are still basing their positions on race. Let me just be candid: My party is full of racists, and the real reason a considerable portion of my party wants President Obama out of the White House has nothing to do with the content of his character, nothing to do with his competence as commander-in-chief and president, and everything to do with the color of his skin, and that's despicable.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/13/colin-powell-gop_n_2467768.html [with embedded video of Powell on Meet the Press, and comments]
===
Eugene Patterson's final column for the Times
By Eugene Patterson
Posted: Jan 12, 2013 10:51 PM
Last modified: Jan 12, 2013 11:07 PM
Editor's note: This is the final column Eugene Patterson wrote as president of the Times Publishing Co. It appeared on Oct. 30, 1988, under the headline "Saying farewell to a long and rewarding career in journalism."
You'll note my name is coming off the masthead now. I turned 65 this month and decided 41 years in the news arena was plenty. So I'm hanging up the gloves and retiring to play with my grandchildren and write a book or two.
Control of the Times Publishing Company passes to Andy Barnes, my designated hitter, who will run it well. Not yet 50, he came down with me from the Washington Post and proved he could play all the positions with elan and lead with the right vision.
This is a note of thanks to you always-faithful and often-forgiving readers who have made my 17 years at the St. Petersburg Times the best. And it is a love letter about the news business to those young people who are interested in journalism but who may wonder if there's a better way to make a living. I can't imagine that there is.
When a working life comes down, as the psalmist said, to a tale that is told, a Georgia farm boy can only look back with astonishment at his luck on entering a line of work that enabled him to get to know every American president since Franklin Roosevelt, all eight of them. (Most likable: Harry Truman, for being his brash and unaffected self. Most likely to be noted longest in history, I think: Lyndon Johnson, for his politically costly courage, as a Southerner, in freeing black Americans from the bondage of legal segregation, concluding the Civil War at last.)
Inelegant assignments come along too. Hasn't every reporter covered a rodeo and an armadillo fair in Texas? Or crushingly sad ones: the dying in a Georgia emergency room of a young automobile wreck victim — a bride on her wedding night. Or scarring scenes that will haunt one: a young black man strapped into the South Carolina electric chair for the rape of a white woman (who was present in the death chamber to watch) asking, when the warden invited his last words, "Will it hurt?"
There were the train wrecks on Long Island and the airplane crashes in New Jersey but to a young reporter a-gawk in New York City, the celebrities were the sights. We retirees are the only one who'll remember Mary Garden but I interviewed her at the Pierre! Gypsy Rose Lee made my lead for the day when I phoned her for a quote on a mid-winter power failure that was cutting off heat in the city. "Honey," said that wonderful stripper, "I'm gettin' out my fur-lined G-string." I buttonholed Thomas E. Dewey in the lobby of the Roosevelt and waylaid Columbia University President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the basement of Pennsylvania Station before he could get in his limousine.
London in the middle 1950s opened the door to Europe. Would you believe these eyes saw Sir Winston Churchill perform as Prime Minister at question time in the House of Commons, and examined his hapless successor Sir Anthony Eden in a press conference at 10 Downing Street; watched Queen Elizabeth II close-up at investitures in Buckingham Palace and witnessed Princess Margaret's sorrow when she had to give up Group Capt. Peter Townsend, the man she loved but couldn't marry because he was divorced; tracked the Soviet leaders Khrushchev and Bulganin down Geneva streets at the summit conference of 1955, and in Monaco saw the wedding of the American actress Grace Kelly to Prince Rainier.
But, thinks the young career-shopper, can a newspaper reporter hope ever to escape the rush and engage in an important issue in depth, over time? Yes, more than a decade's editorial work in Atlanta centered on the civil rights revolution that ramified into every political, social and economic institution in the South. Feeling that mountainous issue begin to move forward rewarded me the most. And I can tell my grandchildren I knew Martin Luther King Jr. and worked at the Constitution alongside Ralph McGill.
Many of our luncheon guests in Katharine Graham's dining room at the Washington Post during the Nixon era were transients in the halls of power — John Erlichman, John Mitchell, Henry Kissinger, Ed Muskie, George McGovern and the rest.
But in St. Petersburg in early 1975, one guest who came for lunch told us he aimed to win high office the next year and he did stick around the power alley for a while. The name was Jimmy Carter.
Then there's been the story of Florida's emergence as America's fourth largest state and Tampa Bay's evolution into Florida's largest city, with all the heady news and human stories attendant to that. We have problems to solve as well as cheers to lead, though.
I worry some about the drift away from the political center in America to the extent that left and right, conservative and liberal, hawk and dove seem thought to be necessary to define us as citizens. With respect to such extremes, I go back to Thucydides: "A nation that draws too broad a difference between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."
It has been rewarding to help engage a community in conversation with itself, which is what Walter Lippmann called the role of a newspaper. To the young who may choose a life in the news business, I wish them all the breadth of experience that came my way, from the blast of the rockets' liftoffs at Cape Canaveral to the tumult of 15 national political conventions, from the silence of patrols through the Vietnam elephant grass to the thunder of Dr. King's " I have a dream" rolling down from the Lincoln Memorial. And may they all become editors so they'll share in the quiet reasoning as the editorial board searches daily for wise ways to the public good.
Walker Percy wrote that none of us expect to affect history more than an infinitesimal amount, but that we have to try. I think, all told, the world may be a little better than it was when I came into the reporting trade, and I leave believing the good guys are going to find a way to win this thing in the end.
Copyright 1988, 2013 Tampa Bay Times
http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/article1270390.ece [with comments]
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Eugene Patterson, 89, voice on civil rights, dies
This 1984 photo shows Eugene Patterson in St. Petersburg, Fla. Newspaper editor and columnist Eugene Patterson, who helped fellow Southern whites understand the civil rights movement, has died, Saturday, Jan. 12, 2013. He was 89.
(AP Photo/The Tampa Bay Times)
Three Pulitzer winners: Jack Nelson, right, was photographed with (from left), Eugene Patterson and Ralph McGill. Patterson, who was editor of The Atlanta Constitution in the 1960s, is holding his Pulitzer Prize citation, awarded in 1967. McGill, the crusading columnist and publisher, won it in 1959. Nelson won his Pulitzer while reporting for the Constitution a year later, in 1960.
(File)
In this Aug. 25, 2012 photo, Gene Patterson, former chairman and chief executive of the Times Publishing Company and its affiliates, checks his email from his bed in St. Petersburg, Fla. Patterson edited 600,000 words out of the King James Bible shown at right, sitting on top of his finished manuscript. Newspaper editor and columnist Eugene Patterson, who helped fellow Southern whites understand the civil rights movement, has died, Saturday, Jan. 12, 2013. He was 89.
(AP Photo/The Tampa Bay Times, Cherie Diez)
This undated photo made during World War II, shows Eugene Patterson, commander of a tank platoon as Gen. George Patton’s 3rd Army drove through the German ranks. Newspaper editor and columnist Eugene Patterson, who helped fellow Southern whites understand the civil rights movement, has died, Saturday, Jan. 12, 2013. He was 89.
(AP Photo/The Tampa Bay Times)
By Roy Peter Clark
For the Journal-Constitution
Updated: 4:51 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 13, 2013 | Posted: 8:49 a.m. Sunday, Jan. 13, 2013
As editor of the Atlanta Constitution from 1960 to 1968, Gene Patterson’s image and words anchored the editorial page during the most tumultuous years of the civil rights movement in the South. With his mentor and best friend, Ralph McGill, Patterson used his platform to persuade his fellow white Southerners that on matters of race, they were wrong and that if they changed, the sky would not fall.
“I see what you’re trying to do,” one reader accused. “You’re trying to make us think that we’re better than we are.”
Eugene C. Patterson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials, died Saturday evening of complications from cancer in St. Petersburg, Fla.. He was 89.
Patterson will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Anderson McQueen Funeral Home in St. Petersburg is in charge of arrangements, which were incomplete Sunday.
Patterson was born on Oct. 15, 1923, in Valdosta to a schoolteacher mother and a bank cashier father. The family moved from Nicholls to Douglas and wound up during the Depression on a small farm near Adel.
“I toiled as a boy,” wrote Patterson, “behind a plow drawn by two mules across 50 acres of isolation. … I grew up hard there. We milked cows, butchered hogs and steers, hoed peanuts and pulled corn and picked cotton and cropped tobacco.”
In 1940, he completed junior college at North Georgia College at Dahlonega, where he edited the school paper. He earned a journalism degree from the University of Georgia in 1943 and enlisted in the Army. He fought from Normandy through the Battle of the Bulge and then across the Rhine with Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army.
By all accounts, Patterson fought bravely, earning Silver and Bronze stars. Until his death, he evoked World War II as the formative influence of his life. It offered the first escape from the segregationist South and let him see, in a foreign setting, where race hatred inevitably led.
In 1946, Patterson headed for the nearest newspaper office in a newly bought suit. He went from Army captain to cub reporter in a single day, launching his journalism career on the pages of the Daily Telegram in Temple, Texas.
A year later he returned to his native Georgia and joined the Macon Telegraph as a city hall reporter. His career took off when the United Press recruited him to work in its Atlanta bureau. From there he became UP bureau chief in Columbia, S. C., where he met his wife, Sue Carter, then a reporter for the Columbia Record.
The UP sent Patterson to New York, where he sharpened his competitive instincts. In 1953, Patterson became bureau chief for the UP in London. It was from there that Patterson issued his most famous news lead after a noted American author crashed his plane in Uganda and was feared dead: “Ernest Hemingway came out of the jungle today carrying a bunch of bananas and a bottle of gin.”
All that experience served as a prelude for what Patterson encountered in Atlanta from 1956 to 1968, during what is now understood as the classic period of the civil rights movement.
Patterson served as executive editor of both the Journal and Constitution from 1956 to 1960, when he succeeded Ralph McGill as editor of the Constitution. McGill was promoted to publisher.
In an era of political assassinations and church bombings, Southern editorial writers who challenged segregation needed courage. Atlanta Mayor William B. Hartsfield advised Patterson not to worry about the anonymous cowards who threatened him with hate mail: “It’s the ones you don’t hear from that you have to worry about.”
Patterson’s equalizer was not a pistol, but a ball-peen hammer hidden in a desk drawer. He never had to wield it, but admitted having, on two occasions, nudged open the drawer.
His daughter, Mary Fausch, remembers how she once phoned her father in a panic because the family dog, Lizzy, had been shot by strangers. “I know who did this, Daddy,” Mary told her father. “It’s the people who are angry about the things you are writing.” The indomitable pup lived to the age of 16 — even with a bullet lodged near her heart.
Patterson was known for his red-hair, his military bearing and his Irish tenor voice that could belt out “Danny Boy” or “Amazing Grace” with spine-chilling clarity. But it was his literary sensibility and editorial voice — part McGill, part Hemingway, part Faulkner — that made him a beacon of progressive reform in the segregationist South.
He wrote a 750-word column every day from 1960 to 1968, more than 3,200 in all. He wrote on Saturdays and Sundays, sometimes by hand in a fishing boat, because he worried that if he wrote two columns on Thursday or Friday, the second would lack the energy of the first.
“To me, writing was like shaving,” Patterson explained. “If a man wants to look good, he gets up in the morning and shaves. That’s what I did every day: shave and write a column.”
With McGill as publisher and Patterson as editor, the Constitution became the leading editorial voice in the South, with a reputation as a progressive force on matters of civil rights.
“Mr. Patterson’s contributions to The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, the Atlanta community and to journalism were enormous. We benefit still from his work and legacy,” said Atlanta Journal-Constitution Editor Kevin Riley.
Former Atlanta Mayor Sam Massell, who was president of the City Council from 1962 until 1970, said the courage that Patterson showed and the topics he tackled — particularly race —helped make Atlanta and guide the city through the turbulent 1960s.
“Gene established himself early on as a protector of Atlanta. He knew local politics, both how the system worked and how it didn’t,” Massell said. “It meant that we had support from the paper, which was extremely important when you are facing such a controversial issue. The daily newspaper was very progressive and unique in the South, to be that advanced on civil rights reforms that were taking place. He was a major factor in the success that we enjoyed.”
Patterson often admitted that his point of view on race took time to develop, that McGill would sometimes chide him for pulling punches and that, like McGill’s, his early opinions were “pale tea.”
As his prose became stronger and his opinions less hesitant, Patterson won a Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for his editorials supporting civil rights for African-Americans and combating white demagogues in Georgia and throughout the South. He also made a difference by what he didn’t do — stalwartly refusing to publish FBI reports about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s private life.
“That’s pretty dangerous stuff,” he told an FBI agent bearing salacious personal information about King, “and it’s not our kind of journalism.”
Patterson’s most famous column was written on September 15, 1963, the day he learned that four young girls had been murdered in Birmingham, Ala., when a dynamite bomb went off in their church. When he told the story, Patterson would describe how he wrote from his home with tears streaming down his face and his own young daughter nearby. The column bore the title: “A Flower for the Graves.”
“A Negro mother wept in the street Sunday morning in front of a Baptist Church in Birmingham. In her hand she held a shoe, one shoe, from the foot of her dead child. We hold that shoe with her. … With a weeping Negro mother, we stand in the bitter smoke and hold a shoe. If our South is ever to be what we wish it to be, we will plant a flower of nobler resolve for the South now upon these four small graves that we dug.”
When word of this editorial reached Walter Cronkite, he invited Patterson to read it, in full, on the CBS Evening News. Patterson’s contribution to social and political change in the South went beyond his opinion columns. In the 1950s and 1960s, he became a close friend and editorial supporter of Georgia governors Ernest Vandiver and Carl Sanders and Atlanta mayors William B. Hartsfield and Ivan Allen.
In a night telephone conversation in 1961, Patterson encouraged Vandiver to stand fast against racial violence designed to frustrate the desegregation of the University of Georgia. And he followed Allen onto Atlanta’s streets on nights when the city experienced violence, vandalism and rioting.
By the end of 1968, Patterson found himself mired in periodic disagreements with publisher Jack Tarver, so he left Atlanta to become managing editor of The Washington Post, serving under publisher Kay Graham and executive editor Ben Bradlee.
His three-year tenure was eventful. Graham would write in her memoir that it was Patterson who insisted to her that she must publish the famous Pentagon Papers. But Patterson and Bradlee were two bulldogs tugging at the same T-bone. Patterson left the Post in 1971 for Duke University, where he spent a year as a professor of public policy.
That same year, Nelson Poynter hired Patterson to become editor of The St. Petersburg Times, now The Tampa Bay Times. Under Patterson’s leadership, the Times gained an international reputation for excellence.
As Patterson’s time in Atlanta receded, he became remembered less as an opinion-shaper on civil rights and more as a national leader of journalistic craft and values. When he retired in 1988, he was CEO of the St. Petersburg Times publishing company and chairman of the board of The Poynter Institute, an acclaimed professional school for journalists.
In 2002, a collection of his Constitution columns was published under the title, “The Changing South of Gene Patterson: Journalism and Civil Rights, 1960-1968.” Patterson’s literary effects are preserved at the Poynter Institute, which has, near one entrance, a saying attributed to Gene Patterson: “Don’t just make a living. Make a mark.”
Hank Klibanoff, former AJC managing editor and co-author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on press coverage of the civil rights movement, spoke of Patterson’s relentless optimism.
“It’s hard for people to recognize now how difficult it was to be progressive on the matter of race relations when he was editor of the Constitution,” Klibanoff said. Patterson tried to reach the silent middle ground, those who felt they were segregationists, but he felt were very educable. “He frequently wrote his column to those people, trying to bring them to sanity.”
Klibanoff recalled how appalled Patterson was when black churches were burned in Terrell County in 1962. Patterson’s column calling on whites to raise money to rebuild the churches raised $10,000. “He knew his audience and knew how oppositional they were to change, but he had enough optimism about the goodness of humanity to feel he could make a difference,” Klibanoff said
Friend and protege George Rahdert, attorney for The Tampa Bay Times, said Patterson had enormous courage, wisdom and fortitude.
