News From A Parallel World

Am I cynical? That’s how one of my internet correspondents sees me, or at least my views as expressed in the opinion pieces I write. I don’t think he meant it as a compliment.

He thinks that in my cynicism I’ve managed a can’t-lose position as a ‘pundit’ –– his noxious term; I could shoot him on that score alone –– because if I’m wrong no one will remember, being so joyous at the outcome and all.

Naturally, I don’t see it that way. I’d say that what he finds cynical I find realistic. I stopped believing in the truth of the mass media around 1964, and I’ve had that view substantiated about every day since. Do I have to recite the instances? Didn’t think so.

I also stopped believing in the truth of politicians beginning with Lyndon Baines Johnson. This has been reinforced by plenty of other clowns and killers since.

So what was it, exactly, that troubled my critic? I wrote that I didn’t think there was a chance in hell that George Zimmerman, the self-appointed ‘neighborhood watch’ stalker who murdered Trayvon Martin, would go to jail.

If I’m wrong, it won’t be because the justice system did the right thing. It will be because its become a ‘cause’ which the White House has to do something about. Right now the Justice Department is pressuring the Florida people to nail this guy because it’s embarrassing. Even that peckerhead Geraldo Rivera has gotten into the act.

America’s a racist country. Yeah, I know, we elected Barack Obama. But we’re still deeply racist, as much of the internet attacks on the President make quite clear.

What’s not so clear is the racist brainwashing that occurs in the military and in the public media. The basic training racism is a requisite in training people to kill without hesitation. Anyone who’s been through it knows this is so.

On a practical level, of course, if you’re sending people into combat they must be able to use their weapons, else the odds increase of their getting killed themselves. And on another level, the people you want them to kill must be dehumanized in order to make the killing easier.

At the same time, the government has to sell its horrible wars to the public. In that service are propaganda programs employed. The ‘enemy’ is dangerous, evil, unworthy, a ‘terrorist.’ The dead are never people but ‘insurgents’ or, regrettably, ‘collateral damage.’

Lest you think American policy-makers are concerned about the deaths their policies bring about, I refer you to the statement of Madeline Albright. In 1996, when asked by Leslie Stahl on ‘60 Minutes’ about the estimated 500,000 deaths of innocent Iraqis due to American economic sanctions, which prevented medicine and food from reaching needy people, she said, “We think it was worth it.” Albright was only Clinton’s U.N. Ambassador at the time, but evidently her defense of mass murder won her a promotion. She was named Secretary of State the following year.

That’s not out of context or anything, it’s what she said about killing half a million people. We think it was worth it.

Two years later, in justifying another U.S. military operation which slaughtered innocent people, Albright said, “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.”

If you’re pimping a foreign policy which will cause horrible consequences for people in other countries, you have to be able to keep the domestic population ignorant and docile. Otherwise, they might ask questions. But the U.S. government has figured out how to get away with murder. We are America. We stand tall and see further... Thus the ludicrous doctrine of ‘American exceptionalism’ which is actually popular these days.

It’s racist and it depends on deep-seated and long cultivated racist tendencies to help sustain otherwise brutal, stupid, and inhumane actions.

Just as troops have to be brainwashed to learn to kill without hesitation, so the general population have to be brainwashed to ‘support our troops’ and rally around the nation’s criminal leaders.

Do you think that the American public, no matter how close to zombie nation we’ve become, would rally around mass murder of white people?

So, no, I do not think I’m being cynical about race in America. We are not merely a racist society, our leaders feed it and make it grow. They want the public to see other peoples as ‘different’ and less human, because when it’s time to rain hell down on them the nation’s rulers don’t want any serious trouble at home.

Madeline Albright was Secretary of State in the administration of a Democrat, Bill Clinton, who is still thought to have been a ‘liberal’ by historians too incompetent to feed themselves. Clinton, Bush, Obama, it’s all the same guy. Isn’t that obvious by now? Obama’s just a better salesman, younger, eyes don’t twitch when he talks.

The clients need war and carnage and the politicians will give it to them. Without racism, without instilling crazed hatred and ignorance in the population, that could be a much harder sell.

So George Zimmerman is not an accident or an aberration. We created him and we armed him. Why are we surprised when this happens?

People sometimes wonder why I keep writing these inflammatory columns. I wonder about it, too. What’s the point, right? I mean, Jesus, the news is uniformly awful and I never have any bright ideas.

Sometimes I hit the button to publish a piece thinking, this ought to do it, another half dozen subscribers fed up and canceling.

Also, some folks read these things and visualize a dark, depressed, perpetually angry little dwarf, holed up with just enough food and drink to keep alive. The dwarf part is true but not the rest of it. There’s something quite liberating about writing and publishing and then being able to let it go until the next time.

The only really unhappy part of it is that I can no longer smoke anything while doing it, and I miss that, especially the illegal stuff, but a lifetime of enjoying tobacco at slightly higher than advisable levels has caused this and, unlike with politics, I have no one to blame but myself.

So why do I keep writing about politics? Lord knows, it’s more fun to write about anything else. But, as Darryl Zero would say, a man can’t escape his nature. Probably a woman can’t, either, but I’m not taking that for granted. Taking anything for granted with respect to women has generally proved to be hazardous and I’ve learned to be more careful.

As Bob Kennedy once really said on the campaign trail, “Make like, not war –– see how careful I am?”

But politics, ah, just too much blood there. Saw a documentary on Marin 26 this evening, the local, community channel where people can apparently broadcast anything they wish, and every Wednesday night, under the title, ‘Lies My Country Told Me,’ there’s a ninety-minute film of one sort or another, generally the kind that makes me want to impeach people or jail them.

The first record album recorded by Jefferson Airplane after they ceased being the airplane was called, ‘Blows Against the Empire.’ The title actually came from a quotation, origin lost at the moment, which ran, “It’s a fresh wind that blows against the empire.” Pretty heady in those days.

I rather like my own way of using it. Every time I write something and send it out there people will read it. Maybe it’ll contain something useful or new or informative, or maybe even somebody will laugh, and that alone would make it worthwhile. These are my own dwarf-like blows against the empire. In themselves, they aren’t much. They may even be a little perilous.

Unlike some folks, I am not unaware of the transformation being imposed on my country, its purpose and aims and the hazards inherent in firing against it even these puny arrows. The people who own the lease on America had the ‘Patriot Act’ written before 9-11. As Chalmers Johnson and other historians observed, they simply brushed the dust off it and fed it into the copy machines. What does that tell you? Probably the same thing it tells me.

The members of Congress passed it without even reading it. That, alone, merits their removal from office, if not their prosecution for criminal malfeasance. Barack Obama is the fourth of consecutive Presidents who have committed grave war crimes clearly prohibited by our own constitution, as well as by the Geneva Convention, and the Nuremberg Principles, including the Nuremberg Code, which expressly bans medical experiments on prisoners.

Both George Bush and Barack Obama have engaged in conduct far more deserving of impeachment and removal from office than did Richard Nixon.

But nobody is going to be impeached. Obama will probably be reelected, and I am not under the misapprehension that Romney or any other Republican bonehead would be one bit better. That’s simply the state of the union now.

Americans were told that it was an emergency situation. We were under attack by a dangerous enemy which knew no boundaries and might be anywhere. We were in precisely the situation envisioned by the Project for a New American Century, which planned to impose a dictatorship on America by using the fear engendered by such a ‘Pearl Harbor’ to get people conditioned to surrender their freedom.

Look around you. What do you see? The screening of ordinary people at airports, using X-rays and physical imposition, and the extension of this search of citizens to other venues. Construction of FEMA concentration camps which are built to hold tens of thousands of prisoners. Construction of a massive intelligence compound in Utah, designed to receive and examine intercepts of your e-mails, your telephone calls, your web browsing, and your physical whereabouts. Why?

All of this is profoundly in violation of the constitution. It cannot be lawfully done. But it is being done and no one is stopping it.

Members of Congress were told that if they did not vote to pass the financial bailout of the biggest banks, martial law would be declared and the military would occupy America’s streets. Why?

Only a willful suspension of disbelief permits anyone with an IQ higher than Dan Quayle’s to buy the government’s story of 9-11. And, yet, like other grave crimes in our nation’s history, the deep horror of the truth of things seems too much to bear and we want desperately to look away.

The consequences of this are predictable. I have no idea whether there is any practical solution or even a reasonable chance to reverse this perilous course, but I believe we are all obligated, as the cost of citizenship in the nation which was home to the greatest experiment in democracy the world has ever known, to do all that we can.

So these columns, whatever they are worth, are my own small blows against the empire. With enough of them, from enough people, who knows? We may still be able to knock the walls down. Now I’m going to grab a frozen yogurt and plug in a funny movie. Sweet dreams.

Maybe I just don’t understand how it works. That’s quite possible. I’ve been a lawyer for a little more than thirty years now, mostly on the civil litigation side of things, and so whatever they’re doing over in the criminal division, well, that’s foreign territory.

Plus, I’m thinking about Oakland. Even when I was doing criminal defense, it was mostly court-appointed in Marin. Oakland, different ball park, evidently.

The article in the Chronicle is a follow-up to a couple I’d seen earlier, troubling stories from the tenor of remarks attributed to defense lawyers. It’s even more troubling now that the case is apparently over.

Couple of years ago, a father and son went into downtown Oakland. They were headed for a jewelry store to shop for coins. The father, Tian Sheng Yu, dropped off his son on Telegraph Avenue near the Fox Theater and looked for a place to park. When he returned, he found two younger men attacking Jim Cheng Yu. He tried to intervene, asking them why they were doing that.

The attackers, Lavonte Drummer, 20, and Dominic Davis, 19, did not answer. Instead, they began beating the older man. Tian Sheng Yu, 59, was beaten to death.

Now the Alameda County District Attorney has cut a deal with the defendants. Drummer and Davis, for murdering Yu, will serve 11 years for ‘voluntary manslaughter.’ With reduced time, they’ll both be on the street again before they turn 30.

I want to know how the fuck this happens. I want to know what the District Attorney is thinking. I want to know why these two creeps are not doing life in prison for murdering a man in cold blood. I doubt I’ll get an answer. According to the Chronicle article by Henry K. Lee, the Deputy D.A. Tim Wellman “declined to discuss what factors led to the plea deal.” I'm not surprised.

Well, maybe it was that the defendants “never intended to kill anyone,” according to defense attorney Adanté Pointer, who probably can sleep at night, though has no moral right to. “My client and his family are happy to put this behind them and hope that the gentleman’s family has closure.”

Isn’t that nice? My client beat your father and husband and friend to death and now we’d just like to ‘put it behind us.’ I’ll just bet.

And the reason for the assault? Drummer told investigators that “he had anger and frustration over his life and planned on hitting someone,” according to the police report. Prosecutors said that the men confessed to being “upset about their lives, drinking rum and looking for someone to punch shortly before they attacked the Yus.”

And that’s it: couple of punks pissed off about their miserable lives, drinking and deciding to punch somebody, anybody, whoever was unlucky enough to wander into their path. They killed a total stranger, a blameless man on an errand with his son.

I am so tired of this shit. Eleven years for homicide. How many people do you have to murder to become eligible for a life sentence? Or is it that you just have to kill someone who’s white?

So every month you’re paying real money to Verizon or AT&T for long distance and cell phone service, and it hurts, right? After all, you know where that money is going. It’s going into the pockets of right-wing Republican candidates.

You can stop that filthy habit.

There’s a phone company which does not have a long-term contract with Satan, which does not bribe reactionary schmucks. It’s called CREDO. It used to be called Working Assets. I don’t know why they changed the name. The new name sounds like a brand of gasoline.

CREDO doesn’t give your money to George Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. In fact, it skims a piece of the profit and gives that money to “groups working to change the world.”

Last year, CREDO gave $2,789,612.00 to forty groups in proportions voted for by its customers.

Human Rights Watch got $75,494. The Innocence Project got $69,615. Rainforest Action Network got $83,291. Those were among those I voted for. The largest recipient was Planned Parenthood. They got $206,630. Take that, Limbaugh, you prick.

It may well be that with the stranglehold capitalism has on politics in America, our best shot at changing things will be in where we put our cash, what there is left of it.

One reaction to the thievery of the major banks has been a strong, continuing movement of people shifting their accounts out of predatory operations such as Wells Fargo and Bank of America and into local, community banks and credit unions. Of course, these banks don’t really feel it yet because most of the cash they’re stealing comes from institutional sources and via the fed, but it’s a fine start.

Same thing with buying locally-produced goods, wherever possible. Same thing, and much healthier, to eat locally-grown organic produce. If you eat meat, free-range chickens are better for you and taste better, too.

Maybe you do those things but haven’t really thought much about your phone. Next time you’re reading a piece on Democracy Now! consider that last year CREDO was able to give Amy and her gang $105,019. It’s not peanuts.

By the way, joining CREDO Mobile now gets you 40% off your monthly voice fee for a year and a contract buyout credit up to $350.00. That’s not peanuts, either.

Got another letter from my friend, Barack Obama. He’s been writing more often lately, I guess because he’s got the time. For a while, he was too busy working hard to bring about the great changes he promised us, the kind we could believe in, but he’s never forgotten the folks who elected him.

It’s a short letter. Just to remind me of the challenges we face together as we walk hand-in-hand into the future. Just to say... well, hey, I’ll let him tell it:

“As we count down to another critical fundraising deadline for this campaign, it's important to remember this:

“We always knew this election would be about two competing economic plans -- whether we get to build on our progress or see it taken away.

“But we had no idea we'd also be up against a social agenda that would roll back decades of progress, particularly for women's health.

“That means the consequences of this election will be felt in more ways than we'd counted on -- and what you do this week will help decide what they are.”

Pretty powerful stuff, those two competing economic plans. And what if we can’t build on our progress? What if we find it taken away? I don’t even want to think about it, the very idea that the President’s grand vision, the plan he’s been implementing, could somehow be derailed. I mean, even though unemployment is still at depression levels and the gap between rich and poor is wider than at any time in history, the stock market is nearly completely recovered, and that’s the really important thing.

And then on top of that, the social agenda! Good gravy, I never imagined. Well, why would I? The President himself had no idea, and he’s such a smart man. Imagine him being taken by surprise. Nefarious Republicans, can’t trust ‘em for a second.

So the ‘consequences of this election’ will be ‘felt in more ways than we’d counted on ––’. Ain’t that the truth? I remember the last one, the consequences that have been felt in many more ways than I’d counted on, that’s for sure.

About those ‘competing’ plans, though. I’m still a bit confused. My friend Barack’s was to give the banks a trillion more dollars, and then after they’d all done the right thing with the money there would be jobs, but it turns out they used the money on bonuses and to consolidate monopoly control. The Republican plan is pretty much the same except they want to screw the poor a little more along the way.

But now with the Republicans introducing bills to outlaw being female, we’ve got a real difference between the two sides.

They agree on all the killing and blowing up and invading other countries, and hanging Bradley Manning for spilling the beans, but the G.O.P. wants to outlaw birth control and make abortion harder to get, or vice versa.

They agree on further enriching the insurance industry and on more oil drilling, and money for nuclear power plants, and letting Monsanto do whatever it wants with the food supply, and torturing ‘terrorists’, and getting rid of the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments to the Constitution, but the G.O.P. thinks women who use the pill are sluts.

They agree on subsidies for factory farms, NAFTA and the exportation of jobs, slashing Social Security and Medicare, digging a trench for the Keystone oil project, and killing American citizens if the President wants to, but the G.O.P. wants to stick probes into women’s vaginas.

It’s not that I don’t believe him about the Republicans and their social agenda. If it weren’t for the fact that none of those birdbrain ideas is going to get more than about 30% in any national poll, that any attempt to reverse Roe v. Wade outside of the court is fatuous and that no Supreme Court will do it because they aren’t going to invite that kind of shit storm, and if it weren’t for the fact that any candidate or party who tries to curtail birth control is going to get retired prematurely, I’d worry. Hell, if it was up some of those people, slavery would be made legal again. But those things ain’t gonna happen. That ship has left the dock.

Hell of an election, the mafia versus the Taliban. Not quite Giants and Dodgers, know what I mean?

The real reason for my friend’s letter is money. He wants me to send him $3.00.

I’d like to help, I really would. It troubles me that Barack, after all that work, is so hard up. It's just that my checking account balance is kind of low. I think I can handle my bills for next month but it’s pretty close and I’d better hang onto the three dollars for the time being.

I got to tell you, though, I’m a little surprised. I know times are tough, but if Barack is scrambling for three bucks each from his old friends, things must be worse than I thought. I guess the check from Goldman Sachs hasn’t cleared yet.

One of the more pathetic –– and revealing –– comments emanating from America’s military leaders during the Viet Nam war was the observation by General William Westmoreland, once named Time Magazine’s Man of the Year, that “the Oriental (sic) doesn’t value life the way we do.”

Forty-five years have passed since that statement, but the value of human life is still very high to Americans. After all, the United States just shelled out as much as $800,000.00 in payment for the 16 dead people recently massacred in Kandahar, Afghanistan. That's at least $3,000.00 per pound. Victims who were merely wounded had to settle for $11,000.00 each.

According to Associated Press reports, the payment of $50,000.00 in cash for each murder victim was ordered by President Obama. The unnamed writer of the wire service story described the “unusually large payouts” as “the latest move by the White House to mend relations with the Afghan people...”

The usual anonymous sources confirmed the payments but not the sums, saying that the amounts reflected the ‘devastating nature of the incident.’

It was not an ‘incident,’ you cretins. It was murder. And if Obama thinks he’s going to thereby ‘mend relations’, he’s off his rocker.

A spokesman for NATO, Lt. Col. Jimmie Cummings, said that the U.S. often makes compensation payments. In 2010, U.S. troops in Helmand province shelled out between $1,500.00 and $2,000.00 for every civilian killed in a military operation. Woundings, if they were ‘serious’ paid between $600.00 and $1,500.00.

Survivors had previously been paid only $2,000.00 for each dead person by the Karzai government in Afghanistan, and only $1,000.00 for each person wounded.

Looks as though Westmoreland was right: America does place a higher value on human life than foreigners do.

It’s a seamy little tale, though not so different from others.

On the surface, a successful couple, she a former television star in her native Venezuela, he a leader of San Francisco’s political progressives, a county supervisor and newly-elected sheriff. They have a two-year-old son.

On New Year’s Eve, they set out for lunch at Delfina Pizza when a long-festering dispute got heated. She renewed her insistence that she would shortly go to Venezuela –– to visit her ailing father –– and take their son with her. He was fearful that neither would return.

He turned the car around and drove them home. As the car rolled to a stop, Eliana Lopez had Theo out of his car seat and the door open; her husband, Ross Mirkarimi, grabbed her by the arm to restrain her but she jerked away. The encounter left a bruise in the area of her biceps.

That evening, while the city celebrated the end of 2011, Mirkarimi and Lopez argued. Again, she threatened to leave and take Theo with her. He bragged that he had political power in San Francisco and could get custody. She believed him.

On New Year’s day, while Mirkarimi was in the shower, Lopez ran next door to visit a neighbor, Ivory Madison, and asked her to make a short video memorializing that her husband had bruised her. Lopez figured she’d use the video as ammunition in any custody battle.

But Madison took it to the cops.

