No, not me

I believe that Republicans are members of a death cult. Sounds extreme, I know, but what else would you call it? They are trying to take health care away from Americans which has already caused deaths due to inadequate medical care. There’s only one reason they would do that: They believe that the profits of insurance companies are more important than the lives of Americans.

But to actually be considered members of a death cult, Republicans would have to do more than just let a few sick people die. They would need to let a whole shitload of sick people die. And they are doing just that.

During the COVID crisis, Republicans are holding rallies to open the economy immediately, consequences be damned. Some of them even say this explicitly. Dan Patrick, Lt. Governor of Texas, said that he’d be willing to die if the economy could be reopened. And of course Donald Trump has said repeatedly, as is his wont, not to let the remedy be worse than the problem. He didn’t explicitly say he wanted people to die alone in nursing homes, but that is certainly what would happen.

Not content with having American citizens die, the Republicans and Trump also have instituted policies that will lead to Mexicans and Central Americans dying in the desert while they are walking to the border or waiting in camps for their court dates. I have heard that some people are even picking up food and water caches placed in the desert to aid refugees.

Republicans have also worked diligently to deny women the right to safe abortions, instead forcing them to use illegal abortionists who in the past have proven careless about the welfare of their patients.

There are other actions taken by Trump and the Republicans, many of which result in death or disease. Trump removed some protections from the Clean Water Act that will permit companies to dump raw waste into our rivers. He also made changes that will permit auto makers and importers to let their cars pollute our air more by raising the legal limit of CO2 emissions and lowering the legal miles per gallon for each new car.

Republicans justify these things by saying that regulations are harming business profits, thereby explicitly stating that the deaths of our citizens must be exchanged for corporate profits.

If that’s not the description of a death cult, I don’t know what would be, unless it’s putting people into concentration camps and starving them to death. But the net result of these Republican policies, and others that I could name, is the deaths of thousands, perhaps even millions of people who were not given the choice or whether they wanted to sacrifice their lives for corporate profits or not.

I’m going to be among the first to say it, no, Mr. President, I do not agree to die so that corporations can enjoy higher profits.

No, not me.

The Republicans Did It--Check the Record

Congratulations, Republicans, for memorizing the Trump party line. You would do very well in a Communist country like China or a kleptocratic one like Russia. No doubt you salivate at the thought of getting a piece of all that oil money.
Here in America we have something besides phony spin and imaginary conspiracies. It’s called the truth. Sure, if you can prove that it was Obama who overthrew the Iraqi government and pushed all its hardliners into ISIS, then I guess you’re right, Obama was alone responsible for the mess in Syria. (hint: It was Bush, Jr. Look it up.)

Yes, it was Obama who supported Putin when he was propping up Syrian dictator. No wait, he opposed Putin but the fickle Congress refused to support him on this or anything else.

I would laugh at the alt-right efforts to blame all the world’s problems on Obama when they never supported Obama on anything. How can they blame him if they didn’t give him a chance to put his policies into effect? Oh, that’s right, they don’t give a damn about real problems, they only want to score points for their party.
Here’s my message to the alt-right brown shirts: The world is not a game of Risk. When countries fall, people are killed. I believe it was Ben Franklin who said,

“Let us…beware of being lulled into a dangerous security; and of being both enervated and impoverished by luxury; of being weakened by internal contentions and divisions.”
Republicans believe that nothing Trump does can adversely affect our security; that their wealth is secure and proves their superiority over everyone else; and that internal contentions and divisions are great ways to keep them in power.
As Franklin said, “Let us beware!”

How much does beef production contribute to global warming?

From Quora: I was surprised when I was attacked for saying that beef production contributes to global warming worldwide. The attacks came in the form of misinformation, primarily from a white paper by Frank Mitloehner, a professor at UC Davis. Mitloehner’s opinions are published in the form of a white paper, not an article in a peer-reviewed journal. But a group of scientists from Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future has provided a detailed response that fills in some of the details that Mitloehner omitted from his paper.

http://www.jhsph.edu/research/ce...

In looking over their response, I find their points well-taken. Mitloehner concentrates on improvements the meat industry has made in their production methods over the past 50–70 years. But these improvements do not address major problems that will always exist in an industry that slaughters 15 billion animals each year (total of all animals, including chickens).

The US meat industry fails to account for the fact that the US imports large quantities of beef from overseas. Thus, some of the efficiencies claimed by the industry merely result from the export of problems—such as emissions from deforestation and feed-crop production—to other countries. The US currently imports about 2 billion pounds of beef annually.

USDA ERS - Trade

Mitloehner’s figure of 4.2% greenhouse gas emissions resulting from livestock refers to US figures and doesn't represent the true scale of the problem. GHG is a world-wide problem where it is impossible to separate the US contribution from the rest of the world. World-wide, animal agriculture accounts for 14.5% of GHG, while world-wide production of GHG from transportation is slightly less.

The reason I described that cutting beef consumption is “low-hanging fruit” is because cutting consumption does not require an onerous life-style change. Clearly, since according to Dr. Mitloehner’s paper transportation accounts for 27% of US GHG production, there are many larger cuts that must be made in the transportation sector. These necessary cuts, however, will require lifestyle changes that Americans will find it difficult to make.

JEB! fortune built on bribes and payoffs--all legal, of course!

It's all legal because We, the 99 percent, have not yet caught on to how politicians have been robbing us blind. Instead, due to misdirection by conservative front groups, we focus on their salaries. Politicians don't get wealthy from drawing salaries while in office. Geb!'s salary as governor of Florida was never higher than $130,000. While that may seem like a hulluva lot to the 99%, it's just chickenfeed to one-percenters like the Bush family.

When Jeb! was the Governor of Florida, his net worth was $1.3 million. A lot to you and me but not to Jeb!'s family. In 2016,9 years after leaving office, Jeb!'s wealth is estimated at $10 million. The year that he left office, 2007, he earned $27 million. What could that money be but payoffs for favors he had done while in office? No, please, tell me what else it could be. Right now I'm going by the Sherlock Holmes rule:

When you have exhausted all the possibilities, whatever is left, no matter how implausible, must be the truth.

During his tenure in office, Jeb! funneled more than $1.3 billion to international brokerage houses in return receiving more than $5 million in campaign contributions for his brother and other Republicans:

Blackstone Group	$99,000.00	$150,000,000.00
Carlyle Group	$69,000.00	$275,000,000.00
Deutsche Bank	$200,000.00	$45,000,000.00
Freeman Spogli	$743,000.00	$50,000,000.00
Goldman Sachs	$1,500,000.00	$150,000,000.00
Hicks Muse	$189,000.00	$25,000,000.00
JPMorgan Chase	$64,000.00	$100,000,000.00
Lehman Brothers	$499,000.00	$175,000,000.00
Morgan Stanley	$1,100,000.00	$150,000,000.00
Prudential Financial	$406,000.00	$100,000,000.00
UBS	$147,000.00	$100,000,000.00
Totals	$5,016,000.00	$1,320,000,000.00

Source: International Business Times.

In the case of Lehman Brothers, the investment company that nearly tanked the entire US economy in 2008, it's not at all implausible that Jeb! received a payoff. During his term as Governor, Jeb! funneled $500,000 in campaign donations from Lehman Brothers employees into various Republican campaigns. In return, Jeb! took $175 million from the state of Florida's workers' pension funds and handed it to Lehman Brothers to invest (as they jokingly called it). After Jeb! left office,  Lehman Brothers hired him at a salary of $1.7 million. Sounds like a payoff to me.

Bush's appointees in Florida kept on giving money to Lehman Brothers for questionable purchases, including over $1.3 billion "invested" in mortgage derivatives. By 2008, that money had vanished as Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy and it turned out that all those mortgage derivatives were worthless. But Lehman Brothers brokers got their commissions and didn't have to stand trial for misrepresenting the value of their "investments".

So Jeb! and his pals transferred $1.3 billion from Florida State Employees pension funds to Lehman Brothers. Not just a bad investment, that money was gone. While Jeb! was working for Lehman.

What has this got to do with you? Check this out. In an interview with the Washington Post, Jeb! claimed he would propose that politicians would have to wait 6 years before going to work for lobbyists. Fascinating proposal, since Jeb! himself didn't wait 6 months after leaving office to get paid off by Lehman Brothers.

It's definitely a case of "do as I say, not as I do".

If Jeb! is elected president, he will no doubt try to do the same thing with the Social Security accounts, currently worth $2.6 trillion. If international brokers paid $5 million to get their hands on $1.3 trillion in Florida Employees' retirement accounts, how much will they pay to get Social Security?

Republicans will tell you that retirement funds can earn more if they are invested in Wall Street. That's a bald-faced lie. Just ask the Florida public employees whose accounts were looted by Jeb!!











http://www.ibtimes.com/george-w-bush-fundraisers-whose-firms-received-florida-pension-deals-under-jeb-bush-1880624

No, Obama is not the worst president ever: The Big Lie and Republican politics

The big lie of the Republican party is that Obama is the worst president ever. Anyone with any critical faculties left recognizes this would be difficult to prove, even if true. Yet Republicans keep repeating the lie over and over again, never giving any facts to back it up. Or, if they do give facts, they turn out to be minor failures to fulfill campaign promises, such as when he said that if you like your health insurance you can keep it. I'm sorry, but no politician has ever kept all his or her campaign promises. 

