Monroe Anderson

Who arrested religion in Indiana?

 

    Indiana's Religious Freedom law has triggered a spirited debate throughout the nation and may be the next right wing attack on civil rights. Here's my Chicago Defender Column on the controversy.

 

What’s bad for the gays will be bad for the Blacks

 

Monroe Anderson

Defender Columnist

 

If you haven’t been paying attention to the firestorm over Indiana’s “freedom of religion” law, it’s time that you do. Our neighboring state’s new legislation reflects Black America’s past and could easily come to mirror our future.

The bill is rightly being described as a license to discriminate. It allows anyone with a business to not do business with anyone they choose by claiming they believe it violates their religious values.

We’ve seen this play before.

God and religion have been used as the guiding principle in overt discrimination against Blacks throughout virtually all of our nation’s history. The KKK burned crosses before lynching Black men.  Bigoted Christians cited the curse of Ham, the father of Canaan in Genesis, to justify slavery. “Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.”

Ham is believed to have been a Black man.

Unequal public schools for Blacks were the will of the Almighty opined Georgia Gov. Allen Candler in 1901, “God made them negroes and we cannot by education make them white folks.”

Nor did God cotton to miscegenation.  Richard Loving, a white man, was sentenced to one year in prison for marrying Mildred Jeter, a Black woman. The couple had broken Virginia's law, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, by going to Washington, D.C. to get married then naively returning to home.

Apparently the Lovings had broken the Holy Father’s law as well. “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents,” wrote Judge Leon M. Bazile in his 1959 ruling. “The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act does not mention same-sex mixing but it’s arguably aimed at those with a certain sexual orientation. Last year, the same-sex marriage ban was overturned by a federal court. Some pouting proponents, who wanted the ban to stand, headed straight for the governor and the Indiana General Assembly to make sure there would be a freedom of religion law on guard to protect bigotry, as they knew it.

The state’s RFRA is yet another Republican head-fake where conservatives pretend that they’re not doing anything wrong while they’re definitely doing something wrong. Just like the GOP’s scheme to suppress Black participation at the ballot box through voter I.D. laws, the religious freedom law would allow business owners the right to use their faith as an excuse not to serve lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transsexuals, aka LGBTs--or hire or rent to them.

Black Americans know all too well how that game is played and if the new rules remain legalized then it won’t be long before it’s played on us. Again.

The legislation Gov. Pence signed last week prohibits state laws that “substantially burden” a religious institution, businesses and associations from following religious beliefs. The new law in effect serves as a legal shield for people, associations and businesses big and small from being sued for discrimination if they claim their religion made them do it.

    The uproar that followed caught Indiana’s governor off guard. He reflectively characterized it as a battle between religious freedom and gay rights, assuming he knew who’d win that fight.

Gov. Pence, and his overly weighted Republican General Assembly, quickly discovered that they were wrong. Besides the sign-carrying LGBT protesters, Indiana’s state lawmakers heard disapproval from other states, businesses, sports organizations, future conventioneers and social media.   

The CEOs from Eli Lilly and Co., Anthem and Indiana University Health were among nine of Indiana’s largest employers pointing out that discriminatory legislation was bad for business. Seattle’s mayor and Connecticut’s governor banned their employees from traveling to Indiana to do business. Indianapolis-based Angie’s List CEO announced that his company was going to halt plans for a $40 million expansion in the state’s capital. The president of NCAA, whose Final Four competition takes place in Indianapolis this weekend, said yesterday  that Indiana's new "religious freedom" law goes against what higher education and America is all about. And there is, of course, a social media response: On Twitter the hashtag is #boycottindiana.

All that outrage has focused Gov. Pence’s mind like a hanging. He was claiming that Indiana’s RFRA law was no different from the one in Illinois and the other 18 states that passed one. Pence left out the part about those other states having a separate law that specifically protected LGBTs from discrimination, while his state does not. You can be fired in Indiana for being gay.

Over the weekend, he was asserting that the law wouldn’t be changed. Yesterday he held a press conference to announce that maybe it would. He’s having his legislature revamp the onerous law.

“Clearly. Clearly, there’s been misunderstanding and confusion and mischaracterization of this law,” Gov. Pence said. “I abhor discrimination.”

Right. Don’t stop paying attention yet. Arkansas passed its own religious freedom law yesterday.

African Americans are caught between a union and a Republican Place

 

Rauner’s union battle in black and white

By Monroe Anderson

DEFENDER COLUMNIST

   

If anything can that raise a Republican’s ire almost as much as a Black man in the White House, it’s labor unions.

 

So few should have been surprised when the new Republican governor of Illinois, Bruce Rauner, came up with an ingenious initiative to further weaken the state’s labor unions.

