Beyond School

• McCain Defends His Rabid Crowds

  tags: mccain, elections08, racism

  • The rabid nature of the scene has startled longtime political observers and even former associates of McCain himself.

    John Weaver, the Senator’s former top strategist, has said McCain is making a tactical mistake by letting abusive hecklers have their voices heard during his forums. David Gergen, a longtime Washington strategist, has warned that the rhetoric from these attendees could “lead to some violence.”

    Veteran Republican Congressman Ray LaHood criticized Sarah Palin in particular, saying her rhetoric did not “befit the office she’s running for.”

    AFL-CIO President John Sweeney denounced the recent campaign stops as dangerous and expressed alarm that the top of the Republican ticket would not protest the crowd’s language.

    “Sen. John McCain, Gov. Sarah Palin and the leadership of the Republican party have a fundamental moral responsibility to denounce the violent rhetoric that has pervaded recent McCain and Palin political rallies. When rally attendees shout out such attacks as “terrorist” or “kill him” about Sen. Barack Obama, when they are cheered on by crowds incited by McCain-Palin rhetoric — it is chilling that McCain and Palin do nothing to object.”

    Veteran reporter Dan Balz has opined that “McCain’s tactics are over the line, with no restraint in sight, and threaten to provoke reactions among partisans on both sides that will continue to escalate.”

    And Frank Schaeffer penned a solemn and critical column (first published in the Baltimore Sun) personally addressed to McCain himself: “If your campaign does not stop equating Sen. Barack Obama with terrorism, questioning his patriotism and portraying Mr. Obama as “not one of us,” I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate, and therefore of potentially instigating violence.”

• Dave Winer: Will this election end in a civil war?

  tags: mccain, racism, elections08

  • But there’s a lot of concern, expressed openly, that there will be violence if Obama wins — that somehow the Republicans will not feel that an African-American, even if he wins the Electoral College, is a legitimate President. If so, this is a prescription for nothing less than civil war.

    I know what it feels like to be bewildered by the choice made by our country. I felt we were poised on a precipice of disaster in 2004 when we re-elected President Bush, but I accepted the result. I said at the time that we need to listen to the Americans who voted for him, because they must be trying to say something. Well, I spent four years listening and nothing came back. So we worked and patiently waited as our country continued to fumble and blunder and waste opportunity after opportunity. Now, facing a global economic collapse, and who knows what politically and militarily, our country will have to either unite, or fly apart.

    I’m going to add my voice, as humble and unpowerful as it is, to the growing chorus asking the Republicans to take a step back, and think longer term, bigger picture. This is not going to end well if we can’t agree that whoever wins this election is our leader for the next four years, at a time when we desperately need leadership. There’s an awful spirit to this competition that says when it’s over we will not unite, and that would be a disaster.

    McCain must give a speech, like the one given by Obama when racial issues came to the front earlier this year, and say clearly that no matter who wins, we must unite behind the new President.

• J.S. McDougall: WATCH: The U.S. Army Prepares to Invade the U.S.

  tags: bush, neocons, fascism

  • When I first learned about Naomi Wolf’s book, The End of America–in which she chronicles America’s slide toward becoming a police state, I considered it a well-played game of “what if…?” I regarded it much in the same way that I regarded Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us–as a mental exercise exploring alternate realities, which serves to make us more appreciative and better stewards of our own reality.

    Sadly, I was mistaken.

    The ten steps to fascism that Wolf laid out in The End of America have occurred–all ten–like clockwork. Steps nine and ten occurred recently with the mass arrests of citizens and journalists at the RNC, and October 1st’s U.S. military missions against U.S. citizens made possible by the suspension of Posse Comitatus in 2006. (Yes, reinstated later, but a signing statement made by Bush on the law frees him from obeying it.)

    This is not an exercise in alternate realities. This is happening in America. With all that we know of human nature, the lessons from history, and the inevitably corrupting effect of power on the human brain, there should be no doubt left in our minds that if all the chess pieces are aligned, it is only a matter of time until checkmate.

