Replies to post #207649 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

LoL .. I wondered what happened, I got through the entire post and then scrolled up . .hit KEEP (as there are several I want to comment on) ... and it said "MESSAGE DELETED" .. . I thought what????? .. never saw that before and could not imagine anyone deleting that post ..

Anyway, that sure is a good one ... There are at least five that I especially enjoyed . .of course, you know me.. .'Larry effin Kudlow? .. omg! he thinks he has the right to 'judge' Pope Frances on his 'love of capitalism'? . .jeeeeeze ........I've so often wondered why anyone listens to that station .. I find it so wrong so much of the time ...

The Hate, The Racism .. IT HURTS! ... it really hurts! .. and then those stupid guys want to know why WE get 'angry and disgusted and disrespect them'? It is the most horrid event I have ever had to witness in this country, yes, of course . .I've read about a different time of race hate and horror and hangings and it changed me forever then, when I read it as a kid, and NOW, since Obama, (with tears trying to escape) ... It has changed me again and of course forever but in a hardened way .. in a way, ready to fight it! because it just doesn't have a right to exist in a civilized country .. with supposedly civilized people ..(yes, I know about the 1st.. ;) ) and you're STILL NOT allowed to vote .. and .. basically you're less than the dogs they hate! .. . .you know........it really really brings tears to your eyes .... and then that ONE article that says ... "the divisions have never been wider" ... no kidding? .... ;) sheeesh I just can't imagine why ... Now, Jesus?

omg! .. I guess 'they have the right' .. .maybe they one day will get on a better boat and have a more successful trip ... . .to Hell where? ... wherever that other couple didn't make it .. .BUT the Mom and Dad of Jesus . .for sure could make it! .. .; )

what can I say about your posts Quoting 'republicans'? .. Conservatism and Libertarianism really is a MENTAL DISORDER! .. and it's proved every day, day in and day out by their very own words ... ;( crazy fricks! ..

The KIDS around the statue of Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese?
Maybe, just Maybe! .. We are doing something right.. ;) Take a Good Look! ... ;)

How Absolutely Beautiful! .. We must NEVER Let them DOWN!

of course, loved the floyd Norris economic commentary, ty. I read it the other day and was going to post it to a small hard headed one on another board as of course, we had gotten into that discussion and of course 'he' denied the truth, just as he denies that Tax Cuts do NOT create jobs .. and just as ... he believes (like SS) ... that runaway inflation is upon us! .. and Actually has been and/or will be AND it's been that way since Obama won the election in November 2008! ... yes, so I didn't post it .. as I had posted two very good writers on the subject, Bruce Bartlett for one ... and of course , so many others ... but I didn't and why? .. because What For? .... haters gonna hate .. and stupid is gonna be stupid in spite of the facts right before their very eyes . .so really .. There is no point ... . ;-)

Thanks for posting the Robert Reich article "Why the Anger" .. I hadn't seen that anywhere .. .I do appreciate it ... ;) .........

Interesting about Ahmad Akkari.. ;) That's Progress. He learned for himself.

The Wendall Holmes guy? .. Too deep for me, but I think he changed his mind about the 1st amendment.. maybe his first opinion was correct? ............;)

Thanks F6! .. and yes, about the aca ... god what a mess!

[F6]

Rep. Steve Stockman: How Are You Gonna Kill Me Without A Gun?

By Katie Burkhart
Posted: 08/16/2013 6:31 pm EDT | Updated: 08/16/2013 6:59 pm EDT

Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas) stopped by the Sean Hannity Show Friday afternoon to offer his thoughts on the rodeo clown who sparked an uproar [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/11/obama-rodeo-clown_n_3741218.html ] at the Missouri State Fair with an impersonation of President Barack Obama.

While the Missouri State Fair has apologized for the incident and banned the clown from ever performing there again, Stockman has invited the clown to perform in Texas [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/14/steve-stockman-rodeo-clown_n_3757399.html ].

The public reaction to the invitation within the Lone Star state has largely been positive, the congressman said, but reactions from left-leaning states have been much less supportive.

"One guy threatened to kill me," said Stockman. "I said, 'How are you gonna do that without a gun? [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/31/steve-stockman-guns-god_n_3365213.html ]'"

Noting that Texans poked fun at former President George W. Bush (a Texas native) during his presidency, the congressman dismissed the uproar as "false outrage."

"We've got some serious issues out there ... and they're focusing on a clown," Stockman told Hannity. "This is more laughable and silly to me than anything. It's a sleight of hand to shift topics from the IRS scandal, from Benghazi."

Stockman isn't the first Republican lawmaker to suggest that the White House should take a joke. Earlier Friday, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) suggested that amends be made over drinks [

Mr. President: Invite the rodeo clown 2 the White House 4 a beer summit. Take the temperature down, have a laugh, relax. It's not about race

— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) August 16, 2013

].

Steve King
@SteveKingIA
Mr. President: Invite the rodeo clown 2 the White House 4 a beer summit. Take the temperature down, have a laugh, relax. It's not about race
6:14 AM - 16 Aug 2013

Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/16/steve-stockman-rodeo-clown_n_3769894.html [with embedded video report, and comments]

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[F6]

Ted Cruz’s Candidacy Would Be Awkward for Birthers


Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) speaks during the family leadership summit in Ames, Iowa, on August 10.
(Justin Hayworth/AP)

The Constitution likely allows Canadian-born Ted Cruz to run for president, but birthers may disagree.

by Ben Jacobs
Aug 16, 2013 11:12 AM EDT

In 2008, “birthers” vehemently and strenuously argued that Barack Obama could not be president. They asserted that the president, whose mother was a citizen but whose father was not, was born in Kenya and therefore could not be a “natural born citizen” as required by Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution. Of course, President Obama was born in Hawaii, so the debate seemed irrelevant-—a matter best left to the conspiracy theorists and Donald Trump. It isn’t anymore.

First-term Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/10/ted-cruz-gets-an-early-start-for-2016.html ], who is already considered a 2016 contender, was born in Canada to a mother who was an American citizen and a father who was then a citizen of Cuba. It’s the exact same fact pattern: foreign birth, citizen mother, non-citizen father that birthers thought applied to Obama. The only difference is that this time it’s true.

The issue has already come up for Cruz earlier this week when ABC News asked Donald Trump [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/08/donald-trump-sen-ted-cruz-perhaps-not-eligible-for-white-house-if-born-in-canada/ ], who has been perhaps the most prominent birther, whether the Texas senator was eligible. “If he was born in Canada, perhaps not,” said Trump. The real-estate millionaire and reality-show host went on to say, ”I don’t know the circumstances. I heard somebody told me he was born in Canada. That’s really his thing.”

Cruz’s birthplace shouldn’t present a legal impediment though. “Natural-born citizen” is an ill-defined term that has not been used in a statute since 1790. Further, courts have never had to adjuciate this issue. The closest it has ever come to presenting a practical problem was during the brief presidential campaign in 1967 of George Romney, the Michigan governor and father of Mitt Romney, who was born in Mexico [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/19/brian-schweitzer-mitt-romney-s-family-came-from-a-polygamy-commune-in-mexico.html ] to parents who were American citizens. This means constitutional scholars debating the issue have to look back to precedents as hoary as a law passed by Parliament in 1350. But, as Jack Markell of the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service notes in a report [ http://www.scribd.com/doc/41197555/41131059-MoC-Memo-What-to-Tell-Your-Constituents-in-Answer-to-Obama-Eligibility ]:

“The weight of scholarly legal and historical opinion appears to support the notion that ‘natural born Citizen’ means one who is entitled under the Constitution or laws of the United States to U.S. citizenship ‘at birth’ or ‘by birth,’ including any child born ‘in’ the United States (other than to foreign diplomats serving their country), the children of United States citizens born abroad, and those born abroad of one citizen parent who has met U.S. residency requirements.”

In short, if you acquire citizenship by birth and do not need to be naturalized, you are natural born.

The irony is that the circumstances of Cruz’s birth almost perfectly mirror the scenario offered by birthers, even down to the fact that the Texas senator nominally entered the world a British subject by dint of being born in Canada in 1970.

The result is a delightful paradox. Any liberals who try to cast doubt on Cruz’s citizenship will likely be using almost the exact arguments they scorned when falsely applied to President Obama. And, of course, any birthers who defend Cruz while still insisting Obama’s tenure in the Oval Office is illegitimate [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/13/congressman-says-majority-in-house-to-impeach-obama.html ] aren’t just being conspiracy theorists. They are being hypocrites as well.

© 2013 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/16/ted-cruz-s-candidacy-would-be-awkward-for-birthers.html [with comments]

[F6]

Saudi Arabia's War on Witchcraft


Members of the religious police attend a training course. The Saudi authorities have a unit dedicated specifically to hunting witches.
(Ali Jarekji/Reuters)

A special unit of the religious police pursues magical crime aggressively, and the convicted face death sentences.

Ryan Jacobs
Aug 19 2013, 9:00 AM ET

The sorceress was naked.

The sight of her bare flesh startled the prudish officers of Saudi Arabia's infamous religious police, the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (CPVPV), which had barged into her room in what was supposed to be a routine raid of a magical hideout in the western desert city of Madinah's Al-Seeh neighborhood. They paused in shock, and to let her dress.

The woman -- still unclothed -- managed to slip out of the window [ http://cms.arabnews.com/node/285436 ] of her apartment and flee. According to the 2006 account [ http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2006/05/29/24177.html ] of the Saudi Okaz newspaper, which has been described [ http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/01/05/040105fa_fact_wright ] as the Arabic equivalent of the New York Post, she "flew like a bird." A frantic pursuit ensued. The unit found their suspect after she had fallen [ http://cms.arabnews.com/node/285436 ] through the unsturdy roof of an adjacent house and onto the ground next to a bed of dozing children.

They covered her body, arrested her, and claimed to uncover key evidence indicating that witchcraft had indeed been practiced, including incense, talismans, and videos about magic. In the Al Arabiya report, a senior Islamic cleric lamented that the incident had occurred in a city of such sacred history. The prophet Muhammad is buried there, and it is considered the second most holy location in Islam, second to Mecca. The cleric didn't doubt the details of the incident. "Some magicians may ride a broom and fly in the air with the help of the jinn [supernatural beings]," he said.

The fate of this sorceress is not readily apparent, but her plight is common. Judging from the punishments of others accused of practicing witchcraft in Saudi Arabia before and since, the consequences were almost certainly severe.

In 2007, Egyptian pharmacist Mustafa Ibrahim was beheaded in Riyadh after his conviction on charges of "practicing magic and sorcery as well as adultery and desecration of the Holy Quran." The charges of "magic and sorcery" are not euphemisms for some other kind of egregious crime he committed; they alone were enough to qualify him for a death sentence. He first came to the attention of the religious authorities when members of a mosque in the northern town of Arar voiced concerns over the placement of the holy book in the restroom. After being accused of disrupting a man's marriage through spellwork, and the discovery [ http://www.abc.net.au/news/2007-11-03/saudi-executes-egyptian-for-practising-witchcraft/714652 ] of "books on black magic, a candle with an incantation 'to summon devils,' and 'foul-smelling herbs,'" the case -- and eventually his life -- were swallowed by the black hole of the discretionary Saudi court system.

The campaign of persecution has shown no signs of fizzling. In May, two Asian maids were sentenced [ http://www.emirates247.com/crime/region/two-maids-get-10-years-1-000-lashes-for-sorcery-2013-05-20-1.507147 ] to 1,000 lashings and 10 years in prison after their bosses claimed that they had suffered from their magic. Just a few weeks ago, Saudi newspapers began running the image of an Indonesian maid being pursued [ http://www.emirates247.com/news/region/saudi-police-on-the-hunt-for-a-witch-housemaid-2013-07-28-1.515753 ] on accusations that she produced a spell that made her male boss's family subject to fainting and epileptic fits. "I swear that we do not want to hurt her but to stop her evil acts against us and others," the man told the news site Emirates 24/7.

According to Adam Coogle, a Jordan-based Middle East researcher for Human Rights Watch who monitors Saudi Arabia, the relentless witch hunts reveal the hollowness of the country's long-standing promises about liberalizing its justice system.

In a country where public observance of any religion besides Islam is strictly forbidden, foreign domestic workers who bring unfamiliar traditional religious or folk customs from Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Africa, or elsewhere can make especially vulnerable and easy targets. "If they see these [folk practices or items] they immediately assume they're some kind of sorcery or witchcraft," he said.

The Saudi government's obsession with the criminalization of the dark arts reached a new level in 2009, when it created and formalized a special "Anti-Witchcraft Unit [ http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Saudi-Arabias-Anti-Witchcraft-Unit-breaks-another-spell ]" to educate the public about the evils of sorcery, investigate alleged witches, neutralize their cursed paraphernalia, and disarm their spells. Saudi citizens are also urged to use a hotline on the CPVPV website to report any magical misdeeds to local officials, according to the Jerusalem Post.

According to a director of the religious police's witchcraft division in Riyadh, the unit provides [ http://www.saudigazette.com.sa/index.cfm?method=home.regcon&contentID=2009031532193 ] confidentiality to informants. "We deal with sorcerers in a special way. No one should think that we mention the name of whomever files a report about sorcery," Sheikh Adel Faqih told the Saudi Gazette. In 2009 alone, at least 118 people [ http://www.saudigazette.com.sa/index.cfm?method=home.regcon&contentid=2009110453524 ] were charged with "practicing magic" or "using the book of Allah in a derogatory manner" in the province of Makkah, the country's most populous region.

Faqih also claimed that the process of arresting someone for crimes of magic involved more than just receiving a tip from a neighbor or employer. A formal investigation would be pursued, and "information must be collected before an arrest can be made." What sort of information do they need? The answer was unsurprisingly vague and innocuous: if the suspect sought to purchase "an animal with certain features." For example, "he asks for a sheep to be killed without mentioning Allah's name and asks to stain the body with the animal's blood or if he asks for similar unusual things."

By 2011, the unit had created a total of nine [ http://wwww.arabnews.com/node/373213 ] witchcraft-fighting bureaus in cities across the country, according to Arab News, and had "achieved remarkable success" in processing at least 586 cases of magical crime, the majority of which were foreign domestic workers from Africa and Indonesia. Then, last year, the government announced [ http://www.emirates247.com/crime/region/saudi-steps-up-war-on-sorcery-2012-03-27-1.450545 ] that it was expanding its battle against magic further, scapegoating witches as the source of both religious and social instability in the country. The move would mean new training courses for its agents, a more powerful infrastructural backbone capable of passing intelligence across provinces, and more raids. The force booked 215 sorcerers [ http://www.saudigazette.com.sa/index.cfm?method=home.regcon&contentid=20130508164754 ] in 2012.

***

The most aggressive pursuit of witches tends to be in the interior of the Arabian peninsula, a parcel of the country that hosts the capital city Riyadh and many of the most dedicated followers of Salafism, the ultra-conservative school of Sunni Islam that the government enforces [ http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/2004/35507.htm ] throughout the country in its religious courts.

Wresting the country's criminal proceedings from the grip of one of the strictest strains of Islam would involve more than just the development of a more progressive outlook; it would require cosmic revisions in Saudi history and religious identity.

The Saudi government and many of its citizens subscribe to the 18th-century teachings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, a revivalist Islamic scholar who called for a return to literal interpretations of the Quran, and for the abandonment of folk rituals that had developed around the worship of Islamic shrines and grave sites. According [ http://www.marxists.org/subject/arab-world/lutsky/ch05.htm ] to historian Vladmir Borisovich Lutsky:

He sharply criticised such superstitious survivals as fetishism and totemism, which, to him, were indistinguishable from idolatry. Formally all the Arabs were Moslems. But, in reality, there existed many local tribal religions in Arabia. Each Arab tribe, each village had its fetish, its beliefs and rites. The variety of religious forms that stemmed from the primitive level of social development and the lack of cohesion between the countries of Arabia were serious obstacles to political unity. Abd el-Wahhab set up against this religious polymorphism a single doctrine called tauhid (unity)...

....

The Wahhabis fought against the survivals of local tribal cults. They destroyed the tombs of the saints, and forbade magic fortune-telling. But at the same time their teachings were directed against official Islam.

Under Wahhabi doctrine, magic is seen as a serious affront to the pure and exclusive relationship one is supposed to share with Allah.

But belief in the supernatural and magic is actually quite common in Muslim culture. According to the Quran, the jinn are demonic supernatural beings [ http://muse.jhu.edu/books/9780815650706?auth=0 ] that were created out of fire at the same time as man. Some believe that jinn have the power to cause harm, and it is not uncommon for the possessed to visit [ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3425750/ ] faith healers or sorcerers tasked with ridding the evil.

According [ http://www.pewforum.org/2012/08/09/the-worlds-muslims-unity-and-diversity-4-other-beliefs-and-practices/#_ftn22 ] to the Pew Research Center's Religion and Public Life Project:

In most of the countries surveyed, roughly half or more Muslims affirm that jinn exist and that the evil eye is real. Belief in sorcery is somewhat less common: half or more Muslims in nine of the countries included in the study say they believe in witchcraft.

Accusations of jinn worship and witchcraft once even touched [ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303657404576357323069853958.html ] the administration of former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, when his advisers and aides were arrested on charges of black magic. Ahmadinejad denied the charges, but a sorcerer well-known among the ruling class claimed that he met with the President at least twice and gathered intelligence for him on "Jinn who work for Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad, and for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency," according to the Wall Street Journal.



According to the Pew survey, the majority of Muslims agree that Islam restricts making contact with jinn or using magic. But Wahhabism is particularly opposed to this notion, according to Muhammad Husayn Ibrahimi's analysis [ http://www.al-islam.org/new-analysis-wahhabi-doctrines/6.htm ] of the sect:

Based on some verses of the Qur'an, Shaykh Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab, Ibn Taymiyyah and the contemporary Wahhabis regard seeking help from other than God or asking for their intercession {shafa'ah} as an act of polytheism. Their main proof is the phrase, "other than God" in verse 18 of Surah Yunus. The Wahhabis regard the prophets, saints, idols, the jinn, and the dead as the most vivid manifestations of this verse.

This might explain why Saudis, many of whom are devout Wahhabi practitioners, are so fierce when it comes to the pursuit of witches.

***

The courts are controlled by judges -- commonly religious clerics -- who have unlimited latitude to interpret and define the content of witchcraft crime, the details of which are not articulated in a spare, barely existent penal code. They can also mete out capital punishments as they see fit. Saudi Arabia ranks third behind China and Iran for its number of executions. Evidence in these cases is limited [ http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2008/02/12/letter-hrh-king-abdullah-bin-abd-al-aziz-al-saud-witchcraft-case ] to witness testimony and the presentation of the "magical" items discovered in the possession of the accused.

The Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia did not respond to requests for comment on the specifics of its dealings with witchcraft crime.

The ability to defend against the charges seems to depend on the caprice of the particular judge assigned to the case. In the 2006 case [ http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2008/02/12/letter-hrh-king-abdullah-bin-abd-al-aziz-al-saud-witchcraft-case ] of Fawza Falih, who was sentenced to death on charges of "'witchcraft, recourse to jinn, and slaughter' of animals," she was provided no opportunity to question the testimonies of her witnesses, was barred from the room when "evidence" was presented, and her legal representation was not permitted to enter court. After appeals by Human Rights Watch, her execution was delayed, but she died [ http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Saudi-Arabias-Anti-Witchcraft-Unit-breaks-another-spell ] in prison as a result of poor health.

The police can also use questionable tactics. In 2008, a well-known Lebanese television personality, Ali Hussain Sibat, who made a living by telling callers' fortunes and instructing them on other superstitious matters, was lured into an undercover sting operation [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/world/middleeast/25saudi.html ] while making a religious pilgrimage to Mecca. According to the New York Times, he was arrested shortly after the police recorded conversations he held about providing a magical elixir to a woman that would force her husband to separate from his second wife. His death sentence was later stayed after outcry from international human rights organizations.

Belief in magic is so widespread that it is often invoked as a defense in Sharia courts. "If there's an employer dispute -- say the migrant domestic worker claims she wasn't paid her wages or her conditions are unlivable -- a lot of times what happens unfortunately is the defendant makes counterclaims against the domestic worker," Coogle said. "And a lot of times they'll make counterclaims of sorcery, witchcraft, and that sort of thing."

Domestic workers, many of whom who are not fluent in Arabic, face significant challenges in defending themselves against these charges, according to Coogle. Sometimes, he says, "they don't even know what's happening." "I think that there are cases where the authorities will provide translation, but I'm told the translation isn't always available and isn't always reliable." Many don't have the resources to hire a lawyer, so they are often representing themselves, unless a human rights organization takes on their case.

Even then, they must face a religious cleric who serves simultaneously as a judge and a prosecutor and can often introduce new charges or modify existing ones during the course of the proceedings. "When you have a situation that's so arbitrary and left to the discretion of a judge, women without the means to defend themselves can sort of be left alone," he said. Though some of the cases receive international attention, Coogle expects that many don't make headlines at all. "Given the isolation of these individuals," he said, "I just expect that a lot happens that we don't know about."

Copyright © 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group (emphasis added)

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/saudi-arabias-war-on-witchcraft/278701/ [with comments]

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[F6]

Ted Cruz: Savior or bane of the Republican Party?


Sen. Ted Cruz speaks at a meetign of the Heritage Foundation, at the Hilton Anatole Hotel in Dallas, Texas on Tuesday, Aug. 20, 2013. He was there to discuss the push to remove funding for federal health care law, also called Obamacare.
(AP Photo/The Dallas Morning News, Michael Ainsworth)

Video [embedded]

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) is renouncing his Canadian citizenship. Does this mean he's going to run for president?
[ http://www.washingtonpost.com/posttv/video/inplay/ted-cruz-i-am-not-a-canadian/2013/08/20/3558f126-09d5-11e3-9941-6711ed662e71_video.html ]

By Sean Sullivan, Published: August 21, 2013

In AMES, Iowa — For 30 long seconds on a Saturday early this month, Ted Cruz stood silent and beaming as hundreds of conservative activists showered him with heartfelt applause in a dimly lighted auditorium. Then he started up again.

“And that reaction right there,” he declared, pointing at the crowd with his thumb and forefinger together, “shows how we win this fight. If I were sitting in the Senate cloakroom, the reaction to that statement would be fundamentally different. I don’t know that I’m quick enough to dodge all the things that would be thrown at me.”

Just like that, Cruz summed up his first seven months as a U.S. senator and exposed the conundrum he represents for the Republican Party: a hero to the conservative base and a worry for the establishment.

Cruz, 42, is a full-bore conservative from Texas whose certitude and combativeness in defense of his positions have made him a rock star to the GOP’s far-right-leaning activists. The comment that brought the crowd to it feet was about shredding Obamacare at all costs.

But that certitude and combativeness also have made him one of the most controversial figures in the Senate, a lightning rod for public and private criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike. The question many are left to ponder as Cruz travels the country targeting President Obama’s health-care law is: What can he realistically hope to achieve in a Senate steeped in tradition and hierarchy as an eloquent yet sharply polarizing figure?

The question is increasingly important, as Cruz is frequently mentioned as a 2016 presidential contender. This week, he released his birth certificate [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/08/19/ted-cruz-releases-birth-certificate/ ] amid questions from some who doubt whether he is eligible to be president because he was born in Canada. But Cruz makes the point that he was a U.S. citizen at birth (his mother was an American born in Delaware), and he promised Monday to renounce [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/08/20/what-ted-cruz-actually-needs-to-do-to-renounce-canadian-citizenship/ ] whatever right he has to Canadian citizenship.

The 2016 speculation has also been driven by the amount of time Cruz has been spending in early presidential nominating states such as Iowa, South Carolina and New Hampshire. He has made two trips to Iowa this year and plans to visit again in October. On Friday, he will be in New Hampshire to headline a fundraiser held by the state GOP.

But he cautions that not too much should be read into those travels. “In my view, it is way too soon for anyone to be focused on the 2016 presidential election,” he said. Cruz insists that his focus is “100 percent” on the Senate, but that is proving a trickier play.

Not a ‘social club’

“Extreme [ http://www.politico.com/blogs/politico-live/2013/08/chambliss-durbin-hit-cruz-on-government-shutdown-169888.html ],” “wacko bird [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/03/08/mccain-calls-paul-cruz-amash-wacko-birds/ ]” and “over the line [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6Hox_IB04o ]” are some of the words Cruz’s Senate colleagues have used to describe him publicly. He has shown none of the traditional deference that junior senators often adopt when dealing with their more senior colleagues.

In one encounter, Cruz tangled with Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a longtime gun-control advocate, during a Judiciary Committee hearing in March. A staunch defender of gun rights, Cruz peppered Feinstein with questions about the Constitution until, in exasperation, she replied: “I’m not a sixth-grader. Senator, I’ve been on this committee for 20 years.” That confrontational approach has not endeared him to many in the Senate, but Cruz said he will not shy away from defending his principles. “I like and respect my colleagues, but the Senate isn’t a social club,” he said.

Allies of Cruz say they respect his forceful opinions. “He brings clarity to every position he has,” said Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa).

The issue on which Cruz has been most clear and forceful lately is an effort to defund Obamacare that has gained little traction. He is pushing a plan that Sen. Mike Lee (Utah) circulated in July calling for Republicans to refuse to support any continuing resolution or appropriations bill that would fund the health-care law. The current funding measure runs though Sept. 30, meaning the government will shut down after that if Obama does not get a new bill.

At a town hall meeting sponsored by a conservative group Tuesday night in Dallas, where Cruz was thrice interrupted by hecklers [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/08/20/hecklers-confront-ted-cruz-at-town-hall-meeting/ ], the senator offered an impassioned defense of the plan, suggesting that Republicans could win a fight against the president if they simply dig in deeper. “If you have an impasse, one side or the other has to blink. How do we win this fight? Don’t blink,” he argued.

The applause-winning line that brought the crowd to its feet in Ames was the simple declaration: “There is no more important regulatory reform that we can do than to repeal every single word of Obamacare.” As Cruz explained how he intends to do it, the crowd gushed.

But in the Senate, many of Cruz’s Republican colleagues are less impressed. Some have cited the practical and political consequences of a government shutdown. Others have noted that even in a shutdown, the health-care law would be funded.

Outside the Senate chamber one afternoon in late July, Cruz was surrounded by a crush of reporters who tossed out question after question about his push to defund Obamacare. Republican senators, including Tom Coburn (Okla.), Richard Burr (N.C.) and John McCain (Ariz.), have sharply criticized the idea. Cruz chalked up the GOP hesitation to fear.

“There are a great many Republicans who are afraid of this fight because they believe the Democrats will blame Republicans and .?.?. the mainstream media will repeat word for word the argument of the Democrats,” he told reporters.

About 15 feet away stood McCain, encircled by another pack of reporters. He mocked the idea that he is less courageous than Cruz. “I think he’s right. I’m scared, and I surrender,” McCain said sarcastically, as he waved an imaginary white flag.

Cruz acknowledges that he has become a target for some of his colleagues but says he does not intend to engage in that fight.

“I can’t control what other senators choose to do,” he said. “More than a few senators, Democrat and Republican, have made the decision to throw rocks at me and to publicly insult me. I have not reciprocated. I don’t intend to reciprocate.”

The Senate is a place where tradition and seniority still matter and where the ability to forge relationships can mean the difference between success and failure. It is a place where the newest members often keep their heads down until they get their bearings. Cruz, who entered the chamber as a political star, has largely eschewed those conventions, setting him apart from other freshman celebrities who preceded him.

Barack Obama, for example, entered the Senate to great fanfare in 2005, but he kept a notably lower profile, following the example of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Even Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), to whom Cruz is sometimes compared, didn’t go big early. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a hero of liberals in a way that Cruz is to conservatives, has maintained a quiet presence during her first few months on Capitol Hill.

“He doesn’t appear to be hunkering down for a long Senate career, and he certainly isn’t angling for a Senate leadership position,” said Ed Rogers, a longtime Republican strategist. “I think he is more of a loner than Rubio, Warren or even Obama and certainly Hillary.”

Lee, one of Cruz’s closest allies in the Senate, says there is little doubt that Cruz is serious about being a senator. “I don’t think anyone can doubt his sincerity or his commitment or his dedication to the job,” he said.

‘In God’s hands’

Born Rafael Edward Cruz in Calgary, Alberta, in 1970, to a Cuban father and an Irish American mother, Cruz grew up in Houston. He’s fond of telling the story of how his dad came to the United States with just $100 sewn into his underwear, as an example of how people can lift themselves up in the United States. Cruz’s father (also Rafael), a pastor, is fond of telling the story of how his son began reading Milton Friedman in junior high school and memorized the U.S. Constitution as a teenager.

Cruz went on to become a star debater at Princeton and received a law degree from Harvard, where he dabbled in theater, playing Reverend Parris in “The Crucible.” He worked as a domestic policy adviser on George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign and on Bush’s Florida recount team. Later, he was appointed solicitor general of Texas, serving from 2003 to 2008.

Cruz’s 2012 Senate win was as unlikely as any in the country. He started out as a major underdog against Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, a well-funded Republican with much of the state party establishment behind him.

But Cruz won the support of the anti-tax Club for Growth and the Senate Conservatives Fund, a group started by then-Sen. Jim DeMint (S.C.), now president of the Heritage Foundation. With a fired-up conservative base behind him, Cruz defeated Dewhurst in a GOP runoff. He skated to victory in the general election.

In his short time in the Senate, Cruz has become a dominant voice in his party, and the question following him as he travels the country is how seriously he is considering a presidential run in 2016. Too early, repeats the Cruz camp.

“That’s in God’s hands,” his father said. “We can’t predict the future.”

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More from PostPolitics

What Ted Cruz's non-endorsement of John Cornyn should tell you
The Texas Republicans wants to run for president. Don't act surprised.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/08/26/what-ted-cruzs-non-endorsement-of-john-cornyn-should-tell-you/

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© 2013 The Washington Post (emphasis added)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ted-cruz-savior-or-bane-of-the-republican-party/2013/08/21/b7960640-0905-11e3-9941-6711ed662e71_story.html [with comments]


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For Ted Cruz, crazy is a family business


Ted Cruz with his daughter, Caroline, and father, Rafael.
(Credit: AP/David J. Phillip)

Ted and his far-right father are having a grand old party wooing GOP primary voters -- and scaring normal people

By Joan Walsh
Wednesday, Aug 21, 2013 11:31 AM CDT

Be careful what you wish for. The Republican Party sought a crop of new leaders with the vitality and ideological fire both Sen. John McCain and Mitt Romney lacked heading into 2016. Now they’ve got them, most notably Sen. Ted Cruz, who’s leading the charge to either “defund” Obamacare or shut down the government, to the horror of McCain and other so-called “establishment Republicans” (as if there were any such thing.) Even Tea Party Sen. Rand Paul has maybe kinda sorta suggested that shutting down the government to defund Obamacare is a bad idea [ http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/08/rand_paul_thinks_its_a_bad_idea_to_shut_down_the_government.html ] — even though he signed Sen. Mike Lee’s letter threatening to do so.

Cruz has no such qualms. Headlining former Sen. Jim DeMint and the Heritage Foundation’s “Defund Obamacare” rally last night in Dallas, he fired up the crowd with his Obama attacks. (Of course, I can’t help but note the irony of Heritage sponsoring Cruz’s “Defund Obamacare” tour when Heritage was the source of one of the plan’s key provisions: the individual mandate to carry health insurance.) Even though some Obama defenders showed up and heckled Cruz, the junior Texas senator and his father were the stars of the night.

“We’ve all seen this movie before,” Cruz told the audience. “President Obama and Harry Reid are gonna scream and yell ‘those mean, nasty Republicans are threatening to shut down the government.’” He went on: “One side or the other has to blink. How do we win this fight? Don’t blink!” Only squishes blink.

“Now is the best time we have to defund Obamacare,” Cruz told the crowd of 1,000. “We’re seeing bipartisan agreement that the wheels are coming off.”

The wheels came off the Heritage event, though, when Cruz’s father, minister Rafael Cruz, took the stage to close it out. When it comes to red meat and red-baiting, Ted is a piker compared to his Cuban refugee father, who talks of Castro’s tyranny but never mentions the fact that he supported the Cuban communist leader’s revolution against Batista. Again we heard Cruz Sr. warn that Barack Obama is leading us toward socialism. This time, though, he didn’t merely exaggerate, he outright lied, insisting “Sarah Palin was right” about death panels in Obamacare.

Cruz was oddly specific, as though he’d had a very vivid hallucination: There is a 16-member death panel, he told the rapt crowd, that “will be implemented next year.” Those “16 bureaucrats will decide” not only whether you get life saving treatment, but even knee surgery, Cruz warned the audience, farcically. Instead of a “knee operation,” maybe you’ll just get “a wheelchair” and pain medication instead. Cruz also predicted shortages of aspirin and a hike in staph infections under Obamacare, just like in his native Cuba (although many of Cuba’s medical shortages are due to the U.S. embargo.) Essentially, according to Cruz, the death panel will tell many of us “Go home and die!” And to think Republicans complained about Rep. Alan Grayson’s rhetoric [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0909/27726.html ] back in the day.

The Cruz and Son roadshow would scare normal voters, but it seems ideal for a GOP primary. Even in Texas, Cruz is the state’s GOP voters’ top pick for a presidential nominee, above Gov. Rick Perry, who is hoping to ride off into the sunset away from the statehouse and toward another primary run. Not so fast, Governor. Cruz had a solid lead even before Perry reversed himself and asked for at least some Medicaid funding for Obamacare, making himself obviously a “squish.”

At what point might Cruz Sr. become a drawback for his son? Can you say “never?” In the important Tea Party primary within the GOP primary, he is leaving Marco Rubio and Rick Perry in the dust, and is neck and neck with Rand Paul nationally. (That’s why Cruz allies are accusing Paul allies [ http://www.mediaite.com/online/cruz-ally-accuses-rand-paul-team-of-pushing-birther-issue-in-iowa/ ] of pushing questions about Cruz’s eligibility to be president especially in Iowa, although the two men profess to be friends.) It looks increasingly like Ted Cruz (and his father) dream of him as the 2016 nominee. But so do Democrats.

Copyright © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc.

http://www.salon.com/2013/08/21/there%E2%80%99s_no_cruz_control/ [with comments]


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Sen. Rafael Edward 'Ted' Cruz's 'Don't Blink' Strategy To Defund ObamaCare!

