Video catches Maryland police beating unarmed student, unprovoked

By David Edwards and John Byrne

Officers caught beating student on video had blamed injuries on their horses

Three Maryland police officers were caught beating an unarmed student following post-basketball game revelry in a videotape released Monday.

The incident, recorded in part by another student Mar. 3 following a Maryland basketball victory, shows several officers in riot gear beating the student with batons. The officers deliver roughly a dozen blows as the student crumples to the ground.

John McKenna, 21, was subsequently charged with "felonies on suspicion of assaulting officers on horseback and their mounts," but prosecutors dropped charges Monday as the video was released.

"The video shows the charging documents were nothing more than a cover, a fairy tale they made up to cover for the officers' misconduct," Christopher A. Griffiths, a lawyer for the student, told the Washington Post. "The video shows gratuitous violence against a defenseless individual."

The Post notes that the beating "occurred March 3 near the university's College Park campus after the Maryland men's basketball team defeated Duke. After the game, students took to the streets to celebrate. Twenty-eight people were arrested or cited, sparking a debate between police and students over how and when it is appropriate to break up a group of revelers."

The video shows McKenna on the sidewalk as he skips and throws his arms in the air. He stops about five feet from an officer on horseback, the video shows. In the video, McKenna's arms appear to be in front of him, but he does not appear to touch the officer or the horse. His hands are empty.

McKenna backs up, then two county police riot officers rush toward him from the street, the video shows. The officers slam McKenna against a wall and beat him with their batons. McKenna crumples to the ground.

As McKenna falls, a third county police riot officer strikes his legs and torso with his baton. The video shows the officers striking an unresisting McKenna about the head, torso and legs -- more than a dozen blows in all.

Other riot police officers on horseback who are captured on tape don't intervene as the student is beaten to the ground.

In charging the student, police initially said McKenna and another student "provoked the beating" by attacking the mounted officers. The Post reports that the charging documents asserted that the horses, rather than the officers, had injured McKenna -- a claim impossible to defend once the video of the incident went public.

An ABC News affiliate reported Tuesday that one of the officers has been suspended and several others could be fired.

"Some of these characters ought to go to jail," McKenna's family said in a statement to ABC. "Some ought to merely be booted off the force, and the remainder should be properly trained to discover that force is not always necessary, and brutality is always wrong."

The Post has more details here.

This video is from The Washington Post, broadcast April 12, 2010.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This story has been altered from its original version. It was expanded to provide more detail about the incident.

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0413/video-catches-maryland-police-beating-student/

Conservative Laments Republicans’ Destruction: the GOP Is Filled With Intolerant Fanatics — Party of Old White Folks

Posted by Tana Ganeva at 10:18 am
April 6, 2010

In an interesting and kind of sad piece on Frum Forum, conservative Chris Curry chronicles how the GOP became the party of crazy old white people after alienating minorities, women, gays, the young, and even life-long Republicans like himself. Curry says that his ideology — sane — would make him a Marxist in today’s overheated political environment and laments the rise of right-wing screamers who have commandeered the GOP, hastening the party’s destruction and poisoning the national dialogue. As Steve Benen points out, Curry doesn’t offer very much in the way of new analysis, but his eloquent take-down of modern conservatives and the sad, flailing GOP is worth reading:

I am an old Republican. I am religious, yet not a fanatic. I am a free-marketer; yet, I believe in the role of the government as a fair evenhanded referee. I am socially conservative; yet, I believe that my lesbian niece and my gay grandchild should have the full protection of the law and live as free Americans enjoying every aspect of our society with no prejudices and/or restrictions. Nowadays, my political and socio-economic profile would make me a Marxist, not a Republican.

Curry goes on to paint a rosy picture of old-timey conservatism, glorifying Eisenhower, Buckley, Reagan. The problem started in the 90s, says Curry:

The leaders of the GOP grew belligerent. They became too religious, almost zealots. They became intolerant. They began searching for purity in Republican thought and doctrine. Ideology blinded them. I continued to vote Republican, but with a certain unease. Deep down I knew that a schism happened between the modern Republican Party and the one I grew up with. During the fight over the impeachment of President Clinton, the ugly face of the Republican Party was brought to the surface. Empty rhetoric, ideological intolerance, vengeance, and religious zealotry became the common currency. Suddenly, if you are pro-choice, you could not be a Republican. If you are for smart and sensible taxes to balance out the budget, you could not be a Republican. If you are pro-civil rights, you could not be a Republican.

It started with minorities: they left the party. Then women; they divorced the GOP and sent it to sleep on the couch. Then, the young folks; they left and are leaving the Republican Party in droves. Then, someone stood up and told my niece and my grandchild that they are not fully Americans — just second class Americans because they are homosexual. They wished hell and damnation upon my loved ones just because they are different. Are we led by priests or are we led by rational politicians? Now, we have became the party of the Old Straight White Folks. We should rename the Republican Party the OSWF rather than the GOP.

Recently, since the election of Barack Obama, common sense has left the Republican Party completely. We are in the era of craziness. As David Frum has written, a deal was there to be made over the healthcare bill. Instead, this ideological purity blinded the GOP. As LBJ said it, instead of being inside the tent pissing out, we choose to be outside the tent, pissing against the wind. And we got splashed by our own nonsense. Why did we do that? Well, when a political party shrinks its electoral based to below 30% and is composed by one demographic group, all that is left are a bunch of zealots. We shrank it by kicking out of the party those who believe that abortion should be legal but limited. We shrank it by kicking out those who believe that an $11 trillion economy, like ours, needs a strong government, not a government that can be drowned in a bathtub. We shrank it when we sanctified Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck, and canonized Sarah Palin. These are the leaders of my party nowadays. How did we go from William F. Buckley to Glenn Beck? How did we go from Eisenhower and Nixon to Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann? I do not know. What I do know, however, is that these leaders remind of me of the leaders of the Whig Party. And if they continue on their nonsense, they will bring the collapse of the GOP.