Obama has kept most of his promises, and most of the ones he hasn't kept have been blocked by the Republicans. But Republicans never admit their complicity. They practice the propaganda tactic known as the "Big Lie", which maintains that people will believe a big lie if they hear it over and over again.

There are other, similar tactics used by Republicans to get people to follow them mindlessly.

Wikipedia discusses these practices in its article on "Big lie".

The primary rules are: 

• never allow the public to cool off 

Keep on cooking up new scandals, or repeating the old ones. Don't let the public forget "Benghazi", even if they don't know what it is. Keep forming new committees and hold hearings to rehash the old accusations.

• never admit a fault or wrong;

Never admit that Congress could have passed an immigration bill if the Republicans had joined with the Democrats. The Senate passed a bill, but the Republicans refused to bring it to a vote. It would have passed had they done so. Yet the Republicans claim it was the Democrats, specifically President Obama, who failed to pass an immigration bill. They also claim that it is Senator Harry Reid who is blocking legislation in the Senate, even though it is the Republican House of Representatives that has been blocking every Obama initiative for 4 years. 

• never concede that there may be some good in your enemy;

Be sure you mention that Obama is the worst president ever as much as possible. Use name-calling whenever you can. Call the Democrats "socialists", or "race-baiters". Call Obama "weak" and say that he needs to "grow a pair". Recall that Obama's stimulus package didn't work, though most of the spending items in it had been included in Republican bills, including G.W. Bush's stimulus package of 2008. Recall that Obama refused to compromise on the Affordable Care Act, although its basic idea was a Republican idea proposed by the Heritage Foundation and passed in Massachusetts by a Republican governor, Mitt Romney.

• never leave room for alternatives;

There were several issues, like immigration and paycheck fairness, where compromise might have produced agreement. But Republicans would rather have government fail, even though the failure causes hardship for everyone except the very wealthy.

• never accept blame;

For example, when Romney was asked about the firing of workers by Bane Capital, he said it happened after he left the company so he had no responsibility for it. When it was discovered that he employed undocumented workers as gardeners, he denied knowing about the problem. He said he fired them as soon as he found out they were undocumented, but in fact he fired them when the press found out about them.

• concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong;

Republicans pretend that Obama can be blamed for everything, even things that took place during the Bush administration.

• people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one;

I'm not so sure this is true. It would appear the Republicans will believe any lie as long as it favors Republicans. Another definition of the Big Lie may be closer to the truth: During WWII it was claimed that 

The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.

That sounds more like the way the Republicans practice the Big Lie than the original definition. 

• and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

Yep. That's what Fox News and Republican talking points are for. 

Republican lies are a Ponzi scheme for American voters

Chaz K writes, "The midterm elections were a repudiation of Obama and his policies."

I would agree with him except that the Republican party spent over $100 million running attack ads that misrepresented the issues and the candidates' positions. What he are saying is, if Fox News and the Koch Brothers were successful in buying the election, then the election is a repudiation of the president and his policies. This position is nonsensical. If Bernie Madoff convinced a thousand people to invest in a Ponzi scheme, it doesn't prove Madoff's Ponzi scheme is a good investment. More to the point, it doesn't "repudiate" the laws of mathematics that prove Ponzi schemes don't work. 

But the Republicans began opposing Obama and his policies before they even knew what they were. They opposed his policy of marriage equality, falsely saying it would legalize polygamy and somehow devalue traditional marriage.They opposed limited intervention in the Middle East, saying that Obama was a closet Muslim who favors ISIS. They opposed the Affordable Care Act, saying it would destroy the US medical system (it hasn't), bankrupt the economy (it hasn't), and create death panels (it hasn't). They opposed the EPA policy of decreasing coal production and burning in the atmosphere, by saying that Climate Change is a myth created by the scientists because...scientists don't know anything about what they spend their whole lives studying.

If the Republicans lied about the policies of the administration to win the election, their repudiation is only a repudiation of the fantasy that Republicans created with their lies. In other words, it was a repudiation of nothing. In addition, the Republicans have suggested no alternatives to policies they oppose--because they know those policies are reasonable and there are no defensible right-wing alternatives.

Most Corrupt States are Controlled by Republcans

A 2011 study of corruption in the U.S. has reached some alarming conclusions. The study used a single factor to determine the level of corruption in a state, namely, the number of officials convicted of corruption over the past several years. There were 25,000 corruption convictions between 1974 and 2008. Corruption trials are all prosecuted under federal laws, which do not vary from state to state and do not favor one party over another. Therefore, a corrupt state official cannot influence his own trial. 

Political corruption results in higher state expenditures. The same study found that states with higher levels of corruption spent an average of $1,300 per resident per year more than they would have with only average levels of corruption. The state of Mississippi, which the study rated most corrupt in the U.S., therefore lost $3.8 billion due to corruption of its officials.

Corrupt states spend more money on construction, capital, and highway projects, because these projects are undertaken by large, monopolistic enterprises. When only one or two companies bid on a project, it is hard to tell whether the bid is inflated by payoffs to politicians. Corruption often takes the form of subsidies to sports franchises for locating in a city or constructing a new stadium. Miami-Dade County paid $337 million to build a stadium for a baseball team. Ultimately, the taxpayers of Miami-Dade will pay at least $2.6 billion to pay of the bonds sold to finance construction. The stadium primarily benefits the owner of the team, Jeffrey Loria, whose estimated net wealth is $500 million. Corruption in these sorts of deal is difficult to prove, but Florida is the tenth most corrupt state on the list.

Government corruption leads to expenditures on capital projects like the Marlins stadium. The budget increases are offset by cuts elsewhere, usually in health and education. In Miami, Florida, the Mayor of Miami-Dade County cut 36 positions for fireboat crews. He also demanded that the fireboat crews should also be cross-trained in emergency rescue, which the union refused to do. The dispute led to shutting down one fireboat.

On the evening of July 4, 2014, a 3-boat collision led to 4 fatalities. The unmanned Miami fireboat, which might have responded and rescued one or more victims in the water, stayed in port. The unmanned fireboat may or may not have saved anyone that night. The stadium deal may not have involved corruption. One fact is clear: The Miami government was able to give $337 million to millionaire Loria, but could not find the funds to pay firefighters.

The most disturbing aspect of this survey is the correlation between the level of corruption and a state's adoption of the Republican Party platform. For example, the study concludes that favoring tax cuts over incremental tax raises correlates with a state's corruption. In other words, the motto, “no new taxes” may invite corruption.

The study says that corrupt state governments tend to hide their excesses by engaging in deficit financing. A popular way for governments to raise revenues for capital projects is tax increment financing (TIF). This form of funding does not increase budgets, but it does lead to abuses. TIF is used to fund redevelopment projects, with the money going to large, politically connected construction companies. Redevelopment projects are supposed to help residents of blighted districts, but they frequently result in gentrification, when richer residents move into the redeveloped districts and the poorer residents are forced out. The money raised goes to the corporations and taxpayers eventually pay the higher cost of services demanded by the new residents.

Policies of Republicans, who favor cutting taxes and awarding contracts on favorable terms to corporations, have caused Republican-governed states to experience more corruption. Here is a list of the ten most corrupt states and the political parties that control them. The list comes from the study and the political party control statistics come from Multistate Associates Incorporated.

Ten most corrupt states Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Alabama, Alaska, South Dakota, Kentucky, and Florida.

Rank.   State name      Governor's Party       State Senate Party       State Assembly Party

1. Mississippi        R                               R                                 R
2. Louisiana          R                               R                                 R
3. Tennessee         R                               R                                 R
4. Illinois               D                              D                                 D
5. Pennsylvania     R                              R                                 R
6. Alabama            R                              R                                 R
7. Alaska               R                              R                                 R
8. South Dakota    R                              R                                 R
9. Kentucky          D                              R                                 D
10. Florida              R                               R                                 R

There are 30 power bases listed in this table. 25 (83%) of them are controlled by Republicans. This is the type of figure you would expect to see if the correlation between corruption and Republican policies is true.

Pew Research study lies about political parties

Pew Research has recently released a study on the polarization of American politics. They conclude that both Democrats and Republicans have become more extreme. Their statistics, however, don't prove anything.

Here is one of their most prominent graphs.

This graph shows that there is a greater divide between Republicans and Democrats than there was in 1994. It does not show who is responsible for the divide. The rest of the study consistently reiterates that Democrats as well as Republicans are becoming more liberal, and this is causing the ideological split between the two parties.

The conclusion drawn is false. The charts are specifically chosen to avoid showing which party is more responsible for the divide. In fact, the Republicans have caused most of the gap. The Pew results review the opinions of voters as a whole, but the important polarization is in Congress, and there, according to the following chart, the Republicans provide almost the entire gap.

The second chart comes from Polarized America, a book about income disparity, among other things. In the second chart, which provides information on who is changing and how much, we can see that between 1977-79 and 2011-12, the Democrats in Congress have become slightly more liberal, about 0.1 per cent. During the same period, Republicans in Congress have become 0.5 per cent more conservative. The gap between the two parties has been increased primarily by Republicans becoming more conservative, not by Democrats becoming more liberal.

