Today we face a climate of ever increasing misdirection by popular media. This site, along with others, aims to reveal the reality of America and the loss of fact inherent to the over riding theme of our current political and social confusion: Purposeful deception.
Congress is now considering
legislative language to mandate indefinite military detentions of US citizens
suspected of present or past associations with alleged terrorist groups, with
or without evidence to prove it. More on that below.
The 2006 Military
Commissions Act authorized torture and sweeping unconstitutional powers to
detain, interrogate, and prosecute alleged suspects and collaborators (including
US citizens), hold them (without evidence) indefinitely in military prisons,
and deny them habeas and other constitutional protections.
Section 1031 of the FY 2010
Defense Authorization Act contained the 2009 Military Commissions Act (MCA).
The phrase "unprivileged enemy belligerent" replaced "unlawful
enemy combatant."
The wonder of our world is
that scientific knowledge is now so powerful that we can save millions of
children, mothers, and fathers from killer diseases each year at little cost.
The Global Fund to
Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria has mobilized that knowledge over the past
decade to save more than 7 million lives and to protect the health of hundreds
of millions more. Yet now the Global Fund is under mortal threat because of
budget cuts approved by President Obama and the Congress.
The Obama Administration had
pledged $4 billion during 2011-13 to the Global Fund, or $1.33 billion per
year. Now it is reneging on this pledge. For a government that spends $1.9
billion every single day on the military ($700 billion each year), Washington's
unwillingness to follow through on $1.33 billion for a whole year to save
millions of lives is a new depth of cynicism and recklessness.
As a result of US budget
cutbacks, and me-too cutbacks by other countries, the Global Fund this week closed its doors on providing new funds to
impoverished nations. It was supposed to accept proposals next month from the
poorest countries for an 11th round of disease-control funds. Instead, it has
scrapped any new funding until 2014 at the earliest, and will only fund the
continuation of the coverage of existing programs. US officials will
prevaricate, noting that the US
spends this amount or that amount. History will treat such excuses with the
scorn they deserve.
Some 100 protesters came to GovernmentCenter
this week, waving signs and chanting slogans for Denis Lemos and his friend
Vinny Quirino, both 25-year-olds who had been fighting deportation to Brazil. The
protesters wanted a reprieve.
But then Lemos stood before
the crowd and delivered the news.
“I got my call,’’ he said as
applause broke out. “I am no longer in removal proceedings. My case is going to
be closed.’’
Quirino’s stay of
deportation followed soon afterward. Some immigrants and their advocatessay
those decisions may be a sign that the Obama administration is finally acting
on a federal directive issued five months ago to consider setting aside the
deportations of students, the elderly, and other immigrants in order to more
quickly deport convicted criminals and other high-priority cases.
As we all know, the United
Nations was founded "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of
war." The words can only elicit deep regret when we consider how we have
acted to fulfill that aspiration, though there have been a few significant
successes, notably in Europe.
For centuries, Europe had
been the most violent place on earth, with murderous and destructive internal
conflicts and the forging of a culture of war that enabled Europe to conquer
most of the world, shocking the victims, who were hardly pacifists, but were
"appalled by the all-destructive fury of European warfare," in the
words of British military historian Geoffrey Parker. And enabled Europe to
impose on its conquests what Adam Smith called "the savage injustice of
the Europeans," England
in the lead, as he did not fail to emphasise.
The global conquest took a
particularly horrifying form in what is sometimes called "the
Anglosphere," England
and its offshoots, settler-colonial societies in which the indigenous societies
were devastated and their people dispersed or exterminated. But since 1945 Europe has become internally the most peaceful and in
many ways most humane region of the earth - which is the source of some its
current travail, an important topic that I will have to put aside.
Americans who flew bombing missions in World War II had a saying:
"You know you're on target when you start getting a lot of flak." The
protesters in today's nascent "Occupy Wall Street" movement must
really be on target, then, because--boy!--they're enduring an unrelenting
barrage of rhetorical flak from political and media defenders of America's
plutocracy.
At first, the Loyal
Defenders of the Plutocratic Order simply tried to ignore the youthful protest
that had sprouted on September 17 in a plaza next door to Wall Street. But the
occupiers, who were remarkably proficient in social media, spread their story
and the visuals of their occupation to millions who tuned in on the web. This
generated support from all over, and many more people began trekking to New York to join them.