No, they’ll probably stop their wildly profitable circus acts for the good of the GOP and the country.

Curry’s piece is elouqent. But did the problem really start in the 90s? To a certain extent, the efforts of self-styled “dignified conservatives” to airlift the Buckley/Reagan legacy from Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are sort of tragicomic. It’s not like Reagan did a great job of pulling in gays and minorities. Where was the strategy of inclusion when William Buckley suggested HIV positive people should be tattood? Who benefits from a narrative that posits a drastic break between conservative politics pre and post 90s? What do you think?

Read the whole piece here.

Tana Ganeva is an AlterNet.org editor. Follow her on Twitter. You can email her at tanaalternet@gmail.com

http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/04/06/conservative-the-gop-is-filled-with-intolerant-fanatics-party-of-old-white-folks/

9.12 DC Tea Party, with interviews

Federal Judge Finds N.S.A. Wiretaps Were Illegal

By CHARLIE SAVAGE and JAMES RISEN
March 31, 2010

WASHINGTON — A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the National Security Agency’s program of surveillance without warrants was illegal, rejecting the Obama administration’s effort to keep shrouded in secrecy one of the most disputed counterterrorism policies of former President George W. Bush.

In a 45-page opinion, Judge Vaughn R. Walker ruled that the government had violated a 1978 federal statute requiring court approval for domestic surveillance when it intercepted phone calls of Al Haramain, a now-defunct Islamic charity in Oregon, and of two lawyers representing it in 2004. Declaring that the plaintiffs had been “subjected to unlawful surveillance,” the judge said the government was liable to pay them damages.

The ruling delivered a blow to the Bush administration’s claims that its surveillance program, which Mr. Bush secretly authorized shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was lawful. Under the program, the National Security Agency monitored Americans’ international e-mail messages and phone calls without court approval, even though the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, required warrants.

The Justice Department said it was reviewing the decision and had made no decision about whether to appeal.

The ruling by Judge Walker, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, rejected the Justice Department’s claim — first asserted by the Bush administration and continued under President Obama — that the charity’s lawsuit should be dismissed without a ruling on the merits because allowing it to go forward could reveal state secrets.

The judge characterized that expansive use of the so-called state-secrets privilege as amounting to “unfettered executive-branch discretion” that had “obvious potential for governmental abuse and overreaching.”

That position, he said, would enable government officials to flout the warrant law, even though Congress had enacted it “specifically to rein in and create a judicial check for executive-branch abuses of surveillance authority.”

Because the government merely sought to block the suit under the state-secrets privilege, it never mounted a direct legal defense of the N.S.A. program in the Haramain case.

Judge Walker did not directly address the legal arguments made by the Bush administration in defense of the N.S.A. program after The New York Times disclosed its existence in December 2005: that the president’s wartime powers enabled him to override the FISA statute. But lawyers for Al Haramain were quick to argue that the ruling undermined the legal underpinnings of the war against terrorism.

One of them, Jon Eisenberg, said Judge Walker’s ruling was an “implicit repudiation of the Bush-Cheney theory of executive power.”

“Judge Walker is saying that FISA and federal statutes like it are not optional,” Mr. Eisenberg said. “The president, just like any other citizen of the United States, is bound by the law. Obeying Congressional legislation shouldn’t be optional with the president of the U.S.”

A Justice Department spokeswoman, Tracy Schmaler, noted that the Obama administration had overhauled the department’s procedures for invoking the state-secrets privilege, requiring senior officials to personally approve any assertion before lawyers could make it in court. She said that approach would ensure that the privilege was invoked only when “absolutely necessary to protect national security.”

The ruling is the second time a federal judge has declared the program of wiretapping without warrants to be illegal. But a 2006 decision by a federal judge in Detroit, Anna Diggs Taylor, was reversed on the grounds that those plaintiffs could not prove that they had been wiretapped and so lacked legal standing to sue.

Several other lawsuits filed over the program have faltered because of similar concerns over standing or because of immunity granted by Congress to telecommunications companies that participated in the N.S.A. program.

By contrast, the Haramain case was closely watched because the government inadvertently disclosed a classified document that made clear that the charity had been subjected to surveillance without warrants.

Although the plaintiffs in the Haramain case were not allowed to use the document to prove that they had standing, Mr. Eisenberg and six other lawyers working on the case were able to use public information — including a 2007 speech by an F.B.I. official who acknowledged that Al Haramain had been placed under surveillance — to prove it had been wiretapped.

Judge Walker’s opinion cataloged other such evidence and declared that the plaintiffs had shown they were wiretapped in a manner that required a warrant. He said the government had failed to produce a warrant, so he granted summary judgment in favor of the plaintiffs.

But Judge Walker limited liability in the case to the government as an institution, rejecting the lawsuit’s effort to hold Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, personally liable.

Mr. Eisenberg said that he would seek compensatory damages of $20,200 for each of the three plaintiffs in the case — or $100 for each of the 202 days he said they had shown they were subjected to the surveillance. He said he would ask the judge to decide how much to award in punitive damages, a figure that could be up to 10 times as high. And he said he and his colleagues would seek to be reimbursed for their legal fees over the past five years.

The 2005 disclosure of the existence of the program set off a national debate over the limits of executive power and the balance between national security and civil liberties. The arguments continued over the next three years, as Congress sought to forge a new legal framework for domestic surveillance.

In the midst of the presidential campaign in 2008, Congress overhauled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to bring federal statutes into closer alignment with what the Bush administration had been secretly doing. The legislation essentially legalized certain aspects of the program. As a senator then, Barack Obama voted in favor of the new law, despite objections from many of his supporters. President Obama’s administration now relies heavily on such surveillance in its fight against Al Qaeda.