Published on Aug 22, 2013 by politicalarticles

Attention, Reince Priebus: Send in The [GOP] Clown Cars: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard/Article/Attention--Reince-Priebus--Send-in-The--GOP--Clown-Cars/257607

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaMs-px1f1I


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Cruz's Supporters Don't Question Eligibility


U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas speaks to high tech executives at National Instruments on August 22, 2013.
photo by: Bob Daemmrich

by Jay Root and Alana Rocha
August 23, 2013

KINGWOOD, Texas — When Democrat Barack Obama was running for president in 2008, Republican voter Christina Katok of Walden said she believed he was ineligible for the job.

She reasoned that he was born in Kenya and therefore wasn’t a “natural born” American — one of a handful of constitutional requirements for the job. (Obama's birth certificate shows that he was born in Hawaii, but some critics do not accept that as fact.)

Fast forward six years and another freshman U.S. senator, Canadian-born Tea Party firebrand Ted Cruz [ http://www.texastribune.org/directory/ted-cruz/ ] of Texas, is being mentioned as a potential 2016 presidential candidate. But Katok, who would vote for Cruz in a heartbeat, doesn’t have any concerns about his eligibility.

“As far as I’m concerned, Canada is not really foreign soil,” she said. Katok said she was more disturbed by Obama's "strong ties to Kenya," the African country where his father was born. She also said she didn’t like the fact that Obama did not release his long-form birth certificate during the 2008 race.

Cruz, who recently released his Canadian birth certificate, is at least “up front about it,” she said.

Katok, who saw Cruz speak at a Tea Party rally here this week, is not alone. The vastly different perceptions of similar controversies were evident at rallies and events Cruz attended this week across Texas, where he is meeting with constituents and promoting his drive to strip federal funding for Obamacare.

Liberal critics say [ http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/03/21/birther-hypocrisy-right-wing-has-no-problem-with-canadian-born-senator-ted-cruz-running-for-president/ ] Republicans who questioned Obama’s presidential eligibility are being hypocritical now that one of their own is facing questions about his. Republican partisans say the controversies are different — and that Cruz has been more transparent about the circumstances of his birth.

But partisanship may also be a factor in the differing perceptions.

Kerrville real estate broker Sue Tiemann, for example, said she had questioned Obama’s American citizenship and concluded that if he had not been born in this country, he would not be eligible.

Even if Obama had been born in Kenya, though, nobody disputed that his mother was from Kansas. In that case, it would be strikingly similar to the circumstances of Cruz’s birth: a mother who was an American citizen, born in Delaware, and a father born somewhere else (in Cruz’s case, Cuba).

Tiemann, who said she has no doubt that Cruz is eligible to be president, acknowledged that party affiliation might have something to do with her evaluation of the circumstances.

“You are always going to have that issue between Republicans and Democrats, [who] always look at it with a different way, a different eye,” she said.

The issue of Obama’s birthplace came up briefly during Cruz’s race for the U.S. Senate. In an October 2012 televised debate, Cruz’s Democratic opponent, Paul Sadler, asked Cruz if he considered himself a “birther,” and whether he believed Obama is Christian. Cruz declined to answer.

Chuck McDonald, who ran Sadler’s campaign, said they thought it was potentially a good wedge issue in the race.

“He could either be in a position where he would have to denounce the birther issue and thus alienate some of his supporters, or he could embrace that marginal point of view,” McDonald said. “He was never forced to really answer the question.”

On Wednesday, Cruz told The Texas Tribune that he never questioned Obama’s eligibility but wondered why the president wasn’t more forthcoming with his full birth certificate.

“I thought it was curious that he didn’t hand over his birth certificate, but I never raised [that],” Cruz said. “When I got the question from the paper, I said sure, here’s my birth certificate, which I think is a pretty straightforward thing to do.”

Cruz released his birth certificate to The Dallas Morning News, which discovered that the senator is still a Canadian citizen. Cruz says he plans to fill out the paperwork needed to renounce his Canadian citizenship.

During the 2008 campaign, Obama released a computer-generated “certification of live birth” indicating he was born in Honolulu on Aug. 4, 1961. According to a timeline published [ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2011/apr/27/obama-birth-certificate-timeline/ ] by PolitiFact, Obama sought a “waiver from Hawaii’s prohibition on releasing the long-form birth certificate” on April 18, 2011.

Nine days later, the White House publicly released the long-form birth certificate.

“I know there’s going to be a segment of people for which, no matter what we put out, this issue will not be put to rest,” Obama said after providing the document. “But I’m speaking to the vast majority of the American people, as well as to the press. We do not have time for this kind of silliness. We’ve got better stuff to do.”

© 2013 The Texas Tribune

http://www.texastribune.org/2013/08/23/cruzs-supporters-dont-question-eligibility/ [with comments]; the YouTube, as embedded, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tI6g4I1GX0E


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Cruz supporter extends US border to include Canada

The Rachel Maddow Show
August 23, 2013

Rachel Maddow shows how one supporter of Republican Ted Cruz resolves the dissonance between denying Barack Obama's fitness for the presidency because of baseless accusations that he is foreign-born and accepting Cruz's fitness for the presidency when he admits to being foreign born: Canada isn't foreign.

© 2013 NBCNews.com

http://video.msnbc.msn.com/rachel-maddow/52832728 [sow links at http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/08/23/20161382-links-for-the-823-trms (with comments); the above YouTube of the segment at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SN_gKsovh4 ]


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One Reform, Indivisible

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 18, 2013

Recent political reporting [ http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/behind-the-curtain-eve-of-destruction-95594.html?hp=t1 ] suggests that Republican leaders are in a state of high anxiety, trapped between an angry base that still views Obamacare as the moral equivalent of slavery and the reality that health reform is the law of the land and is going to happen.

But those leaders don’t deserve any sympathy. For one thing, that irrational base is a Frankenstein monster of their own creation. Beyond that, everything I’ve seen indicates that members of the Republican elite still don’t get the basics of health reform — and that this lack of understanding is in the process of turning into a major political liability.

On the unstoppability of Obamacare: We have this system in which Congress passes laws, the president signs them, and then they go into effect. The Affordable Care Act went through this process, and there is no legitimate way for Republicans to stop it.

Is there an illegitimate way? Well, the G.O.P. can try blackmail, either by threatening to shut down the government or, an even more extreme tactic, threatening not to raise the debt limit, which would force the United States government into default and risk financial chaos. And Republicans did somewhat successfully blackmail President Obama back in 2011.

However, that was then. They faced a president on the ropes after a stinging defeat in the midterm election, not a president triumphantly re-elected. Furthermore, even in 2011 Mr. Obama wouldn’t give ground on the essentials of health care reform, the signature achievement of his presidency. There’s no way he would undermine the reform at this late date.

Republican leaders seem to get this, even if the base doesn’t. What they don’t seem to get, however, is the integral nature of the reform. So let me help out by explaining, one more time, why Obamacare looks the way it does.

Start with the goal that almost everyone at least pretends to support: giving Americans with pre-existing medical conditions access to health insurance. Governments can, if they choose, require that insurance companies issue policies without regard to an individual’s medical history, “community rating,” and some states, including New York, have done just that. But we know what happens next: many healthy people don’t buy insurance, leaving a relatively bad risk pool, leading to high premiums that drive out even more healthy people.

To avoid this downward spiral, you need to induce healthy Americans to buy in; hence, the individual mandate, with a penalty for those who don’t purchase insurance. Finally, since buying insurance could be a hardship for lower-income Americans, you need subsidies to make insurance affordable for all.

So there you have it: health reform is a three-legged stool resting on community rating, individual mandates and subsidies. It requires all three legs.

But wait — hasn’t the administration delayed the employer mandate, which requires that large firms provide insurance to their employees? Yes, it has, and Republicans are trying to make it sound as if the employer mandate and the individual mandate are comparable. Some of them even seem to think that they can bully Mr. Obama into delaying the individual mandate too [ http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/08/17/republicans-to-obama-delay-individual-mandate/ ]. But the individual mandate is an essential piece of the reform, which can’t and won’t be bargained away, while the employer mandate [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/07/02/obamacares-employer-mandate-shouldnt-be-delayed-it-should-be-repealed/ ] is a fairly minor add-on that arguably shouldn’t have been in the law to begin with.

I guess that after all the years of vilification it was predictable that Republican leaders would still fail to understand the principles behind health reform and that this would hamper their ability to craft an effective political response as the reform’s implementation draws near. But their rudest shock is yet to come. You see, this thing isn’t going to be the often-predicted “train wreck.” On the contrary, it’s going to work.

Oh, there will be problems, especially in states where Republican governors and legislators are doing all they can to sabotage the implementation. But the basic thrust of Obamacare is, as I’ve just explained, coherent and even fairly simple. Moreover, all the early indications are that the law will, in fact, give millions of Americans who currently lack access to health insurance the coverage they need, while giving millions more a big break in their health care costs. And because so many people will see clear benefits, health reform will prove irreversible.

This achievement will represent a huge defeat for the conservative agenda of weakening the safety net. And Republicans who deluded their supporters into believing that none of this would happen will probably pay a large personal price. But as I said, they have nobody but themselves to blame.

© 2013 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/19/opinion/krugman-one-reform-indivisible.html [with comments]


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Cruz: Not enough votes now for Obamacare shutdown threat

Sen. Ted Cruz, who has crafted a plan to put the government's finances on the line if President Barack Obama's health care plan isn't stripped of its funding, said in an interview this week there aren't enough Republicans on board currently to make his idea a reality.
"We do not have the votes right now," Cruz said, noting that to succeed, he'd need 41 senators or 218 representatives to get behind his legislation - which would provide a year of funding for the federal government, minus Obamacare.
But the Texas Republican, speaking with CNN chief political correspondent Candy Crowley on "State of the Union," argued a coming "grass-roots tsunami" would bring over fellow conservatives to his side in the next month.
"I'm convinced there's a new paradigm in politics, that actually has Washington very uncomfortable. And it has politicians in both parties very uncomfortable," he said. "And that new paradigm is the rise of the grass roots, the ability of grass-roots activists to demand of their elected officials they do the right thing."
[...]
Cruz was speaking with CNN in Houston, where he appeared at a town hall meeting that was part of a tour sponsored by the conservative Heritage Foundation meant to build support for the effort to defund Obamacare.
"Obamacare was passed under false pretenses," Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint, a former senator, said on "State of the Union" Sunday. "The American people were lied to and they have every right to demand that their representatives stop this unfair and un-American law."
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/08/25/cruz-not-enough-votes-now-for-obamacare-shutdown-threat/ [with comments] [video and transcript of the complete State of the Union segment at http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2013/08/25/sen-cruz-to-candy-crowley-on-defunding-obamacare-we-do-not-have-the-votes-right-now/ (no comments yet)]


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Obamacare: More Republicans Utilize Parents’ Benefits

August 22, 2013
http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/obamacare-more-republicans-utilize-parents-benefits.html/ [ http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/obamacare-more-republicans-utilize-parents-benefits.html/?a=viewall ] [with comments]


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Michigan Medicaid Expansion Backed By GOP Governor Passes In Key Vote

Rick Snyder of Michigan is one of nine Republican governors who support expanding Medicaid to more poor people under President Barack Obama's health care reform law.
08/27/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/27/michigan-medicaid-expansion_n_3823189.html [with comments]


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Starbucks Won't Cut Worker Hours, Benefits Ahead Of Obamacare: CEO



By Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
Posted: 08/26/2013 4:45 pm EDT | Updated: 08/27/2013 3:22 pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Starbucks Coffee Co will not follow the lead of other companies that are cutting health insurance benefits or reducing hours for employees in anticipation of the U.S. Affordable Care Act, the coffee shop chain's CEO Howard Schultz told Reuters on Monday.

"Other companies have announced that they won't provide coverage for spouses; others are lobbying for the cut-off to be at 40 hours. But Starbucks will continue maintaining benefits for partners and won't use the new law as excuse to cut benefits or lower benefits for its workers," Schultz said in a telephone interview.

The 2010 healthcare reform law, often called Obamacare, requires companies with more than 50 employees to offer health insurance for employees who work 30 hours a week or more. Starbucks currently provides healthcare to part-timers who work 20 hours a week or more.

Last week, United Parcel Service Inc told non-union employees that their spouses would no longer qualify for company-sponsored health insurance if they could get coverage through their own jobs.

According to a survey released in March by consultant Towers Watson and the National Business Group on Health, 4 percent of large employers excluded spouses from their health plan in 2013 if they could buy coverage where they work, and 8 percent more planned to do so for 2014.

Last week, Reuters reported that some businesses are keeping staffing numbers below 50 or cutting the work week to less than 30 hours to avoid providing employee health insurance.

(Reporting By Atossa Araxia Abrahamian; Editing by David Gregorio)

Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/26/starbucks-worker-benefits-obamacare_n_3818870.html [with embedded video report, and (approaching 9,000) comments]


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Treasury To Hit Debt Limit In October (UPDATED)


US Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew speaks during a press conference at the US Department of the Treasury July 11, 2013 in Washington, DC.
(BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)

Posted: 08/26/2013 4:03 pm EDT | Updated: 08/26/2013 9:19 pm EDT

UPDATE: 4:14 p.m. ET-- In a Monday letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said latest estimates show the U.S. hitting the debt limit by the middle of October.

"Protecting the full faith and credit of the United States is the responsibility of Congress because only Congress can extend the nation's borrowing authority," Lew writes [ http://www.treasury.gov/initiatives/Documents/082613%20Debt%20Limit%20Letter%20to%20Congress.pdf ]. "Failure to meet that responsibility would cause irreparable harm to the American economy."

Read Lew's letter to Boehner:

Debt Limit Letter
[ http://www.docstoc.com/docs/160487862/Debt-Limit-Letter (embedded, scribd-style)]

Previously:

The U.S. Treasury is on track to hit the debt limit by mid-October, the Wall Street Journal [ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323407104579037181763668714.html ] reported Monday.

The report provides a more specific timeline than previously cited by Treasury officials. Previously, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said he anticipated the U.S. would not hit the debt ceiling "until Labor Day [ http://www.cnbc.com/id/100726621 ]."

"The uncertainty caused by putting this off is not good," Lew said in May. "The anxiety caused to the U.S. and world economy by putting this off until the last minute is not good."

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The mid-October timeframe is sooner than many on Capitol Hill had anticipated. The government hit the borrowing limit several months ago, but Treasury has used emergency measures—such as suspending certain pension contributions—to buy more time for Congress to act. Some believed that the government's improving fiscal condition—bolstered by rising tax revenue and money coming in from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—could give Treasury even more time, potentially until sometime in December.

Last week, Lew called on Congress to raise [ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57599788/treasury-secretary-calls-on-congress-to-raise-debt-limit/ ] the debt ceiling, urging lawmakers to "avoid another unnecessary self-inflicted wound" ahead of the Treasury exceeding the limit.

"We cannot afford for Congress to wait until some unknowable last minute to resolve this matter on the eve of a deadline," Lew said.

As Reuters reported [ http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/22/us-usa-obamacare-debtlimit-idUSBRE97L01O20130822 ] last week, House Republicans have floated using the debt limit as leverage to defund President Barack Obama's health care reform law.

"There are plenty of discussions ongoing but no decisions at this point," one GOP leadership aide said.

Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/26/treasury-debt-limit_n_3818583.html [with (over 5,000) comments]


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Government Shutdown Looms As Obama, Congressional Leaders Aim For Budget Deal



By JIM KUHNHENN
08/23/13 07:44 PM ET EDT

WASHINGTON -- Congressional Republican leaders and the Obama administration are trying to cut a deal that avoids a government shutdown in October while facing what could be an even bigger fight over the nation's debt ceiling in the rest of the year.

An agreement to keep the government operating at current spending levels through October and November would head off a politically costly disruption of federal services but still leave a clash looming, like the one that roiled the economy two years ago, over a possible government default. Neither party has come up with a way out of a debt showdown.

"Right now there isn't a plan, unfortunately, in Washington," said Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, who has been one of eight Republicans negotiating with the White House over the budget. He said lawmakers and the White House can't seem to act until deadlines are at hand and the pressure for a breakthrough is intense.

The double dose of a short-term spending measure that expires in November and a debt limit deadline does create the kind of drama that prompts action.

The coming budget fights mark a new season of uncertainty, which has emerged as an annual rite in Washington. This time the ritual is complicated further by President Barack Obama's pending nomination of a Fed chairman to replace Ben Bernanke, whose term is ending. Investors and corporate leaders, already jittery over a debt ceiling fight, also will be trying to divine what Obama's Fed selection could mean for monetary policy.

"Bernanke's departure is just one more unavoidable source of uncertainty," said Lewis Alexander, U.S. chief economist at Nomura, a global investment bank.

For now, the White House has abandoned its hopes for a large budget deal that would address both increases in tax revenue and reductions in long-term spending on programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Instead, it is proposing an overhaul in corporate taxes to close what it considers loopholes and reduce rates. This would be in exchange for additional spending on public works projects to create jobs.

Republicans are demanding long-term spending cuts, with some insisting that any deal must jettison money to pay for Obama's health care law. The White House argues that the attention on cutting spending is misplaced because the combination of existing cuts, higher taxes on the rich and an improving economy has reduced the deficit.

Without the opportunity to cut a grand bargain on taxes and entitlement spending, however, there are fewer incentives to make a big deal on the debt ceiling and fewer opportunities to attract lawmakers who are reluctant to raise the politically unpopular debt in the first place.

"When we get back to Washington, when Congress gets back to Washington, this is going to be a major debate – it's the same debate we've been having for the last two years," Obama said in Binghamton, N.Y., on Friday. But now, he said, deficits are coming down and "what we should really be thinking about is how do we grow an economy so that we're creating a growing, thriving middle class, and we're creating more ladders of opportunity for people who are willing to work hard to get in the middle class."

The budget year ends Sept. 30 and Congress and Obama need to find a way to continue paying for government operations or force a shutdown.

The next crucial deadline is when the government hits its current debt limit, expected sometime in November. If the debt ceiling is not raised, that means the government would default.

The result would at least halt payments of military salaries, and Social Security, Medicare and unemployment benefits, among other government programs. At worst it would reverse the economic recovery. In 2011, Congress raised the debt ceiling just hours before a default would have kicked in. The close scrape prompted Standard & Poor's to downgrade the government's debt for the first time in 70 years, making borrowing more expensive.

White House officials have scheduled a meeting Thursday with the eight Republicans senators who have been consulting with Obama and his advisers on the budget. It will be the first time in four weeks that the senators and White House have met.

House Speaker John Boehner, in a teleconference with House Republican lawmakers Thursday night, proposed a short-term continuation of government operations at current spending levels, which include the automatic spending cuts that took effect in March but would not include cuts scheduled to kick in at the beginning of next year. The White House seems amenable to that idea as a stopgap measure.

But Boehner's suggestion is not a sealed deal. In a letter to Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor this week, more than a third of House Republicans called for cutting off money for the health care overhaul, even in a short-term spending measure. A small group of Republican senators, led by Ted Cruz of Texas, is pressing for the same thing.

Corker, for one, dismissed those demands. "Most people realize that that is sort of a fringe effort that is not going to be a central part of these discussions," he said.

Obama has insisted he will not negotiate on the debt ceiling. But the confluence of events this fall will make it hard to separate that deadline from a budget deal.

Corker said the "no negotiation" stance of the White House is merely rhetorical.

"Why are we talking right now?" he asked. "Deadlines help focus people's minds. We don't sit around talking about the deadlines. But let's face, it, the funding of government next year and the debt ceiling issue, of course that's what driving these conversations to take place."

© 2013 Associated Press

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/24/government-shutdown_n_3810148.html [with (over 4,000) comments]


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Obama won't negotiate on debt limit, Treasury Secretary Lew says

August 27, 2013
http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-debt-limit-lew-treasury-20130827,0,4354242.story [with comments]


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John Boehner Promises 'Whale Of A Fight' Over Debt Ceiling

08/27/2013
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) promised a "whale of a fight" over the debt ceiling Monday and said that he wanted cuts greater than the increase in the limit.
"I've made it clear that we're not going to increase the debt limit without cuts and reforms that are greater than the increase in the debt limit," he said at a Boise fundraiser for Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), according to the Idaho Statesman [ http://www.idahostatesman.com/2013/08/26/2726580/popkey-boehner-visits-boise-still.html ]. "The president doesn't think this is fair, thinks I'm being difficult to deal with. But I'll say this: It may be unfair but what I'm trying to do here is to leverage the political process to produce more change than what it would produce if left to its own devices. We're going to have a whale of a fight."
Said Boehner, "I wish I could tell you it was going to be pretty and polite, and it would all be finished a month before we'd ever get to the debt ceiling. Sorry, it just doesn't work that way."
His comments signal that he and House Republicans will fight to link spending cuts to the debt ceiling -- an approach that President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats have flatly rejected.
"Let me reiterate what our position is, and it is unequivocal," White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Monday. "We will not negotiate with Republicans in Congress over Congress' responsibility to pay the bills that Congress has racked up, period."
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/27/john-boehner-debt-ceiling_n_3822823.html [with embedded video report, and (approaching 10,000) comments]


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How Rubio, Cruz and Paul stand to win in the losing battle to defund Obamacare


Sen. Ted Cruz
(Mike Fuentes/Bloomberg)


Sen. Rand Paul
(Timothy D. Easley/AP)


Sen. Marco Rubio
(Brad McClenny/AP)

By Sean Sullivan, Published: August 27, 2013 at 4:20 pm

Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) are fighting a losing battle to defund Obamacare that is going nowhere fast on Capitol Hill.

And yet, they each stand to gain politically from the crusade that is doomed to failure in part because, well, it is doomed to failure.

Why? Because Rubio, Cruz and Paul get to champion a plan that looks attractive to many conservatives in theory but could be politically disastrous in practice.

The trio of senators and possible 2016 presidential candidates is supporting a pitch circulated by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) [ http://www.lee.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/dont-fund-it ] that calls on lawmakers to not support any continuing resolution or appropriations bills that devote even a cent to funding President Obama’s health-care law. The plan has gained very little traction in the GOP Conference, despite a series of campaign-style events in August designed to build support for it.

Still, it’s getting the job done for the principals involved. Politically, at least.

Cruz has quickly made it clear that he wants to be an uncompromising, pure conservative who doesn’t play ball with the establishment and doesn’t get outflanked on the right by anyone. This is right up his alley.

Bruised by his push to pass a comprehensive immigration bill, Rubio is looking to reinforce his standing [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/07/03/marco-rubios-next-fight-abortion/ ] among conservative activists. Joining the Obamacare fight is yet another way for him to do that, in addition to speaking out on an issue his allies insist he cares about a great deal.

Finally, Paul’s participation means he doesn’t get outflanked by either Rubio or Cruz on Obamacare. And the campaign-style effort behind the push (Paul, Lee and Cruz are headlining [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/08/26/paul-lee-cruz-to-headline-obamacare-defunding-rally/ ; http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/defund-obamacare-advocates-rally-95917.html ; http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform-implementation/318853-cruz-paul-to-headline-rally-against-obamacare ] a rally on Capitol Hill on Sept. 10) is a venue for all three to continue talking about their opposition to the law.

Of course, those potential political benefits must be weighed against the risks of the plan the senators are touting. The current continuing resolution to fund the government expires on Sept. 30. So, Congress must pass a new one to keep the government running starting Oct. 1.

If enough Republicans joined Lee and his supporters they could prevent Congress from passing a bill that included funding for Obamacare, which could lead to a government shutdown. And potentially triggering a government shutdown is a very politically perilous proposition that risks major backlash and blame directed at the GOP, and more specifically those in the party who are responsible for such an occurrence. Even among the most conservative elements of the party, a sense of buyer’s remorse could kick in if the backlash is strong enough.

But given that the plan has virtually no chance of passing, those concerns have been rendered more or less irrelevant to the discussion at hand. And that’s when a losing proposition begins to look like a winning hand, in at least some respects.

If, as expected, the Lee plan continues to go nowhere, what Rubio, Paul and Cruz can all basically say about their fight against Obamcare is, “Hey, we gave it our all on this crucial issue.” And that’s a powerful argument to make to the most conservative part of the electorate that already has deep distrust for the Republicans and Democrats who don’t support the push to defund Obamacare. It’s also a powerful argument to make a in GOP presidential primary in which candidates often jockey for the conservative high ground.

The reality is that Obamacare almost certainly won’t be defunded the way Paul, Cruz and Rubio want. But don’t automatically pencil them into the loser’s circle as a result.

© 2013 The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/08/27/how-rubio-cruz-and-paul-stand-to-win-in-the-losing-battle-to-defund-obamacare/ [with comments]


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Defund Obamacare supporters target top Republicans



Posted by CNN Political Editor Paul Steinhauser
August 27th, 2013 05:00 AM ET

Washington (CNN) - Conservatives backing a move to shut down the federal government if funding isn't cut off for President Barack Obama's health care law by the end of September are launching a tour starting Tuesday to put pressure on leading Republicans in Congress.

The first target of the push by Tea Party Patriots and ForAmerica is Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. The groups are planning a news conference in Lexington, Kentucky, Tuesday, near McConnell's offices. The Republican is running for a sixth term in the Senate next year.

The next day the Tea Party Patriots and ForAmerica will hold an event in Austin, Texas, near Sen. John Cornyn's office. The number two ranking Senate Republican is also up for re-election in 2014. Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia will also be in the groups' sights during the tour, which is scheduled to conclude September 4.

The new push by the two groups comes after an online ad campaign against McConnell and other GOP lawmakers, comparing them to "chickens" for opposing the Affordable Care Act but refusing to commit to defunding the law.

"Sadly, there are scores of hypocritical Republicans who have just been giving lip service to voters at home with no intention of living up to their promises in Washington. How can they tell their constituents that they are opposed to ObamaCare and then vote to have those same constituents pay for it?" wrote Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin and ForAmerica Chairman Brent Bozell in an op-ed in USA Today.

"No one has fought harder against Obamacare than Senator McConnell and he welcomes every voice in the fight to end this horrible law," McConnell re-election campaign communciations director Allison Moore told CNN.

Tuesday's event in Lexington comes as the Senate Conservatives Fund, a grassroots group which backs conservative causes and candidates, said it was going up with a 60-second radio commercial in Kentucky that urges McConnell to oppose funding the health care law, saying "Obamacare stinks and holding your nose won't make it any better."

The group says they'll run the ad for two weeks. Another conservative organization, the Madison Project, also said Tuesday that it was going up with a radio spot that claims McConnell "is undermining the conservative effort to defund ObamaCare."

Some conservative lawmakers, including Senators Ted Cruz of Texas, Marco Rubio of Florida and Mike Lee of Utah, are using upcoming budget battles as leverage, vowing to oppose any measure that provides funding for the federal government that includes funding for the health care law. The measure funding the federal government expires September 30, setting up another Capitol Hill budget battle between congressional Republicans and the White House.

But so far only slightly more than a dozen fellow Republican senators have signed up to support the cause, leaving it up to outside conservative groups to rally the base.

In an interview with CNN Chief Political Correspondent Candy Crowley that ran Sunday on "State of the Union," Cruz conceded that "we do not have the votes right now," noting that to succeed, he'd need 41 senators or 218 representatives to get behind his legislation - which would provide a year of funding for the federal government, minus Obamacare.

But the Texas Republican argued a coming "grass-roots tsunami" would bring over fellow conservatives to his side in the next month.

"I'm convinced there's a new paradigm in politics, that actually has Washington very uncomfortable. And it has politicians in both parties very uncomfortable," he said. "And that new paradigm is the rise of the grass roots, the ability of grass-roots activists to demand of their elected officials they do the right thing."

The new push by the Tea Party Patriots and ForAmerica comes as another conservative political advocacy group, Heritage Action for America, says it's spending more than half a million dollars to run online ads in the districts of 100 House Republican lawmakers who have not joined the drive to try to defund the healthcare law.

And Heritage Action, which is a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, one of the oldest and largest conservative think tanks, is a week into a nine-stop "Defund Obamacare Tour" of townhalls. Two progressive groups, Americans United for Change and Protect Your Care, have counter protested outside the events.

Americans appear divided on whether they want to repeal the law, which passed in 2010 along party lines when the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. In one of the most recent surveys on the law, conducted last month for CBS News, nearly four in ten called for the entire law to be repealed, with 18% saying that just the measure's controversial individual mandate should be repealed. Thirty-six percent of those questioned said that the law should be kept as is, or expanded.

CNN's Kevin Liptak contributed to this report

© 2013 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/08/27/defund-obamacare-supporters-target-top-republicans/ [with comments]


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Conservative group presses McConnell on health law

Conservative group to run radio ad challenging Senate GOP leader McConnell on health care law

Donna Cassata, Associated Press
August 27, 2013

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A conservative group is launching a radio ad challenging Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell to oppose any money for President Barack Obama's health care law even if it means triggering a government shutdown.

The Senate Conservatives Fund is spending nearly $50,000 on the 60-second commercial [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H9vQwoWjjI (next below)]

that will begin airing on Tuesday in Kentucky, where McConnell is locked in a tough race for a sixth term. The GOP leader faces both a primary rival, businessman Matt Bevin, and a Democratic foe, Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes.

"Republicans in Congress can stop Obamacare by refusing to fund it, but Senator Mitch McConnell refuses to lead the fight," says the ad which also makes a reference to a recent campaign embarrassment for McConnell.

"The Obamacare bill stinks, and holding your nose won't make it any better," the commercial says.

Earlier this month, audio of a Jan. 9 telephone conversation revealed that Jesse Benton, McConnell's campaign manager, said he was "holding my nose" while working for the candidate [see (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=90829503 and preceding and following]. Benton later said in a statement that he believes in McConnell and is 100 percent committed to his re-election.

The Associated Press obtained a text of the conservative group's ad in advance.

The Senate Conservatives Fund, which was founded by former South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint, is spending close to $200,000 on radio ads in six other states calling on GOP senators to refuse to fund the health care law. The group's targets are North Carolina's Richard Burr, South Carolina's Lindsey Graham, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Johnny Isakson of Georgia, Mississippi's Thad Cochran and Arizona's Jeff Flake.

The issue has divided Republicans, with House and Senate GOP leaders wary of the political impact of any government shutdown but tea party conservatives determined to undermine the health care law.

The federal 2013 fiscal year ends Sept. 30. New money must be appropriated by then to avoid a shutdown of countless government offices and agencies.

The radio ad comes as another conservative group, the Madison Project, launched a radio spot on Monday critical of McConnell, labeling him a "career Washington politician" who claims to be a conservative. The Madison Project is supporting Bevin's candidacy.

The Senate Conservatives Fund has not endorsed in the Kentucky GOP primary, but in a statement in July, executive director Matt Hoskins said the group was open to backing Bevin. Hoskins said McConnell could lose the Senate race and cost the GOP its shot at the Senate majority.

The group said it was "waiting to see if the grassroots in Kentucky unite" behind Bevin.

© 2013 Associated Press

http://news.yahoo.com/conservative-group-presses-mcconnell-health-105545042.html [with comments] [also at e.g. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/conservative-group-presses-mcconnell-health-law-20074362 (with comment)]


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Republicans turn on each other, invite national disaster


Justin Amash, John Boehner
(Credit: AP/Carlos Osorio/J. Scott Applewhite)

Awkward infighting on Obamacare pits the GOP realists vs. the fantasists. The result is desperate and catastrophic

By Brian Beutler
Tuesday, Aug 27, 2013 07:30 AM CDT

Anti-Obamacare dead-enders have reached the phase of their campaign to destroy the Affordable Care Act where they’re inviting mockery and derision from the very people they’re trying to convince.

The latest headline-grabber comes out of Ohio, where conservatives are organizing a protest outside of one of House Speaker John Boehner’s congressional offices where they’ll be chanting about “Boehnercare” — a new moniker intended to serve as a wakeup call to GOP congressional leaders: If you don’t adopt our self-defeating tactics, you’ll be as responsible for the ACA as Obama and the Democrats.

I interpret the news as a late act of desperation from a segment of the conservative base that’s running out of time and options. Though the entire movement is united behind the belief that Obamacare needs to be repealed, only part of it has accepted the obvious fact that the 2012 election put that goal nearly out of reach. The rest are holding on to a fantasy (a lucrative, publicity-rich fantasy) that Obamacare can be repealed or hobbled or at least delayed before its major benefits come into effect over the coming weeks.

And though their efforts this summer have been remarkably unsuccessful — I don’t think one GOP leader or party elder has publicly endorsed the defund-or-shutdown strategy — you can see the effect this has had on the party over just a few short weeks.

In that sense, this August’s congressional recess has been a case study in how minority parties react when faced with opponents they can’t defeat. Instead of uniting in common cause against the enemy, they turn on each other. With their backs against the wall, they aim fire to either side, instead of straight ahead. And there’s some new evidence that it’s taking a toll on the party at a national level.

Ruy Teixeira, a liberal political scientist and senior fellow at both the Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress, points [ http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/08/26/2524121/obamacare-counterproductive-republicans/ ] to evidence [ http://www.seiu.org/images/pdfs/a2cc07ca8baa3101d5_l6m6ivyzk.pdf ] that Republicans are either misleading themselves about the wisdom of their Obamacare obsession or are suffering from a collective action problem — that doing what makes political sense in each individual GOP congressional district adds up to a national disaster.

Obamacare remains unpopular, but not as unpopular as support for full repeal. If Republicans are focusing on top lines, they’re missing the fact that a big reason Obamacare is underwater is that many people want to strengthen it — not repeal it. In House GOP town halls and other conservative cocoons, the only thing more certain than death and taxes is that Obamacare must be repealed. Nationwide, this is electoral poison.

Our generic congressional trial heat shows a relatively narrow, three-point advantage for Democratic candidates (44%) over Republicans (41%) nationwide. However, when the choice in the 2014 election is presented as “a Democrat who favors fixing and improving Obamacare rather than repealing it altogether” versus “a Republican who wants to totally repeal Obamacare,” voters favor the Democratic candidate (51%) over the Republican candidate (36%) by 15 percentage points.