    So why do we do nothing?

  • many WWII-era German immigrants in this country are able to recall the pre-WWII German population’s inaction through disbelief. “This happened in Germany, and we did nothing,” Wolf recalls hearing repeatedly.

    Much in the same way, I grew up thinking “They won’t suspend habeus corpus, this is America.” And, “They won’t tamper with the voting system, this is America.” And, “They won’t tap our phone lines, this is America.” And, “They won’t use the military against us, this is America.” But they’ve all happened. And yet, my kneejerk reaction–even after all these crimes against my freedom and voice as a citizen–is still, “They won’t declare martial law, this is America.”

    Why!? And why is this true for so many fellow Americans? And what’s more, why is mentioning these crimes met with scorn and contempt–as though I’m just stirring up trouble.

    I’m not crazy. I’m just reading the news! Upon first glance the administration has plenty of excuses it could use to declare martial law: the plummeting economy, a potentially botched election, racists rioting at Palin rallies, domestic terrorists (real or make-believe), even simply not getting its petulant way (as with the bailout, as the video below will point out).

    It seems that the folks over at CorbettReport are reading the news as well. They’ve put together this timely video explaining that the threat of martial law is real, and likely.

    So, my fellow Americans, I ask you: What do we do to save our democracy…and our own skin?

• Rachel Maddow Show: John McCain’s Terrible Record on Veterans Issues | Crooks and Liars

  tags: mccain, politics

  • Senator McCain had a sort of unusual role on the formation of the G.I. bill this year. He did, in the end, try to take sort of credit for it. He was thanked at the outset at the signing ceremony, but he was not involved as an original co-sponsor on this legislation, isn’t that right?

    RIECKHOFF: Correct. There were 53 original co-sponsors on both sides of the aisle. Eventually, right-wing folks like Senator Warner got involved with folks on the left like Senator Webb. Every major veteran services organization in the country supported it, more ¾ of the House. So, this was kind of a legislative locomotive. And one of the only blocks along the way consistently was Senator McCain.

    So, it’s not a partisan issue here. The G.I. bill had tremendous support. And he was just really behind this legislative issue. Now, he’s made attempts to go back and say he was holding out for transferability. Transferability, being able to transfer your G.I. bill benefits to your family members. It was already in the law. It was at the discretion of the Department of Defense.

    So, it’s kind of a red herring there. But the reports are out there now. Everybody can check the vote. Go to VeteranReportCard.org, you can check their votes and everybody else who’s up for reelection this year.

• Frank Schaeffer: An Open Letter to John McCain

  tags: mccain, elections08, racism

  • Senator John McCain: If your campaign does not stop equating Sen. Barack Obama with terrorism, questioning his patriotism and portraying Mr. Obama as “not one of us,” I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate, and therefore of potentially instigating violence.
  • John McCain and Sarah Palin, you are playing with fire, and you know it. You are unleashing the monster of American hatred and prejudice, to the peril of all of us. You are doing this in wartime. You are doing this as our economy collapses. You are doing this in a country with a history of assassinations.

• Disgrasian: Sarah Palin: Below-Average American

  tags: palin

  • Maybe it’s even unreasonable to expect Sarah Palin’s SAT score to be better than the national average–997 combined–in 1982, the time this alleged transcript was issued. In which case, cool. I can accept that. Because Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, smart and dumb, et al., and I love Jesus. But if this below-average report card turns out to be real, is it too much to ask that Palin stop lying about being so “average“?

• Jeffrey Feldman: Palin Rallies Ignite Widespread Talk of ‘Fascism’

  tags: palin, fascism

  • So, Sarah Palin is not ‘fascist,’ but that does not mean her language and her events have not had a dangerous impact on our democracy.

    Beyond adding populism to the campaign trail, Palin has also done something else: she has re-framed the McCain campaign in violent terms — terms that had been used predominantly by right-wing shock pundits on TV and radio.