Given the findings in Polarized America, I can only conclude--with Norm Ornstein--that Pew Research is misinterpreting its own findings in a manner that is highly favorable to the Republican Party. This study's erroneous conclusions will give fuel to journalists and scholars who wish to avoid blaming Republicans for the impasse in Congress. This development is similar to the Republican polls that showed Mitt Romney winning "in a landslide" up until the moment that Barack Obama defeated him decisively in the 2012 presidential election, as well as the poll in Eric Cantor's congressional district that showed he had a 34 percentage point lead just two weeks before he lost a decisive primary.

Conservatives should take no comfort in such misleading reports. Their party is rapidly moving away from the center of the electorate, the place where elections are won and lost.

Rand Paul advocates segregation, Paul Ryan advocates decimation.

Adherents of libertarian philosophies enjoy wide-spread popularity these days. Their views coincide generally with American ideals. Patrick Henry summed up his animus against the British crown in 1775 by saying, "Give me liberty or give me death." America's schoolchildren conclude each pledge to the flag with the words, "With liberty and justice for all."

As much as Americans idealize liberty, they seldom offer a realistic definition of the word, which means many things to different people. So Rand Paul, a self-identifying libertarian, has stated that liberty means the freedom to refuse service to African Americans at lunch counters and hotels. This comment has endeared him to the crypto-racists of the Republican heartland. I call them crypto-racists because they refuse to admit their own obvious racism and steadfastly maintain, contrary to all available evidence, that white racism no longer exists.

Rand Paul's extreme views place him in the forefront of Republican presidential hopefuls, largely because billionaire David Koch is an ardent libertarian. Koch is likely to spend $100 million or more of his vast fortune to insure the election of a libertarian Republican president. For David and his brother Charles, liberty means the freedom to pollute the environment and endanger the future of the planet by denying the influence of humans—especially himself—on global warming.

Paul Ryan, another Republican politician with libertarian ideals, has attacked the federal government for giving lunch money to disadvantaged children. He says this practice feeds their bodies but starves their souls. The soul, however, cannot be separated from the body except by death.  Whatever benefit a child may gain from refusing a subsidized lunch will be destroyed by malnutrition and ultimate starvation.

Here the philosophy of libertarianism jumps the tracks and starts gnawing at the roots of our democracy. Ryan is apparently applying the views of Patrick Henry, since he unequivocally states that a child would be better off dead than enslaved by free food from the government. Ryan does not betray an iota of satire here, as did Jonathan Swift when he proposed a similar solution to the problem of poverty. He is deadly serious when he advocates helping poor children by refusing them food.

Wealthy businessmen have been the core of Republican power since the party's inception. Their philosophy has always been that whatever is good for business is good for the USA. The Kochs have added a new wrinkle to this self-serving attitude, for they maintain that whatever is good for the Kochs is good for the world. They express this belief repeatedly, by their public pronouncements and their secret donations to organizations and candidates that happily envisage the death of civilization rather than pay an extra dime to protect the environment.

Republicans have cost America $1.3 trillion, not $24 billion

Standard and Poor's rating agency estimates that the government shutdown cost the US--the country, not the government--$24 billion. This figure is based on what the gross domestic product would have been, without the shutdown, compared with what it actually is. This is all hypothetical, of course. No one can say what the GDP would have been because no one can predict the future with certainty.

The government shutdown certainly caused loss of pay for many thousands of workers, not just federal workers, but all those whose livelihood depends on the federal government. It also caused hardship for those left without day care, or unable to get Medicare or Medicaid.

The damage done by Republicans to the US economy, however, has been much greater than just $24 billion. The great recession was a severe blow to the economy. The recession may not have been the fault of the Republicans alone, although an argument can be made that they caused more than a little of it by their obsession with government regulations, which they relaxed with disastrous consequences. But the Republicans were wholly responsible for the lack of a second stimulus package and by the false economies of reductions in government spending that have made the recovery from this recession much worse than average for recoveries in the US.

In fact, the average recovery of the US from recessions after 48 months has been 17%. At this point, the US GDP is only 9% higher than it was in December, 2008. After previous recessions, under both Democrats and Republicans, the federal government has passed vigorous stimulus, assuring that the economy would recover as quickly as possible. After the 2010 elections gave them control of the House of Representatives, the Republican congress refused to pass any stimulus at all. In fact, they forced the president to accept a seriously reduced federal budget, an action that further damaged the economy.

A simple mathematical calculation shows approximately how much the economy has been damaged by Republican intransigence. The economy has actually grown by 9%, or $880 billion since December 2008. If it had grown at a 17% rate (which is only the average rate for recoveries), it would now be $1.31 trillion higher than it actually is.

Therefore, the idiotic policies of Republicans in congress have already cost the nation at least $1.3 trillion.

Our Decrepit Constitution: When Congress Goes Wrong

In many ways, the US Constitution is like an operating system that tells a computer how to run. The Constitution tells the government how to run. Its task is far more important than an operating system, like Microsoft Windows. If Windows fails, it usually causes no more than a minor inconvenience. When the Constitution fails, it affects people's lives dramatically.

The Framers, the colonial Americans who wrote the Constitution, had some experience writing similar documents. Both James Madison and George Mason helped write the Virginia Constitution of 1776. The Framers understood how Constitutional law worked. They did not understand how Constitutional law could fail.

Software operating systems make the computer work. The authors frequently do not consider what will make the computer fail or how to escape from a failure. The Constitution shows the same kind of blindness. The Framers believed the government would work. They did not see how it could fail. They all belonged to a class of well-off gentry. Many in the South held large estates that were run by slaves. The northern framers were professionals—doctors and lawyers and businessmen. These men tended to think alike. All alike believed that they were the elite who should govern the new country.

The framers wrote a document that is particularly ill-suited for our country today. We have numerous contending classes. Each class believes it has a right to participate in government. In the past few years, the former ruling class has been pushed aside and its members are having difficulty accepting their new role. In 2012, Mitt Romney, whose father ran for president in 1960, believed that he would win because he belonged to the governing class.

The governing class, composed primarily of white males, has grown accustomed to receiving preference, in political office, in jobs, in salary, and in a whole host of other ways. This class is recipient of many government programs, including the farm subsidies that go almost exclusively to them. The class never received food stamp benefits, which accounts for its support for the former and hostility to the latter.

The old ruling class viewed the election of Barack Obama as symbolic of their loss of prestige and power. They regarded the presidency as rightfully theirs. The class considered anything that was not traditional—such as African-Americans owning homes and receiving medical care—as a threat to them. For these people, conservatism means preserving their status and prerogatives.

For the ruling class, conservatism also means moral prerogatives. They vehemently oppose legalization of abortion, legalization of marijuana, and gay rights. They see the laws governing these things as the end products of moral struggles that they fought hard to win. They are appalled to watch their America fade away.

But the old America is fading away, and faster than anyone predicted a few years ago. The Republican party has become the party of old, white men. The younger generation today grew up in an integrated society. The young are much more in touch with what is going on throughout the world, and the world is coming to our doorstep.

Past waves of immigrants took at least a generation before they integrated into white American society. The society of those days forced them to conform through discrimination and a tightly knit ruling class. The ruling class is faltering. The new Americans are demanding their rights even before they become citizens. Groups of Americans who never participated in politics before are learning that their votes make a difference.

What we are watching is the last flare-up of a dying system and the birth of a new one. Birth pangs are always painful. Let us hope most of our troubles are behind us.

With charity for none, with malice toward all who are different...

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. Abraham Lincoln, 2nd inaugural address.

You guys just don't get it. My objection to the piece is this:

Hall hits every one of the touchstones of white supremacy. He attacks African-Americans, who he claims are lazy and stupid. He attacks Latinos, who he says are criminals and welfare recipients. He attacks Muslims, who he says are murderers. He attacks scientists who study global warming because he says they suppress debate. He attacks Democrats because they caused the financial meltdown and the mortgage crisis.

In brief, Hall strikes a strong chord with Republicans because he names nearly every prejudice they have and says he shares them. Every one of his statements is false, every one of them is inflammatory.

I published the letter that Hall sent me that explains what was wrong about my original post. I don't see that it alters the original thrust of my post, which was to show that he was lying when he said he couldn't retire. For example, he says he doesn't get social security or Medicare. But he is definitely qualified for them and could use their income to retire. I'm glad to know that he doesn't have military benefits or benefits from the Massachusetts Senate. He reaffirms for me that it is not personal poverty that prevents him from retiring, but personal choices that have nothing to do with African-Americans, illegal immigrants, or global warming.

Hall has a degenerative disease and supports his adult daughter in a separate household. He will definitely retire when his disease prevents him from working. At that time his medical bills will be covered by Medicare and part of his living expenses will be covered by Social Security. In addition he has an IRA and he owns at least one house.

Contrast that with the situation of my friend, Lee, who has only a high-school teacher's pension and a small house in a rural area of California. Lee believed that Hall shared the same problems as he does, but Hall was lying. By Lee's standards, Hall is well-off. He has been earning a good income at steady jobs for 40 years.

Instead of considering himself well-off, Hall pretends he is persecuted, and names all the groups that he believes should be persecuted instead of him. His anger at these people show he is perfectly willing to do that.

We will not be able to solve the problems of this country by blaming the victims of failed social policies, or by pretending that global warming will go away if we ignore it. We will not be able to confront an inconvenient truth if we turn to Fox News for comfortable falsehoods.

Instead of stoking the fears of his fellow true-believers, Hall should be seeking solutions that are acceptable to all. He and the rest of the Republican Party are using fear and hatred to splinter our country and make us unable to work together for the future.

Aren't you scared yet?

