You can't fix Stupid!

This week, the Republican leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives did something that you wouldn't think is even possible: they introduced (and then the House passed) a five-page bill that, despite its brevity, may violate two separate provisions of the U.S. Constitution.




The bill increases the debt limit by some unspecified amount, but only for those expenditures "necessary to fund a commitment by the Federal Government that required payment before May 19, 2013." What does "necessary" mean here? I don't know, and the bill doesn't say. What about "commitment" and "required" - what do they mean? Don't know; doesn't say. Given sovereign immunity, I'm not sure that any payments by the federal government are ever "required" per se. What if the Government said, "Are you going to make me?"



Up until now, the federal debt limit has been a number. Now it's a concept, and an undefined one at that. I find it hard to square that vagueness with Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, which states that: "The validity of the public debt . . . shall not be questioned."



Not content with establishing that constitutional dilemma alone, the Republican leadership then made Congressional pay dependent on passing a budget. The bill says that if the Senate doesn't pass a budget, then Senate pay (which is monthly) is postponed to the first week of 2015. Specifically, it changes pay from $14,500 a month to zero per month, and then something like a $300,000 lump sum on Jan. 2, 2015.



I imagine that the polling on that looks good, but what about the 27th Amendment? The 27th Amendment provides: "No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened." The Republican leadership bill "varies" Senate compensation by postponing it for two years. (It also sticks a finger in the eye of the Senate, but what else is new?)



If you follow Tea Party yammerings, as I do, then you recognize that this "no budget, no pay" idea had been floating around in the Tea Party porcelain bowl for several years now. Right after it was introduced, the Republican Chairman of the Government Operations Committee (who presumably knows a thing or two about government operations) pointed out that this postponement would violate the 27th Amendment to the Constitution. (As Texas Gov. Rick Perry would say, "Oops.") Then he said he was mistaken. But maybe when he said that he was mistaken, that's when he was mistaken.



For goodness sake,  Members of Congress all swore to uphold the Constitution just two weeks earlier. The leader of the House Republican Caucus actually administered that oath to them. Couldn't they at least have waited a little longer?



To make things even worse, just a few days before this bill came up, the House Republicans arranged to have Members of the House read the Constitution out loud on the Floor of the House. Were they all wearing earplugs?



And yet these right-wingers keep telling us that they are "constitutional conservatives."



Fakers.



Anyway, Some voted "no." Because there is no way to vote "this is absurd."



Tea Party Republicans, please don't propose any bills that directly contravene the plain wording of the Constitution. If you were capable of embarrassment, you would be embarrassing yourselves.



Courage,

Gimme that Old Fashington Religion

A court in London has ruled that the Occupy camp near St Paul’s Cathedral should be evicted. When the bailiffs and police turn up, they are likely to find the camp surrounded by hundreds of people kneeling or standing in prayer. This is the face of radically leftwing religion. To much of the British media, it as a strange new phenomenon.




The proximity of the camp to Britain’s best known cathedral has turned Christianity’s relationship with politics into headline news. The camp began after police prevented protesters from getting closer to the London Stock Exchange. Cathedral staff responded with a tortuous series of U-turns. Three clergy resigned in the ensuing controversy.



As they were giving evidence in favour of the City of London’s legal bid for eviction, the cathedral’s leadership gave the impression of being more concerned with the messiness of the camp than with the damage inflicted by the financial institutions around them. They are sincere and compassionate people, but they are used to looking at the world from a position of privilege. The most they can offer is the Bishop of London’s increasingly desperate insistence that he is holding ethical discussions with bankers. To put it politely, this rather misses the scale of the crisis.



For hundreds of years, Christianity was at the centre of power in Britain. Like much of Europe, it went through various forms of Christendom, in which the state gave political backing to the official Church, while the Church provided moral sanction to the state.



As Christendom fades in a multi-faith society, British Christians have largely reacted in one of three ways.



Firstly, there are those who respond by revering the cultural shell of Christendom. This is the attitude that turns cathedrals into tourist attractions, expects to see nativity plays at Christmas and wants people to get married in churches that they never otherwise attend. It is the approach of people who last year celebrated the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible because of its linguistic and cultural significance, as if the quality of a text could be considered independently of the message it conveys.



A second approach is fear and panic. Some cling desperately to the remains of Christendom, such as privileges for church schools and opt-outs from equality legislation. Organizations such as the Christian Legal Centre insist that Christians are facing discrimination in Britain. Like many people who lose privileges, they mistake equality as an attack on their own freedom. They risk reducing Christian identity to the holding of certain views on sexuality and abortion.



At times, these two images of British Christianity seem to be the only ones visible in the media. The excellent work done by Christians groups on issues such as poverty, war and the environment often goes on away from the media spotlight.



But this is changing. Leftwing Christianity is gradually coming into public view. It is drawing on old traditions. For its first 300 years, Christianity was predominantly pacifist. Jesus’ protest against moneychangers is regarded by most scholars as one of the stories about him most likely to be historically accurate. Throughout the centuries, Christendom was challenged by people who called for a return to Jesus’ revolutionary message – Waldensians, Anabaptists and Quakers, as well as individuals and groups within more mainstream churches. The ring of prayer planned at the eviction is only one step in the growth of leftwing Christian activism in Britain. It is a step that is likely to be noticed. And that bodes well for Christians who do not want the options for the future to be nothing more than a choice between promoting bigotry and maintaining tourist attractions.