The overhauled law, however, still requires the government to obtain a warrant if it is focusing on an American citizen or an organization inside the United States. The surveillance of Al Haramain would still be unlawful today if no court had approved it, current and former Justice Department officials said.

But since Mr. Obama took office, the N.S.A. has sometimes violated the limits imposed on spying on Americans by the new FISA law. The administration has acknowledged the lapses but said they had been corrected.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/us/01nsa.html?pagewanted=print

Why You Need to Understand Political Psychology

Thursday 01 April 2010

by: Joe Brewer, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: Brian Hillegas, Reigh LeBlanc, abrinsky)

http://www.truthout.org/why-you-need-understand-political-psychology58214?print

Are you concerned about the future of our country? Do you want to find ways to revitalize democracy and set about the important work of solving our problems? Have you longed for an end to the extreme polarization in our political discourse? Then you'd better learn some psychology.

Let's take stock of several key challenges confronting us:

• Entire voting blocks of society live in fundamentally different realities;


• Fear runs rampant on talk radio and the major media networks, painting many of our public servants in the image of Hitler and, in some cases, the Antichrist;


• Vitally important information about the threats at our door is treated as speculative opinion or false belief;

• A significant portion of the American populace not only doesn't trust in our capacity to govern, but is outright hostile toward civil institutions.

Challenges like these cannot merely be dispelled by facts. Nor can they be addressed by using opinion polls to build policy platforms. What we need is a new theme in public education - knowledge and insights into the political mind. Let me demonstrate this need with an example.

Yesterday, I stumbled upon a blog article that had sent some traffic to my web site. Usually, I'm pleased when my work is referenced. But this was different. I read through the article, "How Should Conservatives Deal with the Left's Disrespect and Lack of Empathy," and felt a chill run through my bones. The author had taken an incomplete theory from the work of Jonathan Haidt (a social psychologist and friend of mine) and used it to argue that conservatives need to treat liberals as "psychopaths" who get away "scot-free" with lying about their political opposition. The author went on to recommend that readers must "make sure consequences are dealt out to those liberals who lie and treat conservatives with disrespect."

But that was only the beginning. Then, I scanned through the comments to find out what kind of discussion they were having. That's when I discovered a gold mine of data for studying the assumptions, beliefs and attitudes of a community that has divided the world into us versus them and is vehement about unleashing their righteous anger on liberals and progressives.

I encourage you to read through the comment thread and give careful consideration to the views held there. When you do so, consider the following foundational insights that come from research in political psychology.

Insight No. 1: Emotions Shape Judgment

Haidt has done more than articulate the Moral Foundations Theory referenced in the blog article (which I have a few methodological concerns about, see the note below). He has also developed a much more robust theory of moral judgment called the Social Intuitionist Model (a copy of the seminal paper on this theory can be requested here). A key finding from this research is that emotion shapes our moral judgments prior to formulating reasons for taking our positions.

In other words, we are more like defense lawyers than philosophers. We are compelled by our judgments to feel a moral view is appropriate and correct, then defend it if pressed to do so. We don't start with a set of assumptions and reason our way to conclusions. And this process occurs largely outside conscious awareness, so it takes practice to recognize when it is happening.

This relates to a common psychological phenomenon called "confirmation bias," which refers to the tendency to be overly critical of information that challenges what one believes to be true (or the tendency to uncritically accept information that supports one's belief). We see this all the time in politics. People are predisposed to consider their values, views and positions as inherently good and right. At the same time, we tend to be suspicious of anyone who holds a view different from our own.

Insight No. 2: Separate Tribes and Weakened Bonds of Humanity

In order to make sense of the world, we have to divide various aspects of our experience into distinct categories. This includes partitioning people into groups such as adults and children, employed and unemployed, domestic and foreign etc. We do this all the time.

What is not commonly acknowledged is the way subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) feelings seep in to establish moral judgments about each group. In politics we divide the world up into categories like liberal, conservative, independent, centrist and libertarian. Each of these tribes is imbued with seemingly "natural" qualities. Yet, as mentioned above, we are prone to making emotionally potent judgments about others without realizing it.

As a result, we often see those who are different from us as less than human. The technical name for this is "infrahumanization," which literally means below human. Common examples include calling one's opponent an insect ("he's a pest"), a virus ("they were the scourge of the seven seas") or a natural disaster ("their ideas wreaked havoc on our nation"). In each of these cases, the opponent is treated as something other than human. As a result, the empathetic connection that drives social emotions like affection, guilt and remorse is weakened.

This is how one political group manages to feel so little sympathy for "the other."

Insight No. 3: Perception Shapes Reality

While it may be the case that there is an objective reality, human beings don't directly live in it. We experience the world through our bodily experience. And our experience is largely shaped by our perceptions.

A concrete example is color. What we experience as "red" is the result of a very complex process wherein photons hit our retinas and our brain circuitry detects boundaries, calculates how much information comes from three different cells with distinct sensitivity to a range of light frequencies and what this information means in the type of setting we presume it to be. In other words, our experience of "redness" is the result of biology, physics and culture. A wonderful discussion of this phenomenon can be found in George Lakoff's "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind."

What is true for concrete aspects of experience (like color) is also true for the more abstract concepts of politics. Progressives and conservatives have very different ideas about the meaning of freedom, security, patriotism and authority. Our understandings of what markets are, how government works and what it means to be a good society vary according to our perceptions of reality.

In other words, our beliefs and worldviews shape our sense of what is real.

A Strategy for Political Change

What would happen if more Americans knew about insights like these? First off, we would likely become sensitive to our own tendencies to misunderstand those who are different. We would also be more aware of the ways we treat others as less than ourselves. And we would have deeper insights into why it has been so hard to have constructive dialogue about important political issues like health care and climate change when the people involved operate under fundamentally different assumptions and beliefs..