Surprised and alarmed by this inflow, the L.D.P.O. tried to cut it off by
firing rounds of mockery at the protesters to make them look frivolous--a September 23 New York Timespiece, for
example, snickered that this "fractured and airy" movement was just a
"carnival" of bored kids adrift in an "intellectual
vacuum." Their cause, opined the writer, was "virtually impossible to
decipher." Already, she declared, the movement is "dwindling."
S. Paul note: Though I mostly agree with this
article, I find the part of the armed forces "protecting us" to be on
the side of promoting global militarism and dominance while we here in this
nation suffer for the increased taxation and lack of representaton currently
infecting our country.
Rampant brutalism expressed though our military is not an
American attribute. It is what we originally revolted against: England's own
policies and the taxation they imposed on the colonies to support it. We
are not very far from the days preceding the1773 Boston Party and consequent Revolution.
Thanksgiving isn't about glorifying our new nationalism
supporting Empire, it is about family. In our efforts to dominate the
world, we should take a moment to remember that the people we want to control
and indiscriminately kill in our campaigns have their
own families.
The article: All Americans know the
history of the origin of Thanksgiving: A group of separatists from the Anglican
Church left Plymouth, England
in September 1620 for the New World, where
they felt they would be able to have both civil and religious liberty.
They sailed across the Atlantic, in a very
rough two-month voyage, until they landed in November. They finally disembarked in
December at a place they designated "Plymouth Rock." Before
leaving the ship, however, they all signed the "Mayflower
Compact." This was America's first document of civil
government, and the first ever to institute the concept of
self-government.
The colonists immediately
held a prayer service and then began the process of building shelter against
the cold Massachusetts
winter. They were not prepared for the starvation and sickness that
accompanied a harsh New England winter,
though, and by spring of 1621, nearly half of those who had arrived in December
were dead. Persevering, and with the help of the native Indians, they
reaped a bountiful harvest that summer. In December of 1621, the grateful
colonists decided to thank God and celebrated a three-day feast with their
Indian friends.
One might think that a
bitter Central Asian war in Afghanistan,
spilling into Pakistan, with
no sign of ending, and an as yet ambiguous military commitment to a defeated
and incompletely reconstituted Iraq,
now overshadowed by Iran and
the Arab Awakening across the Middle East,
would be enough for President Barack Obama to cope with.
He was, after all, elected
to reduce American military commitments. He was going to end things in Iraq, fight the “right war” in Afghanistan,
which Gen. David Petraeus told him could be wound up in a year. Unaccustomed to
generals as he might have been, he surely did not expect “Af-Pak” to turn into
a permanent activity and a source of income for the Pentagon and the American
arms industry.
Why then does he now want a
war with China?
No one seems to have made much of this in American press reports and comment,
but others have noticed, most of all in China. His journey to Asia this
month proclaimed a Pax Americana for Asia—which
as such is absurd. The effort is likely to become just the opposite: a steadily
deepening and costly engagement in suppressing China’s attempt to reclaim the
Asian preeminence it held for more than a thousand years.
What's the biggest story of
the last several weeks? Rick Perry’s moment of silence, all 53 seconds' worth? The PennState
riots after revered coach JoePa went down in a child sex abuse scandal? The Kardashian wedding/divorce? The European debt crisis
that could throw the world economy into a tailspin? The Cain sexual
harassment charges? The trial of Michael Jackson’s doctor?
The answer should be none of
the above, even though as a group they’vedominated the October/November headlines. In
fact, the piece of the week, month, and arguably year should have been one that
slipped by so quietly, so off front-pages nationwide and out of news leads
everywhere that you undoubtedly didn’t even notice. And yet it’s the
story that could turn your life and that of your children and
grandchildren inside out and upside down.
The latest report by the
American Civil Liberties Union(ACLU) is not likely to inspire politicians to
shut down our private prisons when prison operators are pouring millions of
dollars into their campaign coffers.
Jobbing out the
incarceration business, said lawyer David Shapiro of the ACLU Prison Project
“has been a bonanza for the private prison industry, which rakes in billions of
dollars a year and dishes out multi-million dollar compensation packages to its
top executives.”