GOP (Guns over people) angry at president

Republicans piled criticism on Barack Obama on Tuesday for what they described as an ideological inauguration speech, and accused him of failing to offer anything in the way of compromise.



Obama and his vice-president Joe Biden attended a service at the National Cathedral in Washington in the morning, marking the traditional end to four days of inaugural events.



The pastor, the Rev Adam Hamilton, called for the parties to work together. "We're in need of a new common national vision – not one that is solely Democratic, or solely Republican," he said.



But before Obama had even left the church, the hard reality of Washington politics began to kick in.



Republican Congressman Pete King said Obama could at least have made an effort to reach out to Republicans. "I thought he could've found some way to be more constructive," King told CNN, adding: "You can still make a case but do it in a more magnanimous way."



Senator John McCain, Obama's presidential opponent in 2008, rounded on Obama, saying it was the eighth inauguration speech he had heard and the first in which a president had failed to reach out his hand to the opposition party.



Obama devoted much of his first inaugural speech in 2009 offering to work with the Republicans but spent most of the intervening years in bitter, debilitating fights with them that have frequently left Washington paralysed. Obama, frustrated by that and emboldened by his election victory, used his inaugural speech to underline his new combative approach, one in which he outlined a progressive agenda that he hoped to push through in spite of Republican opposition.



Conservative commentators joined Republican members of Congress in criticising Obama. Stephen Hayes at the Weekly Standard accused him seeking "to move the country even further left".



His colleague Paul Kengor echoed that, saying: "In the hands of a conservative like Ronald Reagan, this would be just fine, a return to our founding principles. Yet, in the hands of a radical-left 'progressive' like Barack Obama, these are not the soothing words they appear to be on the surface."



The first reward for Obama's new hardline approach could come as early as Wednesday. The Republicans had threatened to close down Washington in a new economic showdown but are backtracking.



They had given Obama an ultimatum: to make deep spending cuts or they would refuse to vote through raising the debt limit, which could have meant department after department closing down and no cheques for veterans or welfare recipients. Obama, facing them down, told them to go ahead: let the federal government close down and take the consequences.



Instead, Republicans are scheduled to vote on Wednesday in the House, where they have a majority, on a bill to extend the debt limit for a further three months.



The White House said that, while it had some concerns about the bill, if the House and Senate passed it, Obama would sign it.



Obama's press secretary Jay Carney, described the debt ceiling bill as a "very significant development" in scaling down the sense of conflict and the potential for events spinning out of control.

America's Big Political Fight:

Will We Grapple with Reality or Fully Detach and Live in Fantasy land?

Key elements of the American Right have set up permanent residence in the world of make-believe, making the real-world challenges we face almost impossible to solve.


The real struggle confronting the United States is not between the Right and the Left in any traditional sense, but between those who believe in reality and those who are entranced by unreality. It is a battle that is testing whether fact-based people have the same determination to fight for their real-world view as those who operate in a fact-free space do in defending their illusions.



These battle lines do relate somewhat to the Right/Left divide because today’s right-wing has embraced ideological propaganda as truth more aggressively and completely than those on the Left, though the Left (and the Center, too) are surely not immune from the practice of ignoring facts in pursuit of some useful agitprop.



But key elements of the American Right have set up permanent residence in the world of make-believe, making any commonsense approach to the real-world challenges nearly politically impossible. The Right’s fantasists also have the passions of true-believers, like a cult that gets angrier the more its views are questioned.



So, it doesn’t matter that scientific evidence proves global warming is real; the deniers will insist the facts are simply a government ploy to impose “tyranny.” It doesn’t matter how many schoolchildren are slaughtered by semi-automatic assault rifles – or what the real history of the Second Amendment was. To the gun fanatics, the Framers wanted armed rebellion against the non-violent political process they worked so hard to create.



On more narrow questions, it doesn’t matter whether President Barack Obama presents his short or long birth certificates, he must have somehow fabricated the Hawaiian state records to hide his Kenyan birth. Oh, yes, and Obama is “lazy” even though he may appear to an objective observer to be a multi-tasking workaholic.



The American Right’s collective departure from reality can be traced back decades, but clearly accelerated with the emergence of former actor Ronald Reagan on the national stage. Even his admirers acknowledge that Reagan had a strained relationship with facts, preferring to illustrate his points with distorted or apocryphal anecdotes.



Reagan’s detachment from reality extended from foreign policy to economics. As his rival for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination, George H.W. Bush famously labeled Reagan’s supply-side policies – of massive tax cuts for the rich which would supposedly raise more revenues – as “voodoo economics.”



But Bush, who knew better, then succumbed to Reagan’s political clout as he accepted Reagan’s vice presidential offer. In that way, the senior Bush would become a model for how other figures in the Establishment would pragmatically bend to Reagan’s casual disregard for reality.