This suggests a strategy for bringing about real and lasting change:

The Mindful Politics Strategy Approach, political discourse through the lens of political psychology. Look for key differences in group understandings and seek common ground through shared aspects of culture. Build trust by earnestly seeking to know the other. And aspire toward new coalitions based on core concerns that unite culturally distinct communities across the nation around the fundamental human condition we all share.

This is a worthy strategy. It is based on an understanding of how the mind actually works, rather than commonplace assumptions that all too often reflect prejudices and misconceptions. And it is grounded in the foundational desire to build trust among people who see the world through a different lens than us.

Some readers will think this is naive and simplistic. After all, many conservatives have already decided that we are "the enemy" and, therefore, less than human. I am quite aware of the difference between conservatives and progressives - something I researched extensively during my time as a fellow of George Lakoff's Rockridge Institute. And I know that there is a world of difference between the Tea Party Movement and MoveOn.org. But I also realize that many of our problems stem from basic ignorance about how our own minds work.

This is our opportunity to learn more about ourselves and become astute participants in the political process. We neglect the workings of the political mind at our peril.

Note About Moral Foundations Theory

Haidt has done an exceptional job identifying the five moral foundations for the human condition. He has put together a popular survey to help people see how much of their personal makeup is grounded in each one of these foundations. Where his method falters is in the frames that shape key questions used to determine the moral foundations of political liberals and conservatives. He inadvertently frames liberal ideals through a conservative lens, resulting in the misplaced observation that liberals lack a "purity" response. What he actually measures is the absence of conservative notions of purity in liberal responses through the way he words his questions. This minor flaw in his methodology leads to the skewed perception that liberals lack a moral response that is common in conservatives. What is actually happening is that liberals and conservatives have very different moral worldviews and their reactions around purity and disgust are expressed in different ways.

As an example, liberals have a strong purity response to human rights abuses. This has to do with the prominence of human dignity in the progressive worldview. The inherent goodness of people is violated by acts of torture, child abuse, chronic neglect of the homeless etc. This violation of moral purity evokes a strong disgust response in liberals. 

This work by Truthout is licensed under Creative Commons.

Tea party bigotry on parade

Nicole Colson looks at the disturbing politics of the tea party fanatics--and how leading Republicans are doing everything they can to encourage them.

March 25, 2010

THE VICIOUS underbelly of the "tea party" movement was on full display in the run-up to last weekend's vote on health care.

The days before the vote were filled with protests in Washington by supposed "grassroots" tea party groups. From the start, they displayed the same naked racism (and naked stupidity) as similar protests in the past--references to Obama as a Nazi, dressed in Hitler garb; questions about where he was born; references to the health care bill as a communist plot that would mean "death panels" for senior citizens.

But tea party protesters sunk to a new low when they verbally abused Georgia Rep. John Lewis, calling him "nigger."

Lewis, a civil rights movement veteran who was brutally beaten by a white mob--and not for the only time--in 1961 when he participated in the Freedom Rides, was outside the U.S. Capitol building on March 20 when protesters began chanting "Kill the bill, kill the bill" at him. When Lewis responded by saying "I'm for the bill," people in the crowd reportedly chanted, "Kill the bill, nigger."

"It was a chorus," Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), who was behind Lewis and heard the chants, told McClatchy Newspapers. "In a way, I feel sorry for those people who are doing this nasty stuff--they're being whipped up." Cleaver, who is also Black, was spat on by a protester.

"They were shouting, sort of harassing," Lewis told McClatchy. "But, it's okay--I've faced this before. It reminded me of the '60s. It was a lot of hate and anger and people being downright mean."

Also targeted by the tea partiers was openly gay Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who was called "faggot." Some reportedly mocked Frank with "lisping" chants.

The openly racist and anti-gay slurs seem to have finally dented the consciousness of the mainstream media--newspaper and cable TV reports gave greater prominence to the tea partiers' hate than in the past.

But the bigotry didn't stop, even after the vote. Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), another veteran of the civil rights movement, told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann that his office received racist faxes, including an image of a noose, following the House vote for health care legislation.

Meanwhile, the offices of Democrats were vandalized before and after the vote in several areas. The Tucson, Ariz., office of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords appeared to have been shot out with a pellet gun, and bricks were tossed through windows of the New York offices of Rep. Louise Slaughter and the Monroe County Democratic Committee headquarters, as well as through the window of the Democratic headquarters in Sedgwick, Kan.

According to CNN, a note was reportedly attached to one of the bricks, which read "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice"--a quote from 1964 Republican presidential candidate--and civil rights opponent and "states' rights" supporter--Barry Goldwater.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

IN SOME cases, Republican lawmakers were directly responsible for inciting the ugly crowds. According to a report from Dana Milbank in the Washington Post, before the vote:

Republican members of Congress stood on the balcony of the people's House and stirred an unruly crowd. As lawmakers debated their way to a vote on the legislation, dozens of GOP members walked from the chamber, across the Speaker's Lobby and out onto the balcony to whip up thousands of "tea party" protesters massed on the south side of the Capitol, within about 50 feet of the building.

Some lawmakers waved handwritten signs and led the crowd in chants of "Kill the Bill." A few waved the yellow "Don't Tread on Me" flag of the tea party movement. Still others fired up the demonstrators with campaign-style signs mocking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and offering messages such as "Let's Meet 'em at the State Line."

And then, of course, there was Republican Rep. Randy Neugebauer of Texas, who--not content with an Obama executive order denying women any federal funds for abortion--shouted "baby killer" at Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak for changing his vote in favor of the bill.