And those top executives, in
turn, between 1998 and 2000, for example, wrote over $1.2-million in checks to
political candidates and political parties. And why not, when their firms have
received such huge public subsidies as $68 billion in tax-free bonds to help
them build?
Since the 1980s Reagan era
shift to privatization, more than 150 private facilities---detention centers,
jails, and prisons----with a capacity of about 120,000 have been opened, and 7%
of all U.S. adults inmateshave been dumped in them.
UC Davis students, protesting
police brutality at a demonstration on their campus, were assaulted by police wearing
riot gear when they did not disperse as ordered by officials. What is most
disturbing about not only this offense against freedom and against those individuals
occupying Wall Street, is how few people watching actually care. The question that we should all be asking
ourselves is, when did the citizens of a self-touting “Free Nation” become so
desensitized to believe that those paid to serve and protect us are somehow justified
in such an assault?
With each passing day, the
psychological attack against our “Freedom” is soaking into our collective minds
to the point where the fascist state as reflected in these actions, is believed
to be normal. Didn’t our government just
use this sort of treatment of protestors in Libya to justify bombing their
leader out of office to “Liberate the People”?
It would seem that not only have Americans fallen asleep and have become
purposely ignorant of this ongoing assault against us but now, they have become
complacent in it as well. As long as it
doesn’t happen to you, is it alright? Welcome to the new America: Land
of the Oblivious.
America’s Oil Industry is 150 years old. Our addiction to it stems from our dependence upon its poison in every aspect of our lives. This addiction, like that of any other, is slowly but surely destroying our collective body. As crude oil becomes more inaccessible, “natural gas” and “clean coal” are being advocated by the oil industry and their lobbyists in Washington to keep us hooked. This effort includes lying about alternative fuels and their potential role in the detox we so desperately need. The same insane thinking and obsessive lies that haunt the minds of addicts is consistently stated by our corporatist government and their media talking heads: Our nation must have this fuel to continue to survive. The truth though, is there are better solutions.
The world's once, readily available petroleum supplies are now dwindling. To compensate, new recovery tactics have been employed to drill deep water, process coal and tar sands and hydraulically fracture the earth to continue the flow of our economic drug. No matter the cost or potential danger to lives across this nation and the world, our addiction continues to go unchecked and is in fact, worsening. Due to increased lobbying from big energy corporations combined with the attempted deregulation of this industry by their paid-for politicians, the dealers are left to further gouge the American user without resistance. From insane statements like "Drill Baby Drill" to the efforts to destroy all Federal regulation in the name of job creation, this addiction is infecting not our natural body but every aspect of our political and economic system.
Pretending to be poor is a
lot of work. This is both because being poor is a lot of work
and because the more distance between a person and poverty, the less their life
is organized in a way that accommodates pretending.
Conducting the thought
experiment of poverty, or some selected piece of poverty, is a not uncommon way
to try to convey, to oneself or to readers or listeners, the appalling reality
behind the statistics—like the 46.2
million people living in poverty in the United States in 2010.
There's Barbara Ehrenreich's
classic Nickel and Dimed, in which Ehrenreich spent a month living
in each of three places, to see if she could make ends meet at the jobs she
could get without her graduate degree, professional-writer credentials and
employment history. Writing in 2001, the scenario she posed was of a single
mother leaving welfare; how would such a woman survive in the labor and housing
market? Making the attempt—three times—without children, with her health, and
with whatever intangible benefits being middle-class might carry, Ehrenreich
worked as a waitress, a hotel housekeeper, a "Merry Maid," a nursing
home dietary aide and a Walmart employee. Even without lavish expenditures, she
found that there was no way to make ends meet with only one job at a time, but
that working two jobs made it harder to manage the commute necessary to get a
cheap place to live, or simply that finding two jobs with hours that would
never overlap was a struggle.
The program to oust the
Occupy Wall Street movement from its sites of occupation is now under way. The
Occupied, who own the police, have grown tired of the Occupation.
The advantage they possess
is that the Occupiers have not provided a coherent statement of what they want.
Their other advantage is that Americans are not revolutionaries—after all,
isn’t the American system the best in the world?