    Whereas politicians like John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, and Newt Gingrich had occasionally used violent rhetoric in stump speeches, Sarah Palin’s use of it has resulted in a complete repackaging of the Republican presidential campaign. And thhat use of violent rhetoric has threatened to clogged up any attempt by the American public to have serious, pragmatic conversation about the problems we face and the solutions necessary to solve them.

    In our gut, Americans feel that the violent rhetoric in Sarah Palin’s campaign events poisons the productive pragmatism of American Democracy. In response to that gut feeling, some people reach for the word ‘fascism,’ most likely, because that is the word used in popular culture most frequently over the past ten years to describe threats to democracy.

    Even if ‘fascist’ is not an accurate description of Sarah Palin, the scale of the public concern in response to her campaign events is a social fact all by itself. And as we head into the final weeks of the campaign, the scope of that social fact grows by the hour.

• Jeff Schweitzer: Pro-Death: The Anti-Life Policies of Bush/McCain

  tags: abortion, politics, mccain, bush, palin

  • Republicans do not believe life is sacred, not even close; they believe we commit a sin by destroying a microscopic dot of cells, but revel in frying a grown adult until his hair catches fire. No sanctity of life there.
  • But the inherent hypocrisy of supporting the death penalty while opposing abortion is not the primary problem of this false reverence for life. Much worse are the impacts of policies implemented by our faith-based government through the lens of rigid religious ideologies. Right-wing Republicans led by Bush have prevented federal funding of stem cell research. This research holds promise for curing terrible diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, spinal cord injury, rheumatoid arthritis, and cancer. President Bush and now McCain-Palin value a blastocyst smaller than the period at the end of this sentence over the life of a wounded soldier in a wheelchair.
  • Bush, with McCain’s support, continues to decimate funding for family planning in the world’s poorest countries in Asia and Africa. We defund any group or organization that even mentions the word abortion. Bush just announced that we will no longer support any clinic that also receives funds from the highly respected British aid group, Marie Stopes International, which operates clinics in the most desperate regions. The clinics we no longer support provide primary health care for millions of women, and are often the only source for childhood immunizations. Due to this tragic action by religious zealots in Washington, at least 150,000 additional unwanted pregnancies will occur, leading to an additional 60,000 abortions that otherwise would not have been performed. That makes Bush and McCain the world’s leading cheerleaders for abortion. And if that is not sufficiently anti-life, consider that in many regions of Africa women have a 1-in-10 chance of dying in childbirth, so our policies will be killing women across that continent.
  • Bush, along with the Catholic Church, opposes the distribution of condoms in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet condoms are the least expensive, most effective means of preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS, which infects up to 25% of the adult population in some countries. Bush is condemning entire populations to infection and death, all while smugly claiming the mantle of pro-life.
  • Let us finally remove this colossal nonsense from our vocabulary, and say what we mean. Republicans are the pro-death party. Only by spouting Orwellian double-speak can they attempt to deny that harsh reality. The late great George Carlin once remarked that god was the leading cause of death. The truth is that Republicans are the leading cause of death, acting in god’s name.

• Bush Paves the Way for Martial Law: 2007 National Defense Authorization Act overturns Posse Comitatus Act

  tags: bush, neocons, fascism, usa

  • In October 2006, Bush signed into law the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007. Quietly slipped into the law at the last minute, at the request of the Bush administration, were sections changing important legal principles, dating back 200 years, which limit the U.S. government’s ability to use the military to intervene in domestic affairs. These changes would allow Bush, whenever he thinks it necessary, to institute martial law–under which the military takes direct control over civilian administration.

    Sec. 1042 of the Act, “Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies,” effectively overturns what is known as posse comitatus. The Posse Comitatus Act is a law, passed in 1878, that prohibits the use of the regular military within the U.S. borders. The original passage of the Posse Comitatus Act was a very reactionary move that sealed the betrayal of Black people after the Civil War and brought the period of Reconstruction to an end. It decreed that federal troops could no longer be used inside the former Confederate states to enforce the new legal rights of Black people. Black people were turned over to the armed police and Klansmen serving the southern plantation owners, and the long period of Jim Crow began.