What happened next was certainly predictable. There was a public demand to nail Mirkarimi for domestic violence. Lopez refused to press charges and said she would not cooperate with any prosecution. She said that her husband had not struck her and that the incident was being blown out of proportion.

Meanwhile, several women’s groups called for Mirkarimi to resign and the mayor, Ed Lee, himself a classic prop for the city’s real powers, suspended the new sheriff without pay.

A judge granted Lopez’ request to leave the country for a month –– with Theo. Mirkarimi, who has been ordered to stay away from the couple’s home, is staying with a friend, former mayor Art Agnos, one of the very few people still willing to be seen with him.

The local press, of course, is having a wonderful time. Former Mayor Willie Brown, whose ‘Willie’s World’ column in the Sunday Chronicle is usually a lengthy reminder of just how important he still is, is cashing in, as are a bunch of journalists. Front page story: ‘Mirkarimi’s rapid fall from grace,’ repeatedly reminds readers that he is a left-winger, and cites various former ‘friends and allies on the political left’ who are feeling ‘betrayed and duped.’

Not many are sticking by him. Debra Walker, an artist, said that the media had ‘tried and convicted’ him. "I think it’s Ross’ responsibility to fight and stay in office. He was elected by the people, and if the people want to remove him that’s their call.” But there aren’t many like Walker.

Mirkarimi’s fear that Lopez would take Theo to Venezuela and never return may have grown from the circumstances of his own childhood. His parents, a Muslim father who had emigrated from Iran and a mother descended from Russian Jews, broke up when he was 5. His mother took him from Chicago to Rhode Island. He rarely saw his father after that.

As a youngster, Mirkarimi was afflicted with vision problems which forced him to wear an eye patch, and a serious speech impediment. They were also quite poor. He grew up attending rallies against the Vietnam War and for women’s rights.

After graduating from St. Louis University, he interned in Washington, D.C. with Ralph Nader before moving to California in 1984 to study Russian literature in Monterey. He is in the Naval Reserve and holds two master’s degrees, in international affairs from Golden Gate University and in environmental science from USF.

Mirkarimi got into politics working for radical supervisor Terence Hallinan and managed Hallinan’s campaigns for district attorney; he was then hired as an investigator for the D.A.’s office and enrolled in the San Francisco Police Academy to become a state-certified cop.

Then Mirkarimi hooked up with Matt Gonzalez, a supervisor who ran an astonishing –– and nearly successful –– write-in campaign for Mayor against Willie Brown in 2003, and succeeded Gonzalez as the supervisor for the city’s 5th district, representing the Haight, Inner Sunset, and Western Addition.

As supervisor, Mirkarimi found himself immersed in law enforcement matters, often showing up at homicide scenes when his constituents notified him. In 2005 he performed CPR on a man in trouble in Buena Vista Park; in 2007, he helped capture two suspects in a drive-by shooting; in 2008, he stopped a robbery in progress.

On his way up, Mirkarimi sometimes annoyed people with an abrasive style. He didn’t seem to care who he was wrestling with, including members of the press, who are now relishing the get-even part of the equation. It looks as though the odds are bad. After all, the power brokers never much liked him and any appeal has to go through the Board of Supervisors. It is unlikely that he’ll get any votes there. Those people are interested in reelection.

Probably nobody but the parties themselves know what really happened. Mirkarimi acknowledges that he has a problem with ‘arrogance,’ but what politician doesn’t? In the midst of a quarrel, he grabbed his wife’s arm and it left a bruise. Is that spousal abuse? Does it warrant prosecution? Loss of his job? Loss of custody?

It’s a seamy little tale, probably not very unusual. I’ve had a few quarrels with partners but, as far as I know, didn’t leave any bruises.

It’s not a popular question to ask, but I’m asking it anyhow. Is it spousal abuse? If one party grabs another and it leaves a bruise, is that a criminal offense? If it is, is it enough to disqualify Mirkarimi from holding a job in law enforcement?

Maybe you answer yes to these questions. Fair enough. But if so, how many unindicted defendants are there? How many public officials? How many cops? How many judges?

There’s dignity in going hungry. At least, that’s the viewpoint of Michael Nutter, who is mayor of Philadelphia. Nutter has imposed a ban on feeding homeless people at sites on and near the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, and at all city parkland, including Love Park.

According to CBS News, Nutter explained that offering food to the hungry at public places in the City of Brotherly Love invites unsanitary conditions and robs the poor of their dignity.

“Providing to those who are hungry must not be about opening the car trunk, handing out a bunch of sandwiches, and then driving off into the dark and rainy night,” Nutter said. But if you’re planning a picnic, don’t worry: the ban does not apply to family gatherings.

A similar restriction is being implemented by New York’s mayor Bloomberg. As described in a New York Post article last week, the city’s Department of Homeless Services has imposed new rules on the nutritional content of food to be served at city shelters. Because food given to needy people by churches, synagogues, or individuals can’t be tested, it can’t be given away under the new rules, and all such food formerly given to city-run facilities will now be refused.

In New York, it has long been a practice of houses of worship to bring food to the city’s shelters. Now, that’s prohibited. The Post article by Jeff Stier notes, “DHS Commissioner Seth Diamond says the ban on food donations is consistent with Mayor Bloomberg’s emphasis on improving nutrition for all New Yorkers. A new interagency document controls what can be served at facilities — dictating serving sizes as well as salt, fat and calorie contents, plus fiber minimums and condiment recommendations.”

And: “Diamond insists that the institutional vendors hired by the shelters serve food that meets the rules but also tastes good; it just isn’t too salty. So, says the commissioner, the homeless really don’t need any of the synagogue’s food.”

That’s a lie, say long-time providers such as Glenn and Lenore Richter, who have been providing such food for more than a decade –– although they doesn’t use that word. And of course the personal interaction among cooks, donors, and recipients has a significant value which the Bloomberg bureaucrats probably have no ability to understand.

Presumably, the “institutional vendors” will be able to increase their profits now, which is the main thing. And those who are hungry can rest assured that, although they will be deprived of the food formerly brought by people such as the Richters, they won’t be getting too much salt.

These examples are by no means isolated. Beginning with Las Vegas in 2006, American cities have been systematically barring the giving of food to hungry people unless it is by city agents and under controlled conditions.

Vegas ran into trouble with a federal judge by explicitly saying in its ordinance that it was impermissible to feed ‘the indigent.’ Since then, municipalities across America have been careful not to specify that the homeless are not to fed in public in their rules against feeding the homeless in public. As I mentioned in a Parallel World column on Christmas, My Father’s House, the city of Orlando, Florida, has been prosecuting the group Food Not Bombs for feeding soup to the homeless in public parks. Other such ordinances are in effect in Dallas, Houston, and numerous other cities, and where it is not completely prohibited, the rules under which it is regulated are generally impossible to comply with –– which is the point. Between 2006 and the present, the number of homeless in Las Vegas has doubled to about 20,000. Figures have ballooned comparably in other major cities.

Americans don’t want to see the homeless; they are an embarrassment. Any time a group or individual tries to provide food in a centralized location, urban authorities make sure it can’t happen. They do not care about their ‘nutrition’ in New York or their ‘dignity’ in Philadelphia. They don’t want the poor congregating. They want them to leave, or at least keep out of sight.

There’s something deeply disturbing about the spread of municipal ordinances designed to sever the connection between those in need and those whose generosity of spirit impels them to try to help. America is already in terrible trouble. The so-called ‘recovery’ which the President likes to brag about is a lie, as anyone who can’t find a job or has simply given up trying can testify. The stock market is what has ‘recovered.’ The bonuses have ‘recovered.’ The poor are worse off than ever and there are more of them.

The country’s teetering on the brink of a depression and there is no sign that the President or any of his rivals has the slightest idea how to fix it or the slightest inclination to do so even if they did.

If going hungry promotes dignity in Philadelphia, imagine how good it must be to starve to death.

There is legislation moving through the Tennessee legislature which would require the state to publish the name of every doctor who performs an abortion and include details about every woman having one. It’s called the ‘Life Defense Act of 2012, and it is expected to pass both houses.

The information which under law would be made public includes the woman’s age, race, county, marital status, educational level, number of children, the place where the abortion was done, and the number of times she has had the procedure. The doctor performing the abortion would be named, as well.

Interesting, calling this bill the ‘Life Defense Act’ when its obvious purpose is to paint a target on the back of every doctor who performs an abortion and to expose the personal life of every woman who has one. Two years ago, an abortion doctor was shot dead in Kansas. Obviously, passage of the Tennessee law will guarantee that more will be shot. Obviously, that’s the idea.

Hey, as we all know by now, many state legislatures, especially in the South, already think that a woman’s decision to have an abortion gives the state the right to penetrate her with an ultrasound probe. If you’re going to behave like that, apparently, you’re asking for it.

Women’s control over their own bodies has been a hard battle for years, but what we’re witnessing now is a counterattack by (mostly) men who don’t mind killing a few to make their point. Indeed, a bill in the Georgia legislature would explicitly force a pregnant woman, in some circumstances, to jeopardize her life in order to carry a stillborn or dying fetus to term.

If that sounds insane to you, welcome to the club. Republican legislative majorities are passing bills all over America which take away women’s rights while extending them to zygotes. Health care may be denied by employers. Doctors may be prosecuted for the advice they give or withhold. Under a proposed Arizona law, employers may actually fire a woman for using contraceptives.

In Texas, Governor Perry turned down $35 million in federal aid which was to be used to support preventive and reproductive health care for the poor (by the way, Dr. Paul, how well will the ‘states get to decide’ policy work on matters like this?).

These dangerous, oppressive, and inhumane policies and statutes are backed by people who claim they are supporters of ‘right to life.’ But they do not support right to life; they support the right of the male-dominant culture to control women’s lives. That’s all it is, that’s what’s going on here.

America’s a pretty sick society when it comes to the rights of women and when it comes to human sexuality. Put the two together and you’re going to get serious trouble.

Before the feminist movement of the late ‘sixties and early ‘seventies, the role of women in America was carefully restricted. A woman was expected to act dimwitted in public and like a hooker in the bedroom. The notion was termed the ‘Madonna/whore.’ Oddly, this was a pretty good mirrored reflection of men, who tended to be dimwitted in the bedroom and act like whores in public.

The women’s movement threatened all that and men do not like to be threatened. My personal theory is that men, having their primary sex organ outside of the body, are always worried that something will happen to it. This makes them defensive. White men, in addition, are worried that their primary sex organ is not as big as those belonging to black men and that when white women get a load of that it will be all over. You think I’m kidding.

There are a lot of black men killed due to the puny peckers of white men.

I think also that sex is at the very bottom of the gender war some men are waging, using as cover the ‘birth control’ and ‘abortion’ issues. Neither of these things are real issues in the sense that the legal world will materially change. Anyone who thinks they can outlaw abortion and get away with it is too crazy for public life and dangerous when operating heavy machinery. Won’t happen.

Also, trying to make birth control difficult is a stupid, pointless exercise. This particular campaign will shortly disappear when it dawns on the stupid white men pushing it that depriving minorities of birth control would hasten the day when whitey will be in the national minority. That realization should arrive any day now.

But the problem is that abortion and birth control are not what’re driving the latest assault on women. That is coming from pure hatred and fear, and that’s a lot scarier.

Men are afraid of women’s sexuality, no question about it. If abortion is illegal and birth control hard to find, then a woman will either be kept barefoot and pregnant or be constrained to not express herself sexually. Because both things are no longer subject to effective male control, there are a lot of scared MFers out there.

America, when it comes to sex, is one screwed-up country. Maybe it’s the Puritan strain, but I don’t think so. It’s weirder than that. The society pretends to have rather strict sexual conventions but in practice it’s close to anything goes. This leads to incongruities such as the FCC fining a major network for the exposure of a woman’s breast –– for about a tenth of a second –– while ignoring the fact that advertisers have sexualized children in order to sell garbage to the viewer.

Pretty much anything sexual is available on cable, while the myth of ‘family values’ censors words on CBS.

I had a client once, a court-appointed case, who had made a habit of following attractive women home, then writing them letters in which he described explicitly what he would like to do to them; he enclosed Polaroids with his prose, which depicted him, in the memorable words of the police report, “in a highly excited state.” I visited him in jail and asked him just what he thought he was doing. Didn’t he realize that women didn’t like that sort of thing, that they might feel threatened? He seemed genuinely puzzled. “Everybody else advertises,” he said.

Women’s sexuality is permissible in America only as it serves the interests and purposes of men. I realize that’s an ugly thing to say but that doesn’t make it untrue. Over the past forty years, though much of what I personally hoped for with feminism has not come to pass, there have nonetheless been sufficient changes to threaten people such as Rick Santorum and Rush Limbaugh. Those changes are fundamentally sexual, hence the Limbaugh screeds in which he turns anything remotely involving women into a perverse sexual revelation (his demand that Sandra Fluke videotape her sexual relations and post them online for his enjoyment).

As we know, many women who claim rape are probably faking it so they can get abortions; at least that’s the view of Idaho State Senator Chuck Winder, who authored a bill, which passed, requiring two invasive ultrasound procedures –– not one –– for any woman who wants an abortion. She should be asked by her physician, he said, whether “this pregnancy was caused by normal relations in a marriage or was it truly caused by a rape.”

I’ll bet he’s a lot of fun around the house. Maybe Chuck’s wife often says no to him and he has to persuade her. If he was black and they lived in Florida, she could shoot him.

The legislators in Tennessee, like the ones in Idaho, Virginia, Texas, Georgia, and elsewhere, who are passing draconian laws under cover of the ‘right to life’ movement are generally doing nothing for newborns, nothing for malnourished children, nothing for kids who need parents or other adults to care for them. As soon as you’re born, they’re done with you.

These are often the same legislators and other pols who ‘support the troops’ but, as soon as they come home with brain injuries or toxic poisoning from our depleted uranium, just don’t care anymore.

I don’t think it’s enough simply to defeat the latest misogynistic laws and respond to the hate speech from the likes of Rush Limbaugh. We need a renewed feminist movement, one which will will not be satisfied with seventy-seven cents on the dollar compared to what men earn; one which will not think that women such as Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann attaining high office is progress; one which will flatten the corporate sponsors of ‘media women’, the modern equivalent of Barbie.

Maybe the ugly stupidity of this latest round of attacks will finally galvanize a real movement. This culture certainly needs it.

A black kid from up north was visiting some relatives in the south.

Emmett Till had just turned 14. He didn’t know what the rules were. One day, playing with other boys in front of a local store, he told them that back in Chicago he had a white girlfriend; the others thought he was bragging and exaggerating and invited him to go into the store and make conversation with the woman working there, 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant.

What he said to her is not known, but Bryant took offense, and she told her husband, the store owner. Shortly after that, Roy Bryant, carrying a gun and a flashlight, drove to the house where Till was staying and brought him out to a car where his wife identified the boy.

Till was put into the car and taken away. Bryant and J.W. Milam then beat, stripped, tortured, and finally shot him to death before dumping his body into the Tallahatchie River in Money, Mississippi. Even though they were identified, they were acquitted of murder by the jury of twelve white men, and the minor offense of which they were convicted was tossed on appeal.

It was 1955, a year after the integration confrontation at Little Rock, Arkansas, and the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Eisenhower was President.

Emmett Till had been the only child of Louis and Manie Till of Chicago, Illinois. His parents hadn’t wanted him to go but he’d pleaded with them. He was adventuresome. He wanted to see something of the country. When his mother put him on the bus, she warned him, “Be careful. If you have to get down on your knees and bow when a white person goes past, do it willingly.”

But Emmett Till was a young boy and did not understand the madness of some white people.

That was fifty-six and a half years ago, the murder of Emmett Till. Between then and now we’ve had a civil right movement which shook the nation. We’ve had Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks, and Fannie Lou Hamer. We’ve had the March on Washington, and Bull Conner turning loose police dogs against children in Birmingham. We’ve had the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church which killed four girls, and we’ve had Selma, and we’ve had Medgar Evers shot in the back. We’ve had Watts and Detroit and Newark. We’ve had Viola Liuzzo shotgunned in her car.

Emmett Till’s body was finally recovered, his face destroyed by the beating and by a gunshot wound. His parents kept his casket open at the funeral. “I want everyone to see what they did to my boy,” Mrs. Till said.

Twenty-nice days ago, a gun-carrying, self-appointed ‘neighborhood watch’ creep named George Zimmerman saw something he regarded as ‘suspicious’, a 17-year-old black kid who was in Sanford, Florida, visiting relatives. Zimmerman began to stalk him.

The black kid, Trayvon Martin, was armed with a can of Arizona ice tea and bag of Skittles for his cousin. It is evident from subsequent tapes of Martin’s frantic cell phone call to a friend that he was afraid; a stranger, 100 pounds heavier, was following him and closing ground. He wanted help.

Zimmerman, as much of the country now knows, shot Martin to death in cold blood.

The cops arrived. They heard Zimmerman say he’d done it in self-defense. Although Martin had no weapon, they took the word of the white killer. He was not taken into custody; his gun was not even taken from him as evidence.

For two days, Martin’s body was unclaimed because the cops didn’t bother using the cell phone to contact anyone who might’ve known him. Just another dead black guy, I guess. Guilty, as Marian Wright Edelman wrote in a scathing, brilliant essay for Reader Supported News, of walking while black.

Supposedly, the Sanford police let Zimmerman walk because he claimed protection of an idiotic Florida law which gives a person legal immunity to use "deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony." It also bars the deceased’s family from filing a civil suit.

The murderer actually called 911 shortly before killing Martin, saying, according to the tape, "he’s a black male…Something’s wrong with him…These a**holes, they always get away.”

Not really. Fewer all the time, in fact. Three weeks ago, another black man, 20-year-old Bo Morrison was shot to death in Wisconsin when he tried to hide in the bushes after an underage drinking party was raided by the police. The homeowner who killed him was not charged.

These murders of black children by crazy white men are no aberration, and they will continue despite the outrage at the Martin shooting. That’s because a right wing group called the American Legislative Executive Council, a bunch of politicians and business executives from companies such as Wal-Mart, has drafted legislation which permits it, and that legislation has already been enacted in Florida, Wisconsin, and 14 other states which mimics the ALEC model.

These laws are being passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. In Florida, according to an article in Truthout by Brendan Fischer, “Senator Durell Peadon, an ALEC member, introduced the law in his state and it passed in early 2005; the NRA was behind the bill and its lobbyist Marion Hammer reportedly ’stared down legislators as they voted.’ After Governor Jeb Bush signed it into law, Hammer presented the bill to ALEC's Criminal Justice Task Force (now known as the Public Safety and Elections Task Force) months later, (and) the corporations and state legislators on the Task Force voted unanimously to approve the bill as an ALEC model. ALEC Task Force meetings are closed to the press and public, but corporations and ideological special interests or trade groups like the NRA vote as equals with elected officials.

Even with a belated Justice Department inquiry and the locals in Sanford feeling some heat, Zimmerman will probably escape any punishment. The police, not bothering to confiscate the murder weapon, will probably not be able to effectively produce it at a trial because they can no longer establish chain of custody, even if Zimmerman, who has left town, doesn’t throw it into the river. And not only that. On the scene of a homicide, the Sanford cops did not bother to test Zimmerman for drugs or alcohol, although they did test Martin’s corpse.