The Occupiers dismiss this
demand for a program as contrary to the spirit of the Occupation. There is not
and cannot be an agreed upon program because that is not the nature of the
movement, which is anarchistic in quality (yet having nothing to do with
anarchism itself).
It is against “the system.”
The system is how the world economy works today, and it is responsible for
creating the international crisis of which Occupation has been a response:
original, spontaneous, seductive, but incoherent and directionless.
How, after all, can “the
system” be changed? Well, first, justice could be done. This is what people
want: Justice.
Who gains – and who
loses – when public assets and jobs are turned over to the private sector?
The corporate right
endlessly promotes “privatization” of public assets and public jobs as a
cash-raising or cost-saving measure. Privatization is when the public turns
over assets like airports, roads or buildings, or contracts out a public
function like trash collection to a private company. Many cities contract
out their trash collection. To raise cash Arizona even sold its state capital
building and leased it back.
The justification for
privatization is the old argument that private companies do everything better
and more “efficiently” than government, and will find ways to cut costs.
Over and over we hear that companies do everything for less cost than government.
But it never seems to sink in that private companies don’t do things unless the
people at the top can make a bundle of cash; if the CEO isn’t making millions,
that CEO will move the company on to something else. When government does
something they don’t have to pay millions to someone at the top.
So how do private companies
save money? What costs do companies cut that government
doesn’t? When you hear about “cost-cutting” here is something to
consider: what if by “costs” the privatizers are talking about … us?
Higher education today isn't
like it used to be. US
students face crisis conditions. Washington and lenders wage financial war on
them. In addition, dozens of budget-strapped states cut funds to public
colleges and universities.
Students are directly
impacted by sharp tuition hikes (double-digit at some schools) and less
financial aid. As a result, many thousands are entirely shut out. Others
relying on student loans face permanent debt bondage.
By end of 2011, student loan
debt will top $1 trillion. It already exceeds credit card indebtedness.
Moreover, in the past year alone, students borrowed over $100 billion, double
the amount a decade ago adjusted for inflation.
Borrowing is one thing, repaying
another. Therein lies the rub. Many former students end up debt slaves for
life. With interest, collection charges, penalties, and other costs, some
burdens exceed $100,000, Over their lifetime, they can rise five-fold or more
for some.
Repaying graduate school
debt pushes it higher. New medical professionals can owe $200,000 or more at
first. An unidentified one said he'll pay $1,000 a month for the next 30 years.
With higher inflation, monthly costs will rise exponentially.
I personally fail to see the relevance of this "Occupy Baltimore" disruption. If you listen to this speech in full, Rove was making some very good points. Free speech does not mean the freedom to disrespect or disrupt a Q&A with obscenities and pointless chanting. There was nothing to be gained in this but rather to be lost. These types of "protests" only give credence to the claims from some that OWS is nothing more than a rabble. The movement is quickly becoming a moot point with these types of acts.
Rove was making a statement which was in condemnation of the same class disparity OWS has said they stand against. Maybe they need to
research rather than just blindly stumbling into a speech like drunken sailors
merely because the speaker is a Washington
insider.
Please help me understand the point of this particular "Mic Check"....
In a move hearkening back to
the Clinton
era, Senate Republicans introduced a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution earlier
today. All 47 members of the caucus are cosponsoring the
bill, a strong show of force. But here’s the thing: this balanced budget
amendment isn’t about balancing the budget.
For sure, the amendment
would balance the budget. Indeed, it requires a two-thirds vote of both houses
in order for outlays to exceed revenues. But it isn’t as if Congress is unable
to balance the budget now. If Congress wanted to balance the budget, it would
balance the budget. In fact, it has a chance to do so right now, since Congress
is still debating the FY 2011 budget, despite the fiscal year
having started six months ago. But I don’t see anyone arguing for this year’s
budget to be balanced.
The Senate Republicans’
amendment goes far beyond just balancing the budget. The amendment also caps government spending at just 18
percent of gross domestic product, makes it harder to raise the debt ceiling,
and requires a two-thirds vote to raise taxes. It even reaches beyond just the
legislative branch, forbidding the courts from ordering increased revenues.