The parochial concerns of individual Republicans and the national party’s interest in a wider appeal run in opposite directions, and it’s hastening the GOP crackup like cold air on a broken windshield. The infighting has dominated national politics this August. It’s everywhere, public, and at times extraordinarily awkward. The Hill traced the battle lines neatly in an article [ http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/gop-primaries/318603-gop-infighting-over-obamacare-could-spill-over-into-2014-elections ] pitting powerful activists like the Senate Conservatives Fund and Heritage Action against the GOP members they’re targeting.

“This is about stopping the worst law that has ever been passed, something we believe will destroy the country, and not all Republicans are willing to stop it. We need to draw a line in the sand,” Senate Conservatives Fund executive director Matt Hoskins told the Hill. “Anyone who votes to fund ObamaCare should have a primary challenge — they’re part of the problem and they should be replaced.”

Compare to Rep. Renee Elmers, R-N.C., a target of these activists, whose campaign account tweeted [ https://twitter.com/Renee4Congress/status/370963512216276992 ] “Why is @Heritage_Action spending $550K to attack conservatives but not @KayHagan who was a deciding vote on #Obamacare?” on Friday.

Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., is a staunch conservative and one of the newest members of the Senate. He won’t face reelection again until 2018 and is thus politically insulated from anti-ACA pressure groups. He has a record of opposing continuing appropriations for the federal government — he voted against the one that has kept the government operating since March — but has been critical of the defund-or-shutdown ultimatum. And that’s heresy enough to convince activists to light their money on fire [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubnMQri1U0Y&list=UUXUNdquGHHMoBqdQLxTwa7g (next below, as embedded)].

Flake — unlike, say, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. — has a full six-year term ahead of him before these guys can seek real reprisals. On Monday evening, Flake proved that time is freedom and said [ https://twitter.com/JeffFlake/status/372105417775517696 ] what so many other Republicans really think of their new but well-heeled antagonists on the right.

Copyright © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc.

http://www.salon.com/2013/08/27/backs_against_the_wall_republicans_turn_on_each_other_over_obamacare/ [with comments]


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Whatever

Published on Aug 27, 2013 by senateconservatives [ http://www.youtube.com/user/senateconservatives ]

No description available.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwPeNcDfi4s


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Most Republican Voters Oppose The Republican Plan To Shut Down The Government

By Luke Johnson
Posted: 08/22/2013 1:39 pm EDT | Updated: 08/22/2013 4:48 pm EDT

A poll conducted for Republican members of Congress found that Republican voters oppose shutting down the government to defund President Barack Obama's health care law, the Washington Examiner reported Thursday [ http://washingtonexaminer.com/gop-poll-finds-strong-opposition-to-government-shutdown/article/2534580 ].

The poll, conducted by Republican pollster David Winston, found that 53 percent of Republican voters opposed shutting down the government to defund Obamacare, while 37 percent supported it. Among all registered voters surveyed, 71 percent opposed a shutdown while 23 percent supported it.

The poll is yet another sign of trouble [ http://www.nationaljournal.com/domesticpolicy/the-defund-obamacare-movement-falls-on-hard-times-20130818 ] for the tactic championed by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and other Republicans to try to force a showdown over Obamacare and the budget.

Numerous Senate Republicans, including Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), have pushed back against using the tactic.

A poll by Heritage Action for America, which favors the push to defund the law, asked a similar question but phrased it very differently. The poll found that almost 60 percent [ http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/government-shutdown-poll-95530.html ] of likely voters in 10 Republican-leaning districts would support a "slowdown" in nonessential services.

Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/22/government-shutdown-republicans_n_3796020.html [with (close to 4,000) comments]


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Majority Of Americans Oppose Defunding Obamacare: Poll

08/28/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/28/defunding-obamacare_n_3829779.html [with comments]


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Republicans swing at Braley for ‘batting for Obamacare’


The NRSC’s new walk cards, which GOP operatives will hand out at the Iowa State Fair.

by Jennifer Jacobs
5:43 AM, Aug 16, 2013

The majority of Iowans are unfamiliar with Democrat Bruce Braley, and Republican operatives hope voters will get to know their version of who the U.S. Senate candidate is.

Republicans will hand out faux baseball cards at the Iowa State Fair that say “Team: Obamacare,” and “Hometown: Washington, D.C.” and “Liberal members since: 2007.”

Seven billboards will spring up in Des Moines that accuse Braley, currently a congressman from Waterloo, of hurting Iowans by supporting Obamacare. The billboards also have a baseball theme, with four versions of a scoreboard [ http://imgur.com/a/wB2uR (the 'Iowa Farmers' one next below)]

that cite families, farmers, seniors and small businesses as the losers when it comes to the federal health care law.

And there’s a new website, WrongTeamBraley.com [ http://wrongteambraley.com/ ], which shows Braley wearing a baseball cap with the Obama campaign logo.

The “batting for Obamacare” effort is being paid for by the National Republican Senatorial Committee. It kicks off today, NRSC staff told The Des Moines Register.

Braley campaign aides have said he’s someone who fights to reduce health care costs for Iowa families.

“Those who would repeal Obamacare want to send Iowa back to the days when insurance companies could deny individuals coverage based on pre-existing medical conditions, when seniors on Medicare spent thousands of dollars out-of-pocket every year dealing with the donut hole gap in their prescription drug coverage, and when insurance companies weren’t required to cover routine screenings for illnesses like breast cancer,” Braley’s senior adviser Molly Scherrman said earlier this week when a new social welfare group organized by Republicans, Priorities for Iowa, launched in Iowa with criticism of Braley [ http://blogs.desmoinesregister.com/dmr/index.php/2013/08/14/new-republican-group-kicks-off-with-anti-braley-message/article ].

A Des Moines Register Iowa Poll in June [ http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20130609/NEWS09/306090032/Senate-seat-seekers-unfamiliar-many-voters ] found that 57 percent of Iowa adults are unfamiliar with Braley, who made a career as a successful trial lawyer and was first elected to Congress in 2006. Still, twice as many people view Braley favorably as unfavorably, according to the June 2-5 poll.

Braley is the lone Democrat running to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin. Several Republicans are fighting each other for the nomination, including David Young, Matt Whitaker, and Joni Ernst – all names that barely registered for Iowans in the June poll.

The election is in fall 2014.

Copyright © 2013 www.desmoinesregister.com

http://blogs.desmoinesregister.com/dmr/index.php/2013/08/16/republicans-swing-at-braley-for-batting-for-obamacare/article [with comments]


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Florida Insurers Are Now Free to Screw Consumers and Must, By Law, Blame Obamacare

By Wendell Potter [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wendell-potter/ ]
Posted: 08/20/2013 10:49 am

First do no harm. That's a tenet of medical ethics that future doctors worldwide are taught in medical school.

If only the people we elect to represent us were required to take such an oath when they're sworn into office.

Because they aren't, folks in Florida are facing having to pay far more for health insurance over the next two years than necessary. And health insurance executives will be laughing all the way to the bank.

Florida state lawmakers, in their ongoing efforts to block the implementation of Obamacare in the Sunshine State, recently passed a law that will allow health insurance companies to gouge Floridians more than any corporate boss dreamed was possible.

And if that weren't bad enough, insurers will actually be required by law to mislead their Florida customers about why they're hiking their premiums.

Republicans, who control the governor's office as well as both houses of the Florida legislature, were confident the U.S. Supreme Court would declare the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional. Not only did they vote to prohibit the state from spending money to implement a law they just knew would be overturned by the high court, they refused to accept money from the federal government that would have enabled the state's department of insurance to do a better job of regulating health insurers and enforcing new consumer protections in the law.

When the Supreme Court shocked Obamacare opponents last year by upholding the law, Florida lawmakers were in a pickle.

Their response? They passed a bill that prohibits the state's Office of Insurance Regulation from protecting consumers from unreasonable rate increases for two years.

I learned about what is essentially a "first, do as much harm as possible" bill in a letter the nine Democrats in the Florida congressional delegation sent to U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius earlier this month pleading with her to step in to protect Floridians by taking an active role in regulating rate increases in the state.

The lawmakers said intervention by HHS was urgently needed because of a law signed in May by Gov. Rick Scott that specifically prohibits Insurance Commissioner Kevin McCarty from doing his job of reviewing rate increases and rejecting those he and his staff determine are unjustifiably high.

Until the passage of SB 1842, McCarty had the power to do that. Florida state lawmakers who voted for the bill, including a few Democrats who seemed to think HHS has more authority than it does, took the position that since the federal government was requiring insurance companies to be more consumer friendly, the federal government should assume the responsibility of enforcing the new consumer protections in Obamacare. The problem is that Congress gave the federal government no such additional powers. As a consequence, HHS really can't take over what is still a state responsibility. And since Florida turned down the federal money that McCarty would have used to do his job, Floridians appear to be out of luck.

Last month, McCarty's office said insurance premiums for individuals in Florida would be significantly higher than they are now. In their letter to Sebelius, the state's congressional Democrats wrote that those increases are "not a coincidence, but rather the product of a cynical and intentional effort by Gov. Scott and the Florida legislature to undermine the Affordable Care Act and make health insurance premiums on the Florida Health Insurance Marketplace more expensive by refusing to allow the insurance commissioner to negotiate lower rates with companies or refuse rates that are too high."

As PolitiFact noted in a recent analysis [ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/aug/08/ted-deutch/florida-democrats-say-gov-rick-scott-and-legislatu/ ] of the charges made by the Democrats in their letter (which PolitiFact ruled are true), the states that have authority to approve or disapprove rates were "able to extract significant reductions." PolitiFact cited a Palm Beach Post story [ http://http//www.palmbeachpost.com/news/news/as-details-of-health-insurance-rates-emerge-2013-f/nY89N/ ] which noted that Maryland's insurance department had used its regulatory powers "to push rates for next year's premiums down by as much as a third."

As Florida CHAIN, a state advocacy group, pointed out when Scott signed SB 1842, the law not only blocks McCarty's office from protecting consumers, a provision in the law actually requires insurers to send deceptive and misleading notices about rate increases to consumers -- and to blame Obamacare for them.

"The only 'public education' of any sort authorized by the Legislature related to the ACA (Affordable Care Act) is a requirement ... that insurers send extremely biased and incomplete notices this fall about the ACA and its effect on policyholders' rates," Florida CHAIN said in a statement.

"The sole purpose of the requirement is to create 'sticker shock' that can be blamed on the ACA. There will be no mention of the many uncertainties or any other relevant factors, such as past rate increases or how actual rates will be reduced for many by the availability of premium tax credits (to low and middle income earners.)"

So not only will many Floridians be harmed by SB 1842, they will, by law, be misled about who caused the harm.

Maybe it's time to rethink the oath of office for people we vote to represent us.

Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wendell-potter/florida-insurers-are-now_b_3785206.html [with comments]


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Sequestration Cuts A $4 Million Hole Into Iconic Medical Research Institution
08/21/2013
With little evidence that Congress will be able to find a budget fix, officials at one of America's most iconic medical research centers are warning that cuts brought about by sequestration could dramatically set back decades-long work.
The Framingham Heart Study in Framingham, Mass. -- the longest running cardiovascular research project in the country -- saw a major funding stream slashed by $4 million this year after lawmakers couldn't agree on a sequester replacement. Some of the effects have already been felt. Last month, the organization announced that this fall it would let go 19 staffers out of a staff of about 90, in addition to eliminating certain ancillary studies.
But now, with a critical research period on the horizon, officials are worried that the project's basic mission could also be harmed.
"You're going to lose a major investment that we've been making over the last 65 years," said Dr. Karen Antman, dean of Boston University School of Medicine, which co-runs the Framingham Heart Study. "This is an iconic trial that has more than proven its value from a public health point of view ... It's made an enormous difference by identifying diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and other risk factors. We've really decreased deaths from cardiovascular disease. That human laboratory would be lost."
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/21/sequestration-cuts_n_3790647.html [with embedded video report, and comments]


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Nearly 20 Percent Of Scientists Contemplate Moving Overseas Due In Part To Sequestration

08/29/2013
New data compiled by a coalition of top scientific and medical research groups show that a large majority of scientists are receiving less federal help than they were three years ago, despite spending far more time writing grants in search of it. Nearly one-fifth of scientists are considering going overseas to continue their research because of the poor funding climate in America.
The study, which was spearheaded by [ http://www.asbmb.org/Advocacy/advocacy.aspx?id=22422 ] the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) and will be formally released next week, is the latest to highlight the extent to which years of stagnant or declining budgets, made worse by sequestration, have damaged the world of science.
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/29/sequestration-scientists_n_3825128.html [with the full report, "Unlimited Potential, Vanishing Opportunity", embedded scibd-style, and comments]


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Rick Perry Seeks Obamacare Funding For Texans
08/21/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/20/rick-perry-obamacare-funding_n_3787510.html [with embedded video report, and (nearly 6,000) comments]


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The right gets confused by its own lie

Right-wing groups claim Congress is exempted from Obamacare. But five months ago, they had a very different story
Aug 20, 2013
A good lie never dies, and so it is that we get Texas Sen. Ted Cruz telling [ http://www.lauraingraham.com/pg/jsp/charts/streamingAudioMaster.jsp?dispid=302&headerDest=L3BnL2pzcC9tZWRpYS9mbGFzaHdlbGNvbWUuanNwP3BpZD0xMzA0Nw== ] Mary Matalin, sitting in for Laura Ingraham, Monday: “I think it is disgraceful that President Obama, in just a lawless move, just exempted Congress [from Obamacare].”
“If Congress gets a pass on Obamacare, you should, too,” the conservative group Freedomworks [ http://www.salon.com/2013/08/02/the_worst_anti_obamacare_gambit_ever/ ], which has been leading the push to defund the health law, demands [ https://secure.freedomworks.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=999 ]. Then there’s John Cornyn [ http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/capitol-hill-obamacare-crisis-solved-95100.html ], the number two Senate Republican, along with the Wall Street Journal [ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324635904578644202946287548.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop ] editorial board and Fox News [ http://gretawire.foxnewsinsider.com/2013/08/02/well-congress-just-took-care-of-itself-just-exempted-themselves-from-obamacare-and-raced-out-the-door-for-a-5-week-vacation-nice-huh/ ], not to mention former senator and current Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint [ http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/08/06/2419741/jim-demint-young-people-will-be-hung-by-obamacare/ ], and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol [ http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/08/11/sunday-shows-push-myth-that-congress-is-exempt/195344 ], and all the rest. A Washington Times columnist even called it “treason [ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/aug/13/hurt-obamacare-exemption-none-dare-call-it-treason/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS ].”
Sadly, but not surprisingly, they’re all lying to you. Congress did not, and never has, “exempted” itself from Obamacare. Here’s the New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn [ http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114284/congress-exempt-obamacare-latest-lie-wont-die ], one of the smartest writers on health care policy anywhere:
As is often the case with these arguments, this one contains an element of truth. Obamacare really does treat congressional employees differently from other people. But that’s because of an amendment written by Senator Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican. The amendment—almost certainly a political stunt designed to embarrass the Democrats—created an ambiguity in the law that the Obama administration had to clarify. Last week the administration issued a ruling and, sure enough, it is getting political grief over it. But there’s no reason it should.
Grassley offered an amendment that would kick members of Congress and their staffers off the federal employee health plan and make them enroll in the new health insurance exchanges, which are mostly for individuals who don’t get employer coverage. If not for his amendment, their insurance scheme wouldn’t have changed at all. Republicans expected Democrats would vote it down, thus giving them an opening to attack the law, but Democrats called the bluff and passed the amendment.
But what wasn’t resolved, until last week, was whether members of Congress and their employees would still get the money the government had been contributing to their health insurance premiums as their employer. Last week, the administration ruled: They would get to keep the employer contribution. That’s it.
[...]
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/20/the_right_gets_confused_by_its_own_lie/ [with comments]


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Gingrich: Republicans to Blame for Lack of Obamacare Alternatives

August 21, 2013
http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/gingrich-republicans-to-blame-for-lack-of-obamacare-alternatives.html/ [ http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/gingrich-republicans-to-blame-for-lack-of-obamacare-alternatives.html/?a=viewall ] [with comments]


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A Republican conversion to Obamacare


Former Republican operative Clint Murphy of Savannah

By Jim Galloway
Posted: 9:00 a.m. Saturday, Aug. 17, 2013

One afternoon last week, though a thousand miles apart, Newt Gingrich in Boston and Clint Murphy in Savannah came to the same conclusion about Obamacare and the GOP.

Their verdict: This is not August 2010, when town hall meetings erupted in a pitchforked frenzy over the slim congressional margin that had handed Democrats their dream victory of near-universal health care coverage.

No longer, Gingrich and Murphy agree, is it acceptable to propose the elimination of Obamacare without offing something – an effective something — in its place.

As a former House speaker and 2012 presidential candidate, Gingrich offered the 35,000-foot view to members of the Republican National Committee at their summer session in Boston.

Ask members of Congress about “a positive replacement” for President Barack Obama’s health care makeover, Gingrich said. “They will have zero answer.”

“Because we are caught up right now in a culture, and you see it every single day, where as long as we’re negative, and as long as we’re vicious, and as long as we can tear down our opponent, we don’t have to learn anything. And so we don’t,” said Gingrich, who, it might be said, invented the all-or-nothing GOP.

But Clint Murphy’s take on Obamacare might matter more.

If Gingrich sits near the top of the Republican food chain, Murphy was one of those underpaid GOP soldiers who slogged through muddy grassroots in campaign after campaign.

U.S. Sen. Paul Coverdell’s patronage took Murphy to Washington in the 1990s. He volunteered in Casey Cagle’s successful effort to become lieutenant governor in 2006, took a paid position in John McCain’s 2008 presidential effort in Florida, and served as a salaried staffer during Karen Handel’s gubernatorial push in 2010.

And so Murphy’s Facebook post on Obamacare last week, addressed to his Republican friends, was something of a surprise: “When you say you’re against it, you’re saying that you don’t want people like me to have health insurance.”

There is nothing like a bout with testicular cancer to bring focus to your life, Murphy explained over the phone.

Murphy was an invincible 25-year-old working the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia when he was diagnosed. Four rounds of chemo later, all covered by insurance, the cancer was in remission by 2004. But the damage had been done. He was now a man with a medical record.

Political work is an on-again, off-again for many, as it was for Murphy. Some of that work offered insurance -- the McCain presidential campaign had an excellent plan, for instance.

But in his supplemental occupation, as a real estate agent, Murphy hit a roadblock. “That’s when I got into the pre-existing thing,” he said.

The year 2010 was a rough one. Murphy lost his mother to brain cancer. He left politics, weary of its meanness, and went full-time into real estate. After a decade of living cancer-free, he thought the insurance companies might lighten up. Instead, they found something else.

“I have sleep apnea. They treated sleep apnea as a pre-existing condition. I’m going right now with no insurance,” said Murphy, now 38.

When Georgia’s health insurance exchange opens in October, Murphy will sign up. “Absolutely,” he said.

Murphy would like to call himself a Republican, but has been too dismayed by his party’s cavalier attitude toward the health care debate. “We have people treating government like a Broadway play, like it’s some sort of entertainment,” he said. So call Murphy an independent.

Obamacare isn’t perfect, the former political spear-carrier said. “But to even improve it, to make something work, you’ve got to participate in the process. [Republicans] are not even participating in the process.” He pointed to his current occupation. “I work day in and day out to get two people together. If I can’t find a middle road, I don’t get paid.”

On a larger scale, Murphy wonders if Georgia’s refusal to engage on Obamacare – Gov. Nathan Deal has refused to accept federal dollars to expand Medicaid coverage – might soon have economic development implications. There will be Obamacare states and non-Obamacare states.

“How can you sustain two countries in one country?” he asked.

Murphy doesn’t have things fully sorted out yet. On one hand, he thinks repealing Obamacare will push people like him into bankruptcy, which could lead to welfare. “Increasing the cost of government,” he wryly concluded.

On the other hand, Murphy said he will be supporting Karen Handel for the U.S. Senate next year, come what may. He believes that much in her ability to find a practical path through the current health care swamp.

We called the Handel campaign, which informed us that the former secretary of state remains committed to “a full stop and defunding of Obamacare in its entirety now.” She has endorsed the effort by U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and others to shut down the federal government this fall if it doesn’t happen.

As for a replacement to Obamacare, Handel points to the proposal from U.S. Rep. Tom Price, R-Roswell, that would provide coverage through a series of tax credits and deductions that would act as incentives for individuals to purchase health care coverage.

Currently in its third iteration since 2009, Price’s “Empowering Patients First Act” has yet to receive a vote in the Republican-controlled House.

© 2013 Cox Media Group

http://www.ajc.com/weblogs/political-insider/2013/aug/17/two-changing-views-top-and-bottom-gop-health-care-/ [with comments]


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The right is wrong about rights

The conservative theory of freedom is short-sighted and confused. This helps explain why they oppose so much
Aug 27, 2013
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/27/the_right_is_wrong_about_rights/ [with comments]


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Louie Gohmert: GOP Lawmakers Meet Weekly To Plot Obamacare's Downfall

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) is a vocal proponent of repealing Obamacare.
08/23/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/22/louie-gohmert-obamacare_n_3795205.html [with embedded video report, and (over 14,000) comments]


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How Louie Gohmert Became The Face Of Egyptian Anti-Americanism

By Joshua Hersh
Posted: 08/26/2013 10:48 am EDT | Updated: 08/26/2013 5:04 pm EDT

CAIRO -- There was a curious detail in Monday's New York Times report on the recent surge of visceral [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/26/world/middleeast/as-egyptians-ignore-curfew-talk-of-a-us-brotherhood-conspiracy.html ] -- and often inconsistent -- anti-Americanism that that has swept through Egypt lately. It was a video clip, widely broadcast on Egyptian state television, and cited, the report said, with some regularity on the streets of Cairo, as evidence of America's history of undermining the Egyptian people by siding with the Muslim Brotherhood.

In the video [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqDRUxCeGsE (next below)],

recorded in March, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) lambastes the Obama administration from the floor of the House of Representatives for failing to sever its financial ties to an Egyptian government that, until a military takeover unseated it from power in early July, was run by the Islamist Brotherhood.

This administration, through Secretary Hillary Clinton, is going to announce they can care less what Congress had ordered about helping the enemies of Israel, about helping those who are terrorizing and persecuting christians in Egypt and destroying churches and eliminating freedom of religion.

There is some significant confusion here. The money Gohmert was talking about, of course, is indeed almost entirely military aid, which means it would never get near the civilian government of the Muslim Brotherhood. In fact much of it never makes it to Egypt at all [ http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/08/08/209878158/egypt-may-not-need-fighter-jets-but-u-s-keeps-sending-them-anyway ]. The vast majority is spent on American defense contractors, who supply parts and service to the American products -- like Abrams tanks or F-16 fighter jets -- that they give to Egypt's military.

Here in Egypt, the confusion about that aid is only magnified further. On the streets of Cairo, where angry pro-military citizens are often looking for an excuse to vent frustration at President Barack Obama's supposed support for the Brotherhood, the failure to cut off that aid package during the Brotherhood's rule is a convenient totem for America's betrayal of secular Egyptians. (The old saw that Obama is himself a Muslim, or has a family member in the Brotherhood itself, has also resurfaced in Egyptian media; Gohmert has been among the leading proponents [ http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/07/01/gop_hammers_obama_for_supporting_the_wrong_people_in_egypt ] of the unfounded notion that Obama has Muslim Brotherhood "advisers.")

But so far at least, Obama has also refused to cut off the aid despite the takeover by the military, which has been accompanied by a brutal crackdown on the opposition.

Meanwhile, the confusion of Gohmert's own proclamations continues. At a Tea Party town hall last week [ http://www.news-journal.com/news/local/gohmert-gop-afraid-to-block-obamacare/article_a5788e45-fe26-5191-928e-b378bae37399.html ], the congressman managed to both accuse Obama of failing to support the Egyptian military enough and fault him for not yet cutting the military aid.

He also announced that since videos of his March floor speech went viral in Egypt, he'd received a number of invitations to bring the rhetoric to Cairo.

“They want me to come over in a couple of weeks and speak to a big group there,” Gohmert said. “And if things work out, I will be in Egypt."

It would be a meeting of the minds.

Ryan Rainey contributed reporting.

Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/26/louie-gohmert-egypt_n_3816841.html [with embedded video report, and comments]


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Texans Louie Gohmert, Ted Poe, Steve Stockman make Congress’s ‘most quotable’ list

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

It doesn’t take much for a politician’s rants or ramblings to go viral in the age of YouTube and GIFs.

Ten lawmakers’ notable rhetoric stands above the rest, earning them the title of Congress’s most quotable [ http://blogs.rollcall.com/goppers/10-most-quotable-members-of-congress/ ] by Roll Call this week.

Three Texans made the list, with Rep. Louie Gohmert, the outspoken Republican from Tyler, landing at the top.

The quotability of Reps. Steve Stockman, R- Friendswood, and Ted Poe, R-Humble, scored eighth and tenth, respectively.

Also on the list is Iowa Republican Steve King, who stirred a media frenzy for his now-infamous comment [ http://blog.chron.com/txpotomac/2013/07/rep-steve-king-earns-bipartisan-condemnation-for-saying-there-are-100-drug-dealers-for-every-dreamer-success-story/ ] about children of immigrant families who have “calves the size of cantaloupes” from hauling drug across the border.

Seven out of the 10 members are Republicans, and all are from the South or Midwest.

Gohmert’s affinity for attention earned him the No. 1 spot, Roll Call’s Matt Fuller wrote.

To avid C-SPAN watchers, the Texas Republican (and staunch Obama critic) is known for his regular floor appearances, when he warns about everything from marijuana dealers using stolen potato chips to a Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of the U.S. government.

Roll Call’s favorite Stockman quotes were also featured in New York Magazine earlier this year, which dubbed Stockman “Congress’s Most Underappreciated Tweeter [ http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/03/steve-stockman-twitter-texas-congressman.html ].”

One tweet – “If babies had guns, they wouldn’t be aborted” – has already been turned into a campaign bumper sticker [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/12/steve-stockman-bumper-sticker_n_3070199.html ].

And Poe earned a shout-out for his famous ending to his speeches: “And that’s just the way it is.”

http://blog.chron.com/txpotomac/2013/08/texans-louie-gohmert-ted-poe-steve-stockman-make-congresss-most-quotable-list/ [with comment]


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Former Polk GOP co-chairman says party has moved too far to the right

by Kathie Obradovich
12:02 PM, Aug 20, 2013

The co-chairman of the Polk County Republican Party has resigned and changed his party registration to independent, saying the GOP has become too conservative and is condoning “hateful” rhetoric.

Chad Brown, 34, of Ankeny, had been party co-chairman since March. He said he resigned his position on Aug. 5. His resignation letter is below.

Brown said in a phone interview that he became disgusted by a party he believes is being run by the Christian right and the National Rifle Association. He cited Congressman Steve King’s recent, controversial comments on illegal immigrants as an example of his philosophical conflict with the party.

“No one’s really stood out to really fight him on those. I think they’re hateful statements,” he said. King made national news with his comment that illegal immigrants were more likely to be drug traffickers “with calves the size of cantaloupes” than valedictorians.

Brown said he also believes the party “has declared war on science and common sense,” by denying global climate change. He said he also was offended by statements from some party leaders that he felt glorified gun violence.

Beyond the philosophical differences, Brown cited concerns about others in county party leadership and management decisions.

Will Rogers, chairman of the Polk County GOP, declined to comment publicly on Brown’s resignation.

Here’s Brown’s resignation letter the party executive committee.

Dear Polk GOP Executive Committee Member,

I am writing to inform you that I changed my voter registration to Independent today – severing all ties to the Republican Party. Having been a Republican all my life, I did not take this decision lightly.

Having spoken with a pastor and having prayed about this for hours, I came to the conclusion that this is my only recourse. I’m disappointed with the Republican Party at the National level. I’m disappointed with the Republican Party at the Statewide level. I’m disappointed with the Republican Party at the Countywide level. I find it increasingly difficult to defend issues and statements made by Party leaders and officials from all three levels.

I decided to get back in this arena following the “contentious” 2012 Polk County GOP Convention. I was upset by what happened at the conventions, and I entered into the arena with the intent to help fix the problems. However, I think this level of dysfunction is not going to be fixed any time soon.

I donated time and financial resources to the Polk GOP and haven’t had a good return on my investment. In the 2000 Presidential Election, the Polk GOP lost Polk County by about 16,000 votes. In fall of 2000, the Polk GOP had no headquarters. The Polk GOP had no paid staff. The Polk GOP didn’t even have a working telephone number. Fundraising was minimal.

In 2012, the Polk GOP lost Polk County by over 32,000 votes. Until 2002, Republicans were elected to the State House from Des Moines. In 2012, Republicans lost 2 State House seats in suburban, Republican-leaning districts and came two dozen votes from losing a third. Facts are stubborn things. I think we are now headed in the wrong direction on several fronts and regretfully must step aside.

It’s my opinion that rather than fix the problems that led to such a massive 2012 defeat, the GOP does not seem to seriously want to fix the issues. I think helping a dysfunctional Party that does not want to address its problems is enabling. I do not believe in enabling. I debated this for weeks and am certain this is the only course.

I wish you the best of luck,

Chad Brown

Copyright © 2013 www.desmoinesregister.com

http://blogs.desmoinesregister.com/dmr/index.php/2013/08/20/former-polk-gop-co-chairman-says-party-has-moved-too-far-to-the-right/article [with comments]


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Scott DesJarlais, GOP Congressman, Tells 11-Year-Old Girl Her Father Should Be Deported
08/19/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/19/scott-desjarlais-father-deported_n_3780107.html [with embedded video report, and (over 6,000) comments]


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Louie Gohmert Basks In The Glow Of 'Most Quotable' Honor

08/20/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/20/louie-gohmert_n_3785473.html [with comments]


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How Texas Republicans Are Preparing America for the Apocalypse

By Elford Alley
Posted: 08/21/2013 1:28 pm

It seems more and more Americans are starting to disapprove [ http://www.pollingreport.com/cong_rep.htm ] of the way Republicans are legislating. But that's just because they don't know what Republican lawmakers know: The end is near, people. They know that western civilization has had a good run, but that the party has to end sometime. So, instead of allowing their constituents to live in a bubble of quality education and ample healthcare, they've decided to do the noble thing and prepare us for the nuclear fall-out infused hellscape to come! In Texas, with a Republican dominated state government, they can finally show us the way:

Dumbing down education. For the children.

The first step in preparing our children for the end of days is education. Specifically, getting them ready for a total lack of it. You need to learn survival, and you won't get that through cushy jobs provided by a quality education. Quick! Name five ways to turn a three-day-old dog corpse into a delicious snack. Ha. Bet you couldn't list more than two. That's why Republicans cut over $5 billion [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/09/us/for-texas-schools-a-year-of-doing-without.html?pagewanted=all ] in funding from Texas' public schools. So, with thousands of teachers laid off, a ranking of 43rd in high school graduation rates, 45th in SAT rates, and with 1 out of 4 children living in poverty, Texas will soon have an entire generation ready to battle the race of deformed mutants sure to overtake our cities after the smoke clears.

Poisoning the water supply. A thank-you would be nice.

When the entire nation is glowing that sweet, green glow of nuclear annihilation, Texans everywhere will be chuckling to themselves. See, they will have weathered the debilitating birth defects and throbbing brain tumors of poisoned water for generations. Lawmakers in Texas have approved a landfill to be stuffed with nuclear waste in West Texas, which scientists warn could poison [ http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/27/us-usa-energy-texas-dump-idUSBRE83Q11W20120427 ] the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides water statewide. To further prepare Americans for the end of days, Texas has embraced fracking [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LBjSXWQRV8 (next below)].

The process uses and poisons so much water that over 30 towns [ http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/aug/11/texas-tragedy-ample-oil-no-water (first item at/see {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=90898314 and preceding and following)] may lose their entire water supply this year. Getting accustomed to water free of feces and untainted by the tangy richness of nuclear waste sounds good on paper, but when western civilization finally crumbles and your stomach can't digest radiation-laced Dasani, you'll be in for a wake up call.

Keeping 'em uninsured, the way Mortok intended.

I've heard it a million times. Liberals whining about how Texas has the highest rate [ http://www.gallup.com/poll/161153/texas-uninsured-rate-moves-further-away-states.aspx ] of uninsured in the nation, with nearly 63 percent of those who uninsured living in poverty. So, when the Federal government offered Texas billions [ http://www.npr.org/2013/05/23/186303141/health-officials-decry-texas-snubbing-of-medicaid-billions ] to insure 1.5 million impoverished Texans, Republicans did the only honorable thing: They refused it. Come on people, do you think insurance is going to help you when radioactive spiders are burrowing into your cerebrum? No. You'll have to sacrifice a goat to Mortok the Almighty Child of the Sun like everyone else, you entitled mooch.

Keeping women in the home, and away from doctors. Because they care.

Texas Republicans know as well as anyone that once the thin veneer of civilized society is shattered we'll revert back to a simpler way of life. Much like the days of the Old Testament, when God spoke to man and women were property to be traded, valued somewhere between a mule and really, really nice mule. So, why get women used to fancy things like contraceptives or surviving childbirth? It's not fair. Not to them, or the hideous, multi-armed offspring they're sure to give birth to. That why in their zealous efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, Texas Republicans ended up crippling the Texas Women's Health Program [ http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2013/July/31/Texas-reproductive-services.aspx ], denying over 130,000 Texas women access to the most basic healthcare [ http://abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/News/texas-abortion-ban-limits-abortions/story?id=19543757 ]. So, while women elsewhere are complaining about lack of hospitals due to the end times, you ladies will be sitting pretty. Or dead. Probably dead.

Screw regulations. You're welcome.

Hey, remember on April 17, 2013 when that fertilizer plant in West, Texas exploded, killing 14 people? Of course you do. And remember how right after that the Republicans in Texas started examining regulations to find out how this was allowed to happen and prevent future tragedies? No? That's because it didn't happen. Instead, Texas focused on regulating vaginas [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/07/west-texas-aftermath-regulation-laws ]. Regulations are all well and good...sometimes. Sure, most people wouldn't place a fertilizer plant that holds explosive materials across the street [ http://www.scribd.com/doc/136745813/Location-of-West-Texas-plant-explosion ] from a middle school and a hospital, but do you think anyone will be regulating anything the Age of Fire and Blood? When Mortok reigns over the ashes of our civilizations, we won't have time for regulations. After all, virgins aren't going to disembowel themselves on an altar of skulls.