One thing Republicans are doing this year is promising to solve all our problems by passing constitutional amendments. Sometimes this promise is the only specific promise a candidate makes during the campaign. Voters considering support for one of these candidates should ask them what else they intend to do in Washington. Constitutional Amendments rarely succeed, sometimes taking 20 years or more to become the law of the land. So what is your representative planning to do while waiting for his or her amendment to be ratified by 3/4 of the states?

They're also sending out spam, sometimes in the form of chain letters. Here is one of them.This is amusing. The Republicans have shown us this year what happens when they go to a bunch of inexperienced candidates. They're all nut jobs! On the other hand, some great people are long-time congressmen, like Nancy Pelosi, Jackie Speier, Pete Stark, Maxine Waters, Henry Waxman, George Miller, Barbara Lee. Do we really want to throw these excellent congresspeople out so the Republicans can have a shot at their seats? Most of the power in Congress comes from seniority, so it's no surprise that the people mentioned above have powerful positions. Do we want to replace them with people who have no power at all?

The Republican Senate has contributed greatly to the low opinion people have of Congressmen, by filibustering, voting against, and objecting to nearly every progressive bill or appointee that has come before them. Their intent is to make the Democrats look bad because they didn't pass the legislation that Obama promised. One Republican Latino group has advised Latinos in Nevada not to vote "because the Congress hasn't kept its promise to Latinos." The Republicans want you to be discouraged. If Latinos follow their advice, Sharon Angle could be elected to the Senate. This is a person who favors militarization of the border, no amnesty for undocumented latinos, and

The current congress, despite complete Republican stone-walling, has passed the first universal health care law in our nation's history, a government stimulus bill that funded 2.5 to 3.5 million jobs as well as many much-needed public works projects, and a financial reform package that brings the Financial industry back under control.

Speaking of financial reform, one of Obama's key advisors and a strong advocate for consumer rights is Elizabeth Warren. But she can't be appointed the new consumer rights tsar because of Republican opposition. The Senate could hold her nomination hostage indefinitely while they smear her daily on their Propaganda channel (Fox).

Perhaps the most important defect in this idea is that newcomers to congress are suckers for the lobbyists, since they have no information and the lobbyists are happy to give it to them and write their bills for them. This idea is a recipe for disaster.

But it would take a constitutional amendment to implement it, not just a bill. The Constitution specifically sets the terms for federal representatives. It took an amendment to restrict the president's terms to 2 (the twenty-second amendment). So this idea is going nowhere.

==allan


On Oct 20, 2010, at 2:00 PM, fred padula wrote:


Please forward:

If each person contacts a minimum of twenty people then it will only take three days for most people (in the U.S. ) to receive the message. Maybe it is time.

THIS IS HOW YOU FIX CONGRESS!!!!!

A friend sent this along to me. I can't think of a reason to disagree.

I am sending this to virtually everybody on my e-mail list and that includes conservatives, liberals, and everybody in between. Even though we disagree on a number of issues, I count all of you as friends. My friend and neighbor wants to promote a "Congressional Reform Act of 2010." It would contain eight provisions, all of which would probably be strongly endorsed by those who drafted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

I know many of you will say "this is impossible." Let me remind you, Congress has the lowest approval rating of any entity in Government. Now is the time when Americans will join together to reform Congress - the entity that represents us.

We need to get a Senator to introduce this bill in the US Senate and a Representative to introduce a similar bill in the US House. These people will become American heroes


**********************************
Congressional Reform Act of 2010


1. Term Limits.

12 years only, one of the possible options below..

A. Two Six-year Senate terms
B. Six Two-year House terms
C. One Six-year Senate term and three Two-Year House terms

2. No Tenure / No Pension.

A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.

3. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security.

All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people.

4. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

5. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

6. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

7. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

8. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/11.

The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen. Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves.


Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathersenvisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.


If you agree with the above, pass it on. If not, just delete.

Robert A. Hall Sends Out Scary Email

Hi, Hon--

Robert A. Hall at 73

Thank you for sending me the forward from Robert A. Hall. I'm assuming, based on the fact that you sent it to me, and to your children, that you feel the email accurately reflects your own feelings and beliefs. Since I've recently sent you a fair amount of info about MY feelings and beliefs, I'm glad you want me to know what YOU feel, as well.

At the same time, Hall's email presents me with what is quite simply a not-to-be-missed opportunity.. because it is a perfect example of what is most pernicious about the way the Republican Right is manipulating voters. That entire email is a masterpiece of propaganda... carefully crafted to play upon your fears, speak to your life experience. What it is NOT... is sincere. Not in any way, shape, or form. He isn't who you think he is... and he doesn't have your best interests at heart.

Let's start with Robert A. Hall himself. I asked Allan to do some research on him, and the first thing he found is that the two photos on the email are NOT of the man who wrote it. They're both of the ACTOR, Robert Hall, from C.S.I. The dramatic picture in the email that shows a man covered with blood, facing what appears to be a brain... that man is NOT Robert A. Hall. And while that picture IS actually labeled truthfully, the other is not... and the juxtaposition of the photos with the email is DECEPTIVE. It creates the impression that the man writing the email IS the man in those photos.

The next thing Allan found out is that while Robert A. Hall claims to speak for the common man-- you know, the ones like YOU, who worked hard for 40 years and then couldn't afford to retire-- he actually has almost nothing in common with ordinary people. Though Hall claims he is being hurt by the policies of the federal government, he actually is not. In point of fact, he's been supported by government assistance (and hence, taxpayer's money) most of his life. He is eligible for Medicare, possibly receives Social Security, and enjoys an enviable lifestyle, due in part to his taking advantage of military benefits, serving as a public servant in the Massachusetts Legislature, and taking advantage of the educational system that is heavily subsidized by state and federal governments. (I'm just going to put in most of what Allan wrote here, and add in my own bit at the bottom...)

Hall neglects to add that he served as a Republican in the Massachusetts State Senate. This might explain why all his complaints are about Democrats, and why his intention is to demoralize voters during this off-year election.

When Robert A. Hall pretends he doesn't have enough money to retire, he's lying. By my count, he has at least 4 pensions, as a lieutenant in the Marines, as a former Massachusetts State Senator, as a worker in the private sector (Social Security), and, as executive director of non-profit associations since 1982, a 501(c)3 pension. We all wish we had that much retirement income. He owns his $250,000 condo free and clear. As a State Senator, he was able to shelter a portion of his salary from any taxes to invest in retirement instruments. His salary, as president of the American Association of Cosmetic Dentistry, from 2002 to 2007, was likely more than $150,000 per year, although he doesn't come clean about that. He also qualifies for federal health plans, Medicare and VA hospitalization.

Hall has also been writing right-wing articles for his blog and other publications. He's not saying how much money he gets for these, though others who do the same thing are not hurting.

Many of us are not so lucky as he. For example, those who had their retirement money in 401k equity accounts saw the accounts lose 50% of their value in 2008-2009. It will take years to recoup those losses, but of course people who are retiring don't have years to wait. But the people who lost their retirement funds are not to blame. They are the victims. The ones whose greed caused the financial meltdown are responsible for the suffering of millions. One of these, AIG, has donated $18 million to the U.S. Chamber of commerce since 2003. They still owe $50 billion to the U.S. taxpayers for their bailout. The CoC uses their donations to finance attack ads against people who voted to regulate the financial industry.

Hall's email contains a hodgepodge of false and prejudiced claims (... if you have favorite ones, pick them and I'll address them in detail-- otherwise, it would just be too time-consuming... and many of his complaints are too general). Its viewpoints about race and ethnicity are similar to those of white supremacist and other hate groups around the country. Hall hopes that he can get away with stoking hatred as long as he isn't wearing a sheet or a nazi uniform.
What Hall does NOT do is offer any solutions. He stirs up anger. He echoes frustration. But he leaves his readers with a feeling of hopelessness. It's quite clear his intention is to stop you from voting by piling up lie upon lie, prejudice upon prejudice, none of them backed up by facts, until you decide it's just not worth it to go to the polls.
The superwealthy heads of corporations, such as Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox News, have been spending millions of dollars to buy this election, through front groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and willing stooges like Beck and Rove. The banks and stockbrokers are upset by the current administration's success in financial reform. The insurance industry is upset by the passage of health care legislation. The energy companies are concerned that their subsidies may be re-routed to renewable energy sources and companies looking for environmentally sensitive solutions. The New York Times reports that half of the $50 to $70 million the Chamber will spend to buy this election will ome from just 45 corporations, many of which received billions of dollars in bailout money from TARP. These 45 corporations are managed by just a tiny handful of superwealthy executives, like Rupert Murdoch. When asked whether stockholders would be consulted about his $2 million in contributions to Republican candidates, Murdoch replied no, that if the stockholders didn't like his actions they could vote him off the board, otherwise he would do exactly as he sees fit.
Hall's role in this election is an important one. If all the voters who would benefit from the decline of corporate influence stay home, the corporations will win and take back the government. Then, the hundred or so executives of those 45 corporations will make all governmental decisions from now on.

Robert A. Hall isn't tired... and he could retire if he wanted to. He just doesn't WANT to. He's wealthy, he's successful, and he's having fun, doing what he likes. Why would he retire? Frankly, I think he's more likely to run for another office... and accrue another pension.

Hall's task is to make you feel frustrated, powerless, and hopeless. So you won't bother to vote.