None of these added
provisions have anything to do with balancing the budget, but they are central
parts of the conservative agenda. And the provisions will make it hard for
Congress to function even in times of relative economic normalcy. Imagine if
our current House of Representatives needed a two-thirds margin to raise the
debt ceiling. It just wouldn’t happen. And the budget would still be
unbalanced.
Spaul note: This article, though written quite a time ago, focuses on the regime change of the Bush Doctrine and encompasses the very fabric of the modern American governmental farce we were about to endure. Video by Chris Hedges is included to drive the point home. This change in the American approach to imperialism, has had catastrophic, social and economic implications and will continue to worsen until the people stand up against it. The question is though, considering the depth of the corruption is; can we?
The war on Iraq has so
monopolized public attention as to obscure the regime change taking place in
the Homeland. We may have invaded Iraq to bring in democracy and
bring down a totalitarian regime, but in the process our own system may be
moving closer to the latter and further weakening the former. The change has
been intimated by the sudden popularity of two political terms rarely applied
earlier to the American political system. "Empire" and
"superpower" both suggest that a new system of power, concentrated
and expansive, has come into existence and supplanted the old terms.
"Empire" and "superpower" accurately symbolize the
projection of American power abroad, but for that reason they obscure the
internal consequences. Consider how odd it would sound if we were to refer to
"the Constitution of the American Empire" or "superpower
democracy." The reason they ring false is that "constitution"
signifies limitations on power, while "democracy" commonly refers to
the active involvement of citizens with their government and the responsiveness
of government to its citizens. For their part, "empire" and
"superpower" stand for the surpassing of limits and the dwarfing of
the citizenry.
Don’t look now, members of
the “supercommittee” battling the national debt, but the amount the U.S. owes
topped the $15 trillion mark Wednesday afternoon.
That’s a lot of George
Washingtons, as you can see here live at USdebtclock.org.
With a week until the
committee’s deadline to reach agreement on cutting $1.2 trillion to $1.5
trillion from the federal deficit over the next 10 years, the Joint Select
Committee on Deficit Reduction still has no agreement to stem automatic cuts to
the budget.
A Democrat on a special
deficit-cutting supercommittee Wednesday questioned whether
Republicans are still interested in negotiating after the panel’s top GOP
member said Republicans have “gone as far as we feel we can go” on tax hikes,
the Associated Press reported.
A sense of deep pessimism
has gripped the supercommittee, and judging from the limited public statement
by panel members, a debt bargain could be out of reach.
“We need to find out whether
our Republican colleagues want to continue to negotiate or whether they’ve
drawn a hard line in the sand,” said supercommittee member Chris Van Hollen, a
Democrat from Maryland.
“The question is whether they’ve kind of said ‘take it or leave it.’ ”
The deficit
has ballooned to nearly $48,000 for every man, woman and
child in the U.S.
This year alone, the U.S.
will spend $1.3 trillion more than it takes in
The debt has expanded at an
alarming pace, from $7.5 trillion in 2004 and $5.6 trillion in 2000. At the
current rate, Debtclock.org reckons that the debt will top $23 trillion in
2015, though the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office puts the
estimate at $17.6 trillion.
Back in August after a
protracted fight, Congress voted to raised the national-debt ceiling by $2.7
trillion to $17 trillion, while requiring $2.7 trillion in deficit reduction by
2021.
Compared with other
developed nations, the U.S.
has a debt to GDP ratio of 85 percent, compared with Germany
at 74 percent and Japan
at a whopping 194 percent. World
debt clocks can be found here.
At four in the morning in
lower Manhattan,
as what remains of theOccupy Wall Street encampment
is loaded into trash compacters, some protesters have still not given up on the
police. Kevin Sheneberger tries to engage one NYPD officer in a serious debate
about the role of law enforcement in public protest. Then he sees them loading
his friend's tent into the back of a rubbish truck. Behind him, a teenage girl
holds a hastily written sign saying: "NYPD, we trusted you – you were
supposed to protect us!"
The sentiment is a familiar
one. Across Europe, over a year of
demonstrations, occupations and civil disobedience, anti-austerity protesters
have largely shifted from declaring solidarity with the police – as fellow
workers whose jobs and pensions are also under threat – to outrage and anger at
state violence against unarmed protesters. Following last
month's police brutality in Oakland, and today's summary
eviction of the Occupy Wall Street camp, American activists too are
reaching the conclusion that "police protect the 1%".