Perception Management



The Reagan administration also built around the President a propaganda infrastructure that systematically punished politicians, citizens, journalists or anyone who dared challenge the fantasies. This private-public collaboration – coordinating right-wing media with government disinformationist – brought home to America the CIA’s strategy of “perception management” normally aimed at hostile populations.



Thus, the Nicaraguan Contras, who in reality were drug-connected terrorists roaming the countryside murdering, torturing and raping, became “the moral equivalent” of America’s Founding Fathers. To say otherwise marked you as a troublemaker who had to be “controversialized” and marginalized.



The remarkable success of Reagan’s propaganda was a lesson not lost on a young generation of Republican operatives and the emerging neoconservatives who held key jobs in Reagan’s Central American and public-diplomacy operations, the likes of Elliott Abrams and Robert Kagan. The neocons’ devotion to imperialism abroad seemed to motivate their growing disdain for empiricism at home. Facts didn’t matter; results did. [See Robert Parry’s  book Lost History.]



But this strategy wouldn’t have worked if not for gullible rank-and-file right-wingers who were manipulated by an endless series of false narratives. The Republican political pros manipulated the racial resentments of neo-Confederates, the religious zeal of fundamentalist Christians, and the free-market hero worship of Ayn Rand acolytes.



That these techniques succeeded in a political system that guaranteed freedom of speech and the press was not only a testament to the skills of Republican operatives like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. It was an indictment of America’s timid Center and the nation’s ineffectual Left. Simply put, the Right fought harder for its fantasy land than the rest of America did for the real world.



There were a number of key turning points in this “info-war.” For instance, Reagan’s secret relationship with the Iranian mullahs was partly revealed in the Iran-Contra scandal, but its apparent origins in treacherous Republican activities during Campaign 1980 – contacting Iran behind President Jimmy Carter’s back – were swept under the rug by mainstream Democrats and the Washington press corps.



Similarly, evidence of Contra drug-trafficking – and even CIA admissions about covering up and protecting those crimes – were downplayed by the major newspapers, including the Washington Post and the New York Times. Ditto the work of Central American truth commissions exposing massive human rights violations that Reagan aided and abetted.



The fear of taking on the Reagan propaganda machine in any serious or consistent way was so great that nearly everyone looked to their careers or their personal pleasures. One side dug in for political warfare and the other, too often, favored trips to wine country.



Distrusting the MSM (or as Sarah Palin calls it "The Lame stream Media"  [ Only a FOX news contributor would have the unmitigated gall to say that]



As this anti-empiricism deepened over several decades, the remaining thinking people in America came to distrust the mainstream. The initials “MSM” – standing for “mainstream media” – became an expression of derision and contempt, not undeserved given the MSM’s repeated failure to fight for the truth.



National Democrats, too, showed little fight. When evidence of Republican misconduct was available – as in the investigations of the early 1990s into Iran-Contra, Iraq-gate and the October Surprise case – accommodating Democrats, such as Rep. Lee Hamilton and Sen. David Boren chose to look the other way. [See America’s Stolen Narrative.]



The Democrats even submitted when the Right and the Republicans overturned the electoral will of the American people, as happened in Election 2000 when George W. Bush stole the Florida election and thus the White House from Al Gore. [For details, see the book, Neck Deep.]



In the decades after the Vietnam War, the American Left also drifted into irrelevance. Indeed, it’s common in some circles on the Left to observe that “America has no Left.” But what was left of the Left often behaved like disgruntled fans in the bleachers booing everyone on the field, the bad guys who were doing terrible things as well as the not-so-bad guys who were doing the best they could under impossible conditions.



This post-modern United States may have reached its nadir with George W. Bush’s presidency. In 2002-03, patently false claims were made about Iraq’s WMD and virtually no one in a position of power had the courage to challenge the lies. Deceived by Bush and the neocons – with the help of centrists like Colin Powell and the editors of the Washington Post – the nation lurched off into an aggressive war of choice.



Sometimes, the Right’s contempt for reality was expressed openly. When author Ron Suskind interviewed members of the Bush administration in 2004, he encountered a withering contempt for people who refused to adjust to the new faith-based world.



Citing an unnamed senior aide to George W. Bush, Suskind wrote: “The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ …



“‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”



Reality Bites Back



Despite this imperial arrogance, real reality gradually reasserted itself, both in the bloody stalemate in Iraq and in the economic crises that Bush’s anti-regulatory and low-tax policies created at home. By Election 2008, the American people were awaking with a terrible hangover from a three-decade binge on anti-reality moonshine.



In that sense, the election of Barack Obama represented a potential turning point. However, the angry Right that Ronald Reagan had built – and the corresponding crippling effects on the Center and the Left – didn’t just disappear.



The Right counterattacked ferociously against the nation’s first African-American president, even intimating violent revolution if Obama acted on his electoral mandate; Obama often behaved like one of those accommodating Democrats (in retaining much of Bush’s national security team, for instance); the mainstream press remained careerist; and the Left demanded perfection regardless of the political difficulties.