So, cut 'em some slack, America! Because when Mortok one day rules from a throne of gore, you'll remember that Republican lawmakers did everything they could to prepare you.

Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elford-alley/how-texas-republicans-are_b_3783038.html [with comments]


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Gohmert: Obama Stirring up 'Racial Tension and Violence'

Published on Aug 13, 2013 by RWW Blog

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/gohmert-obama-stirring-racial-tension-and-violence

Rep. Louie Gohmert accuses President Obama of intensifying racial violence and discord.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqJ38yA5tPg


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Paul LePage Says Obama 'Hates White People,' GOP Lawmakers Report


Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) speaks to reporters shortly after the Maine House and Senate both voted to override his veto of the state budget on June 26.
(AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)

By Amanda Terkel
Posted: 08/19/2013 9:53 pm EDT | Updated: 08/20/2013 11:47 am EDT

Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) told a group of Republicans last week that President Barack Obama "hates white people [ http://www.pressherald.com/politics/LePage-is-heard-to-say-Obama-hates-white-people.html ]," according to two state GOP lawmakers who said they were in the room and heard the remark.

According to the Portland Press Herald, which first reported the comment, LePage made the claim at a Maine Republican Party fundraiser on Aug. 12 at a private home. The new state GOP chairman, Rick Bennett, was also at the event.

“Yeah, he said it,” one Republican lawmaker told the Press Herald, requesting anonymity out of fear of retribution. “It was one little thing from a speech, but I think most people there thought it was totally inappropriate.”

In 2010, LePage remarked at a GOP forum that he wouldn't be afraid to tell Obama to "go to hell [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/29/paul-lepage-obama-go-to-hell_n_743532.html ]." He later stood by his criticisms of the president, but said he regretted his choice of words.

In 2011, LePage declined to attend an NAACP event, saying the group could "kiss my butt [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/14/paul-lepage-naacp-kiss-my-butt-video_n_809234.html ]" if it didn't like his decision.

LePage's senior political adviser would not comment to the Press Herald [ http://www.pressherald.com/politics/LePage-is-heard-to-say-Obama-hates-white-people.html ], and Bennett did not return the paper's calls.

This month, LePage also joked -- while in a fighter jet simulator -- that he wanted to find the office of the Press Herald and "blow it up [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/09/paul-lepage-portland-press-herald_n_3733653.html ]."

Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/19/paul-lepage-obama_n_3782531.html [with embedded video report, and comments]


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University Of Texas Investigates Another Possible 'Bleach Bomb' Attack Against Minority Student
08/27/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/26/university-of-texas-bleach-bomb-bryan-davis_n_3818280.html [with embedded video report, and comments]


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Ohio Student Says Racist Campus Postings A 'Joke'
08/25/13
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/25/ohio-student-racist_n_3814732.html [with embedded video report, and comments]


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Local GOP withdraws support for mayoral candidate James Knox


James Lee Knox
[ http://www.news-record.com/news/local_news/article_784e5474-098c-11e3-88d3-001a4bcf6878.html ]

By Wesley Young/Winston-Salem Journal
Posted: Monday, August 19, 2013 6:01 pm | Updated: 5:38 pm, Tue Aug 20, 2013

The Forsyth County Republican Party has withdrawn its support from mayoral candidate James Lee Knox because of Facebook comments Knox has made and an episode in which he used a racial epithet to describe a black county elections worker.

The executive committee of the local GOP voted on Thursday to pull its support for Knox – an action that means Knox will stay on the ballot, but won’t be able to draw on party support in November.

“A person who talks like that and is crude in that fashion just doesn’t represent who we are as a party, and we can’t endorse someone like that,” said Scott Cumbie, chairman of the Forsyth County Republican Party.

Knox acknowledged that he used the racial slur after the 2012 election. Knox said he was trying to find out the name of a black elections employee with whom he had exchanged words during early voting.

Knox said he was repeatedly thwarted by county employees when he tried to find out the woman’s name, and during a conversation with another county worker, Knox referred to the woman using several derogatory terms, including the n-word.

Knox said he doesn’t believe in using such words, but that he “got frustrated and said I wanted the woman’s name.”

In addition to that incident, Knox has three misdemeanor convictions on his record, the latest in 2007, and those incidents also were mentioned on Thursday by Knox’s opposition.

On Monday, Knox said he was planning to appeal the local GOP’s decision to the state level. Later in the day, David Singletary, Knox’s campaign manager, said that the state GOP was not going to get involved in the case.

Singletary said that Knox was accused Thursday of posting derogatory comments on his Facebook page.

Singletary said he did advise Knox to change his Facebook settings so that only friends can view all his posts. He said he examining Knox’s Facebook posts, but has not had a chance to go through them in detail.

Knox said that the kinds of Facebook comments that he was criticized for were “comments that Republicans make.

“I would make comments about (President) Obama,” Knox said. “They were comments that most Republicans should agree with.”

Knox accused GOP leaders of using the Facebook comments and other complaints as an excuse to give Winston-Salem Mayor Allen Joines – a Democrat – no opposition from the Republicans. According to Knox, the idea was that the GOP stood a better chance of picking up seats on the city council if it did not oppose Joines.

Cumbie called that allegation groundless:

“We interviewed a dozen candidates for mayor, people we thought would be excellent mayors, and none of them were able to run,” Cumbie said. “Some were appointed (to posts by Gov. Pat) McCrory, some had business reasons and some had personal reasons. We actively recruited for almost a year.”

Cumbie said that Knox was given a chance to speak during the meeting that ended party support for his bid.

Cumbie said the executive committee vote was unanimous, but Knox said it wasn’t.

“It was not unanimous,” Knox said. “Four or five people spoke up. (Cumbie) is a liar. I had people come up to me afterward and say it was stupid that it happened. One guy talked with me in the parking lot for 15 minutes and told me he didn’t agree with this and that I had been screwed over. I was stunned that I was stabbed in the back.”

Singletary, who was at the meeting, said that everything happened quickly and that the vote was over before he had a chance to vote against the withdrawal of support from Knox.

Knox said he felt that party leaders were “looking for something to find to bully me out of the race.”

Cumbie said the party’s decision means Knox is “absolutely on his own” as he runs for mayor.

“We won’t be supporting him. We won’t be working against him,” Cumbie said. “He won’t be able to use our headquarters or materials.”

© 2013 World Media Enterprises Inc.

http://www.journalnow.com/news/local/article_ec669e60-091a-11e3-8d89-001a4bcf6878.html [with comments]


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Knox ends his campaign for mayor

By Wesley Young/Winston-Salem Journal
Posted: Tuesday, August 20, 2013 5:33 pm | Updated: 9:43 am, Fri Aug 23, 2013

Republican candidate James Lee Knox ended his campaign for mayor of Winston-Salem on Tuesday, saying that the decision of the county GOP to pull support from his campaign makes his task impossible.

Knox said that GOP leaders were endorsing a “smear campaign” against him, but that he would continue to support the party.

Last Thursday, GOP leaders met and voted not to support Knox’s campaign.

Complaints were made about the tone of postings by Knox on Facebook, and over Knox’s use of a racial epithet this year to describe a black county elections worker with whom he had argued in 2012.

Knox used the n-word to describe the woman during a conversation with another county worker.

Knox acknowledged using the term, said Tuesday that it was a mistake and that he’s not a racist.

David Singletary, Knox’s campaign manager, said that Knox will be filing the paperwork he needs to in order to formally end his candidacy with the Forsyth County Board of Elections.

Singletary said that Knox didn’t want to put his family through what he saw as a conflict with GOP leaders that could only escalate.

In his statement, Knox described his conflict with GOP leaders as a family dispute. He said he and others in the party would “find a way to get past this,” and that they would keep making it possible for anyone to run for office “and sometimes even win.”

Knox’s departure from the campaign means that the winner of the Democratic primary battle between incumbent Mayor Allen Joines and Gardenia Henley, his challenger, will go on to the November general election without opposition.

Scott Cumbie, chairman of the Forsyth County GOP, said that he felt “grateful” about Knox’s announcement.

"We think he made the right decision,” Knox said. “I do agree this is a family issue and I regret that it made it into the press the way it did. This is about the mayoral race and not Mr. Knox.”

© 2013 World Media Enterprises Inc.

http://www.journalnow.com/news/elections/local/article_1cfa3fb2-09e0-11e3-88f4-001a4bcf6878.html [with comments]


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Wild Wing Cafe [Charleston, S.C.] Kicks Out 25 African Americans After White Customer Felt 'Threatened': Report
08/26/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/25/wild-wing-cafe_n_3814099.html [with embedded videos, and (over 10,000) comments]


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Neo-Nazi Seeks To Turn Depressed North Dakota Town Into His Very Own Commune Of Racism And Hate



By Nick Wing
Posted: 08/23/2013 12:14 pm EDT | Updated: 08/23/2013 12:16 pm EDT

A white supremacist whose incendiary displays have gained him notoriety in the neo-Nazi movement is working to establish an all-white enclave in the small North Dakota town of Leith.

Paul Craig Cobb, who is wanted in Canada for hate speech, has been snatching up abandoned property in the threadbare town since April 2012, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported [ http://splcenter.org/blog/2013/08/22/white-supremacists-making-bid-to-take-over-north-dakota-town/ ] earlier this week. He's doing so with the intention of drawing other white supremacists to the town. Cobb has made the pitch to other likeminded extremists, and according to the SPLC, some have already taken up his offer.

Cobb's plan to create his very own "Cobbsville" in Leith has taken members of the tiny town of 19 by surprise.

“I didn’t have a clue who the guy was until he showed up. All I know is he bought that house sight unseen, $5,000 cash, and had no idea what it looked like, where it was, other than he knew the directions to get to Leith,” Leith Mayor Ryan Schock told the SPLC.

According to the Toronto Star [ http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/08/22/white_supremacist_wanted_by_rcmp_surfaces_in_us_town.html ], Cobb fled Canada in 2010 after being charged with "willful promotion of hatred — inciting hatred against an identifiable group." He'd previously built his profile in the U.S. with a series of inflammatory disruptions that he'd recorded for Vanguard News Network, a white nationalist website. In October 2005, Cobb appeared at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, where people were gathered to pay their respects to civil rights leader Rosa Parks, who was lying in state. Cobb reportedly confronted visitors [ http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2009/summer/behind-the-gunfire ], referring to Parks as a "shitskin communist" and declaring that he was there to "celebrate" her death.

After fleeing Canada, Cobb had been largely off the grid, posting only a few videos to his YouTube channel [ http://www.youtube.com/user/CraigCobbDeprogram? ]. He's moved quickly into Leith, however, purchasing 13 properties, the Bismarck Tribune reported [ http://bismarcktribune.com/news/local/mayor-everybody-s-wound-up-over-plans-for-white-supremacist/article_76da4e36-0ab3-11e3-bc53-0019bb2963f4.html ]. Those transactions caught the attention of the community. Leith's only mixed-race couple told the Tribune that the development was concerning, but that they had confidence Cobb's plans would collapse.

Grant County Sheriff Steve Bay is reportedly aware of Cobb's intentions. He pointed out that Cobb has kept a relatively low profile since moving in and hasn't broken any laws, but maintained that he is keeping a close eye on the situation.

Raw Story pointed out [ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/22/neo-nazi-plans-to-build-an-all-white-city-of-racists-in-north-dakota/ ] a post made by Cobb on a Vanguard News Network forum in which he laid out some simple ground rules for Cobbsville. Members of the community would be expected to fly “racialist banners” 24 hours a day, recruit "responsible radical hard core" white nationalists, and become residents of North Dakota so they could vote. Cobb also attempted to lure members with the potential of "music festivals."

Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/23/paul-craig-cobb-north-dakota_n_3804562.html [with comments]


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Detailed Map Shows Race, Segregation Across America
08/27/13
The United States of America:

Detroit's 8 Mile Road:

New York City:

Salt Lake City:

Los Angeles:

Chicago:

Washington D.C.:

The United States East Coast:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/27/map-segregation-america-race_n_3824693.html [with comments]


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The politics of being friends with white people


(Credit: Blend Images via Shutterstock/kati1313 via iStock/Salon)

My best friend at 9 was white -- but interracial friendships later became a struggle. Here's why everything changed

By Brittney Cooper
Tuesday, Aug 13, 2013 06:45 AM CDT

A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, which found that 40 percent of white people and 25 percent of nonwhite people have no friends of the opposite race [ http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/08/us-usa-poll-race-idUSBRE97704320130808 ], caused me to reflect deeply on the friendship segregation that has characterized my own life.

These days most of my close friends are black. No. Let me be honest. All my close friends are black. One of my BFFs likes to joke that all of my white friends were grandfathered in before 1998, the year I graduated high school.

In third grade, during the Presidential election of 1988, my grandmother asked me whom I was voting for. To her utter dismay, I proudly announced “Bush!” unsuspectingly mimicking the overwhelming choice that my young classmates had made during the class “election.” She looked at me, shook her head forcefully and said, “Naw, Girl! Dukakis!” It would be many years before I understood that the difference in political orientations was just one of the many substantive differences between me and my classmates.

I had only begun to have white friends the year prior when I found myself newly “tracked” into the higher-achieving second grade class based on superior reading ability. Scattered into a predominantly white classroom among only a handful of black students left me desperately wanting to culturally fit in and sound like my peers, especially since the vast majority of black children I knew stayed concentrated in the “B” and “C” tracks. My awkward attempts to fit in resulted in me being teased mercilessly by my black peers, who from then on through the better part of high school both accused and found me guilty of “talking too proper,” “acting white” and, perhaps most egregious of all, “thinking I was white.”

I was grateful for the friendship of a white girl in my class, Amanda. I’m not sure why we were drawn to each other, but more and more, we became each other’s primary playmates during recess. By fourth grade, Amanda and I were joined at the hip, so much so that our teacher, a Black lady named Mrs. Gaulden, still my all-time favorite teacher, called us Ebony and Ivory after the famous song. Amanda directed the classroom production of “Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” starring yours truly as Rosa Parks.

It was Amanda with whom I had my first deep philosophical conversations. In fifth grade, I asked her what she thought about interracial marriage, probably after meeting a kid who had both black and white parents. She told me, “My daddy says people should marry their own kind.” Having never heard it put quite that way before, I simply nodded my head. It sort of made sense. Even I knew that my friendship with Amanda was an anomaly.

Still, it was Amanda with whom I shared most early adolescent memories. I called her when I got my period. It is she who saved me from being mercilessly teased by letting me know that even though all of us had read Judy Blume’s “Deenie,” we should never say the word “masturbation” out loud. Gross! It is she who put up with my obsession with the “Baby Sitters Club” series even though if I remember correctly she preferred “Sweet Valley Twins.” And there is a picture somewhere of Amanda and me dancing to Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” at our first junior high dance.

By the end of junior high school, as adolescent friendships go, Amanda and I had drifted apart, but in an amicable sort of way. We couldn’t giggle about the same kinds of boys since our tastes fell along racial lines, couldn’t trade makeup or hair products, or move through each other’s social circles with ease any longer, because increasingly these things were defined by race. So I decided that I needed black girls for friends, girls who liked the boys I liked, who went to churches sort of like mine, where we didn’t have “youth group” but youth either joined the choir or the usher board, girls whose cultural experiences were and would be closer to my own.

Maintaining integrated friendships past a certain age is more struggle than triumph.

My peer groups in high school did remain mostly white, but with increasing difficulty. I found myself ostracized on the one hand by black classmates who still thought I wanted to be white, and increasingly the target of disdain from my white counterparts, who liked me all right – mostly because as more than one told me, “you aren’t like other black people” — as long as I did not outperform them academically.

My stint on a multiracial, close-knit debate team offered some reprieve, and is the source of my most enduring friendships with white people. But I think now about what it meant that the policy positions I advocated for in debate rounds, often in tandem with my mostly white and Asian teammates, were antithetical to a progressive race politics. For instance, my Taiwanese debate partner and I won our first debate state championship in 1995, advocating for the passage of Proposition 187 in California, a proposal that would have barred undocumented immigrants from receiving education and emergency medical care. My teammates also had a love affair with Ayn Rand’s objectivism. Had I been more cognizant and more confident, I would’ve thought about what it meant for people of color to win rounds advocating for those kinds of positions. What I took to be merely an academic exercise at the time came to be a kind of deep political and ideological training for many of my white counterparts.

I increasingly cultivated a certain degree of resolve to deal with classmates whose racial views evolved to reflect those of their parents with a disturbing degree of similarity. I remained friends (some to this day) with classmates who asked to touch my hair and then remarked with shock and surprise that it was “soft and didn’t feel like a brillo pad”; classmates who inquired about whether black people could see better in the dark, and even one who told me that “black people do drive down our property values,” when they move into the neighborhood.

Back then, folks who made these asinine remarks got a withering side eye from me, but their casual, everyday racism was not a deal-breaker for our friendships.

When I went off to college (a historically black institution), this changed. I made my first close black friendships. Those four years at Howard are actually the outlier in an educational background populated by predominantly white learning institutions. And yet, since leaving high school, I have not had many nor actively sought opportunities to make friends with white people.

When you are 9, or 12, or 17, it is easy to overlook racist comments. That your friends’ dad does not like black people has little to do with what your friend thinks, right? When you cannot yet vote, the fact that your friends’ parents are Republicans means little. With age, these things start to matter. At 25 or 32, it is harder to overlook the inevitable racially ignorant comment that will come, especially when you have had access to friendships where this is never an issue. At 30 or 35, the fact that your white friends now vote Republican alongside their parents strikes you as a choice that detrimentally impacts your material existence.

It is hard to stomach.

Several years ago, I had the opportunity to attend the wedding reception of two of my old debate teammates, who were getting married. I went with another teammate, also black. When we arrived, we were shocked to discover that among a gathering of probably 75 people, we were the couple’s only black friends. And it had been years since we had spoken to them.

This is why the Reuters poll is unsurprising. I have always been skeptical of white people who claim that “one of my best friends is black.” Internally my response has always been, “They may be your friend, but are you their friend?”

I believe deeply in the power of friendship to make us better human beings. But interracial friendships, especially in adulthood, require a level of risk and vulnerability that many of us would rather simply not deal with. And that is perhaps one of racism’s biggest casualties: Beyond the level of systemic havoc that racism wreaks on the material lives of people of color, in a million and one ways every day, it reduces the opportunity of all people to be more human.

Copyright © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc. (emphasis in original)

http://www.salon.com/2013/08/13/the_politics_of_being_friends_with_white_people/ [with comments]


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Shaffer Chapel, Which Opposed KKK In Muncie, Indiana, Now Needs Financial Help

Posted: 08/29/2013 12:27 pm EDT | Updated: 08/29/2013 12:29 pm EDT

On August 7, 1930, two black teenagers, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith [ http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129025516 ], were kidnapped from the Marion City, Ind. Jail by an angry mob and hanged from a tree on the Courthouse lawn. They had been charged with armed robbery, murder, and rape of a white factory worker and his companion.

It was the last lynching ever to happen north of the Mason-Dixon line, and the iconic photo [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ThomasShippAbramSmith.jpg , via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_of_Thomas_Shipp_and_Abram_Smith (next below)]]

taken of the two young men hanging from the tree inspired Billie Holiday's haunting song, "Strange Fruit [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ZyuULy9zs (next below)]."

The story didn't end there, however. Despite the furious crowd surrounding the swinging bodies, members of Shaffer Chapel in Muncie, Indiana [ http://www.in.gov/history/markers/79.htm ], braved the mob in order to retrieve the bodies and give them a decent burial.

Gunmen reportedly perched atop the church [ http://editorsroom.5minmedia.com/?videoID=517911815&sid=577&from=cn (video embedded)] when rumors of a Ku Klux Klan march arose, as the KKK wanted to steal the bodies from the mortuary. Luckily, the teens were buried before that could happen. Now the church that defied the Klan is fighting a different sort of battle -- the struggle to stay afloat financially.

The house of worship needs $60,000 by end of September to carry out crucial repairs. The church is an important part of civil rights history, and its leaders hope that donors will stand by it in a time of need.

A church member commented in the [linked embedded] video above, "We have to understand our history before we can move forward and realize that all of those things that happened 83 years ago, that's part of us."

Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/29/shaffer-chapel-kkk-muncie-indiana_n_3836729.html [with (the referenced and linked) embedded video report, and comments]


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Fox News has its own civil rights struggle

While the nation discusses racial and economic equality, the cable network is covering a totally different story
Aug 28, 2013
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/28/fox_news_has_its_own_civil_rights_struggle/ [with comments]


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A party full of rodeo clowns: GOP flips the bird to racial justice


John Boehner, George W. Bush, John McCain
(Credit: Reuters/Larry Downing/Jim Young/Yuri Gripas)

By spurning invitations to celebrate the 1963 March, Republicans show they don't care about seeming racist anymore

By Joan Walsh
Thursday, Aug 29, 2013 12:02 PM CDT

Republicans haven’t been truly competitive for the African-American vote since Richard Nixon got a third of black voters in 1960 against John F. Kennedy, who spent most of that campaign hedging his bets on civil rights. After that, the party of Lincoln actively drove black people into the ranks of Democrats. The testimony of black Republicans who were sidelined, excluded and even attacked at the 1964 convention in San Francisco, when the party nominated the anti-civil rights Barry Goldwater, is painful to read [ http://shfg.org/shfg/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/4-Wright-final-design-pp32-45.pdf ].

In the post-Reagan years, however, Republicans became more careful about blatantly spurning the support of African-Americans, mainly because an image of racial tolerance, at least, was deemed essential to gaining the support of white moderates and independents; soccer moms, it was said, didn’t like overt racism. Then-Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman’s 2006 speech to the NAACP repudiating the GOP’s ’60s-era “Southern Strategy” wasn’t designed to seriously challenge the Democrats’ lock on black votes, but to give moderates, and maybe even Latinos, a reason to hope the party was evolving on race.

That’s all behind us. As recently as 2007, I believe, it would have been unthinkable that no major Republican leader would accept an invitation to join Wednesday’s commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. But that’s what happened this week [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/republicans-absent-from-march-on-washington/2013/08/28/43b807ac-1010-11e3-8cdd-bcdc09410972_story_1.html ], even though a delusional Bill O’Reilly claimed last night that “no Republicans and no conservatives were invited [ http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/08/28/bill-oreilly-falsely-claims-republicans-barred/195656 ]” to speak. As usual, O’Reilly is wrong: House Speaker John Boehner was washing his hair; wait, he was visiting Wyoming (the sixth whitest state in the U.S., by the way). Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who traveled to Selma with Rep. John Lewis last year, was likewise otherwise engaged. Both Presidents Bush are recuperating from health troubles. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was invited in his brother and father’s stead, but he had other plans. Sen. John McCain also declined.

“We had a very concerted effort, because this is not a political moment,” said Rep. Leah Daughtry, executive producer of the commemoration. “This was about us coming together as a community, so we wanted to be sure that we had all political representations,” Daughtry said. “We attempted very vigorously to have someone from the GOP participate and unfortunately they were unable to find someone who was able to participate.”

RNC chairman Reince Priebus pointed to the fact that Republicans held their own King commemoration Monday, inviting only blacks who are Republicans. Sounds like a fun time — a separate but equal celebration.

The fact that no leading Republican bothered to attend the 50thanniversary commemoration shows how far to the right they’ve moved on race. It’s not just that they’ve thrown in the towel when it comes to appealing to black voters. They also don’t think it’s worth it to make an extra effort to appeal to white voters who flinch at racism.

Thursday morning’s campaign by some Republicans to make march organizers out to be the real racists, because they didn’t invite South Carolina’s appointed black senator, Tim Scott, represents the usual GOP game of racial tit-for-tat. The fact is, the organizers were reaching out to national GOP leaders, and Scott is not one of them. His hostility to everything the Congressional Black Caucus stands for also makes him an unlikely and provocative choice as speaker.

If Scott asked to speak and was rebuffed, we haven’t heard about it. Nothing stopped him, or any other Republican, from wandering down to the Mall to join the throng. Such a move would have attracted media attention and it would almost certainly have been positive. Reporters are desperate to find signs of moderation and decency in today’s Republican Party.

Unfortunately, Republicans aren’t desperate to display such signs. Right now they’re comfortable with the status quo, in which more than 90 percent of self-described GOP voters are white, in a country that’s barely 60 percent white, and getting less white every day. While MSNBC was broadcasting the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 speech in its entirety, former Sen. Jim DeMint of the Heritage Foundation was buffoonishly tweeting: “Would MLK have approved of Obamacare?” DeMint couldn’t be bothered to walk to the Mall and talk to any of King’s actual or political heirs. He’s just another rodeo clown in a party that’s teeming with them.

Copyright © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc.

http://www.salon.com/2013/08/29/a_party_full_of_rodeo_clowns_gop_flips_the_bird_to_racial_justice/ [with comments]


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How Many Times Does Colin Powell Have to Tell the GOP It Has a Race Problem?



Philip Bump
Aug 22, 2013

Standing in front of the state's governor on Thursday morning, Colin Powell attacked North Carolina Republicans for turning away minority voters. Strong words — but not ones he hasn't used before. Powell has been trying to tell his party how to win over black voters for almost two decades.

Powell's critique stemmed from the state's strict new laws limiting voting accessibility [ http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/08/north-carolina-stuck-legislature-it-hates-until-2014/68327/ ]. The Charlotte News & Observer reported [ http://projects.newsobserver.com/under_the_dome/speaking_in_raleigh_colin_powell_blasts_north_carolina_voting_law ] Powell's comments.

"I want to see policies that encourage every American to vote, not make it more difficult to vote," said Powell, a Republican, at the CEO Forum in Raleigh.

"It immediately turns off a voting block the Republican Party needs," Powell continued. "These kinds of actions do not build on the base. It just turns people away." …

Powell, who served under President George W. Bush, also said the new sends the wrong message to minority voters. "What it really says to the minority voters is ... 'We really are sort-of punishing you,'" he said.

A call to Gov. Pat McCrory's office for a response to Powell's critiques has not yet been returned.

But this should come as no suprise. On at least four other occasions, Powell has criticized the racial sensibilities of his party. On another occasion, a staffer close to Powell did the same.

September 1995, to the New Yorker

In an interview with the magazine that quickly made national news [ http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=lWsaAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Ey0EAAAAIBAJ&pg=4239,5678237&dq=colin-powell+racist&hl=en ], Powell suggested that Republican leaders – including Ronald Reagan — didn't understand race issues.

"The problem with Reagan and [George H. W.] Bush and (former Defense Secretary Caspar) Weinberger and their ilk is that they just never knew," Powell says …

In the interview with the New Yorker, he said Bush and Reagan were two of the closest people in my life," but added that on the issue of racism, "they were never sensitized to it. … This was an area where I found them wanting."

August 2000, to the Republican National Convention

During his speech [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmNDt7nYwTc (just above, as embedded)] at the convention which nominated George W. Bush as the party's candidate, Powell appealed [ http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0007/31/se.20.html ] to the Republican delegates to be more sensitive to people of color.

Recently, Governor Bush addressed the annual meeting of the NAACP. He spoke to the delegates about his plans for housing and health and educational programs to help all Americans. He also spoke the truth to the delegates when he said that the party of Lincoln has not always carried the mantle of Lincoln. I talked with him again today and I know that with all his heart, Governor Bush welcomes the challenge. He wants the Republican Party to wear that mantle again. …

He knows that that mantle will not simply be handed over, that it will have to be earned. The party must follow the governor's lead in reaching out to minority communities and particularly the African-American community.

December 2008, to CNN

Shortly after the election that made Barack Obama president — the candidate Powell endorsed — the then-former Secretary of State again criticized Republicans [ http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/12/11/powell-gop-polarization-backfired-in-election/ ] for marginalizing black and minority voters.

In an interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria for Sunday's "GPS" program, President Bush's former secretary of state said his party's attempt "to use polarization for political advantage" backfired last month.

"I think the party has to take a hard look at itself," Powell said in the interview, which was taped Wednesday. "There is nothing wrong with being conservative. There is nothing wrong with having socially conservative views - I don't object to that. But if the party wants to have a future in this country, it has to face some realities. In another 20 years, the majority in this country will be the minority."

October 2012, Powell's former chief of staff talks to The Ed Show

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a former top staffer for Powell, told MSNBC's Ed Schultz [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2012/10/27/colin-powells-former-chief-of-staff-gop-is-full-of-racists/ ] his views on the party.

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.

January 2013, on Meet the Press

Speaking to David Gregory [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-sffvkqWgA (just above, as embedded)], Powell again criticized Republicans [ http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2013/01/13/1440471/colin-powell-condemns-republican-party-racism-there-is-a-dark-vein-of-intolerance/ ] on the topic of race.

There’s also a dark — a dark vein of intolerance in some parts of the party. What do I mean by that? I mean by that that they still sort of look down on minorities. How can I evidence that?

When I see a former governor say that the President is “shuckin’ and jivin’,” that’s racial era slave term. When I see another former governor after the president’s first debate where he didn’t do very well, says that the president was lazy. He didn’t say he was slow. He was tired. He didn’t do well. He said he was lazy. Now, it may not mean anything to most Americans, but to those of us who are African Americans, the second word is shiftless and then there’s a third word that goes along with that. The birther, the whole birther movement. Why do senior Republican leaders tolerate this kind of discussion within the party?

There's a big picture point that might be worth making. Republicans also appear not to be eager to embrace criticism from prominent members of the party that happen to be black.

Copyright © 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/08/how-many-times-does-colin-powell-have-tell-gop-it-has-race-problem/68637/ [with comments]


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Drug Sentencing Poll Finds Most Oppose Mandatory Minimums

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - AUGUST 12: U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder speaks during the 2013 America Bar Association (ABA) annual meeting on August 12, 2013 in San Francisco, California. Attorney Holder announced plans for major changes in the sentencing of certain drug-related crimes in an effort to reduce overcrowding in the nation's prisons.
08/27/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/27/drug-sentencing-poll_n_3818866.html [with embedded video report, and comments]


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U.S. Says It Won’t Sue to Undo State Marijuana Laws

By ASHLEY SOUTHALL
Published: August 29, 2013

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Thursday said it would not sue to undo laws legalizing marijuana in 20 states, although it will monitor operations in those states to make sure they do not run afoul of several enforcement priorities.

Washington and Colorado recently began allowing small amounts of marijuana to be used recreationally, while 18 other states and the District of Columbia permit the use of marijuana for medical purposes.

In a phone call on Thursday afternoon, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. explained the government’s “trust but verify” approach to Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington and Gov. John W. Hickenlooper of Colorado, a Justice Department official said.

In a memo sent to federal prosecutors nationwide on Thursday, James M. Cole, the deputy attorney general, laid out eight priority enforcement areas. They are aimed at preventing marijuana sales to children, illegal cartel activity, interstate trafficking of marijuana, and violence and accidents involving the drug.

Federal prosecutors are expected to help state officials set up and carry out regulations, the Justice Department official said.

After Colorado and Washington legalized recreational marijuana, some members of Congress sought to have the administration clarify whether state officials risked federal criminal prosecution while carrying out their duties under the state laws.

The attorney general is expected to testify on Sept. 10 at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing focused on clarifying the administration’s stance on the state laws.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and the chairman of the committee, said the administration should respect the state laws.

“It is important, especially at a time of budget constraints, to determine whether it is the best use of federal resources to prosecute the personal or medicinal use of marijuana in states that have made such consumption legal,” Mr. Leahy said. “I believe that these state laws should be respected. At a minimum, there should be guidance about enforcement from the federal government.”

Last week, the White House said President Obama did not [yet] support changing federal laws regulating marijuana, which treat the drug as a highly dangerous substance with no medical purpose.

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Document: Justice Department Memo on Marijuana Enforcement
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/08/30/us/politics/30justice-marijuana-memo.html

*

© 2013 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/30/us/politics/us-says-it-wont-sue-to-undo-state-marijuana-laws.html [with comments]


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Obama Offers New Executive Actions On Gun Control

By JOSH LEDERMAN
08/29/13 12:03 PM ET EDT

WASHINGTON -- Striving to take action where Congress would not, the Obama administration announced new steps Thursday on gun control, curbing the import of military surplus weapons and proposing to close a little-known loophole that lets felons and others circumvent background checks by registering guns to corporations.

Four months after a gun control drive collapsed spectacularly in the Senate, President Barack Obama added two more executive actions to a list of 23 steps the White House determined Obama could take on his own to reduce gun violence. With the political world focused on Mideast tensions and looming fiscal battles, the move signaled Obama's intent to show he hasn't lost sight of the cause he took up after 20 first graders and six adults were gunned down last year in an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

Vice President Joe Biden, Obama's point-man on gun control after the Newtown tragedy thrust guns into the national spotlight, unveiled the new actions Thursday at the White House.

"It's simple, it's straightforward, it's common sense," Biden said in the Roosevelt Room.

One new policy will end a government practice that lets military weapons, sold or donated by the U.S. to allies, be reimported into the U.S. by private entities, where some may end up on the streets. The White House said the U.S. has approved 250,000 of those guns to be reimported since 2005; under the new policy, only museums and a few other entities like the government will be eligible to reimport military-grade firearms.

The Obama administration is also proposing a federal rule to stop those who would be ineligible to pass a background check from skirting the law by registering certain guns, like machine guns and short-barreled shotguns, to a corporation or trust. The new rule would require people associated with those entities, like beneficiaries and trustees, to undergo the same type of fingerprint-based background checks as individuals if they want to register those types of guns.

"It's a very artful dodge to get around people who are not capable, constitutionally or legally, of owning a weapon," Biden said.

The National Rifle Association dismissed the administration's moves as misdirected, arguing that background checks for corporations and a ban on reimporting outdated guns wouldn't keep criminals from getting weapons.

"The Obama administration has once again completely missed the mark when it comes to stopping violent crime," said NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam. "This administration should get serious about prosecuting violent criminals who misuse guns and stop focusing its efforts on law-abiding gun owners."

Joined by Attorney General Eric Holder, Biden formally unveiled the new measures Thursday while swearing in Todd Jones, whose confirmation to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives after six years of political wrangling to fill that position was another of Obama's post-Newtown priorities. A Senate deal to approve the president's pending nominations after Democrats threatened to change Senate rules cleared the way for Jones' confirmation last month.