Don't succumb to despair. Vote.

Lee-- I'm sure you know all about propaganda. I also understand that this is a brother Marine... but I feel certain that not ALL Marines, in your memory, were worthy of that name. This one is NOT... because this one is STROKING you.

If you doubt anything that Allan has said, or feel that any of the statements put forth by Mr. Hall in his email deserve a further answer, please say so-- and be specific. I will be happy to produce documentation (which, I assure you, Mr. Hall will NOT) for any statement that I or Allan has made here, so that you may judge for yourself who is telling you the truth.

Love, always--
Holly

Robert Hall responds

Ann Coulter: The Case of the Malicious Maven

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With her new book, Guilty: Liberal Victims and Their Assault on America, Ann Coulter returns again to attack her favorite targets, liberals. The biggest problem with trying to counter her assaults is that she brings a large array of disinformation, half-truths, and right-wing mythology that takes time and energy to debunk. Then, too, is her protean wit: when she is confronted by an obvious error or outright lie, she responds that she was only making a joke and attacks the targets of her barbs as “pussies” because they can't take a joke. Then there are her obscenities and her snide attacks, calculated both to make her fans laugh and to irritate her critics to the point where her books are unreadable.

So why bother? Why make the effort to criticize someone who is so illogical, so disorganized, and so ignorant?

Ann Coulter is a charismatic individual. She has a flamboyant personality that appeals to many people. She becomes more important as the void in Republican Party leadership spreads. She needs to be understood and refuted.

Beyond Dictionary Definitions

The first thing you notice about Ann Coulter's universe is that it resembles the fantasy worlds of Lewis Carroll. Many of the key words that are a part of normal discourse have been redefined. The most conspicuous of these is liberal, which Coulter redefines to mean “any person who is not a religious conservative or a Republican. An example of this is her fantastic claim that

every presidential assassin in the history of the nation has been a liberal—or has had no politics at all. None were right-wingers.[258]

John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan were all, she claims, liberals. This list is helpful in deciphering Coulter's language, because she clearly believes that Communists, Socialists, Anarchists, and Arab Nationalists are all liberals.

Another curious word usage is racist. Coulter accuses Jeremiah Wright of being a “racist” on the basis of anti-government rhetoric. But listen to what Wright said to a young African-American woman who wondered whether she should marry a white man:

Racial divisions [are] unacceptable...no matter how great or prolonged the pain that caused them. God would not want us to assess or make decisions about people based on race. The world could make progress on issues of race only if people were prepared to break down barriers that were much easier to let stand.

Are those the words of a racist?

Now listen to the words of Nathan Hoss Rager from the pages of the Citizen Informer, newsletter of the Council of Concerned Conservatives (CCC), an organization of which Coulter says “there is no evidence on its Web page that it...supports segregation”[24]:

Whether you're a troubled stripper, disadvantaged and forgotten by society; or you're black in LaSalle Parish where white students enjoy the company of their own people, and David Duke carried over 62% in a US Senate race, society is always to blame. Maybe if we let some more non-White immigrants come in, and the government pays its welfare queens to have more illegitimate children, and the schools teach students about how bad white people made this country, then maybe we can move past our differences and live in brotherhood in our “new America.” After all, isn't south Africa better off?

Though Rager doesn't mention segregation, he does imply that South Africa was better off under apartheid, its version of segregation. Yes, this article is on the CCC web page, and yes, I'm sure that Coulter understands all the code words on the site.

But Coulter defends this organization even as she attacks Reverend Wright's church. She says that

Republican politicians who had given speeches to [the CCC] were branded sympathizers of white supremacists because some of the directors of the CCC had, decades earlier, been leaders of a segregationist group...[24]

The rhetoric of Coulter bears a strong similarity to that of Rager; the names are sometimes different but their targets remain the same. She calls daughters of single mothers “future strippers”[36] , while Rager just calls them strippers.

Rager talks about someone “disadvantaged and forgotten by society”; Coulter spends her first chapter talking about victims.

Instead of attacking “welfare queens”, Coulter attacks single mothers, saying “single motherhood is like a farm team for future criminals and social outcasts.”[38] She attacks single mothers for 38 pages, mostly trying to convince us that single mothers are phony victims who don't deserve our sympathy because they brought it on themselves.

The CCC statement of principles takes special exception to mixed marriages :

We believe in the traditional family as the basic unit of human society and morality, and we oppose all efforts by the state and other powers to weaken the structure of the American family through toleration of sexual licentiousness, homosexuality and other perversions, mixture of the races, pornography in all forms, and subversion of the authority of parents (italics mine).

So it comes as no surprise when Coulter criticizes African-Americans like Halle Berry, Alicia Keyes, and Barack Obama, who all had white mothers, for

representing themselves simply as "black"--the better to race-bait their way to success. [7]

She accuses Berry of "wild race-baiting" to win her 2002 Oscar, but doesn't offer a word of proof for her charge, other than briefly citing a line from Berry's acceptance speech:

claiming her award was "so much bigger than me." [7]

Coulter says that Obama's statement, "this election is bigger than me," is evidence of his "race-baiting" as well. But look at the context in that speech:

I still believe this election is bigger than me, or Senator Clinton, or Senator McCain. It’s bigger than Democrats versus Republicans. It’s about who we are as Americans. It’s about whether this country, at this moment, will continue to stand by while the wealthy few prosper at the expense of the hardworking many, or whether we’ll stand up and reclaim the American dream for every American.

There is no reference to race, no racial language, no attempt to incite or intimidate, any more than there was in Berry's acceptance speech.

Race-baiting is "an act of using racially derisive language, actions or other forms of communication, to anger, intimidate or incite a person or groups of people". Therefore, the actions and words of Obama and Berry are not race-baiting, since they do not use racially derisive language and they are not directed at any person or race.

The CCC newsletter, the Citizens Informer, used to be edited by Sam Francis, a gifted propagandist who was fired from the conservative Washington Times for advocating slavery, as reported on the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) website. The ADL also says the CCC

Advances its ideology by inflaming fears and resentments, among Southern whites particularly, with regard to black-on-white crime, non-white immigration, attacks on the public display of the Confederate flag, and other issues related to "traditional" Southern culture.

But Coulter finds nothing wrong with the CCC's endless recital of black on white violence:

apart from some aggressive reporting on black-on-white crimes--the very crimes that are aggressively hidden by the establishment media--the is little on the CCC website suggesting that the group is a "thinly veiled white supremacist" organization, as the New York Times calls it...[24]

Liberals as Victims

Coulter begins her book by asserting that liberals use victims to manipulate the soft-hearted American people into unwise political decisions. Liberals, says Coulter, are always pretending to be victims. They do this so that they can oppress the rest of us. She never explains exactly what mechanism they use to oppress us, other than that they arouse our sympathy to promote government programs for the victims:

But often the victims are nameless, faceless victims of repellent liberal policies that are promoted on behalf of counterfeit victims, such as single mothers or "the poor." [2]

Coulter starts by giving a examples of people who falsely claim to be victims. John Edwards was a "phony victim" who tried to get sympathy for his wife's cancer. Of course, there was nothing phony about her cancer. Coulter appears to argue that no one should feel sorry for Edwards' or his wife because he was having an affair at the time, which exempts him from the category of “victim”. Since Edwards' wife actually had cancer, she had no reason to conclude.

Democrats dredge up victim after victim, but it's hard to find one real story. [4]

If liberals need victims to increase the size and scope of government, conservatives like Coulter need enemies to attack. Coulter doesn't shy away from revealing her enemies by continuous attacks. They are the blacks, the Jews, the weak (whom she calls "pussies" or “women”), the poor, single mothers, atheists, liberal journalists, homosexuals who won't stay in the closet, Democrats, and liberals, a term she expands to include every presidential assassin in history [258].

Denying the existence of racism, she charges that the left is

constantly trying to gin up phony racial crises in a nation where none exist. They were finally willing to take a stand against racism at the precise moment that no one was for racism. [8]

Her language is a little vague here, because she doesn't explain what she means by "racial crisis". Nor does she explain what it means to be "for racism". But there are plenty of statistics to show that many racially motivated crimes are committed in the US annually. In 2007, the FBI reported 2,658 anti-black and 969 anti-Jewish hate crime incidents in the US. The Anti-Defamation League also tracks incidents of anti-Jewish racism, reporting a total of 1,554 in 2006.

Hate crimes are the public, verifiable manifestations of racial hatred and do not give an indication of how widespread or well-organized racists may be. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) lists 888 active hate organizations, the majority of them anti-black.

But Coulter is also making another charge altogether, against the Democratic party and not liberals in general: That the Democratic party had advocated Jim Crow laws and other racist policies, but stopped doing that after no one was "for" them any more. This is a distortion of the historical record.

While it's true that southern Democrats were the main proponents of racism, the northern democrats, called "liberals", had opposed them for a long time before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Thanks to the liberals, led by Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic party platform in 1948 had a strong Civil Rights position in it, so strong in fact that many southerners bolted the party to run their own candidate, Strom Thurmond, on the Dixiecrat ticket.

The irony of Coulter's position here, and her support for Thurmond elsewhere[1], is that southern segregationists who left the Democratic party eventually found their way into the Republican party. Thurmond himself officially switched parties in 1964. Nixon enlisted the segregationists in the Republican party in 1968 with his "southern strategy", one of whose intentions was to delay integration and the granting of Civil Rights to southern blacks.