“He was right on every issue and usually way before the rest of the pack had figured it out,” he said. “He always had the insight to do the right thing. And he would do it with grace and courage. He would never say, ‘You go.’ He said, ‘Lets’s go.’ He really envisioned what newspapers should be and actually became. He was a big part of that.”
Always the editor, Patterson’s last assignment was a massive one — editing the King James Bible. In 2012, working from a laptop and under hospice care, he published “Chord: The Old Testament Condensed,” which lopped out more than a half-million words from the text in an effort to streamline it.
“Some force urged me to lay my editor’s pencil on the Old Testament and lighten its density. Its expository entanglements had tripped up my lifelong efforts to read it through,” Patterson wrote in the introduction. “I wondered if that great river of a story might be made to flow unvexed past the dams of details and tributaries of digression. I wanted to read the Bible as a book aimed at people in the pews, not shelve it as a catalog of passages from which to select a sermon subject or a movie script. A book with a sustaining narrative, easily followed, surely lay there for the telling.”
Patterson is survived by his daughter, Mary Patterson Fausch, of Raleigh, N.C. and St. Petersburg; three granddaughters, Laura Carter Fausch and Emily Carr Fausch, both of Raleigh, and Molly Patterson Fausch, of Columbus, Ohio; and a sister, Anne Facer, of Homosassa, Fla.
Roy Peter Clark is vice president and senior scholar at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla. Staff writers Ernie Suggs, Fran Jeffries, Daarel Burnette and Poynter Institute researcher David Shedden contributed to this article.
© 2013 Cox Media Group
http://www.ajc.com/news/news/eugene-patterson-89-voice-on-civil-rights-dies/nTt2C/
===
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Official White House Response to
Peacefully grant the State of Louisiana to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government. and 8 other petitions
By Jon Carson
Thank you for using the White House's online petitions platform to participate in your government.
In a nation of 300 million people -- each with their own set of deeply-held beliefs -- democracy can be noisy and controversial. And that's a good thing. Free and open debate is what makes this country work, and many people around the world risk their lives every day for the liberties we often take for granted.
But as much as we value a healthy debate, we don't let that debate tear us apart.
Our founding fathers established the Constitution of the United States "in order to form a more perfect union" through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government. They enshrined in that document the right to change our national government through the power of the ballot -- a right that generations of Americans have fought to secure for all. But they did not provide a right to walk away from it. As President Abraham Lincoln explained in his first inaugural address [ http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln1.asp ] in 1861, "in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual." In the years that followed, more than 600,000 Americans died in a long and bloody civil war that vindicated the principle that the Constitution establishes a permanent union between the States. And shortly after the Civil War ended, the Supreme Court confirmed [ http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0074_0700_ZO.html ] that "[t]he Constitution, in all its provisions, looks to an indestructible Union composed of indestructible States."
Although the founders established a perpetual union, they also provided for a government that is, as President Lincoln would later describe [ http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/gettyb.asp ] it, "of the people, by the people, and for the people" -- all of the people. Participation in, and engagement with, government is the cornerstone of our democracy. And because every American who wants to participate deserves a government that is accessible and responsive, the Obama Administration has created a host of new tools and channels to connect concerned citizens with White House. In fact, one of the most exciting aspects of the We the People platform is a chance to engage directly with our most outspoken critics.
So let's be clear: No one disputes that our country faces big challenges, and the recent election followed a vigorous debate about how they should be addressed. As President Obama said the night he won re-election, "We may have battled fiercely, but it's only because we love this country deeply and we care so strongly about its future."
Whether it's figuring out how to strengthen our economy, reduce our deficit in a responsible way, or protect our country, we will need to work together -- and hear from one another -- in order to find the best way to move forward. I hope you'll take a few minutes to learn more about the President's ideas [ http://www.whitehouse.gov/ ] and share more of your own [ http://www.whitehouse.gov/engage ].
Jon Carson is Director of the Office of Public Engagement
The above response applies to the following 9 petitions
Deport Everyone That Signed A Petition To Withdraw Their State From The United States Of America.
29,650 Signatures
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/deport-everyone-signed-petition-withdraw-their-state-united-states-america/dmQl1bXL
Peacefully grant the State of S.C. to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government.
26,104 Signatures
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/peacefully-grant-state-sc-withdraw-united-states-america-and-create-its-own-new-government/KL6qrls8
Peacefully grant the State of North Carolina to withdraw from the United States and create its own NEW government
31,835 Signatures
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/peacefully-grant-state-north-carolina-withdraw-united-states-and-create-its-own-new-government/rx1KDYTs
Peacefully grant the State of Alabama to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government.
31,597 Signatures
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/peacefully-grant-state-alabama-withdraw-united-states-america-and-create-its-own-new-government/2TvhJSSC
Peacefully grant the State of Tennessee to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government.
32,694 Signatures
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/peacefully-grant-state-tennessee-withdraw-united-states-america-and-create-its-own-new-government/7xsNwkJ8
Peacefully grant the State of Georgia to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government.
33,828 Signatures
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/peacefully-grant-state-georgia-withdraw-united-states-america-and-create-its-own-new-government/pgJ9JLY3
Peacefully grant the State of Florida to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government.
37,014 Signatures
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/peacefully-grant-state-florida-withdraw-united-states-america-and-create-its-own-new-government/D87Rv7yJ
Peacefully grant the State of Texas to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government.
125,746 Signatures
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/peacefully-grant-state-texas-withdraw-united-states-america-and-create-its-own-new-government/BmdWCP8B
Peacefully grant the State of Louisiana to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government.
38,991 Signatures
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/peacefully-grant-state-louisiana-withdraw-united-states-america-and-create-its-own-new-government/1wrvtngl
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/our-states-remain-united [evidently released 1/11/13 ( http://www.buzzfeed.com/zekejmiller/white-house-responds-to-secession-petitions )]
===
Obama Threat: Michigan Man's Alleged Remarks Of Assassination Alert Secret Service
U.S. Secret Service agents hold open the door as President Barack Obama steps out of his vehicle to board Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base, Md., Monday, Dec. 10, 2012, as he travels to Michigan to visit the Daimler Detroit Diesel plant in Redford, Mich. A Michigan man allegedly made a death threat against Obama in January, the latest of many recent intimidating statements his Secret Service staff has investigated since winning reelection.
(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
Posted: 01/11/2013 1:38 pm EST | Updated: 01/11/2013 1:53 pm EST
An alleged threat against President Obama has brought the scrutiny of the U.S. Secret Service down on a resident of Clinton Township, Mich. A Comerica Bank employee told local police that he overheard the 57-year-old man tell another customer on Jan. 2 that he wanted the president to be assassinated [ http://clintontwp.patch.com/articles/clinton-twp-man-s-obama-comments-brought-to-attention-of-secret-service ], reports Clinton Township Patch.
The source also said he heard the man say that he knew of some people willing to drive him to Washington D.C. to “get the job done,” according to a police report cited by Patch. When questioned about the incident by Clinton Township police, the man denied the allegations and said he was simply voicing his unhappiness with President Obama's policies. Police notified the Secret Service, who are expected to handle any additional investigation.
Another Michigan man, James Allen Myers of Dearborn Heights, was recently charged for making racially-charged threats against Obama [ http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130110/METRO01/301100480 ] and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
The 37-year-old, who is a registered sex offender, made several calls in December to the FCC and the National Geographic Channel. In one, he reportedly said, "I'm gonna hang our. . .president from a tree outside the White House with a burning cross and a swastika on the lawn," the Detroit News reports.
Unfortunately for the president, these incidents are far from isolated.
After Obama was reelected, the Secret Service investigated a 22-year-old California woman who wrote a Facebook post about Obama [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/09/denise-helms-california-woman-hopes-obama-is-assassinated_n_2104184.html ] using a racial slur and adding “Maybe he will get assassinated this term.”
A Florida man who also used Facebook to post a threatening comment about the president [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/15/christopher-castillo-obama-facebook_n_2137360.html ] in November was arrested after the Secret Service investigated.
The same month, the Secret Service arrested 20-year-old Mitchell Kusick of Denver for threatening to kill the president during a visit to Colorado [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/20/corrected-denver-man-accu_n_2162312.html ]. A federal judge later ruled that Kusick, who also made threats to kill children trick-or-treating on Halloween, was mentally ill and had to remain in custody.
In 2010, a 47-year-old New Orleans man was sentenced to eight years in prison total for threatening President Obama [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/12/john-turnpaugh-man-who-se_n_573145.html ] and additional charges related to the possession of marijuana and firearms.
After taking office President Obama became the target of about 30 death threats a day [ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/5967942/Barack-Obama-faces-30-death-threats-a-day-stretching-US-Secret-Service.html ], according to the book In the President's Secret Service.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/obama-threat-michigan-clinton-township_n_2456971.html [with comments]
===
Revolutionary Language
The New York Times
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Published: January 11, 2013
Listen closely.
That sound you hear is the sound of a cultural paranoia by people who have lost their grip on the reins of power, and on reality, and who fear the worst is coming.
And they are preparing for it, whatever it may be — a war, a revolution, an apocalypse.
These extremists make sensible, reasonable gun control hard to discuss, let alone achieve in this country, because they skew the conversations away from common-sense solutions on which both rational gun owners and non-gun owners can agree.
These people, a vocal minority, have extreme fears — gun confiscation, widespread civil instability, a tyrannical government — from which they are preparing to defend themselves with arsenals of weapons and stockpiles of ammunition.
If you pay attention to the right-wing’s rhetoric, you can hear a string of code words that feed the fears of these people and paralyze progress.
A collection of conservative groups have declared Jan. 19, during the weekend celebrating President Obama’s inauguration and Martin Luther King’s Birthday, as Gun Appreciation Day.
In a press release, the event chairman, Larry Ward, said, “The Obama administration has shown that it is more than willing to trample the Constitution to impose its dictates upon the American people.”
Using the word “dictates” is a subtle, but intentional, effort to frame the president as dangerous.
Andrew P. Napolitano, a Fox News analyst, said in a video [ http://gretawire.foxnewsinsider.com/open-thread/judge-napolitano-wants-to-know-2/ ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpYTzvY1ZFs , at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=83346853 )] posted Thursday on the network’s GretaWire blog: “Here’s the dirty little secret about the Second Amendment, the Second Amendment was not written in order to protect your right to shoot deer, it was written to protect your right to shoot tyrants if they take over the government. How about chewing on that one.”
He went even further in a piece [ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jan/10/the-right-to-shoot-tyrants-not-deer/ ] in The Washington Times, saying that the Second Amendment “protects the right to shoot tyrants, and it protects the right to shoot at them effectively, with the same instruments they would use upon us.”
Who are Napolitano’s tyrants here? Is this government takeover theoretical, imminent, in progress or a fait accompli?
Ward went so far as to say on CNN [ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/01/11/gun-appreciation-day-chairman-slavery-wouldnt-have-happened-if-slaves-were-armed/ ]: “I believe that Gun Appreciation Day honors the legacy of Dr. King.” He continued: “The truth is, I think Martin Luther King would agree with me if he were alive today that if African-Americans had been given the right to keep and bear arms from Day 1 of the country’s founding, perhaps slavery might not have been a chapter in our history. And I believe wholeheartedly that it’s essential to liberty.”
Set aside, if you can, what would most likely be King’s horror at the association, and look at that language. Pay particular attention to the suggestion that guns are an essential guard against slavery’s resurgence in this country. And who would be the slaves and who the enslavers?
As the Southern Poverty Law Center said in a Spring 2012 report [ http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2012/spring/the-year-in-hate-and-extremism ], the number of so-called patriot groups surged after Barack Obama was first elected president.
“The swelling of the Patriot movement since that time has been astounding,” the report said. “From 149 groups in 2008, the number of Patriot organizations skyrocketed to 512 in 2009, shot up again in 2010 to 824, and then, last year, jumped to 1,274 [ http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2012/spring/active-patriot-groups-in-the-united-states ].”
(According to the center, “Generally, Patriot groups define themselves [ http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2012/spring/active-patriot-groups-in-the-united-states ] as opposed to the ‘New World Order,’ engage in groundless conspiracy theorizing, or advocate or adhere to extreme antigovernment doctrines.”)
The center also points out [ http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/ideology/patriot-movememnt ]: “Fears of impending gun control or weapons confiscations, either by the government or international agencies, also run rampant in antigovernment circles. As a result, many antigovernment activists believe that being well armed is a must. The militia movement engages in paramilitary training aimed at protecting citizens from this feared impending government crackdown.”
That’s why it is both shocking and predictable that James Yeager, the C.E.O. of a Tennessee company that trains civilians in weapons and tactical skills, posted a video online Wednesday (since removed but still viewable at rawstory.com [ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/01/10/unhinged-tactical-response-ceo-threatens-to-start-killing-people-over-obamas-gun-control/ (about a third of the way down in the post to which this is a reply)]) saying he was going to start killing people if gun control efforts moved forward. He said, and I quote:
“I’m telling you that if that happens, it’s going to spark a civil war, and I’ll be glad to fire the first shot. I’m not putting up with it. You shouldn’t put up with it. And I need all you patriots to start thinking about what you’re going to do, load your damn mags, make sure your rifle’s clean, pack a backpack with some food in it and get ready to fight.”
Again, calling the “patriots” to arms is, I think, no accident.
Chew on that.
*
Related News
Gun Control Group Urges Expanded Background Checks (January 12, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/us/politics/gun-control-group-urges-expanded-background-checks.html
Related in Opinion
Dick Cavett: Back When I Was Packing (January 11, 2013).
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/back-when-i-was-packing/
Joe Nocera: How to Shoot a Gun (January 12, 2013).
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/opinion/nocera-how-to-shoot-a-gun.html
Room for Debate: What the Fight Over Guns Is Really About (January 6, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/01/06/what-the-fight-over-guns-is-really-about/
*
© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/opinion/revolutionary-language.html [with comments]
===
Radical right: “We’ll start killing people” if Obama enacts gun control
(Credit: Chantal de Bruijne [ http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-309916p1.html ] via Shutterstock)
On Wednesday, a Tennessee weapons instructor's crazed YouTube rant went viral. More terrifying? He's not alone
By Mark Potok, Southern Poverty Law Center
Friday, Jan 11, 2013 11:51 AM CST
This article was originally published [ http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2013/01/11/yeager-not-alone-radical-right-reacts-to-gun-control/ (with comments)] by The Southern Poverty Law Center.
When Tennessee weapons instructor James Yeager threatened Wednesday [ http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2013/01/10/weapons-instructor-for-police-threatens-to-start-killing-people/ ] to “start killing people” if President Obama moved ahead on gun control, his infuriated rant went national, with dozens of media outlets and blogs expressing amazement.
In thousands of comments about Yeager’s YouTube video and another video [ http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2013/01/10/tennessee-weapons-instructor-eases-up-sort-of/ ] the unrepentant Tactical Response CEO posted yesterday, Americans wondered if Yeager was breaking the law, or mentally ill, or a perfect example of the need for gun control. “Amazing, really,” wrote a commenter on the Hatewatch blog. “Simply amazing. These people are certifiably insane.” Said another, “These are the words of a real terrorist.” And a third wondered, “Can’t he be arrested for this?”
But the truth is that the death threats from Yeager — a man who is a former police chief, protective services contractor in Iraq, and owner of two companies that provide tactical weapons and training to police and military units — are not unique. Although Yeager said it more clearly than most, and with more profanity, the far right in America generally is reacting to the prospect of gun control with hysteria.
Yeager may well have been set off in the first place by the online Drudge Report, which earlier Wednesday compared the administration to Hitler and Stalin for considering using executive orders to facilitate some gun control measures. But Matt Drudge’s was the only the latest in a series of furious attacks from the political far right.
The League of the South [ http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/groups/league-of-the-south ], a white supremacist secessionist group based in Alabama, on Wednesday said that “the biggest threat is the U.S. government itself” and described the Obama administration as “a criminal regime.” “Those in positions of power who exceed the limits of lawful authority ought to be made to live in mortal fear of their transgressions,” league president Michael Hill [ http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/profiles/michael-hill ] said.