Considering the history of white treatment of blacks in America, a nation where it appears that the former continues with impunity to lynch the latter, I am amazed at the persistent nonviolence among blacks. I do not know how they retain such dignity and grace.

I am sixty-five years old. When Emmett Till was murdered by a couple of cracker assholes I was nine. That this is still going on in America, after all these years and all these struggles, after so many victories and such courageous work, is heartbreaking. God, I hope I live to see the day when I am not so ashamed to be white.

Like you, I’ve been a witness to the ongoing travesty masquerading as public policy, the legislative assault on women engineered by people too stupid and evil to be trusted with power or even a microphone.

That they have audiences and supporters is one of the most depressing things about it.

It’s easy to make fun of Limbaugh and Santorum, and the state legislatures in Virginia and Texas, and others, twelve states at last count. After all, you’ve got to be pretty barking brainless to not only hold the kinds of ‘thoughts’ they hold but to voice them.

For years, I wondered whether stupid people knew they were stupid, but I don’t wonder any longer. No, they don’t. They’re the sort of boneheads who commit crimes but think they can get away with it because nobody can prove it. If Santorum hadn’t made it to the Senate, he’d be doing time.

Limbaugh, like Ann Coulter, regularly slanders people and calls for violence, and then pretends he was just kidding around. After several days of referring to a woman as a ‘slut’ and suggesting that she post videos of herself engaged in sexual activities, his press agents tried to deflect criticism by saying it was merely ‘satire.’

It’s easy to make fun of them because they’re such obvious cases of arrested development. I love the Bill Hicks commentary on Limbaugh, ten years old but still quite relevant. It’s fairly graphic and disgusting but, then, so is Limbaugh. You can find it on YouTube.

Article online today, “Turns Out Being Born A Woman Is A Major Financial Mistake,” by Cassie Murdoch, details how women routinely pay more for essentially identical goods and services. She calls it the ‘vagina tax.’

There are obvious differences, the dry cleaners and what are called ‘personal care products’, but it also extends to some big items, house purchases, for example. Women with more resources and higher incomes than their male counterparts find it more difficult to qualify for equivalent mortgage deals.

As Murdoch notes, a 2006 study by the Consumer Federation of America found that 32% of women were more likely than men to end up with high interest sub-prime loans.

Women also regularly pay higher health insurance premiums, ironically in part because they tend to follow recommended health maintenance protocol.

In California, where gender pricing has been outlawed for sixteen years, women spend on average $1,351.00 more per year on costs and fees than do men.

And there’s another piece to this story:

Women are still being paid a lot less than men. According to a recent story in the business news, data compiled by Bloomberg shows that among 265 major occupations in America, the median female salary exceeds that paid to men in only one of them: female personal care and service workers, including butlers, valets, house sitters and shoe shiners earn $1.02 for every $1.00 earned by men in the same jobs. As journalist Frank Bass noted, women who want to earn more on Wall Street than their male colleagues have one reliable option. They can set up a shoeshine stand in Lower Manhattan.

Not surprising: the six jobs with the greatest gender gap in pay were in ‘financial sectors’ –– insurance agents, managers, clerks, securities sales, personal advisers, and other financial specialists. That’s the job I want, personal adviser. Six-figure income, call me anytime.

Women doctors earn sixty-three cents for every dollar male doctors earn. For chief executives, it’s up to seventy-four cents.

The good news is, it’s actually gotten better. Fifty years ago, it was 61 cents, not 77. The bad news is, it doesn’t seem to have improved in recent years.

So I’ve got to say that this afternoon I’m finding the latest round of misogyny less than amusing. I’d really like to grab Limbaugh by his pecker and swing him out an upper window of the Chrysler Building. Yes, I’d put on gloves first, what do you take me for?

Hey, Rush: just satire.

Reading the latest data on wage disparity I remembered how we couldn’t manage to get the Equal Rights Amendment passed. We got the two-thirds vote in Congress –– that’s right, youngsters, there was a time when your House and Senate weren’t inhabited entirely by useless hacks –– but couldn’t manage the three-quarters of state legislatures before the time expired.

I remembered also one of the greatest speeches ever given by an American politician, by Jesse Jackson at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, and I found it on YouTube. Toward the end, he demanded of us that we “never surrender to inequality. Women cannot compromise ERA or comparable worth. Women are making sixty cents on the dollar to what a man makes. Women cannot buy meat cheaper, women cannot buy bread cheaper, women cannot buy milk cheaper! Women deserve to get paid for the work that you do, it’s right and it’s fair...”

For the full effect, it’s worth checking out: the commentary on women’s pay is 2:41 into this segment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHd6XYMlP4I&feature=channel

Today we’ve got imbeciles trying to legislate what women may do with their bodies, and the media take them seriously. I truly can’t understand how anyone can utter these things. I don’t understand how anyone can be so heartless, so crazy, so nasty, so shameless, so lacking in perception, feeling, and intelligence. But they’re out there and they have power.

My God, can’t we do better than this?

When New York City cops attacked the latest Occupy demonstration, beating people and dragging them to jail, it represented another small step in a long, steady escalation of violence the state is using against those among its citizens with the nerve to object to conditions.

The First Amendment called it “petition(ing) the government for redress of grievances” but the government calls it ‘disorderly conduct,’ and its minions will now beat your head in for it.

Police violence has been getting worse, especially against organized protests, and the rules designed to shut people up have been getting more and more draconian. Couple of weeks ago, the Congress passed –– with only three dissenting votes –– yet another measure limiting your right to demonstrate, this time anywhere the Secret Service may be operating, which includes large sporting events and all political conventions.

Exercising your constitutional rights, you know, the ones all those troops our ‘leaders’ claim to support have died to preserve, is now pretty much against the law.

Along with the right to petition for redress of grievances, i.e. demonstrate, we have effectively lost the right to freedom of speech and of assembly, the right to legal counsel, a jury of our peers, habeas corpus, and freedom from unwarranted searches and seizures.

When Occupy arrestees got into court, they discovered that the amount of their bail was dependent upon whether they had agreed to allow the cops to photograph their irises and log them into a data base.

There is no law –– yet; I’m sure Congress will get around to it when they’re back from the country clubs and hooker palaces they frequent –– requiring that criminal suspects submit to having their eyes scanned, but the police tell you it’s mandatory, and when you’re in custody the inherent atmospheric threat tends to impact one’s sense of civil rights.

Meanwhile, the judiciary is lending the state a hand, unsurprising to anyone who’s familiar with the help the German judiciary afforded Adolf Hitler.

In New York, Judge Abraham Clott, and how perfect is that, told arrestees that he didn’t much care about the niceties of the Constitution. Those who refused iris scans would be hit with much higher bail.

Obviously, conditioning bail on whether a person waives his or her rights is not quite legal. Doesn’t bother Clott. One defendant, charged with resisting arrest –– one of the manifestly fake charges cops use when they have no actual criminal behavior to charge you with –– and with no criminal record, no likelihood of flight, and strong roots in the community, and whose parents were in the courtroom, nevertheless was slapped with a $1,000.00 bail by the judge because she had refused the scan.

The legal purpose of bail is to ensure a defendant’s appearance. It may not be used punitively. Historically, political demonstrators with ties to a community and whose offenses are clearly minor, are granted release ‘on their own recognizance’ and without bail. When I and a band of friends and fellow compatriots were arrested forty years ago for failing to leave the local federal building when ordered to do so, we were all OR’ed. That was before the government created a sufficient emergency to justify the modern security state.

Even if Congress fails to further tighten the screws, underlings like Judge Clott can be depended upon to do whatever the cops want of them. Constitutional rights have become ‘quaint’ under Obama in the same way the Geneva Convention became ‘quaint’ under Bush.

Everything Hitler did was legal. Millions were exterminated legally. The German people claimed afterwards not to have known, and the world largely did not believe them.

As Wired Magazine revealed last week, the National Security Agency is erecting an enormous building in the very center of polygamy, in Bluffdale, Utah. The completed structure will be five times the size of the U.S. Capitol. It will house an army of computer experts, spies, and security personnel. It is designed to contain the sum total of massive intelligence being gathered about you and everyone you know. No doubt iris scans will be included.

We used to believe in the rights of the individual against the power of the government. Those days are gone. Even the barest notion that the FBI or CIA was spying on citizens who demonstrated or spoke their minds brought outrage from an angry U.S. Congress in the mid-’seventies. There were Senate investigations of the CIA and other police operations which disclosed serious abuses such as MK-Ultra and COINTELPRO. It was learned then that the CIA had infiltrated urban police forces, every cabinet office in Washington, and every major media source including big newspapers, radio, and TV networks. The CIA, partially exposed and presumably grateful that it hadn’t been nailed for killing John Kennedy, promised to cease these operations, which was a lie.

The Senate of the 1970s was a real one. What we have now is a sick joke. In barely two generations, our liberties have been stolen in broad daylight and those who were charged with the guardianship of those gates have shown themselves to be worthless and even traitorous. In the 1970s, Joe Liebermann would have been laughed out of the Senate. Nobody would’ve taken an empty suit like Harry Reid seriously.

Eight years ago, the Bush regime floated the idea of a national intelligence operation to collect everything, the Total Information Awareness program. It was buried under a loud popular opposition. Now, under Barack Obama, nobody even objects. TIA was developed secretly, awaiting only the election of a suitable President whose race and party credentials would keep the liberals quiet.

The Utah center will compile and sort everything about you, all of your e-mails, phone calls, Google searches, and, as the Wired article by James Bamford notes, “all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter.’”

In at least one Southern state, there is a move to eliminate cash, in fact to make it illegal, and to require people to use plastic instead. It’s a test situation. If people accept it, it will be expanded to other states. Once your purchases –– for everything including shelter and food –– must be made by plastic, the government can destroy you by canceling your card.

Out across America, people know there’s something wrong. Many can’t quite name it but they feel a sense of unease, a sense of dread. On the message boards there’s a new darkness, a clanging cynicism. Big Brother is here after all, the New World Order, each day bringing yet another troubling story of government intrusion and a loss of liberty.

Personally, I’m not ready to give up. I’m one of those survivors of the ‘sixties who got a real education. Consequently, I learned where democracy comes from and what it promises. I learned that I have rights, and I’m pissed off that any government thinks it’s going to steal them with some phony scare about ‘terrorists’ under the bed.

A democracy which honors its faith and respects its people has nothing to fear from those who would harm it. Actually, such a country would have very few enemies since it would not be bringing harm to others. But in any case, America can only be defeated if its own leaders break their oaths and its own people stop caring enough to stand up.

I guess that’s what we’re going to discover about ourselves, whether we’re willing to stand up for freedom, for what we were promised.

“As we mourn today with the Afghan people, we are steadfast in our resolve to work hand in hand with our Afghan partners to accomplish the missions and goals on which we have been working together for so long."

That’s America’s Secretary of War, Leon Panetta, shedding crocodile tears over the slaughter of 16 people in Kandahar Province , Afghanistan. Just as sincere as Charlie Manson apologizing for the Tate-LaBianca killings in 1969, except that Manson never apologized, being a murderer but not a hypocrite.

Nine days ago, as many as twenty U.S. troops engaged in systematic torture, rape, and murder in two villages, more than a kilometer apart. They might’ve been able to blame it on the Taliban except they were sloppy, leaving survivors. And the survivors talked.

Not, of course, on American television. American television, along with the ‘liberal press’ of the New York Times and Washington Post have played the story as though the single named suspect, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, was a gentle, decent man, a true patriot who signed up after 9-11 to protect his country, and who just ‘snapped’ under the strain of doing so.

A terrible aberration, that’s what it is, so regrettable. A “tragic incident... that resulted in the loss of life and injuries..." according to Panetta, making it sound like a traffic accident. Life was ‘lost’, misplaced, evidently, in the ‘incident.’ Words such as murder do not issue from his lips.

Not everyone in the American military guards his words so carefully. Take, for example, Maj. General James Mattis, who said, "It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be up-front with you. I like brawling."

As journalist Stephen Lendman writes in his lengthy exposé of U.S. military actions over the recent past, "’Kill teams’ are deployed. Indiscriminate murder, sadism, and other atrocities are committed, most often with impunity. It's done for sport and lust. Celebratory high-fives follow. Rarely ever are soldiers like Jeremy Morlock punished. Others guilty like him get off scot-free, especially commanders. His 5th Stryker Brigade committed countless murders and atrocities. Cover-up involved staging incidents to look like defensive actions against attacks. Pentagon apologies ring hollow. Soldiers are trained to kill reflexively.”

What U.S. troops did on March 11th was policy. It was probably even carried out by a squadron under the direction of higher-ups. Testimony from numerous eyewitnesses contradict the story Panetta and Obama –– and the useless western media –– have been selling to a still-unconscious American public in striking and profound ways.

Here’s what America’s hookers are saying: after an afternoon of drinking, Bales went off on his own and carried out the killings unaided, including burning many of the bodies. The Associated Press cited the ‘defense team’ saying, “it’s too early to determine what factors may have played into this incident and the defense team looks forward to reviewing the evidence, examining all of Sergeant Bales’ medical and personnel records...”

One AP dispatch quoted Bales’ lawyer, John Henry Browne, formerly the lawyer for serial killer Ted Bundy, as saying, "What’s going on on the ground in Afghanistan, you read about it... but it’s totally different when you hear about it from someone who’s been there. It’s just really emotional.” I’ll just bet it is. And it’s all been so hard on Bales, who is either a designated scapegoat or a remarkably savage murderer, even by the standards set by the U.S. in recent years.

Bales’ wife, Karilyn, “offered condolences to the victims’ families on Monday” and said that the whole thing is “completely out of character of the man I know and admire.” AP wire service reports describe the man Karilyn admires as having been convicted of securities fraud in 2003, two years after joining the army in a burst of patriotism. In addition, “a Florida investment job went sour, and his Seattle-area home was condemned as he struggled to make payments on another.” He still owes $1.5 million on the fraud judgment, which arose when Bales, working as a stockbroker, “engaged in fraud, breach of fiduciary duty, churning, unauthorized trading, and unsuitable investments. His legal troubles included charges that he assaulted a girlfriend and, in a hit-and-run accident, ran bleeding in military clothes into the woods, according to court records.”

Panetta couldn’t have invented a more perfect patsy, whether he did the killings by himself or not. Four tours of duty, brain injury, heard about (not ‘saw’ –– that story has already fallen apart) a fellow soldier losing a limb. That’s the haywire defense. On the other hand, if patriotism won’t cut it, if the government has to dump this guy, he’s also a convicted felon, liar, and hit-and-run driver. Either way, he’s atypical.

Either way, he’s Lee Harvey Oswald.

In Afghanistan, the evidence looks otherwise. According to local news sources, "A parliamentary probe team on Thursday said up to 20 American troops were involved in Sunday’s killing of 16 civilians in southern Kandahar province. It spent two days interviewing surviving family members, witnesses, and tribal elders. They also gathered evidence where killings took place.”

Press observers said that preliminary findings said that “Two groups of US soldiers were involved. Attacks occurred in separate villages one and a half kilometers apart.”

"We are convinced that one soldier cannot kill so many people in two villages within one hour at the same time." said the Pajhwok Afghan News, as cited by Lendman.

Afghan’s Army Chief of Staff, Lt. General Sher Mohammad Karimi, called it "preplanned murder” and both he and President Karzai said that “multiple assailants’ were involved, according to ‘Russia Today.’

India’s ‘Siasat Daily’ headlined, “U.S. Forces raped two Afghan women” and reported that “The Afghan probe team said US soldiers systematically went from house to house in two villages, raped two women before murdering them, and at least 14 others. Some victim bodies were then set ablaze.”

Karzai and General Karimi said that “U.S. commanders stonewalled Afghan demands to interrogate those responsible and hold them accountable locally.” According to ‘Russia Today,’ “Surviving family members and witnesses said assailants had air support. Helicopters brought them in and remained overhead during the carnage.”

Well, as Americans we not only hear the Obama story almost exclusively because our media is corrupt to the core, but we’re invited to believe our people anyway. I mean, everybody knows those Afghans are unreliable.

Except that the U.S. snatched Bales out of the hands of Afghan authorities and took him out of the country, first to Kuwait, then to Leavenworth, Kansas, where nobody in the nation where the murders took place has a chance to question him.

Wherever America goes in the world, our immunity goes with it, our sovereignty, our authority. The world knows it, too. It was commonplace and accepted that when Blackwater mercenaries murdered civilians in Iraq they were answerable to no one, not even the U.S. government. Our killers have immunity, you see, from laws.

That includes immunity from international law.

The second reason it’s more likely the Afghan sources are telling the truth is the history of American fabrication when it comes to war stories. For sheer gall, it’s hard to beat the complete invention of the Jessica Lynch fable, wherein her Iraqi captors wanted to release her but the U.S. instead wanted a heroism video –– and then created one. There she was, fighting off hordes of the infidel single-handedly, until she blew the cover in front of a congressional committee, saying the video was a fake, as was the story. Runner-up in the individual category might be the Pentagon’s version of how Pat Tillman died a hero under enemy fire, until an independent, outside investigation, paid for by the family, showed he’d been shot by U.S. troops.

In fact, U.S. troops have committed atrocities by the carload over the history of the most recent wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. As is evidently the case in the Kandahar massacre, rape seems to be a repeating theme.

Stephen Lendman of Progressive Radio Network, posted this note entitled ‘Kandahar Massacre Reflects Earlier Ones’:

"Analyst Rick Rozoff called the incident "particularly egregious" because of its "cold-blooded, calculated" nature. It evoked echoes of past ones like Vietnam's My Lai, Iraq's Haditha, and two Fallujah slaughter incidents in April/May 2004, then in genocidal numbers in November/December.

"Survivors and witnesses confirmed industrial scale mass murder. Children saw parents shot. Adults lost spouses and children. Homes and stores were looted.

"Thousands of others were destroyed. A government committee found 26,000 houses damaged and another 3,000 completely demolished. They included 70 mosques, 50 schools, and Fallujah's power plant. The city depended on it for electricity, 50% of its drinking water distribution, and 70% of its sewer system.

"Overall, indiscriminate slaughter, destruction, and environmental contamination occurred. It was followed by looting, mass arrests, torture, and deaths from ill treatment and disease. A cancer epidemic followed and numerous previously unknown or rarely seen illnesses, severe congenital malformations, and more.”

For those hoping and expecting that things would change once Obama replaced George Bush, the past three years have been a nightmare.

“In May 2009, Britain's Daily Telegraph said former US General Antonio Taguba said the Obama administration sought to suppress images of US soldiers raping and sodomizing Iraqi prisoners.

“He called photos he saw explosive, saying they ‘show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency. The mere description of these pictures is horrendous enough. Take my word for it.’”

Rather than try to control abuses, the Obama administration has acted to cover them up. One of the more famous involves the killing of a group of Iraqis, including two journalists from Reuters, by a helicopter gunship crew which rejoiced over the deaths and in which, as captured by audio released via WikiLeaks, they blow up people who tried to come to the aid of those initially shot, including the driver of a van who stopped in the street. Though clearly identifiable, none of these murderers were charged. Instead, the man thought to have leaked the video, Bradley Manning, was placed in prison conditions U.N. and Red Cross authorities have described as torture while he awaits trial.

Lendman argues, and I agree, that overwhelming evidence indicts the U.S. government for war crimes. The May, 2009, article described merely one example.