While most Republican officials were smart enough to distance themselves from the racist and homophobic slurs directed at Lewis and Frank, at least one--California Rep. Devin Nunes--claimed that the Democrats' "totalitarian" tactics were to blame for the tea partiers spewing their hate. On CSPAN, Nunes stated:

The left loves to play up a couple of incidents here or there, anything to draw attention away from what they are doing...When you use totalitarian tactics, people begin to act crazy. And I think, y'know, there's people that have every right to say what they want. If they want to smear someone, they can do it.

This sentiment was echoed by right-wing bloggers like Glenn Reynolds, who had the nerve to ask "Does Clyburn owe tea party protesters an apology?" He added, "The bogus racism card has been played so often that I no longer find such charges very credible."

Meanwhile, as Gawker.com noted, while Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele and House Minority Leader John Boehner condemned the protesters, these are "the same protesters who they encourage and inspire with dog-whistle phrases and sly hints."

Sarah Palin, meanwhile, twittered to her followers: "Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: 'Don't Retreat, Instead RELOAD!'" and linked to a map of Democratic districts with rifle targets on them.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

SUCH RHETORIC is a barely disguised attempt to whip up the worst elements of the right wing. These kinds of tactics are hardly surprising, however. For all the claims that the "tea partiers" are an independent "grassroots" movement, the truth is that they represent, for the most part, the same old reactionary core of the Republican Party.

Not only is the tea party movement propped up--sometimes behind the scenes, sometimes openly--by various political action committees tied to well-connected Republicans like Dick Armey and Steve Forbes, but the "stars" of the tea party movement include prominent Republicans like Sarah Palin. Likewise, the tea partiers themselves are likely to support Republicans when it comes to voting.

In February, a CNN/Opinion Research poll found that some 11 percent of Americans described themselves as having given money, attended a rally or engaged in some other "active support" for the tea party movement.

The demographic is striking. Of those "active" supporters, 60 percent were male, 80 percent were white, and 66 percent made more than $50,000 a year. In fact, the largest income group of tea party activists (34 percent) was those making $75,000 or more per year. More tellingly, 87 percent said they vote for Republican candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives (as opposed to 46 percent of all respondents), and 77 percent described themselves as "conservative."

In other words, tea party activists are not working-class populist independents, but one of the core demographics of the Republican Party--the same reactionary base that the Republicans have appealed to in nakedly racist fashion for decades.

As Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor wrote during the run-up to Obama's election:

[The race card] has been a staple of American politics since African Americans could vote, most successfully since the invocation of the so-called "Southern strategy" employed by the likes of Richard Nixon and then Ronald Reagan.

The Black political movements of the 1960s and 1970s made it impossible for politicians to be brazenly racist, and so different racial monikers and codes were developed to implicate African Americans without mentioning them by name. Richard Nixon implored the rights of the "silent majority"--as opposed to the vocal minorities demanding civil rights. Ronald Reagan created myths and lies about "welfare queens," law and order, and demanded a war on drugs. All of these inferences and many others were meant to tap into the insecurities and racism of whites, without being accused of racism.

Today, the tea party protests are part of a "movement"--and it should be emphasized that it is by no means the mass movement that the media portrays it as--that recycles these same myths and lies for a new generation.

Hence, the emphasis on Obama's "Muslim-sounding" middle name or the repeated assertions that he wasn't born in the U.S. While most Republicans may be smart enough to disavow nakedly racist rhetoric and distance themselves--for example, from the tea partiers who yelled "nigger" at John Lewis--many are more than willing to hitch their wagons to the tea party movement.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

RATHER THAN call out these racist and bigoted attacks for what they are, the leadership of the Democratic Party, has been all-but-silent.

Last September, former President Jimmy Carter asserted that racism was a major factor in the tea party opposition to Obama. As he told students at Emory University:

When a radical fringe element of demonstrators and others begin to attack the president of the United States as an animal or as a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler, or when they wave signs in the air that said we should have buried Obama with Kennedy, those kinds of things are beyond the bounds. I think people who are guilty of that kind of personal attack against Obama have been influenced to a major degree by a belief that he should not be president because he happens to be African American.

But rather than take up the issue, the Obama White House immediately distanced itself from Carter. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters that Obama did not believe the criticism directed at him and his policies was "based on the color of his skin," but a reasonable frustration with government.

Worse still has been the response of the Democrats to the furor over the health care bill. Rather than focus on the Republicans' incitement of bigotry, the Obama administration took one opportunity after another to talk about how much Republicans should appreciate the bill--because it delivers major items on their wish list.

As author Matt Taibbi noted:

Only in America could we have a situation in which the GOP punts away a political opportunity by having a some Texas congressman shout "Baby Killer!" during a debate--and then the Democrats fumble that punt by celebrating the Republican-ness of the historic bill they just passed.

As she inched toward the triumphant win, Nancy Pelosi issued a fact sheet about the bill that cheerfully quoted an E.J. Dionne editorial. The passage: "An op-ed by E.J. Dionne on Friday reveals that the current health reform legislation pending before Congress was 'built on a series of principles that Republicans espoused for years.'"

The Democrats not only won't fight the bigotry and right-wing attacks used against them, but they celebrate what they have in common with the bigots--and make concession after concession to accommodate them, as the health care debate showed all too plainly.

The result is that racism and hate only fester. According to a recent Harris poll, 67 percent of Republicans (and 40 percent of Americans overall) believe that Obama is a socialist; 57 percent of Republicans (32 percent overall) believe that Obama is a Muslim; 45 percent of Republicans (25 percent overall) agree with the "birthers" that Obama was "not born in the United States, and so is not eligible to be president"; 38 percent of Republicans (20 percent overall) say that Obama is "doing many of the things that Hitler did"; and 24 percent of Republicans (14 percent overall) say that Obama "may be the Antichrist."