A day later, Terry Jones, the Muslim-bashing Florida preacher whose burning of the Koran set off violence [ http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2011/04/01/enraged-by-florida-pastor-afghan-crowds-kill-foreigners/ ] in the Middle East, sounded similar. “Every generation needs a revolution,” Jones said. “We must resist the disarming of the American people, if necessary, with violent aggressive opposition. The tree of liberty must be, from time to time, refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
Chuck Baldwin [ http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/profiles/chuck-baldwin ], a Montana leader of the antigovernment “Patriot” movement and a pastor, wrote last week, and reiterated yesterday, that semi-automatic weapons were essential to preserve “freedom” and prevent “tyranny.” “Ladies and gentlemen, whatever the consequences might be, and whatever anyone else does or doesn’t do, I am prepared to become an outlaw over this issue! I don’t know how to say it any plainer: I will not register my firearms, and I will not surrender my firearms.” He went on to say that any confiscation attempt would result in a “revolution.”
It wasn’t only acknowledged radicals reacting. In Wyoming, a state where guns are very much a part of life for many, lawmakers have sponsored a bill that would ensure that “any federal law which attempts to ban a semi-automatic firearm or to limit the size of a magazine of a firearm or other limitation on firearms in this state shall be unenforceable in Wyoming.” Of course, this kind of attempt to “nullify” federal laws dates back to the Civil War and is generally unconstitutional.
Yeager found a virtual cheering section on the radical racist right as well. “He is saying what needs saying and is ready to rock,” wrote “Fred O’Malleu” on the neo-Nazi Vanguard News Network Internet forum. Elsewhere, he added: “He is saying what we should all be saying, LOUD AND FUCKING CLEAR!! … You fucking idiots, if you let them get away with this shit, you have no life left anyway.”
“A line must be drawn in the sand, a small spark could set off the power keg of patriots lets hope it blows sky high,” wrote another commenter on Stormfront, which is the world’s largest white supremacist Web forum. “I see Civil War II on the horizon,” said another. A third commenter, “Rosalynn,” put it like this: “We’ve been putting every extra penny aside to buy more ammunition and hopefully in the next couple of weeks we will also be able to purchase a few more firearms. They can kiss my white butt if they think they are getting any of our guns.”
Copyright © 2013 The Southern Poverty Law Center
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/11/radical_right_well_start_killing_people_if_obama_enacts_gun_control/ [with comments]
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The Hitler gun control lie
Gun rights activists who cite the dictator as a reason against gun control have their history dangerously wrong
By Alex Seitz-Wald
Friday, Jan 11, 2013 12:35 PM CST
This week, people were shocked [ http://washingtonexaminer.com/journalists-react-in-shock-to-drudge-report-header-featuring-hitler-and-stalin/article/2518041 ] when the Drudge Report posted a giant picture of Hitler over a headline speculating that the White House will proceed with executive orders to limit access to firearms. The proposed orders are exceedingly tame [ http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2013/01/09/what_crazy_fascist_executive_orders_might_obama_use_to_take_away_your_freedoms.html ], but Drudge’s reaction is actually a common conservative response to any invocation of gun control.
The NRA [ http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-01-10/news/ct-perspec-0110-nra-20130111_1_gun-control-gun-rights-gun-owners ], Fox News [ http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/01/10/guns-and-freedom/ ], Fox News (again) [ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/07/fox_news_guest_compares_gun_control_to_nazi_germany/ ], Alex Jones [ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2259303/Piers-Morgan-Alex-Jones-says-CNN-looked-like-Hitlers-bunker.html ], email chains [ http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/01/drudge-hitler-stalin-guns/60784/ ], Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/06/joe-the-plumber-blames-the-holocaust-on-gun-control ], Gun Owners of America [ http://www.prisonplanet.com/larry-pratt-slams-piers-morgan-over-sham-gun-control-argument.html ], etc., all agree that gun control was critical to Hitler’s rise to power. Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership [ http://jpfo.org/ ] (“America’s most aggressive defender of firearms ownership”) is built almost exclusively around this notion, popularizing posters [ http://shop.jpfo.org/cart.php?m=product_detail&p=78 ] of Hitler giving the Nazi salute next to the text: “All in favor of ‘gun control’ raise your right hand.”
In his 1994 book [ http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Crime-Freedom-Wayne-LaPierre/dp/0895264773 ], NRA head Wayne LaPierre dwelled on the Hitler meme at length, writing: “In Germany, Jewish extermination began with the Nazi Weapon Law of 1938, signed by Adolf Hitler.”
And it makes a certain amount of intuitive sense: If you’re going to impose a brutal authoritarian regime on your populace, better to disarm them first so they can’t fight back.
Unfortunately for LaPierre et al., the notion that Hitler confiscated everyone’s guns is mostly bogus. And the ancillary claim that Jews could have stopped the Holocaust with more guns doesn’t make any sense at all if you think about it for more than a minute.
University of Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt explored this myth in depth in a 2004 article published in the Fordham Law Review [ http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4029&context=flr ; http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4031&context=flr ]. As it turns out, the Weimar Republic, the German government that immediately preceded Hitler’s, actually had tougher gun laws than the Nazi regime. After its defeat in World War I, and agreeing to the harsh surrender terms laid out in the Treaty of Versailles, the German legislature in 1919 passed a law that effectively banned all private firearm possession, leading the government to confiscate guns already in circulation. In 1928, the Reichstag relaxed the regulation a bit, but put in place a strict registration regime that required citizens to acquire separate permits to own guns, sell them or carry them.
The 1938 law signed by Hitler that LaPierre mentions in his book basically does the opposite of what he says it did. “The 1938 revisions completely deregulated the acquisition and transfer of rifles and shotguns, as well as ammunition,” Harcourt wrote. Meanwhile, many more categories of people, including Nazi party members, were exempted from gun ownership regulations altogether, while the legal age of purchase was lowered from 20 to 18, and permit lengths were extended from one year to three years.
The law did prohibit Jews and other persecuted classes from owning guns, but this should not be an indictment of gun control in general. Does the fact that Nazis forced Jews into horrendous ghettos indict urban planning? Should we eliminate all police officers because the Nazis used police officers to oppress and kill the Jews? What about public works — Hitler loved public works projects? Of course not. These are merely implements that can be used for good or ill, much as gun advocates like to argue about guns themselves. If guns don’t kill people, then neither does gun control cause genocide (genocidal regimes cause genocide).
Besides, Omer Bartov, a historian at Brown University who studies the Third Reich, notes that the Jews probably wouldn’t have had much success fighting back. “Just imagine the Jews of Germany exercising the right to bear arms and fighting the SA, SS and the Wehrmacht. The [Russian] Red Army lost 7 million men fighting the Wehrmacht, despite its tanks and planes and artillery. The Jews with pistols and shotguns would have done better?” he told Salon.
Proponents of the theory sometimes point to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as evidence that, as Fox News’ Judge Andrew Napolitano put it [ http://www.scribd.com/doc/79328777/It-is-Dangerous-to-Be-Right-When-the-Gov-Andrew-P-Napolitano ], “those able to hold onto their arms and their basic right to self-defense were much more successful in resisting the Nazi genocide.” But as the Tablet’s Michael Moynihan [ http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/119543/gun-control-and-the-holocaust ] points out, Napolitano’s history (curiously based on a citation of work by French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson) is a bit off. In reality, only about 20 Germans were killed, while some 13,000 Jews were massacred. The remaining 50,000 who survived were promptly sent off to concentration camps.
Robert Spitzer, a political scientist who studies gun politics and chairs the political science department at SUNY Cortland, told Mother Jones’ Gavin Aronsen that the prohibition on Jewish gun ownership was merely a symptom, not the problem itself. “[It] wasn’t the defining moment [ http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/01/hitler-stalin-gun-control ] that marked the beginning of the end for Jewish people in Germany. It was because they were persecuted, were deprived of all of their rights, and they were a minority group,” he explained.
Meanwhile, much of the Hitler myth is based on an infamous quote falsely attributed to the Fuhrer, which extols the virtue of gun control:
This year will go down in history! For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!
The quote has been widely reproduced in blog posts and opinion columns about gun control, but it’s “probably a fraud and was likely never uttered,” according to Harcourt. “This quotation, often seen without any date or citation at all, suffers from several credibility problems, the most significant of which is that the date often given [1935] has no correlation with any legislative effort by the Nazis for gun registration, nor would there have been any need for the Nazis to pass such a law, since gun registration laws passed by the Weimar government were already in effect,” researchers at the useful website GunCite note [ http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcbogus.html ].
“As for Stalin,” Bartov continued, “the very idea of either gun control or the freedom to bear arms would have been absurd to him. His regime used violence on a vast scale, provided arms to thugs of all descriptions, and stripped not guns but any human image from those it declared to be its enemies. And then, when it needed them, as in WWII, it took millions of men out of the Gulags, trained and armed them and sent them to fight Hitler, only to send back the few survivors into the camps if they uttered any criticism of the regime.”
Bartov added that this misreading of history is not only intellectually dishonest, but also dangerous. “I happen to have been a combat soldier and officer in the Israeli Defense Forces and I know what these assault rifles can do,” he said in an email.
He continued: “Their assertion that they need these guns to protect themselves from the government — as supposedly the Jews would have done against the Hitler regime — means not only that they are innocent of any knowledge and understanding of the past, but also that they are consciously or not imbued with the type of fascist or Bolshevik thinking that they can turn against a democratically elected government, indeed turn their guns on it, just because they don’t like its policies, its ideology, or the color, race and origin of its leaders.”
Copyright © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/11/stop_talking_about_hitler/ [with comments]
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Allen West: Gun Control Is 'Your Index Finger'
By Paige Lavender
Posted: 01/12/2013 3:48 pm EST | Updated: 01/12/2013 4:26 pm EST
Former Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) said gun control [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/gun-control/ ] comes down to the finger you pull the trigger with, calling the larger discussion on gun violence part of a "political agenda."
"This is your gun control, this finger right here -- your index finger," West said in an interview [ http://www.newsmax.com/US/west-gun-control-laws/2013/01/11/id/471052 (video embedded)] with Newsmax TV. "Nothing happens with that gun until you put that finger into the trigger well and you pull it. So my concern is that we’re not talking about the real issue, we’re talking about a political agenda."
West's comments come in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/sandy-hook-elementary-school-shooting/ ], where 20 first-graders and several teachers were killed. West said "we should start first and foremost" with mental health issues rather than gun control, claiming Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter, had "parental problems."
This isn't the first time West has argued against the gun control debate. At a campaign stop in 2010, West suggested [ http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/allen-west-also-blames-gun-control-for-the-holocau ] gun control was to blame for the Holocaust.
"In 1930, there was a gentleman in Germany who took away private gun ownership and you know what happened to that population," West said. "You must be well informed and well armed, because this government we have right now is a tyrannical government."
On Tuesday, Vice President Joe Biden will issue a sweeping series of recommendations on gun policy. HuffPost's Sam Stein reported earlier [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/joe-biden-gun-control-background-checks_n_2458633.html ]:
Multiple sources close to the talks tell The Huffington Post that the vice president will make universal background checks for all gun purchases the "top priority" of his suggestions. The idea has broad support among politicians in the wake of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, as well as backing from some traditionally pro-gun rights voices. The clearest sign that background checks will be the centerpiece of the Biden recommendations, however, is that a number of gun control advocacy groups have also deemed it such, as opposed to focusing their efforts on higher-profile measures, such as those that would limit the types of guns available for purchase.
That said, those measures will also likely end up in Biden's set of recommendations as well, according to an administration official. The White House pushed back Friday morning on reports that it is shying away from including some form of an assault weapons ban in its final legislative push out of concern that it was too heavy a lift through Congress.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/12/allen-west-gun-control_n_2463956.html [with embedded video of the West interview on Newsmax TV, and comments]
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Joe Miller, Alaska Tea Party Favorite, Wore Bulletproof Vest After GOP Senate Primary Win, Informant Says
Former U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller leaves his celebration headquarters on Nov. 2, 2010, in Anchorage, Alaska.
01/11/2013
WASHINGTON -- Alaska Tea Party favorite Joe Miller wore a bulletproof vest the night he beat Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) to become the Republican Party's 2010 Senate nominee, his former private security guard told The Huffington Post.
"As we're finding out that he's winning, I'm in the bathroom putting a bulletproof vest on the guy," William Fulton said in one of several interviews this week. Describing Miller as "paranoid," Fulton said the underdog conservative was afraid he'd be targeted at election headquarters in Anchorage on that August night. "It was fucking ridiculous."
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/joe-miller-alaska-bulletproof-vest_n_2444137.html [with comments]
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How Bill Fulton Infiltrated Alaska's Right Wing As An FBI Informant
Bill Fulton, right, pictured with Sally Heath, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's mother.
01/11/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/bill-fulton-alaska-fbi-informant_n_2456883.html [with comments]
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Sales of Guns Soar in U.S. as Nation Weighs Tougher Limits
At a gun store in Casper, Wyo., late last month, a wall that typically displays about 25 military-style rifles was almost bare.
Alan Rogers/Casper Star-Tribune, via Associated Press
Brooke Stallings, co-owner of Atlas Tactical, handles an assault rifle for sale in her store near Newport, Va. in December.
Matt Gentry/The Roanoke Times, via Associated Press
By MICHAEL COOPER
Published: January 11, 2013
As Washington focuses on what Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will propose next week to curb gun violence, gun and ammunition sales are spiking in the rest of the country as people rush to expand their arsenals in advance of any restrictions that might be imposed.
People were crowded five deep at the tiny counter of a gun shop near Atlanta, where a pastor from Knoxville, Tenn., was among the customers who showed up in person after the store’s Web site halted sales because of low inventory. Emptying gun cases and bare shelves gave a picked-over feel to gun stores in many states. High-capacity magazines, which some state and federal officials want to ban or restrict, were selling briskly across the country: one Iowa dealer said that 30-round magazines were fetching five times what they sold for just weeks ago.
Gun dealers and buyers alike said that the rapid growth in gun sales — which began climbing significantly after President Obama’s re-election and soared after the Dec. 14 shooting at a school in Newtown, Conn., prompted him to call for new gun laws — shows little sign of abating.
December set a record for the criminal background checks performed before many gun purchases, a strong indication of a big increase in sales, according to an analysis of federal data by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun industry trade group. Adjusting the federal data to try to weed out background checks that were unrelated to firearms sales, the group reported that 2.2 million background checks were performed last month, an increase of 58.6 percent over the same period in 2011. Some gun dealers said in interviews that they had never seen such demand.
“If I had 1,000 AR-15s I could sell them in a week,” said Jack Smith, an independent gun dealer in Des Moines, referring to the popular style of semiautomatic rifle that drew national attention after Adam Lanza used one to kill 20 children and 6 adults at a Newtown school. “When I close, they beat on the glass to be let in,” Mr. Smith said of his customers. “They’ll wave money at me.”
Mr. Smith said many people were stocking up on high-capacity magazines in anticipation that they might be banned. Two weeks ago, he said, a 30-round rifle magazine was $12, but it now fetches $60. Popular online retailers were out of many 20- and 30-round rifle magazines.
In Washington, Mr. Biden said the task force he leads is “shooting for Tuesday” to make its recommendations to President Obama about preventing gun violence. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, one of the nation’s leading gun control groups, said its top priority was to close the loopholes that currently allow 40 percent of gun sales to be made without background checks.
Some groups that support gun control urged the White House not to focus too much energy on an assault weapons ban, which they said could be hard to persuade Congress to pass. Officials at Third Way, a left-leaning research group in Washington, urged the president to save his political capital for higher-priority goals like universal background checks and cracking down on gun trafficking.
Outside Greta’s Guns, a gun store in Simi Valley, Calif., about an hour northwest of downtown Los Angeles, several customers said that they opposed any assault weapons ban, but would support more thorough background checks.