Still out of reach for Obama were the steps that gun control advocates and the administration's own review say could most effectively combat gun violence in the U.S., like an assault weapons ban and fewer exceptions for background checks for individual sales. Only Congress can act on those fronts.

There is scant evidence that support for gun control legislation has grown substantially since April, when efforts died in the Senate amid staunch opposition from the NRA and most Republican senators.

"Sooner or later, we are going to get this right," Obama said that day in the White House Rose Garden, with the families of Newtown victims and former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords – herself a victim of a gunman – at his side. "The memories of these children demand it, and so do the American people," the president said at the time.

In the months following the Senate vote, Biden has claimed that at a handful of lawmakers who opposed expanded background checks have told him privately they've changed their minds and want another chance. But Biden and White House officials have not named any of those lawmakers.

Renewing his pledge to keep working for legislative fixed, Biden suggested that one opportunity for improving prospects for gun control may come next year in the midterm elections. Liberal groups and those supporting gun control have vowed to hold accountable in 2014 those lawmakers who voted against gun control.

"If Congress won't act, we'll fight for a new Congress," Biden said. "It's that simple. But we're going to get this done."

These days, Obama and Biden mention gun control with far less regularity than when it appeared the Senate was poised to take action, although Obama did meet Tuesday with 18 city mayors to discuss ways to contain youth violence. And with immigration and pressing fiscal issues dominating Congress' agenda, the prospects for reviving gun legislation appear negligible.

With Jones' confirmation at ATF, the White House has completed or made significant progress on all but one of the 23 executive actions Obama had previously ordered in January, the White House said. Still lingering is an effort to finalize regulations to require insurers to cover mental health at parity with medical benefits, although the White House said that it is committed to making that happen by the end of 2013.

The new rules for guns registered to corporations will follow the traditional regulatory process, with a 90-day comment period before ATF reviews suggestions and finalizes the rule. It would only apply to certain types of guns that must be federally registered. Last year, ATF received 39,000 requests to register guns to corporations and trusts.

© 2013 Associated Press

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/29/obama-executive-actions-guns_n_3836183.html [with embedded video report, and (approaching 4,000) comments]


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Wayne LaPierre: IRS Targeting 'Could Easily Spread To Americans Who Cherish The 2nd Amendment'


National Rifle Association (NRA) CEO Wayne LaPierre speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, on March 15, 2013.
(NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images)

By Paige Lavender
Posted: 08/20/2013 9:27 am EDT | Updated: 08/20/2013 1:46 pm EDT

Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, warned "Americans who cherish the Second Amendment" that the scandal surrounding the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative groups could potentially affect gun lovers.

In an op-ed published by the Daily Caller [ http://dailycaller.com/2013/08/19/wayne-lapierre-canadas-roadmap-for-your-rights/ ] on Monday, LaPierre claims the IRS wanted "to intimidate and silence specific voices in the political spectrum." He then proposed a "what if" scenario in which those wishing to own a gun would be required to answer questionnaires that would then be analyzed:

And this gets us to the Second Amendment, to the efforts by the likes of billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, his cabal of machine politicians, and the likes of anti-gun U.S. Sens. Charles Schumer and Dianne Feinstein.

Imagine if the biggest step in their confiscation scheme—“universal gun owner licensing and registration”—were a reality. Acquisition, transfer or continued ownership of firearms could depend on the whim of federal bureaucrats—just like the IRS operation—in analyzing questionnaires that gun owners would be required by law to answer.

This “what if” scenario closely tracks the way the IRS wields bureaucratic power to scuttle the First Amendment rights of targeted “conservative” Americans—most of whom are our people, fighters for Second Amendment freedom.

"This scenario exactly mirrors what the IRS is subjectively doing to Americans seeking tax-exempt protection under the law," LaPierre wrote. "It could happen to us if we fail to stand and fight."

Controversy erupted when the IRS apologized [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/10/irs-conservative-groups_n_3254180.html ] in May 2013 for the inappropriate targeting of conservative groups during the 2012 election. Democrats released IRS documents [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/24/irs-progressive-groups_n_3492679.html ] in June that showed the agency targeted progressive groups applying for tax-exempt status in addition to conservative ones.

Republican lawmakers continue [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/13/republicans-irs_n_3751487.html ] to put pressure on the IRS, with Representatives Darrell Issa and Jim Jordan leading a probe into the matter for the House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/20/wayne-lapierre-irs_n_3784562.html [with comments] [and see (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=91276917 and preceding and following]


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IRS 'Scandal' Fades As Documents Show Scrutiny Of Democratic Groups, ACORN Successors

08/20/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/20/irs-scandal-democratic-acorn_n_3785717.html [with newly-released documents embedded scribd-style, and (nearly 4,000) comments]


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Gun Bill in Missouri Would Test Limits in Nullifying U.S. Law


Lawmakers are considering whether to override a veto of a gun bill by Gov. Jay Nixon of Missouri, who considered the bill unconstitutional.
Orlin Wagner/Associated Press

By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: August 28, 2013

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — Unless a handful of wavering Democrats change their minds, the Republican-controlled Missouri legislature is expected to enact a statute next month nullifying all federal gun laws in the state and making it a crime for federal agents to enforce them here. A Missourian arrested under federal firearm statutes would even be able to sue the arresting officer.

The law amounts to the most far-reaching states’ rights endeavor in the country, the far edge of a growing movement known as “nullification” in which a state defies federal power.

The Missouri Republican Party thinks linking guns to nullification works well, said Matt Wills, the party’s director of communications, thanks in part to the push by President Obama for tougher gun laws. “It’s probably one of the best states’ rights issues that the country’s got going right now,” he said.

The measure was vetoed last month by Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, as unconstitutional. But when the legislature gathers again on Sept. 11, it will seek to override his veto, even though most experts say the courts will strike down the measure. Nearly every Republican and a dozen Democrats appear likely to vote for the override.

Richard G. Callahan, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, is concerned. He cited a recent joint operation [ http://www.justice.gov/usao/moe/news/2013/july/vrcp.html ] of federal, state and local law enforcement officials that led to 159 arrests and the seizing of 267 weapons, and noted that the measure “would have outlawed such operations, and would have made criminals out of the law enforcement officers.”

In a letter [ http://www.house.mo.gov/billtracking/bills131/rpt/HB436vl.pdf ] explaining his veto, Mr. Nixon said the federal government’s supremacy over the states’ “is as logically sound as it is legally well established.” He said that another provision of the measure, which makes it a crime to publish the name of any gun owner, violates the First Amendment and could make a crime out of local newspapers’ traditional publication of “photos of proud young Missourians who harvest their first turkey or deer.”

But the votes for the measure were overwhelming. In the House, all but one of the 109 Republicans voted for the bill, joined by 11 Democrats. In the Senate, all 24 Republicans supported it, along with 2 Democrats. Overriding the governor’s veto would require 23 votes in the Senate and 109 in the House, where at least one Democrat would have to come on board.

The National Rifle Association, which has praised Mr. Nixon in the past for signing pro-gun legislation, has been silent about the new bill. Repeated calls to the organization were not returned.

Historically used by civil rights opponents, nullification has bloomed in recent years around a host of other issues, broadly including medical marijuana by liberals and the new health care law by conservatives.

State Representative T. J. McKenna, a Democrat from Festus, voted for the bill despite saying it was unconstitutional and raised a firestorm of protest against himself. “If you just Google my name, it’s all over the place about what a big coward I am,” he said with consternation, and “how big of a ‘craven’ I was. I had to look that up.”

The voters in his largely rural district have voiced overwhelming support for the bill, he said. “I can’t be Mr. Liberal, St. Louis wannabe,” he said. “What am I supposed to do? Just go against all my constituents?”

As for the veto override vote, he said, “I don’t know how I’m going to vote yet.”

State Representative Doug Funderburk, a Republican from St. Peters and the author of the bill, said he expected to have more than enough votes when the veto override came up for consideration.

Adam Winkler, a professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles, who follows nullification efforts nationally, said that nearly two dozen states had passed medical marijuana laws in defiance of federal restrictions. Richard Cauchi, who tracks such health legislation for the National Conference of State Legislatures, said: “Since January 2011, at least 23 states have considered bills seeking to nullify the health care law; as of mid-2013 only one state, North Dakota, had a signed law. Its language states, however, that the nullification provisions ‘likely are not authorized by the United States Constitution.’ ”

What distinguishes the Missouri gun measure from the marijuana initiatives is its attempt to actually block federal enforcement by setting criminal penalties for federal agents, and prohibiting state officials from cooperating with federal efforts. That crosses the constitutional line, said Robert A. Levy, chairman of the libertarian Cato Institute’s board of directors — a state cannot frustrate the federal government’s attempts to enforce its laws.

Mr. Levy, whose organization has taken a leading role in fighting for gun rights, said, “With the exception of a few really radical self-proclaimed constitutional authorities, state nullification of federal law is not on the radar scope.”

Still, other states have passed gun laws that challenge federal power; a recent wave began with a Firearms Freedom Act in Montana that exempts from federal regulations guns manufactured there that have not left the state.

Gary Marbut, a gun rights advocate in Montana who wrote the Firearms Freedom Act, said that such laws were “a vehicle to challenge commerce clause power,” the constitutional provision that has historically granted broad authority to Washington to regulate activities that have an impact on interstate commerce. His measure has served as a model [ http://firearmsfreedomact.com/ ] that is spreading to other states. Recently, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit struck down Montana’s law, calling it “pre-empted and invalid.”

A law passed this year in Kansas has also been compared to the Missouri law. But Kris W. Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, disagreed, saying it had been drafted “very carefully to ensure that there would be no situation where a state official would be trying to arrest a federal official.”

In Missouri, State Representative Jacob Hummel, a St. Louis Democrat and the minority floor leader, said that he was working to get Democrats who voted for the bill to vote against overriding the veto. “I think some cooler heads will prevail in the end,” he said, “but we will see.”

Taking up legislative time to vote for unconstitutional bills that are destined to end up failing in the courts is “a waste of taxpayers’ money,” Mr. Hummel said, adding that more and more, the legislature passes largely symbolic resolutions directed at Congress.

“We’re elected to serve the citizens of the state of Missouri, at the state level,” he said. “We were not elected to tell the federal government what to do — that’s why we have Congressional elections.”

The lone Republican opponent of the bill in the House, State Representative Jay Barnes, said, “Our Constitution is not some cheap Chinese buffet where we get to pick the parts we like and ignore the rest.” He added, “Two centuries of constitutional jurisprudence shows that this bill is plainly unconstitutional, and I’m not going to violate my oath of office.”

Mr. Funderburk, the bill’s author, clearly disagrees. And, he said, Missouri is only the beginning. “I’ve got five different states that want a copy” of the bill, he said.

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Related

Times Topic: Guns and Gun Control
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/g/gun_control/index.html

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© 2013 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/29/us/missouri-gun-measure-pushes-nullification-boundary.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/29/us/missouri-gun-measure-pushes-nullification-boundary.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]


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Authorities in Vegas arrest 2, say 4-month probe foiled plot to kidnap, torture, kill police

Published: August 22, 2013

LAS VEGAS — A four-month undercover operation foiled a plot by two people to abduct, torture and kill at least one police officer to gain attention for their “Sovereign Citizen” cause, police said Thursday.

The arrests of David Allen Brutsche, 42, and Devon Campbell Newman, 67, scuttled a carefully planned operation to kidnap, put on trial and execute a police officer, according to a 10-page police arrest report.

The report detailed weeks of meetings, training sessions and plans that included using video cameras to follow police, identifying an officer to abduct, finding a vacant house and rigging it to serve as a “jail” in which the officer would be bound to cross beams in a room for torture.

Every one of the 30 meetings, including hundreds of hours of conversation, was documented and recorded, police said.

“We need to arrest the police and take them to our jail and put them in a cell and put them on trial in a people’s court,” the report quotes Brutsche saying during a July 9 meeting with an unidentified undercover officer. “If we run into the position that they resist, then we need to kill them.”

The report alleges the two recorded and planned to post videos about Sovereign Citizen ideology and their actions following the abduction.

FBI officials in Las Vegas say the federal agency wasn’t involved in the Las Vegas investigation. The FBI generally considers Sovereign Citizen extremists to be domestic terrorists.

Police identified Brutsche as a six-time convicted felon and child sex offender from California. Records showed he was being held at the Clark County jail in Las Vegas on multiple charges ranging from failure to register as a sex offender to conspiracy to commit kidnapping and murder.

Newman was being held at the jail pending a court appearance on conspiracy to commit murder and kidnapping charges.

© 2013 Associated Press

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/authorities-in-vegas-arrest-2-say-4-month-probe-foiled-plot-to-kidnap-torture-kill-police/2013/08/22/0a6234e8-0b72-11e3-89fe-abb4a5067014_story.html [with comment]


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Case of 2 ‘sovereign citizen’ defendants in plot to kill Vegas police draws attention to cause

Published: August 22, 2013 | Updated: Friday, August 23, 2013 6:15 PM

LAS VEGAS — A foiled plot by two self-proclaimed adherents of a sovereign citizen movement to kidnap and execute Las Vegas police officers shows the potential for violence from a growing group that renounces government and is considered a domestic terror group at its extremes, experts and investigators said Friday.

Allegations that David Allen Brutsche, 42, and Devon Campbell Newman, 67, planned to confront police officers during traffic stops and kill them if they resisted illustrated the volatility of official interactions with people committed to the idea of fighting governmental authority, they said.

“You look at their motivation being that the government that gives the officer authority isn’t viable, and if they get a following, it’s a threat to be reckoned with,” said Kory Flowers, a Greensboro, N.C., police detective who studies sovereign citizen groups and teaches police about them.

“Even if it’s a crackpot idea, four or five guys can be a tactical assault team,” he said.

Heidi Beirich, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., counted seven killings of law enforcement officers by alleged sovereign citizen members in the past 10 years in South Carolina, Louisiana, Arkansas and last year in Alamo, Calif.

Other officers have been served with “paper terrorism” arrest documents and bills for millions of dollars, Beirich said, or discovered liens filed against their personal property.

“It becomes, at the end of the day, ‘We hate the government, and the government has no right to tell us what to do,’” Beirich said.

The center estimates there are 300,000 adherents to the sovereign citizen anti-government philosophy around the country.

Former West Memphis, Ark., Police Chief Bob Paudert thinks there may be twice that number.

Paudert blames the 2010 death of his son, West Memphis Police Sgt. Brandon Paudert, on a sovereign citizens confrontation during a traffic stop in their hometown. Another officer also died in that shooting, before suspected sovereign citizen followers Jerry Kane and his 16-year-old son, Joe Kane, were killed a short time later in a separate police shootout in West Memphis.

“They’re willing to die for their beliefs,” said Paudert, who now travels the country talking about the group.

Brutsche is an ex-felon child sex offender who sometimes sold water to tourists on the Las Vegas Strip, while Newman has only speeding, parking and vehicle registration tickets in her background.

The two stood before a judge Friday and told him they didn’t recognize his authority to keep them in jail.

Las Vegas Justice of the Peace Conrad Hafen had none of it.

“So noted,” he responded.

The judge made sure Brutsche and Newman read the criminal complaints against them, then sent them back to jail pending a Sept. 9 preliminary hearing on charges of felony conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to commit kidnapping and attempted kidnapping.

Over Brutsche’s rambling objections, the judge appointed the county public defender’s office to represent him and set bail at $600,000.

Hafen named a lawyer to represent Newman and scheduled her bail hearing for Monday. Newman’s lawyer didn’t immediately respond Friday to messages.

Police allege Brutsche and Newman held training sessions about sovereign citizen philosophy, shopped for guns, found a vacant house to serve as a “jail,” and drilled bolts into wall studs to hold cross-beams on which captives could be bound during interrogation.

A police report alleges Brutsche and Newman recorded and planned to post videos about their actions and sovereign citizen ideology following the first abduction.

Brutsche said he expected to draw a large following once they started because of the publicity, the report said.

Police began investigating Brutsche after he insisted to police and judges that he wasn’t subject to their authority and the laws and regulations of the United States, Las Vegas police Capt. Chris Jones said.

Jones characterized Newman as an acquaintance and roommate of Brutsche who shared his ideology.

Records show Brutsche served three stints in California prisons before leaving a facility in Tracy, Calif., in Sept. 2011. Since then, in Las Vegas, he has faced more than 20 criminal cases on misdemeanor offenses including doing business without a license, obstructing a public sidewalk, driving without a license, driving an unregistered vehicle and failing to appear in court.

Las Vegas police said Friday that Brutsche had 17 bench warrants when he was arrested Tuesday.

Judges noted his declarations that he was a sovereign citizen and continued to move his cases forward, according to court records.

“Each time we came in contact with him, he became increasingly adamant that police had no authority over him or his actions because he considered himself a sovereign,” said Jones, head of the Las Vegas police regional counterterrorism center.

Federal authorities regard sovereign citizen extremists as domestic terrorists.

Beirich, at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said not all people who consider themselves sovereign citizens are violent.

But she called traffic stops involving people driving with fake license plates or without registration or driver’s licenses a “typical flash point between cops and sovereigns.”

Associated Press writer Michelle Rindels contributed to this report.

© 2013 Associated Press

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/authorities-in-vegas-arrest-2-say-4-month-probe-foiled-plot-to-kidnap-torture-kill-police/2013/08/22/f86b4a6e-0b89-11e3-89fe-abb4a5067014_story.html [with comments]


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'Sovereign Citizens' Arrested in Las Vegas Are A Sex Offender And A Scientologist


David Allen Brutsche and Devon Campbell Newman.
Photo courtesy of NBC Los Angeles.

By Matthew Bramlett
Aug 23, 2013 4:59 PM

Two people arrested Tuesday night over a plot to kidnap and kill law enforcement officers in the Las Vegas area have ties to California, according to NBC Los Angeles [ http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/california/NorCal-Sex-Offender-Tied-to-Vegas-Cop-Killing-Plot-220847981.html ].

David Allen Brutsche, 42, along with his roommate, Devon Campbell Newman, 67, were arrested after a months-long investigation by Las Vegas police. They are believed to be a part of the "Sovereign Citizen" movement, which espouses anti-government and anti-taxation beliefs.

According to NBC 4, Brutsche was convicted in 1993 of molesting a child and in 2001 of indecent exposure. Both incidents happened in Santa Clara County, in Northern California. Additionally, in 2009 Brutsche was arrested after a six-hour standoff that began when he would not come out of his trailer to be arrested for failing to register as a sex offender, according to NBC Bay Area.

Newman has an interesting past as well. According to her LinkedIn profile [ http://www.linkedin.com/pub/devon-newman/16/800/2a9 ], she has been the PR director for the Church of Scientology in Las Vegas since 2010 and has worked on projects such as Foundation For a Drug Free World, Youth for Human Rights Foundation and the Way to Happiness Foundation. According to The Underground Bunker [ http://tonyortega.org/2013/08/23/pr-director-of-scientologys-las-vegas-celebrity-center-arrested-in-plot-to-assassinate-a-cop/ ], an anti-Scientology blog run by the Village Voice's Tony Ortega, Newman also worked for the Sea Org, another branch of the church, in Los Angeles.

The two came under suspicion by law enforcement in April, when Brutsche was observed committing a number of crimes in the Las Vegas area, according to Lt. Jim Seebock, who heads the counter-terrorism unit for the Las Vegas Police Department. The LVPD assigned an undercover cop to act as an accomplice to Brutsche and Newman and collect information on them.

"As the investigation progressed, we became aware that these two individuals were extremist in their beliefs, and were actively plotting to kidnap and kill at least one southern Nevada police officer," said Lt. Seebock during a press conference [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMBAfNgUKDM ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMBAfNgUKDM#t=129 ) (next below)].

During their arraignment on Friday, both Brutsche and Newman stated that they do not acknowledge the court's authority to keep them in jail, according to the LA Times [ http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-vegas-sovereign-citizen-police-plot-20130823,0,2537269.story ]. They have both been charged with conspiracy to commit murder, attempted first-degree kidnapping with use of a weapon and conspiracy to commit kidnapping.

© 2013 Gothamist LLC

http://laist.com/2013/08/23/sovereign_citizen_arrested_in_las_v.php [with comments]


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Terror suspect also charged with soliciting murder



Undercover agent was alleged target

By Jason Meisner, Chicago Tribune reporter
9:11 p.m. CDT, August 29, 2013

A west suburban teenager accused of plotting to set off a bomb outside a downtown bar was indicted Thursday on new charges that he solicited the murder of an undercover FBI agent after his arrest last fall.

Adel Daoud, 19, was charged with one count each of attempted murder of a federal agent, murder-for-hire and obstruction of justice.

The target of the alleged plot was an undercover FBI agent who had posed as a terrorist in New York and supplied Daoud with what he thought was an explosive device to use in a terrorist attack in Chicago, according to the U.S. attorney's office. Daoud was arrested last September as he stood in a Loop alley, punching the trigger of the fake bomb, authorities said.

While he was being held without bail in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, Daoud plotted the murder to keep the undercover agent from testifying at trial, according to the indictment. The charges alleged that a person connected to Daoud used a cellphone Nov. 28 with the intent of the murder being committed in return for payment.

Daoud's attorney, Thomas Anthony Durkin, did not return calls for comment.

Daoud came under FBI scrutiny in 2011 after posting messages online about killing Americans, according to a criminal complaint filed against him last year. FBI analysts posing as terrorists exchanged messages with Daoud and eventually got him to meet with the undercover agent, who was described as a "cousin" interested in waging jihad.

Over the next several months, Daoud and the undercover agent met several times in the Chicago area and discussed potential targets for an attack, according to the charges. In one meeting in Villa Park last August, Daoud allegedly told the agent he wanted to maximize the carnage so he would feel like he "accomplished something."

"If it's only like five, 10 people, I'm not gonna feel that good," the charges quoted Daoud as saying. "I wanted something that's … massive. I want something that's gonna make it in the news like tonight."

Daoud faces a potential life sentence if convicted on the terrorism charges. He is scheduled for trial in April.

The murder solicitation charges came just days after the judge overseeing Daoud's case ruled his lawyers are not entitled to know whether the terrorism investigation was sparked by the controversial government surveillance program recently exposed by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor.

In her order Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman said she agreed with prosecutors who argued they are not required to disclose whether the Daoud investigation has its roots in the spying programs.

Copyright © 2013 Chicago Tribune Company, LLC

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-daoud-terrorism-charges-20130830,0,1324645.story [no comments yet]


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Wikileaks Founder Assange: “I’m a Big Admirer of Ron Paul and Rand Paul”

Assange also lavishes praise on Matt Drudge and the conservative movement

By Charles Johnson
Aug 16, 2013

Today, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange gave an interview to Campus Reform and revealed that he’s a “big admirer” of the craziest libertarian racists in US politics: Ron and Rand Paul [ http://www.campusreform.org/blog/?ID=4989 ; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FofnFbF_JO8 (above, as embedded)].

Assange says the far right (represented by these two bigoted kooks) is America’s “only hope.”

College-aged support for libertarians and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) represents the United States’ “only hope” in politics, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange told Campus Reform early Friday morning.

“The only hope as far as electoral politics… presently, is the libertarian section of the Republican party,” said Assange, in response to a question about the recent swell of college-aged and youth-based support for libertarianism.

“The libertarian aspect of the Republican Party is presently the only useful political voice really in the U.S. Congress,” said Assange. “[I] am a big admirer of Ron Paul and Rand Paul for their very principled positions in the U.S. Congress on a number of issues.”

And he didn’t stop there; Assange also lavished praise on the ugliest race-baiting right wing news aggregator in the US, Matt Drudge:

Assange, who was speaking in an online video forum, hosted by the transparency organization OurSay.org, also praised American Journalist Matt Drudge saying he is responsible for breaking down the “self-censorship” of the American mainstream media.

“Matt Drudge is a news media innovator… It is as a result of the self-censorship of the establishment press in the United States that gave Matt Drudge such a platform and so of course he should be applauded for breaking a lot of that censorship,” said Assange.

It’s not really surprising to see the wacko libertarian left [umm, sorry, Charles, but with all due respect to your own journey ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Green_Footballs ), there's no real basis for saying Assange, or Manning or Snowden or even Greenwald, has ever actually been anything "left"] meeting up with the wacko libertarian right, out on the fringes where they belong. But this is Assange’s most direct statement of support yet for the US radical right wing.

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Related:

Video: Ron Paul Gives Speech on Civil War in Front of Giant Confederate Flag
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/39801_Video-_Ron_Paul_Gives_Speech_on_Civil_War_in_Front_of_Giant_Confederate_Flag

Rand Paul’s Neo-Confederate Co-Author Praised Lincoln’s Assassin
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/42242_Rand_Pauls_Neo-Confederate_Co-Author_Praised_Lincolns_Assassin

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© 2013 Little Green Footballs

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/42405_Wikileaks_Founder_Assange-_Im_a_Big_Admirer_of_Ron_Paul_and_Rand_Paul [and see (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=91368986 and preceding and following]


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Rand Paul: NSA Spying 'Unconstitutional,' Can't Be Saved By More Oversight


Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is calling for congressional hearings on the NSA's data collection.
(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

By Amanda Terkel
Posted: 08/18/2013 10:32 am EDT | Updated: 08/18/2013 1:09 pm EDT

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) called for congressional hearings on the National Security Agency's data collection on Sunday, while saying that much of the program is unconstitutional and likely can't be improved by oversight.

"You know, I think it would be better with more oversight, but there are some things they are doing that I fundamentally think are unconstitutional," Paul said on "Fox News Sunday." "Our founding fathers, when they wrote the Fourth Amendment, said a single warrant goes toward a specific individual and what you want to look for. ... The constitution doesn't allow for a single warrant to get a billion phone records. ... They basically, I believe, are looking at all of the cell phone calls in America every day."

Paul, who has become one of the most vocal critics of the NSA's surveillance program, also lamented the one-sided nature of the discussion on the issue. He accused the president -- a former constitutional law professor -- of ignorance about the U.S. Constitution.

"You know, I think the president fundamentally missunderstands the constitutional separation of powers," he said. "Because the checks and balances are supposed to come from independent branches of government. So he thinks that if he gets some lawyers together from the NSA and they do a Power Point presentation and tell him everything is okay, that the NSA can police themselves. But one of the fundamental things that our founders put in place was they wanted to separate police power from the judiciary power."

President Barack Obama addressed the NSA's data collection [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/transcript-president-obamas-august-9-2013-news-conference-at-the-white-house/2013/08/09/5a6c21e8-011c-11e3-9a3e-916de805f65d_story_4.html ] at a news conference on Aug. 9, saying there was no evidence that the agency was abusing its powers.

"What you’re hearing about is the prospect that these could be abused. Now part of the reason they’re not abused is because they’re -- these checks are in place, and those abuses would be against the law and would be against the orders of the FISC [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court]," he said.

But the following week, the Washington Post revealed that the NSA had "broken privacy rules [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-broke-privacy-rules-thousands-of-times-per-year-audit-finds/2013/08/15/3310e554-05ca-11e3-a07f-49ddc7417125_story.html ] or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents."

The chief judge on the FISC, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, has also admitted that the court's oversight powers are limited.

“The FISC is forced to rely upon the accuracy of the information that is provided to the Court,” Walton said in a statement to the Post. “The FISC does not have the capacity to investigate [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/court-ability-to-police-us-spying-program-limited/2013/08/15/4a8c8c44-05cd-11e3-a07f-49ddc7417125_story.html ] issues of noncompliance, and in that respect the FISC is in the same position as any other court when it comes to enforcing [government] compliance with its orders.”

Paul added on Sunday that he would like to see the Supreme Court take up the issue of the NSA's spying program.

"So I think the constitutionality of these programs need to be questioned," Paul said, "and there needs to be a Supreme Court decision looking at whether what they're doing is constitutional or not."

Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), who also appeared on "Fox News Sunday," defended the NSA.

"I fully disagree with what Sen. Rand Paul said," King stated. "That was just a grab bag of misinformation and distortion. ... And this whole tone of snooping and spying that we use, I think it's horrible. It's really a distortion and a smear and a slander of good, patriotic Americans."

Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/18/rand-paul-nsa_n_3775821.html [with embedded video, and (over 6,000) comments]


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Snowden impersonated NSA officials, sources say


A still frame grab recorded on June 6, 2013 and released to AFP on June 10, 2013 shows Edward Snowden, who has been working at the National Security Agency for the past four years, speaking during an interview with The Guardian newspaper at an undisclosed location in Hong Kong.
The Guardian via AFP-Getty Images file

By Richard Esposito, Matthew Cole and Robert Windrem
NBC News
August 29, 2013

Edward Snowden accessed some secret national security documents by assuming the electronic identities of top NSA officials, said intelligence sources.

“Every day, they are learning how brilliant [Snowden] was,” said a former U.S. official with knowledge of the case. “This is why you don’t hire brilliant people for jobs like this. You hire smart people. Brilliant people get you in trouble.”

Snowden was a Honolulu-based employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, an NSA contractor. His job gave him system administrator privileges on the NSA’s intranet, NSAnet. He reportedly used his privileges to download 20,000 documents.

The NSA still doesn’t know exactly what Snowden took. But its forensic investigation has included trying to figure out which higher level officials Snowden impersonated online to access the most sensitive documents.

The NSA has as many as 40,000 employees. According to one intelligence official, the NSA is restricting its research to a much smaller group of individuals with access to sensitive documents. Investigators are looking for discrepancies between the real world actions of an NSA employee and the online activities linked to that person’s computer user profile. For example, if an employee was on vacation while the on-line version of the employee was downloading a classified document, it might indicate that someone assumed the employee’s identity.

The NSA has already identified several instances where Snowden borrowed someone else’s user profile to access documents, said the official.

Each user profile on NSAnet includes a level of security clearance that determines what files the user can access. Like most NSA employees and contractors, Snowden had a “top secret” security clearance, meaning that under his own user profile he could access many classified documents. But some higher level NSA officials have higher levels of clearance that give them access to the most sensitive documents.

As a system administrator, according to intelligence officials, Snowden had the ability to create and modify user profiles for employees and contractors. He also had the ability to access NSAnet using those user profiles, meaning he could impersonate other users in order to access files. He borrowed the identities of users with higher level security clearances to grab sensitive documents.

Once Snowden had collected documents, his job description also gave him a right forbidden to other NSA employees– the right to download files from his computer to an external storage device. Snowden downloaded a reported 20,000 documents onto thumb drives before leaving Hawaii for Hong Kong on May 20.

Snowden’s documents became the basis for a series of articles in the Guardian and the Washington Post detailing the extent of the U.S. government’s collection of data and metadata on emails and phone calls.

“The damage, on a scale of 1 to 10, is a 12,” said a former intelligence official.

The NSA declined to comment.

Snowden has been charged with theft and violations of the Espionage Act. He is now in Russia, where he has been granted temporary asylum.

Richard Esposito is the Senior Executive Producer for Investigations at NBC News. Matthew Cole is an investigative reporter at NBC News. Robert Windrem is an investigative reporter at NBC News.

*

More from NBC News Investigations:

How Snowden did it
http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/26/20197183-how-snowden-did-it

US doesn't know what Snowden took, sources say
http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/20/20108770-us-doesnt-know-what-snowden-took-sources-say

Glenn Greenwald's partner detained by British security
http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/18/20079507-partner-of-journalist-who-revealed-nsa-documents-detained-by-british-security

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© 2013 NBCNews.com

http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/29/20234171-snowden-impersonated-nsa-officials-sources-say [with comments]


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Tom McClintock, GOP Congressman, Calls For Edward Snowden Amnesty


Rep. Tom McClintock said, "As a practical matter, I'd much rather have him in America talking to Americans than in Russia talking to Russians."
(John Decker-Pool/Getty Images, File)

By Katie Burkhart
Posted: 08/20/2013 6:45 pm EDT

Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) is the latest member of Congress to sound off on the fate of Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked information about secret surveillance programs to media outlets.

In an interview with KCRA-TV last week [ http://www.kcra.com/news/rep-mcclintock-holds-roseville-town-hall-calls-for-snowden-amnesty/-/11797728/21380714/-/ty2ei6z/-/index.html ], McClintock announced that he supports amnesty for Snowden, who is currently facing U.S. espionage charges [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/21/edward-snowden-charged_n_3480984.html ] and residing in Russia under temporary asylum.

"As a practical matter, I'd much rather have him in America talking to Americans than in Russia talking to Russians," the congressman explained to The Sacramento Bee [ http://www.sacbee.com/2013/08/20/5664490/mcclintock-bucks-gop-has-it-right.html ] this week. "More importantly, Congress was lied to about the existence of the NSA program that seized the phone and Internet records of millions of Americans without a warrant."

McClintock told the Bee that while Snowden may have violated anti-espionage laws, "there's a higher power ... and that's the Constitution."

"Government officials take an oath to protect the Constitution. Doesn't say anything about protecting the country," he asserted. "The reason is, if we lose the Constitution, we've lost our country."

Since leaking information on the NSA surveillance programs, Snowden has proved to be an enormously polarizing figure, drawing both praise [ http://videos.huffingtonpost.com/politics/ron-paul-defends-patriot-edward-snowden-517813350 ] and criticism [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/11/john-boehner-edward-snowden_n_3420635.html ] from both ends of the political spectrum [ http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/06/10/snowden-draws-praise-and-condemnation/ ].

Last month, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) proposed a resolution [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/19/lindsey-graham-chuck-schumer-russia_n_3623792.html ] calling on President Barack Obama to seek another location for the September G-20 summit, in hopes that doing so would pressure Russia to turn Snowden over to the United States.

Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/20/tom-mcclintock-edward-snowden_n_3787182.html [with comments]


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Rand Paul: Chris Christie Started It!
08/18/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/18/rand-paul-chris-christie_n_3776556.html [with embedded video report, and comments]


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America's Libertarian Moment


Associated Press

A longtime libertarian policy wonk talks about whether the philosophy can save the GOP -- and why he still doesn't think Rand Paul can win the presidency.

Molly Ball
Aug 18 2013, 7:00 AM ET

Libertarianism is on the march. From the rapid rise to prominence of first-term Senator Rand Paul to the state-level movements to legalize gay marriage and marijuana, the philosophy of fiscal conservatism, social liberalism, and restrained foreign policy seems to be gaining currency in American politics. But it's nothing new, of course. (New York Times Magazine, 1971: "The New Right Credo: Libertarianism [ http://fare.tunes.org/liberty/library/new_right_credo.html ].") A lonely band of libertarian thinkers have been propounding this philosophy since the 1960s, when the late thinker Murray Rothbard published his first book, Reason magazine was founded, and, in 1974, Rothbard teamed up with Charles Koch and Ed Crane to found the Cato Institute, one of Washington's most influential think tanks.