This combination of dysfunction contributed to the rise of the Tea Party and the Republican congressional victories in 2010. But Election 2012, with Obama’s reelection and a general rejection of Tea Party fanaticism, has created the chance of a do-over for American rationalists.



After all, the United States continues to see the consequences of three decades of right-wing delusions, including high unemployment; massive deficits; self-inflicted financial crises; a degraded middle class; poor health care for millions; a crumbling infrastructure; an overheating planet; costly foreign wars; a bloated Pentagon budget; and children massacred by troubled young men with ridiculously easy access to semi-automatic assault rifles.



Yet, if rational and pragmatic solutions are ever going to be applied to these problems, it is not just going to require that President Obama display more spine. The country is going to need its conscious inhabitants of the real world to stand up with at least the same determination as the deluded denizens of the made-up world.



Of course, this fight will be nasty and unpleasant. It will require resources, patience and toughness. But there is no other answer. Reality must be recovered and protected – if the planet and the children are to be saved.

How to rid the world of hate!

Why do terrorists hate America enough to give up their lives in order to deal the country such mortal blows? Of course it,s not America the terrorists hate; it,s American foreign policy. It,s what the United States has done to the world in the past half century -- all the violence, the bombings, the depleted uranium, the cluster bombs, the assassinations, the promotion of torture, the overthrow of governments, and more. The terrorists -- whatever else they might be -- are also rational human beings; which is to say that in their own minds they have a rational justification for their actions. Most terrorists are people deeply concerned by what they see as social, political or religious injustice and hypocrisy, and the immediate grounds for their terrorism is often retaliation for an action of the United States.


Most Americans find it difficult in the extreme to accept the proposition that terrorist acts against the United States can be viewed as revenge for Washington,s policies abroad. They believe that the US is targeted because of its freedom, its democracy, its modernity, its wealth, or just being part of the West.

But government officials know better. A Department of Defense study in 1997 concluded that: "Historical data show a strong correlation between US involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States." Former president Jimmy Carter, some years after he left the White House, was unambiguous in his concordance with such a sentiment: "We sent Marines into Lebanon and you only have to go to Lebanon, to Syria or to Jordan to witness first-hand the intense hatred among many people for the United States because we bombed and shelled and unmercifully killed totally innocent villagers -- women and children and farmers and housewives -- in those villages around Beirut. ... As a result of that ... we became kind of a Satan in the minds of those who are deeply resentful."

The terrorists responsible for the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 sent a letter to the New York Times which stated, in part: "We declare our responsibility for the explosion on the mentioned building. This action was done in response for the American political, economical, and military support to Israel the state of terrorism and to the rest of the dictator countries in the region."

For more than four months the most powerful nation in history rained down a daily storm of missiles upon one of the poorest and most backward people in the world. Eventually, this question pressed itself onto the world,s stage: Who killed more innocent, defenseless people? The terrorists in the United States on September 11 with their flying bombs? Or the Americans in Afghanistan with their AGM-86D cruise missiles, their AGM-130 missiles, their 15,000 pound "daisy cutter" bombs, their depleted uranium, and their cluster bombs? By year's end, the count of the terrorists, victims in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania stood at about 3,000. The total count of civilian dead in Afghanistan was essentially ignored by American officials and just about everyone else, but a painstaking compilation of numerous individual reports from the domestic and international media, aid agencies, and the United Nations, by an American professor -- hunting down the many separate incidents of 100-plus counts of the dead, the scores of dead, the dozens, and the smaller numbers -- arrived at considerably more than 3,500 through early December, and still counting.

The American scorched-earth bombing of Afghanistan may well turn out to be a political train wreck. Can it be doubted that thousands throughout the Muslim world were emotionally and spiritually recruited to the cause of the next Osama bin Laden by the awful ruination and perceived injustice? That is to say, the next generation of terrorists. Indeed, in December, while the American bombs were still falling on Afghanistan, a man -- British citizen Richard Reid, who was a convert to Islam -- tried to blow up an American Airlines plane en route to the United States with explosives hidden in his shoes. At the London mosque that Reid had attended, the cleric in charge warned that extremists were enlisting other young men like Reid and that agents aligned with radical Muslim figures had stepped up recruiting efforts since September 11. The cleric said that he knew of "hundreds of Richard Reids" recruited in Britain. Reid, described in the press as a "drifter," reportedly traveled to Israel, Egypt, the Netherlands, and Belgium before arriving in Paris and boarding the American Airlines plane. This raises the question of who was financing him. The freezing of numerous bank accounts of alleged terrorist groups throughout the world by the United States may have rather limited effect.

Americans do not feel any more secure in their places of work, in their places of leisure, or in their travels than they did a day before their government's bombings began.

Has the power elite learned anything? Here's James Woolsey, former Director of the CIA, speaking in December in Washington, advocating an invasion of Iraq and unconcerned about the response of the Arab world: The silence of the Arab public in the wake of America's victories in Afghanistan, he said, proves that "only fear will re-establish respect for the U.S." What, then, can the United States do to end terrorism directed against it? The answer lies in removing the anti-American motivations of the terrorists. To achieve this, American foreign policy will have to undergo a metamorphosis.