While there are questions about the Harris survey's sampling and methodology, this poll isn't unique in showing the large number of Republicans who have reactionary ideas, particularly about Barack Obama. But the Democrats refuse to actively take on such ideas, preferring to talk up "common ground."

Right-wing extremism, whether racism, anti-gay bigotry or Islamophobia, has to be challenged--period. There can be no common cause with bigotry.

http://socialistworker.org/2010/03/25/tea-party-bigotry-parade

The Health Care Hindenburg Has Landed

By Chris Hedges

Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s decision to vote “yes” in Sunday’s House action on the health care bill, although he had sworn to oppose the legislation unless there was a public option, is a perfect example of why I would never be a politician. I respect Kucinich. As politicians go, he is about as good as they get, but he is still a politician. He has to run for office. He has to raise money. He has to placate the Democratic machine or risk retaliation and defeat. And so he signed on to a bill that will do nothing to ameliorate the suffering of many Americans, will force tens of millions of people to fork over a lot of money for a defective product and, in the end, will add to the ranks of our uninsured.

The claims made by the proponents of the bill are the usual deceptive corporate advertising. The bill will not expand coverage to 30 million uninsured, especially since government subsidies will not take effect until 2014. Families who cannot pay the high premiums, deductibles and co-payments, estimated to be between 15 and 18 percent of most family incomes, will have to default, increasing the number of uninsured. Insurance companies can unilaterally raise prices without ceilings or caps and monopolize local markets to shut out competitors. The $1.055 trillion spent over the next decade will add new layers of bureaucratic red tape to what is an unmanageable and ultimately unsustainable system.

The mendacity of the Democratic leadership in the face of this reality is staggering. Howard Dean, who is a doctor, said recently: “This is a vote about one thing: Are you for the insurance companies or are you for the American people?” Here is a man who once championed the public option and now has sold his soul. What is the point in supporting him or any of the other Democrats? How much more craven can they get? 

Take a look at the health care debacle in Massachusetts, a model for what we will get nationwide. One in six people there who have the mandated insurance say they cannot afford care, and tens of thousands of people have been evicted from the state program because of budget cuts. The 45,000 Americans who die each year because they cannot afford coverage will not be saved under the federal legislation. Half of all personal bankruptcies will still be caused by an inability to pay astronomical medical bills. The only good news is that health care stocks and bonuses for the heads of these corporations are shooting upward. Chalk this up as yet another victory for our feudal overlords and a defeat for the serfs.

The U.S. spends twice as much as other industrialized nations on health care—$7,129 per capita—although 45.7 million Americans remain without health coverage and millions more are inadequately covered, meaning that if they get seriously ill they are not covered. Fourteen thousand Americans a day are now losing their health coverage. A report in the journal Health Affairs estimates that, if the system is left unchanged, one of every five dollars spent by Americans in 2017 will go to health coverage. Private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume 31 cents of every health care dollar. Streamlining payment through a single nonprofit payer would save more than $400 billion per year, enough, Physicians for a National Health Plan points out, to provide comprehensive, high-quality coverage for all Americans. Check out www.healthcare-now.org. It has some of the best analysis.

This bill is not about fiscal responsibility or the common good. The bill is about increasing corporate profit at taxpayer expense. It is the health care industry’s version of the Wall Street bailout. It lavishes hundreds of billions in government subsidies on insurance and drug companies. The some 3,000 health care lobbyists in Washington, whose dirty little hands are all over the bill, have once more betrayed the American people for money. The bill is another example of why change will never come from within the Democratic Party. The party is owned and managed by corporations. The five largest private health insurers and their trade group, America’s Health Insurance Plans, spent more than $6 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2009. Pfizer, the world’s biggest drug maker, spent more than $9 million during the last quarter of 2008 and the first three months of 2009. The Washington Post reported that up to 30 members of Congress from both parties who hold key committee memberships have major investments in health care companies totaling between $11 million and $27 million. President Barack Obama’s director of health care policy, who will not discuss single payer as an option, has served on the boards of several health care corporations. And as salaries for most Americans have stagnated or declined during the past decade, health insurance profits have risen by 480 percent.

Obama and the congressional leadership have consciously shut out advocates of single payer from the debate. The press, including papers such as The New York Times, treats single payer as a fringe movement. The television networks rarely mention it. And yet between 45 and 60 percent of doctors favor single payer. Between 40 and 62 percent of the American people, including 80 percent of registered Democrats, want universal, single-payer not-for-profit health care for all Americans. The ability of the corporations to discredit and silence voices that represent at least half of the population is another sad testament to the power of our corporate state to frame all discussions.

Change will come only by building movements that stand in fierce and uncompromising opposition to the Democrats and the Republicans. If they can herd Kucinich and John Conyers, the sponsors of House Resolution 676, a bill that would create a publicly funded National Health Program by eliminating private health insurers, onto the House floor to vote for this corporate theft, what is the point in pretending there is any room left for us in the party? And why should we waste our time with gutless liberal groups such as Moveon.org, which felt the need to collect more than $1 million to pressure House Democrats who had voted “no” on the original bill to recant? What was this purportedly anti-war group doing anyway serving as an obsequious recruiting arm of the Obama election campaign? The longer we tie ourselves to the Democrats and these bankrupt liberal organizations the more ridiculous and impotent we appear.

“I’m ready to listen to the White House, if the White House is ready to listen to the concerns about putting a public option in this bill,” the old Kucinich said on the “Democracy Now!” radio and television program before he flipped. “I mean, they can do that. You know, they’re still cutting last-minute deals. Put the public option back in. Make it a robust public option. Give the people a chance to really negotiate rates with the insurance companies … from the standpoint of having a public option. But don’t just tell the people that you’re going to call this health care reform, when you’re giving insurance companies an even more powerful monopoly status in our economy.”