“These and similar incidents aren't isolated. Nor are a few "bad apples" alone involved. They're widespread, tolerated, and sanctioned up to the highest government, military, and intelligence levels in all US war theaters.

“Victims are helpless targets, including young girls and boys sodomized with phosphorescent tubes, clubs, wire, and other implements to inflict pain.

“Instead of holding those responsible accountable, Obama suppressed their crimes. As a result, they continue. The latest Afghan victims represent a drop in the ocean. International and US law principles are ignored. Atrocities follow others repeatedly."

Credible reports on America’s Iraq invasion and occupation describe soldiers being issued not only amphetamines but pornographic materials to incite crimes against women. Rape is being used by America’s military as a tactic, and the military has specifically recruited people with backgrounds conducive to it.

According to Ernesto Cienfuegos, editor-in-chief of La Voz de Aztlan:

"The American people and the rest of the world are generally not aware that the U.S. government has hired literally thousands of (mercenaries), many with notorious war crime records.

"A significant number of these are rapists, sodomites and murderers from South African and Serbia. These vile individuals work for Security Service under contract to the Pentagon.

"There are an estimated 1,500 South Africans employed by Security Service in Iraq, according to the South African foreign ministry.

"Many used their atrocities backgrounds during Apartheid to bolster their credentials to the Pentagon. Many other hired mercenaries are Serbians, known rapists of Muslim-Croatian women... The Military Police, including Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, said cells where sexual torture took place were dominated by these mercenaries in collusion with the CIA and Military Intelligence."

According to the same military sources, "film crews run mostly by mercenaries actually instigated rapes and sodomy inside Abu Ghraib prison. The mercenaries had the full cooperation of the CIA and Military Intelligence and perverted elements inside Pentagon and the U.S. government. In addition, these mercenaries trolled the Iraqi countryside for Iraqi women they could abduct, rape and film."

The foregoing of course carries a horrible dissonance for most Americans, no doubt including many of you reading this. It is so contrary to everything we’ve always been told, everything we’ve wanted to believe about ourselves.

We ignore the implications of an empire having military deployments in more than seventy countries around the world, with a yearly war and weaponry budget exceeding the combined spending of every other nation, including China, Russia, Israel, France, on earth. Why would a peaceful country do this?

We ignore, too, the ridiculous claims made preceding each new military assault. WMDs which did not exist. Civilian brutality which is pure propaganda. ‘Terrorism’, the perfect enemy which can never be defeated, thus we may continue to kill whomever we want, for any reason at all, and in fear of whom we are forced to dismantle the most important protections of liberty America has.

We’re not like that, though, not us. We’re America. We’re a democracy. We want peace.

The story we’re getting on Robert Bales and the most recent slaughter is already being spun so badly one wonders at what point Americans will begin screaming in unison. But maybe we’ll just go mute, a few malcontents hauled off for the good of the society to those new FEMA camps and the rest ordering more beer and cable in every room.

The Pentagon says Bales earned more than a dozen medals for combat and for good conduct. His wife Karilyn is quoted in the Washington Post as saying, "all of the work Bob has done and all the sacrifices he has made for his love of his country, family and friends."

Barack Obama said, “This incident is tragic and shocking and does not represent the exceptional character of our military and the respect that the United States has for the people of Afghanistan.”

Lying through his teeth.

Watching one of my favorite films tonight, ‘Pleasantville’, a tale which seems to me to have significance beyond the evident storyline.

Thought I’d try it with the simultaneous commentary by the writer/director. That sort of thing rarely works, mainly because the writer/director talks incessantly and it becomes a struggle to watch the film, and this time for some reason I couldn’t figure out how to turn the guy off. Managed it finally. I’m still not convinced Gary Ross knows what he’s created here. I’ve seen or tried to see his other movies and didn’t even like them.

But in ‘Pleasantville’ there’s something beyond the cloying sweetness the guy can’t help dipping everything in.

The people in the town don’t know that any other world exists. They think that the end of Main Street “is just the beginning again.” It never rains. The job of a fireman is to rescue cats from trees because nothing burns. There are no toilets. I believe that’s enough general description, except this: everything’s in black and white. No color is allowed.

Most reviewers, and I suspect Ross himself, think the movie is about racism. The metaphors are so obvious, especially when the appearance of color sparks the kind of nasty violence we’ve seen in the film clips of Selma and Birmingham, and Newark.

But to me the film is about risking the unknown. ‘What’s outside of Pleasantville’ is a dangerous question, but it gets asked and there are consequences. For people living an insular life, who never question, whose books are filled with blank pages, going through that door means they will not be able to go back.

I think we’re often like that. Children, mostly, until scared or broken, are not afraid of going through the doors; that’s what the doors are for, discovery. But in many cases, we’re instructed not to do this. There is punishment by our masters and the disapproval of our peers. Sometimes the stove tops are hot. Dogs bite. Other people may hurt you.

I had a lover once who was clearly half mad. She had fears, certainly, but often she acted as though she didn’t. She was that rare person who would leap from a plane with the offhand belief that she’d packed a parachute. She tries hard to look normal but she didn’t fool me back then and still doesn’t. Crazy, but spectacular.

These are the ones who go through the open doors even knowing there may be no way back. It was like hanging around Jennifer Jason Leigh or Hunter Thompson. Seat belts did no good; you had to be able to move quickly just in case. These are the heroes of our world, breaking barriers, knocking over fences.

The folks in Pleasantville who are the most fearful are the city fathers and those others frightened of what they do not know. These are people who won’t go through the doors; they in fact will seal them if possible. They are terrified that others will not only go through but summon their friends, will come back for a moment and wave to the rest of us, hey, look what’s outside of Pleasantville!

The fearful are the ones tightly wrapped.

Of course, I’m getting around to politics. I’m reading story after story concerning the war some politicians and others are waging against women in America. That’s really what it is, you know. They can call it whatever they want to call it and pretend it’s somehow a religious matter, which insults religion as well as your intelligence, but it’s just fear and hatred, and that shit is ugly.

Rick Santorum. He’s not the only one, obviously. Twelve states have now adopted or are prepared to adopt laws requiring that women who choose to undergo abortions first undergo what amounts to rape by the government. But Santorum is the face of this meanness, the creepy evil it manifests. He’s easy to make fun of, certainly; he’s not especially bright and his ignorance on a wide range of public matters is stupefying –– he thinks people who go to college are ‘snobs’ and professors are pushing a gay or communist agenda, something like that –– but he’s serious and so are the stupid people who are voting for him.

Sex is the problem here. Santorum, like Limbaugh, is pissed off, and maybe even surprised, that women enjoy sex. That’s a door everybody else is going through but not him. Oh, he’s had sex with his wife a few times, probably with the lights out, with no laughter or ease. God knows what sorts of fantasies he’s got.

The frightening thing about these men, for nearly all of them are men, is that the very idea of a sexual woman unhinges them. It makes them angry and vengeful. Limbaugh was pilloried for calling a woman names, but his most revealing offense, to me, was his suggestion that she videotape her sexual acts and upload them to YouTube so that he could watch. Think about that.

Women are supposed to submit, not enjoy. Certainly they are not to choose.

I can’t believe that in America in the 21st century we have to witness this twisted hatred, this psycho babble, that it is taken seriously by anyone, that the mass media, even the morons who run television ‘news’ knowing what this is, credit it.

A state legislator who would vote to force a woman to undergo an unnecessary, invasive procedure, to be raped, as a price for her decision, to agree to be physically violated and thus a servant, a slave, a lesser being, that state legislator should be turned out of office, painted with tar and feathers and kicked down the road until he can’t find his way back.

I know I’m not sounding very temperate or kind here. My daughter is always reminding me that hate is not a good word nor a wise emotion, and she’s right, I know, but there are moments.

I watch these pricks with their sexual insecurities and sexual nightmares and sexual fantasies too alarming for them to acknowledge try to legislate chastity belts on all the women who are secretly laughing at their tiny penises, and I am really, really angry.

There’s a poster circulating on facebook, some of my Democratic friends, detailing what it’s like thinking as a Republican.

It’s some ugly shit, no question.

“Corporations are people
Women who use birth control are sluts
College students are snobs
Gay Americans are an abomination
Poor people deserve to be poor
Union workers are socialist thugs
The unemployed are lazy parasites
Latinos are illegal until proven otherwise
The bible trumps the constitution
Global warming is a hoax
The U.S. auto industry should go bankrupt
The U.S. President is a muslim agent from Kenya”

Beneath this fine litany is the phrase Vote Republican 2012.

A dozen examples of glowing ignorance and meanness of spirit, the Rush Limbaugh Show with a guest appearance by Rick Santorum.

Of course, most of the cited examples are of attitude and not policy. Although in some cases, the G.O.P. mutants are trying to turn them into policy, and no doubt would do so if given a Senate majority, a poster describing the acts of the Obama administration might not look appreciably better:

“Invasion of other countries
Discarding the First Amendment to the Constitution
Billionaires deserve renewal of the Bush tax cuts
No prosecution of war criminals
Drone strikes on funeral processions
Assassination of American citizens
Protection for GMO crops and Monsanto
Expanded surveillance of citizens
Auto workers lose bargaining rights
Outsourcing of jobs via NAFTA
Lobbyists permeating the Cabinet and White House
Expanded offshore oil drilling

Vote Democratic 2012”

It’s well past time for Americans, especially those left-of-center, to wake up. I still see on the message boards the occasional rationalization for and defense of Obama’s behavior and it’s nauseating.

Look, you want to vote for this guy, go ahead. You want to say Romney or whichever turkey the Republicans nominate will be worse, I suppose it’s conceivable. But face the fact that Barack Obama is a police state wet dream, a good-looking, intelligent, articulate Democrat who can mute opposition to horrible policies of death and oppression because he appears sane and because, what a break, he’s black! They couldn’t have built a better one in a factory in Indiana.

America in his term, two years of which saw a healthy majority in both houses, has achieved nothing of real import while taking the country over the edge on civil liberties. Waging those ugly wars, even torturing and assassinating people and destroying nations –– we’ve done that before, c.f. Lyndon Baines Johnson –– but we’ve never wiped out the Bill of Rights.

Once a government has taken away your right to due process, habeas corpus, freedom of speech and assembly, it does not give those rights back.

So please, please do your country a favor. Vote for whomever you want, but stop lying to yourself. We’re in real trouble, and it’s not simply the fault of those Republican bad guys. Okay?

America’s Secretary of War visited the operation in Afghanistan on the heels of the latest U.S. atrocity, the mass murder of villagers, including nine children under the age of 12, and U.S. forces felt the need to disarm the local troops in advance of and during his visit.

It was thought necessary to prevent any of the Afghan soldiers and security officers we are training and equipping from getting in range of Leon Panetta while armed.

Ordinarily, of course, American policy-makers do not go anywhere near war zones except for public relations trips. They are going to get your sons and daughters’ asses shot up but not their own. They are too important to take that sort of risk.

It is difficult to imagine a more eloquent statement about America’s military presence in Afghanistan than the plain fact that no indigenous soldiers, the people we are training to protect their own country –– presumably from invaders such as us –– can be trusted not to shoot our Secretary of War.

Whether America has won or lost in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, or any of the other nations we’ve attacked, depends on whose goals you’re talking about.

Judging by the reasons announced by the various U.S. Presidents who send in the troops and okay the slaughter from the air, we’re getting our asses kicked. We engage the local patriots, calling them insurgents or, in some cases, terrorists, and we kill lots and lots, and then, inevitably, after destroying the infrastructure, killing the leaders, further impoverishing the population, and establishing a deal for the natural resources and the flow of money, we leave.

There is, of course, no great freedom in our wake, nor was there meant to be. Iraq was about currency paid for oil, control of resources, establishing military bases, and giving Halliburton, Bechtel, and Blackwater –– now Xe –– fat contracts. Afghanistan is about the opium trade, the natural gas pipeline, and the vast deposit of valuable ores just ‘discovered’. Freedom doesn’t enter into it.

The losers are the inhabitants of the countries we’ve blown to bits, the GIs killed, wounded, or so mentally defrosted that they can’t function or they kill their spouses. The losers are those who pay for the fireworks with money they might otherwise waste on food, rent, their kids’ education, meaning you and me.

The bankers are doing well. In fact, that’s why America’s Presidents, who are owned by them, launch the wars.

But now the bankers’ instruments are finding the world a hostile place. Dick Cheney is afraid to go to Canada. Kissinger can’t go to much of Europe. That’s because they face prosecution in places that America doesn’t yet own.

Leon Panetta is worried he’ll be shot in the most secure of all places inside Afghanistan, by the most trusted of Afghan troops. What does that tell us?

It tells us that the U.S. has been run out of Afghanistan. The only thing left to work out are the financial details.

“War is hell,” Leon Panetta said, his response to the massacre in Afghanistan, as though that covers it, explains it, justifies it.

The man who, as CIA director, ordered remote controlled missile attacks on targets in Pakistan and elsewhere, and never gets his hands dirty.

Nothing has changed. It’s still the Bush administration, with Rumsfeld and his ilk running the show; they’re just dressed a little better and call themselves Democrats. What a crock.

War is hell, all right. Too bad your ass isn’t in the middle of it. Chickenhawks, all of them. All of the well-connected in their nice suits, lunch with important people and dinners with Washington society.

I remember a woman whose child had been killed in another one of America’s precision drone hits, several months back, who kept asking an American journalist, why is your country doing this to us?

Forty-four years ago, one of my country’s last great Senators asked, of another war, “if we care so little for these people that we are prepared to see them killed and their country destroyed, why are we there in the first place?”

Why we’re there, well the reasons keep changing, don’t they? Whatever happy horse shit will sell for the moment. Anybody thinks we’re killing people in Afghanistan to ‘stop Al Qaeda’ or to ‘defend freedom’ is too stupid to cross the street without assistance.

Now we’re gearing up for more war, more killing, more women with dead children and dead husbands, more weeping pleas for mercy falling on the dead ears of the bastards in Washington.

What’s next? Will the land of the free attack Syria? Iran? The Congo? Uganda? So many countries and so little time.

I don’t have anything of import to pass along tonight. This isn’t an analysis, or a research paper. I’m just angry. What kind of human beings would do what America is doing around the world right now? What kind of monsters?

Yes, Mr. Secretary, war is hell, and you and your friends are dragging everyone into it. Damn you for this.

In the movie ‘V for Vendetta’ the title character observes that people should not be afraid of their government; governments should be afraid of their people.

Any open-eyed examination of the American political reality in 2012 exposes it for the upside-down nightmare it has become. We are afraid of our government, those of us paying attention. Everyone else, too drunk or distracted to think or care, will be able to say one day, as many Germans did after the war and the camps, ‘we didn’t know.’

We have a President who promised us ‘transparency,’ then fought to keep the American people from finding out anything. Meanwhile, our own right to privacy is gone, stolen by electronic surveillance, internet spying, cameras everywhere, airport groping and unwanted x-rays. Nothing about you is secret because the government wants to see it, and whatever the government wants, it gets.

Two United States Senators have written to the Justice Department, complaining that the government’s interpretation of a section of the Patriot Act is being hidden from them and from the people. Colorado Senator Mark Udall and Oregon Senator Ron Wyden expressed alarm that “section 215, which is a public statute, has been the subject of secret legal interpretations. The existence of these interpretations, which are contained in classified opinions issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (or "FISA Court") has been acknowledged on multiple occasions by the Justice Department and other executive branch officials.

“We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted section 215 of the Patriot Act. As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows.”

While the Obama administration refuses to disclose its own legal opinion on the reach of section 215 –– which covers surveillance of citizens –– many observers have noted that the public statements by FBI officials, as well as Attorney General Eric Holder, suggest an interpretation much broader than that commonly believed. As the letter from Udall and Wyden notes:

“(I)n a democratic society — in which the government derives its power from the consent of the people — citizens rightly expect that their government will not arbitrarily keep information from them. Americans expect their government to operate within the boundaries of publicly-understood law, and as voters they have a need and a right to know how the law is being interpreted, so that they can ratify or reject decisions made on their behalf. To put it another way, Americans know that their government will sometimes conduct secret operations, but they don't think that government officials should be writing secret law.”

Well, what is Section 215? Keep in mind that as you read this, you are doing what nobody in the United States Senate did before adopting it.

SEC. 215. ACCESS TO RECORDS AND OTHER ITEMS UNDER THE FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE SURVEILLANCE ACT.

• Title V of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1861 et seq.) is amended by striking sections 501 through 503 and inserting the following:

`SEC. 501. ACCESS TO CERTAIN BUSINESS RECORDS FOR FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE AND INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM INVESTIGATIONS.

• `(a)(1) The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or a designee of the Director (whose rank shall be no lower than Assistant Special Agent in Charge) may make an application for an order requiring the production of any tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items) for an investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, provided that such investigation of a United States person is not conducted solely upon the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution.

• `(2) An investigation conducted under this section shall--

`(A) be conducted under guidelines approved by the Attorney General under Executive Order 12333 (or a successor order); and

`( not be conducted of a United States person solely upon the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

• `(b) Each application under this section--

`(1) shall be made to--

`(A) a judge of the court established by section 103(a); or

`( a United States Magistrate Judge under chapter 43 of title 28, United States Code, who is publicly designated by the Chief Justice of the United States to have the power to hear applications and grant orders for the production of tangible things under this section on behalf of a judge of that court; and

`(2) shall specify that the records concerned are sought for an authorized investigation conducted in accordance with subsection (a)(2) to obtain foreign intelligence information not concerning a United States person or to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.

• `(c)(1) Upon an application made pursuant to this section, the judge shall enter an ex parte order as requested, or as modified, approving the release of records if the judge finds that the application meets the requirements of this section.

• `(2) An order under this subsection shall not disclose that it is issued for purposes of an investigation described in subsection (a).

• `(d) No person shall disclose to any other person (other than those persons necessary to produce the tangible things under this section) that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has sought or obtained tangible things under this section.

• `(e) A person who, in good faith, produces tangible things under an order pursuant to this section shall not be liable to any other person for such production. Such production shall not be deemed to constitute a waiver of any privilege in any other proceeding or context.

`SEC. 502. CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT.

• `(a) On a semiannual basis, the Attorney General shall fully inform the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence of the House of Representatives and the Select Committee on Intelligence of the Senate concerning all requests for the production of tangible things under section 402.

• `(b) On a semiannual basis, the Attorney General shall provide to the Committees on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives and the Senate a report setting forth with respect to the preceding 6-month period--

`(1) the total number of applications made for orders approving requests for the production of tangible things under section 402; and

`(2) the total number of such orders either granted, modified, or denied.'.

I am especially fond of subsection 501 (c) (2) and (d). The feds can go after information about you and whoever they talk to is not allowed to tell you about it. They can ask questions of your boss, your landlord, your spouse or children, your neighbors, and it is a felony if any of those people mention it to you.

What Wyden and Udall are getting at, of course, is that the Obama administration is interpreting these clauses quite broadly, to the extent that they are probing the activities of Americans who have nothing to do with possible terrorism or terrorist activities.

While 215 requires a FISA judge to authorize the snooping, and the authority is supposed to be based on the statutory requirements, it is probably safe to say that these judges will authorize whatever the government wants them to. After all, it’s not as though you get to argue against it; you don’t even know it’s happening.