If I were the president, I could stop terrorist attacks against the United States in a few days. Permanently. I would first apologize to all the widows and orphans, the tortured and impoverished, and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism. Then I would announce, in all sincerity, to every corner of the world, that America's global interventions have come to an end, and inform Israel that it is no longer the 51st state of the USA but now -- oddly enough -- a foreign country. I would then reduce the military budget by at least 90% and use the savings to pay reparations to the victims. There would be more than enough money. One year's military budget of 330 billion dollars is equal to more than $18,000 an hour for every hour since Jesus Christ was born. That's what I'd do on my first three days in the White House. On the fourth day, I'd be assassinated.

NRA- Extreme or sensible?

 

 

By spearheading the gun industry’s extremist agenda, which is not even supported by its own members, the leadership of the National Rifle Association (NRA) is proving itself to be uniquely despicable. And with all the  hate groups out there -- groups we’re all too familiar with here at Scripture Institute -- that’s saying something.

Gun violence is a continuing national tragedy. But since the Sandy Hook shooting, NRA leaders have been aggressively, and dangerously, stoking irrational paranoia about attacks on Americans’ freedoms, erroneously conflating common sense policies that could help reduce gun violence with infringements on constitutional rights. In an ad released yesterday -- which they pulled down later the same day -- the NRA accused President Obama of being an “elitist hypocrite” for having secret service protection for his children.

 

The NRA is a massive organization, with immense wealth and powerful lobbyists. But the American people and even, according to polls, vast majorities of gun owners and the NRA’s own rank and file membership support many of the common sense reforms opposed by the NRA. However, because of the political clout the NRA leadership and the gun industry have with many politicians, particularly in the GOP, it’s going to take a groundswell of Americans demanding action if change is going to happen.

NRA spokespersons have served up a heap of rhetoric aimed at manipulating ordinary people into zealous support of the gun industry’s ability to make as much profit as possible with as little restriction as possible, the safety and welfare of the public be damned. And an unholy alliance of far-right organizations, activists and politicians, including much of the Religious Right, has fallen in behind the NRA in staunch opposition to any common sense reforms that could help stem gun violence.

President Obama proposed some strong commonsense reforms yesterday and Congress must seriously consider them instead of drowning in the flood of distractions and deflections being thrown at them and the public by NRA officials.

With every press release, speech, TV ad and interview, NRA spokespeople and supporters are relentlessly attempting to shift the debate about gun policy reforms like background checks, a ban on assault weapons and restrictions on the size of ammunition clips to some phony disagreement about armed guards in schools.

The national conversation currently looks a little something like this:

Leader in favor of a commonsense approach: “We should consider sensible reforms that will protect 2nd Amendment rights while improving public safety, and devote resources to researching the causes of gun violence in an attempt to prevent more of it.”

NRA: “Why don’t you support security guards in schools to protect our kids? Do you hate America’s children?”

It’s time to stop this madness and harness the rightful outrage that the NRA’s efforts and tactics deserve. We need to be at least as vocal as the gun enthusiasts, Tea Partiers and gun industry lobbyists.

Thank you for standing up for common sense in government and our fundament right to keep our children, and all of us,

GOP plans to "steal" your vote next time!

Fresh from claiming the GOP’s 2012 run was “a great campaign—a great nine-month campaign" that only went awry at the end, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus now wants to rig the Electoral College so that when Republicans lose they still might “win.”




Specifically, Priebus is urging Republican governors and legislators to take up what was once a fringe scheme to change the rule for distribution of Electoral College votes. Under the Priebus plan, electoral votes from battleground states such as Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin and other states that now regularly back Democrats for president would be allocated not to the statewide winner but to the winners of individual congressional districts.



Because of gerrymandering by Republican governors and legislators, and the concentration of Democratic votes in urban areas and college towns, divvying up Electoral College votes based on congressional district wins would yield significantly better results for the GOP. In Wisconsin, where Democrat Barack Obama won in 2012 by a wider margin than he did nationally, the president would only have gotten half the electoral votes. In Pennsylvania, where Obama won easily, he would not have gotten the twenty electoral votes that he did; instead, under the Priebus plan, it would have been eight for Republican Mitt Romney, twelve for Barack Obama.



Nationwide, Obama won a sweeping popular-vote victory—with an almost 5-million ballot margin that made him the first president since Dwight Eisenhower to take more than 51 percent of the vote in two elections. That translated to a very comfortable 322-206 win in the Electoral College.



How would the 2012 results have changed if a Priebus plan had been in place? According to an analysis by Fair Vote-The Center for Voting and Democracy, the results would have been a dramatically closer and might even have yielded a Romney win.



Under the most commonly proposed district plan (the statewide winner gets two votes with the rest divided by congressional district) Obama would have secured the narrowest possible win: 270-268. Under more aggressive plans (including one that awards electoral votes by district and then gives the two statewide votes to the candidate who won the most districts), Romney would have won 280-258.



“If Republicans in 2011 had abused their monopoly control of state government in several key swing states and passed new laws for allocating electoral votes, the exact same votes cast in the exact same way in the 2012 election would have converted Barack Obama’s advantage of nearly five million popular votes and 126 electoral votes into a resounding Electoral College defeat,” explains FairVote’s Rob Richie.