S. Paul note: It is curious how this hearing will take place with such proximity to the Presidential elections. This can not be a coincidence; can it?
The Supreme Court agreed on
Monday to decide the fate of President Barack Obama's healthcare law, with an
election-year ruling due by July on the U.S. healthcare system's biggest
overhaul in nearly 50 years.
A Supreme Court spokeswoman
said oral arguments would take place in March. There will be a total of 5-1/2
hours of argument. The court would be expected to rule during its current
session, which lasts through June.
The decision had been widely
expected since September, when the Obama administration asked the country's
highest court to uphold the centerpiece insurance provision and 26 of the 50
states separately asked that the entire law be struck down.
Another Presidential
election will soon be upon us. As in the past, this election has more to do
with showmanship than reality. When a pizza slogan captures the imaginations of
American voters rather than serious issues like that of a ten-year long war
without purpose or the migration of American Industry to foreign lands, one has
to wonder whether American voters are all in some way, suffering from dementia when
seriously considering any of these performers for the highest office in the
land. If these candidates are the best
of the best from the Republican Party, one must pause to contemplate whether
reality has left the GOP’s collective consciousness or whether those producing
this performance, think American’s are all so easily amused.
Currently, the public
opinion of Congress shows an 82%
disapproval rating. Considering this political side show of Presidential
campaigning echoing the reality of our representative’s inability to lead, it
doesn’t seem things are going to get better any time soon. One would hope this
campaign would have brought about a better approach to our current, economic
and social debacle but this latest Republican run for President has brought to
us all nothing more than sycophantic amusement.
Forget the circus, this show has an entertainment factor high enough to
rival even the best of late night television or drama mini-series’. Like watching an episode of Family Guy,
candidates from Perry to Bachmann have rendered unto us all a level of
ridiculous that one has to wonder whether they even take the role of President
seriously. It would be funny if it
weren’t so very sad.
You probably missed it on
the news, three weeks ago, the item about the Vietnamese rhinoceros going
extinct; it didn't make a lot of noise. The fact that an animal which had
roamed the jungles of Vietnam
for millions of years had now disappeared from the Earth for ever didn't hit
the front pages, or the television headlines: there were far more pressing
concerns for the world. A rhino in Vietnam? So what? Who's bothered?
But I've been thinking about
it ever since. I find the story gripping. Nobody knew there were any rhinos at
all in Vietnam, or in mainland Indo-China, for that matter, until just over 20
years ago, when hunters shot one in the dense forests of the Cat Tien National
Park about a hundred miles north of Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon as was). Imagine.
You suddenly realise your country's got rhinos. You had no idea. It's like
finding wolves surviving in the Scottish Highlands.
It turned out to be a
subspecies of the Javan rhinoceros, itself one of the world's rarest animals,
and its discovery was one of the first elements of what you might call Vietnam's
zoological peace dividend. For nearly 40 years, remember, the country was
continually at war, with the Vietnamese fighting first the Japanese, then the
French, then the Americans, and its tropical forests were off-limits to all but
the combatants; but after hostilities finished, in 1975, the jungles slowly began
to give up their secrets, which included a whole series of large mammals
previously unknown to science.
For days now, we have endured
demonstrably false propaganda that the fallen soldiers of U.S. wars
sacrificed their lives for "our freedoms." Yet, as that noxious
nonsense still lingers in the air, militarized police have invaded OWS sites in
numerous cities, including ZuccottiPark in Lower Manhattan,
and, in the boilerplate description of the witless courtesans of the corporate
media, with the mission to "evict the occupiers".
Hundreds of NYC riot police
forcibly evicted Occupy Wall Street from ZuccottiPark
early on Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2011.U.S soldiers died protecting what and who
again? These actions should make this much clear: The U.S. military and the
police exist to protect the 1%. At this point, the ideal of freedom will be
carried by those willing to resist cops and soldiers. There have been many who
have struggled and often died for freedom--but scant few were clad in uniforms
issued by governments.