George Gray, 60, who said that he already owned “more arms than arms to bear them,” said that he was in favor of more background checks. “If you own a weapon, you should be stable,” said Mr. Gray, who said he had come from Los Angeles to buy a gun for his daughter. “You should be accountable for your actions. I don’t mind stricter background checks. What we’ve done with the mental health in this country — these people used to get care and were in facilities. And in most of these instances, it’s been people with mental problems.”
Some customers at Greta’s said that they wanted to buy guns before any new gun control measures made it more difficult. Bob Davis, 64, said that he wanted a new pistol. “They want to take guns out of citizens’ hands,” he said. “So as a consequence I ordered a gun. And they’re not going to be able to get me a gun for like six months, because of the backlog. They can’t make guns fast enough.”
The gun industry expected a surge in sales even before the Newtown shooting [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/school_shootings/index.html ]. Gun sales rose after President Obama was first elected in 2008, and many manufacturers expected an increase in gun sales in the event of his re-election. “We believe the continued economic uncertainty and the outcome of the 2012 presidential election is likely to continue to spur both firearms and ammunition sales,” the Freedom Group, which owns Bushmaster, the company that makes the rifle used in Newtown, wrote in a financial report on the quarter that ended Sept. 30.
The possibility that the federal assault weapons ban — which lasted from 1994 to 2004 — might be reinstated was enough to spur sales of semiautomatic rifles with military-style features.
Dale Raby, who manages one of two Gus’s Guns shops in Green Bay, Wis., said his inventory of guns and ammunition was almost cleaned out, and that most of the interest was in AR-15-style rifles.
“I had almost fistfights over the remaining inventory of that type gun,” he said.
Joel Alioto, 44, an Iraq war veteran who lives in the area, said he recently sold an AR-15 rifle at a gun show for $1,700, more than three times what he had paid for it. “I think the shooting in Connecticut was a terrible thing,” said Mr. Alioto, who is unemployed. “But before the shooting the gun was worth 500 bucks. I don’t think I did anything wrong. I wanted to get my teeth done, get a computer and pay for my first year of Bible college.”
Brad Williamson, one of the owners of Quint’s Sporting Goods in Saraland, Ala., said the waiting lists for some products are double what they normally are — especially for guns that are mentioned in the gun control debate. “Whenever there’s a blip on the news about a particular model, the next day people want to come in wanting whatever they named,” he said. “When Biden makes his recommendation next week, you’re going to see another surge.”
At Georgia Arms in Villa Rica, Ga., west of Atlanta, the ammunition business was brisk, with dozens of the yellow bins that usually held ammunition empty. The Rev. Laurence Hesser, a pastor at Memorial United Methodist Church near Knoxville, stopped by because he had been unable to buy ammunition on the shop’s Web site, which halted sales because inventory was so low.
He likened the current run on ammunition to the rush to buy Twinkies last year after its maker, Hostess Brands, announced it was closing. “It’s the same thing,” he said. “When you are threatened with the possibility that you are going to lose something, you get a bunch of it.”
Reporting was contributed by Kim Severson in Villa Rica, Ga.; Trip Gabriel in New York; Ian Lovett in Simi Valley, Calif.; Campbell Robertson in New Orleans; and Michael D. Shear in Washington.
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Related
Gun Control Group Urges Expanded Background Checks (January 12, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/us/politics/gun-control-group-urges-expanded-background-checks.html
Lawmaker Seeks Public Reply on Guns (January 12, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/us/politics/in-california-lawmaker-seeks-public-response-on-guns.html
Tough Path Seen by Obama on Ban of Assault Weapons (January 11, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/us/politics/biden-to-meet-with-gun-advocates-including-nra.html
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© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/us/as-us-weighs-new-rules-sales-of-guns-and-ammunition-surge.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/us/as-us-weighs-new-rules-sales-of-guns-and-ammunition-surge.html?pagewanted=all ]
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Who killed Keith Ratliff, YouTube’s “gun nut” celeb?
(Credit: YouTube)
The weapons enthusiast was shot surrounded by guns in Georgia, and no one knows how or by whom
By David Daley
Friday, Jan 11, 2013 12:32 PM CST
The gun enthusiast with the 11th most popular channel on YouTube [ http://vidstatsx.com/youtube-top-100-most-subscribed-channels ] — who insisted everyone has the right to an assault weapon under the Second Amendment — was shot and killed in what’s been described as his Georgia “weapons development and testing facility” last week.
Keith Ratliff died, according to reports [ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/11/keith-ratliff-youtube-shot-georgia-murder-guns-fpsrussia/1826545/ ], from a single shot to the head — but the murder weapon can’t be found, and there was no sign of a struggle.
And all that has confused police in Georgia — who have called his death a homicide — and Ratliff’s millions of fans and followers, who have poured out sadness and confusion on Twitter [ https://twitter.com/search?q=keith%20ratliff ] and Facebook that he was not able to fight back and defend himself.
As USA Today reports [ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/11/keith-ratliff-youtube-shot-georgia-murder-guns-fpsrussia/1826545/ ], Ratliff’s brother, Kelly, told an Atlanta TV station [ http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/police-investigate-death-popular-youtube-channel-o/nTqpg/ ] that “For him not to pull out that gun and try to defend himself, he had to feel comfortable around somebody. Either that or he was ambushed.”
But as the Huffington Post reports [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/10/keith-ratliff-gun-advocate-dead_n_2448175.html ], the Georgia Bureau of Investigation says there was no sign of a struggle at the Carnesville, Ga., store where Ratliff repaired firearms. (He was registered with the ATF.)
It was online, however, that Ratliff was a celebrity within the gun-rights movement. His YouTube channel, FPS Russia [ http://www.youtube.com/user/FPSRussia ], has almost 3.5 million subscribers, according to the New York Times [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/us/keith-ratliff-gun-enthusiast-of-fpsrussia-is-shot-to-death.html ], and has been viewed some 500 million times. FPS stands for first-person shooter; the Russia refers to partner Kyle Myers, who plays a character in the videos who speaks with a Russian accent.
Lots of things blow up in the videos, as USA Today notes [ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/11/keith-ratliff-youtube-shot-georgia-murder-guns-fpsrussia/1826545/ ]: “The zany videos demonstrate the firepower of various weapons, usually in a dramatic fashion that involves dummies or objects being blown up.” Those objects might be bales of hay, or photos of Justin Bieber [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GH3MLmvhuCA (next below)].
(That video is called “Shooting Justin Bieber with F2000.”)
In a recent “gun control rant” on his personal YouTube page [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8z_5YJ0gbw (next below)],
as the national debate over weaponry picked up after Newtown, he called himself a “gun nut” and insisted that the Second Amendment is “about owning weaponry to allow you to defend yourself from all enemies, no matter where they rise from.”
According to the Times [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/us/keith-ratliff-gun-enthusiast-of-fpsrussia-is-shot-to-death.html ], “Keith Ratliff loved guns. He built his own rifles. He kept bullets in his car’s cup holder. And on the rear window he slapped a sticker of the Starbucks Coffee mermaid firing two pistols. ‘I [heart] Guns and Coffee,’ it read.”
Copyright © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/11/who_killed_keith_ratliff_youtubes_gun_nut_celeb/ [the last video at the end, as embedded without mention in the text, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXONItsEU7E ; with comments]
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Erik Rush: 'The Obama Administration or One of Its Surrogates is Responsible for [Keith] Ratliff's Death'
Submitted by Brian Tashman on Friday, 1/11/2013 11:30 am
WorldNetDaily columnist [ http://www.wnd.com/author/erush/ ] and Fox News regular [ http://mediamatters.org/search/index?qstring=%22erik+rush%22+%22fox%22&x=0&y=0 ] Erik Rush today is suggesting [ http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/52325 ] that President Obama may be behind the recent murder [ http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/professed-gun-nut-keith-ratliff-found-fatally-shot-head-article-1.1237250 ] of gun enthusiast Keith Ratliff. Rush admits that while he has “no proof” besides his own “inclination,” the extremist writer claims Obama helped kill Ratliff as just “the first of many such executions that will take place in order to silence individuals whom the government deems a threat to their oligarchical collectivist agenda.”
On January 3, Keith Ratliff, a 32 year-old firearms enthusiast, was found fatally shot in the head in his Carnesville, Georgia home. Police are investigating the case as a homicide. Ratliff’s YouTube channel for fellow firearm enthusiasts was ranked as one of the top 10 channels on YouTube, with 3.4 million subscribers and more than 537 million views.
Although I have no proof, my inclination is to suspect that the Obama administration or one of its surrogates is responsible for Ratliff’s death, the first of many such executions that will take place in order to silence individuals whom the government deems a threat to their oligarchical collectivist agenda.
…
The only people upon which Americans can depend will be each other, private organizations, and a few intrepid state and county officials. Days ago, Sheriff Denny Peyman of Jackson County Kentucky said that his office “will not comply with any federal action which violates the United States Constitution or the Kentucky Constitution which I swore to uphold.”
We can be encouraged by such gestures, but we must also bear in mind that the White House’s gun-grabbing plan is but one component in the larger agenda to transform America, as it were. Barack Obama is indeed playing a significant part in this tragic comedy, but he only wishes to see America brought down; whether it is by Islamofascists, communism, economic upheaval, or a misadventurous asteroid matters little to him, in my view.
If that of which informed conservative and libertarians are already aware is deeply disturbing, Obama’s designs, and measures which his administration have already set into motion behind the scenes will truly chill the blood. God Willing, these will also come to light before it is too late.
Whether there is still time to implement effective remedies to them remains to be seen.
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Related Items
Erik Rush: 'Supernatural Evil' and 'Mind-Control' Behind Rise of the Left
1/10/13 @ 11:50
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/rush-evil-mind-control-behind-rise-left
Erik Rush: Obama Bringing About the Apocalypse
1/4/13 @ 1:35
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/erik-rush-obama-bringing-about-apocalypse
Erik Rush Suggests Founders Would Hang 'Evil' Obama for Seeking to 'Enslave Us'
1/2/13 @ 4:30
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/erik-rush-suggests-founders-would-hang-evil-obama-seeking-enslave-us
WND Floats Armed Resistance to Obama Administration
12/20/12 @ 12:15
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/wnd-floats-armed-resistance-obama-administration
WND: Gun Violence part of Obama's Marxist Plot
12/6/12 @ 11:30
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/wnd-gun-violence-obamas-marxist-plot
*
© 2013 People For the American Way
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/erik-rush-obama-administration-responsible-ratliffs-death
===
James Yeager, CEO Who Threatened To 'Start Killing People' Over Gun Control, Backpedals... Sort Of
Posted: 01/11/2013 10:23 pm EST | Updated: 01/12/2013 10:10 am EST
The Tennessee CEO who said in a YouTube video earlier this week that he would "start killing people [ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/01/10/unhinged-tactical-response-ceo-threatens-to-start-killing-people-over-obamas-gun-control/ (about a third of the way down in the post to which this is a reply)]" if current gun control efforts went "one inch further" walked back his original statement [ http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/01/just_watch_this.php ] during an interview with Nashville's WSMV-TV on Friday.
Insisting that he had no imminent plans to open fire on anyone -- while also falsely claiming that he never used the phrase "start killing people" -- Tactical Response CEO James Yeager said that he was simply "angry" when he filmed the original video about encroachments on his 2nd Amendment "birthright."
However, Yeager's damage-control effort hit a snag when asked to elaborate on his fervent devotion to the Bill of Rights. Pressed by the interviewer to identify the conditions under which he would consider taking up arms, Yeager named "outright gun confiscation" as an example, leading to the following exchange:
INTERVIEWER: The attention-getter is saying that you're going to shoot some people.
YEAGER: Right.
INTERVIEWER: And when I hear you, I'm thinking, if someone comes to confiscate guns at your house, you're going to open fire on them?
YEAGER: Yes, yes.
INTERVIEWER: Go through that again?
YEAGER: If somebody comes to take my guns, I will shoot them.
Coincidentally, Yeager's handgun carry permit was suspended [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/james-yeager-ceo-start-killing-people-gun-permit_n_2459456.html ] by the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security on Friday. The department's commissioner explained that the decision was based on "material likelihood of risk of harm to the public."
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/james-yeager-gun-ceo_n_2460452.html [with comments]
===
The psychological and public health benefits of gun ownership
Jan. 9, 2013: Daniel White of Estes Park, Colo., waves a placard at a pro-gun rally as the Colorado Legislature opened its general session across the street in the State Capitol in Denver.
(AP)
FILE: March 7, 2012: Gun owners and supporters participate in an Illinois Gun Owners Lobby Day rally at the Illinois State Capitol in Springfield.
(AP)
By Dr. Keith Ablow [gesundheit!]
Published January 12, 2013
FoxNews.com
Those who advocate gun control measures as solutions to tragedies like those in Newtown, Connecticut and Aurora, Colorado seem to be ignoring the fact that the perpetrators of the carnage in those towns were severely psychiatrically ill and could have chosen other lethal means to cause just as many deaths.
Explosives are one obvious example.
In 1995, Timothy McVeigh used explosives to kill 168 people at the Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. Between 1978 and 1995, Ted Kaczynski used homemade bombs delivered by mail to kill 3 people and severely injure 23 others. Back in 1982, 12 people, including a 12-year-old girl, died when someone (who has never been apprehended) poisoned Tylenol capsules with potassium cyanide.
Sadly, I could cite dozens of examples.
But, equally important, gun control advocates also ignore the potential widespread psychological harm that disarming Americans could cause.
As Thomas Jefferson wrote to his nephew Peter Carr in 1785, "A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives a moderate exercise to the Body, it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence to the mind . . . "
The right to bear arms is a critical component of feeling competent and autonomous as individuals, rather than relying on the goodwill of a super-powerful, unassailable government.
A disarmed population is, by definition, a population that has completely ceded the power to defend its homes against local, state or federal authorities. This implies a level of trust much more consistent with that which children have for parents than that which thinking adults have for the institutions they have created to perform vital functions like defending the nation, keeping the peace, maintaining schools and providing clean water.
A disarmed population is allowed the toxic luxury of feeling as though our way of life and our safety from oppression comes without the tremendous responsibilities and moral complexities of wielding force. The same people who passively pay taxes that put tanks on the streets and fighter jets in the skies over our enemies' nations can cringe at the idea of owning guns themselves — projecting their survival instincts onto an all-powerful father figure (the state).
History is replete with examples of cultures in which taking guns away from law-abiding citizens foreshadowed catastrophic abuses of the power thereby invested in government. One need look no further than Nazi Germany.
While gun control advocates point not only to episodes of terrible violence, but also to the toll of accidental deaths and murders involving firearms, I believe such tragedies highlight the need for citizens to take more personal responsibility for the handguns they own, not any justification for them to be infantilized by banning them from owning handguns at all.
It may well be that putting more—not fewer—guns in the hands of law-abiding American men and women and training them to safely store those guns would actually be one immediate way to immunize the population from feeling like potential victims of the Adam Lanzas and James Holmes among us.
It may be that putting more—not fewer—guns in the hands of law-abiding American men and women would be a way of immunizing them from feeling like passive participants in history and in safeguarding what we value about our way of life.
The psychological truth is that every gun privately and legally owned in America is a tiny impediment to the citizenry assuming a docile, nearly delusional perspective that the world will always be predictable, that one's home and loved ones will always be safe and that government will always tend toward light and never toward darkness.
Dr. Keith Ablow [gesundheit!] is a psychiatrist and member of the Fox News Medical A-Team.
©2013 FOX News Network, LLC
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/01/12/psychological-and-public-health-benefits-gun-ownership/
===
Alex Jones On HuffPost Live: 'YOU'RE IN DANGER! YOU'RE IN DANGER!'
By Jack Mirkinson
Posted: 01/11/2013 5:06 pm EST | Updated: 01/11/2013 6:15 pm EST
Alex Jones, the radio host whose tussle with Piers Morgan was felt 'round the world [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/08/alex-jones-piers-morgan-guns_n_2429161.html ], appeared on HuffPost Live [ http://live.huffingtonpost.com/#r/segment/alex-jones-piers-morgan-gun-control/50e4588278c90a7ebd000109 ] on Friday to talk about the fallout from his interview.