This is something Priebus, a bare-knuckles pol who promoted a variety of voter-disenfranchisement schemes in 2012, well understands.



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The RNC chair is encouraging Republican governors and legislators—who, thanks to the “Republican wave” election of 2010, still control many battleground states that backed Obama and the Democrats in 2012—to game the system.



“I think it’s something that a lot of states that have been consistently blue [Democratic in presidential politics] that are fully controlled red [in the statehouse] ought to be considering,” Priebus says with regard to the schemes for distributing electoral votes by district rather than the traditional awarding of the votes of each state (except Nebraska and Maine, which have historically used narrowly defined district plans) to the winner.



Already, there are moves afoot in a number of battleground states to “fix” the rules to favor the Republicans in 2016, just as they have already fixed the district lines for electing members of the House. Thanks to gerrymandering and the concentration of Democratic votes, Republicans were able to lose the overall nationwide vote for US House seats by 1.4 million votes and still take control of the chamber—thus giving the United States the divided government that voters have rejected.



There are many reforms that are needed to expand democracy in the United States. But gaming the Electoral College is not one of them.



Indeed, as Richie says, the very fact that it is possible to rewrite the rules and use gerrymandered congressional district lines to thwart the will of the people regarding the election of the president of the United States the very fact “should give us all pause.”



“The Election of the president should be a fair process where all American voters should have an equal ability to hold their president accountable,” says Richie. “It’s time for the nation to embrace one-person, one-vote elections and the ‘fair fight’ represented by a national popular vote. Let’s forever dismiss the potential of such electoral hooliganism and finally do what the overwhelming majorities of Americans have consistently preferred: make every vote equal with a national popular vote for president.”



That’s the right standard for a modern nation that respects democracy.



And Reince Priebus, who was wrong about the Republicans running a “great” campaign in 2012, is even more wrong when he proposes rule changes that would allow a losing Republican candidate to “win” the presidency.

Re: Guns for everyone?

Babies now Born will get a concealed to carry with every Birth certificate!


This week, people were shocked when the Drudge Report posted a giant picture of Hitler over a headline speculating that the White House will proceed with executive orders to limit access to firearms. The proposed orders are exceedingly tame, but Drudge’s reaction is actually a common conservative response to any invocation of gun control.




The NRA, Fox News, Fox News (again), Alex Jones, email chains, Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher, Gun Owners of America, etc., all agree that gun control was critical to Hitler’s rise to power. Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (“America’s most aggressive defender of firearms ownership”) is built almost exclusively around this notion, popularizing posters of Hitler giving the Nazi salute next to the text: “All in favor of ‘gun control’ raise your right hand.”



In his 1994 book, NRA head Wayne LaPierre dwelled on the Hitler meme at length, writing: “In Germany, Jewish extermination began with the Nazi Weapon Law of 1938, signed by Adolf Hitler.”



And it makes a certain amount of intuitive sense: If you’re going to impose a brutal authoritarian regime on your populace, better to disarm them first so they can’t fight back.



Unfortunately for LaPierre et al., the notion that Hitler confiscated everyone’s guns is mostly bogus. And the ancillary claim that Jews could have stopped the Holocaust with more guns doesn’t make any sense at all if you think about it for more than a minute.



University of Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt explored this myth in depth in a 2004 article published in the Fordham Law Review. As it turns out, the Weimar Republic, the German government that immediately preceded Hitler’s, actually had tougher gun laws than the Nazi regime. After its defeat in World War I, and agreeing to the harsh surrender terms laid out in the Treaty of Versailles, the German legislature in 1919 passed a law that effectively banned all private firearm possession, leading the government to confiscate guns already in circulation. In 1928, the Reichstag relaxed the regulation a bit, but put in place a strict registration regime that required citizens to acquire separate permits to own guns, sell them or carry them.



The 1938 law signed by Hitler that LaPierre mentions in his book basically does the opposite of what he says it did. “The 1938 revisions completely deregulated the acquisition and transfer of rifles and shotguns, as well as ammunition,” Harcourt wrote. Meanwhile, many more categories of people, including Nazi party members, were exempted from gun ownership regulations altogether, while the legal age of purchase was lowered from 20 to 18, and permit lengths were extended from one year to three years.



The law did prohibit Jews and other persecuted classes from owning guns, but this should not be an indictment of gun control in general. Does the fact that Nazis forced Jews into horrendous ghettos indict urban planning? Should we eliminate all police officers because the Nazis used police officers to oppress and kill the Jews? What about public works — Hitler loved public works projects? Of course not. These are merely implements that can be used for good or ill, much as gun advocates like to argue about guns themselves. If guns don’t kill people, then neither does gun control cause genocide (genocidal regimes cause genocide).



Besides, Omer Bartov, a historian at Brown University who studies the Third Reich, notes that the Jews probably wouldn’t have had much success fighting back. “Just imagine the Jews of Germany exercising the right to bear arms and fighting the SA, SS and the Wehrmacht. The [Russian] Red Army lost 7 million men fighting the Wehrmacht, despite its tanks and planes and artillery. The Jews with pistols and shotguns would have done better?” he told Salon.