Freedom rises despite cops
and soldiers not because of them. And that is exactly why those who despise
freedom propagate military hagiography and fetishize those wearing uniforms--so
they can give the idea of liberty lip service as all the while they order it
crushed.
The PennsylvaniaStateUniversity football team
took to the field Saturday and for the first time in 62 years, their coach, Joe
Paterno, was not on the sidelines.
After 46 years as head
coach, Paterno, 84, was fired last week, along with University President Graham
Spanier for their actions – or more accurately – their lack of actions
surrounding the sexual abuse of minors by a former football coach hired by
Paterno.
Normally, we wouldn’t opine
on a national issue of this nature, preferring instead to focus our attention
on South Sound. But the circumstances surrounding the Paterno case are
screaming for comment.
The facts, at least the
facts that have emerged to date, go something like this:
Jerry Sandusky was employed
by Paterno’s Nittany Lions as defensive coordinator, leaving the team in 1999.
In 2002, assistant coach Mike McQueary, then a PennState
graduate assistant, heard a noise in the team showers. When the assistant coach
investigated, he saw Sandusky
engaged in illegal sexual contact with a boy McQureary estimated to be 10 years
old. The next day, McQueary reported the incident to Paterno.
Paterno relayed the
information to athletic director Tim Curley and Gary Schultz, senior vice
president for finance and business. Not one of the men, not McQueary, not
Paterno, not Curley or Schultz, reported the child abuse to law enforcement.
Meet John Matko. John Matko
is a 34-year-old PennState class of 2000
alumnus, distraught by the recent revelations that legendary Coach Joe Paterno
and those in charge allegedly shielded a serial child rapist, assistant Jerry
Sandusky. He was livid that students chose to riot on campus this week, more
upset about Paterno's dismissal than anything else. He was disgusted that the
Board of Trustees decided to go ahead as planned with Saturday's Nebraska game just days
after the revelations became public. John Matko felt angry and was compelled to
act. He stood outside Saturday's Penn State-Nebraska game in HappyValley
and held up two signs. One read, "Put abused kids first." The other
said, "Don't be fooled, they all knew. Tom Bradley, everyone must
go." [Tom Bradley is the interim head coach.]
The response to Matko gives
lie to the media portrayal of last Saturday's game. We were told the atmosphere
was "somber", "sad" and "heart-rending", as
"the focus returned to the children." The crowd was swathed in blue,
because, we were told, that is the color to awareness of child abuse (also the PennState
colors) The team linked arms emerging from the tunnel. They dropped to a knee
with their Nebraska
opponents at midfield before the game. Once again, broadcasters told us,
"the players were paying tribute to the victims of child abuse." We
were told all of this, and I wish to God it was true.
Mississippi's personhood amendment, where anti-choicers tried to
give fertilised eggs the same legal status as your average adult male, has
thankfully failed. But while the short-term efforts to give single-cell
citizens more rights than adult women may have faltered, pro-lifers aren't
giving up. There will certainly be more state personhood amendments in the
future, and now congressional
Republicans want to take the plan national. So, despite the failure of the Mississippi bill,
pro-choicers still need to be vigilant – not just about the law, but about the
small cultural shifts that pro-lifers are pushing.
Anti-choice activists aren't
stupid (they're wrong, but they're not stupid). Over the past few decades,
they've realised that if they can frame reproductive rights as being about
saving babies' lives, they've got a winning case – after all, who doesn't like
babies? What anti-choicers are actually hostile to are changing gender roles and the
increased freedoms and liberties that have been afforded to women by the right
to determine the number and spacing of their children. Unfortunately, those
freedoms and liberties are wildly popular in the United States. Women like
having rights. Women like having sex for pleasure. Women like going to school.
Women like being able to work and have children, or have the option of choosing
to be a stay-at-home parent rather than being forced or coerced into it. Women
like marrying someone they choose, not someone they were accidentally
impregnated by.
There is a question from a
gentleman in the fourth row.
He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that he ran for
county commissioner in Maryland's CarrollCounty because he had come to the
conclusion that policies to combat global warming were actually "an attack
on middle-class American capitalism." His question for the panelists,
gathered in a Washington, DC, Marriott Hotel in late June, is this:
"To what extent is this entire movement simply a green Trojan horse, whose
belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine?"