The Murder of Kirsten Brydum
In its 26 January 2009 blog, under the headline, "Kirsten Brydum: She died for your Stupidity!", the CCC "news team" describes the murder of a young woman in New Orleans on September 27, 2009:

Kirsten Brydum was an avowed Marxist and political activist from San Fransisco. She was so brainwashed by multicultural propaganda that she traveled the country by train to campaign for Barack Obama.

Fresh from protesting the evil GOP at the 2008 Republican National Convention, Kirsten arrived in New Orleans by Amtrack[sic] with just a suitcase and an old bicycle.

That’s when her naive idealism caught up with her. Kirsten was shot in the head while riding her bike through a black neighborhood. Her corpse sprawled on the sidewalk for several hours. None of the residents would even call the police. Police were finally notified by construction workers in the area the next day.

The press reported the murder as an “attempted robbery” even though nothing, not even her bicycle, was stolen. “Attempted robbery” is a common media decoy phrase for a racially motivated attack on a white person by a non-white.

What came next was even more shocking. Her own Marxist friends posted online memorials, but would not even mention how she died. The enlightened San Fransisco Chronicle ran a column insulting Kirsten instead of talking about rampant black on white violence and murder. The San Fransisco Chronicle wanted to make sure more idiot whites, drunk on the cult of multiculturalism, keep following in Kirsten’s fatal footsteps.

This article is similar to others that Coulter calls “aggressive reporting”. But since some of the details are incorrect, perhaps intentionally so, and there are a number of racist code words, the article is not reporting at all. It is a propaganda piece intended to arouse racial anger and support the contention that this was a racially motivated, black-on-white crime.

• Marxist is the code word used by the CCC to describe anyone they wish to attack. Coulter uses the word liberal in the same way.

• Kirsten was visiting anarchist cells around the country, not working for Obama. Both because he is African-American and because he espouses a liberal philosophy, his name arouses the ire of the CCC's target audience. In addition, white campaign workers had flooded the south to campaign for him.

• The bicycle was borrowed from a friend in New Orleans, not brought on the train. Amtrak and bicycle are words that arouse hostility of the target audience, who see them as part of a liberal assault on the automobile.

• Since the he bicycle was not found with her, so she probably was not shot while riding it.

• Kirsten's wallet was not found with the body and police were unable to identify her for two days.

• Neighbors notified police that shots had been fired at 8:30 AM. Since the police found her shortly thereafter, she had not lain unnoticed for hours. This falsehood reinforces negative stereotypes about blacks.

• The column run in the Chronicle is a tender memorial to Kirsten, ending with a touching quote from her diary.

• Kirsten's friends posted moving memorials to her. More than 77,000 people have visited the main website.

• There is no evidence that Kirsten was killed by an African American, nor is there any indication that the crime was racially motivated.

• Cult of Multiculturalism is any attempt at racial reconciliation. According the the CCC Statement of Principles,

We believe that education should inform and build the mind and character, not brainwash children with political propaganda or “liberate” them from the traditional values and loyalties their families have taught them. We therefore oppose all “sex education” as well as so-called “multiculturalist” and “Afrocentric” curricula, “Outcome-Based Education,” and similar radical indoctrination in the schools.

The sources for the actual facts of the case and the memorials can be found here.

This particular article was not on the site when Coulter looked at it, but there are many, many others like it that she did see.

Trouble With Statistics

Coulter has difficulty with statistics, both in saying where she found them and understanding them. Without giving a source, she estimates the membership of the Ku Klux Klan at less than 1,000. [8] Organizations who make it their business to track such things place the number at 5,000 to 8,000.

In a section attacking Barbara Ehrenreich, Coulter claims that

domestic abuse is virtually non-existent for married women living with their husbands [58]

To support this claim, Coulter cites a US Justice Department (DOJ) survey that apparently shows the rate of abuse for married women was just 0.9 per 1000 in 2005, while the rate was 49.0 per 1000 for women who were separated. [57]

But this is a complete distortion of the actual meaning of the survey statistics. The survey interviewed women who may have been abused and noted what their marital status was at the time of the interview, not at the time of the abuse. In order to draw the conclusion she did, Coulter had to ignore the text accompanying the statistics:

it is not possible to determine whether a person was separated or divorced at the time of the interview or whether the separation or divorce followed the violence.

Common sense should tell you that separated and divorced couples will have fewer incidents of spousal abuse, if only because they no longer live under the same roof.

A key to good statistical analysis is the selection of valid studies, usually from peer reviewed journals. To support her attack on single mothers, Coulter takes statistics from a 2002 article in the Village Voice, which in turn had taken them from an organization called Fathers' Rights and Equality Exchange. The article's author says the group is "admittedly probably not entirely unbiased". Coulter reports the statistics without commenting on the unreliability of their source.

But even if the statistics are valid, they still don't prove anything, primarily because they rely on the logical fallacy, post hoc ergo propter hoc. This type of logic assumes that whatever happens must have been caused by something that preceded. Using this logic, you could prove that a rooster crowing causes the sun to rise. A child's lack of a father is only one indicator of possible problems; there are many others.

When Coulter looks at studies that do consider other indicators, she concludes

Controlling for socioeconomic status, race, and place of residence, the strongest predictor of whether a person will end up in prison is that he was raised by a single parent. [37]

But at least one of the studies she cites as a source does not at all support this statement. Instead it concludes in its abstract,

a sizable portion of the risk that appeared to be due to father absence could actually be attributed to other factors, such as teen motherhood, low parent education, racial inequalities, and poverty.

While concluding that father-absent homes still accounted for elevated risk of incarceration, the same study goes on to say that

The adolescents who faced the highest incarceration risks, however, were those in stepparent families, including father–stepmother families.

Both of these findings directly contradict Coulter's conclusion:

Look at almost any societal program and you will find it is really a problem of single mothers. [36]

Taking her bogus statistics at face value, Coulter assumes that, if we could just get rid of single mothers, we could get rid of all those criminals (who, remember, are not just products of fatherless homes, but also poverty, discrimination, teen pregnancy, and parental ignorance). So she gushes,

Imagine an America with 70 percent fewer juvenile delinquents, 63 to 70 percent fewer teenage suicides, and 70 to 90 percent fewer runaways... [38]

This conclusion too has no merit. Since many other factors affect the incidence of juvenile delinquents, teenage suicides, and runaways, even eliminating all illegitimate births would only reduce these statistics by a small amount.

So how does Coulter suggest that we solve the problem of single mothers?

Keep your knees together before marriage and graduate from high school. [41]

In other words, give young women abstinence-only sex education and our problems will be solved. But abstinence-only sex education programs have been shown to increase the incidence of pregnancy. The lowest adolescent pregnancy rate in the world belong to the Netherlands, whose sex-education program is characterized by “sex education, open discussions on sexuality in mass media, educational campaigns and low barrier services.” In other words, the exact opposite of abstinence only training combined with expensive or nonexistent medical services.

Single Mothers

In support of her attacks on single mothers, Coulter enlists Charles Murray, whom she calls "the eminent social scientist" [37]. But Murray could better be described as the author of a controversial book, The Bell Curve in which he asserts that, based on intelligence tests, African-Americans are inferior to white Americans and that this inferiority cannot be helped by education. Therefore, he concludes (as reported in Slate Magazine)

Any efforts government might make to improve the economic opportunities of poor people, especially poor black people, are likely to fail, because their poverty is so much the result of inherited low intelligence.

Coulter makes yet another unsubstantiated attack against liberals:

While liberals go around physically assaulting conservatives, they pretend to live in terror of jack-booted racist thugs. [9]

She doesn't list any examples to support her charge. Although there are many racially motivated attacks, against both whites and African-Americans, there is no evidence that liberals are systematically attacking conservatives.

Insults

Coulter also interweaves her text with racist slurs and offensive epithets. Her similes often have crude sexual contexts. She says Monique De Wael, a writer who pretended to be a holocaust survivor

did everything she could think of to sound more Jewish but complain about being seated too close to the air conditioner.

Although De Wael is not a Democrat and never lived in the US, she still becomes an example of someone who makes herself a victim, something that Coulter claims is a universal characteristic of liberals.

Coulter calls Newsweek contributing editor Eleanor Clift a "braying left-wing slattern" partly because Clift named Bill Clinton the Biggest Winner of the year on the McLaughlin Group.

She describes New York Times columnist Paul Krugman as "eager to win his presidential knee pads" [185] and describes him numerous times as a cross-dresser.

Hypocrisy

Another word that Coulter has trouble defining--along with racism, race-baiting, and segregation--is hypocrisy. When Chris Matthews of MSNBC criticized Larry Craig as a

cultural warrior of the right,...exposed as both a sexual deviant and a world-class hypocrite[29]

Coulter replies

Naturally the media claims Larry Craig was a hypocrite because he opposed gay marriage—and yet he propositioned an undercover cop in a public bathroom.[29]

But here she purposely misses the point that Matthews was making, that being simultaneously gay and a cultural warrior of the right is hypocritical. Coulter later says

Only liberals consider it offensive for a gay person to have strong morals.[31]

Matthews's point is that claiming to have a moral code that you personally ignore is the definition of hypocrisy. Coulter denies this definition. For her, “strong morals” is a code word, along with “family values”, which describes a certain set of beliefs and policies. Therefore, you can only have “strong morals” if you support “family values”. If you do that, you may behave immorally, but you still support family values, and therefore you can't be hypocritical. For her, it doesn't matter if you are homosexual, so long as you keep it a secret, get married, and support legislation that discriminates against gays.