For most of the chat, Jones was relatively restrained — a far cry from the high-decibel ranter who shouted at Morgan about the Second American Revolution. Towards the end, though, he regained his old spark with a tirade that truly has to be seen to be believed.
After quoting liberally (and loudly) from the famed "mad as hell" speech from "Network," Jones began going on a wide-ranging monologue that encompassed everything from drone wars and curtailments on privacy to more boutique topics.
"Learn about the New World Order!" he said at one point. "Learn about eugenics and the cancer viruses and the vaccines! Learn about the GMO's designed to sterilize you!"
He then held up a book called "Ecoscience," and took his shouting to a new level. A rough transcript follows:
"THEY'VE GOT POISON IN THE WATER! POISON IN THE WATER! THIS IS A NORMAL RESPONSE TO THIS! THIS IS HOW THEY SHOULD HAVE RESPONDED TO HITLER! YOU'RE IN DANGER! YOU'RE IN DANGER! YOU'RE IN DANGER, EVERYBODY WATCHING! THEY CONTROL BOTH PARTIES! YOU'RE IN DANGER! WAKE UP! GET OUT OF YOUR TRANCE! THEY SHOULD HAVE RESISTED HITLER LIKE THIS!"
The interview ended there.
Watch the full segment at HuffPost Live [ http://live.huffingtonpost.com/#r/segment/alex-jones-piers-morgan-gun-control/50e4588278c90a7ebd000109 ].
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/alex-jones-youre-in-danger-huffpost-live_n_2459055.html [with the relevant portion of the linked full segment embedded, and comments]
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Alex Jones: Glenn Beck Is 'Despicable,' Stole My Work (VIDEO)
Posted: 01/11/2013 5:43 pm EST | Updated: 01/11/2013 6:16 pm EST
Alex Jones hit back at Glenn Beck during an appearance on HuffPost Live on Friday [full segment at http://live.huffingtonpost.com/#r/segment/alex-jones-piers-morgan-gun-control/50e4588278c90a7ebd000109 ], alleging that Beck has taken credit for his work and calling him "despicable."
Jones, a radio host, recently directed a pro-gun tirade [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/08/alex-jones-piers-morgan-guns_n_2429161.html ] at Piers Morgan on CNN. After seeing the rant, Beck called Jones "a fascist [ http://www.glennbeck.com/2013/01/08/crazy-person-alex-jones-rants-and-raves-on-cnn/ ]," among other things. When asked to respond to Beck's comments, Jones did not hold back.
"Glenn Beck has basically taken my research... five years ago, he said everything I talked about was a lie," he said. "He's taken the stuff that I put out, that's true, re-worked it, re-engineered it, neoconned it and then rolled it out later so he's mad that I'm getting on hundreds of stations, he's mad that I'm getting attention."
"I'm not here trying to be numero uno like Glenn Beck," Jones added. "I'm here trying to save our Bill of Rights and Constitution."
He pushed back against Beck's other claims about his work, and tore into Beck's attempt to rebrand The Blaze [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/09/glenn-beck-relaunching-the-blaze-again_n_2438890.html?ir=Media ] as a "libertarian" network. Beck is "not consistent," Jones blasted. "And he really disdains his audience and he's another despicable person just like Piers Morgan."
This was before Jones capped his HuffPost Live appearance with yet another angry monologue [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/alex-jones-youre-in-danger-huffpost-live_n_2459055.html (just above)]. He was cut off after yelling, "YOU'RE IN DANGER! WAKE UP! GET OUT OF YOUR TRANCE! THEY SHOULD HAVE RESISTED HITLER LIKE THIS!"
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/alex-jones-glenn-beck-fascist_n_2459117.html [with the relevant portion of the linked full segment embedded, and comments]
===
Sweeping new gun laws proposed by influential liberal think tank
By Philip Rucker
Saturday, January 12, 3:16 PM
With President Obama readying an overhaul of the nation’s gun laws [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-house-weighs-broad-gun-control-agenda-in-wake-of-newtown-shootings/2013/01/05/d281efe0-5682-11e2-bf3e-76c0a789346f_story.html ], a liberal think tank with singular influence throughout his administration is pushing for a sweeping agenda of strict new restrictions on and federal oversight of gun and ammunition sales.
The Center for American Progress is recommending 13 new gun policies to the White House — some of them executive actions that would not require the approval of Congress — in what amounts to the progressive community’s wish list.
CAP’s proposals — which include requiring universal background checks, banning military-grade assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips and modernizing data systems to track gun sales and enforce existing laws — are all but certain to face stiff opposition from the National Rifle Association and its many allies in Congress.
Obama, as well as Vice President Biden, who is leading the administration’s gun violence task force [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-house-insists-obama-will-push-for-assault-weapons-ban/2013/01/11/55b6e032-5c05-11e2-88d0-c4cf65c3ad15_story.html ], has voiced support for many of these measures. Yet it is unclear which policies he ultimately will propose to Congress. Biden is planning to present his group’s recommendations [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-cites-broad-agreement-on-universal-background-checks-for-gun-sales/2013/01/10/2369cc6c-5b4b-11e2-9fa9-5fbdc9530eb9_story.html ] to Obama this Tuesday.
CAP’s recommendations, presented Friday to White House officials and detailed in an 11-page report [ http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/civil-liberties/report/2013/01/13/49510/preventing-gun-violence-in-our-nation/ ] obtained by The Washington Post, establish a benchmark for what many in Obama’s liberal base are urging him to do [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-campaign-for-tougher-gun-laws-obama-and-allies-work-to-tilt-public-opinion/2013/01/09/64b07be0-5a8c-11e2-9fa9-5fbdc9530eb9_story.html ] following last month’s massacre at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.
“There’s nothing here that interferes with the rights of people to have a gun to protect themselves,” CAP President Neera Tanden said. But, she added, “We have daily episodes where it seems that guns are in the wrong hands, and that’s why we think it’s important that the president acts.”
On Monday, Tanden will moderate a public discussion with three Democrats who have played leading roles in the gun debate: Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who in the Clinton White House helped get the 1994 assault weapons ban passed; Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), who helped author that bill as a House member; and Rep. Mike Thompson (Calif.), who chairs the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force.
One of CAP’s suggestions to toughen federal regulation of gun sales is to make the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which is currently an agency within the Department of Justice, a unit of the FBI. CAP says absorbing the ATF into the FBI would better empower the ATF to combat gun crime and illegal trafficking.
“It is a beleaguered agency lacking leadership and resources,” said Winnie Stachelberg, senior vice president of CAP. “It needs to be a well-functioning federal law enforcement agency, and we need to figure out ways to ensure that happens.”
CAP’s top recommendation is to require criminal background checks for all gun sales, closing loopholes that currently enables an estimated 40 percent of sales to occur without any questions asked. The organization also wants to add convicted stalkers and suspected terrorists to the list of those barred from purchasing firearms.
CAP is urging the Obama administration to back Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s assault weapons ban proposal. The California Democrat wants to prohibit the sale, transfer, importation and manufacturing of military-style assault weapons and ammunition magazines that carry more than 10 bullets.
The group also suggests requiring firearms dealers to report to the federal government individuals who purchase multiple semi-automatic assault rifles within a five-day period. Current law requires reporting multiple purchases of handguns, but not semi-automatic assault rifles.
CAP also wants the administration to free public health research agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to study the impact of gun violence on injuries and deaths. For years, lawmakers, urged by the NRA, have placed so-called riders on spending bills that restrict these and other agencies from conducting such research.
© 2013 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/sweeping-new-gun-laws-proposed-by-influential-liberal-think-tank/2013/01/12/65192d26-5c2a-11e2-9fa9-5fbdc9530eb9_story.html [with comments]
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NRA President David Keene Rejects Outline Of White House Gun Control Recommendations
Vice President Joe Biden speaks during a meeting with representatives from the video game industry in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House complex in Washington, Friday, Jan. 11, 2013. Biden is holding a series of meetings this week as part of the effort he is leading to develop policy proposals in response to the Newtown, Conn., school shooting.
(AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
By Sabrina Siddiqui
Posted: 01/13/2013 9:55 am EST | Updated: 01/13/2013 11:21 pm EST
WASHINGTON -- Just two days before Vice President Joe Biden delivers a comprehensive set of recommendations on gun policy, National Rifle Association President David Keene rejected the reported outline of suggestions Sunday and dismissed any ban on assault weapons or high-capacity magazines as a non-starter.
"We don't think any of those things work," he said in appearance on CNN's "State of the Union [ http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2013/01/13/exp-sotu-nra-pres-david-keene-response-to-wh-task-force-biden.cnn (video embedded; transcript http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1301/13/sotu.01.html ]." "You should absolutely be able to compromise on things that accomplish the purpose. Our objection to those things is that they interfere with people's rights without doing anything to solve the problem."
Biden on Tuesday is expected to issue a series of proposals to address gun violence, in response to last month's shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Based on initial reports, the White House will make more comprehensive background checks a priority [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/joe-biden-gun-control-background-checks_n_2458633.html ] and continue to push for the reinstatement of an assault weapons ban.
But despite having an NRA representative present for a meeting with the vice president last week, Keene doesn't foresee his organization and the White House reaching an agreement on how to proceed.
On Sunday, he called for a greater focus on mental health and said those who are mentally ill and potentially dangerous should be placed on a list of people prohibited from purchasing firearms. He did not raise the NRA's initial suggestion to place armed guards in schools [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/21/nra-press-conference_n_2346382.html ] across the country, which was not only met with widespread criticism but has also proven to be ineffective [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/21/columbine-armed-guards_n_2347096.html ] in prior mass shootings.
The NRA president predicted a difficult road ahead for those pursuing a ban on assault weapons and said he believed he had enough support to prevent such legislation from passing.
"They are not going to be able to get an assault weapons ban through Congress," Keene said, adding that even outlawing high-capacity magazines would be difficult. "The fact is that we live in a society where first of all, we have constitutional rights, and secondly, there are millions upon millions of Americans who value the rights that they have under the Second Amendment and who are involved in the shooting sports or use firearms for self-defense, and we think that they will be heard."
But while an assault weapons ban remains a divisive issue on Capitol Hill, several of its opponents have said they could get behind action on high-capacity magazines [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/joe-biden-gun-control-background-checks_n_2458633.html ]. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) called high-capacity magazines "a whole different issue," while Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.), who has enjoyed a lifetime "A" rating from the NRA, said he would be "willing to listen to the possibility of the capacity of a magazine."
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/13/nra-gun-control_n_2467081.html [with embedded video of Keene on CNN, and comments]
===
Legally Make your own Gun
Published on Jul 5, 2012 by Ares Armor [ http://www.youtube.com/user/aresarmor ]
Click here to get started.
http://www.aresarmor.com/install/ecom-catshow/hmg.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30i_6awxEG4
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Make a Working GUN using a 3D Printer! 100% Legal. Amature GunSmith Makes an AR-15 Rifle
Published on Aug 9, 2012
Make a Working GUN using a 3D Printer! 100% Legal. Amature GunSmith Makes an AR-15 Rifle
From pediatric prosthetics to drugs and guitars, 3-D printing is already revolutionizing the way we use, make and think about a plethora of products.
Now, a firearms enthusiast is claiming to have added yet another thing to the list: a functional AR-15 rifle, which he made at home using a 3-D printer and gun blueprints downloaded from the Internet.
Last month, Extreme Tech reported that amateur gunsmith Michael Guslick had managed to "construct and shoot a pistol partly made out of plastic, 3-D printed parts."
Guslick, an engineer who operates under the moniker 'HaveBlue,' had previously announced in an online forum that he had successfully fired 200 rounds from his custom-made, 3-D printed .22 caliber pistol. The pistol was partially made out of plastic, having been created from a 3-D printed lower receiver and a commercial upper receiver.
In other words, the main body of the gun was made of plastic and printed at home. Guslick told The Huffington Post that he had obtained gun blueprints from a website before using his 3-D printer to print the component. To complete the weapon, he then combined it with off-the-shelf metal parts.
Guslick said that the resulting gun was a success.
"Everything ran just as it should, magazine after magazine," Guslick described in a blog post. "To be honest, it was acting more reliably than a number of other .22 pistols I've shot."
The 3-D printed AR-15 lower receiver and an earlier 75 percent scale version, which Guslick said he printed as an initial feasibility test
Guslick said he then adapted what he had created to make an AR-15 -- a semiautomatic rifle.
Guslick said that creating his own rifle -- which incidentally was the same model used by alleged Aurora gunman James Holmes -- "wasn't that difficult."
The 3-D printed lower receiver assembled into a functioning .22 caliber pistol
However, Guslick said that though early testing of the rifle proved that it worked, it still had some minor feed and extraction problems that needed to be sorted out, Popsci notes.
Though various news sources have reported that the gun enthusiast's homemade weapon is the "world's first 3-D printed gun," Guslick was quick to point out that this is not the case.
"Firearms manufacturers have been doing exactly that for prototyping and testing for many years, and I'm certain many hobbyists have used 3-D printed gun parts as well," he told HuffPost.
However, he added that his gun is -- to the best of his knowledge -- the "first 3-D printed firearm to actually be tested" in a non-commercial setting.
News of Guslick's creation has provoked a number of discussions about gun control laws and the future of gun use and manufacturing in this country and elsewhere -- with some commenters saying that 3-D printers could now allow just about anyone to assemble a completed gun from mail-order parts without government licensing or registration.
Others have pointed out that Guslick only used a 3-D printer to create one component of the rifle and that an all-plastic, functioning assault weapon is probably not in our near future.
For his part, Guslick said he's been surprised by all the media attention and insists that the creation of a 3-D printed firearm is not cause for alarm.
"In the end, 3-D printing an AR-15 lower receiver and assembling it into a functional gun is unremarkable on a technical level, yet a curious novelty on a legal level," he said.
"[And] yes, though such tools are equally available to criminals as well, I cannot foresee criminals turning to 3-D printing as an avenue to obtain illicit arms when the black market continues to serve as a far simpler means of acquisition -- and does not require any level of technical acumen."
Ultimately, Guslick said he hopes his 3-D printed creation does not take away from the many possibilities that 3-D printing has for our future.
"3-D printing will change our perception of mass production, with products being made more economically, not to mention locally. Similarly, 3-D printing will expand to help redefine ergonomics as more of the items we use everyday will not just be designed for 'humans' but for 'individuals,'" he said.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqzJlBcCsow
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Armed Janitors Approved By Montpelier, Ohio, School Board To Stop School Shootings
01/12/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/armed-janitors-approved-school-shootings_n_2458167.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
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David Dewhurst, Texas Lieutenant Governor, Calls For State-Funded Weapons Training For Teachers
01/11/13
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/david-dewhurst-texas-teachers_n_2458527.html [with comments]
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Niwot High School 'Hit List' Closes Colorado School Amid Bomb Threat
01/11/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/niwot-high-school-hit-lis_n_2456251.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
===
David Barton Explains The Second Amendment
Published on Dec 19, 2012
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/david-barton-explains-second-amendment
David Barton says the Founders crafted the Second Amendment (aka, "the biblical right of self defense" to ensure that citizens had access to the same firepower as any government.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zpqTThbLOo
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Think Again: More Tea Party Fiction
David Barton is the author of The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson.
January 10, 2013
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/media/news/2013/01/10/49318/think-again-more-tea-party-fiction/
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Barton: 'Hate is a Virtue' and 'We're Going to be Intolerant of Liberalism'
Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on Wednesday, 1/2/2013 12:23 pm
On yesterday's broadcast [ http://www.wallbuilderslive.com/listen.asp?cs=high&mf=wma&fileName=WBLive2013-01-01 ] of "WallBuilders Live," David Barton and Rick Green were discussing a column by right-wing blogger John Hawkins titled "5 Ways Liberalism Destroys Virtue [ http://townhall.com/columnists/johnhawkins/2012/07/13/5_ways_liberalism_destroys_virtue/page/full/ ]" and it prompted Barton to lay out a rambling and rather incoherent theory about how hate is a virtue while tolerance is a sin, eventually culminating in the declaration that Christians have got to be "intolerant of liberalism":
[audio embedded]
I wrote this down recently and I'm thinking about it as a name for a book; if not the name for a book, this is definitely something that we have to at least get in our thinking. So let me throw out the thought that I had here, this is just throwing out the title for a book:
When tolerance is a sin and hate is a virtue.