Here at the Heartland
Institute's Sixth International Conference on Climate Change, the premier
gathering for those dedicated to denying the overwhelming scientific consensus
that human activity is warming the planet, this qualifies as a rhetorical
question. Like asking a meeting of German central bankers if Greeks are
untrustworthy. Still, the panelists aren't going to pass up an opportunity to
tell the questioner just how right he is.
Chris Horner, a senior
fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who specializes in harassing
climate scientists with nuisance lawsuits and Freedom of Information fishing
expeditions, angles the table mic over to his mouth. "You can believe this
is about the climate," he says darkly, "and many people do, but it's
not a reasonable belief." Horner, whose prematurely silver hair makes him
look like a right-wing Anderson Cooper, likes to invoke Saul Alinsky: "The
issue isn't the issue." The issue, apparently, is that "no free society
would do to itself what this agenda requires.... The first step to that is to
remove these nagging freedoms that keep getting in the way."
It
is the latest case of extreme government food tyranny, and one that is sure to
have you reeling in anger and disgust. Health department officials recently
conducted a raid of Quail Hollow Farm, an organic community supported
agriculture (CSA) farm in southern Nevada, during its special "farm to
fork" picnic dinner put on for guests -- and the agent who arrived on the
scene ordered that all the fresh, local produce and pasture-based meat that was
intended for the meal be destroyed with bleach.
For about five years now, Quail Hollow Farm has been growing organic produce
and raising healthy, pasture-based animals which it provides to members as part
of a CSA program. And it recently held its first annual "Farm to Fork
Dinner Event," which offered guests an opportunity to tour the farm, meet
those responsible for growing and raising the food, and of course partake in
sharing a meal composed of the delicious bounty with others.
But when the Southern Nevada Health District (SNHD) got word of the event and
decided to get involved, this simple gathering of friends and neighbors around
a giant, family-style picnic table quickly became a convenient target for the
heavy hand of an out-of-control government agency. And Monte and Laura Bledsoe,
the owners and operators of Quail Hollow Farm, were unprepared for what would
happen next.
It is hard to disagree with
President Obama when he tells us it is wrong for returning veterans to be
unable to find work. Even Senate Republicans went along with his proposal to
give tax credits to companies that hire unemployed veterans.
Still, this kind of rhetoric
and legislation should make us all very uneasy. Although it sounds good in
Veteran’s Day oratory, it smacks too much of telling us that the wrong people
are unemployed.
Government should not be in
the business of deciding who should be employed and who should not be employed.
Nor should anybody else be in that business. In a full-employment economy,
veterans, like everyone else, would be able to find jobs.
The "Volcker rule"
is a simple thing. Basically, it says that if you're a bank that takes deposits
and benefits from federal deposit insurance, you can't also make risky trades
that might blow up your bank and cost the taxpayers a bundle. Wall Street never
liked the rule, because banks make a lot of their money these days trading for
their own accounts and didn't want their trading profits cut off. They fought
the idea in Congress, but in the end, the Dodd-Frank bill that passed in 2010
included a version of the Volcker rule in its final draft.
Was this a victory for
common sense? Hardly. Last month regulators unveiled their first take on the
actual implementation of the Volcker rule, and it had become a monster. "Only in today's
regulatory climate could such a simple idea become so complex, generating a
rule whose preamble alone is 215 pages, with 381 footnotes to boot,"
complained American Bankers Association Chief Executive Frank Keating.
Everyday, every hour, every
time I raise up my head to investigate just what the hell is going on in this
country. I am met with an outrage, met with nonstop bullshit and parsimonious
non-sense called government, and then, all that I can do to restrain and to
comfort myself and to keep my head from exploding is to repeat this one little
phrase. "What this country needs is a f*cking revolution."
Not content with a decade of pointless war in the Middle East, the Obama
administration begins to ratchet up the war rhetoric against Iran. They
don't think that, we the people, have enough common sense to understand that
they have now removed enough troops from Iraq
and Afghanistan
to start some new conflict somewhere else for the sole purpose of hegemony.
They think that, we the people are so stupid; that we will fall yet again for
the same arguments of the big, bad, scary boogeyman who is going to get us if
we don't get him first.