Defamatory Attacks

Coulter criticizes Newsweek's Jonathan Alter for referring to the Franklin sex scandal as an example of "conservative-hypocrisy", since the Franklin sex scandal turned out to be a hoax. She pounces on Alter like a vulture on a carcass, even though his entire reference to the crisis consisted of the phrase,

the Franklin child-sex ring, which ensnared more than a dozen officials in the Reagan and first Bush administrations.

That's it, no names, no details, no nothing. But Coulter declares this

the most vile lie ever spread by the establishment media. No right-wing radio host has ever propagated such a fraud.[30]

Coulter cites a 15 Dec 1988 New York Times article as the source of the hoax and concludes by saying

Even the Times must have smelled a rat because after one story mentioning the investigation there were no further articles on foster child sex orgies until July 1990, when the Times reported that the story was a hoax.[30]

Alter had hist facts wrong, but he was only using the scandal as background for his article. Contrast this with the 29 June 1989 front-page, six-column, banner headline story in the conservative Washington Times. If Alter's 19-word reference is “the most vile lie ever spread”, what would Coulter call the article in the Washington Times? What about the more than 15 other articles about the scandal run by the Washington Times between 20 June 1989 and 2 February 1990?

In fact, Coulter ignores the Washington Times smear campaign. By this time, we recognize the pattern. Coulter attacks liberals for a variety of reasons. The same acts, when performed by conservatives, she either praises or doesn't mention. She inhabits a Manichaean world, where people are either all good or all bad. An action like rumor mongering, as in the case of the Washington Times, becomes good if it was done for a good reason, such as electing a Republican. A minor slip, like Alter's, becomes the “most vile lie ever spread.”

The single article that appeared in the New York Times was only tangentially about the sex scandal. It made no accusations, instead questioning the whole sex-abuse aspect of the case:

The various investigators, their efforts barely begun, decline to speak of them in detail. Mr. Chambers himself says he wants to disclose just enough to encourage those with information on the affair to give testimony before the legislative committee.

As a result, there are these large gaps in public knowledge about the case, among others:

* If child prostitution was involved, how vast was it?
* If foster homes were involved, which ones?

No contrast could be more dramatic than between the restraint of the New York Times and the sensationalism of the Washington Times. Yet it is the New York paper that Coulter accuses of bias.

Coulter rehashes the Alger Hiss case. She states that John Dean, in Blind Ambition, his memoir of the Watergate scandal, claimed

he overheard Nixon saying the "typewriters are always the key. We built one in the Hiss case."[124]

This, says Coulter, was proved a "bald-faced lie about twenty years later", referring to Soviet documents that implicated Hiss. But Dean wrote that Charles Colson had given him the provocative Nixon quote, not that he had "overheard it". So Coulter's statement is false and her accusation against Dean has no merit.

One aspect of Coulter's style is her habit of making things up, quotes from newspapers or individuals, usually giving vent to her sarcastic wit. For example, she states that Reagan's budget director, David Stockton, intended to write a book called, "The Internet Will Never Take Off". It's a funny title for a book but it has nothing to do with Stockton, anything he said, or anything he did. It comes in the middle of a passage where she criticizes the book he did write, The Triumph of Politics: How the Reagan Revolution Failed.[125]

Coulter frequently uses sarcastic asides instead of reasoned argument to attack her victims. In the next sentence, Coulter criticizes Stockton for misusing the word "literally", instead of addressing the truth or falsehood of the statement in which the offending word appears.

She goes on to comment

Damn that Reagan! What a crafty, mildly retarded, evil-genius, yet senile bad guy he turned out to be![125]

Most of her humor, like Reagan's, may amuse her target audience, but offend many others. It also serves the function of annoying political adversaries, who might otherwise read her books and publicize her falsehoods and distortions.

Coulter does not recognize her internal contradictions, so eager is she to attack her chosen enemies. At one point, she attacks media personalities for being taken in by frauds, as when Dan Rather accepted a story about G. W. Bush's National Guard service at face value, only to discover it was based on a forged letter. This, she says, is an example of the liberal bias of the media. She doesn't mention that Rather lost his job as a result of his poor judgment, an indication that CBS executives may not have a liberal bias, and are quite willing to punish those who do.

Fox News Frauds

Coulter makes the startling claim that "Fox News has never been caught promoting a fraud" [15] the way CBS, ABC, and CNN had been.

Media Matters records an incident where Steve Doocy found a school prank on the internet and reported it as fact.

Another, more serious case of Fox propagating a fraud was reported in a PBS documentary. The fabricated story that Obama is a Muslim and hiding it appeared first in a 16 January 2007, article on the website of Insight, a sister publication of the conservative Washington Times. The article was entitled, "Hillary's Team Has Questions About Obama's Muslim Background", and claimed that Obama had attended a madrassa as a young boy in Indonesia.

Fox News took up the story the next day on its morning program, Fox & Friends.

Gretchen Carlson: Something that he left out of his book, that apparently when he was a young boy, he attended a Muslim school.

Later that day it was picked up by Fox News:

Announcer: What we have heard about, coming out of the madrassa schools over in Indonesia...This is huge!

The next day Hillary's campaign denied any connection to the story and called the piece a "right-wing hit job.” Nevertheless, Fox's conservative host John Gibson reported the story again on 19 January 2007. Four days later, while admitting that right-wing host Glenn Beck had reported the rumor as fact on CNN Headline News, CNN took a camera crew over to Indonesia and showed the school that Obama attended to be an ordinary public school, not a madrassa.

Nevertheless, as PBS reported, seven months later the “madrassa” lie was used to smear Obama in an email campaign in South Carolina.

A slightly different form of confusion of fact and fiction occurred when Fox personalities confused the fictional tv series "24" with reality. Speaking of the fictional character Jack Bauer, Gretchen Carlson said, "All he does is tell the truth," when the show's plot called for him to testify before Congress about torture. Other people on the show agreed with her, but the only person cited as an "expert" on torture was Jack Bauer, who is not even a real person.

Coulter accuses the New York Times of bias by claiming that the Times did not list the charges against Mike Wooten, Sarah Palin's brother-in-law, in their coverage of the incident. This charge is false. Although the article reporting the findings of a legislative investigation did not enumerate the charges, the Times did list the charges in an article on 29 August 2008:

An internal police investigation conducted in 2005, prompted by complaints from Ms. McCann and her family, eventually resulted in Mr. Wooten’s being suspended for illegally shooting a moose and using a Taser on his stepson, although most of the complaints were dismissed...the findings of a private detective the family had hired to investigate Mr. Wooten...accused him of a variety of transgressions, including drunken driving and child abuse. Mr. [Todd] Palin told the newspaper that Mr. Wooten had made threats against his wife and her family.

This does point out one interesting aspect of Coulter's attack on what she calls liberal establishment media. She does not claim that the liberal media never report facts that favor the conservatives, but that they do not keep on reporting them often enough. Fox news/talk shows frequently repeat the same sound bytes, which they consider damaging to liberals, over and over again. Coulter seems to require repetition.

During the 2008 campaign, Fox radio commentators used this tactic by playing a clip of one of Jeremiah Wright's sermons, which was supposed to prove that Obama was racist and unpatriotic, over and over again. They could not have believed that they were informing people of something they didn't know. Instead, they had to believe that if they played the clips often enough, their listeners would come to believe the associated charges to be true. This is not fair and balanced, nor even journalism; it is propaganda.

Coulter also criticizes the New York Times for not publishing allegations against John Edwards after the National Enquirer broke the story. She seems oblivious to the fact that the Enquirer publishes stories without bothering to investigate them. The facts of the Edwards case were in doubt until the Edwards released a statement and appeared on ABC to make his confession. The Times published the entire statement, plus a statement that his wife made, on the same day, 8 August 2008. Coulter claims the timing of the story is an example of media bias, since the Olympics held their opening ceremonies that day. It was no coincidence that Edwards chose a moment when attention would be focused elsewhere, but the timing was chosen by him, not ABC News or the Times.

Coulter claims

The Bush campaign did not spread rumors that John McCain had a black illegitimate child during the 2000 GOP campaign [192]

The source she cites for this is an article in the National Review, a prominent right-wing publication. The original source of the story was the McCain campaign, not a left-wing media source. A PBS documentary interviewed several South Carolina political insiders on dirty politics in the state, evincing this comment from Will Folks, who writes a blog about South Carolina politics:

David Brancaccio: Who do you think was the author of that attack on McCain?
Will Folks, political consultant: (laughs) Everybody knows who the author was. Warren Tompkins.

Other experts on South Carolina smear campaigns spoke in the same documentary:

Scott Huffmon, Political Science Professor: People calling and saying did you know John McCain had a black baby out of wedlock?...

Rod Shealy, longtime South Carolina politico and disciple of Lee Atwater: Your challenge as a campaign is to damage your opponent without getting caught doing it...

Will Folks: They scorched the earth to win that primary.

Jay Carney, former Washington Bureau Chief for Time Magazine, wrote in a blog entry,

The Bush campaign -- including Tompkins -- claimed no complicity in the slander, an assertion taken at face value by exactly no one with any experience in South Carolina GOP politics.