I throw that out because we're getting to the point where tolerance is a bad thing and hate is a good thing. And let me define that: we're told in, I believe it's Proverbs 4:13, it says "the fear of the Lord is to hate evil." Which means that if I'm going to stand for what God stands for, there's some certain things I have to hate: I have to hate evil, I have to hate murder - well no, you can't hate, that's a bad thing ... no, hate is a good thing!
I mean hating Nazis, that's a good thing. And people say "well, you hate their philosophy, you don't hate the people." No, I hate people who want to kill other people and I'm sorry that they're killing others but the guys who were on the Nazi trials at the end, I'm sorry, I just hate what they did. Alright, I love them as a person, yes Jesus died for them, I understand, but I hate certain things.
So we've got to get to the point where tolerance is seen as a sin because we're tolerating a lot stuff that destroys our families, that destroys our own character and we can't tolerate that stuff. We have to get back to the point where hate is a virtue, at least certain kinds of hate. The fear of the Lord is to hate evil and we need to have a hatred of things and get off this fence of having no passion about anything. You know, I tolerate anything, I'm not going to have a passion good or bad, I'm not going to hate anything ... We just can't do that and we've got to get back to that same type of intolerance, that we're going to be intolerant of liberalism.
*
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http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/math-and-reading-comprehension-lesson-david-barton
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http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/barton-show-me-bible-and-i-will-be-concerned-about-it
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http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/wnd-roberts-should-refuse-swear-obama
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http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/tea-party-nation-obama-hates-america
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1/2/13 @ 3:05pm
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/geller-how-long-do-jews-have-obamas-america
Swanson: Obama's Reelection 'Solidified our Doom' and Empowered 'Softy-Wofty, Weeny Socialists'
1/3/13 @ 1:30pm
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/swanson-obama-reelection-solidified-our-doom
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© 2013 People For the American Way
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/barton-hate-virtue-and-were-going-be-intolerant-liberalism
===
Texas Has Created a Costly Roadmap for Defunding Planned Parenthood
.jpg)
Allison Joyce/Getty Images
Molly Redden
January 11, 2013 | 12:00 am
Since 2010, nine states have tried to strip funding from their local Planned Parenthood chapters. Not three years later, almost all of their schemes have been laughed out of court. In the cases of Arizona, Indiana, and Texas, where legislatures and governors had tried to bar the federally approved provider from participating in state Medicaid, judges ruled that states simply can't do that [ http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/abortion/264439-efforts-to-cut-state-funding-for-planned-parenthood-fall-short ] and expect to receive federal dollars. The governor of one of those states, however, decided that if federal rules won’t allow him to defund Planned Parenthood, so be it. He would achieve his goal by forfeiting hundreds of millions of federal dollars in Medicaid tagged for women's health care.
That governor, of course, is Rick Perry of Texas. Since fading from our national memory as the presidential candidate who couldn’t remember [ http://www.mediaite.com/tv/at-gop-debate-rick-perry-cant-remember-third-agency-he-would-end-as-president/ ] the Department of Energy, Perry has gone home to oversee the dissolution of what was once a decent health-care partnership with the federal government, the Women's Health Program. Its replacement, an entirely state-run and -funded program of the same name, launched January 1 with rules that exclude Planned Parenthood [ http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/12/31/judge-allows-ban-on-funds-to-planned-parenthood/ ]. As a result, Texas is no longer eligible to receive the $200 million–plus a year that Medicaid provided to Texas to care for low-income women, a fact that doesn't bother Perry one whit.
Perry hasn't won outright; Planned Parenthood has filed lawsuits in state and federal court, and a state court will decide Friday whether to grant an injunction that would temporarily protect Planned Parenthood’s local funding. But Perry's success thus far is instructive to other conservatives looking to give Planned Parenthood the boot. (It's not clear who might be the first to reprise the fight, although a Planned Parenthood official said the organization is keeping a fretful eye on onetime antagonist Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker [ http://www.jsonline.com/business/123166483.html ].) With that in mind, and with the far-right dream of defunding Planned Parenthood alive and well, it’s worth examining just what Texas has sacrificed with all those federal dollars—and what kind of a public health mess it has on its hands as a result.
The costs are stark. One-quarter of Texas women are uninsured [ http://www.texmed.org/Template.aspx?id=5519 ], and the Women’s Health Program was a reliable way to cover at least some of their needs. But by freezing Planned Parenthood out of the program last week, Texas has forced more than 50,000 of them to search for a new primary care doctor within the Women’s Health Program—and it is not at all clear that the system has the capacity to reabsorb them. Planned Parenthood accounted for about half of Women’s Health Program services [ http://www.austinchronicle.com/blogs/news/2012-09-21/consider-the-source-crisis-pregnancy-center-transforms-into-womens-health-program-provider/ ] last year—mostly in the form of cancer, diabetes, and STI treatment, plus high blood pressure screenings, contraception dispersement, and annual checkups. In many parts of Texas, Planned Parenthood served half of all low-income women enrolled in the Women’s Health Program; in certain areas [ http://s3.amazonaws.com/static.texastribune.org/media/documents/GWU_WHP_study.pdf ], that number was as high as 80 percent. And having rejected Medicaid, which provided about $9 to the Women’s Health Program for every $1 the state spent, Texas is now challenged to come up with about $200 million for the program over the next five years. (One proposal is to make up the gap through Medicaid fraud penalties, but the state's method for collecting these is dubious and under heavy fire [ http://www.texmed.org/Template.aspx?id=25964 ]). All this has taken place at a time when Republican legislators have already slashed the family-planning budget by two-thirds [ http://www.texasobserver.org/one-year-later-cuts-to-womens-health-have-hurt-more-than-just-planned-parenthood/ ]. “This is Rick Perry versus Texas women, literally,” a Planned Parenthood official told me.
For its part, the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC), which administers the Women’s Health Program and wrote rules to exclude Planned Parenthood at Perry’s behest, disputes that shedding Planned Parenthood has created a problem. In a media blitz begun this week, its officials are touting a survey of state-approved providers who say they have more than enough capacity to serve Planned Parenthood’s former patients. But Texas reporters have called [ http://www.wacotrib.com/news/185863732.html ] alternative providers listed by the HHSC and found that many are not actually participating in the Women’s Health Program or are not accepting new clients. State Rep. Donna Howard, a Democrat from Austin, and her staff have placed a few such calls, too. “We’ve been told that providers are no longer there, that they don’t take Medicaid, a wide variety of answers,” she said. The website, she added, lists an assortment of providers who perform important auxiliary services—like radiologists, anesthesiologists, and endoscopic physicians—but don’t provide the primary care that would replace a visit to Planned Parenthood. “It’s very confusing.”
How exactly did Texas get here? In part, of course, because of Planned Parenthood’s reputation as an abortion provider. In Texas, though, the arm of Planned Parenthood that provided health care services to poor women is separate, legally and administratively, from the one that performs abortions. Nonetheless, in 2011, according to an HHSC spokesperson, Perry and his attorney general, Greg Abbott, directed the HHSC to write into its laws language that would defund Planned Parenthood because it was an “affiliate” of the abortion provider of the same name. In fact, Planned Parenthood is so hated that the HHSC rules include a clause—that Planned Parenthood hopes will not pass judicial scrutiny—that dissolves the entire Women’s Health Program, serving 110,000 needy women, if a court ever allows Planned Parenthood to participate in the program. But the real genesis of the current crisis, Howard proposed, can be found in that August 2011 decision by a Republican-controlled legislature to solve a fiscal shortfall by cutting the family-planning budget [ http://www.texastribune.org/2011/08/15/day-15/ ] by two-thirds. The cuts had the effect of shuttering 60 clinics [ http://www.texasobserver.org/one-year-later-cuts-to-womens-health-have-hurt-more-than-just-planned-parenthood/ ] across the state that once provided everything from oral contraceptives to pap smears. As a result, said Howard, many rural and remote areas of Texas no longer have immediate access to female care providers. The unplanned pregnancies that will result from these cuts, moreover, are estimated [ http://www.texmed.org/Template.aspx?id=24707 ] to cost the state $231 million.
So there you have it. Politicians anywhere who are interested in defunding Planned Parenthood need only follow Texas' roadmap: Give up hundreds of millions of free federal money, launch their own state-run health care apparatus, and steel themselves for the cost of all the unwanted pregnancies that result. Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood is waiting for a court to decide if it can continue to serve Texas’s poor women. Speaking from the State House, Howard told me that her Republican colleagues in Austin are beginning to realize just how drastic those family-planning cuts were, especially now that the costs of resulting unwanted pregnancies are becoming clear. But whether there’s anything those remorseful legislators can do to stop Gov. Perry—“I don’t have a good answer for that right now,” she said.
Copyright 2013 The New Republic
http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/111812/texas-planned-parenthood-defund [with comments]
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Ken Cuccinelli: Opponents Of Obama Contraception Mandate Must Be Willing To 'Go To Jail'
By Nick Wing
Posted: 01/10/2013 6:10 pm EST | Updated: 01/10/2013 6:13 pm EST
Virginia Attorney General and GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli on Wednesday urged opponents of an Obamacare mandate on contraception coverage to dig in their heels, exercise civil disobedience and be prepared to "go to jail" for the cause.
Politico relays the exchange [ http://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/ken-cuccinelli-go-to-jail-to-fight-contraception-mandate-86028.html ] between Cuccinelli and Iowa-based radio host Steve Deace:
"You know, Abraham Lincoln has many good quotes, but one of them is ‘the best way to get rid of a bad law is to enforce it vigorously.' And here we're going to have an example of what tyranny means when it's played to its logical conclusion,” Cuccinelli said. "Because forcing business owners and businesses to do this is not consistent with our history of preserving religious liberty, one of the most important protections we have in this country."
Cuccinelli recounted an exchange with his own bishop in which he counseled the cleric to embrace civil disobedience: "My local bishop said, 'Well, you know I told a group I’m ready to go to jail.' And I said, 'Bishop, don't take this personally: You need to go to jail.'"
The attorney general's comment comes as the Christian conservative owners of Hobby Lobby have decided to defy [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/28/hobby-lobby-obamacare_n_2375041.html ] a federal mandate under President Barack Obama's health care reform law that requires businesses to offer employees health coverage that includes access to the morning-after pill.
The company's move was spurred by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor's denial of its request for an injunction while a lawsuit against the measure is pending. The decision could invite potential fines of up to $1.3 million per day.
Cuccinelli's conservative views and past action on women's issues [ http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2012/07/virginia_attorney_general_cuccinelli_blocks_health_board_on_abortion_clinic_regulations_.html ] have made him a popular target for protesters. Virginia Democrats recently criticized Cuccinelli [ http://articles.dailypress.com/2013-01-09/news/dp-nws-cuccinelli-women-wire-20130109_1_attorney-general-ken-cuccinelli-domestic-violence-victims-address-confidentiality-program ] after he emerged as one of three state attorneys general who declined to sign a letter urging Congress to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act.
And earlier this month, a group of demonstrators referring to themselves as the “Cooch Watch” planned a protest [ http://wtvr.com/2013/01/04/pro-choice-group-hold-protest-against-ken-cuccinelli/ ], vowing to "keep an eye" on the attorney general in the upcoming legislative session.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/10/ken-cuccinelli-contraception_n_2451289.html [with comments]
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Hobby Lobby Resists Obamacare Mandate, Plans To Delay Birth Control Coverage
Posted: 01/10/2013 11:27 pm EST | Updated: 01/11/2013 8:09 am EST
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — An attorney for Oklahoma City-based Hobby Lobby says the company has found a way to delay providing insurance coverage for emergency contraceptives as required under the federal health care law.
Peter Dobelbower said in a statement Thursday that the company will shift the plan year for employee health insurance that will delay by several months the Jan. 1 effective date of the requirement.
Hobby Lobby did not return phone calls seeking further comment.
Hobby Lobby sued to overturn the mandate on grounds that it violates the religious beliefs of founder and CEO David Green and his family. The Greens say requiring insurance for what is known as "morning-after" and "week-after" pills forces them to either violate their religious beliefs or face hefty fines.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor denied the companies' request for an injunction while the lawsuit is pending.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/hobby-lobby-obamacare-birth-control_n_2452885.html [with comments]
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Arielle and Shawnee McPhail, Lesbian Couple, Handed Anti-Gay Letter From Restaurant Owner
01/11/2013
The letter
reads as follows:
"God said in the last days that man and wom[a]n would be lover of self, more [than] the lover of God.
That man and woman would have unnatural [affection] for one another. Then, the coming of the Son of Man, who is Jesus. So please, look at your life. See how it hurt[s] everyone around you. And ask the Lord to open your eye[s] before it [is] to[o] late.
The Love of Christ
P.S. my daughter also was gay. It destroy[ed] her life and my grandson."
McGovern confirmed with NewsChannel 12 that he did give the couple that letter, out of love, and that he did something similar to another lesbian couple in the past.
McGovern said he wrote the letter because he did not approve of the McPhails kissing outside of his restaurant. But the couple denied doing it.
[...]
[ http://www.wcti12.com/news/Lesbian-couple-Restaurant-owner-hands-them-letter-condemning-homosexuality/-/13530444/18086232/-/n0mfvd/-/index.html (with embedded video report, and comments)]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/arielle-and-shawnee-mcphail-lesbian-couple-anti-gay-letter-restaurant-owner_n_2456093.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
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Pat Brady Resignation Flap: Illinois GOP Calls For Ouster Of Their Gay Marriage-Supporting Party Leader
State GOP Chairman Pat Brady rejected calls for his resignation after supporting same-sex marriage in Illinois--a direct contradiction of his party's platform.
01/12/2013
[...]
Marriage equality supporters in Illinois this week reintroduced legislation that would legalize same-sex marriage [ http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/lgbt/Illinois-marriage-bill-introduced-/41138.html ] in the state. Sponsors had hoped to pass the bill during the lame-duck session earlier this month, but say they ran out of time to do so, though it was advanced by the Senate Executive Committee for the first time. The Windy City Times reports that bill sponsors are still confident the bill will be approved yet this year, very possibly as soon as next month [ http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/lgbt/The-vote-on-equal-marriage-in-Illinois-many-ask-when/41143.html ].
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/12/pat-brady-resignation_n_2459147.html [with comments]
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The Burn: Westboro Baptist Church Protest
Episode 201 | Posted: 01/08/2013
Jeff Ross wishes that the Westboro Baptist Church would exercise their fifth amendment rights. (4:08)
Copyright © 2013 Comedy Partners
http://www.comedycentral.com/video-clips/ye76jv/the-burn-with-jeff-ross-westboro-baptist-church-protest [with comments]
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The End of Courtship?
Denise Hewett says hanging out has replaced dating.
January 11, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/fashion/the-end-of-courtship.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/fashion/the-end-of-courtship.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
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We are raising a generation of deluded narcissists
By Dr. Keith Ablow [gesundheit!]
Published January 08, 2013
FoxNews.com
A new analysis of the American Freshman Survey, which has accumulated data for the past 47 years from 9 million young adults, reveals that college students are more likely than ever to call themselves gifted and driven to succeed, even though their test scores and time spent studying are decreasing.
Psychologist Jean Twenge, the lead author of the analysis, is also the author of a study showing that the tendency toward narcissism in students is up 30 percent in the last thirty-odd years.
This data is not unexpected. I have been writing a great deal over the past few years about the toxic psychological impact of media and technology on children, adolescents and young adults, particularly as it regards turning them into faux celebrities—the equivalent of lead actors in their own fictionalized life stories.
On Facebook, young people can fool themselves into thinking they have hundreds or thousands of “friends.” They can delete unflattering comments. They can block anyone who disagrees with them or pokes holes in their inflated self-esteem. They can choose to show the world only flattering, sexy or funny photographs of themselves (dozens of albums full, by the way), “speak” in pithy short posts and publicly connect to movie stars and professional athletes and musicians they “like.”