The Patriot Act essentially gave the government carte blanche to paw through your mail, your computer, your closets, your clothing, and your body orifices. The only proviso was that these acts should not be based solely on protected First Amendment activities. I suspect that even the non-lawyers reading this can easily understand how this is no protection at all.

Senator Udall is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. In that capacity, he’s better placed than most to know what the Obama regime is doing and how it is using the provisions of the Patriot Act.

Udall says, “When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.”

We’ll see. I’m already angry. The Congress has so far rolled over for the police state measures backed by Obama, including the NDAA and the most recent inroads into the First Amendment, a bill which makes it a crime to ‘disrupt’ any appearance by the President. It passed with exactly three dissenting votes.

The American people? They’re captivated by March Madness, by CSI Miami, by the latest drivel from Santorum and the other clowns. The majority of Americans apparently believe that they are living in the land of the free, that U.S. troops are fighting in foreign lands to protect them, and that the economy is improving. They don’t know what the Bill of Rights says and don’t really care very much.

So, we’ll see. Usually, by the time people figure out their country has been hijacked it’s too late. Ask Germany.

Senator George McGovern stood in the well of the Senate in 1967 and spoke to his colleagues about the American war in Viet Nam: “The walls of this chamber reek with blood.”

People of integrity don’t sit in the Senate anymore. Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash. Feingold was defeated. The rest count the millions in campaign ‘contributions’ and plan recess vacations.

The internet is filled with articles on the latest Afghanistan horror story, the sergeant who on his fourth tour of duty finally snapped, butchering sixteen people in their homes.

Well-paid ‘commentators’, ‘news’ anchors at networks, and politicians on the make talk about the effect this massacre will have on U.S. policy, while the Obama administration issues empty statements and promises that it will ‘get to the bottom of’ the whole thing.

Of course, ‘the bottom’ is pretty much where we’ve already got to, and we can now see what the people of Fallujah saw a few years ago, the true face of America in the world.

Obama said, “This incident is tragic and shocking and does not represent the exceptional character of our military and the respect that the United States has for the people of Afghanistan.”

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said, “I condemn such violence and am shocked and saddened that a U.S. service member is alleged to be involved, clearly acting outside his chain of command.”

National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said, “(we are) deeply concerned by the initial reports of this incident,” and “this is a deeply regrettable incident and we extend our thoughts and concerns to the families involved.”

The American Embassy offered its "deepest condolences to the families of the victims of today’s tragic shooting.”

Acting U.S. Ambassador, James B. Cunningham, said, “Our thoughts and prayers are with the families and their entire communities. U.S. forces are providing the highest level of care for those injured... The incident is under investigation... We deplore any attack by a member of the U.S. armed forces against innocent civilians and denounce all violence against civilians.”

The terminology is of a piece. We were ‘shocked’ at this ‘incident’ and ‘deeply regret’ that it happened.

But in Afghanistan, the people are not shocked or surprised, and they do not consider mass murder to be an ‘incident,’ despite the happy face Barack Obama would like to put on it. Two days earlier, four Afghan villagers had been killed and three more wounded when ‘coalition’ helicopters fired on innocent people in Kapisa province.

In 2010, a group of U.S. soldiers trained at the same Washington State army base as the suspected shooter in Kandahar, and members of the Fifth Stryker Brigade, killed three Afghans “for sport,” according to an article in the New York Times, and one of the killers, Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, told his court martial that they enjoyed cutting fingers off corpses and yanking out a victim’s tooth to keep as war trophies, “like keeping the antlers off a deer you’d shoot.” Gibbs and his troops photographed themselves holding up the heads of those they’d killed.

While Obama wraps himself in the “exceptional character of our military,” the facts pull the cloak off such an arrogant conceit. Indeed, American troops have been engaged in widespread brutality, including murder of civilians and noncombatants, in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Panetta’s “chain of command” remark, I suppose intended to shield him from any responsibility for the grisly and depraved acts of his troops, has echoes of Abu Ghraib, where the horrors, other ‘regrettable incidents’, could be attributed to the excesses of underlings and not to the nation’s policy.

But torture is America’s policy. So, too, is the wanton murder of the innocent. As the Guardian revealed recently, leaked cables show that American drones purposely target both funeral processions and medical teams who try to assist those who have been attacked.

It is also hard to imagine why Panetta, Obama, and the rest of the crew are ‘shocked’ at the rampage engaged in by at least one soldier here –– there is reason to doubt that the murders were the work of a single man –– when the Pentagon’s own doctors are reporting that more than half of all returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering from some form of traumatic brain injury, most especially emotional damage, and when the incidence of suicide among these troops is alarming the top brass.

As Charles P. Pierce wrote for Esquire, “whatever lit this soldier’s fuse may have started back here,” the same Washington State base at which the Gibbs gang was trained. "There have been other episodes of violence involving the base’s soldiers or former soldiers. A former soldier shot and injured a Salt Lake City police officer in 2010; he died when police returned fire. On January 1, a 24-year-old Iraq war veteran shot and killed a Mount Rainier National Park ranger... There were also 12 suicides at this same base in the past year.”

The media is pointing out that the accused was just beginning his fourth tour of duty, that he had previously been diagnosed with a brain injury, and that he’d been having ‘family problems’ back home, all of this presumably in support of the Obama notion that the whole thing, regrettable as it was, was uncharacteristic of America’s military and its wars.

More than one journalist has reminded readers –– or informed readers –– of the My Lai massacre in Viet Nam more than forty years ago. Seymour Hersh, who broke the story and won a Pulitzer for doing so, recalls that a lot of people knew of it, and that other massacres had taken place. Hundreds of Vietnamese innocents, most of them women and children, were summarily executed and rolled into ditches by U.S. troops.

Anyone tempted to believe that we’re better than that now ought to consider that while journalists had access to the front in Viet Nam they are almost entirely sequestered now on orders from the U.S. military. But when it comes to massacres, what the United States did in Fallujah, Iraq, will be long remembered in that country, even if the American people are not permitted to know about it.

It’s hard to credit anything the U.S. government says concerning the war, especially given its history of blatant lies. Remember the ‘heroism’ of Jessica Lynch? A pure, made-for-propaganda story blew up when Lynch herself exposed it as false. How about the cover-up concerning the death of Pat Tillman?

Now we’re told that a lone soldier, crazy from stress, went on what some in the media have called a ‘killing spree,’ shooting to death 16 people, nine of them children, five of these younger than six years old, and then setting fire to the bodies. But that’s not the story being told by the survivors.

A 20-year-old man whose father, mother, sister and brother were killed as he played dead, told the BBC that there was more than one soldier in his house. “The Americans stayed in our house for a while. I was very scared.”

A Reuters dispatch noted, “There were conflicting reports of how many shooters were involved, with U.S. officials asserting that a lone soldier was responsible in contrast to witnesses’ accounts that several U.S. soldiers were present...

“Neighbors and relatives of the dead said they had seen a group of U.S. soldiers arrive at their village in Kandahar’s Panjwayi district at about 2:00 a.m., enter homes and open fire. An Afghan man who said his children were killed, accused soldiers of later burning the bodies.”

The government of Afghanistan released a statement which quoted one villager as saying, “American soldiers woke my family up and shot them in the face.”

Haji Samad, who said he had left his home a day earlier, returned to find evidence of the carnage and heard the accounts of witnesses. “I saw that all 11 of my relatives were killed, including my children and grandchildren,” he said, weeping, “They poured chemicals over their dead bodies and burned them.”

According to the Reuters story, “Neighbors said they had awoken to crackling gunfire from American soldiers, who they described as laughing and drunk. ‘They were all drunk and shooting all over the place,’ said neighbor Agha Lala, who visited one of the homes where the killings took place. ‘The bodies were riddled with bullets.’”

Survivors gathered the charred bodies and carried them to the U.S. military base.

There are 90,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. They are there because America wants to secure a natural gas pipeline and get its hands on the country’s natural resources ahead of the Chinese. It has nothing to do with ‘freedom’ as anyone brighter than the average Republican presidential candidate can easily recognize.

Obama, the ‘moderate’, wants to withdraw about 20,000 of those troops. Under the deal being worked out with the semi-puppet government of President Hamid Karzai, all foreign combat troops are to be removed by the end of 2014. Guess it just takes a long time to pack.

Thousands of American lives have been sacrificed on the altar of corporate profit and American hegemony. War is big business. There’re the armaments, the weaponry, and all the supporting materials, lots of bucks for Halliburton, Bechtel, General Electric, Boeing, and the like. Then, there’s the necessary ‘reconstruction,’ which the victim country will pay for out of its resources, and which will have to be financed, making the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and its members, even richer.

Who cares if a bunch of nonwhites have to die, their homes destroyed, their children without limbs or eyes? Who cares if it makes eternal enemies for America? Another 9-11-style attack and the nation’s owners can dispense with what remains of the Bill of Rights.

Blame it all on this stressed-out, four-termer from that base in Washington State, the guy with post-traumatic stress disorder. He “does not represent the exceptional character of our military,” according to our Commander-in-Chief.

Leave it to Barack Obama to stack his ‘apology’ with praise for the military. And who can doubt his sincerity, the man who won a Nobel Peace Prize about ten minutes after being sworn-in?

Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! interviewed several people, among them Kathy Kelly, who had just returned from Afghanistan.

Kelly, a longtime peace activist, has herself been nominated twice for a Nobel Peace Prize but hasn’t won, presumably because she lacks Obama’s connections. Here’s what she had to say:

“I think that the United States and military officials would like to characterize the massacre as exceptional, sort of one bad apple. But I think it actually encapsulates what the United States presence in Afghanistan has been all about.

“Unprovoked and uncaused attacks have been waged by the United States against Afghan civilians. It isn’t as though this was one deplorable act. This soldier was assigned to a Joint Special Operations Force base, and the Joint Special Operations Forces have been engaging in the night raids on an average of 10 per night, sometimes as many as 40 per night, all across Afghanistan and killing civilians steadily.

“And combine that with the drone surveillance and the helicopter — combat helicopter attacks that have killed civilians. Just in Kapisa three days earlier, four civilians were killed. This, of course, has fueled a long-simmering rage across Afghanistan, where 400 people are displaced every single day by the war and the fighting.”

Anyone with an ounce of sense knows where this is going and how it will end. Anyone with an ounce of humanity knows where the fault lies, and it is not all in the hands of some sick creep who finally snapped. “The walls of this chamber reek with blood.” Still true, maybe more than ever. And now it’s the walls of the Oval Office, as well.

There was a terrific fight inside Ronald Reagan’s White House, at least at the beginning, between one group of Republicans who were, essentially, Cold War crazies and a second, smaller group, who were true believer libertarians. The crazies won.

That was probably inevitable. The owners of America are comfortable with the likes of Rumsfeld and Cheney but not with a David Stockman.

With the victory of the thugs, the Reagan administration took the predictable road which helped pave the way for the wreckage of the middle class, NAFTA, the gutting of welfare, and the ruin of public education.

I was thinking about that the other day, Reagan being essentially a weak man and not terribly bright. Had he been a little stronger and more self-assured, he might’ve held on to those libertarian parts of his persona and a few things would’ve played out quite differently.

Most people on the left don’t see it that way. There’s a tendency to lump all of those guys together, right-wingers, you know. And in some respects there’s a shared viewpoint, but only in some respects.

In a 2-1 ruling last week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco reinstated a wrongful death lawsuit brought by the family of a mentally ill man who while in an Arizona jail was forced to wear pink underwear; the man panicked, took off, and died of a heart attack when told he might have to go back into custody.

The jail was run by infamous Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arapaio, one of the major racist pricks in law enforcement in America. Arapaio claims that he forces inmates to wear pink underwear so that it can be easily identified if it’s stolen.

Have you ever noticed that dimwitted sadists, when they get their hands on a little power, seem to think that a wink is as good as a nod?

Judge John Noonan wrote the majority opinion, which read in part:

“Given the cultural context, it is a fair inference that the color is chosen to symbolize a loss of masculine identity and power, to stigmatize the male prisoners as feminine... the dress out in pink appears to be punishment without legal justification.”

The dead man was identified as Eric Vogel. Vogel had apparently been arrested in 2001 as a burglary suspect; there was no evidence of his guilt but he was held in jail for a week before his mother was able to bail him out. In that time, he had refused to wear the pink underwear and had been forcibly stripped by deputies and clothed by them. Two weeks later, Vogel was in the car when his mother was involved in a minor traffic accident. When he learned there was a warrant for his arrest for spitting at an officer, he ran more than four miles from the scene to his home. He died the next day at age 36.

The Ninth Circuit, in reinstating the case, was saying that whether or not Vogel’s heart attack was due to his reaction and fear at possible incarceration, his family was entitled to make that claim to a jury and offer proof to back it up.

John Noonan was one of my law professors at Boalt Hall in 1971. I recall writing a paper for him about ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ by Friedrich Neitzche, although I have no idea why.

Noonan, a lawyer with libertarian tendencies, was appointed to the Ninth Circuit by President Reagan. He is not the sort of ‘conservative’ assholes such as Arpaio have in mind when they peddle their mutant philosophies to the general public. Noonan, as is the case with many libertarians, wanders off the reservation when it comes to things such as civil liberties.

These days, it’s not an inconsiderable issue. We’re looking at an ostensibly ‘Democratic’ administration which quite plainly believes that the constitution is old and in the way. Obama has already extended the Bush policies of warrantless wiretaps, kidnapping (called, quaintly, ‘rendition’), ubiquitous police spying, and the termination of habeas corpus, a fundamental principle which can be said to be the literal foundation of liberty. He thinks he has the power to arrest and hold people without charge, and even to kill them, no questions asked.

In his mad dash to install a police state, Obama has the support of nearly all of the Republican Party, whose ‘conservatives’ are of the Joseph Stalin variety. That’s why the only votes against the imposition of a police state in America have come from the fringes, the ‘far right’ and ‘far left.’

Evidently, the rest of the Congress are too busy cashing their payoff checks and looking for fresh interns to fondle to be bothered with the fine points of legislation or what the crap they’re voting for actually says.

That’s why a candidate such as Ron Paul looks good to me. Fact is, there is no more important issue than trying to save the Bill of Rights. Nothing else comes close. I realize many people are distracted by other ‘controversies’ and I read the boards so I know how seriously some people take other issues, but personally it’s obvious. We save the Bill of Rights –– we restore it as a meaningful document –– or we’re cooked.

Right now, I’ll take a patriot wherever he or she may be found. The rest of these people, –– the ones who voted for the Patriot Act without reading it, who gave the NDAA an overwhelming majority from both parties, who last week voted to ban ‘disrupting’ an appearance by the President, who brainlessly agree that America –– the country these ‘good Germans’ automatically now call ‘the homeland’ –– is part of the ‘battlefield’ in a ‘war’ with no cognizable enemy, thus authorizing for the first time the use of the military to ‘deal with’ domestic ‘threats’ –– these people are utterly worthless. They do not deserve my vote, or yours if you really care about this country.

I will make common cause with John Noonan and others like him, with Ron Paul, however nutty he may be on all sorts of ancillary matters. The ‘center’ is nothing better than a sinkhole characterized by ignorance and moral collapse. I’m done with those neo-Nazis Hunter Thompson called screwheads. I’m hanging with the fringe.

Here come the Konyheads. Millions of them. Gone viral as in the black plague.

America’s military needs a black plague now that bin Laden’s been shot through the eye. Preferably a black African plague. We’ve overthrown and killed Qaddafi, bought a large piece of the Egyptian military, thrown Iraq into irremediable chaos, and waved our wanger at Iran, but most of Africa is still up for grabs in the imperial sweepstakes.

After all, China would like to run the place, too. Best to get our people in place, don’t you agree? Can’t let China grab the initiative here, especially since it owns many billions in debt from America’s wars. Next thing you know, there really will be Chinese troops in Bakersfield, and the government will be telling us it’s just part of a student-exchange program.

You think I’m joking. Hah. Laugh while you can, monkey boy.

The Kony 2012 campaign hit the internet like the perfect storm, all the idealistic young, plus a few idealistic old, looking for something to believe in, now that Obama turns out to have been a hoax.

It’s a great story, got to admit. Black guy forcing children to become soldiers and sex slaves, terrorizing the countryside for more than twenty years. Everyone’s afraid of him until these three white guys from Wonderbreadland show up with their video cameras.

The Christian fundamentalists behind the Kony 2012 campaign have been selling ‘action kits’ for twenty-five smackers, which is a little high for action kits but what the hey? The money goes to a good cause, well, sort of.

Skepticism began rising around day three of the Kony explosion. First came the fiscal examiners. How come, they asked, such a low percentage of the take goes to the victims in Uganda? Why such a high cost for administration? Why no certification from the Better Business Bureau?

A Yale professor called these guys “misleading, naive, and dangerous.” Foreign Affairs cited their “manipulation of facts for strategic purposes.”

But the top dogs at Invisible Children, Inc. are making no more than a hundred grand a year which wouldn’t even get them in the door at Spago’s. Or so they say.

The next round of criticism was factual, with internet critics noting that the identified villain, Kony, had not been operating in Uganda for years; that the government opposition in Uganda was, by many accounts, as vicious and bloodthirsty as Kony; and that the video makers had themselves posed for photos carrying rifles.

But maybe the most trenchant observations were to be found in the third round response, acid-tongued replies and satiric ripostes. The sudden propulsion of Kony into the ranks of international evildoers coincided with the evident need for the U.S. to bolster its Africom military operations, and this might engender domestic grumblings unless it could be shown that this time we were on the side of the angels.

News accounts have noted that President Obama dispatched a hundred special ops troops to Uganda a brief while ago, presumably on a mission to kill Kony. Should they succeed, that would give Obama another propaganda boost heading into a difficult general election. Should they fail, at least in the short term, the Kony 2012 campaign will help America’s corporate greedheads generate public support for broader military operations on the continent. After all, we didn’t murder Qaddafi for nothing.

Invisible Children, Inc. won’t allow their financials to be independently audited. This is universally seen by non-profit experts as disturbing because it’s impossible to find out exactly where the money’s going. Apparently, lots of it is going to the aforementioned Ugandan government, which by all accounts does its fair share of raping.

The organization is also quite vocal in its insistence that the U.S. intervene militarily, even though Kony hasn’t operated in Uganda in around six years. ICI has pointed out that it hasn’t tried to hide that fact but insists that Kony is still around causing trouble, as he indeed seems to be. But what then does military intervention mean? It means that U.S. troops, in pursuit of the latest western black nightmare, will be chasing into the Congo and elsewhere. Pretty convenient if what you’re looking for is an excuse that Americans will buy after more than ten years of stupid, bloody wars.

I guess more will emerge. In the days of instant communication, not to mention Wikileaks, it’s hard to keep secrets for long. Viral is as viral does, as the old prospector used to say; better keep your inoculations up to date.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68GbzIkYdc8&feature=share

There’s this video, Bill O’Reilly trying to run over Ron Paul.

As regular readers and subscribers to this space know, I don’t watch anything which is billed as ‘news’ on television for reasons of mental health and because it is very painful to see what corporate monopolies have done to journalism.

There is no journalism on television anymore, as you are likely to know much better than I, although I hear that Rachel Maddow is doing okay, that Keith O is relocated somewhere, and that Maher and Stewart, while not strictly news reporters, show signs of familiarity with reality, which is not permitted on F*X, CBS, CNN, ABC, or anything with a peacock symbol.