Proponents of the theory sometimes point to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as evidence that, as Fox News’ Judge Andrew Napolitano put it, “those able to hold onto their arms and their basic right to self-defense were much more successful in resisting the Nazi genocide.” But as the Tablet’s Michael Moynihan points out, Napolitano’s history (curiously based on a citation of work by French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson) is a bit off. In reality, only about 20 Germans were killed, while some 13,000 Jews were massacred. The remaining 50,000 who survived were promptly sent off to concentration camps.



Robert Spitzer, a political scientist who studies gun politics and chairs the political science department at SUNY Cortland, told Mother Jones’ Gavin Aronsen that the prohibition on Jewish gun ownership was merely a symptom, not the problem itself. “[It] wasn’t the defining moment that marked the beginning of the end for Jewish people in Germany. It was because they were persecuted, were deprived of all of their rights, and they were a minority group,” he explained.



Meanwhile, much of the Hitler myth is based on an infamous quote falsely attributed to the Fuhrer, which extols the virtue of gun control:



This year will go down in history! For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!



The quote has been widely reproduced in blog posts and opinion columns about gun control, but it’s “probably a fraud and was likely never uttered,” according to Harcourt. “This quotation, often seen without any date or citation at all, suffers from several credibility problems, the most significant of which is that the date often given [1935] has no correlation with any legislative effort by the Nazis for gun registration, nor would there have been any need for the Nazis to pass such a law, since gun registration laws passed by the Weimar government were already in effect,” researchers at the useful website GunCite note.



“As for Stalin,” Bartov continued, “the very idea of either gun control or the freedom to bear arms would have been absurd to him. His regime used violence on a vast scale, provided arms to thugs of all descriptions, and stripped not guns but any human image from those it declared to be its enemies. And then, when it needed them, as in WWII, it took millions of men out of the Gulags, trained and armed them and sent them to fight Hitler, only to send back the few survivors into the camps if they uttered any criticism of the regime.”



Bartov added that this misreading of history is not only intellectually dishonest, but also dangerous. “I happen to have been a combat soldier and officer in the Israeli Defense Forces and I know what these assault rifles can do,” he said in an email.



He continued: “Their assertion that they need these guns to protect themselves from the government — as supposedly the Jews would have done against the Hitler regime — means not only that they are innocent of any knowledge and understanding of the past, but also that they are consciously or not imbued with the type of fascist or Bolshevik thinking that they can turn against a democratically elected government, indeed turn their guns on it, just because they don’t like its policies, its ideology, or the color, race and origin of its leaders.”

In a world of self "there is no God"

The Unbearable Heaviness of Being (In a World Without God)


Modern man is in a bad way. Everywhere we see people in the modern Western world in crisis and chaos. The signs of disintegration and degeneration are of course apparent for all to see. And the ways people seek to cope with the modern plague of alienation, meaninglessness and despair take plenty of forms: suicide, drug abuse, reckless relationships, sexual promiscuity and random acts of violence.



From whence does this mess arise? Why are we in such dire straits? The answer is as simple as it is profound. We are in a monumental mess because we are seeking to carry a load we were never meant to carry. We are seeking to do the impossible. We are seeking to put a square peg in a round hole.



We are, in a word, seeking to be God. Modern man has declared there is no God. There is no centre to the universe. There is no divine glue that holds all things together. We have wrenched God out of the universe, and there is now a gaping hole where God once was.



But just as nature always abhors a vacuum, so the only thing left to fill this massive hole of God’s banishment is mankind – individuals who have been made in God’s image, but who no longer believe that creator exists anymore.



So now we are seeking to climb a mountain impossible to climb. In kicking God out of the universe, we are seeking to take his place. We are vainly pretending that the centre of all things is ourselves, and that we can hold all things together. We are now the source of all meaning, of all purpose, of what is true and false, right and wrong.



We, the creature, have usurped the rightful place of the creator, and now think we can somehow take his place. But that means we are now carrying a burden impossible to bear. We have supplanted God and enthroned self. But naked self, without the God of heaven and earth, is crushed under the load of its own choosing.



No wonder we have an obsession with self today. With no more God in the universe, all we are left with is self. We have sought to replace the sovereign God of the universe with the Sovereign Self. With such a huge burden to shoulder, we are not holding up very well. Thus we are awash with techniques and programs to help the self cope.



We are up to our ears in self-fulfillment, self-actualization, self-esteem, self-identification. Therapists, psychiatrists and counselors are working overtime to deal with the problems of self. But to the extent that these are secular counselors, their help will be of limited value.



Man is more than just a slab of meat. He is also a spiritual creature with spiritual needs. When we deny this aspect of human reality, we end up with alienation, despair, and frustration. In biblical terms, our real problem is sin.



Sin robs us of our rightful place because it robs God of his rightful place. And when we do that, we destroy ourselves. As David Wells puts it in his new book, “The self that has been made to bear the weight of being the center of all reality, the source of all our meaning, mystery, and morality, finds that it has become fragile and empty. When God dies to us, we die in ourselves”.