 

During last week’s State of the State address, Rauner said he would like to see “empowerment zones” in counties across the state where voters would decide whether unions could exist and workers should be obligated to pay associated dues. Given the governor’s party affiliation and the fact that he’s a one percenter, it’s easy to guess who he is zeroing in on empowering and who he’s zoning out.

 

Making the standard-issue, corporation-coddling Republican argument that the smaller the union presence, the greater the number of jobs, on Monday, Rauner signed Executive Order 15-13, which denies labor the right to deduct dues from state employees who benefit from union activities but don’t want to pay to support them.

 

As our newly constituted Congress is reaffirming, Republicans may be lousy at governing but they are masters of code wording, dog whistling and name-calling.

 

When the GOP set out to do some serious union busting by stripping organized labor of its funding, power and influence, for example, the words destruction and dismemberment were spoken mainly in quiet rooms while those southern states and Midwestern ones where Republicans ruled went about their dirty deeds. Instead, Republicans insisted these would be “right-to-work” states.

 

Rauner is just the latest of Republican governors, who after immediately taking office, has made it his mission to kneecap the unions. Republican Gov. Rick Snyder was not halfway through his first term when he signed a bill making Michigan the 24th right to work state in the nation. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has forged his anti-union alchemy into gold by cutting the collective bargaining rights of most of his state’s public unions and transforming himself into one of the current shiny objects among the potential 2016 Republican presidential nominee contenders.

 

Like Rauner, both Walker and Snyder asserted that their union body slams would mean more jobs for their states. So far, the reasons for Michigan’s modest job increases are debatable and Wisconsin’s job growth has been so slow that Walker grasped at one of the right wing’s threadbare straws blaming it on Obamacare.

 

Union jobs have always been considered “good jobs.” They have also been good for America. Whether it’s the 40-week, paid vacation, pensions, health insurance or higher wages, over the decades labor unions are directly and indirectly responsible for raising the standard of living for millions but cutting into the precious bottom lines of corporations as people and the people who over-reward themselves for running them. Labor unions also fail to endear themselves with Republicans by being important campaign contributors for the Democrats.

 

Unfortunately, for Black Americans, we find ourselves between the labor unions and a Republican place.  

 

One out of every five working Blacks are government employees, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, When the Republican’s national obsession with austerity was running at fever pitch six years ago, governors across America reduced their state’s payroll through mass layoffs of state employees. African Americans, who are overwhelmingly Democrat, took a disproportionate hit, becoming the most fired and at risk of being the least rehired.

 

From the beginning of the Great Migration until now, it’s been a continuous struggle for African Americans in Chicago to get either contractors or the labor unions to cut them in on the action. When black skilled craftsmen, who had come from generations of bricklayers from the south, moved north, by edit, union bosses blocked them from working on the best jobs.

 

History has stubbornly repeated itself. Lilly-white trade unions have been as much a part of the wink and nod society as the boardrooms they take on. Both have been almost exclusively populated with white men. Both have been perfectly satisfied with that chummy arrangement for far too long.

 

Even now, too often when you see construction companies at work on big projects throughout Chicago, you don’t see a crew that looks like the residents of the city. Even with the implementation of set-aside programs, you don’t see big black construction firms getting their fair share of the jobs.

 

Of course all unions are not alike but the battle between the governor and the unions may not be an easy one for Blacks in Illinois to join. It may simply be a case of going with the devil we knew or the devil we’re getting to know.

 

Sikh Slayings: White Anxiety Gone Extreme

Here's my Root commentary on the Sikh tragedy. No more commentary here. It speaks for itself.

 

Sikh Slayings: White Anxiety Gone Extreme

America's browning drives a backlash that found its most virulent strain in Wade Michael Page.

By: Monroe Anderson | Posted: August 10, 2012 at 12:26 AM

 

(The Root) -- When Wade Michael Page walked into a Wisconsin temple last wesek, murdering six Sikh worshippers and critically wounding three others, it was an incident waiting to happen.

As the neo-Nazi loser marched through the temple randomly shooting one Sikh after the next, perhaps the "14 words" motto of white supremacists was running through his warped mind: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."

To the insecure and frightened haters in our nation, the end of white dominance in America is increasingly inevitable. Besides being red, white and blue, the good old US of A is steadily becoming brown, black and yellow -- a majority-minority nation.

During a 12-month period that ended July 2011, for the first time in America's modern history, more minority babies were born than white babies. Casually referred to by white supremacists as members of "the mud races," Hispanic, black and Asian newborns made up 50.4 percent of the nation's births during that period. Just 22 years ago, minority births accounted for a much lower figure -- 37 percent.

"White supremacist groups have been having a meltdown since the Census Bureau predicted that non-Hispanic whites would lose the majority by 2050," said Mark Potok, spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitored Wade Michael Page in particular for the past 12 years, and hate groups in general for much longer than that. "The demographic change in this country is the single-most-important driver in the growth of hate groups and extremist groups over the last few years," he told ABC News.