• Pete Cenedella: Ooh, That Smell: McCain and His Mob Waltz with Death

  tags: politics, mccain, palin, racism, elections08

  • A line of McCain supporters on their way in to a rally in Ohio heckle the Obama supporters and journalists across the street with cries of “You need to go die” and “Commie faggots,” and several call Obama a terrorist, a socialist, a traitor, and more.

    It’s easy to view this footage and feel panic welling up inside. Easy to feel that a tide is rising in the heartland of fear and anger, ignorance and violence, that is on the verge of flooding the ballot boxes and carrying John McCain and Sarah Palin to the White House.

    What’s important to bear in mind is that these are hardly “swing voters.” These are the 19 percent of the country who might yet call themselves “Bush Republicans,” even after the verdict of history. Bush Republicans are not the concern, in the end. Reagan Democrats are. As McCain’s own former top strategist John Weaver was quoted as saying: “Please find me a swing voter, an undecided independent, or a torn female voter that finds an angry mob mentality attractive.”

  • What is terrifying about these images, these sounds, these ugly days, is not what might befall Barack Obama at the ballot box. It is that unthinkable thing that we all think about, that Palin and McCain are conjuring like a dark specter. The game McCain is playing is as real as Russian Roulette and might have the same outcome. David Gergen has warned on CNN that “real violence” could be the bitter fruit of these dark electoral arts. “There is a free-floating sort of whipping-around anger that could really lead to some violence. And I think we’re not far from that,” Gergen said. “I really worry when we get people — when you get the kind of rhetoric that you’re getting at these rallies now. I think it’s really imperative the candidates try to calm people down.”

    The dire question that seems to be rising is this one: How many more crowds can McCain whip up this way and not expect to stumble on the loaded chamber?

• Naomi Wolf: The Battle Plan III: Deployment and Its Dangers

  And this is not in the news.

  tags: bush, neocons, fascism, usa

  • We should worry because history shows that there are no magic shields that protect citizens in a weakening democracy once troops are deployed in civilian streets. It is folly to assume that military units would never obey orders to take action against their own fellow civilians — say ‘unruly individuals’ at a protest or turned away from a voting booth. Chinese soldiers round up at gunpoint Chinese parents protesting tainted milk; German soldiers arrested Germans in 1933; Italian soldiers obediently beat up Italian editors and journalists in 1920; Russian soldiers brutalize compatriot Georgians. Lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights and the National Lawyers Guild say that these are legitimate questions to ask now: The U.S. military reports to the Commander in Chief — not to Congress.
  • If the U.S. is a battlefield does military law override civilian law? The president has said he can call anybody an ‘enemy combatant’: can the Third Battalion seize U.S. citizens and keep them in military detention? What about interrogation? What rules apply? If the First Brigade is sent to the Washington Post newsroom to seize ‘inflammatory’ or ‘classified’ work threatening ‘national security’, and the executive editor resists, can they Taser him? Detain him? Col. David Antoon says that if ordered to, they must do all of this. If reporters take pictures of the altercation can the Third Battalion seize their film? Arrest them? If ordered to, Antoon says they must. If the president declares a state of emergency and Congress disagrees, he can send the First Brigade into the halls of Congress, according to Antoon. History shows that once troops are visibly deployed in the vicinity of a parliament, parliamentarians become very passive — even while the nation is still a technically functioning democracy.
  • I argue that a coup has taken place, without the headlines.

• Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1 - Army News, opinions, editorials, news from Iraq, photos, reports - Army Times - Annotated

  Frightening: Bush feels like the end of Weimar Germany. Seriously: “They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack.

  Training for homeland scenarios has already begun at Fort Stewart and includes specialty tasks such as knowing how to use the “jaws of life” to extract a person from a mangled vehicle; extra medical training for a CBRNE incident; and working with U.S. Forestry Service experts on how to go in with chainsaws and cut and clear trees to clear a road or area.