Mostly, television ‘news’ and ‘commentary’ is dominated by loud mouthed assholes so far to the right they make Obama look like a moderate. Such is the state of American politics in 2012.

I’d seen clips of O’Reilly once or twice before, so it wasn’t a complete shockola, but still, my God, after twenty seconds I wanted to waterboard him, just for fun, and that’s not a healthy attitude. Justified, perhaps, but not healthy.

What got O’Reilly was that Paul wouldn’t give him the answer he wanted on Iran.

You remember Iran; it’s that country in the middle east next to the last one we invaded. We’re getting geared-up to invade Iran, too, but Obama hopes to wait until after the election in November. That’s what makes him a moderate. True Americans like Romney and Santorum want to bomb Iran tomorrow.

It’s hard to tell with these guys whether they’re in the grips of deep paranoid fantasies or simply scurrying after votes. In the case of the candidates, they have no demonstrable moral character and their minds are never troubled by serious thought. Same with O’Reilly, although he doesn’t seem to want votes.

The Iran war preparation is mostly about propagandizing the American people. The Pentagon and CIA have had their plans finalized long ago and are awaiting the signal. But before Obama orders up some serious ordnance, he wants the election over with and as much of the public on his side as possible.

While they are of different parties and have very different goals, O’Reilly and Obama share the need to convince the public of things which are not true.

Obama’s pretty good at it, still, despite three years in which virtually every promise he made while campaigning has been ignored or turned on its head. O’Reilly, by contrast, is satisfied with his somewhat limited audience of inbred imbeciles. He does not have any need for smooth.

So O’Reilly demands of Paul, aren’t you scared by Iran’s getting nuclear weapons, and Paul says, no, not really, and begins to explain why that is.

Not on O’Reilly’s program. The interview was on split screen. No doubt Paul was out campaigning somewhere and O’Reilly was in the studio, surrounded by armed guards. I don’t actually know about the guards. I’m assuming he’s got some because if he didn’t someone like me, or maybe Ron Paul, would have long ago broken a lot of his bones.

I’m into my sixties now and not capable to breaking anyone’s bones, but the fantasy is a fleeting pleasure. I advocate peace and love and gentleness but I may as well admit there are people whose bones could use a good snapping. O’Reilly would be one.

Paul starts talking about how there’s a history to the middle east situation, that in providing Saddam Hussein with weapons for many years we helped him wage war against Iran, not to mention that the CIA overthrew Iran’s democratic government in 1953 and put the Shah into power. O’Reilly keeps trying to stop him, to talk over him. He doesn’t want this information on his show.

I’m not interested in the history, O’Reilly shouts. I know the history. Viewers may doubt this. The history would make a mess of his opinion, which is based on ideology and racism, not facts. Paul is offering facts and O’Reilly is getting hysterical trying to shove them back in the drawer.

Iran is merely behaving in its own rational self-defense, Paul says, and O’Reilly is going to bust a blood vessel or maybe blow out an eyeball. Iran wouldn’t have a nuclear weapon for ten years, Paul says, citing Pentagon and CIA estimates, but that kind of argument does not persuade O’Reilly because he doesn’t hear it. He knows it’s coming and he’s raised his voice again.

It really amazes me that anyone appears on television with people like O’Reilly. Why bother? His viewers are generally as cracked as he is, so you would not be convincing anyone anyhow; he’s not going to let you talk. I mean, do people enjoy being peed-on by this guy, or Limbaugh, or the others whose names thankfully escape me at the moment?

And what’s the deal with Ron Paul? I understand he’s essentially a libertarian and his views on economics are closer to the standard Republican nonsense than to the Democratic nonsense, but on issues such as foreign policy, war and peace, civil liberties, and protecting the Bill of Rights, there isn’t anybody in his party who agrees with him.

It’s crazy. Or maybe he’s crazy. Here’s a guy proclaiming Bradley Manning an American hero and demanding that he be released. You can’t find another Republican office holder in America who thinks that, let alone one willing to say it. Hell, you can’t find more than half a dozen Democrats who will say it, either.

Here’s a guy wants to legalize drugs. Not only that, he says he would pardon everybody in prison on drug offenses. Show me anyone else, Democrat or Republican, holding public office, who expects to continue holding public office, who will say that.

And there he is on Bill O’Reilly’s television show, calmly trying to respond to the ravings of a bull goose loony who won’t even let him talk.

Want to see it? Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m76BOQ_2Hs&feature=endscreen

In 1982, addressing the Joint Economic Committee in the 97th United States Congress, Admiral Hyman Rickover, often credited as the father of nuclear submarines and a much-decorated naval hero, said this:

"I do not believe that nuclear power is worth it if it creates radiation. Then you might ask me why do I have nuclear powered ships. That is a necessary evil. I would sink them all. I am not proud of the part I played in it. I did it because it was necessary for the safety of this country.... Every time you produce radiation, you produce something that has a certain half-life, in some cases for billions of years. I think the human race is going to wreck itself, and it is important that we get control of this horrible force and try to eliminate it."

But nuclear radiation, to corporations which see enormous profit in it and to politicians who see enormous profit in doing what corporations tell them, is simply a public relations difficulty to be overcome by spreading misinformation, media whoring, and the purchase of pseudo-scientists comfortable with lying for cash.

The nuclear industry had a hard time of it for awhile. Despite a massive public brainwashing campaign which convinced many that this was a ‘clean’ energy, cheap, and the new age answer to expensive oil and dirty coal, nuclear power kept running into problems.

There was Three Mile Island, where the State of Pennsylvania almost got itself irradiated out of existence in 1979. The meltdown didn’t reach the core, but if it had a nuclear cloud would have covered much of the state and dropped over the eastern seaboard.

The government and industry were able to suppress much of the data in the aftermath, and incidence of birth defects and cancers, while clearly elevated, couldn’t be sufficiently quantified to destroy the industry.

Then there was Chernobyl in 1986, and the numbers were harder to dismiss. Wide swaths of the former Soviet Union were poisoned. Striking levels of disease and mutations. Much of Europe was hit.

In the U.S., the pro-nuclear lobby managed to win legal exemption from lawsuits and taxpayer protections from damage claims, but politically the industry did not easily bounce back. For some reason, many Americans resisted the idea that risking the survival of a large part of the human population for a shaky, dangerous, expensive source of energy might not be a good bargain, on top of which nobody could figure out what to do with the nuclear waste created thereby.

While the feds tried to find some state corrupt enough to let the government bury this shit on their land –– settling on the Rocky Mountain region –– various ‘safety’ proposals ranged from the ignorant (burying waste in vast lead cylinders) to the bonehead stupid (firing it into space).

So, for a long time, although the U.S. still housed 104 reactors, the industry was stuck. Politically, it had become too difficult because, even with a compliant Congress, many ordinary people had wised-up and would cause a real stink. Plus, of course, the money. Nukes were expensive as hell because even where approved the various safety requirements the crooked pols insisted on –– to cover their asses with nosy voters –– cost a bundle.

Meanwhile, in the United States, safety inspections were pretty much forgotten. The feds stopped worrying. It turns out that, in at least in several instances, there have been near catastrophes, close calls hushed up so as not to unduly alarm people.

In a feature article published May 11, 2011, in the New York Times, Matthew L. Wald, reported that “The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said this week that in hindsight, a problem at the Browns Ferry nuclear plant in Alabama last fall was quite serious. And its records indicate that there have been reports in recent days of engineers' flubbing a basic calculation of reactor operation at two other plants...

“The commission staff announced that a valve that got stuck last October at the Browns Ferry nuclear plant near Athens, Ala., posed a safety threat that fell into the "red" category, the most serious on its four-color scale.”

And there were others. “And last week, operators of the Oyster Creek nuclear plant near Toms River, NJ, and Nine Mile Point 1, near Syracuse, reported separately that General Electric, which supplies their reactors with fuel, had notified them that it had made some math errors that could have resulted in the reactor fuel's getting hotter than plant operators thought.”

The stuck safety valve at Browns Ferry was noticed only because operators intentionally shut the reactor down for refueling, a rare occurrence. It was the failure of an identical valve in the heat removal system which crashed Fukushima. The system’s design is also virtually identical to those in use at two other American reactors where near-disasters have taken place, Oyster Creek, in New Jersey, and Nine Mile Point 1, near Syracuse.

According to a Nuclear Regulatory Commission press release, "The public was never endangered because no actual event occurred. However, the system is counted on for core cooling during certain accident scenarios, and the valve failure left it inoperable, which could have led to core damage." Translated into english, had an emergency required the reactor to be shut down, there would have been a lot of dead people in Alabama.

Wald’s Times story invoked “the notorious case of the Davis-Besse reactor near Oak Harbor, Ohio, where an unnoticed leak allowed acid to flow onto the vessel head. Workers discovered in 2002 that it had corroded away all but a fraction of a thick stainless steel liner.”

The nuclear industry has been in retreat for a long time. Even during the Bush years, when the worst predators found seats at the table, the nuke gang was mostly silent. But on Obama’s election, the industry was back in business. The new President pushed nuclear power as a part of his ‘green energy’ future.

And then came Fukushima.

It’s not in the news much these days. In December, Japan announced that the number 2 reactor was finally in cold shutdown. Then in early February, another announcement: the temperature inside number 2 had risen to 82 celsius, which meant that it could no longer be considered stable. The utility in charge, Tokyo Electric Power Company, reported this news along with the assurance that “sustained nuclear reactions” were not occurring inside and the reactor had not “gone critical”, although the rising temperature was cause for concern, and any temperature above 80 C is considered dangerous.

Nobody knows for sure whether the temperature at the bottom of the reactor’s pressure vessel is at 8 C, because radiation levels, a year after the catastrophe, are still too high for plant workers to enter.

The truth about Fukushima is that the amount of radiation already loosed into the atmosphere is far more significant than the Japanese and American governments admitted, and that substantial amounts of plutonium, strontium, and cesium rapidly permeated the air, water, and food in the western United States.

As much as 20 million tons of radioactive debris was washed into the sea when the tsunami struck. Several environmental organizations have raised alarms, and scientists attached to Fairewinds Energy Education have described a toxic ‘island’ twice the size of Texas having already reached Hawaii. One, Curtis Ebbesmeyer, told French newspapers that “the first traces are appearing on the other side of Pacific Ocean, on US and Canadian shores. We are not prepared for this. Nobody is prepared for this. Nobody’s even thought through the dimensions...”

From the beginning, the Japanese government tried to minimize the extent of the accident, evacuating people to gradually greater distances from the reactors as the scope of the crisis widened. One year later, some researchers claim that the measurable exposures to radiation among schoolchildren is as much as ten times greater than that of the average nuclear power plant worker in the United States. One, Arnie Gunderson at Fairewinds, said, "the Japanese people are facing an ever unfolding and expanding tragedy of a magnitude the world has never experienced.”

This may not be an exaggeration. There is high resolution photographic evidence which shows that the core in reactor number 3 was entirely exposed; exposure of the core creates a nuclear explosion throwing great quantities of radioactive particles into the atmosphere. Japan denies it, and the government then declared that some commentary and disclosures leaked to the internet constituted “illegal” information.

One investigator was so alarmed at her analysis of aerial photos that she wrote to the Union of Concerned Scientists describing what she saw:

“High resolution photographic proof that the reactor core exploded at Fukushima unit 3

“I was looking at the high resolution photos taken of the Fukushima complex a few weeks ago, and looking at the shots of unit 3 in particular - because it was the one using the MOX fuel and was also the one most severely damaged by the hydrogen explosions. I'm sure UCS has already seen these shots.

“A few days later I came across an article that had a good cut away diagram of the reactor buildings: http://my.firedoglake.com/kirk... (copy and paste to google search if link does not work) click on diagram to enlarge.

“I was struck by the location of the spent fuel pool on the third floor. (The spent fuel pool in the diagram is in the upper right corner of the building to the right of the top of the reactor, below the yellow beam, which is below the large orange girders. Part of the pool is cut away in the diagram, it appears to extend most of the way across about half of the building on the third floor) I went back to the site with the aerial photos and confirmed that the third floor was pretty much entirely obliterated in the explosion. The spent fuel pool is gone... see for yourself.

“Today I had another look at the diagram, and noticed something else quite significant that I had missed before. I realized that the top of the primary containment vessel is flush with the floor level of the 4th floor, and that the top of the reactor itself was in the space between the 3rd and 4th floors, partially surrounded by the spent fuel pool.

“Look at those photos again. At the back wall of the building nearer the top of the photo you see the skeletal remnants of the wall of the 3rd and 4th floors- the only walls remaining from those floors. It is easy to see the floor level of the third floor - there are two massive steam pipes running behind and below the building...the lower edge of the lower pipe is almost perfectly aligned with the floor level of the 3rd floor. Follow the floor line of the third floor down from that back wall along the right side of the building, then across the front side of the building near the bottom of the photo. That shows you the floor level of the 3rd floor very clearly. There are no walls rising above the third floor, except for the back skeleton wall. The walls of the spent fuel pool are missing. There is nothing but air remaining above that level, except for a bit of roof debris which you can see through. The top of the primary containment vessel, as well as the top of the reactor itself, which went to the floor level of the 4th floor, is simply GONE.

“Even to a lay person, it is obvious that this means that the huge hydrogen explosion at unit 3 must have occurred in the reactor itself, and that the entire top of the reactor containment vessel was obliterated, ejecting the contents of the core - as well as the spent fuel pool- into the atmosphere.

“This tells us that massive quantities of plutonium were released, and that the release of radiation from unit 3 alone must be many times higher than has been admitted for the entire complex - there were HUNDREDS OF TONS of fuel in the reactor core and spent fuel pool. Chernobyl pales in comparison.”

The Japanese and U.S. governments have been in collusion in downplaying the danger of what has happened and its long-term effects. Both TEPCO and U.S. corporations have an enormous financial stake in keeping people as ignorant as possible. That prominently includes General Electric, which owned NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC, and manufactured parts for Fukushima and of course most reactors in the United States.

Shortly after the meltdown, the Japanese government, according to a contemporaneous report, ‘charges that the damage caused by earthquakes and by the nuclear accident are being magnified by irresponsible rumors, and the government must take action for the sake of the public good. The project team has begun to send "letters of request" to such organizations as telephone companies, internet providers, cable television stations, and others, demanding that they "take adequate measures based on the guidelines in response to illegal information." The measures include erasing any information from internet sites that the authorities deem "harmful to public order and morality."’

In the U.S., daily monitoring of radiation levels was quietly and unceremoniously cut back to once each month, an action which has never been explained. President Obama announced that funds would be allocated to develop the first new nuclear plants since Three Mile Island. This is one campaign promise he’s keeping.

Now, the money is being made available. Obama has asked for $54.5 billion in loan guarantees (about one third of this has already been authorized by Congress). That means that if a project is delayed or canceled for any reason, the taxpayers pay for it. Two such plants are on the drawing board, located in the State of Georgia. And the Georgia legislature, along with South Carolina and Florida, has already passed legislation which mandates something called “advanced cost recovery.” It means what you think it means: the utility building the reactor is authorized to charge rate payers for the cost of its construction before it’s built.

How corrupt are these people?

The amount of insurance the industry is required to carry is miniscule compared to the fiscal costs of a disaster. The industry-wide pool is currently at about $12 billion. The Fukushima meltdown will exceed $250 billion. Chernobyl ran to $600 billion. Should there be a calamity at Indian Point, 35 miles north of New York City, experts put the cost at $1.5 trillion. In other words, when one of these reactors blows, the financial cost will be yours, not the company’s, thanks to the U.S. government.

The simple fact is that, in addition to the poisoning of the planet certain to continue as one reactor after another has a ‘stuck safety valve’ and an earthquake or just an ordinary series of errors cause a meltdown, the nuclear power industry can’t actually survive without massive government subsidies.

Nuclear power is subsidized by taxpayers and rate payers at every part of the nuclear fuel chain, mining, milling, enrichment of the uranium fuel, construction, operations, shutting down and cleaning up, and waste disposal. Energy economist Doug Kaplow, cited on Alternet, says that because the value of the subsidies often exceeds the value of the energy actually produced, buying power on the open market and giving it away free would be less costly than the construction and operation of nuclear plants.

Don’t tell that to President Obama, however. Despite the Fukushima disaster, the revelations of near-disasters in a number of U.S. plants, Chernobyl, and the evident long-term genetic damage caused to residents of Pennsylvania in the years after Three Mile Island; despite the ridiculous costs, the need for subsidies, and the associated risks in trying to dispose of spent fuel, he is still pushing it.

On Democracy Now! Amy Goodman expressed shock at the near-unanimity of support for nuclear power among the candidates for President. Only Ron Paul, who stands zero chance of being nominated by the G.O.P., would abandon nuclear power, and in his case simply by getting rid of all subsidies.

Goodman says, “This is mind-boggling, on the first anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, with the chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission warning that lessons from Fukushima have not been implemented in this country. Nevertheless, Democrats and Republicans agree on one thing: They’re going to force nuclear power on the public, despite the astronomically high risks, both financial and environmental.”

In the wake of Fukushima, Japan’s prime minister, Naoto Kan, said “We will aim to bring about a society that can exist without nuclear power.” But Kan has been replaced, and his successor, in the face of unsurprising public opposition, supports it.

As Goodman notes, Obama has surrounded himself with people who not only like nuclear power but profit from it. His chief adviser, David Axelrod, was a consultant for a subsidiary of Exelon, a major producer of nuclear energy, and his former chief of staff and close political associate, Rahm Emanuel, played “a key role” in the formation of Exelon. Over the past four years, Exelon employees have contributed $244,000.00 to Obama’s campaign, this, Goodman hastens to add, is apart from whatever may have been funneled into his new super PACs.

We’re looking now at new power plants at Waynesboro, Georgia, on the border with South Carolina. The chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory Jaczo, voted against approving the licenses, saying, “I cannot support issuing this license as if Fukushima never happened.”

Evidently, Barack Obama can.

There was a declaration in the Congress during the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act, to the effect that in the ‘war on terror’ the United States was a part of the field of battle.

This statement was made by Senator Lindsey Graham, among others. It was consequent to the continuing fantasy that we now live in a ‘post-9-11 world’ which, presumptively, means that the laws which have protected Americans from their government for two hundred years no longer apply.

Sorry about your freedom, but we had to make some sacrifices to keep you free.

Because of 9-11, we were told, we needed the grotesquely-named ‘Patriot Act’ which took large pieces out of the Bill of Rights. In order to be safe from the ‘enemy’ we had give up the constitution. The Patriot Act was passed as emergency legislation with no debate. The Senators and representatives who voted for it did not read it. For that alone, they deserve impeachment and removal from office.

But betraying the country is no longer a crime when it’s done by the government.

It seemed at the time like an odd construction, the insistence that America’s own turf was now a part of the battlefield, but that’s what Graham and others insisted.

There were reasons for this.

For one thing, as the NDAA legislation makes clear, the protection afforded Americans from the use of the army against us, the so-called Posse Comitatus Act, has effectively been nullified. Last month, the army conducted ‘exercises’ with Homeland Security operatives and the L.A. police force in a section of downtown Los Angeles.