Using Twitter, young people can pretend they are worth “following,” as though they have real-life fans, when all that is really happening is the mutual fanning of false love and false fame.
Using computer games, our sons and daughters can pretend they are Olympians, Formula 1 drivers, rock stars or sharpshooters. And while they can turn off their Wii and Xbox machines and remember they are really in dens and playrooms on side streets and in triple deckers around America, that is after their hearts have raced and heads have swelled with false pride for “being” something they are not.
On MTV and other networks, young people can see lives just like theirs portrayed on reality TV shows fueled by such incredible self-involvement and self-love that any of the “real-life” characters should really be in psychotherapy to have any chance at anything like a normal life.
These are the psychological drugs of the 21st Century and they are getting our sons and daughters very sick, indeed.
As if to keep up with the unreality of media and technology, in a dizzying paroxysm of self-aggrandizing hype, town sports leagues across the country hand out ribbons and trophies to losing teams, schools inflate grades, energy drinks in giant, colorful cans take over the soft drink market, and psychiatrists hand out Adderall like candy.
All the while, these adolescents, teens and young adults are watching a Congress that can’t control its manic, euphoric, narcissistic spending, a president that can’t see his way through to applauding genuine and extraordinary achievements in business, a society that blames mass killings on guns, not the psychotic people who wield them, and—here no surprise—a stock market that keeps rising and falling like a roller coaster as bubbles inflate and then, inevitably, burst.
That’s really the unavoidable end, by the way. False pride can never be sustained. The bubble of narcissism is always at risk of bursting. That’s why young people are higher on drugs than ever, drunker than ever, smoking more, tattooed more, pierced more and having more and more and more sex, earlier and earlier and earlier, raising babies before they can do it well, because it makes them feel special, for a while. They’re doing anything to distract themselves from the fact that they feel empty inside and unworthy.
Distractions, however, are temporary, and the truth is eternal. Watch for an epidemic of depression and suicidality, not to mention homicidality, as the real self-loathing and hatred of others that lies beneath all this narcissism rises to the surface. I see it happening and, no doubt, many of you do, too.
We had better get a plan together to combat this greatest epidemic as it takes shape. Because it will dwarf the toll of any epidemic we have ever known. And it will be the hardest to defeat. Because, by the time we see the scope and destructiveness of this enemy clearly, we will also realize, as the saying goes, that it is us.
Dr. Keith Ablow [gesundheit!] is a psychiatrist and member of the Fox News Medical A-Team.
©2013 FOX News Network, LLC
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/01/08/are-raising-generation-deluded-narcissists/ [with embedded videos of Dr. Ablow [gesundheit!] speaking his wisdoms]
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Generation LGBTQIA
January 9, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/fashion/generation-lgbtqia.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/fashion/generation-lgbtqia.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
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Robertson: Women Usually to Blame for Troubled Marriages
Published on Jan 9, 2013
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/robertson-troubled-hard-nosed-slatternly-women-ruining-marriages
Pat Robertson tells a viewer that the woman usually deserves to be blamed when a couple has marriage troubles.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuLBGUcR2b4
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Robertson Admits he Blew Election Prediction he Received from God
Published on Nov 21, 2012
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/robertson-admits-blew-election-prediction
Romney-backer Pat Robertson at the beginning of the year said God told him who would win the presidential election, now admits he got it wrong.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF14lBHrQaU
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Vatican Paper Criticizes Gay Adoption After Italy Ruling
Posted: 01/13/2013 6:27 am EST
VATICAN CITY, Jan 13 (Reuters) - The Vatican newspaper on Sunday stressed that children should be raised by a father and a mother after Italy's top appeals court granted a gay mother custody of her son, prompting a debate over gay adoption.
Italy's Court of Cassation on Friday rejected an appeal by a father who feared his son would not have a balanced upbringing if he lived with his mother and her female partner. The court ruled it was "mere prejudice" to think that a child could not be brought up normally by homosexual parents.
While gay rights group Arcigay hailed the decision as a "historic ruling" in Italy, where it is illegal for gay couples to adopt, Catholic leaders were quick to defend the traditional family unit.
L'Osservatore Romano, the 151-year-old mouthpiece of the Holy See, on Sunday ran an editorial which sought to play down the ruling of the court, saying that children often grow up in difficult circumstances without a mother or father.
"But no one believes that these situations should be created just because in some cases they don't cause damage," wrote Adriano Pessina, director of bioethics at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart.
"The human is the masculine and the feminine ... the monogamous family is the ideal place to learn the meaning of human relations and is the environment where the best form of growth is possible," he said.
He went on to reaffirm the Vatican's view that no one has the "right" to children that he said gay couples who want to adopt are claiming.
The debate flared up in Italy as hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Paris for a mass demonstration against President Francois Hollande's planned legalisation of same-sex marriage.
The Vatican has become increasingly vocal against gay marriage and adoptions in recent months. The pope strongly reaffirmed the Church's opposition to gay marriage in December, saying heterosexual marriage had an indispensable role in society.
(Reporting by Catherine Hornby; Editing by Alison Williams)
Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/13/vatican-gay-adoption-_n_2466541.html [with comments]
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Worlds collide over same-sex rights bill
A woman holds a placard reading "A real mother, a real father, a true marriage" during a demonstration against the Government's plan to legalise same-sex marriage and adoption for same-sex couples.
Photo AP
By Catherine Field
5:30 AM Saturday Jan 12, 2013
Ancient resentments and modern differences of opinion have emerged as France's Catholic Church fights a rearguard action against plans to let homosexuals and lesbians marry and adopt children.
The church is hoping hundreds of thousands will rally in Paris tomorrow, heaping pressure on the Socialist Government before the draft legislation is put to a parliamentary vote this month.
The law is a cornerstone of the election manifesto of President Francois Hollande, who declared it a vital step towards equality.
But it ran into furious opposition from the Catholic Church, which sees it as an assault on marriage and the family. In November, opponents to the bill staged demonstrations that gathered more than 100,000 people in half a dozen cities.
"The firm position we've taken on this legal change has caused many waves," Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois, 70, head of the Roman Catholic church in France, told bishops.
"The reactions to the bill range wider than we imagined and have revealed real unease among our fellow citizens. Denouncing the fraud of same-sex marriage does not prevent us from understanding the need homosexuals feel for recognition, a need that this supposed marriage will not satisfy."
The backstory to this is the French Revolution of 1789, which targeted the corruption and influence of the church just as much as the greed and tyranny of the aristocracy.
The inheritors of the secular crusade are Hollande's Socialists. Many harbour a suspicion of the Vatican and are fiercely proud of their party's role in a 1905 law that separated church and state, barring either side from interference.
Hollande, 58, is a father of four who never married their mother and now lives with his partner, a twice-divorced mother of three who supports same-sex marriage.
After November's rallies, Hollande sought to dial down the heat, insisting that the law would apply only to civil weddings and that mayors who were unhappy about carrying out the ceremony would not be obliged to do it, although he later retreated on the latter point.
Tensions have risen steadily as the bill heads towards the National Assembly. Last week, Education Minister Vincent Peillon warned France's state-supported Catholic schools not to discuss the gay-marriage debate with students because that would breach the country's deal on secularism, although some Catholic leaders slammed this as a gag on freedom of speech.
A Catholic high school in Normandy distributed an anti-gay marriage tract from a parents' association in its year-end students' reports, a move that brought leftist accusations of "proselytising".
Since 1959, Catholic schools have received government subsidies if they teach the state curriculum, appoint teachers who are state-trained and open their doors to children of all faiths. In return, the state pays the teachers' salaries.
This week the Vatican hailed "the courage" of France's bishops, saying they were "defending the heritage of humanity".
The impending protest - officially, at least - does not come under the Catholic Church's banner, although the church clearly supports it and is hoping for support from other conservative religions, including Muslims.
The Grand Rabbi has said Jews should "reflect" on the bill, for which he has expressed reservations, but has not called on them to take part in the rally.
Catholics argue that same-sex marriage breaches France's civil code, a charter of citizen's rights, "and to make the demonstration a religious matter could weaken it", says Monsignor Hyppolite Simon, deputy head of the French bishops' conference.
"We would be handing an argument to all those who say it is being driven by religious dogma."
Several special trains have been laid on from Bordeaux and Lyons and hundreds of buses have been organised to bring demonstrators from Catholic strongholds in northern France, Brittany and the western Vendee region.
Activists are hoping for a turnout in the hundreds of thousands. Only a big show of strength would give any hopes of scrapping the law, as Catholics did nearly 30 years ago when faced with Socialist plans to incorporate Catholic schools into the state education system.
Opinion polls indicate that many people in France back gay marriage or are indifferent to the fuss; and 60 per cent support same-sex marriage although many consider it a question of "secondary priority".
In contrast, less than 50 per cent support adoption rights for gays, which Hollande has bundled into the bill.
Last month, tens of thousands marched in Paris to support the Government's plans under the banner "Demonstration for Equality".
A similar split has developed in the main conservative party, the Union for a Popular Majority and in the far-right National Front, which said it was up to its own members and politicians to decide whether to take part in the demonstration.
*
Related
MP slams polygamy claim on gay bill
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10858223
Gay marriage protest converges on Eiffel Tower
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10858955
Vatican 'surprised' by credit card block
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10858965
Same-sex marriage ceremonies begin in Maryland
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10856921
*
© Copyright 2013, APN Holdings NZ Limited
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10858615
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Gay marriage opponents flood Paris
Women shout during a demonstration in Paris against plans to legalise gay marriage.
Source: AP
January 14, 20138:33AM
HUNDREDS of thousands of protesters have flooded the streets of Paris in protest at government plans to legalise gay marriage and adoption.
With the proposed legislation due to go before parliament at the end of this month, opponents travelled from all over France for a demonstration supported by leaders of the mainstream centre-right opposition, the Catholic Church and France's five-million-strong Muslim community.
Organisers of the 'demo for all' (a reference to the government's billing of its legislation as 'marriage for all') estimated attendance at 800,000, but the police suggested a figure of around 340,000 was nearer the mark.
The protesters hope their show of strength will put pressure on President Francois Hollande to review the plans or agree a referendum.
But the Socialist leader has made it clear he has no intention of dropping a promise he made in his election manifesto last year and to which he is personally committed.
Mr Hollande is already pencilled in to attend one of France's first gay marriages once the legislation is enacted later this year.
Despite months of protests, opinion polls have shown consistently that most voters support the right of homosexual couples to marry and a narrower majority favour granting them adoption rights.
The slim prospect of success did not appear to dampen the spirits of the protesters however as giant marches converged near the Eiffel Tower on Sunday after setting off from three different starting points.
Many of the protesters were accompanied by children, some of whom brandished placards exclaiming: "Born of a man and a woman." A more light-hearted banner proclaimed: "There are no eggs in the testicles."
Jacques Julien, 70, who had travelled from the Haute Loire region of central France, said he had voted for Mr Hollande but disagreed with the Socialist president's approach.
"A man and a woman, that is the basis of the family," he said. "I'm saying out loud what many people on the left think privately."
The movement against gay marriage has given France a new celebrity in the form of its public face, Virginie Tellenne, a Parisian socialite who goes by the name of Frigide Barjot.
Her assumed name - a play on the name of French film star Brigitte Bardot, a sex symbol in the 1960s - translates as Frigid Loony.
"The president must listen to us," Barjot said. "He must put this law on hold."
Copyright 2013 AFP
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/gay-marriage-opponents-flood-paris/story-e6frg6so-1226553271678
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Catholic League's Bill Donohue Suggests Obama Should Swear In On Marx's 'Das Kapital'
Bill Donohue appeared on CNN in 2012 to slam Obama's decision to support gay marriage. This week, Donohue published a news release [ http://www.catholicleague.org/should-obama-swear-on-das-kapital/ ] in which he suggested the president be sworn in on Marx's "Das Kapital" for his pro-gay views.
01/11/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/catholic-league-bill-donohue-obama-marx-das-kapital_n_2458579.html [with comments]
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Colin Powell: GOP Holds 'Dark Vein Of Intolerance'
By Chris Gentilviso
Posted: 01/13/2013 12:26 pm EST | Updated: 01/13/2013 12:59 pm EST
Former Secretary Of State Colin Powell delivered some harsh words for the GOP as a whole on Sunday.
In an appearance on NBC's "Meet The Press [transcript and video http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/50447941/ns/meet_the_press-transcripts/t/january-colin-powell-cory-booker-haley-barbour-mike-murphy-andrea-mitchell/ (video embedded), via http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8987534/ns/meet_the_press-resources/t/meet-press-transcripts-resources-video/ ]," Powell noted that there is a "dark vein of intolerance in some parts of the party."
"What do I mean by that?," he explained. "What I mean by that is they still sort of look down on minorities."
Powell specifically pointed to October 2012 comments by former Alaska Gov. and Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin on the attacks in Benghazi, Libya [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/24/sarah-palin-obama-shuck-and-jive-benghazi_n_2010833.html ].
"When I see a former governor say that the president is 'shuckin' and jivin' -- that's a racial-era slave term," Powell said, referring to Palin's words on Obama's response.
Powell added that Republicans had become too preoccupied with the candidate-selection process, losing sight of the group's overall message.
"You've got to think first about what's the party actually going to represent," Powell said. "If it's just going to represent the far right wing of the political spectrum, I think the party is in difficulty. I'm a moderate, but I'm still a Republican."
Powell was the first African American to fill the role of Secretary Of State, serving under President George W. Bush [ http://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/people/powell-colin-luther ] from 2001-05. Despite maintaining his allegiance to the Republican Party, Powell has been an ardent supporter for President Barack Obama [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/25/colin-powell-endorses-obama_n_2011162.html ], giving him a 2008 vote and a 2012 endorsement.
"I think we ought to keep on the track we are on," said Powell in October 2012, commending Obama on the economy and Iraq War.
Top Mitt Romney surrogate John Sununu [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/26/john-sununu-colin-powell-endorsement_n_2020735.html ] turned heads after the announcement, suggesting that Powell's Obama endorsement was motivated by race. That statement prompted former Powell Chief Of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/26/lawrence-wilkerson-colin-powell-sununu_n_2027721.html ] to make Republican-Party comments similar in nature to Powell's Sunday remarks.
My party, unfortunately, is the bastion of those people -- not all of them, but most of them -- who are still basing their positions on race. Let me just be candid: My party is full of racists, and the real reason a considerable portion of my party wants President Obama out of the White House has nothing to do with the content of his character, nothing to do with his competence as commander-in-chief and president, and everything to do with the color of his skin, and that's despicable.
Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/13/colin-powell-gop_n_2467768.html [with embedded video of Powell on Meet the Press, and comments]
===
Eugene Patterson's final column for the Times
By Eugene Patterson
Posted: Jan 12, 2013 10:51 PM
Last modified: Jan 12, 2013 11:07 PM
Editor's note: This is the final column Eugene Patterson wrote as president of the Times Publishing Co. It appeared on Oct. 30, 1988, under the headline "Saying farewell to a long and rewarding career in journalism."
You'll note my name is coming off the masthead now. I turned 65 this month and decided 41 years in the news arena was plenty. So I'm hanging up the gloves and retiring to play with my grandchildren and write a book or two.
Control of the Times Publishing Company passes to Andy Barnes, my designated hitter, who will run it well. Not yet 50, he came down with me from the Washington Post and proved he could play all the positions with elan and lead with the right vision.
This is a note of thanks to you always-faithful and often-forgiving readers who have made my 17 years at the St. Petersburg Times the best. And it is a love letter about the news business to those young people who are interested in journalism but who may wonder if there's a better way to make a living. I can't imagine that there is.
When a working life comes down, as the psalmist said, to a tale that is told, a Georgia farm boy can only look back with astonishment at his luck on entering a line of work that enabled him to get to know every American president since Franklin Roosevelt, all eight of them. (Most likable: Harry Truman, for being his brash and unaffected self. Most likely to be noted longest in history, I think: Lyndon Johnson, for his politically costly courage, as a Southerner, in freeing black Americans from the bondage of legal segregation, concluding the Civil War at last.)