  The 1st BCT’s soldiers also will learn how to use “the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded,” 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.

  tags: bush, neocons, fascism, usa, orwell

• Joe Sixpack snubs Sarah Palin - Capitol Chronicles - Susan Demas - MLive.com

  tags: palin

  • But this raises a more important question: How can we trust John McCain when he’s willing to entrust the country he loves so deeply with someone so inexperienced and unintellectual?

    That fancy-pants know-it-all Obama doesn’t seem like such a bad guy to steer us through a financial meltdown no one seems to comprehend. As conservative icon Charles Krauthammer ruefully observes, the Democrat has a “first-class intellect and a first-class temperament. That will likely be enough to make him president.”

    He won’t lurch from stunt to stunt, as McCain jarringly has for his entire campaign. And Obama doesn’t need flash cards to solve the crisis, like Palin brought to her debate last week.

    Afterward, the talking heads (those evil Eastern elites) were convinced Joe Sixpack would go as ga-ga for Palin as they did, because the pretty lady said “Joe Sixpack,” “hockey mom” and the Reagan classic, “There you go again.”

    We didn’t. Why? Americans are smarter than a fifth grader. We do value substance over style. The fact that she can only spout scant talking points on the bailout and doesn’t grasp McCain’s position on Pakistan bothers us. That’s why every poll showed Biden wiped the floor with her.

  • On the campaign trail, Palin brings the heat to a movement running cold. “This is not a man who sees America as you and I do - as the greatest force for good in the world,” she drawls (rhetoric that incited one cultured fan to shout, “Kill him!”)

  • Palin will soon be relegated to irrelevance, perhaps the de facto leader of the far-right fringe of a party teetering on the brink of combustion. That’s why David Brooks calls her brand of anti-intellectual populism a “fatal cancer to the Republican party.”

    I hope it eats the party alive so it reverts back to the civil spirit of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Eisenhower. But instead of looking backward to ’80s-style solutions, the young Turks will have to embrace a 21st century realism to the staggering problems ahead.

    Palin can serve as a parable for the dangers of always choosing glib politics over good policy. She can invigorate the GOP, perhaps by destroying it as Democrats take both houses of Congress, the White House, most governor’s mansions and more state and local seats across the country.

    And for that, let’s salute ya, Sister Sarah.

• Anger Is Crowd’s Overarching Emotion at McCain Rally

  tags: elections08, mccain, palin

  • WAUKESHA, Wis., Oct. 9 — There were shouts of “Nobama” and “Socialist” at the mention of the Democratic presidential nominee. There were boos, middle fingers turned up and thumbs turned down as a media caravan moved through the crowd Thursday for a midday town hall gathering featuring John McCain and Sarah Palin.

  • Standing at the center of the crowd, McCain and Palin drew on the crowd’s energy as they repeatedly trained their fire on Obama.

    “Senator Obama has a clear radical, far-left, pro-abortion record,” McCain said after being asked about the issue.

    The answer prompted a shower of boos from the crowd members. They booed again when he mentioned William Ayers, who bombed U.S. facilities to protest the Vietnam War as part of the domestic terrorist group the Weather Underground. They booed again at the mention of Rep. Barney Frank, a liberal from Massachusetts.

  • “No, I’m not mad, I’m pissed,” said Joan Schmitz, who owns a plumbing company here. She said she was frustrated with polls showing Obama surging, McCain’s performance in a Tuesday night debate, Obama himself, the media, and the liberal group ACORN, which she said was registering voters fraudulently.

    Noting Obama’s connections with Ayers, she said that “if it was a Republican, it would be nonstop,” referring to what she said was the media ignoring the controversial acquaintance.

    “I can’t stand to look at him, I don’t trust him. I don’t like the circle of friends he keeps, I don’t like his policies,” Schmitz said of Obama. “I’m pissed off by it. I’m beyond mad. How is he climbing up in the polls?”