For another, by calling the United States part of the battlefield, the President, any President, can direct the army to arrest and detain without trial any citizen ‘suspected’ of actions in ‘support’ of an ‘enemy.’ The person imprisoned with no rights, in violation of the most fundamental clauses of the Constitution, can’t get judicial review and may never be released because the ‘war’ against ‘terror’ is a war which will by definition never end.

Pretty neat trick, huh?

Last time I looked, only fascist countries and totalitarian regimes did these sort of things. I must’ve been mistaken.

A week ago, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Steven G. Bradbury, former acting assistant Attorney General, principal deputy for the Office of Legal Counsel, and one of the authors of the infamous Bush ‘torture memos’, told Senators that an amendment to the NDAA which would exempt American citizens from indefinite detention without charge or trial would be a mistake.

“…the evident purpose of the legislation is to prevent the President from detaining as an enemy combatant under the laws of war, without criminal charge, any American citizen or lawful permanent resident of the United States who is apprehended in this country, even if the person is captured while acting as part of a foreign enemy force engaged in acts of war against the United States, such as a US-based terrorist recruit of al Qaeda acting to carry out an armed attack within our borders…”

Bradbury believes such a limit would hamper the President in waging the war against terror. America’s a battlefield, he believes, echoing the words of Graham and Chuck Grassley, the Senator who brought him in to testify, and that means that anyone on the side of the ‘enemy’ should not be able to count on the protection of the Bill of Rights.

According to an article on the hearing by Kevin Gosztola in Firedoglake, Graham, who was present, "contended the 'homeland' was part of the battlefield and reading Miranda rights is not the best way to collect intelligence. He firmly asserted that homegrown terrorism could be a problem and he wanted the legal system to recognize 'the difference between fighting a crime and fighting a war.'"

No, reading a suspect ‘Miranda rights’ was never the best way to get a confession, either. A rubber hose or simple, repetitive beatings, or simulated drownings, for that matter, could get people to confess to anything just to make it stop. The use of torture, which Obama claimed to oppose but which his administration continues to authorize, is good only for the purpose of satisfying the perverse, sadistic interests of the torturers; nobody in law enforcement thinks it extracts much truth.

Bradbury testified that since President Obama believes he has the authority to order the killing of American citizens in other countries –– such as the victims of U.S. targeted drones in Yemen –– it doesn’t make sense that such a target could become entitled to constitutional rights simply by “making it to the homeland.”

See where this is going?

If the ‘war’ against ‘terror’ is fought everywhere on earth, and if Americans can be legally killed by order of the President on foreign soil, then the President can order the killing of American citizens anywhere, including the United States.

That was the point of Lindsey Graham’s continued harping on the ‘battlefield’ terms; that was the point of the NDAA and its lightning-swift passage through a somnolent and hopelessly corrupt Congress which barely raised any questions. If America is part of the battlefield, whatever may be legally done on a battlefield may be done here, right here, maybe in L.A. or Oakland, or wherever you live.

True, the use of drone attacks might have to be minimized; too much political fallout from killing a bunch of neighbors along with the ‘enemy’ suspect.

A year ago, the idea that the President had initiated use of death lists, lists of people who were to be killed by the CIA, was considered fanciful or paranoid. Such a claim in the New Yorker by Pulitzer Prize winner Sy Hersh, drew little public response and no congressional outcry. Now, it’s a conceded fact. And still very few object.

Now, Attorney General Holder, obviously speaking for Obama, tells Congress that the President has the right to order the assassination of whomever he wants. And if America’s now in a permanent state of war, and if that war is taking place right here, in the Fatherland, then there is nothing to prevent Obama –– or any future President –– from killing people, or simply letting the army do it.

That is the situation. It’s not exaggerated. Right now, the U.S. uses death lists. Right now, people are targeted for assassination not because of what anyone’s proven them to do but because of what they are said to have done, or even are said to be thinking of doing. Obama and Holder are telling us that in plain english. Right now, with the Patriot Act and NDAA, the U.S. is considered part of the ‘battlefield’, which means that the army may do to anyone suspected of wrongful behavior, or of planning such behavior, whatever it wishes. That gives the formerly proscribed act known as prior restraint a whole new meaning.

There are no more legal barriers to arrest without warrants, prison without lawyers, condemnation and even execution without trial. It is a situation so antithetical to what America has by law always been that it is beyond belief. Yet it is so.

Here’s Holder again:

“Now, let me be clear. An operation using lethal force in a foreign country targeted against a U.S. citizen who is a senior operational leader of al-Qaeda or associated forces and who is actively engaged in planning to kill Americans would be lawful at least in the following circumstances: first, the U.S. government has determined after a thorough and careful review that the individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States; second, capture is not feasible; and third, the operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles.”

The government “has determined.” “Careful review.” “Capture is not feasible.”

And this:

“Some have argued that the president is required to get permission from a federal court before taking action against a United States citizen who is a senior operational leader of al-Qaeda or associated forces. This is simply not accurate. Due process and judicial process are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process. It does not guarantee judicial process.”

If due process under the American system, under the Bill of Rights, does not consist of judicial process, of what does it consist? For Holder and Obama, it consists of their own judgment. Don’t worry. Your government will not mistreat you.

Holder:

“Some have called such operations "assassinations." They are not. And the use of that loaded term is misplaced. Assassinations are unlawful killings. Here, for the reasons that I have given, the U.S. government’s use of lethal force in self-defense against a leader of al-Qaeda or an associated force who presents an imminent threat of violent attack would not be unlawful, and therefore would not violate the executive order banning assassination or criminal statutes.”

“Self-defense” against someone who has yet done nothing but who “presents an imminent threat” as determined by, well, by the government.

And Barack Obama, on the heels of drone attacks which have specifically targeted not only individuals, such as the 16-year-old son of Anwar al-Awlaki, but funeral processions and first responders, such as medical teams, had this to say:

“I want to make sure that people understand, actually, drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties. For the most part, they have been very precise precision strikes against al-Qaeda and their affiliates. And we are very careful in terms of how it’s been applied. So, I think that there’s this perception somehow that we’re just sending in a whole bunch of strikes willy-nilly. This is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists who are trying to go in and harm Americans, hit American facilities, American bases, and so on. It is important for everybody to understand that this thing is kept on a very tight leash.”

People who have not attacked America but who “are trying to go in and harm Americans” based on the secret information that we have. The President wants people to understand.

I understand, all right. Here’s Hina Shamsi, an ACLU lawyer, on Democracy Now!: “President Obama has used more targeted killings than the Bush administration ever did. And we do not have the memos, the Office of Legal Counsel memos, that justify the targeted killing policy. And so, very disappointingly, we see the administration claiming a broad and dangerous authority without adequate public transparency, disclosure, and refusing to defend its authority in the courts.”

We do not get to see the memos, the memos that ‘justify’ murdering, that is using ‘lethal force’ against, Americans, drafted by a government agency. Thanks for the transparency, Mr. President, that you promised. But don’t worry, we trust you. You would never lie to us. You would never violate the constitution. You want to make sure that people understand. I understand, all right, and so do plenty of other people. This Constitution means something to us, brother, and we're not giving it up just yet.

The Obama administration announced today that the President would kill fourteen suspected Al Qaeda sympathizers on the White House lawn in celebration of Easter. Those to be executed were selected from a list maintained by the Department of Homeland Security.

“I want to assure the American people that those chosen will have their constitutional rights strictly observed,” the President said.

Voices of dissent were raised in the small crowd which tried to picket outside the gates but capitol police herded them into a free speech zone seven blocks away. They were not heard from thereafter.

Former Congressman Alan Grayson criticized the President for executing the prisoners, twelve of whom are men, but party leaders pointed out that if Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney were President, they’d probably execute more women and, David Axelrod said, if Santorum was President the killings might even be done inside the White House itself.

“This President is committed to transparency,” Axelrod told reporters. “He believes in the Constitution. He’s not going to kill off enemy suspects in private.” He added, “So long as Barack Obama is President, there won’t be mass roundups of American citizens. He will be selective.”

On internet message boards, liberal Democrats posted defenses of Mr. Obama, pointing out that he couldn’t have done much better given the lack of cooperation among some Democrats in the Senate and the party having less than the 90 votes necessary to secure the super Super majority the President needed in order to pass the “really good legislation.” Others pointed out that his health care bill would help the ailing economy by leading to more jobs in the insurance industry.

Others talked about his peace initiatives and reminded Americans that Obama had never bombed Greenland, Panama, or Australia, despite the squawking of the far right and the New York Times editorial board.

“He’s shown great restraint,” one insisted. “Even when Hillary tried to talk him into invading Peru, he held back.”

Another argued out that Obama couldn’t close Guantanamo Bay Prison as he’d once promised because, “not all of the prisoners have died yet.”

Several backers pointed out that a Republican victory would result in the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority increasing from 7-2 to as much as 8-1. “No matter how disappointed some of us are,” said NEVERVOTEREPUBLICAN on the ReaderSupportedNews web site, “his judicial appointments will be better, if the Republicans let him make some.”

The President himself, speaking to a private gathering of rich donors, declared that “change is hard. We can’t do everything at once.”

Thank God.

While everybody’s having a great time throwing spears at the pill-popping pervert for his latest grotesqueries, the U.S. is gearing up to either start or avert yet another war. It’s a little hard to tell.

Of course, the U.S. is already committing acts of war against Iran, as is Israel. The wonder of it all is that Iran has not tried to find some way to strike back.

I know, I know, the storyline on the corporate media, on CNN and Fox and all the rest of the clowns pretending to deliver ‘the news’ is that Iran is dangerous, its leaders are crazy, and that unless someone does something fast it will have nuclear weapons and probably use them to attack Israel.

You don’t really believe that shit, do you?

Not unless you’ve surrendered your critical faculties to the nonstop propaganda issuing from the U.S. State Department, the New York Times, and the sociopaths who run Israel.

Let’s pretend we’re rational beings. As Americans, that may be a stretch but we can do it.

First, Iran does not have nuclear weapons, unlike the peaceful and democratic regimes in Pakistan and North Korea.

Second, as a signatory to the nuclear nonproliferation agreement, Iran has a right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful uses.

Third, the claims that Iran is secretly working to develop nuclear weapons is based on extremely shaky allegations made by notoriously unreliable sources to the U.N.’s investigative body –– the same body which, until it elected its new pro-U.S. director, did not credit these claims.

Fourth, over the past several years, Israel has assassinated at least five Iranian scientists with car bombs inside Iran.

Fifth, Israel has over 200 nuclear weapons.

Sixth, the U.S.’s own intelligence networks believe that Iran is not attempting to build a bomb. That includes the CIA and the Pentagon’s own evaluators.

Can we agree that the foregoing statements are correct? Good, let’s proceed.

As far as we know, Iran has violated no international law or treaty, unlike Israel and the United States. It has attacked no one. Its leaders have made intemperate remarks, however none of these is any crazier than the blather from the mouth of Netanyahu, if you’ve noticed. And if you want comments from bellicose morons, look no further than Joe Liebermann.

President Obama, who has implemented a variety of sanctions against Iran in clear violation of international law, is regarded as a voice of calm in this situation. Yet, he threatens to destroy Iran with firepower greater than anything the world has ever known should we decide to. Iran will do what America demands, or else...

Israel, meanwhile, is screaming for blood. The rhetoric of some of its leaders is so nuts it’s hard to believe these people are permitted to hold power anywhere. Among other things, they compare the potential development of a nuclear device by Iran to the works of Adolf Hitler.

If Iran has an interest in developing nukes, it is at least two –– and probably three or more –– years away from achieving this. There is no urgency. Israel claims that the Iranians are building an underground bunker which would be too deep to destroy with their own missiles, presumably even the ‘bunker busters’ the U.S. gave them.

So what? So fucking what?

What gives Israel or the United States, between them two of the biggest nuclear powers on earth, the right to tell anyone else they can’t have nukes? Is this some sort of moral right conferred on them by God? Not by any God I’m familiar with. Maybe Rick Santorum’s God.

As Congressman Ron Paul put it, if Iran noticed that the U.S. attacks countries such as Iraq, which have no nuclear weapons, but lays off countries such as North Korea which do, it’s only logical that they’d want to get a few for themselves, for self-defense.

It is obvious that Iran is the country in danger, not Israel.

And if Iran had nuclear weapons, then what? For many years, the U.S. had a nuclear stand-off with the Soviet Union, a much more serious enemy and dangerous opponent than Iran. Pakistan has the bomb. China. France. Iran has not survived for more than four thousand years as an entity by being stupid. If it obtains or develops nuclear weapons, it would obviously be for defensive purposes and no other.

But the world is on fire now, constant warfare, terrible consequences, and evil creeps like Joe Liebermann looking for even more blood.

Once America was a nation which never struck another except in clear self-defense. That changed with Viet Nam. Then a whole string of military ‘interventions’ in places like Panama, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Iraq, Afghanistan and, by proxy, Libya.

If Israel strikes Iran, it will be unjustified. It will be mass murder. It may do so because it knows that America and Barack Obama will not do anything about it.

If Obama was a real President, if he was deserving of that Nobel Prize he sucked up, he would give this message to Netanyahu: if Israel attacks Iran, the U.S. will cancel all foreign aid to Israel, all weapons sales, and all diplomatic exchanges. That, as a nonviolent response, would be a minimum.

But America kisses Israel’s ass. And we are likely inviting tragedy because of it.

What does he have to do? Execute Bradley Manning on the White House lawn? Would that do it?

Maybe not.

Although his defenders are less talkative than they were a year or two ago, they have not abandoned the field. Every article on Truthout, every piece on Alternet, the latest columns in Salon, Huffington, ReaderSupportedNews, whatever and wherever the latest crazy news is there are those who drag out the remains of the carcass, the pitiful, threadbare, embarrassments that are his legislative and foreign policy legacy.

Should he execute Manning with a single shot from a Magnum on the South lawn, there would be those who claim it as humane and others who would insist that the Republicans made him do it.

If Obama wasn’t black, he’d be facing a serious challenge in the primaries of his own party. If he wasn’t a Democrat, the Democrats who presently defend him would be demanding his impeachment.

His apologists sound exactly like victims of domestic abuse begging the police not to take away their abuser. “He’s a good man, officer. He didn’t mean to hit me. I was lying down in the driveway and he ran over my head by accident...”

Hey, my fellow Democrats: we married a liar and an abuser. That’s hard to admit, but it’s even harder to deny. We need to gather up what’s left of our belongings and make a better life for yourselves somewhere else.

Maybe we need an insurrection inside the Democratic Party. We could do worse than throw these bums out, including most of the Congressional leadership. Start fresh. Am I wrong here? Without the assistance of these people, we wouldn’t have lost half of the Bill of Rights. No anti-democratic ‘Patriot Act’, no NDAA, no warrantless wiretapping, no amnesty for the telecoms, no trillions for the bank criminals.

We’ve been gang-raped, and the Democrats have piled on along with their inbred moronic cousins, the Republicans. Look at which corporations gave money to which politicians. The people who run the country know the two parties are just variations of the same theme; only the voters still think there’s much difference, and that illusion has begun to fade.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06fCDiu9HiA

That about covers it.

Look, I’ve got no answers. I talk to people, read everything I can get my hands on, throw commentary around on a couple of discussion groups where people are arguing ideology and I’m nodding out.

This place is an empire and the democratic process is now almost entirely an illusion. The gang that runs this show is not kidding around. It’s methodically captured government agencies, tax policies, Congressional committees and the vast majority of the members of both houses, the Supreme Court, and the mass media. It tells us what to think. Maybe the Obama presidency is simply the final affirmation that there isn’t anything we can do about it.

I’m beginning to think that the bizarre race for the Republican nomination is actually symptomatic of the state of the nation. Never seen anything like it, a dozen or so prospective candidates, each one crazier than the last, only Ron Paul with any integrity and his economic notions may be too weird even for our times.

Look at these people: Bachmann, a certifiable nutball who once hid in the bushes to watch a gay political rally and whose husband, clearly a closet case, aims to ‘cure’ gays. Perry, a racist with the brains of a goose, unable to push two words together without screwing them up. Herman Cain, the pizza king, who pawed so many uninterested women you’d have thought he was Clarence Thomas. Newt Gingrich, nailed on fifty ethics violations as Speaker of the House and forced out in disgrace, a serial adulterer who abandoned one wife as she lay in a hospital bed having been treated for cancer. Romney, the guy who will say anything it takes to win your vote, and who made millions off the misery he was able to inflict on others. And Rick Santorum, the sanctimonious schmuck who is clearly afraid of his own dark impulses.

If Kurt Vonnegut came back to write one more novel and this was it, the publisher would tell him he had too many twistos and ought to eliminate a few.

So, no, I do not think there’s a rational alternative, not a realistic one, in the Republican Party. We’ll save the Ron Paul stuff for another day.

Barack Obama. I repeat, those of you out there defending him, would you be defending him if he were Lyndon Johnson? How about if he were George W. Bush? Because his policies on virtually anything you can name are direct continuations of the Bush regime’s.

In 2007, on the campaign trail in Iowa, Obama, his voice rising with dramatic inflection, attacked the influence of corporate lobbyists in Washington. “They will not work in my White House,” he yelled, to great applause. To date, he’s appointed 46 corporate lobbyists to positions high in his government and, yes, inside the White House. The number two guy at Defense was a Raytheon lobbyist once convicted of fraud. His ‘food safety czar’ at the FDA was a Monsanto executive, lawyer, and lobbyist responsible for the approval of GMO foods without human testing. He’s got Wall Street bankers all over the place.

Now that the 2012 campaign has begun officially, Obama is again offering eloquent words, picking off the Republican candidates and a few other, easy targets such as garbage mouth Rush Limbaugh. He doesn’t talk about military adventurism, how we overthrew the Libyan government and lied about the reasons, how we’re lying about Iran, and Saudi Arabia, and Israel, and Russia. He doesn't remind us of his authorization for assassinations, and CIA death lists, and the use of drones to attack funerals. He doesn’t mention the Bush tax cuts he’s turned into perpetual theft, the enormous payoffs to the banks, the sacrifice of human services and human rights to the machinery of empire.

His Justice Department wanted to “turn the page” on the crimes of the Bush regime, letting scores of egregious felonies go because we ‘don’t want to look backward,” then tried to get Roman Polanski extradited for jumping bail on a trumped-up charge from twenty years ago.

He doesn’t talk about the torture of Bradley Manning, closing marijuana medical dispensaries, massive surveillance of U.S. citizens, the extension of the Patriot Act, the NDAA and its provisions for destroying the Constitution. He doesn’t mention how the U.S. played a role in overthrowing the government in Honduras, leading to terrible human rights abuses and disasters such as the recent prison fire. He doesn’t say much about the FEMA camps or the militarization of our urban police forces, against all history and respect for the protection of the people against a police state.

He can’t really mention agriculture unless he lies, since he assigned the fox to guard the chicken coop on this one, to the detriment of organic foods, small farmers, and even the health of consumers. He has to lie about health care, too, since his landmark legislation further enriched the insurance racket to the detriment of the taxpayers.

In the end, Obama has only one thing to recommend him, which is that he’s not Romney. On the other hand, if we want to be honest about it, what difference does that make?