Inelegant assignments come along too. Hasn't every reporter covered a rodeo and an armadillo fair in Texas? Or crushingly sad ones: the dying in a Georgia emergency room of a young automobile wreck victim — a bride on her wedding night. Or scarring scenes that will haunt one: a young black man strapped into the South Carolina electric chair for the rape of a white woman (who was present in the death chamber to watch) asking, when the warden invited his last words, "Will it hurt?"
There were the train wrecks on Long Island and the airplane crashes in New Jersey but to a young reporter a-gawk in New York City, the celebrities were the sights. We retirees are the only one who'll remember Mary Garden but I interviewed her at the Pierre! Gypsy Rose Lee made my lead for the day when I phoned her for a quote on a mid-winter power failure that was cutting off heat in the city. "Honey," said that wonderful stripper, "I'm gettin' out my fur-lined G-string." I buttonholed Thomas E. Dewey in the lobby of the Roosevelt and waylaid Columbia University President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the basement of Pennsylvania Station before he could get in his limousine.
London in the middle 1950s opened the door to Europe. Would you believe these eyes saw Sir Winston Churchill perform as Prime Minister at question time in the House of Commons, and examined his hapless successor Sir Anthony Eden in a press conference at 10 Downing Street; watched Queen Elizabeth II close-up at investitures in Buckingham Palace and witnessed Princess Margaret's sorrow when she had to give up Group Capt. Peter Townsend, the man she loved but couldn't marry because he was divorced; tracked the Soviet leaders Khrushchev and Bulganin down Geneva streets at the summit conference of 1955, and in Monaco saw the wedding of the American actress Grace Kelly to Prince Rainier.
But, thinks the young career-shopper, can a newspaper reporter hope ever to escape the rush and engage in an important issue in depth, over time? Yes, more than a decade's editorial work in Atlanta centered on the civil rights revolution that ramified into every political, social and economic institution in the South. Feeling that mountainous issue begin to move forward rewarded me the most. And I can tell my grandchildren I knew Martin Luther King Jr. and worked at the Constitution alongside Ralph McGill.
Many of our luncheon guests in Katharine Graham's dining room at the Washington Post during the Nixon era were transients in the halls of power — John Erlichman, John Mitchell, Henry Kissinger, Ed Muskie, George McGovern and the rest.
But in St. Petersburg in early 1975, one guest who came for lunch told us he aimed to win high office the next year and he did stick around the power alley for a while. The name was Jimmy Carter.
Then there's been the story of Florida's emergence as America's fourth largest state and Tampa Bay's evolution into Florida's largest city, with all the heady news and human stories attendant to that. We have problems to solve as well as cheers to lead, though.
I worry some about the drift away from the political center in America to the extent that left and right, conservative and liberal, hawk and dove seem thought to be necessary to define us as citizens. With respect to such extremes, I go back to Thucydides: "A nation that draws too broad a difference between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."
It has been rewarding to help engage a community in conversation with itself, which is what Walter Lippmann called the role of a newspaper. To the young who may choose a life in the news business, I wish them all the breadth of experience that came my way, from the blast of the rockets' liftoffs at Cape Canaveral to the tumult of 15 national political conventions, from the silence of patrols through the Vietnam elephant grass to the thunder of Dr. King's " I have a dream" rolling down from the Lincoln Memorial. And may they all become editors so they'll share in the quiet reasoning as the editorial board searches daily for wise ways to the public good.
Walker Percy wrote that none of us expect to affect history more than an infinitesimal amount, but that we have to try. I think, all told, the world may be a little better than it was when I came into the reporting trade, and I leave believing the good guys are going to find a way to win this thing in the end.
Copyright 1988, 2013 Tampa Bay Times
http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/article1270390.ece [with comments]
--
Eugene Patterson, 89, voice on civil rights, dies
This 1984 photo shows Eugene Patterson in St. Petersburg, Fla. Newspaper editor and columnist Eugene Patterson, who helped fellow Southern whites understand the civil rights movement, has died, Saturday, Jan. 12, 2013. He was 89.
(AP Photo/The Tampa Bay Times)
Three Pulitzer winners: Jack Nelson, right, was photographed with (from left), Eugene Patterson and Ralph McGill. Patterson, who was editor of The Atlanta Constitution in the 1960s, is holding his Pulitzer Prize citation, awarded in 1967. McGill, the crusading columnist and publisher, won it in 1959. Nelson won his Pulitzer while reporting for the Constitution a year later, in 1960.
(File)
In this Aug. 25, 2012 photo, Gene Patterson, former chairman and chief executive of the Times Publishing Company and its affiliates, checks his email from his bed in St. Petersburg, Fla. Patterson edited 600,000 words out of the King James Bible shown at right, sitting on top of his finished manuscript. Newspaper editor and columnist Eugene Patterson, who helped fellow Southern whites understand the civil rights movement, has died, Saturday, Jan. 12, 2013. He was 89.
(AP Photo/The Tampa Bay Times, Cherie Diez)
This undated photo made during World War II, shows Eugene Patterson, commander of a tank platoon as Gen. George Patton’s 3rd Army drove through the German ranks. Newspaper editor and columnist Eugene Patterson, who helped fellow Southern whites understand the civil rights movement, has died, Saturday, Jan. 12, 2013. He was 89.
(AP Photo/The Tampa Bay Times)
By Roy Peter Clark
For the Journal-Constitution
Updated: 4:51 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 13, 2013 | Posted: 8:49 a.m. Sunday, Jan. 13, 2013
As editor of the Atlanta Constitution from 1960 to 1968, Gene Patterson’s image and words anchored the editorial page during the most tumultuous years of the civil rights movement in the South. With his mentor and best friend, Ralph McGill, Patterson used his platform to persuade his fellow white Southerners that on matters of race, they were wrong and that if they changed, the sky would not fall.
“I see what you’re trying to do,” one reader accused. “You’re trying to make us think that we’re better than we are.”
Eugene C. Patterson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials, died Saturday evening of complications from cancer in St. Petersburg, Fla.. He was 89.
Patterson will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Anderson McQueen Funeral Home in St. Petersburg is in charge of arrangements, which were incomplete Sunday.
Patterson was born on Oct. 15, 1923, in Valdosta to a schoolteacher mother and a bank cashier father. The family moved from Nicholls to Douglas and wound up during the Depression on a small farm near Adel.
“I toiled as a boy,” wrote Patterson, “behind a plow drawn by two mules across 50 acres of isolation. … I grew up hard there. We milked cows, butchered hogs and steers, hoed peanuts and pulled corn and picked cotton and cropped tobacco.”
In 1940, he completed junior college at North Georgia College at Dahlonega, where he edited the school paper. He earned a journalism degree from the University of Georgia in 1943 and enlisted in the Army. He fought from Normandy through the Battle of the Bulge and then across the Rhine with Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army.
By all accounts, Patterson fought bravely, earning Silver and Bronze stars. Until his death, he evoked World War II as the formative influence of his life. It offered the first escape from the segregationist South and let him see, in a foreign setting, where race hatred inevitably led.
In 1946, Patterson headed for the nearest newspaper office in a newly bought suit. He went from Army captain to cub reporter in a single day, launching his journalism career on the pages of the Daily Telegram in Temple, Texas.
A year later he returned to his native Georgia and joined the Macon Telegraph as a city hall reporter. His career took off when the United Press recruited him to work in its Atlanta bureau. From there he became UP bureau chief in Columbia, S. C., where he met his wife, Sue Carter, then a reporter for the Columbia Record.
The UP sent Patterson to New York, where he sharpened his competitive instincts. In 1953, Patterson became bureau chief for the UP in London. It was from there that Patterson issued his most famous news lead after a noted American author crashed his plane in Uganda and was feared dead: “Ernest Hemingway came out of the jungle today carrying a bunch of bananas and a bottle of gin.”
All that experience served as a prelude for what Patterson encountered in Atlanta from 1956 to 1968, during what is now understood as the classic period of the civil rights movement.
Patterson served as executive editor of both the Journal and Constitution from 1956 to 1960, when he succeeded Ralph McGill as editor of the Constitution. McGill was promoted to publisher.
In an era of political assassinations and church bombings, Southern editorial writers who challenged segregation needed courage. Atlanta Mayor William B. Hartsfield advised Patterson not to worry about the anonymous cowards who threatened him with hate mail: “It’s the ones you don’t hear from that you have to worry about.”
Patterson’s equalizer was not a pistol, but a ball-peen hammer hidden in a desk drawer. He never had to wield it, but admitted having, on two occasions, nudged open the drawer.
His daughter, Mary Fausch, remembers how she once phoned her father in a panic because the family dog, Lizzy, had been shot by strangers. “I know who did this, Daddy,” Mary told her father. “It’s the people who are angry about the things you are writing.” The indomitable pup lived to the age of 16 — even with a bullet lodged near her heart.
Patterson was known for his red-hair, his military bearing and his Irish tenor voice that could belt out “Danny Boy” or “Amazing Grace” with spine-chilling clarity. But it was his literary sensibility and editorial voice — part McGill, part Hemingway, part Faulkner — that made him a beacon of progressive reform in the segregationist South.
He wrote a 750-word column every day from 1960 to 1968, more than 3,200 in all. He wrote on Saturdays and Sundays, sometimes by hand in a fishing boat, because he worried that if he wrote two columns on Thursday or Friday, the second would lack the energy of the first.
“To me, writing was like shaving,” Patterson explained. “If a man wants to look good, he gets up in the morning and shaves. That’s what I did every day: shave and write a column.”
With McGill as publisher and Patterson as editor, the Constitution became the leading editorial voice in the South, with a reputation as a progressive force on matters of civil rights.
“Mr. Patterson’s contributions to The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, the Atlanta community and to journalism were enormous. We benefit still from his work and legacy,” said Atlanta Journal-Constitution Editor Kevin Riley.
Former Atlanta Mayor Sam Massell, who was president of the City Council from 1962 until 1970, said the courage that Patterson showed and the topics he tackled — particularly race —helped make Atlanta and guide the city through the turbulent 1960s.
“Gene established himself early on as a protector of Atlanta. He knew local politics, both how the system worked and how it didn’t,” Massell said. “It meant that we had support from the paper, which was extremely important when you are facing such a controversial issue. The daily newspaper was very progressive and unique in the South, to be that advanced on civil rights reforms that were taking place. He was a major factor in the success that we enjoyed.”
Patterson often admitted that his point of view on race took time to develop, that McGill would sometimes chide him for pulling punches and that, like McGill’s, his early opinions were “pale tea.”
As his prose became stronger and his opinions less hesitant, Patterson won a Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for his editorials supporting civil rights for African-Americans and combating white demagogues in Georgia and throughout the South. He also made a difference by what he didn’t do — stalwartly refusing to publish FBI reports about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s private life.
“That’s pretty dangerous stuff,” he told an FBI agent bearing salacious personal information about King, “and it’s not our kind of journalism.”
Patterson’s most famous column was written on September 15, 1963, the day he learned that four young girls had been murdered in Birmingham, Ala., when a dynamite bomb went off in their church. When he told the story, Patterson would describe how he wrote from his home with tears streaming down his face and his own young daughter nearby. The column bore the title: “A Flower for the Graves.”
“A Negro mother wept in the street Sunday morning in front of a Baptist Church in Birmingham. In her hand she held a shoe, one shoe, from the foot of her dead child. We hold that shoe with her. … With a weeping Negro mother, we stand in the bitter smoke and hold a shoe. If our South is ever to be what we wish it to be, we will plant a flower of nobler resolve for the South now upon these four small graves that we dug.”
When word of this editorial reached Walter Cronkite, he invited Patterson to read it, in full, on the CBS Evening News. Patterson’s contribution to social and political change in the South went beyond his opinion columns. In the 1950s and 1960s, he became a close friend and editorial supporter of Georgia governors Ernest Vandiver and Carl Sanders and Atlanta mayors William B. Hartsfield and Ivan Allen.
In a night telephone conversation in 1961, Patterson encouraged Vandiver to stand fast against racial violence designed to frustrate the desegregation of the University of Georgia. And he followed Allen onto Atlanta’s streets on nights when the city experienced violence, vandalism and rioting.
By the end of 1968, Patterson found himself mired in periodic disagreements with publisher Jack Tarver, so he left Atlanta to become managing editor of The Washington Post, serving under publisher Kay Graham and executive editor Ben Bradlee.
His three-year tenure was eventful. Graham would write in her memoir that it was Patterson who insisted to her that she must publish the famous Pentagon Papers. But Patterson and Bradlee were two bulldogs tugging at the same T-bone. Patterson left the Post in 1971 for Duke University, where he spent a year as a professor of public policy.
That same year, Nelson Poynter hired Patterson to become editor of The St. Petersburg Times, now The Tampa Bay Times. Under Patterson’s leadership, the Times gained an international reputation for excellence.
As Patterson’s time in Atlanta receded, he became remembered less as an opinion-shaper on civil rights and more as a national leader of journalistic craft and values. When he retired in 1988, he was CEO of the St. Petersburg Times publishing company and chairman of the board of The Poynter Institute, an acclaimed professional school for journalists.
In 2002, a collection of his Constitution columns was published under the title, “The Changing South of Gene Patterson: Journalism and Civil Rights, 1960-1968.” Patterson’s literary effects are preserved at the Poynter Institute, which has, near one entrance, a saying attributed to Gene Patterson: “Don’t just make a living. Make a mark.”
Hank Klibanoff, former AJC managing editor and co-author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on press coverage of the civil rights movement, spoke of Patterson’s relentless optimism.
“It’s hard for people to recognize now how difficult it was to be progressive on the matter of race relations when he was editor of the Constitution,” Klibanoff said. Patterson tried to reach the silent middle ground, those who felt they were segregationists, but he felt were very educable. “He frequently wrote his column to those people, trying to bring them to sanity.”
Klibanoff recalled how appalled Patterson was when black churches were burned in Terrell County in 1962. Patterson’s column calling on whites to raise money to rebuild the churches raised $10,000. “He knew his audience and knew how oppositional they were to change, but he had enough optimism about the goodness of humanity to feel he could make a difference,” Klibanoff said
Friend and protege George Rahdert, attorney for The Tampa Bay Times, said Patterson had enormous courage, wisdom and fortitude.
“He was right on every issue and usually way before the rest of the pack had figured it out,” he said. “He always had the insight to do the right thing. And he would do it with grace and courage. He would never say, ‘You go.’ He said, ‘Lets’s go.’ He really envisioned what newspapers should be and actually became. He was a big part of that.”
Always the editor, Patterson’s last assignment was a massive one — editing the King James Bible. In 2012, working from a laptop and under hospice care, he published “Chord: The Old Testament Condensed,” which lopped out more than a half-million words from the text in an effort to streamline it.
“Some force urged me to lay my editor’s pencil on the Old Testament and lighten its density. Its expository entanglements had tripped up my lifelong efforts to read it through,” Patterson wrote in the introduction. “I wondered if that great river of a story might be made to flow unvexed past the dams of details and tributaries of digression. I wanted to read the Bible as a book aimed at people in the pews, not shelve it as a catalog of passages from which to select a sermon subject or a movie script. A book with a sustaining narrative, easily followed, surely lay there for the telling.”
Patterson is survived by his daughter, Mary Patterson Fausch, of Raleigh, N.C. and St. Petersburg; three granddaughters, Laura Carter Fausch and Emily Carr Fausch, both of Raleigh, and Molly Patterson Fausch, of Columbus, Ohio; and a sister, Anne Facer, of Homosassa, Fla.
Roy Peter Clark is vice president and senior scholar at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla. Staff writers Ernie Suggs, Fran Jeffries, Daarel Burnette and Poynter Institute researcher David Shedden contributed to this article.
© 2013 Cox Media Group
http://www.ajc.com/news/news/eugene-patterson-89-voice-on-civil-rights-dies/nTt2C/
===
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"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
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upon the Right of Election, 1790
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