Finally, a New York Times article reported that

A smear campaign during the primary in February 2000...had many in South Carolina falsely believing that Mr. McCain’s wife, Cindy, was a drug addict and that the couple’s adopted daughter, Bridget, was the product of an illicit union. Mr. McCain’s patriotism, mental well-being and sexuality were also viciously called into question.

The same PBS documentary reported that, by the time of the 2008 South Carolina primary, Warren Tompkins was working for Mitt Romney, but the techniques were still the same. A web site called “PhoneyFred” appeared containing disinformation about Fred Thompson, including pictures of Thompson in costume with labels like “Pimp Fred”, “Moron Fred”, and “Playboy Fred”. The site was taken down after the Washington Post traced it to a firm run by Tompkins.

Two Minute Hate

In his dystopian classic, 1984, George Orwell describes a technique called “two minute hate”. The citizens of Oceania were required to gather every day to renew the hatred they felt for their rivals in a perpetual war.

For her part, Coulter can't get enough of 9/11. She criticizes the New York Times for growing bored with the anniversary. Idoes she believe there something new to be said or learned about 9/11? Coulter explains that

liberals are not merely bored with 9/11, they fear that reminders of 9/11 will anger Americans and reawaken their fighting spirit.[183]

The idea that playing the gruesome scene over and over again may be somehow beneficial is macabre, to say the least. But Coulter goes even further.

Continuing her theme, Coulter says of 9/11,

I think it should be mentioned at the start of each school day...On Every anniversary we should have wall-to-wall TV coverage of the savage attack lest anyone, ever, anywhere, forget what those animals did to us.[183]

Note that Coulter deliberately dehumanizes the perpetrators of 9/11. Her idea of indoctrinating children can only be understood in the context of a never-ending war that our children and their children will be fighting a generation hence.

Clinton's Pseudoscandals

Contrary to Coulter's belief in a liberal bias in the media, the media scandals of the Clinton era--Whitewater, Troopergate, Travelgate, Filegate, Christmas-card gate, and the trashing of the White House by Clinton staffers when they handed over the premises to the Bush administration—were all covered ad nauseam by the media. Coulter notes that Paul Krugman called these "pseudoscandals", but she claims that each of them is "a far more serious scandal than anything the media ever managed to produce against the Bush administration." She also claims, predictably, that none of these scandals "could be described as having received overwhelming media attention."[184]

Here again her appetite for repetition must be enormous. Media Matters reports

A Nexis search yields 539 hits for "Clinton and Whitewater" in the The New York Times between January 1 and October 26, 1996 -- nearly two per day.

But that wasn't enough for Coulter. She argues against Krugman's calling this a "pseudoscandal" by counting up the number of felony convictions associated with the Whitewater development company.

But Krugman was referring to the Whitewater issues as they related to the Clintons, for there were thousands of articles and a $60 million investigation which all ended up showing that the Clintons had no criminal liability. It was a pseudoscandal because the press covered it as a scandal but ultimately the Clintons had no criminal exposure.

The Whitewater controversy began with an article in the New York Times, supposedly a newspaper with a liberal bias. The Times continued to carry a hundreds of articles about the land development deal. One of the main forces behind the media obsession with Whitewater was a little-known organization called Citizens United. According to a May 1994 article by Trudy Lieberman that appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review,

The character issue can be turned on the press, which has shamelessly taken the hand-outs dished up by a highly partisan organization, with revenues of more than $2 million a year, without identifying the group as the source of their information.

Filegate was another investigation by the special prosecutor's office, and again the Clintons were exonerated of all wrongdoing. Coulter compares this incident, where a White House employee illegally obtained 900 confidential FBI files, to the confidential FBI file that Chuck Colson leaked to the press, intending to smear Daniel Ellsberg, saying

if that's a pseudoscandal, someone owes Nixon Aide Charles Colson three years of his life back. [188]

The problem here is that Colson was not accused merely of possessing an FBI file. He plead guilty to obstruction of justice for using the contents of that file to deny Ellsberg a fair trial. Colson actually served seven months in prison for this crime, not three years. In addition, he had the opportunity to avoid going to jail at all, but refused to cooperate with the Watergate special prosecutor. So the comparison is not even remotely accurate, yet another example of how Coulter cherry-picks historical details to support her attacks.

Inventing History

In her last chapter, Coulter revs up her attack on what she calls “liberals” by claiming that

every presidential assassin in the history of the nation has been a liberal—or has had no politics at all. None were right-wingers.[258]

This statement is not just an error; it shows a complete disregard for historical scholarship. In the first place, the modern American concepts of liberalism were not established by Herbert Croly until 1908. In her ignorance, Coulter evidently assumes that the same relationship between the political parties existed in the 19^th century as exists today. Also, she believes that Theodore Roosevelt was serving a third term as president when he survived an assassination attempt in 1908[258].

Notwithstanding the difficulties inherent in the task, here is my partial list of American assassins. (Left-wingers: 0; right-wingers: 5; other: 1; insane: 6)

• John Wilkes Booth (assassin of Lincoln) was a pro-slavery secessionist and States-Rights advocate. Through the years, those positions came to be identified with southern conservatives. He also belonged to the Know Nothing Party, which opposed immigration, a position more closely identified with the Republicans of today. So Booth was definitely a right winger.

• Charles Guiteau (assassin of Garfield) was a political chameleon whose opinions changed with each new obsession. Coulter describes him as having “a long relationship with a Utopian commune called the Oneida Community, where free love and communal child-rearing were practice.” [258] Far from being a liberal group, the Oneida Community was a theocracy, basing its practices on a unique interpretation of Christian scripture. Their idea of free love resembled a group marriage or polygamy. After failing to be accepted by the Community, Guiteau became a Republican and a strong supporter of President Garfield. He was definitely a right-winger.

• Leon Czolgosz (assassin of McKinley) was interested in socialism and anarchy, but he was a registered Republican who had voted in the Republican primary in Cleveland. He tried to join an anarchist group in Chicago or Cleveland, but the anarchists rejected him as a possible spy. Since the anarchists rejected him but the Republicans did not, he was a right-winger.

• John Schrank (attempted to kill Theodore Roosevelt) was also a Republican and a profoundly religious Bible scholar. He was definitely a right-winger, since he claimed the ghost of Republican President William McKinley had advised him in a dream to assassinate Theodore Roosevelt. [258]

• Giuseppe Zangara (attempted to kill F. D. Roosevelt; killed Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak instead) was convinced the President of the United States was supernaturally causing him pain. Since he wanted to kill both Hoover and Roosevelt, and because he raved against both kings and capitalist presidents, Zangara seemed too incompetent to form a coherent political idea. Insane but politically neutral.

The Most Magnificent Campaign Ads In Political History

Coulter makes a number of statements that she says “over and over again, conservatives are forced to remind people”. Among these is the claim that “the Bush campaign did not spread rumors that John McCain had a black illegitimate child during the 2000 GOP primary”[192][see above for comments]. Another is that

The Willie Horton ads were the most magnificent campaign ads in political history.[192]

The Willie Horton ads, featuring a dark-skinned African-American and other ethnic minorities being released from prison, frightened white Americans and placed the blame for violent crime on liberals in general and Michael Dukakis in particular. Dukakis lost so badly that it's hard to credit his defeat to any one factor, but the ads were effective. They were, however, a vicious smear with racial overtones of the kind that epitomized the career of Lee Atwater, George H. W. Bush's campaign manager at the time (1988).

Such ads “play to the base” of Republican support. They energize their supporters and help ensure a large turnout. They demoralize their opponents and keep their supporters away from the polls.

There are several problems with these kinds of ads. If you continue smearing your opponents using racial attacks, you will alienate black voters and others who identify with their struggle. Republicans may complain that African-Americans seldom vote for them, but they have only themselves to blame.

Furthermore, the deceit and arrogance of these tactics have a cumulative effect, which has resulted in the Republican party losing support among independents. One reason Obama's “high road” campaign worked in 2008 was because the electorate already identified Republicans as the practitioners of dirty politics. They remembered “the most magnificent campaign ads” and associated them with McCain, even though he himself had been victimized by Atwater's disciples in South Carolina.

But Coulter's tactics are all slash and burn. She doesn't care that many people would find her attacks on single mothers heartless and cruel. She thinks it acceptable to attack celebrities because their fathers were African-American. Perhaps she should remember what Lee Atwater himself said of his own career.

Lee Atwater, the godfather of Republican disinformation campaigns and mentor of Carl Rove and Walther Tompkins apologized for his activities in politics, which included the Willie Horton ads that Coulter calls the best ever. When he knew he was dying with incurable cancer in 1991, Atwater said in a Life Magazine article:

My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The '80s were about acquiring -- acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn't I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn't I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.

[Note on Kirsten Brydum: Far from appearing to be a "black-on-white" crime, this crime is reminiscent of the murders of freedom riders in the deep south in the 1950s and 1960s. Note that the writers assume that she was working for Obama, one of many young white people who came south to work on the Obama campaign. Note also, as is indicated in actual newspaper articles, that she left a club alone at 1:30 AM but was not killed until 8:30 AM the following morning. This raises the question, what was she doing in that time? My guess is that she may have been interrogated by her captors before being assassinated for her political beliefs. I suggest that the U. S. Attorney in New Orleans should investigate this crime as a Civil Rights violation.]

Allan Masri has a blog at MasriZone.BlogSpot.com.