Rick Santorum thinks women should prevent pregnancy by putting an aspirin between their legs. Want to testify on the President’s contraceptive rule? Not if you're a woman. Darrell Issa thinks you have nothing of importance to tell him. How about abortion? If you want one in Virginia, the legislature and governor think you should first be subject to a medical instrument shoved up your vagina.

Want access to birth control? Rush Limbaugh believes you should make a porn film for his entertainment.

What in the world is going on here?

Limbaugh in particular shows signs of serious mental health problems. Probably he’s fooling around with oxycontin again, but it doesn’t seem to be helping.

Limbaugh is the same useless prick who claimed that Michael J. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson’s Disease, was faking it when he made political statements about health care coverage. We’re talking about a really horrible human being.

The Georgetown University law student who Issa didn’t think had anything useful to offer his committee eventually testified at a hastily convened version of a committee the Democrats cobbled together. It was no big deal, what Sandra Fluke had to say, and not especially controversial except to people with troubled minds. Thus, Limbaugh.

He called her a lot of his favorite idiotic expressions, including ‘feminazi’, and labeled her a ‘slut’, presumably because she enjoys sex, or simply wants the option of enjoying sex, outside of marriage. In Limbaugh’s world, Fluke’s interest in insuring that health services include the availability of contraceptives makes her a prostitute. I know, I know.

“What does it say about the college coed Sandra Fluke, who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex, what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception...”

Limbaugh followed this up with the remarkable demand that “if we’re going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.”

Anyone out there who wants to take a baseball bat to Limbaugh’s skull and post the video online so we can all watch, I’ll help raise bail money.

What kind of mind would take someone’s advocacy of birth control and conflate that with prostitution? What kind of mind would then suggest that a woman who believed that the society had a legitimate interest in making contraception available ought to “pay” for access by filming her sexual activities for his enjoyment?

Anyone whose mind works like that is not very far away from the sickest perversions imaginable.

As usual, the great Bill Hicks had Limbaugh nailed perfectly. I am not going to print what Bill said in this column. I’m willing to print all sorts of stuff, as you know if you read my work regularly, but Bill’s take on Limbaugh is probably the most raw, disgusting thing he ever said about anybody, and that includes his tale of Jesse Helms and Jesse’s ‘collection of little shoes.’

Here’s the link. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Make sure there are no children or overly sensitive people present.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIT-SYVPV8s&feature=endscreen.

Maybe that was a little too edgy. How about George Carlin:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vzrxy9A7Ja4&feature=endscreen.

I don’t know what it will take to get this disgrace to the human race off radio and television, but it should be done. No more coddling twisted evil creeps like Limbaugh, the spreaders of hatred. Let him stand on a street corner and shout his lies. See how long he lasts.

Where do they find these guys?

This particular guy, Daniel Richards, was found by California’s former Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, which I suppose explains it in part. Schwarzenegger is famous for thinking he was going green by driving Hummers and that he was being faithful to his wife Maria so long as he didn’t engage in sexual acts with other women while she was in the same room.

So, Daniel Richards, President of the California Fish and Game Commission.

Daniel recently went on a hunt in Idaho. Well, calling it a ‘hunt’ is a little misleading. What it is really is that you pay a lot of money to people who are responsible for running your ‘prey’ into a place from which it cannot escape. Then, in an act of sheer bravery, you shoot it to death.

Such manhood! Such spirit! Hey, Bungalow Bill, what did you kill, Bungalow Bill?

Richards, taking a break from his arduous task of overseeing fish and game in California, braved the wilds of Idaho in search of the illusive puma. After ponying up the $7,000.00 fee, Richards waited until the dogs from the Flying B Ranch had treed one, then shot it.

He posed for a photo, the brave hunter holding the carcass upright, grinning and wearing shades.

Killing mountain lions is illegal in California and has been for forty years, forcing the courageous Richards to journey to a foreign jurisdiction to sate his cheery blood lust.

When the photo hit the internet, a few people were not amused. Several California legislators called on him to resign. Several Republicans, unsurprisingly, defended him, calling Richards a ‘conservationist’ and saying that he had every right to shoot the cat.

For his part, Richards told those who objected to his fun with a gun that “it’s none of your business,” and said that what he did outside of California had no relationship to his ability to do his job while here.

Richards, a commercial realtor and developer from San Bernardino County, compared his actions to a vacationer who gambles in Las Vegas, presumably of the opinion that what happens on the Flying B stays on the Flying B.

Among other duties, the President of Fish and Game is charged with insuring that the laws protecting mountain lions in California are obeyed.

He may be removed by a majority vote in both houses. Such a vote will apparently be held as early as next Tuesday in the State Assembly.

Personally, I can understand why the G.O.P. defends him. After all, one’s personal actions are their own business unless they want to have an abortion, smoke marijuana, or criticize the government. Shooting animals, that’s the manly, American thing to do.

In fact, looking at the photo of Big Dan, standing in the snow with his dead prize in his arms, the bulky clothing no doubt hiding his erection, I got an idea which should please both parties. To hell with the Assembly vote. Why not drop him back into the Idaho wilds, this time without his .45 caliber rifle or his $7,000.00. Just Dan and the pumas. A kind of nature reality show.

F*X could film the exciting developments from a helicopter as Dan uses his wits in an epic battle to survive. I don’t watch much television, but I’d pop some popcorn and settle in for that one.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The reason the framers made this the first one, without it you’re not a free country. Franklin and Madison and Jefferson and the boys had been through plenty dealing with King George and his enforcers and they knew what happened when the government could shut you up or keep you out of the public square.

Pretty soon, the rest of us are going to know what happens, too.

It’s been on the way for some time. In Seattle, at the WTO conference, tens of thousands of demonstrators were routed by the police. At national political conventions, police began to designate something called ‘free speech zones’ in which protesters were penned, far away from the center of things. The removal of people from any chance to express themselves so they might be heard, the statutory prohibitions against petitioning in any meaningful sense for a redress of grievances, is now commonplace.

At Occupy scenes across America, cops and government agents force confrontations with mostly peaceful protesters, beating them, shooting them with ‘non-lethal’ ammunition, dousing them with chemical agents, and arresting them, and nobody –– nobody –– in the government seems to think there’s anything wrong here.

“Congress shall make no law...”

Once upon a time, freedom of speech was inviolate. There were exceptions. The Supreme Court famously drew the line at ‘shouting fire in a crowded theater,’ where one could not by the exercise of speech immediately endanger the lives and safety of others.

Otherwise, speech was protected and its protectors took that seriously. The central point was, obviously, unpopular speech. Popular speech does not require protecting. Speech which supports the powerful, which aligns with the government, which offends virtually no one –– that’s not what the framers were getting at. ‘Hooray for the king’ does not need any guarantees.

Over the last hundred years or so, the federal government, state governments, and local governments, as governments will, have whittled away at the First Amendment. They have worked on convenient ‘exceptions’, situations and circumstances in which their right to control what you say is more important than your right to say it.

The feds have at various times passed such noxious junk as the ‘Alien and Sedition Act’ of 1798, designed by President Adams and the Federalists to silence supporters of the French Revolution and damage Jefferson and the Republican Party. Numerous people were charged and some convicted, but Jefferson’s party swept the elections of 1800 and the four provisions of which it consisted were permitted to expire.

Tack on the 1917 Espionage Act and the 1918 Sedition Act, and the Alien Registration Act of 1940, and you get a pretty fair picture. “Congress shall make no law...” unless the government wants to go to war and keep the people from complaining about it.

State and local governments have relentlessly tried to shut people up as well. For the most part, the Supreme Court has been on the side of free speech, striking down the transparent ruses localities have used to silence dissent or make it less messy.

Colleges and universities, too, have not always been bastions of free speech, though they like to claim that they are. Fortunately, students are not often as readily manipulated as their elders and have the energy to fight back. This has led to signal revolts such as Berkeley’s 1964 Free Speech Movement, which brought down the Chancellor and overturned the Regents’ attempt at prior restraint.

But the Supreme Court, over the years, opened the door for oppressive government by approving ‘time, place, and manner’ restrictions. As the Court became less vigilant in protecting the rights of the people, governments at all levels became bolder in trying to shut us up.

Take the case of Dearborn, Michigan, and the crazy pastor from Gainesville, Florida, Terry Jones. Jones rolled into Dearborn with the idea of demonstrating across the street from a local mosque on Good Friday. Dearborn police did not think this was a good idea and refused to issue him a permit, required under local law. The court agreed with the cops. Jones, the mayor said, was welcome to demonstrate in one of the city’s “free speech zones.”

Granted, Jones is an asshole, but that’s precisely the point of the First Amendment. The authorities in Dearborn argued that his plans would not only be disruptive but were likely to lead to violence against him.

The ‘free speech zones’ of Dearborn were created after a court struggle in 2003. The city had an ordinance which required demonstrators to obtain a permit thirty days in advance. The imposition of permit requirements is, of course, a classic tactic of the government to prevent people from responding with public demonstrations to ugly official acts, and also to give authorities a handy code section for use in arresting anybody participating in such festivities.

When an appeals court struck down the Dearborn time requirement, the city imposed so-called ‘free speech zones’.

The use of these zones has spread across America like a malignancy. If they are not stopped, they will kill their host.

They have been used by both parties to keep protesters away from political conventions, and away from appearances by public figures.

The general public has been brought to accept the practice. Civil liberties, the actual cornerstone of democracy, are often seen as confusing or unimportant by people who believe their ‘freedom’ is secured by troops and military campaigns. Tyranny depends on such ignorance.

On December 6, 2001, George Bush’s Attorney General John Ashcroft gave a carefully-prepared statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee. “To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty,” he said, “your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and … give ammunition to America’s enemies.”

Shortly thereafter, the Secret Service ordered local police to set up ‘free speech zones’ in advance of any presidential visit. These zones were to be outside the view of the President and outside the view of the media, too. Anyone wanting to demonstrate against the President’s policies might just as well go to a different city, or stay home altogether.

That’s what they are telling us now: protesters are “aiding terrorists” because “they erode national unity.” Exercising free speech, the foundation of a free people, “gives ammunition to America’s enemies.” This is an evil declaration, an Orwellian proclamation. Patriotism is sedition.

Thirty-five years prior, President Lyndon Johnson was forced to speak almost entirely on military bases to avoid angry antiwar demonstrators. Now, however, in the new world order, it was the demonstrators who would be moved, to ‘protest’ zones where they would be seen and heard by no one.

The Bush policy suppressing free speech was challenged successfully on more than one occasion. On a Labor Day visit to Pittsburgh in 2002, the Secret Service had designated a ‘free speech zone’ on a baseball field, behind a chain-link fence, nearly half a mile from the President’s speech. People with pro-Bush signs were admitted to line the President’s route but those opposing his policies were kicked out. One man, a 65-year-old retired steelworker named Bill Neel refused to go to the designated ‘protest’ area and was arrested for disorderly conduct. Neel said, “As far as I’m concerned, the whole country is a free speech zone.”

At Neel’s trial, a police detective told the court that they had acted on the orders of the Secret Service, that they were to confine “people that were there making a statement pretty much against the President and his views.” A top official of the Allegheny County cops testified that the Secret Service “come in and do a site survey and say, ‘Here’s a place where the people can be, and we’d like to have any protesters put in a place that is able to be secured.”

Astoundingly, the district judge threw out the disturbing the peace charge, saying “I believe this is America.”

But not all judges have agreed and, in any case, judicial rulings had no effect on either the Secret Service or local police departments. Throughout the entirety of Bush’s terms in office, people were arrested for trying to assert meaningful public dissent. At a Bush rally in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 2001, three demonstrators, two of them grandmothers, were arrested for holding up handwritten protest signs outside the designated zone. Seven more were arrested for refusing to be cordoned off hundreds of yards from a Bush rally at the University of South Florida, including a 62-year-old man with a sign reading “War’s good business. Invest your son.” All seven were charged with trespassing, obstructing, and disorderly conduct.

The practice was expanded during Bush’s first term. In St. Louis, on January 22, 2003, more than a hundred people carrying signs were removed from the site of his speech to a location so far away no one would be aware of their protest; not only that, police prevented reporters from entering the zone and kept protesters from leaving it to speak to reporters. On the same trip, when Bush stopped by a Boeing aircraft plant, police arrested a young mother who disobeyed orders to leave the area, taking her and her five-year-old daughter away in separate squad cars.

In Columbia, South Carolina, the cops arrested one Brett Bursey who was standing among a crowd of Bush supporters. Bursey’s crime was failing to take his protest sign, “No War For Oil” to the designated zone half a mile away. Although Bush supporters could line the route, critics such as Bursey were prohibited to occupy the same space.

Bursey said later that he had already moved 200 yards from where Bush was supposed to speak, but “the restricted area kept moving. It was wherever I happened to be standing.”

Bursey was charged with trespassing, but five months later the charge was dropped because South Carolina law prohibits arresting people for trespassing on public property. But the federal government was not done with him. Lest anyone tempted to exercise their right of free speech think they could get away with it by hiding behind a technicality, the Justice Department then charged Bursey with violating a rarely-enforced federal law of ‘entering a restricted area around the President of the United States.’

Penalty for violating this law was a maximum fine of $5,000.00 and six months in prison. Bursey’s request for a jury trial was denied by federal judge Bristow Marchant, who said that his crime was merely a ‘petty offense’ not warranting a jury. The U.S. Attorney charged that Bursey’s actions “threatened the President.” At the court trial, he was found guilty and fined $500.00.

As we shall see, the Bursey case is important today, nine years later.

At the time these policies were first being implemented, with people being shunted into usually enclosed areas literally out of view of the President and the media, and with the inevitable arrests of some demonstrators who mistakenly believed that the First Amendment to the Constitution applied to them, there was some public protest. Newspaper editorials raised objections, usually tepid, and the ACLU raised a howl. Even a judge or two could be found who would throw out the charges. But the policy stuck and no one with any power to confront it, meaning the Congress and the Supreme Court, would interfere.

The Secret Service, meanwhile, pretended that the rules had nothing to do with dissent, free speech, or political policies. As agent Brian Marr explained on National Public Radio:

“These individuals may be so involved with trying to shout their support or non-support that inadvertently they may walk out into the motorcade route and be injured. And that is really the reason why we set these places up, so we can make sure that they have the right of free speech, but, two, we want to be sure that they are able to go home at the end of the evening and not be injured in any way.”

Hey, you know what? Why don’t you stay home and protest there? You can make a sign and hold it up in front of your television set. Same right of free speech and no chance of being injured.

In 1966, a U.S. Senate subcommittee held hearings in California’s Central Valley on the issue of the farm workers and their attempts to organize the UFW. A local sheriff testified that he had arrested some farm workers in order to protect them from the threats of violence from the growers. One of the Senators, Robert Kennedy, suggested that the sheriff use the luncheon recess to read the Constitution of the United States.

But the Kennedys are dead, and so is the First Amendment. Free speech is now just another empty expression, like the presumption of innocence.

Under the Bush regime, dissent was not permitted even on his foreign travels. In a visit to Australia, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, “The basic right of freedom of speech will adopt a new interpretation during the Canberra visits this week by the US President, George Bush, and his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao. Protesters will be free to speak as much as they like just as long as they can’t be heard.”

And on a trip to England, where he prattled about freedom in Baghdad thanks to the horrific U.S. invasion, the White House demanded a complete shut down of the city’s center and a prohibition of protest marches. There were no ‘free speech zones,’ but ‘exclusion zones’ in which no protesters were permitted.

Legal challenges in the U.S., mostly brought by the ACLU, failed to stop the Bush or the Secret Service. Even a 2003 case filed in Pennsylvania federal district court and citing instances of constitutional rights violations in a dozen states, did not end the practice. In fact, over the past nine years, especially including the Obama presidency, it’s gotten much worse.

The Democrats hopped aboard the Mussolini Special in 2004, at their national convention in Boston. Protesters were confined to a fenced area –– topped with razor wire –– outside the Fleet Center. The party justified it by making public safety claims, citing the ‘time, place, and manner’ qualifications now commonly accepted thanks to a comatose Supreme Court, and objections were confined to the usual ‘leftists.’

The corralling of demonstrators made normal under Bush has continued and expanded under Obama. He, like Bush, is protected from having to see the signs and the faces of dissent. No wonder he remains oddly unaware of the depths of fury his policies have engendered among those who feel betrayed.

Free speech zones are now routinely used by mayors and chiefs of urban police forces to deal with the Occupy movement. Permits, rules about what you can carry, what you can have on your person. In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg managed some sweet words about constitutional rights while trying to force Occupy Wall Street to occupy some other place. In Oakland, there is no right to peacefully assemble to petition for redress of grievances, and freedom of speech is honored in its absence.

Police sweeps are common, and confrontations, whether instigated by police agents or by the police themselves, are now inevitable. This is becoming a nationwide phenomenon. Also being widely accepted with little objection is the active participation in anti-protest planning by the Department of Homeland Security.

In an article on free speech zones before the age of Obama, James Bovard, author of Terrorism & Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice, and Peace to Rid the World of Evil, noted with some alarm the May, 2003, ‘Terrorist Advisory” in which Homeland Security “warned local law enforcement agencies to keep an eye on anyone who “expressed dislike of attitudes and decisions of the U.S. government.”

Bovard cites a Senate report describing the FBI’s “belief that dissident speech and association should be prevented because they were incipient steps towards the possible ultimate commission of act which might be criminal.” The Bureau is also “urging local police to report suspicious activity by protesters to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which is run by the FBI.”

Now, with government agencies engaging in massive electronic surveillance, all of it formerly against the law, and with the passage of the Patriot Act and the NDAA, which authorizes, incredibly, the arrest and detention without charges or trial, in clear and dramatic contravention of the most basic rights of Americans, any citizen the government doesn’t like, we are on the threshold of something deeply sinister.

Freedom, unlike the moronic bleating of right wing fools, does not depend on military might but on adherence to fundamental principles. The framers of the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights knew exactly what they were doing. It is the Bill of Rights which distinguishes America from other empires. It is the only thing between us and fascism.

Remember the Bursey case? The man was actually prosecuted for ‘entering a restricted area around the President of the United States.’

Two days ago, the House of Representatives voted 388-3 in favor of H.R. 347, a new federal law which will allow the federal government to bring charges against anyone, anywhere in America, who enters a building without permission or with the intent to disrupt a government function. Under the law, any building or grounds where the president is visiting — even temporarily — is covered, as is any building or grounds “restricted in conjunction with an event designated as a special event of national significance."

It will shortly be, after Obama signs it, a federal offense to disrupt, even accidentally, an event involving not only a President but anyone else accorded Secret Service protection, including cabinet members and presidential candidates. Three members of the House voted 'no.'

It will be against the law to create a disturbance, in the opinion of the police, Secret Service, FBI, or any other law enforcement agency, at or in the vicinity of any of these personages, or at a designated ‘National Special Security Event’, a category of public gatherings invented by President Clinton, and which have included Super Bowl XXXVI, the Reagan and Ford funerals, State of the Union addresses, and the Democratic national Convention.

The protesters who arrive in Chicago in a couple of months for the G8 and NATO summits will be present at a National Special Security Event. Disruptive activity will be a federal offense. And ‘disruptive activity’ can, as experience has shown, be anything.

Piece by piece, the foundation of America’s freedom is being chipped away.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Freedom of speech. The right of the people peaceably to assemble... When those are gone, we may wonder how it happened. Of course, it will be too late to matter.