We are simply not built to carry the world on our shoulders. Atheists can chirp all they like about the non-existence of God, but all they are doing is chaining mankind with a death-wish. Instead of liberating mankind, atheism enslaves him.



In his superb examination of atheistic humanism, and the huge costs of it in recent human history (as in the reigns of Stalin and Hitler), Vincent Miceli closes with these words:



“Whoever strikes against God strikes down himself. The atheist denying God degrades himself. The atheist exalting himself above God sinks below the level of animate and inanimate beings. Liberation from God is enslavement in creatures. Absolute humanism is the sure road to absolute despotism. Denial of God as truth begets the imprisonment of man in the self-imposed darkness of his own myths.” (The Gods of Atheism, 1971)



The twentieth century certainly bore witness to the despotism and inhumanity of the atheist utopias. How could it be otherwise, when we seek to take the place of our Creator? When we attempt to dethrone God, and put our own fallen and finite values and wisdom into place, we are doomed to failure.



Yet we have not learned the lessons of the previous century. We continue to make the same mistakes today. Only now we celebrate these moves and glory in our past mistakes. The new militant atheists positively applaud and fastidiously promote the eradication of all religion – at least in its public expressions.



The new atheist fundamentalists like Dawkins and Hitchens pronounce a curse on all religion, but will probably not live long enough to see the full results of such foolish thinking. They should have learned from what was attempted in the name of Sovereign Man last century. Instead they make excuses for it, and claim that communism was not atheistic, or that Hitler was somehow really a Christian.



The inhumanity of humanism was warned about by many earlier prophets. C.S. Lewis spoke much of the “abolition of man”. The secular experiment is a grand experiment to see what life is like without God. And the results are not looking very good.



As the late philosopher, and atheist turned Christian, C.E.M. Joad put it, “For the first time in history there is coming to maturity a generation of men and women who have no religion, and who feel no need for one.” Or as the late ethicist Paul Ramsey said, “Ours is the first attempt in recorded history to build a culture upon the premise that God is dead.”



Announcing, and believing, that God is dead has consequences. And it is we who suffer the most for it. We cannot bear the whole universe on our shoulders. We were not meant to. We must let God be God. Only then can men be men. Only then can we find the way forward to be possible, and the burdens not insurmountable.



Miceli again lays out what is at stake here. Although negative in nature, a-theism has an affirmative component: “For atheism receives its true, full meaning from the reality it rejects – God. It represents a choice the creature makes of himself and his universe in preference to his Creator. For every temptation to deny God has as the necessary correlative of the denial the affirmation of the creature over God”.



“The affirmation of the creature over God”. If that sounds like an absurd proposition, it is. But the Psalmist rightly expressed this absurdity three millennia ago: “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Psalm 53:1). For most of human history mankind has let God be God. Today we think we know better. But the foolish and tragic results only continue to multiply.

Top 10 quotes of 2012

The Best Quotes of 2012:
(LIST: Should Psy Be TIME’s Person of the Year?)
1. “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what … who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims. … These are people who pay no income tax. … and so my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
— Mitt Romney, remarks at private fundraiser, Boca Raton, Florida, May 17
2. “We took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet [in Massachusetts]. I went to a number of women’s groups and said, “Can you help us find folks?” and they brought us whole binders full of women.”
— Mitt Romney, second presidential debate, Hempstead, New York, Oct. 16
3. “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that.”
— Barack Obama, remarks at campaign appearance, Roanoke, Virginia, July 13
4. “Please proceed, Governor.”
— Obama, during the second presidential debate in Hempstead, New York, Oct. 16, as Romney insisted (incorrectly) that the President had not called the Libya attack an act of terrorism.
5. “You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets because the nature of our military has changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.”
— Obama, third presidential debate, Boca Raton, Florida, Oct. 22
6. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
— Missouri Republican senatorial candidate Todd Akin, KTVI-TV interview, Aug. 19
7. “You hit a reset button for the fall campaign; everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and we start all over again.”
— Romney senior campaign adviser Eric Fehrnstrom, CNN interview, March 21
8. “I’m an honorary consul general, so I have inviolability.”
—Jill Kelley, in a telephone call to an emergency dispatcher, Tampa, Florida, Nov. 11, regarding media crews at her home as news broke of her involvement in the resignation of CIA director David Petraeus
9. “Oppan Gangnam style.”
—South Korean rapper PSY, “Gangnam Style”
10. [tie] “Under current law, on January 1st, 2013, there is going to be a massive fiscal cliff of large spending cuts and tax increases.”
—Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, testimony at House Committee on Financial Services hearing, Feb. 29
10. [tie] “I care more about my country than I do about a 20-year-old pledge.”
—Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss, WMAZ-TV television interview on the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, Nov. 21
10 (tie)
“I have a job to do. … If you think right now I give a damn about presidential politics, then you don’t know me.”
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Fox News interview on Hurricane Sandy, Oct. 30


Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/12/13/mitt-romneys-47-percent-gaffe-tops-yales-quotes-of-the-year/#ixzz2H82DSTIw