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_health_care_hindenburg_has_landed_20100322/

Revealed: Ashcroft, Tenet, Rumsfeld warned 9/11 Commission about ‘line’ it ’should not cross’

By Sahil Kapur
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 -- 9:11 am

Senior Bush administration officials sternly cautioned the 9/11 Commission against probing too deeply into the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, according to a document recently obtained by the ACLU.

The notification came in a letter dated January 6, 2004, addressed by Attorney General John Ashcroft, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and CIA Director George J. Tenet. The ACLU described it as a fax sent by David Addington, then-counsel to former vice president Dick Cheney.

In the message, the officials denied the bipartisan commission's request to question terrorist detainees, informing its two senior-most members that doing so would "cross" a "line" and obstruct the administration's ability to protect the nation.

"In response to the Commission's expansive requests for access to secrets, the executive branch has provided such access in full cooperation," the letter read. "There is, however, a line that the Commission should not cross -- the line separating the Commission's proper inquiry into the September 11, 2001 attacks from interference with the Government's ability to safeguard the national security, including protection of Americans from future terrorist attacks."

The 9/11 Commission, officially called the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, was formed by President Bush in November of 2002 "to prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks" and to offer recommendations for preventing future attacks.

"The Commission staff's proposed participation in questioning of detainees would cross that line," the letter continued. "As the officers of the United States responsible for the law enforcement, defense and intelligence functions of the Government, we urge your Commission not to further pursue the proposed request to participate in the questioning of detainees."

FireDogLake's Marcy Wheeler speculates that this was an attempt by the Bush administration to ensure that its torture of certain detainees, which has since been widely documented, remained secret.

"[W]hoever made these annotations appears to have been most worried that Commission staff members could make independent judgments about the detainees and the interrogations," Wheeler wrote on her blog. The official "didn't want anyone to independently evaluate the interrogations conducted in the torture program."

Eventually, the commission's co-chairs harshly criticized the administration for having purportedly "destroyed" tapes of its interrogations with terror suspects, as Raw Story reported last year.

9/11 Commission members Thomas Kean and Lee H. Hamilton wrote that although US President George W. Bush had ordered all executive branch agencies to cooperate with the probe, "recent revelations that the CIA destroyed videotaped interrogations of Qaeda operatives leads us to conclude that the agency failed to respond to our lawful requests for information about the 9/11 plot."

"Those who knew about those videotapes — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation."

They continued: “There could have been absolutely no doubt in the mind of anyone at the CIA — or the White House — of the commission’s interest in any and all information related to Qaeda detainees involved in the 9/11 plot.

"Yet no one in the administration ever told the commission of the existence of videotapes of detainee interrogations," Kean and Hamilton wrote.

The letter can be found on page 26 of the ACLU's set of unveiled documents.

http://rawstory.com/2010/03/revealed-ashcroft-tenet-rumsfeld-warned-911-commission-line-should-cross/

Terrorism Law, the New McCarthyism

Monday 22 February 2010
by: Stephen Rohde | The LA Daily Journal

Tomorrow, the US Supreme Court will hear oral argument in the first encounter with the free speech and association rights of American citizens in the context of terrorism since the 9/11 attacks, and in the first test of the constitutionality of a provision of the USA Patriot Act.

The "Material Support" law takes a sweeping approach to its ban on aid to terrorist groups, prohibiting the provision of cash, weapons and the like, as well as four more ambiguous categories - "training," "personnel," "expert advice or assistance" and "service." Opponents of the law say that when it comes to providing lawful legal advice or training in nonviolence, the law is nothing more than "guilt by association," reminiscent of the witch hunts of McCarthyism.

These are no paranoid fears. "Congress wants these organizations to be radioactive," Douglas N. Letter, a Justice Department lawyer, said in a 2007 appeals court argument in the case, referring to the dozens of groups that have been designated as foreign terrorist organizations by the State Department. Letter admitted that it would be a crime for a lawyer to file a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of a designated organization or "to be assisting terrorist organizations in making presentations to the U.N., to television, [or] to a newspaper."

The Humanitarian Law Project, a nonprofit group that has a long history of mediating international conflicts and promoting human rights, brought the case in 1998. Two years earlier, passage of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) had made it a crime to provide "material support" to groups the State Department had designated as "foreign terrorist organizations." The definition of material support included "training" and "personnel." Later versions of the law, including amendments in the USA Patriot Act, added "expert advice or assistance" and "service."

In 2007, the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the bans on training, service and certain types of expert advice were unconstitutionally vague, but upheld the bans on personnel and expert advice derived from scientific or technical knowledge. Both sides appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the consolidated cases in October. The cases are Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, No. 08-1498, and Humanitarian Law Project v. Holder, No. 09-89.

David D. Cole, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents the challengers, is arguing that the case concerns speech protected by the First Amendment "promoting lawful, nonviolent activities," including "human rights advocacy and peacemaking."

A number of victims of McCarthy-era persecution filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the Supreme Court to remember the lessons of history.

"I signed the brief," said Chandler Davis, an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto, "because I can testify to the way in which the dubious repression of dissent disrupted lives and disrupted political discourse." Professor Davis refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1954, and was dismissed from his position at the University of Michigan. Unable to find work in the United States, he moved to Canada. In 1991, the University of Michigan established an annual lecture series on academic freedom in honor of Professor Davis and others it had mistreated in the McCarthy era.

The material support law authorizes the secretary of state to designate "foreign terrorist organizations," and makes it a crime to provide certain statutorily defined "material support" for even the nonviolent and humanitarian activities of such groups. Similar to the Smith Act and federal executive orders in the 1940s and '50s, the law grants the executive branch unreviewable discretion to designate groups as "terrorist" and creates vague bans on providing "expert advice or assistance," "training," "service" or "personnel" to designated groups. It threatens, once again unconstitutionally, to interfere with the rights of free speech and association.