David Boaz [ http://www.cato.org/people/david-boaz ], Cato's executive vice president, has been with the organization since 1981, giving him a good perch to put the current libertarian vogue in perspective. In an interview this week, we talked about the political currents propelling libertarianism into the political mainstream, the Supreme Court's libertarian turn, whether Paul will be our next president, and much more. This is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Is there a libertarian moment happening in America?

Libertarian ideas -- and I'm never using a capital L [i.e., referring to the Libertarian Party] when I say that; in this case I don't even mean consciously libertarian, so not just the people who read Reason magazine and Murray Rothbard and call themselves libertarians -- libertarian ideas are very deeply rooted in America. Skepticism about power and about government, individualism, the idea that we're all equal under the law, free enterprise, getting ahead in the world through your own hard work -- all of those ideas are very fundamentally American. Obviously, from a libertarian point of view, America nonetheless has done a whole lot of things, from slavery to Obamacare, that offend some number of those libertarian values, but the core libertarian attitude is still there. And a lot of times when the government suddenly surges in size, scope, or power, those libertarian attitudes come back to the fore.

I think that's what you're seeing. I think you're seeing a growth of self-conscious libertarianism. The end of the Bush years and the beginning of the Obama years really lit a fire under the always-simmering small-government attitudes in America. The TARP, the bailouts, the stimulus, Obamacare, all of that sort of inspired the Tea Party. Meanwhile, you've simultaneously got libertarian movements going on in regard to gay marriage and marijuana. And I'll tell you something else that I think is always there. The national media were convinced that we would be getting a gun-control bill this year, that surely the Newtown shooting would overcome the general American belief in the Second Amendment right to bear arms. And then they pushed on the string and it didn't go anywhere [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/05/what-really-sank-gun-control-distrust-of-government/275609/ ]. Support for gun control is lower today than it was 10 or 15 years ago. I think that's another sign of America's innate libertarianism.

This year you have a whole series of scandals that at least call into question the efficacy, competence, and trustworthiness of government. The IRS, maybe the Benghazi cover-up [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/08/the-attack-in-benghazi-worth-investigating-after-all/278299/ ], and the revelations about surveillance. All of those things together, I think, have lit a fire to the smoldering libertarianism of the American electorate.

None of which necessarily means that there's a libertarian majority that will sweep Rand Paul to the White House or anything like that. But there are a lot of people who care a lot, and a lot more people who care some, about these things, and a majority of Americans think our taxes are too high, a majority of Americans think the federal government spends too much, a majority of Americans think it was a mistake to get into Iraq. A bare majority of Americans now favor gay marriage, a bare majority favor marijuana legalization, a huge majority think there should be a requirement to balance the federal budget. So if you're a presidential candidate you don't call yourself a libertarian and run on Murray Rothbard's book, you run on those issues. And on those issues, you find a lot that a majority agrees with.

What is the significance of Rand Paul to this discussion?

Rand Paul is clearly the most significant libertarian-leaning American political figure in a long time. There are a couple of issues I disagree with him on, but when you look at issues that cut across left-right boundaries, like his interest in reduced spending, less regulation, reining in our adventurous foreign policy, protecting America's rights against surveillance -- that's a combination of issues that libertarians have waited a long time to find together in one candidate. I think he can have a lot of appeal. A lot of libertarians, including those who came out of the Ron Paul movement but also others, are very interested in seeing how far his political ambitions might take him.

How does libertarianism figure into the war of ideas that's going on in the Republican Party? Is the GOP poised to embrace libertarianism?

I think they're poised to debate it. Rand Paul is going to be in the middle of the people debating the future of the Republican Party. Rand Paul has said he doesn't call himself a libertarian; he calls himself a libertarian Republican, small L-capital R, and he does sometimes say that the party needs to move in a more libertarian direction to broaden its appeal to young people and independent voters.

One of the things Ron Paul's campaign showed was that a lot of young people who were not Republicans were interested in these ideas. But [as a Republican politician] you either have to get those people into Republican primaries or you have to get the nomination for that to do you any good.

Rand Paul's supporters believe as soon as he starts to look like a contender, the establishment is going to see him as a threat and try to destroy him [ http://www.politico.com/story/2013/07/rand-paul-republican-hawks-94817.html ].

There are all sorts of Washington establishments who are going to want to take down Rand Paul. The spending establishment is certainly not going to like what he's talking about. The Republican political establishment doesn't particularly want to change. And certainly the national security establishment is extremely eager not to debate our policy of global interventionism. They have always sought to rule out of bounds any challenge to it.

They tried it in the Republican primary in Kentucky [in 2010]. The neocons organized one of their emergency committees to stop Rand Paul in the primary. I think they will continue to do that.

And yet some libertarians have started to criticize [ http://reason.com/blog/2013/05/13/rand-paul-assures-evangelicals-that-he-d ] Rand Paul for going squishy as he tries to appeal more to the GOP mainstream.

If you want a pure libertarian to run for president, you've got the Libertarian Party. If you think the Libertarian Party's candidates aren't pure enough, you can write in Murray Rothbard. When we talk about a U.S. senator running for president, you are talking about the real world of politics. Nobody is going to be a doctrinaire Ayn Rand libertarian. Rand Paul has rounder edges than his father. He has a number of other advantages over his father: He's not 77 years old; he's a not a House member, he's a senator; and he has rounder edges in the way he presents libertarian ideas. There may even be issues on which they actually disagree, though I'm not sure I can think of one.

Well, Rand Paul says he would audit the Federal Reserve, not end it as his father promised to do.

Does he, in his heart, believe in ending the Fed? I believe he does. But the next president is not going to get rid of the Fed. If we can audit the Fed -- and, more important to me, we can rein in the incredible powers the Fed seized in 2008 and put some governor in control of the creation of new money -- we will have accomplished a lot.

Rand Paul is also strongly against abortion rights, which many libertarians disagree with. What is the libertarian position on abortion?

I don't think there is a libertarian position on abortion. There was a study done by a graduate student at UCLA that found that about two-thirds of people you would identify as libertarian are pro-choice. From a philosophical perspective, libertarians generally believe the appropriate role of government is to protect life, liberty, and property. The question is, is forbidding abortion a way of protecting life, or should it be viewed as a restriction of liberty? There's a plausible libertarian case on both sides. People who are consciously libertarian are more respectful of the other position on abortion, in my experience, than most pro-lifers and pro-choicers. I do not think there is an official position.

The Supreme Court had a remarkably libertarian term, and Cato had a very successful year [ http://www.cato.org/blog/great-year-cato-supreme-court ] at the Court, isn't that right?

Yes, we filed briefs in 18 cases and were on the winning side in 15 of them. [Cato was also the only organization to file briefs on the winning side of the four highest-profile cases: affirmative action, voting rights, the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8.]

That's maybe less a sign of the zeitgeist and more a sign that Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court's swing vote, is a bit of a libertarian.

Of the 15 cases we won, Justice Kennedy was with us 14 times. If you look at his record over his 25 years on the court, you could argue he's the most libertarian member of the Court. He's made some egregious errors in that time. He was wrong on the Kelo [ http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/04-108.ZS.html ] case [in which the Court ruled that the state has the right to take private property for private development]. However, on a lot of civil liberties, personal freedom, and gay-rights issues, he's been on the liberal side, and on a lot of business regulation, size of government, and federalism cases he's been on the conservative side. And that means we often agree with him.

There was a lot of whiplash among partisans over the big Court decisions -- progressives anguished about voting rights one day and thrilled about gay rights the next, and vice versa for conservatives. But from your point of view, a libertarian point of view, there was a consistency to be seen.

Yes, and not just the broad consistency of individual freedom versus the power of government, but on the narrower issue of treating people equally under the law. We would say that the issue of race in college admissions and the issue of equal marriage rights in the DOMA case are both applications of equal protection of the law. We actually had a similar experience 10 years ago, in 2003, when we were the only organization to have filed amicus briefs in support of Lawrence in Lawrence v. Texas [the case that struck down sodomy laws] and Jennifer Gratz in her lawsuit against the University of Michigan [for its affirmative-action policy]. There were a lot of gay-rights and liberal groups on our side in the Lawrence case, and a lot of conservatives on our side with Jennifer Gratz. We felt that we were asking for equal freedom under law for both Gratz and Lawrence.

Is this part of the attraction of young people to libertarianism -- that it seems to stand outside partisanship, in a pure, consistent way?

I think that's true. I think having a consistent principle that organizes all these issues was very helpful for Marxism, and I think it's also an attraction of libertarianism. It may also be that on a gut level, there are a lot of people who like not being a Democrat or a Republican. Millions of Americans -- 59 percent, according to one poll -- would tell you they are fiscally conservative and socially liberal, and that's a real loose definition of libertarian. We consider those people to be a large constituency that libertarians should be able to access. Especially for young people, saying, "Nobody tells me what to say, I'm not a partisan Democrat or Republican," is attractive. To see Ron Paul, in the Republican primary debates, clearly challenging the things the rest of the Republicans were saying, but also clearly not a Democrat.

You mention Marxism. Some would extend the parallel and say libertarianism is another ideology that works in theory but not in practice.

I'll tell you the difference. We've tried stunted and cramped versions of libertarianism in the world, and we've tried versions of Marxism that were less stunted and cramped because they had all the levers of power. I am willing to match England, the United States, Canada, and Hong Kong, which are all approximately libertarian societies, against the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba any day.

In my view, the farther you go toward actual, existing libertarianism, the closer you get to a society with prosperity, economic growth, social dynamism, and social harmony. More and more countries in the world are moving toward broadly libertarian principles. Freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of travel, freedom of movement, freedom of occupation. Sometimes we forget how different these things are than what went before. Economic and personal freedom, and the extension of the promise of the Declaration of Independence to more and more people -- to black people, to women, to gay people -- all of those things are trying libertarianism in real life, and I think it works pretty well.

Can someone like Rand Paul win a national election? Won't he get painted as weak on national defense by his political opponents?

It's not clear that a strongly libertarian, noninterventionist program could command a majority. But I think a mildly noninterventionist retrenchment, and [proposing to] do a better job of protecting people's privacy, could be a viable political alternative. I do think the reaction to the NSA spying and Americans' weariness with the wars in the Mideast is changing that game.

You say people want more freedom, but the counterargument is that people really want the welfare state. They don't want Social Security and Medicare taken away or cut. Doesn't that limit the political viability of libertarianism?

Certainly people on Social Security and people who anticipate being on Social Security are supportive of it.

Isn't that everyone?

Well, I'm not sure people your age think of themselves as future Social Security recipients. You might be thinking, "I want someone taking care of my parents." But people want economic growth. They want low taxes. They also like people to give them stuff. So part of the political argument is which side wins those battles. It changes. Reagan did say we have to rein in spending and government is the problem right now, and he won a big victory twice. It's also true that he didn't really touch Social Security or Medicare.

He tried to change Social Security, and he paid a big price for it politically and changed his tune.

That's right. So those things are tough. For a libertarian policy wonk, that is a very frustrating thing. We actually have a plan that would work to put Social Security on a sound footing and eventually liberate people from being reliant on government, and we couldn't even get a hearing in Congress for it. And Social Security is so much easier a topic than Medicare.

You mean in policy terms it's an easier fix, not that it's easier to attack politically.

Right, it's a much easier problem to solve. With Medicare, the unfunded liabilities are far greater, transforming it into a privately funded system of accounts is much more difficult. So absolutely the entitlement state is a huge challenge for libertarians in any modern welfare state. But it's also true that people don't like paying what it takes to pay for these programs in Europe, and it's getting to be that way here.

The political battle is to get people to recognize that the cost in taxes and lost economic growth is more than they are willing to pay for an expanded welfare state. The current welfare state is a tougher argument. In Europe, they are running into walls. They're going to have to do something, and some of them have. Sweden has significantly reined in their welfare state. They figured out that they can't afford it.

Are there other libertarian-leaning politicians you're interested in besides Rand Paul?

One of the problems for libertarians is they aren't much interested in politics. The three most libertarian governors of past decade -- the brilliant lawyer William Weld, the true citizen-politician Gary Johnson [ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/pipe-dreamer/309079/ ], and the eccentric entertainer Jesse Ventura [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/06/jesse-ventura-on-how-democrats-and-republicans-are-like-crips-and-bloods/258652/ ] -- all walked away from politics. In the House you have Justin Amash [of Michigan] and Thomas Massie [of Kentucky] -- I once did a study that determined that Kentucky was the least libertarian state in the country by several criteria. Then they elected Rand Paul and Thomas Massie, so maybe I have to reconsider.

There are a few other members of Congress who say they are inspired by Ron Paul. Then there are people on the conservative side like [Pennsylvania Senator] Pat Toomey, who is a strong fiscal conservative, even though he would probably vote wrongly in my view on things like gay marriage and the Iraq war. Jeff Flake is a very good fiscal conservative. Mike Lee has interesting ideas on the Constitution and the role of the federal government.

I keep hearing about libertarian Democrats out West, like [Senator Jon] Tester and [former Governor Brian] Schweitzer in Montana -- they're good on privacy issues and gun rights. [Oregon Senator] Ron Wyden is doing a great job on privacy even though I disagree with him about other things. [Texas Rep.] Beto O'Rourke spoke at a conference of ours on drug policy in Latin America. I assume on other issues he's a standard big-government Democrat, but he does want to change the drug war. [Colorado Rep.] Jared Polis is a guy who I think is very interested in personal freedom and civil liberties issues.

Is Ted Cruz a libertarian?

No, Ted Cruz is a two-fisted Goldwater conservative. He's very strong on national sovereignty issues in a way libertarians tend not to be, aggressively so. He defended the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the Texas state Capitol, which to me smacks of entangling government and religion. He is very strongly against gay marriage. I am glad to see him standing up against Obamacare and showing up on filibuster night to spell Rand Paul for a little while. He's a smart guy. But I wouldn't call him a libertarian.

What should a libertarian candidate be running on? I would say fiscal conservatism and social tolerance. Get the government out of people's lives. Why do you care who marries someone else? But that's one thing that Rand Paul can't run on in a Republican primary. He's not in favor of marriage equality.

He says he would leave it up to the states to define marriage.

That was a defensively softer-edges libertarian position until the Supreme Court cases. Six years ago, that was a libertarian position because it meant you were not in favor of a federal amendment [banning gay marriage nationally]. These days, it's pretty clear there's not going to be a federal amendment banning marriage equality. What there may be is a Supreme Court decision striking down marriage bans [in the states] on equal protection grounds. So Rand Paul is still behind the curve on that issue. He's where President Obama was about a year ago, so it's not like he's stuck in the 1950s.

And the social conservatives see his position as opening the door to gay marriage in the states.

From their point of view, they're still pushing for a federal marriage amendment, but that's not going to happen. And didn't Rand Paul do a radio interview [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/06/27/rand-paul-invokes-bestiality-while-discussing-gay-marriage-walks-it-back/ ] after the Supreme Court decision where he talked about people marrying dogs? [Ed. note: Paul later said [ http://wfpl.org/post/senator-rand-paul-says-bestiality-comments-were-misunderstood ] he had been joking.] He's trying to do a balancing act. He doesn't think you can win the Republican presidential nomination without the religious right, or at least not with them united against him, You don't have to get all of them. And he probably believes, along with Karl Rove, that you can't put together a 51 percent Republican majority without making sure Christian conservatives show up and vote.

What about the many religious voters there are in America? What does libertarianism have to say to them?

If somebody's Catholic values inform what they believe, on welfare or marriage or whatever, that's their business. They can say in public, "God says we should take care of our neighbors" -- that's fine, that's legitimate. What's not legitimate to me, and goes against the American Constitution, the American tradition, is to entangle government policy with religion. We don't have an established church. We don't have a religious test for public office. That's why I am against things like school prayer -- that is an establishment of religion. And if your best arguments for banning gay marriage are, in fact, religious, then I think you can expect a limited reception in the courts, because the courts want to know what does the Constitution say. They're not going to care what your religion says.

You're rather dismissive of the Libertarian Party. Why is that?

It appears that Americans are not much interested in third parties, especially third parties not led by existing political figures or celebrities. Ross Perot was a celebrity and a billionaire. George Wallace was an existing political figure with a regional base. [1980 independent presidential candidate] John Anderson was kind of an interesting one, but still, he got 7 percent of the vote. That's not exactly what you'd call successful. And none of them created anything lasting, they were just individuals.

What's next?

I believe that that libertarian policies work, and that over long periods of time we figure out what works. A whole lot of things we have tried -- actual socialism, established churches, rigid class distinctions, racial distinctions, even 90 percent income tax rates -- have fallen by the wayside. A lot of really bad, unlibertarian policies have fallen by the wayside, and I think we will broadly, gradually move in a more libertarian direction over the next 100 years.

Over the next five or 10 years, I don't know. There could always be another 9/11, another financial crisis. Looking at what the Fed's doing, I can't believe there won't be inflation that won't significantly affect our politics, but that's not showing up yet, at least in consumer prices.

My guess is that Rand Paul will make a serious bid for the Republican nomination. If had to bet on Rand Paul versus the field, I'd take the field. After that, I don't know. There will be more libertarian-leaning politicians in Congress, but we're a long way from being a caucus at this point. What's more important is what do the Republicans and Democrats who actually get elected want to do. I hope they will recognize that the country wants to move in a more tolerant direction on marriage and marijuana, and that we are overextended financially and need to restrain spending and the entitlement state.

Copyright © 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/08/americas-libertarian-moment/278785/ [with comments]


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Court rejects appeals from imprisoned former Iowa GOP prodigy

by Grant Rodgers
11:20 AM, Aug 21, 2013

An appeal from a former Iowa GOP up-and-comer serving a 60-year prison sentence failed to prove alleged errors made by the district court during his second trial, the Iowa Court of Appeals said today.

A jury found Matthew Elliott, 32, guilty in April 2012 of child endangerment causing death and willful injury causing serious injury in the 2008 death of 7-month old Alexis Gilbert. Elliot was first tried and convicted of the crime in 2009, but the Iowa Supreme Court granted him a new trial based on concerns surrounding improper testimony.

Today’s ruling is the most recent legal development in the story of Elliott’s downfall. A former student body president at Drake University and organizer with the Republican Party of Iowa, his legal battles began with an arrest in 2006 for child pornography.

Over the next year, he was charged when he lied about his address when registering as a sex offender and was arrested for drunken driving and assault.

The infant Alexis Gilbert, daughter of then 16-year-old Kristina Gilbert, died on Jan. 21, 2008. Elliott lived with members of the Gilbert family in Urbandale and West Des Moines after he cut off an electronic tracking device and left the Fort Des Moines Residential Facility.

At trial, prosecutors argued the infant died after Elliott, who often acted as the child’s caretaker, slammed her against the floor and broke her skull.

In his appeal, Elliott argued the court in his second trial should have let his defense present information surrounding a 2003 investigation by the Iowa Department of Human Services. The investigation looked at Kristina Gilbert’s mother and brother, Jean Christensen and Matthew Gilbert, both of whom testified for the prosecution in Elliott’s second trial.

In the 2003 incident, another infant granddaughter of Jean Christensen’s suffered a fractured skull. Matthew Gilbert, then 15, told law enforcement the child rolled off a bunk bed.

The 2003 incident gave Christensen and her family insight into how such investigations of child abuse are handled by law enforcement, Elliott argued in his appeal. That information could’ve been used by the family to point blame for Alexis Gilbert’s death on him, he said.

The district court, however, ruled against letting Elliott use the incident in his defense. In its opinion released today, the court of appeals agreed, finding the incident showed no pattern of deceit on the part of the family.

“Elliott has never explained how anything Jean, Matthew, and possibly Kristina learned during the 2003 investigation would have further contributed to his theory the three conspired to blame him for Alexis’s death or led to a bias on the parts of Jean, Matthew, or Kristina,” the opinion said.

In its ruling, the appeals court disagreed with another of Elliott’s claims that prosecutors shouldn’t have been allowed to question him on his past convictions for failing to comply with the sex offender registry laws.

However, the questions from prosecutors were appropriately worded at the trial, the appeals court said.

In its last finding, the court today disregarded Elliott’s final claim that there was too little evidence to find him guilty in the case. His defense was allowed to present alternative theories at trial, and they were “clearly rejected” by the jury, the court said.

In 2008, when Elliott was first charged with Gilbert’s death, Iowa Republicans expressed confusion about the bright young man’s fall from grace.

“This has been really puzzling,” Dave Roederer, director of the Iowa Department of Management, told the Register at the time. “Obviously, what has taken place has been just a horrible situation for everybody involved. Still, I am reminded of the Matt Elliott I knew, and this is like two separate people.”

Copyright © 2013 www.desmoinesregister.com

http://blogs.desmoinesregister.com/dmr/index.php/2013/08/21/court-rejects-appeals-from-imprisoned-former-iowa-gop-prodigy/article [no comments yet]


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Liz Cheney: Terrorists' 'Recruitment Goes On Through Mosques'
08/27/2013
U.S. Senate candidate Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) [ http://www.cheneyforwyoming.com/ ] made her presence felt at a Tea Party function on Saturday, revealing some thoughts on mosques and terrorism in America.
The Casper Star-Tribune reports that Cheney appeared [ http://trib.com/news/state-and-regional/govt-and-politics/cheney-attacks-enzi-at-tea-party-event-in-emblem-wyo/article_7dca1689-0e4a-521c-8cc8-ec1b47058951.html ] at an event in Emblem, Wyo., where those two topics emerged into the conversation. According to the paper, Wayne Simmons made comments earlier during the event suggesting that growth of mosques in America is leading to more recruitment outlets for terror groups.
“I do think that we know that recruitment goes on through mosques,” Cheney said in response, the Star-Tribune reported.
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/26/liz-cheney-terrorists_n_3816610.html [with embedded video reports, and comments]


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NYPD Secretly Designated Entire Mosques As Terrorism Organizations

By ADAM GOLDMAN and MATT APUZZO
08/28/13 03:27 PM ET EDT

NEW YORK -- The New York Police Department has secretly labeled entire mosques as terrorist organizations, a designation that allows police to use informants to record sermons and spy on imams, often without specific evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

Designating an entire mosque as a terrorism enterprise means that anyone who attends prayer services there is a potential subject of an investigation and fair game for surveillance.

Since the 9/11 attacks, the NYPD has opened at least a dozen "terrorism enterprise investigations" into mosques, according to interviews and confidential police documents. The TEI, as it is known, is a police tool intended to help investigate terrorist cells and the like.

Many TEIs stretch for years, allowing surveillance to continue even though the NYPD has never criminally charged a mosque or Islamic organization with operating as a terrorism enterprise.

The documents show in detail how, in its hunt for terrorists, the NYPD investigated countless innocent New York Muslims and put information about them in secret police files. As a tactic, opening an enterprise investigation on a mosque is so potentially invasive that while the NYPD conducted at least a dozen, the FBI never did one, according to interviews with federal law enforcement officials.

The strategy has allowed the NYPD to send undercover officers into mosques and attempt to plant informants on the boards of mosques and at least one prominent Arab-American group in Brooklyn, whose executive director has worked with city officials, including Bill de Blasio, a front-runner for mayor.

De Blasio said Wednesday on Twitter that he was "deeply troubled NYPD has labelled entire mosques & Muslim orgs terror groups with seemingly no leads. Security AND liberty make us strong."

The revelations about the NYPD's massive spying operations are in documents recently obtained by The Associated Press and part of a new book, "Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD's Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden's Final Plot Against America." The book by AP reporters Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman is based on hundreds of previously unpublished police files and interviews with current and former NYPD, CIA and FBI officials.

The disclosures come as the NYPD is fighting off lawsuits accusing it of engaging in racial profiling while combating crime. Earlier this month, a judge ruled that the department's use of the stop-and-frisk tactic was unconstitutional.

The American Civil Liberties Union and two other groups have sued, saying the Muslim spying programs are unconstitutional and make Muslims afraid to practice their faith without police scrutiny.

Both Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly have denied those accusations. Speaking Wednesday on MSNBC's Morning Joe, Kelly reminded people that his intelligence-gathering programs began in the wake of 9/11.

"We follow leads wherever they take us," Kelly said. "We're not intimidated as to wherever that lead takes us. And we're doing that to protect the people of New York City."
___

The NYPD did not limit its operations to collecting information on those who attended the mosques or led prayers. The department sought also to put people on the boards of New York's Islamic institutions to fill intelligence gaps.

One confidential NYPD document shows police wanted to put informants in leadership positions at mosques and other organizations, including the Arab American Association of New York in Brooklyn, a secular social-service organization.

Linda Sarsour, the executive director, said her group helps new immigrants adjust to life in the U.S. It was not clear whether the department was successful in its plans.

The document, which appears to have been created around 2009, was prepared for Kelly and distributed to the NYPD's debriefing unit, which helped identify possible informants.

Around that time, Kelly was handing out medals to the Arab American Association's soccer team, Brooklyn United, smiling and congratulating its players for winning the NYPD's soccer league.

Sarsour, a Muslim who has met with Kelly many times, said she felt betrayed.

"It creates mistrust in our organizations," said Sarsour, who was born and raised in Brooklyn. "It makes one wonder and question who is sitting on the boards of the institutions where we work and pray."
___

Before the NYPD could target mosques as terrorist groups, it had to persuade a federal judge to rewrite rules governing how police can monitor speech protected by the First Amendment.

The rules stemmed from a 1971 lawsuit, dubbed the Handschu case after lead plaintiff Barbara Handschu, over how the NYPD spied on protesters and liberals during the Vietnam War era.

David Cohen, a former CIA executive who became NYPD's deputy commissioner for intelligence in 2002, said the old rules didn't apply to fighting against terrorism.

Cohen told the judge that mosques could be used "to shield the work of terrorists from law enforcement scrutiny by taking advantage of restrictions on the investigation of First Amendment activity."

NYPD lawyers proposed a new tactic, the TEI, that allowed officers to monitor political or religious speech whenever the "facts or circumstances reasonably indicate" that groups of two or more people were involved in plotting terrorism or other violent crime.

The judge rewrote the Handschu rules in 2003. In the first eight months under the new rules, the NYPD's Intelligence Division opened at least 15 secret terrorism enterprise investigations, documents show. At least 10 targeted mosques.

Doing so allowed police, in effect, to treat anyone who attends prayer services as a potential suspect. Sermons, ordinarily protected by the First Amendment, could be monitored and recorded.

Among the mosques targeted as early as 2003 was the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge.

"I have never felt free in the United States. The documents tell me I am right," Zein Rimawi, one of the Bay Ridge mosque's leaders, said after reviewing an NYPD document describing his mosque as a terrorist enterprise.

Rimawi, 59, came to the U.S. decades ago from the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

"Ray Kelly, shame on him," he said. "I am American."

It was not immediately clear whether the NYPD targeted mosques outside of New York City specifically using TEIs. The AP had previously reported that Masjid Omar in Paterson, N.J., was identified as a target for surveillance in a 2006 NYPD report.
___

The NYPD believed the tactics were necessary to keep the city safe, a view that sometimes put it at odds with the FBI.

In August 2003, Cohen asked the FBI to install eavesdropping equipment inside a mosque called Masjid al-Farooq, including its prayer room.

Al-Farooq had a long history of radical ties. Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian sheik who was convicted of plotting to blow up New York City landmarks, once preached briefly at Al-Farooq. Invited preachers raged against Israel, the United States and the Bush administration's war on terror.

One of Cohen's informants said an imam from another mosque had delivered $30,000 to an al-Farooq leader, and the NYPD suspected the money was for terrorism.

But Amy Jo Lyons, the FBI assistant special agent in charge for counterterrorism, refused to bug the mosque. She said the federal law wouldn't permit it.

The NYPD made other arrangements. Cohen's informants began to carry recording devices into mosques under investigation. They hid microphones in wristwatches and the electronic key fobs used to unlock car doors.

Even under a TEI, a prosecutor and a judge would have to approve bugging a mosque. But the informant taping was legal because New York law allows any party to record a conversation, even without consent from the others. Like the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge, the NYPD never demonstrated in court that al-Farooq was a terrorist enterprise but that didn't stop the police from spying on the mosques for years.

And under the new Handschu guidelines, no one outside the NYPD could question the secret practice.

Martin Stolar, one of the lawyers in the Handschu case, said it's clear the NYPD used enterprise investigations to justify open-ended surveillance. The NYPD should only tape conversations about building bombs or plotting attacks, he said.

"Every Muslim is a potential terrorist? It is completely unacceptable," he said. "It really tarnishes all of us and tarnishes our system of values."
___

Al-Ansar Center, a windowless Sunni mosque, opened in Brooklyn several years ago, attracting young Arabs and South Asians. NYPD officers feared the mosque was a breeding ground for terrorists, so informants kept tabs on it.

One NYPD report noted that members were fixing up the basement, turning it into a gym.

"They also want to start Jiujitsu classes," it said.

The NYPD was particularly alarmed about Mohammad Elshinawy, 26, an Islamic teacher at several New York mosques, including Al-Ansar. Elshinawy was a Salafist – a follower of a puritanical Islamic movement – whose father was an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center attacks, according to NYPD documents.

The FBI also investigated whether Elshinawy recruited people to wage violent jihad overseas. But the two agencies investigated him very differently.

The FBI closed the case after many months without any charges. Federal investigators never infiltrated Al-Ansar.

"Nobody had any information the mosque was engaged in terrorism activities," a former federal law enforcement official recalled, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the investigation.

The NYPD wasn't convinced. A 2008 surveillance document described Elshinawy as "a young spiritual leader (who) lectures and gives speeches at dozens of venues" and noted, "He has orchestrated camping trips and paintball trips."

The NYPD deemed him a threat in part because "he is so highly regarded by so many young and impressionable individuals."

No part of Elshinawy's life was out of bounds. His mosque was the target of a TEI. The NYPD conducted surveillance at his wedding. An informant recorded the wedding, and police videotaped everyone who came and went.

"We have nothing on the lucky bride at this time but hopefully will learn about her at the service," one lieutenant wrote.

Four years later, the NYPD was still watching Elshinawy without charging him. He is now a plaintiff in the ACLU lawsuit, which was also filed by the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility project at CUNY School of Law and the New York Civil Liberties Union.

"These new NYPD spying disclosures confirm the experiences and worst fears of New York's Muslims," ACLU lawyer Hina Shamsi said. "From houses of worship to a wedding, there's no area of New York Muslim religious or personal life that the NYPD has not invaded through its bias-based surveillance policy."
___

Online: Documents

TEI Discontinuance: http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/documents/nypd/TEI_Discontinuance.pdf ( http://apne.ws/146zqF9 )

Informant Profiles: http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/documents/nypd/Informant_Profiles.pdf ( http://apne.ws/1aNfuyH )

Elshinawy Surveillance: http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/documents/nypd/Elshinawy_Surveillance.pdf ( http://apne.ws/15fau4D )

Handschu Minutes: http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/documents/nypd/Handschu_Minutes.pdf ( http://apne.ws/1cenpD6 )

© 2013 Associated Press

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/28/nypd-spying-mosques_n_3827567.html [with embedded video report, and comments] [(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=91503652 (and any future following)]


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Kansas School Takes Down Five Pillars Of Islam Display After Coming Under Fire

By Rebecca Klein
Posted: 08/20/2013 5:29 pm EDT | Updated: 08/21/2013 7:24 pm EDT

A Kansas elementary school has taken down a hallway display depicting the Five Pillars of Islam [ http://www.kansas.com/2013/08/19/2951756/bulletin-board-at-wichita-school.html ] after it caused an Internet controversy and complaints from parents.

The bulletin display at Minneha Core Knowledge Magnet Elementary [ http://minneha.usd259.org/ ] greeted students on their first day of school last Wednesday, the Wichita Eagle reports. After a photo of the bulletin was posted on the Internet, several conservative blogs [ http://conservativefiringline.com/kansas-elementary-school-posts-five-pillars-of-islam-on-wall/ ], Facebook pages [ https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=544962645558769&set=a.351212731600429.92717.350771908311178&type=1 ] and a state politician accused the school of promoting Islam to children.

“If you’re going to talk about Islam and make it sound like it’s another one of those religions that needs to be understood and contemplated by mankind, there’s a serious misunderstanding,” state lawmaker Rep. Dennis Hedke told the Kansas Watchdog. He told the outlet that he was "appalled" when he heard about the display [ http://watchdog.org/101810/kansas-lawmaker-appalled-by-islamic-display-in-wichita-school/ ].

In response to the controversy, school administrators have agreed to temporarily take down the display. Still, they say that the photo of the bulletin was taken out of context.

“There is also a painting of the Last Supper hanging in the school as part of the study of art and the Renaissance period [ http://radio.foxnews.com/toddstarnes/top-stories/public-school-promotes-5-pillars-of-islam.html ],” a school representative told Fox News. “A photo [taken] of a bulletin board without context is misleading, and some have taken it out of context without having all the information.”

At the school, students receive instruction on the five major world religions –- Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam -- as part of their “Core Knowledge magnet curriculum,” according to a letter the school’s principal sent to parents Monday. In the letter, the school’s principal explained that she decided to take down the display until classes begin to cover world religions [ http://media.graytvinc.com/documents/Minneha+parent+letter+8-19-2013+_2_.pdf ].

“There are some who took offense to the bulletin board without understanding Core Knowledge curriculum, and this offense resulted in numerous phone calls, e-mails and media inquiries,” principal Linda Hope wrote. “In order to alleviate the distraction to our students and teachers, the display was taken down last week until this particular unit for 4th graders is taught in early October.”

The controversy comes a month after Florida Rep. Ritch Workman said a textbook used throughout the state has a pro-Islam bias [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/30/ritch-workman-islam-textbook_n_3678927.html ]. According to Workman, the book dedicates 36 pages to the history of Islam and only several paragraphs to Christianity.

"When you report history truly, then you report those horrible things that we did in the name of Christ or that the Jews did. And you should also report that in the name of Islam [ http://www.wesh.com/news/central-florida/brevard-county/florida-lawmaker-text-book-too-favorable-to-islam/-/11788124/21151496/-/item/0/-/6h2vymz/-/index.html ]," Workman told local outlet WESH-TV.

Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/20/kansas-school-pillars-of-islam_n_3786594.html [with embedded video report, and comments]


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N.C. governor allows anti-Shariah bill to become law


Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina

Omar Sacirbey | Aug 26, 2013

(RNS) North Carolina became the seventh state to prohibit its judges from considering Islamic law after Gov. Pat McCrory allowed the bill to become law without formally signing it.

McCory, a Republican, called the law “unnecessary,” but declined to veto it. The bill became law on Sunday (Aug. 25).

The state joins Arizona, Kansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Tennessee.

Supporters hailed the bill as an important safeguard that protects the American legal system from foreign laws that are incompatible with the U.S. Constitution, while critics argued that the bill’s only purpose is to whip-up anti Muslim hatred because the Constitution already overrides foreign laws.

“The intent behind this law is bigoted and it is intended to alienate the Muslim community,” said Jibril Hough, a spokesman for the Islamic Center of Charlotte.

The North Carolina ban is limited to family law; bans in other states are broader, applying to commercial law, contract law and other types of laws.

Lawyers specializing in Islamic law said such legislation could make it harder for Muslim women married in Islamic countries under Shariah law to obtain alimony and child support payments because husbands will be able to argue they were never married. Judges will be prohibited from recognizing those Shariah marriage contracts.

“These bogus attempts to defile Islam have a negative effect on Muslim youth who feel marginalized and discriminated against,” said Khalilah Sabra, executive director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at the Muslim American Foundation in Raleigh, N.C.

In Missouri, Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon vetoed a similar anti-Shariah bill in June [ http://www.religionnews.com/2013/06/04/citing-risk-to-adoptions-missouri-gov-vetoes-anti-shariah-bill/ ]. Lawmakers there have until September to mount an override effort.

© 2013 Religion News LLC

http://www.religionnews.com/2013/08/26/n-c-governor-allows-anti-shariah-bill-to-become-law/ [with comments]


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Terry Jones Wants To Burn Qurans Again, Florida Town Tells Him To Take His Trolling Elsewhere

08/21/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/20/terry-jones-quran_n_3787151.html [with comments]


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The right’s bigoted crusade against Al Jazeera America


(Credit: Reuters/Jason Reed)

Jingoists aren't so angry about other foreign-owned media like Fox News and its Saudi co-owner. Here's the reason

By David Sirota
Tuesday, Aug 27, 2013 01:03 PM CDT

“The Muslims are coming!” That is the tongue-in-cheek name of a new documentary by Muslim comedians [ http://themuslimsarecoming.com/ ]. But it is also the deadly serious shriek echoing through the American right in response to the launch of Al Jazeera America. Like Dr. Emmett Brown’s distraught warning that bazooka-wielding Arab terrorists are stalking the palatial suburbs (“The Libyans [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2RvT27lYmc (next below)]!”),

conservatives [ http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/Outside-View/2013/08/20/Outside-View-The-Gore-ing-of-America/UPI-14381376971380/ ] are [ http://www.aim.org/aim-column/interview-with-cliff-kincaid-stopping-al-jazeera-america/ ] in [ http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/vernon/130218 ] a full-on [ http://www.carbonated.tv/news/fox-news-calls-al-jazeera-a-mouthpiece-for-osama-bin-laden-video ] frenzy [ https://twitter.com/chuckwoolery/status/369902044045275137 ], insinuating that Al Jazeera’s entry into the U.S. cable television market is akin to an invasion by a foreign menace and, thus, represents an existential threat to U.S. national security.

Before getting to some juicier hypocrisy, let’s first ponder an obvious question: Are these Islamophobes living in the 21st century? Because I get the sense they’re still stuck somewhere in the early 1980s, not just because they seem to see the world as a cartoonish mashup of “Delta Force [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi1ZNEjEarw (next below)]”

and “Red Dawn,” but also because they apparently haven’t yet heard of that little thing called the Internet.

Had they known of that complex and now-ubiquitous network of computers, they might know that most Americans can already expose themselves to news from foreign Muslim-owned media organizations 24-7. Indeed, because the Internet is inherently boundary-less, that includes everything from the esteemed Al Jazeera English [ http://www.aljazeera.com/ ], which is widely recognized as a responsible news outlet [ http://www.aljazeera.com/pressoffice/2012/04/2012416161854868952.html ], to Al Manar [ http://www.almanar.com.lb/english/main.php ], the media organization the U.S. Treasury Department [ http://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/js4134.aspx ] has called an “arm of the Hizballah terrorist network” — and everything in between.

Now, to the hypocrisy: If the jingoistic anti-Al Jazeera saber rattlers are so angry about media outlets with foreign owners coming to the United States, where is their outrage when it comes to similar media-expansion efforts by entities connected to other countries?

For example, Australian citizen Rupert Murdoch began buying up major American newspapers like the San Antonio News-Express [ http://blog.mysanantonio.com/vault/2011/07/rupert-murdochs-1973-purchase-of-e-n/ ] and the New York Post [ http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/11673/ ]. Murdoch only became a U.S. citizen in 1985 [ http://articles.latimes.com/1985-09-04/news/mn-23112_1_rupert-murdoch ] — and that was in order to circumvent U.S. statutes restricting the amount of media a single foreign owner can control. Why aren’t the anti-Al Jazeera jingoists expressing concern that Murdoch represents a dangerous foreign infiltration of the U.S. media market?

Murdoch owns News Corp., and one of his most powerful co-owners is none other than Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal [ http://www.arabnews.com/economy/prince-alwaleed-murdoch-discuss-strategic-alliance ], who owns the largest amount of company stock next to Murdoch. Considering the rhetoric about Al Jazeera America, why haven’t we once [ http://townhall.com/columnists/dianawest/2013/01/11/is-saudi-prince-steering-news-corp-coverage-n1486794/page/full ] again [ http://thinkprogress.org/media/2010/02/10/81482/right-rebels-foxnews/ ] seen an effort by conservatives to insinuate that this means that their beloved conservative Fox News is actually a secret plot by Muslims to conquer America?

Then there is the Washington Times. In 1982, South Korean religious leader Sun Myung Moon created the newspaper, making it of the two major broadsheets in the nation’s capital. Moon’s Korea-based church has run the conservative publication for almost three decades, and now plans an expansion into cable television [ http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/mar/13/the-washington-times-extending-reach-cable-network/ ]. Why aren’t the same conservatives who are slamming Al Jazeera America also slamming the Washington Times? If they are insisting that Al Jazeera America is an unacceptable attempt by Islam to take over America, why aren’t they pointing to the Unification Church’s missionary history and claiming that the Times is an equally unacceptable attempt by that religion to take over America?

Considering the difference between the conservative reaction to Al Jazeera and the conservative reaction to these other outlets, could it be that something else is really going on? Could it be that the criticism of Al Jazeera America isn’t about legitimate national security concerns or about some general fear of foreigners, but instead about both promoting conservative political ideology and about selective and specific religious persecution?

The answer is clearly “yes.”

Quite obviously, this is the right’s attempt to try to preemptively discredit a new news organization that — at least so far — seems determined to avoid parroting right-wing talking points. That defiance makes the outlet a threat to the right, and so it is being attacked.

Additionally, in a society where the ugliest [ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/06/04/guilty-plea-in-tennessee-mosque-threat/2390285/ ] Islamophobia [ http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2012/spring/fbi-dramatic-spike-in-hate-crimes-targetin ] is [ http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-10-20/politics/35280679_1_terrorist-groups-fbi-michael-p-kortan ] still pervasive [ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/20/peter_king_calls_for_increased_surveillance_of_muslims_after_boston/ ], the right wing is also using the launch of Al Jazeera America as yet another excuse to manufacture a spectacle of anti-Muslim bigotry and to vilify anything with ties to Muslims — even a news organization whose international branch has won esteemed awards for its objective journalism [ http://www.aljazeera.com/pressoffice/2012/04/2012416161854868952.html ].

In that larger campaign of Islamophobia, when ties to Muslims are found among the right’s own institutions — say, the aforementioned Saudi royal family’s connections to Fox News — conservatives are often willing to direct their Islamophobia elsewhere, as long as the institution in question loyally champions conservative political ideology and Islamophobia, which, of course, Fox News [ http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/07/11/fox-host-bob-beckels-increasingly-islamophobic/194833 ] most [ http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/07/29/reza-aslan-and-how-fox-news-islamophobia-comes/195097 ] certainly [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/fox-news-top-five-islamophobic-smears ] does [ http://thinkprogress.org/media/2011/04/21/159743/hannity-fox-news-islamophobia/ ].

Now, sure, as with any new news outlet, there are all sorts of legitimate questions about Al Jazeera America. One is: Will it eventually have a political or ideological bent? Another is: Will it bring in new voices or will it emulate other cable networks that primarily rely on a relatively small stable of establishment-vetted retreads? Still another is: Will the outlet focus only on the narrow set of DC/New York-focused stories that most other cable news outlets primarily focus on, or will Al Jazeera branch out by expanding the definition of American news? And, to my mind, the biggest question of all is: Will the network be a hard-hitting investigative news outlet or will it pull punches [ http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/14/al-jazeera-marwan-bishara-email ]?

The good news is that the initial answers to those queries seem [ http://www.thewrap.com/tv/column-post/review-al-jazeera-radically-out-touch-america-good-way-112701 ] promising [ http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/21/al-jazeera-america-news-channel ]. The even better news is that if such promising developments continue, it will be great for an American mediascape that desperately needs a revitalized Fourth Estate to start reporting far more fact-based reality and far less opinion-based political fantasy.

But perhaps best of all, if Al Jazeera America’s initially promising efforts become its standard operating procedure, then it will be awful for the fringe elements of the conservative movement — and not just because, as Stephen Colbert might say, reality tends to have a liberal bias [ http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2006/04/30/5100/reality-has-a-well-known-liberal-bias/ ]. It will also be terrible for the extreme right because the more credible, hard-hitting and journalistically effective Al Jazeera America is, the more conservatives’ criticism of the network will be exposed for what it is: an ugly combination of preemptive ideological thuggery and old-school bigotry.

Copyright © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc. (emphasis in original)

http://www.salon.com/2013/08/27/the_rights_bigoted_crusade_against_al_jazeera_america/ [with comments]


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Newest ‘Values Voters’ adversary to America: The Emergent Church.


Tony Jones, left, and Mark Scandrette portray traveling evangelists circa 1908 in the Church Basement Roadshow, a light-hearted tour performed by leaders of Emergent Village.
Religion News Service photo courtesy Doug Pagitt

Sarah Pulliam Bailey | Aug 27, 2013

(RNS) Christian conservatives who think Satan is using communism and Islam to bring down America can add a new “adversary” to the list: the Emergent Church movement.

A portion of the upcoming Values Voter Summit in Washington will stray from its usual focus on politics and consider the Emergent Church as one of three “channels the adversary is using to bring America down [ http://www.valuesvotersummit.org/ ].” Art Ally, president of The Timothy Plan, a Florida-based mutual fund company devoted to “biblically responsible investing,” will lead the breakout session.

“Why would Satan use Communism? It’s a godless form of government,” said Ally. “Why would Satan use Islam? Same reason. It’s not a religion. It’s a movement to dominate the world under the guise of religion. The Emergent Church plays right into that by weakening further our church community.”

The Emergent (or Emerging) Church was a hot topic a decade ago as authors and pastors like Brian McLaren and Tony Jones challenged churches to adapt to a postmodern culture, but the movement never organized itself well, and the debate surrounding it eventually died down.

“The Emerging Church was founded to get the evangelical church to take art, social justice and other what might be considered progressive issues more seriously. It was also founded to get the Mainline church to loosen their neckties a little bit,” Jones said.

“If we had one one-thousandth of the adherence of either of communism or Islam, we’d be doing pretty well.”

Jones was surprised by the Emerging Church’s inclusion in the conference, given that the movement has largely gone under the radar.

“When I first saw this, I thought it was a headline from The Onion,” Jones said. “Some people say the Emerging Church is dead, other people say the Emerging Church has spread so far it’s just been absorbed into the fabric of the American church, so maybe that’s what frightens these guys.”

But what Ally considers to be part of the Emergent Church might include a wider definition than what Jones and McLaren would. While hesitant to name names, Ally suggested that megachurch pastors Rick Warren, Bill Hybels and recently retired pastor John Piper could be considered emergent.

“These guys don’t even talk about sin for fear it’s driving away the postmodern generation,” Ally said. “The Emergent Church has watered down biblical Christianity to the point that John the Baptist would have been shocked.”

Many theologians, however, would likely not include Warren, Hybels and Piper in the Emergent camp. Piper, for example, has been critical of the Emergent Church, saying [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkGq5A4QEjg (next below)]

it is “going away from the gospel.”

Either way, the movement could be considered sputtering, said Scot McKnight, a New Testament scholar at Northern Seminary in Lombard, Ill.

“It’s an unaware perception of what’s going on in the church today,” McKnight said. “I’m thinking this is going to appeal to people who are 70 and above.”

The Timothy Plan has been featured in Christianity Today [ http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/1999/september6/9ta028.html ] and World magazine [ http://www.worldmag.com/2013/05/investing_your_values ], which called it the “granddaddy of evangelical investment funds.”

The mutual fund company, which has a portfolio of about $700 million, avoids investing in companies that it deems contrary to Scripture. For instance, it declines to invest in Starbucks because of the company’s stance on gay rights.

The first 200 attendees at Ally’s breakout session will receive complimentary copies of Curtis Bowers’ DVD on Communism, Paul Blair’s DVD on Islam and Roger Oakland’s book “Faith Undone.”

The Family Research Council’s annual Values Voter Summit is seen as a platform for Republican and Tea Party luminaries to reach politically minded social conservatives. Confirmed speakers [ http://www.valuesvotersummit.org/speakers ] this year include Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.; Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis.; Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.; Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn.; and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

A spokesman for FRC said that those who sponsor breakout panels choose their own content.

In 2007, the summit hosted a debate [ http://www.frcaction.org/get.cfm?i=PR07H01 ] between Sojourners founder Jim Wallis and Richard Land, then-president of the Southern Baptists’ Ethics and Religious Commission, but it has generally strayed away from theological debates.

“Aspects of Emergent have become popular in Mainline Protestantism, and more regularized in pockets of evangelicalism,” said Daniel Treier, a theology professor at Wheaton College outside Chicago. “I would speculate that the Values Voters are up in arms because of some prominent Emergent tensions over sexual ethics, its general aversion to right-wing culture wars, and thus its perceived tendency to go Democrat.”

© 2013 Religion News LLC

http://www.religionnews.com/2013/08/27/newest-values-voters-adversary-to-america-the-emergent-church/ [with comments]


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Hospital Continues to Fight Amish Family’s Choice to Stop Girl’s Chemotherapy


Doctors believe that chemotherapy would increase 10-year-old, Sarah Hershberger's survival rate from cancer up to 85 percent. But her parents are still turning to natural remedies.
(Photo : Flickr/ srqpix)

Cheri Cheng
Update Date: Aug 29, 2013 04:00 PM EDT

When it comes to medical care, doctors must provide patients with all of the treatment options available in order to maximize survival rates. Even though doctors can press for certain therapies that promise good results, the decision to pursue these options still lies in the hands of the patients, or the patients' parents if they are under aged. However, sometimes the parents might not know what is best for their children. In a recent medical case in Ohio, a hospital is still fighting an Amish family's decision to stop chemotherapy for their 10-year-old daughter.

The young girl, Sarah Hershberger, was diagnosed with leukemia earlier this year. After discovering tumors on her neck, chest and kidneys, she began chemotherapy, which her parents consented to at the Akron Children's Hospital. After one month of chemotherapy, Sarah's tumors had shrunk. However, she was also suffering from the nasty side effects of the chemotherapy. After witnessing the pain she was going through, Sarah's parents decided to stop the chemotherapy and turn to natural remedies.

"We've seen how sick it makes her," Andy Hershberger said to ABC News [ http://abcnews.go.com/US/hospital-battling-amish-familys-decision-end-girls-chemotherapy/story?id=20102874 ]. "Our belief is the natural stuff will do just as much as that stuff if it's God's will. She would have more suffering doing chemo than not."

After the parents stopped the treatment, the hospital sued the parents for temporary guardianship of Sarah in July. According to doctors, with the chemotherapy, Sarah's survival rate is around 85 percent. Without the treatment, she could die within the year. At the juvenile courts, the judge from Medina County in northeast Ohio ruled that Sarah's parents had the right to stop treatment. After appealing this ruling, on this past Tuesday, an appeals court ruled that the juvenile court must reconsider its decision.

"I believe there can be no doubt that it is in her best interest to have chemotherapy and have a chance to live a full life," Maria Schimer, the hospital attorney lobbying to take over Sarah's care said.

As the hospital awaits the decision, Sarah remains out of the hospital without care.

Copyright 2013 Counsel&Heal

http://www.counselheal.com/articles/6538/20130829/hospital-continues-fight-amish-family-s-choice-stop-girl-chemotherapy.htm [no comments yet]


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UPDATED: Hospital wins appeal in Amish girl guardianship case

Filed by Nick Glunt August 28th, 2013

Akron’s Children Hospital is getting a second chance to gain partial guardianship of a 10-year-old Amish girl with cancer whose parents stopped chemotherapy.

The 5th District Court of Appeals on Tuesday overturned Medina County Juvenile and Probate Judge John J. Lohn’s ruling from July in favor of the girl’s parents. The 5th District heard the case because the 9th District judges recused themselves.

Lohn has since retired. His successor, Judge Kevin W. Dunn, will hear the case.

Limited guardianship would grant hospital attorney and registered nurse Maria Schimer the authority to make medical decisions for the girl, Sarah Hershberger, instead of her parents, Andy and Anna Hershberger, of Homer Township.

Lohn had ruled the hospital failed to show the girl’s parents were irresponsible.

“The court cannot deprive these parents of their right to make medical decisions for their daughter because there is not a scintilla of evidence showing the parents are unfit,” Lohn wrote. “There was no basis in law and no basis in fact to file this action.”

In rejecting the ruling, the appellate court stated that Lohn “failed to even consider” that a person filing for limited guardianship simply needs to prove they’re acting in the child’s best interest.

“There is no requirement the trial court find the parents to be unfit or unsuitable before appointing a guardian on this ground,” the appeals judges wrote.

The judges also said they were glad the court and attorneys worked quickly on the appeal. Most appeals take more than six months to resolve, but this one took less than a month.

The case began when Sarah was taken to the hospital with tumors on a kidney and visible ones on her neck and chest, according to court records.

The parents at first accepted chemotherapy, but later chose natural medicine, including herbs and vitamins.

Physicians have said Sarah will die in a year or less if she does not get treatment.

“Our goal is to ensure that this child, like all children in our care, receives the most appropriate care, based on scientific evidence,” a hospital spokeswoman said Wednesday. “Chemotherapy presents children with lymphoblastic lymphoma with their best — and essentially only — hope for survival.”

The spokeswoman stressed the hospital is not claiming the Hershbergers are unfit parents, noting the hospital isn’t seeking physical or legal custody of the girl.

“This involves a disagreement between providers and parents over what course of treatment is best for their child,” the spokeswoman said.

John Oberholtzer, the attorney for the Hershbergers, said his clients disagree with the hospital that their daughter will die without chemotherapy.

“They look at this as a religious thing,” Oberholtzer said, “and they believe this kind of thing is in the hands of God.”

In Amish culture, anything harmful to the body is shunned. He said his clients weren’t properly warned how chemotherapy would affect their daughter, so he said the negative side-effects took them by surprise.

They’d rather leave the matter to God, he said, than put their daughter through more of the “brutal treatment.”

He said the idea that a hospital could take rights away from parents is disturbing to him.

“That goes way beyond the Amish community,” he said. “Everyone’s got to look at that long and hard.”

© 2013 The Medina County Gazette

http://medinagazette.northcoastnow.com/2013/08/28/hospital-wins-appeal-in-amish-girl-guardianship-case/ [with comments]


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Court says atheist was wrongly jailed over religious rehab

Kimberly Winston | Aug 26, 2013

SAN FRANCISCO (RNS) An atheist parolee should be compensated by California after the state returned him to prison for refusing to participate in a religiously-oriented rehabilitation program, a federal court ruled Friday (Aug. 23).

A three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled that a lower court judge erred when he denied Barry A. Hazle Jr., a drug offender and an atheist, a new trial after a jury awarded him no damages.

In a move that could have wider implications, the appeals court also ordered a Sacramento district judge to consider preventing state officials from requiring parolees attend rehabilitation programs that are focused on God or a “higher power.”

Hazle was serving time for methamphetamine possession in 2007 when, as a condition of his parole, he was required to participate in a 12-step program that recognizes a higher power. Hazle, a life-long atheist and member of several secular humanist groups, informed his parole officer that he did not want to participate in the program and would prefer a secular-based program.

According to court documents, the parole officer informed Hazle the state offered no secular treatment alternatives. When Hazle entered the program but continued to object, he was arrested for violating his parole and returned to a state prison for an additional 100 days.

Secular Organizations for Sobriety [ http://www.cfiwest.org/sos/index.htm ], a 12-step program with no emphasis on God or a higher power, runs multiple programs in California, but had none near Hazle’s home in Northern California during that period.

Hazle sued, alleging his First Amendment rights had been violated. The district court agreed, citing well-established rulings supporting Hazle’s claim, but allowed to stand a jury’s conclusion that he deserved no compensation.

Friday’s ruling requires Hazle be awarded a new trial for damages and compensation.

“The jury’s verdict, which awarded Hazle no compensatory damages at all for his loss of liberty, cannot be upheld,” Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote in the court’s opinion [ http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2013/08/23/11-15354.pdf ].

“The jury simply was not entitled to refuse to award any damages for Hazle’s undisputable — and undisputed — loss of liberty, and its verdict to the contrary must be rejected.”

The case now returns to the district court in Sacramento.

© 2013 Religion News LLC

http://www.religionnews.com/2013/08/26/court-says-atheist-was-wrongly-jailed-over-religious-rehab/ [with comments]


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Ken Cuccinelli: 'I Have A Flat Position' On Birth Control


Ken Cuccinelli says he won't "touch contraception as governor" of Virginia, if elected.
(Photo by Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

By Laura Bassett
Posted: 08/29/2013 11:00 am EDT | Updated: 08/29/2013 3:21 pm EDT

In his campaign for governor, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli appears to be channeling Mitt Romney [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/16/mitt-romney-contraception_n_1972351.html ] on the issue of birth control.

Cuccinelli told voters at an Ashburn, Va., campaign event [ http://www.loudountimes.com/news/article/cuccinelli_says_government_shouldnt_legislate_birth_control432 ] on Tuesday that he "[doesn't] think government should be doing anything about birth control."

"I’m not going to touch contraception as governor," he said at the event.

Then, on Wednesday, Cuccinelli doubled down on his remarks. “I have a flat position: I’m not touching contraception while I’m governor,” the candidate told The Washington Post [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/cuccinelli-says-he-wont-limit-birth-control-expresses-mild-support-for-affordable-housing/2013/08/28/7fc077b2-1000-11e3-8cdd-bcdc09410972_print.html ]. He added that if the state legislature did send him a personhood bill, he would remove anything that could be construed to affect contraception. “I’d amend it out of the bill,” he said. “And the governor gets the last shot.”

Despite what may seem to be a clear stance, it's not apparent Cuccinelli is entirely clear on how he defines contraception. In 2007, he sponsored a bill that would give legal rights to embryos from the moment of fertilization, which would prohibit of any form of contraception (likely including IUDs [ http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2011/10/mississippi-personhood-birth-control-abortion ]) that could block a fertilized egg from implanting into the uterus. And in 2003, he urged his colleagues to vote against [ http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/836004/replies?c=1 ] a bill establishing that contraception is different from abortion.

Cuccinelli wrote [ http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/836004/replies?c=1 ] in a 2003 email to colleagues that he doesn't consider emergency contraception, or the morning-after pill, to be a form of birth control:

One particularly troublesome bill escaped the Senate today on a 24-16 vote. That was Sen. Mary Margaret Whipple’s redefinition of “contraception” as “not abortion” (SB 1104). Sounds simple enough, right? But her bill actually twists the definition in such a way that clears the way for “the morning after pill” or “emergency contraception.” These are abortion methods, not contraception. I am hopeful that this bill will be killed in the House of Delegates.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, similarly, called emergency contraceptives "abortive pills [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/02/romney-calls-morning-after-pills-abortive-says-right-to-worship-god-is-necessity/ ]" on the campaign trail in 2012.

The assertion is not supported by science. Medical experts consider emergency contraception a regular form of birth control because it delays ovulation and prevents the sperm from fertilizing the egg [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/health/research/morning-after-pills-dont-block-implantation-science-suggests.html?pagewanted=all ], thus preventing a pregnancy. The FDA recently approved the sale of the morning-after pill over the counter without age restrictions, unlike the abortion-inducing medication, RU-486.

Cuccinelli's campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Planned Parenthood Votes has released an animated video ad urging women to educate each other about the attorney general's record on reproductive rights issues.

“There is no question that the Republican ticket’s record on women’s health is the most extreme that we have ever seen in Virginia," said Cianti Stewart-Reid, executive director of Planned Parenthood's Virginia PAC. "That’s why we’re seeing Ken Cuccinelli attempting to muddy the waters on issues important to Virginia women and our health."

Watch Planned Parenthood's video [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOosQ6etocM (embedded)] below:

Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/29/ken-cuccinelli-birth-control_n_3832319.html [with (separate) embedded video report, and comments]


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Debate Over LGBT Ordinance Roils San Antonio


photo by: Owen Parry

by Jody Serrano
August 26, 2013

Updated, Aug. 26, 6:15 p.m.:

Attorney General Greg Abbott [ http://www.texastribune.org/directory/greg-abbott/ ] is the latest in a slew of Texas politicians to weigh in on a proposed San Antonio ordinance that would include lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in the city's nondiscrimination code.

Abbott in a statement Monday said he opposed the ordinance because it would stifle religious liberty and create a burden for those who hold a "traditional view on human relations." He said the proposed ordinance violates the Texas Constitution and would create discrimination instead of preventing it.

"The proposed ordinance runs contrary to the Texas Constitution, which prohibits religious tests, and also defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman," Abbott said in a statement. "This ordinance is also contrary to the clearly expressed will of the Texas Legislature."

Abbott joins a number of Republicans who have voiced disapproval [ http://www.mysanantonio.com/default/article/AG-candidates-rip-ordinance-4760279.php ] of the proposal, including the three candidates running for to replace him as attorney general — Sen. Ken Paxton [ http://www.texastribune.org/directory/ken-paxton/ ], R-McKinney; state Rep. Dan Branch [ http://www.texastribune.org/directory/dan-branch/ ], R-Dallas; and Railroad Commission Chairman Barry Smitherman [ http://www.texastribune.org/directory/barry-smitherman/ ]. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz [ http://www.texastribune.org/directory/ted-cruz/ ], R-Texas, also criticized the ordinance earlier this month.

Other cities in Texas have nondiscrimination policies that include some protections for LGBT individuals, including Austin, Houston, Dallas and Fort Worth.

The San Antonio City Council is expected to vote on the proposed ordinance Sept. 5.

Original story, Aug. 21:

A proposal to include sexual orientation and gender identity in San Antonio's nondiscrimination policy has turned the city into a new gay rights battleground.

Amid a heated citywide debate that has drawn the attention of local, state and even national politicians, the San Antonio City Council has delayed a vote on the ordinance for weeks, though it is now scheduled to come before the council on Sept. 5.

The ordinance would prevent people who have demonstrated bias toward lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender individuals from serving in city positions and prohibit the city from discriminating against employees based on sexual orientation or gender identity. It would also prevent local business owners from discriminating against LGBT individuals.

San Antonio is one of the only major cities in Texas that does not have such a nondiscrimination policy. Austin, Houston, Dallas and Fort Worth have nondiscrimination policies that include some protections for LGBT individuals.

On Tuesday, GetEQUAL Texas, a gay rights organization, issued a travel alert for all LGBT individuals traveling to San Antonio. The alert warned against "traveling alone in the city" and encouraged visitors to only patronize gay-friendly businesses and stay at hotels with specific policies preventing discrimination against LGBT people.

"Even if you're visiting San Antonio, you can be kicked out of any public place," said Jennifer Falcon, the lead organizer in San Antonio for GetEQUAL TEXAS. "We've had transgender people kicked out of the Riverwalk, kicked out of bowling allies. We even had a woman that looked too much like a man that was kicked out of H-E-B."

The advisory came days after the San Antonio Express-News published a secret recording [ http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/news_columnists/brian_chasnoff/article/Chan-reveals-views-on-homosexuality-in-secret-4736543.php ] of San Antonio City Councilwoman Elisa Chan calling homosexuality "disgusting" and saying she did not believe that people were born gay.

"You know, to be quite honest, I know this is not politically correct," Chan said during the exchange, which was caught on tape by a staffer who has since quit. "I never bought that you are born, that you are born gay. I just can't imagine it."

Chan said on Tuesday [ http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/politics/article/Elisa-Chan-defends-anti-gay-remarks-as-free-speech-4745674.php ] that her comments were taken out of context but that she stood by her opinions.

Although the state protects people from employment and educational opportunity discrimination based on age, sex, race, religion, national origin and disability, there is no statewide protection for sexual orientation or gender identity. Texas law deemed certain homosexual activity a Class C misdemeanor until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in 2003.

At the state level, measures to prevent discrimination against LGBT individuals have failed for years. State Rep. Mike Villarreal [ http://www.texastribune.org/directory/mike-villarreal/ ], D-San Antonio, and state Sen. Leticia Van de Putte [ http://www.texastribune.org/directory/leticia-van-de-putte/ ], D-San Antonio, filed bills this year that would have banned workplace discrimination, but they failed to make it out of committee.

Van de Putte said the divide in San Antonio reminded her of the fierce debate that engulfed the Legislature when it took up abortion restrictions earlier this summer, but she said she remained optimistic.

"Anytime a community goes through such an emotional issue, it's an opportunity for learning and for expanding that understanding," Van de Putte said. "In a way, this dialogue has become very public. It has become very personal at the family dinner table as well."

She said she was confident that the City Council would approve the ordinance and that she planned to reintroduce legislation on worker discrimination next session.

On Tuesday, another state lawmaker, Rep. Dan Branch [ http://www.texastribune.org/directory/dan-branch/ ] of Dallas, a Republican who is running for attorney general, also stepped into the debate, urging San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro to withdraw the ordinance [ http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local/article/AG-candidate-to-Mayor-Castro-Drop-LGBT-ordinance-4746685.php ], according to the Express-News.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz [ http://www.texastribune.org/directory/ted-cruz/ ] also weighed in on the issue earlier this month.

"Any attempt to bar an individual from public service based on a personal religious conviction is contrary to the liberties guaranteed us under our constitution and should be emphatically opposed," Cruz said in a statement. "It is encouraging to see so many Texans standing up to defend their religious freedoms in light of the misguided proposal put forth by the local city council."

Jonathan Saenz, president of the conservative group Texas Values, said the ordinance would violate religious freedom and threaten Christian businesses for standing up for their values. Saenz said it would also force local business owners into uncomfortable situations, like allowing men to use women's restrooms.

"We've seen this is other states when people that are transgender may want to go into a men's restroom one day and a women's restroom another day, and if they're not allowed in, they're going to claim discrimination," Saenz said.

At least one religious organization, the conservative Liberty Institute, has already pledged to sue the city if the ordinance is approved.

The debate has also incited fierce debate at the local level. Falcon, of GetEQUAL Texas, said religious leaders have called her Satan and have prayed for her at community input meetings. On Wednesday, hundreds of people protested outside of City Hall to urge council members to vote against the ordinance.

Eric Alva, a marine veteran who was the first American soldier injured in Iraq in 2003, spoke at the community meeting last week and was booed by hundreds in the chambers [see (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=91182450 and preceding (and any future following)]. Alva, who is gay, lost one of his legs in Iraq and spoke in favor of the ordinance.

Alva said in an interview that those who booed him should be ashamed.

"I know my God loves me because he was with me as I lay bleeding on the sands of Iraq," Alva said.

© 2013 The Texas Tribune

http://www.texastribune.org/2013/08/26/san-antonio-divided-over-proposed-lgbt-non-discrim/ [with comments]


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Daniel Hernandez Jr., Intern Who Helped Save Gabby Giffords, Faces Anti-Gay Smear Campaign

President Barack Obama honored Daniel Hernandez Jr., the intern who helped save former Rep. Gabby Giffords' (D-Ariz.) life.
08/27/2013


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/26/daniel-hernandez-gay_n_3819884.html [with embedded video report, and comments]; http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/daniel-hernandez-former-intern-who-saved-giffords-hit-nasty-homophobic-recall-campaign


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Pat Robertson Suggests Gays With AIDS Wear Rings To Cut, Infect Others
08/27/2013
Pat Robertson delved into a discussion about AIDS during a recent episode of "The 700 Club," in which he suggested that infected individuals in cities like San Francisco purposefully infect others by cutting them with special rings.
On Tuesday, Robertson and co-host Terry Meeuwsen responded to a question from a viewer about the disclosure of an AIDS status [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/robertson-gay-people-deliberately-spread-hivaids-cutting-people-special-rings ]. Apparently, the viewer had been driving a nursing home patient to church and came to find out he has AIDS. The viewer was angry no one disclosed the man's health condition to her.
Robertson said [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7XzA8VzkXg#t=104 (that YouTube since removed at CBN's insistence)] he “used to think it was transmitted by saliva and other things, now they say it may be sexual contact.” So, he advised the woman not have sex with the man.
“There are laws now... I think the homosexual community has put these draconian laws on the books that prohibit people from discussing this particular affliction," he continued. "You can tell somebody you had a heart attack, you can tell them they’ve got high blood pressure, but you can’t tell anybody you’ve got AIDS [ http://www.towleroad.com/2013/08/robertsonaids.html ]."
“You know what they do in San Francisco? Some in the gay community there, they want to get people. So if they got the stuff they’ll have a ring, you shake hands and the ring’s got a little thing where you cut your finger,” he said. “Really. It’s that kind of vicious stuff, which would be the equivalent of murder.”
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/27/pat-robertson-aids-rings_n_3824401.html [with embedded video, and comments]


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GOP State Senator Is Against Gay Marriage, Uses Alexander The Great As 'Overwhelming Evidence' Why


Sen. William Sharer, R-Farmington, speaks against a bill that would remove taxes on groceries and raise taxes on other items on the Senate floor at the Capitol in Santa Fe, N.M., Thursday, Feb. 19, 2004.
(AP Photo/Jeff Geissler)

By Chris Gentilviso
Posted: 08/28/2013 1:54 pm EDT | Updated: 08/28/2013 2:40 pm EDT

During a week where New Mexico's three largest counties [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/27/new-mexico-gay-marriage_n_3822067.html ] decided to issue same-sex marriage licenses, one GOP official drew upon the Hellenistic era to craft his argument.