    On the way into the event, the Republican Party of Wisconsin handed out fliers reading “Your Vote Is Being Stolen,” an anti-ACORN leaflet that concluded, “Why is vote fraud allowed? Vote fraud is allowed since it benefits Democrats.”

    The crowd showed equal disdain for the media, fueled by comments from Palin, who encouraged the Republican supporters to take the campaign’s message around the media. “I can’t pick a fight with those who buy ink by the barrel,” she said. “It’s dangerous territory whenever I suggest the mainstream media isn’t asking all the questions.”

    That message was clearly shared among the crowd. Mike Payne, who traveled from Madison, Wis., for the rally, rejected the idea that McCain’s supporters are angry, preferring to use the word “frustrated.”

    “It might have something to do with you guys,” he told a reporter.

• The End Of American Capitalism?

  tags: capitalism

  • The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression is claiming another casualty: American-style capitalism.

    Since the 1930s, U.S. banks were the flagships of American economic might, and emulation by other nations of the fiercely free-market financial system in the United States was expected and encouraged. But the market turmoil that is draining the nation’s wealth and has upended Wall Street now threatens to put the banks at the heart of the U.S. financial system at least partly in the hands of the government.

    The Bush administration is considering a partial nationalization of some banks, buying up a portion of their shares to shore them up and restore confidence as part of the $700 billion government bailout. The notion of government ownership in the financial sector, even as a minority stakeholder, goes against what market purists say they see as the foundation of the American system.

    Yet the administration may feel it has no choice. Credit, the lifeblood of capitalism, ceased to flow. An economy based on the free market cannot function that way.

• Daylight Atheism > On Expertise

  “The Courtier’s Reply” reminds me of my own use of Occam’s Razor against…Occam’s religion.

  tags: religion, christianity, non-theism

  • One of the most common complaints leveled against Richard Dawkins (and other atheist writers) is that his understanding of religion isn’t sufficiently sophisticated - that he dismisses religion without delving into all its intricacies of doctrine. For instance, Terry Eagleton:

    What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them?

    What any of this has to do with the basic question of whether God exists is left unexplained. So common is this attack that P.Z. Myers gave it its own, very appropriate name - The Courtier’s Reply - a reference to the famous fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes. The analogy behind the Courtier’s Reply is that no one has the right to claim the Emperor is naked unless they’ve first engaged in a detailed study of all the latest fashions in imaginary fabrics.

    The use of this argument shows how religious apologists set the bar at a different height for atheists than they do for their own fellow believers. Why is it that that atheists are expected to be fluent in every last detail and nuance of theology, while no similar qualifications are needed to be a churchgoer?

• In Dozens of Calls, Palins Pressed for Trooper’s Removal - NYTimes.com

  tags: palin

  • Ms. Palin has denied that anyone told Mr. Monegan to dismiss Trooper Wooten, or that the commissioner’s ouster had anything to do with him. But an examination of the case, based on interviews with Mr. Monegan and several top aides, indicates that, to a far greater degree than was previously known, the governor, her husband and her administration pressed the commissioner and his staff to get Trooper Wooten off the force, though without directly ordering it.

    In all, the commissioner and his aides were contacted about Trooper Wooten three dozen times over 19 months by the governor, her husband and seven administration officials, interviews and documents show.

    “To all of us, it was a campaign to get rid of him as a trooper and, at the very least, to smear the guy and give him a desk job somewhere,” said Kim Peterson, Mr. Monegan’s special assistant, who like several other aides spoke publicly about the matter for the first time.

    Ms. Peterson, a 31-year veteran of state government who retired 10 days before Mr. Monegan’s firing, said she received about a dozen calls herself. “It was very clear that someone from the governor’s office wanted him watched,” she said.

    Nor did that interest end with Mr. Monegan, the examination shows. His successor, Chuck Kopp, recalled that in an exploratory phone call and then a job interview, Ms. Palin’s aides mentioned the governor’s concerns about Trooper Wooten. None of the 280 other troopers were discussed, Mr. Kopp said.

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