The AEDPA's vague ban on "assistance" and "advice" is essentially no different from the McCarthy-era attempt to root out association with and advocacy for groups unpopular with the government. Starting in the 1930s, and through the 1960s, Congress and the executive branch identified organizations - the Communist Party and groups with ties to the Communist Party - as using illegal means, including terrorism, with the aim of overthrowing the US government by force and violence. The Smith Act and the Subversive Activities Control Act made it a crime to associate with these designated groups or to speak in support of these groups. These were crimes regardless of whether or not that speech or association supported or furthered the groups' unlawful activities.

Our society now recognizes that the McCarthy era was a shameful episode in American history, characterized by widespread abuses of executive and legislative power, fueled by demagoguery and overzealous government action, ultimately encompassing "loyalty" investigations of over four million American citizens. See, e.g., Ellen Schrecker, "Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America" (1998), at x (the McCarthy era is "the most widespread and longest lasting period of political repression in American history.").

While few individuals were ultimately prosecuted under the McCarthy-era laws, thousands were persecuted. Among the latter, larger group were Amici and their relatives, none of whom intended to or actually did engage in violence against this country. Nonetheless, they were investigated, libeled, terminated from and unable to secure employment, blacklisted, prosecuted and imprisoned. One of the key lessons from this era is that when the federal government fans the flames of public passion by enacting overreaching criminal statutes, staging Congressional hearings and investigating the loyalty of millions of American citizens, it implicitly condones and sanctions retributions against individuals, such as Amici. Eventually, our society and this court understood that these consequences were unacceptable. We should not make these mistakes again.

It is against this background that this court issued the decisions that are the controlling law that governs this case. In a series of landmark First Amendment decisions, this court struck down these statutes, restored freedom of speech and halted guilt by association. This court concluded that the Congressional and executive branch excesses were unconstitutional. The court held that punishing speech without showing incitement to crime and punishing association without showing specific intent to further illegal ends penalizes innocents and chills the political freedoms at the very core of our democracy.

These principles are equally applicable today, where the federal government (once again) has designated certain organizations as proscribed and purports to make it a crime to speak for or otherwise associate with such organizations. Now, when, once again, our safety and security have been threatened, this court should reaffirm the rights to free speech and association.

Stephen Rohde, a constitutional lawyer, was co-counsel with Arnold & Porter on the amicus brief filed by victims of McCarthyism in Humanitarian Law Project v. Holder.

© 2010 Daily Journal Corporation. All rights reserved.

http://www.truthout.org/terrorism-law-new-mccarthyism57092

1,000 Architects & Engineers Call for New 9/11 Investigation

Fri Feb 19, 8:00 am ET

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 19 –
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 19 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Richard Gage, AIA, architect and founder of the non-profit Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Inc. (AE911Truth), will announce a decisive milestone today at a press conference in San Francisco, as more than 1,000 worldwide architects and engineers now support the call for a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7 at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. After careful examination of the official explanation, along with the forensic data omitted from official reports, these professionals have concluded that a new independent investigation into these mysterious collapses is needed.

Mr. Gage will deliver the news around this major development, accompanied by signers of the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth petition. The press conference will be held concurrently in 38 cities in 6 countries. http://www.ae911truth.org/info/160

These prominent architectural and engineering professionals will discuss the organization's findings and concerns. A brief presentation of the explosive evidence they have compiled will be followed by Q & A. The presentation is an important update of "9/11: Blueprint for Truth – The Architecture of Destruction," the DVD produced by the organization, and available on their website AE911Truth.org, which analyzes the scientific forensic evidence concluding that the three skyscrapers in New York City were demolished with explosives on 9/11. The petition will be delivered today to every congressional representative by AE911Truth petition signers throughout the country. Government officials will be notified that "Misprision of Treason", US Code 18 (Sec. 2382), is a serious federal offense which requires those with evidence of treason to act.

Gage and his group base their conclusions on forensic evidence. Gage states, "The official FEMA and NIST reports provide insufficient, contradictory, and fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers' destruction. We are therefore calling for a grand jury investigation of NIST officials. Gage points out the destruction of the third high-rise, World Trade Center 7, a 47-story skyscraper which was not hit by an aircraft, yet came down in pure free-fall acceleration for more than 100 feet, a significant fact that NIST has been forced to admit, due to research conducted by AE911Truth petition signers. Other disturbing facts emerging from the forensic evidence include:

* Complete destruction of both Twin Towers in just 10 to 14 seconds at near free-fall acceleration
* Over 100 first-responder reports of explosions and flashes at onset of destruction
* Multi-ton steel sections ejected laterally 600 ft at 60 mph
* Mid-air pulverization of 90,000 tons of concrete & metal decking
* 1200-foot-dia. debris field: no "pancaked" floors seen in the debris pile
* Several tons of molten metal found in debris.
* Evidence of advanced explosive nano-thermitic composite material found in the WTC dust by an international team of scientists


AE911Truth's conclusions are shared by thousands of scientists; senior-level military, intelligence and government officials; pilots and aviation professionals; firefighters; scholars and university professors; and 9/11 survivors and their family members. The implications are enormous and may have profound impact on the forthcoming Khalid Sheikh Mohammed trial.

The 9/11 Truth Movement, which Time magazine in 2006 called "a mainstream political reality," continues to gain momentum. As AE911Truth's own influence grows, Gage has embarked on well over 130 speaking events, covering 20 states and 13 countries, including Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. He has been interviewed by media around the world – including the BBC, CBC, NatGeo, and Fox TV.

SOURCE Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Inc.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/usnw/20100219/pl_usnw/DC57612_1