New Mexico state Sen. Bill Sharer (R-Farmington) [ http://www.koat.com/news/new-mexico/albuquerque/gop-lawmakers-look-to-take-legal-action-against-gay-marriage/-/9153728/21661378/-/13fbqhtz/-/index.html ] has been a leading voice against giving the go-ahead for gay couples to marry. In a blog post published on his website last week, Sharer outlined some reasons [ http://www.williamsharer.com/1/post/2013/08/why-marriage.html ] showing "overwhelming evidence that the unit of 'mom, dad and children' has been encouraged from the earliest pre-written record."

Near the top of his list was how Alexander the Great handled homosexuality. Via Sharer's website:

Alexander the Great’s - View of Marriage

Alexander the Great (356-323 BC) married a Bactrian woman – modern day Afghanistan. Alexander may have engaged in homosexual activity, but he married a woman.

He directed his officers to stop “whoring” around and find a local woman to marry.

WHY?

BECAUSE

“It is only through blood relations that hatred and war will end”. In other words, Alexander the Great thought that marriage was about creating and raising the next generation.

This is the reason for Marriage –

According to a Tuesday Associated Press report, Sharer is leading a Republican effort [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/27/new-mexico-gay-marriage_n_3822067.html ] to file a lawsuit against the issuance of gay marriage licenses in New Mexico. He argued that the State Legislature and governor are responsible for that decision, not county clerks or district judges.

"It is inexplicable how a district court just today discovered a new definition of marriage in our laws, when our marriage law has not been changed in over a century," Sharer said.

Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal noted that New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez (R) [ http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2013/08/22/new-mexico-clerk-marries-more-than-50-gay-couples/ ] is against gay marriage but believes the issue should be decided by voters in a statewide referendum. New Mexico [ http://www.policymic.com/articles/47137/new-mexico-gay-marriage-the-next-state-to-legalize-same-sex-marriage ] is the only state without a law explicitly allowing or banning gay marriage.

Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/28/bill-sharer-gay-marriage_n_3830909.html [with comments]


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Pennsylvania attorneys: Gays, like '12-year-olds,' can't marry

08/29/2013
HARRISBURG - Marriage licenses given to same-sex couples in the state are invalid because the couples were barred from marrying, just like 12-year-olds, Republican Gov. Tom Corbett's attorneys said Wednesday.
[...]
http://www.ydr.com/state/ci_23967710/pennsylvania-attorneys-gays-like-12-year-olds-cant [no comments yet]


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Tim Donnelly, California Politician, To Pull Son Out Of Public School Over Transgender Students Bill

Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, R-Twin Peaks, announced at least one of his boys will not be returning to public school, in part because of the transgender rights bill.
08/19/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/19/tim-donnelly-transgender-bills-school_n_3780264.html [with comments]


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Steve Lonegan Says It's 'Weird' Cory Booker Won't Refute Gay Rumors: 'I Like Being A Guy'

08/28/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/28/steve-lonegan-cory-booker_n_3829053.html [the YouTube, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpF6Sv2o-HU , embedded ( http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/lonegan-its-weird-cory-booker-wont-say-if-hes-gay-i-personally-being-guy ); with (nearly 4,000) comments]


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For Long-Shot New Jersey Senate Candidate, Passion and No Filter


Steve Lonegan, left, the Republican nominee for the Senate from New Jersey, with Gov. Chris Christie last week.
Richard Perry/The New York Times

By KATE ZERNIKE
Published: August 27, 2013

NEWARK — To start his “Expose Cory Booker” tour, Steve Lonegan stood in front of one of this troubled city’s more rundown schools this month and attacked the mayor’s record on education.

“He can issue all the Cory Booker platitudes — Cory-tudes — that he wants,” Mr. Lonegan said. “Cory Booker has failed people.”

Then he showed up days later at the scene of a double homicide, and accused Mayor Booker of being “too busy hanging out with Oprah” and “tweeting about Winnie the Pooh” to address the city’s problems.

“Finally,” Mr. Lonegan said, “Mayor Booker issued a tweet mourning someone’s passing. But it wasn’t the two men shot dead in Cory Booker’s Newark on Friday night. It was Michael Ansara, the Klingon from Star Trek.”

Even if Mr. Lonegan were not running against a nationally known Democrat, his campaign to be the first Republican in 40 years elected to the United States Senate from New Jersey would be a long shot. But he has no intention of letting it be dull.

The election to replace Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, who died in June, presents a stark contrast: Mr. Booker, the mayor of the state’s largest city, invites comparisons to President Obama; Mr. Lonegan, a former mayor of suburban Bogota, N.J., intends to go to Washington and dismantle the Obama agenda.

Though Mr. Lonegan has taken in just $325,000 to Mr. Booker’s $8.6 million in campaign contributions, Mr. Lonegan’s campaign argues that he can take advantage of the unusual conditions of the special election — it will be held on Oct. 16, a Wednesday — to turn out a high number of conservative voters who rally passionately to his message.

But it is not clear how many of them there are.

New Jersey’s Republican voters tend to reward moderation. Mr. Lonegan tends more toward outrage: railing against federal aid to Hurricane Sandy victims, for example, by saying that the state should “suck it up and be responsible for taking care of ourselves.”

“I don’t think I’m a flamethrower,” he said, responding to a characterization used by Mr. Booker. “I advocate for issues, I advocate for them passionately. That’s just who I am.”

Mr. Lonegan, 57, was most recently the state director for Americans for Prosperity, the conservative advocacy group backed by the Koch brothers. He was Tea Party before anyone knew to call it a movement. As his favorite reading he cites works by Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises, and other limited-or-no-government treatises of the libertarian canon.

He argues that the Federal Reserve’s attempts to stimulate the economy have devalued the nation’s currency, that President Obama’s health care law will destroy the economy, that military spending could be cut and entire federal agencies, including energy and education, eliminated to rein in spending.

“I’m very deeply concerned for my kids — and I know it’s cliché — that we’re on a trajectory toward economic collapse,” he said last week, sitting in a restaurant in Hunterdon County. He was there for the biggest coup of his campaign, an endorsement from Gov. Chris Christie, his opponent in the 2009 primary for governor.

“People should be able to work hard and save and accumulate wealth and a better future, and not have it taken away by the government, whether it’s through taxation, or regulation, or debasing the dollar,” he said.

His models in the Senate are all Tea Party freshmen: Ted Cruz of Texas (“brilliant,” he called him), Mike Lee of Utah (“very principled”) and Rand Paul of Kentucky (“sharp, aggressive”).

He comes across as a younger, more New Jersey-esque version of Ron Paul: formal, serious, not so much flamethrower as simply annoyed — by the Affordable Care Act, by the Federal Reserve, by having to suffer fools.

“I am one of the few people who has read Dodd-Frank,” Mr. Lonegan said, by way of explaining his antipathy for the bank regulations passed after the economic meltdown of 2008.

As to Mr. Booker’s celebrity, he sounds mystified: “What does that do for the country? There’s no substance here at all. It’s all, like, glitz.”

Mr. Lonegan grew up in Bogota and moved in with his grandparents after his father died when Mr. Lonegan was 16. He received a diagnosis of retinitis pigmentosa as a teenager; the disease slowly claimed his sight, eventually leaving him legally blind. But he recalls his childhood as blessed because he grew up in a household where people worked hard and saved money.

He met his wife, Lorraine, at William Paterson University, where he was captain of the football team, and they started a kitchen cabinet business.

He joined the local Republican club as a hobby, and was elected mayor of his hometown in 1995, serving for three consecutive terms.

“By double-digit margins,” he noted, in a town that voted for “Al Gore, Bill Clinton, John Kerry, Bob Menendez, Frank Lautenberg, Jim McGreevey, Jon Corzine and Barack Obama — and me.”

His success, he said, was focusing on fiscal issues. But he battled with the police unions, and stirred controversy when he pushed to make English the official language of Bogota after McDonald’s put up a Spanish billboard that he considered “divisive.” He also sued, unsuccessfully, to stop the state from borrowing money without voter approval.

He lost when he ran for Congress in 1998 and in the 2005 primary for governor. In the 2009 primary against Mr. Christie, he won 42 percent of the vote in a sharply negative race.

Mr. Christie spent 5 minutes 7 seconds giving his endorsement last Tuesday, holding up Mr. Lonegan’s hand briefly but not sharing the bear hug he offers even voters on the street. Mr. Christie said he was “proud” of Mr. Lonegan as the party’s nominee.

“I know Steve is going to give Cory Booker some tussle over the next 60 days,” he said.

That was clear two days later, when Mr. Booker gave a speech to outline the differences between him and Mr. Lonegan, calling him “someone who stands way out on the fringes.”

Mr. Lonegan responded with his own hastily scheduled news conference the next hour, calling Mr. Booker, who is frequently criticized in his own party for his moderate views, “a far left liberal extremist.” Conservative crowds reacted excitedly to Mr. Lonegan, cheering when he talked about the “commie — I mean the Common Core” curriculum in schools.

But his bluntness has attracted some unwanted attention, too. When someone from his staff posted a racially charged message on his campaign’s Twitter account in early August — comparing the black neighborhoods of Newark to foreign countries — Mr. Lonegan ordered it taken down. But he then criticized “political correctness,” saying that his opponents “will use any chance they can to pull the race card.”

In an interview he said, “I don’t have a filter, that’s my problem.”

In his work at Americans for Prosperity, Mr. Lonegan taught conservatives to be “citizen lobbyists,” and he says he will rely on that kind of grass roots appeal to win the election.

“I’m going to mobilize the base, and I’m going to focus on issues,” he said. “Cory Booker’s going to run on name ID and run around with Oprah Winfrey and the ‘Desperate Housewife’ lady.” (He was referring to Eva Longoria, who has campaigned with Mr. Booker.)

Mr. Lonegan’s wife, however, would not mind the chance to tell their story to Ms. Winfrey, and wrote to her to ask. Ms. Lonegan said she has not heard back.

“It’s not going to matter,” Mr. Lonegan told his wife. “She’s a political hack.” He put his fingers to his mouth. “Sorry. No filter.”

© 2013 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/28/nyregion/for-long-shot-seeking-new-jersey-senate-seat-no-filter.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/28/nyregion/for-long-shot-seeking-new-jersey-senate-seat-no-filter.html?pagewanted=all ]


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An open letter to the people who hate Obama more than they love America

Jan 09, 2012
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/01/09/1053088/-An-open-letter-to-the-people-who-hate-Obama-more-than-they-love-America [with comments]


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The New Fad Taking The Country By Storm: "Overpasses For Obama’s Impeachment"
August 19, 2013
The group “Overpasses For Obama’s Impeachment” held rallies around the country this weekend calling for Obama’s impeachment. The group lists [ http://overpasses.org/index.php/reasons-for-impeachment/ ] 12 reasons for Obama’s impeachment on their website and has quite the following [ https://www.facebook.com/OverpassesForObamasImpeachment ] on Facebook. It’s the next big thing.
[lotsa photos]
http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/the-new-fad-taking-the-country-by-storm-overpasses-for-obama [with comments]


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GOP Congressman: Would Be “Dream Come True” To Submit Obama Impeachment Bill

The Michigan congressman said he’s discussed impeaching the president with lawyers.

by Andrew Kaczynski
posted on August 20, 2013 at 5:34pm EDT

Michigan Republican Rep. Kerry Bentivolio said Monday it would be a “dream come true” to submit a bill to impeach President Obama. Bentivolio also said he had meetings with lawyers asking them to “tell me how I can impeach” the president of the United States. Bentivolio was speaking [ http://allevents.in/Birmingham/August-2013-Birmingham-Bloomfield-Republican-Club-Meeting/219783121506443 ] at the August 2013 Birmingham Bloomfield Republican Club Meeting.

“If I could write that bill and submit it, it would be a dream come true,” Bentivolio said. “I stood 12 feet away from the guy and listened to him. I couldn’t stand being there, but because he is president I have to respect the office. That’s my job, as a congressman, I respect the office.”

“I went back to my office and I’ve had lawyers come in,” the congressman continued. “These are lawyers, PhDs in history, and I said, ‘Tell me how I can impeach the president of the United States.’”

The Michigan congressman then explained to the audience that someone couldn’t impeach the president without evidence.

“Until we have evidence, you’re going to become a laughingstock if you’ve submitted the bill to impeach the president because number one, you’ve got to convince the press,” he said. “There are some people out there no matter what Obama does he’s still the greatest president they’ve ever had. That’s what you’re fighting.”

Bentivolio recently held [ http://www.freep.com/article/20130807/NEWS15/308070153/House-speaker-John-Boehner-U-S-Rep-Kerry-Bentivolio-Birmingham-fundraiser ] a fundraiser with House Speaker John Boehner.

The full video [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fun76Bi_QnM ] of Benitvolio’s town hall has been embedded below:

© 2013 BuzzFeed, Inc

http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/gop-congressman-would-be-dream-come-true-to-submit-obama-imp [with (a separate) embedded video of the impeachment-related comments by Bentivolio, and comments]


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Book Ushers In The Obama Impeachment Movement



Impeachment book sales are booming, says Klein. It’s not just overpasses anymore.

by Ben Smith
posted on August 20, 2013 at 9:23am EDT

A new book making the case for the impeachment of President Barack Obama is flying off the shelves, its author said, as the president’s reelection fails to entirely damp down the deep loathing of him on parts of the right.

Impeachable Offenses: The Case for Removing Barack Obama from Office [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/1938067193 ] cites everything from the attack on the American consulate and CIA outpost in Benghazi — which it compares to the Iran Contra scandal in the Reagan years — to the way Obamacare was passed, which the authors say constitutes “taxation without representation.” The book, by WABC radio host Aaron Klein and Brenda Elliott, an anti-Obama blogger, also includes American military action in Libya and the Transportation Security Administration’s passenger screenings as impeachable offenses.

The book, set to be published by WND Books on Aug. 27, has pre-sold nearly 100,000 copies already and just went to its third printing, Klein said, “due to unexpected demand from bookstores.” WND is also among the conservative websites that operate a booming online and direct mail book sales business, the backbone of the conservative book market. (The presale figures couldn’t be independently verified.)

“We knew this was going to be a popular book. What we didn’t realize is that retailers would recognize it in advance and place large orders before the public weighed in,” said WND Books CEO Joseph Farah (best known as a leading figure in the “birther” movement) in a statement through Klein.

“Clearly a large segment of the population is concerned Obama has overstepped his executive authority and has used his office to circumvent Congress to change, ignore, or at times perhaps invent de facto law,” said Klein.

The rumblings for Obama’s impeachment — the other main push [ http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/the-new-fad-taking-the-country-by-storm-overpasses-for-obama ] appears to be a campaign centered on highway overpasses, and the movement has been encouraged at times by House Republicans [ http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/republican-congressman-we-probably-have-the-votes-to-impeach ] — has not reached the heights of the liberal demands for George W. Bush’s impeachment, much less the actual impeachment of President Bill Clinton, but continues what appears to be a bipartisan tradition, and Klein tried to cast his book as a nonpartisan effort.

“Every American, whether conservative or liberal, Democrat, Republican or Independent, should be concerned about the nearly limitless seizure of power, the abuses of authority, the cronyism, corruption, lies and cover-ups documented in this news-making book,” he said in an email.

© 2013 BuzzFeed, Inc

http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/book-ushers-in-the-obama-impeachment-movement [with comments]


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Tom Coburn: Obama “Getting Perilously Close” To The Standard For Impeachment

“If it continues, I think we’re going to have another constitutional crisis in our country in terms of the presidency.”

by Andrew Kaczynski
posted on August 22, 2013 at 3:16pm EDT

Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn said Wednesday that President Barack Obama was getting “getting perilously close” to the constitutional standard for impeachment. Coburn was speaking at the Muskogee Civic Center in Oklahoma.

“What you have to do is you have to establish the criteria that would qualify for proceedings against the president, and that’s called impeachment,” Coburn said, responding to a question about holding President Obama accountable. “That’s not something you take lightly, and you have to use a historical precedent of what that means. I think there’s some intended violation of the law in this administration, but I also think there’s a ton of incompetence, of people who are making decisions.”

“Even if there is incompetence, the IRS forces me to abide by the law,” a constituent responded to Coburn.

“No, I agree,” Coburn said. “My little wiggle out of that when I get that written to me is I believe that needs to be evaluated and determined, but thank goodness it doesn’t have to happen in the Senate until they’ve brought charges in the House. Those are serious things, but we’re in a serious time. I don’t have the legal background to know if that rises to high crimes and misdemeanor, but I think they’re getting perilously close.”

Coburn then mentioned a story of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services employees telling him that officials at Homeland Security said to “ignore all the background” and just “approve people.”

“I’m documenting all this stuff as it goes along, but I don’t know where that level is,” Coburn added.

“Barack Obama is personal friend of mine. He became my friend in the Senate but that does not mean I agree in any way with what he’s doing or how he’s doing it. And I quite frankly think he’s in a difficult position he’s put himself in, and if it continues, I think we’re going to have another constitutional crisis in our country in terms of the presidency,” Coburn concluded.

The full video [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpAiUeWgzi4 ] of Coburn’s remarks has been embedded below.

© 2013 BuzzFeed, Inc

http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/republican-senator-obama-getting-perilously-close-to-the-sta [with (a separate) embedded video of the impeachment-related comments by Coburn, and comments]


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The Case for Impeaching Obama


Senator Ted Cruz is among the Republican lawmakers whose constituents have recently pressured them to impeach President Obama. He said it was "a good question."
(Yuri Gripas/Reuters)

Conservative activists across the country are more obsessed than ever with removing the president from office. What do they think he's done to deserve it?

Molly Ball
Aug 27 2013, 2:27 PM ET

There’s a hot new idea sweeping the conservative grassroots: impeaching the president.

Republican members of Congress home for the August recess have been pressured by their constituents on the subject at town halls across the country [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/08/obama-impeachment-talk-of-the-town-hall/ ]. Indeed, if Democrats thought that President Obama, having produced his original birth certificate and gotten himself easily reelected, might have finally put to rest the right-wing conviction of his illegitimacy, the opposite seems to have occurred: In certain conservative precincts, the determination to oust him is stronger than ever.

At a meeting of a local Republican club in Michigan last week, a woman asked Rep. Kerry Bentivolio [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTAAl0i0rxg (next below)],

“Who is going to stop Obama from everything that he’s doing against our Constitution?”, while a man chimed in, “Articles of impeachment!” Bentivolio responded, “If I could write that bill and submit it, it would be a dream come true. I feel your pain.” But, he said, he didn’t have the evidence.

At a town hall in Texas, Rep. Blake Farenthold was confronted [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GH266F3UEVM (next below)]

by a constituent with a dossier she said proved Obama’s birth certificate was fraudulent. Farenthold said it’s “a question that I get a lot: If everybody’s so unhappy with what the president’s done, why don’t you impeach him?” The congressman said there were probably enough votes in the House, but impeachment would die in the Senate.

In Muskogee, Oklahoma, the question was posed [ http://www.tulsaworld.com/article.aspx/Coburn_calls_on_Oklahomans_to_push_for_national_constitutional/20130821_11_0_MUSKOG815093?subj=298 ] to Senator Tom Coburn, who said that while he called Obama a “personal friend,” he considered the administration to be lawless and incompetent, and “getting perilously close” to impeachability. In Conroe, Texas, Senator Ted Cruz said [ http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/356237/cruz-calls-why-dont-we-impeach-obama-good-question-katrina-trinko ] a query about impeachment was “a good question,” but just not realistic; he later told National Review, “That’s not a fight we have a prospect of winning.”

The impeachment activists are undeterred by the lawmakers’ reluctance, however. The website overpasses.org [ http://overpasses.org/index.php/media/ ] records impeachment “rallies” -- often a few people with posters waving at highway traffic from above -- in 17 states.

This week, the movement stands to get a shot in the arm with the release of a new book, Impeachable Offenses: The Case for Removing Barack Obama From Office [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/1938067193 ]. Co-author Aaron Klein, a reporter for the website WorldNetDaily, says preorders of the book by retailers and book clubs were “approaching six figures” prior to its release Tuesday, and the publisher plans to deliver copies to the offices of members of Congress shortly after they return to Washington on September 9.

WND is known for its pursuit of the birth-certificate non-issue, but Klein, a radio host whose other books include The Manchurian President: Barack Obama's Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Manchurian-President-Communists-Anti-American/dp/1935071874 ], said no space is devoted to birtherism in his book. Its aim, despite the title, is not to advocate impeachment, he claims, but to dispassionately lay out the potential grounds. “I’m trying to present the case journalistically and allow the public to decide,” he said in an interview. “I personally think, yes, there is a strong case for impeachment proceedings on multiple fronts.”

Klein insists this is not a partisan endeavor -- he calls himself an independent and quotes the ACLU and the lefty antiwar group Code Pink in his book, which focuses on alleged overreaches of executive authority. “This is about individual liberty. It’s about the rule of law,” he said. “It’s about whether the separation of powers means anything or not.” While Klein wasn’t on the case when George W. Bush was in office, he says many of the Obama Administration’s alleged national-security offenses might have applied then, too.

For now, the impeachment movement is too fringe even for the likes of Cruz, the capitol's chief boat-rocker. But I was curious: What does Klein’s case for impeachment consist of? There’s a lot in the book, he told me, but he gave a few examples. The constitutional standard for impeachment is "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors." Klein's claims fall under the second two categories.

* Obamacare: Klein describes a number of arguments involving the health-care legislation, with the crux being that Obama committed a crime against his office by bypassing Congress in some way. "An obvious response is that the healthcare legislation was upheld by the Supreme Court," he noted. "But the book reports the White House has been hard at work changing the implementation of key sections of Obamacare without Congressional oversight."

* Immigration: Did Obama’s executive orders and interagency directives usurp Congress’s legislative authority? “President Obama has bypassed Congress, which has legislative authority for setting immigration policy in America,” Klein says. Last summer’s temporary reprieve for young undocumented immigrants, for example, “seems to be de facto amnesty without congressional approval.”

* Benghazi: In the attack last fall that killed four diplomatic workers, Klein sees a new version of the Iran-Contra scandal, claiming his original reporting has uncovered arms trafficking that wound up in the hands of al-Qaeda fighters.

* Fast and Furious: “I would think it would be very easy to argue that sending weapons deliberately with the intention of getting them in the hands of the drug cartels is a very clear violation [of the law], especially since it resulted in the murder of a U.S. border agent.”

* Surveillance: Klein claims to have uncovered much of the expansive surveillance regime that’s now coming to light; his book went to press before NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden went public.

* The Libya campaign: “There’s a chapter that questions whether the entire campaign was unconstitutional. We don’t conclude it was or wasn’t; we present both sides of the debate.”

* Bribery: “There are a lot of questions about stimulus-bill money that went to campaign donors. There’s money that went to different green companies that some of the top leaders then popped up as members of the Obama administration.”

Klein says its careful, investigative, nonpartisan approach distinguishes his book from the various Tea Party email forwards and impeachment petitions that offer a laundry list of conspiracy theories. His book even debunks some claims, such as the allegation that the Department of Homeland Security is buying ammunition in bulk [ http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/the-ammo-conspiracy/ ].

To the Obama Administration, such claims are simply further proof of the wild-eyed intransigence the president faces. To Republican lawmakers who’d like to present a constructive face for the party, they’re a nuisance. But Klein’s book is only likely to bolster the conviction of the impeachment-seeking conservative grassroots. The passion for ousting Obama may be here to stay.

Copyright © 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/08/the-case-for-impeaching-obama/279075/ [with comments]


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No, you’re not impeaching anyone


Ted Cruz, Tom Coburn, Blake Farenthold
(Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst/AP/Jacquelyn Martin)

Tom Coburn, Ted Cruz and other crackpots can't stand up to their base and face reality. Can this party ever change?

By Joan Walsh
Friday, Aug 23, 2013 10:50 AM CDT

The last time Sen. Tom Coburn spoke warmly but candidly to his Oklahoma constituents about his “friend” Barack Obama, it was to reassure them that the president doesn’t want to “destroy America [ http://www.salon.com/2011/08/18/with_friends_like_tom_coburn/ ].” Instead, Coburn said two years ago, “his intent is to create dependency because it worked so well for him.” He went on: “As an African-American male,” Obama received “tremendous advantage from a lot of these programs.” That’s what friends do, in Coburn’s world: They indulge in delusional racial stereotyping to defend their “friend” from detractors.

Also? Apparently they claim their “friend” is “perilously close” to “high crimes and misdemeanors [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/08/22/coburn-obama-getting-perilously-close-to-impeachment-standard/ ]” – the standard for impeaching a president – and promise they won’t let their friendship stand in the way of impeaching the “lawless” president.

Coburn is just the latest Republican to humor his crackpot constituents in August town halls by suggesting the president can and/or should be impeached. By the standards of the modern GOP, he may be the most surprising, since every once in a while he has an outbreak of sanity and refuses to go along with his party’s nihilism caucus. Most recently he said Sen. Mike Lee’s drive to shut down the government to repeal Obamacare amounts to “destroying the Republican Party [ http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/313845-coburn-government-shutdown-would-destroy-the-gop ].”

To make up for that breach with the base, Coburn told constituents in Muskogee that the administration is “lawless” and “getting perilously close” to the constitutional standard for impeachment. He one-upped Lee by joining crackpot Mark Levin’s call for a new constitutional convention. “The constitutional republic that we have is at risk,” he told the crowd. When asked directly about impeachment, he said, “I think those are serious things, but we’re in serious times. And I don’t have the legal background to know if that rises to ‘high crimes and misdemeanors,’ but I think you’re getting perilously close.”

To be fair, Coburn also defended his “friend” Obama by allowing that the first black president just might not be very good at his job. “I think there’s some intended violation of law in this administration, but I also think there’s a ton of incompetence,” he said. Glad to have that out there.

Though Coburn’s impeachment remarks have triggered a lot of coverage, he’s gotten less attention for another wild assertion to the Muskogee crowd: that a better strategy for repealing Obamacare than shutting down the government is to use the debt ceiling deadline.

“If you wanna do it,” he told an angry constituent, “do it on the debt limit, don’t do it on shutting down the government, because the economy’s so precarious right now, and shutting down the government won’t stop Obamacare one iota.” If the economy is too “precarious” for a government shutdown, imagine what a debt-ceiling meltdown would do. Nobody in the crowd asked Coburn to explain.

Coburn’s impeachment rambling comes on the heels of similar musings by other congressional Republicans at their August town halls. Just Monday, when asked why not impeach the president, Sen. Ted Cruz genially replied: “It’s a good question. And I’ll tell you the simplest answer: To successfully impeach a president you need the votes in the U.S. Senate.” Actually, the supposedly brilliant Cruz ought to know that to impeach a president, you need the votes in the House – the Senate then votes on whether to “convict” him.

But you know, maybe Cruz is getting ahead of himself because he believes his fellow Texan Rep. Blake Farenhold, who recently told his constituents that Republicans have the votes in the House to impeach Obama. “If we were to impeach the president tomorrow, you could probably get the votes in the House of Representatives to do it,” he said. “But it would go to the Senate and he wouldn’t be convicted.”

Of course, reindeer farmer Kerry Bentivoglio thinks impeaching Obama would be “a dream come true [ http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/08/21/republicans-grasp-straws-to-justify-dreams-to-impeach-obama/ ],” but he sounded more skeptical than Coburn about the chances of doing it – though he admitted consulting lawyers about possible grounds. “Until we have the evidence, you’re going to become a laughingstock if you’ve submitted a bill to impeach the president, because number one, you’ve got to convince the press,” he said.

So let’s recap: Coburn, one of the Republicans the Beltway media regularly use as an example of someone willing to work with Obama, sounds more convinced the president might be impeachable than a former reindeer farmer who resides on the party’s wingnut fringe. Reporters have to stop covering the supposed attempt of the GOP to heal itself, because it’s not happening. Real change in the party will require Republican leaders leveling with their base. That means standing up to nuts like Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh and the delusional extremists organizing “Overpasses for Obama’s impeachment” (yes, that’s a thing [ http://overpasses.org/index.php/state-links-on-facebook/ ]) and showing up to rant at town halls.

Tom Coburn doesn’t have the guts to do that, so he can’t be counted among the last few reasonable Republicans. Let’s hope Time magazine leaves him off its annual list of 100 “influential” luminaries next year. Or at least let’s hope Obama declines to write the tribute to his GOP “friend [ http://time100.time.com/2013/04/18/time-100/slide/tom-coburn/ ]” next time around.

Copyright © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc.

http://www.salon.com/2013/08/23/party_of_wackadoos_the_delusional_impeachment_crusade/ [with comments]


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Welcome to the Age of Denial


Chloé Poizat

By ADAM FRANK
Published: August 21, 2013

ROCHESTER — IN 1982, polls showed that 44 percent of Americans believed God had created human beings in their present form. Thirty years later, the fraction of the population who are creationists is 46 percent [ http://www.gallup.com/poll/155003/hold-creationist-view-human-origins.aspx ].

In 1989, when “climate change” had just entered the public lexicon, 63 percent [ http://artsandsciences.colorado.edu/magazine/2010/10/a-new-take-on-the-climate-fix/ ] of Americans understood it was a problem. Almost 25 years later, that proportion is actually a bit lower, at 58 percent.

The timeline of these polls defines my career in science. In 1982 I was an undergraduate physics major. In 1989 I was a graduate student. My dream was that, in a quarter-century, I would be a professor of astrophysics, introducing a new generation of students to the powerful yet delicate craft of scientific research.

Much of that dream has come true. Yet instead of sending my students into a world that celebrates the latest science has to offer, I am delivering them into a society ambivalent, even skeptical, about the fruits of science.

This is not a world the scientists I trained with would recognize. Many of them served on the Manhattan Project. Afterward, they helped create the technologies that drove America’s postwar prosperity. In that era of the mid-20th century, politicians were expected to support science financially but otherwise leave it alone. The disaster of Lysenkoism, in which Communist ideology distorted scientific truth and all but destroyed Russian biological science, was still a fresh memory.

The triumph of Western science led most of my professors to believe that progress was inevitable. While the bargain between science and political culture was at times challenged — the nuclear power debate of the 1970s, for example — the battles were fought using scientific evidence. Manufacturing doubt remained firmly off-limits.

Today, however, it is politically effective, and socially acceptable, to deny scientific fact. Narrowly defined, “creationism” was a minor current in American thinking for much of the 20th century. But in the years since I was a student, a well-funded effort has skillfully rebranded that ideology as “creation science” and pushed it into classrooms across the country. Though transparently unscientific, denying evolution has become a litmus test for some conservative politicians, even at the highest levels.

Meanwhile, climate deniers, taking pages from the creationists’ PR playbook, have manufactured doubt about fundamental issues in climate science that were decided scientifically decades ago. And anti-vaccine campaigners brandish a few long-discredited studies to make unproven claims about links between autism and vaccination.

The list goes on. North Carolina has banned [ http://abcnews.go.com/US/north-carolina-bans-latest-science-rising-sea-level/story?id=16913782 ] state planners from using climate data in their projections of future sea levels. So many Oregon parents have refused vaccination that the state is revising its school entry policies [ http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/06/10/2127601/oregon-vaccine-stigma-bill-advances/ ]. And all of this is happening in a culture that is less engaged with science and technology as intellectual pursuits than at any point I can remember.

Thus, even as our day-to-day experiences have become dependent on technological progress, many of our leaders have abandoned the postwar bargain in favor of what the scientist Michael Mann calls the “scientization of politics [ http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/the-scientization-of-politics ].”

What do I tell my students? From one end of their educational trajectory to the other, our society told these kids science was important. How confusing is it for them now, when scientists receive death threats for simply doing honest research on our planet’s climate history?

Americans always expected their children to face a brighter economic future, and we scientists expected our students to inherit a world where science was embraced by an ever-larger fraction of the population. This never implied turning science into a religion or demanding slavish acceptance of this year’s hot research trends. We face many daunting challenges as a society, and they won’t all be solved with more science and math education. But what has been lost is an understanding that science’s open-ended, evidence-based processes — rather than just its results — are essential to meeting those challenges.

My professors’ generation could respond to silliness like creationism with head-scratching bemusement. My students cannot afford that luxury. Instead they must become fierce champions of science in the marketplace of ideas.

During my undergraduate studies I was shocked at the low opinion some of my professors had of the astronomer Carl Sagan. For me his efforts to popularize science were an inspiration, but for them such “outreach” was a diversion. That view makes no sense today.

The enthusiasm and generous spirit that Mr. Sagan used to advocate for science now must inspire all of us. There are science Twitter feeds and blogs to run, citywide science festivals and high school science fairs that need input. For the civic-minded nonscientists there are school board curriculum meetings and long-term climate response plans that cry out for the participation of informed citizens. And for every parent and grandparent there is the opportunity to make a few more trips to the science museum with your children.

Behind the giant particle accelerators and space observatories, science is a way of behaving in the world. It is, simply put, a tradition. And as we know from history’s darkest moments, even the most enlightened traditions can be broken and lost. Perhaps that is the most important lesson all lifelong students of science must learn now.

Adam Frank [ http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~afrank/afrankhome/afrank.html ], a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester, is the author of “About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang [ http://www.amazon.com/About-Time-Cosmology-Culture-Twilight/dp/B007PLZZSY ]” and a founder of NPR’s 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog [ http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/ ].

*

Room for Debate
Should Creationism Be Controversial?

Why are some people drawn to origin narratives like in Genesis, and others to the scientific story?
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/08/15/should-creationism-be-controversial/

*

© 2013 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/22/opinion/welcome-to-the-age-of-denial.html [with comments]


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