Last year Potok's organization reported that hate groups in America had exploded to more than 1,000 from 602 at the beginning of the millennium.

Domestic terrorist Page, a 40-year-old U.S. Army reject, who died from a self-inflicted wound during the Oak Creek massacre, could take credit for some of that growth. For more than a decade, Page had been playing hate music. He played with white-power heavy-metal bands affiliated with Hammerskins Nation, and he led a couple of bands of his own, Definite Hate and End Apathy. His music appealed to other young white losers, creating new haters every day. It also raised money to help bankroll other hate groups like the National Alliance, the violent hate group that inspired Timothy McVeigh to blow up a Oklahoma City federal building in 1995.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, which also monitors America's white supremacy groups, the names of these racists bands reveal what's on their minds and in their hearts, names like Grinded Nig, Jew Slaughter and Aggravated Assault. "In keeping with its attempts to reach out to young people, one label, named Resistance Records, even markets a white supremacist video game, 'Ethnic Cleansing,' " the ADL reports on its website. "The game is a first-person-shooter in which the player takes on the role of a white warrior in a future 'Race War,' who must kill all nonwhites to ensure 'the survival of your kind.' "

Although these virulent, malicious white supremacists, who wear their hate on their tattoo sleeves and everywhere else, are more or less a limited group of bigots, they may merely be the underbelly of a larger phenomenon.

When the Tea Party and other conservatives cry, "We want our country back," it doesn't take much imagination to translate what that means as the nation's demographics and culture continue their colorful shift.

Mainstream conservatives have been spewing coded, dog-whistle racist messages since Ronald Reagan's "Welfare Queen" speech in 1976 and the Willie Horton ad employed in the George H.W. Bush 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis. More recently, the billionaire Koch brothers and their right-wing organization, Americans for Prosperity, were accused of buying a North Carolina school board in an effort to resegregate the Wake County school system.

So I wasn't exactly shocked when conservatives attacked Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano when she issued a report in April 2009 warning that right-wing extremists threaten American security. The nine-page report, titled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," documented the smoldering hate among the nation's extreme right-wing groups, warning that some individuals might commit violent acts. "If such violence were to occur," the report said, "it likely would be isolated, small-scale, and directed at specific immigration-related targets."

Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin posted a blog with this headline: "Confirmed: The Obama DHS Hit Job on Conservatives Is Real."

Another conservative website, Alex Jones' Prison Planet, is headlined, "Homeland Security Report Lists 'Liberty Lovers' as Terrorists."

And then-top Republican of the House Intelligence committee, former Michigan Rep. Pete Hoekstra, charged "unsubstantiated conclusions and political bias," worthy of a House investigation.

I would like to attribute all this hate to good old-fashioned American exceptionalism, but I would be wrong.

A year ago, Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik went on a shooting and bombing spree that left 77 people dead, many of them teenagers, almost all of them Muslims. Like his brethren in the U.S., he hated Muslims, he hated people who didn't look like him and he hated cultural diversity.

I fear this is just the beginning. Not only are some white Americans threatened by the encroaching "mud races," but there is a quickening recognition around the planet that the world is yellow, brown and black.

Less than a quarter of the world's population is white. By 2060, fears conservative Pat Buchanan, that percentage may dip into the single digits.

Cyber columnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed-page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show. He was also the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.

Obama's straight walking, double talking Urban League speech

The Root called me last night to ask if I could do a quick turnaround commentary on the president's speech at the National Urban League. The is what I wrote.

Obama's Careful Urban League Speech

The president kept his message all-inclusive at the civil rights group's annual convention.

By: Monroe Anderson | Posted: July 26, 2012 at 12:06 AM



(The Root) -- President Barack Obama walked a narrow line in his speech to the National Urban League convention in New Orleans Wednesday night, attempting to fire up his most enthusiastic base while giving his most rabid enemies as little ammo as possible to fire back at him.

It was no easy task. There has been some grumbling in the black community that the first African-American president was taking the last-hired and first-fired community for granted. That sentiment grew stronger this summer after Obama sent Vice President Joe Biden to address the National Association of Black Journalists and the NAACP. So Obama arrived in New Orleans for the annual Urban League meetup possibly fearing that African Americans might not show up in large enough numbers at the polling booths in November.

The president's speech to the venerable civil rights organization hit on the three most critical challenges in the black community -- violence, education and jobs -- while deftly managing to broaden the scope enough so that conservatives wouldn't have an easy shot at labeling his remarks as for blacks only.



 

With the exception of announcing that, by executive order, he was establishing "the first ever White House initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans, so that every child has greater access to a complete and competitive education," the president's speech was pretty much all-American for all Americans.

The POTUS ticked off measures his administration has done to help black students, such as increasing Pell Grants and pushing colleges and universities to cut their costs. But imbedded in those boasts was an unspoken truth: This is good for the rest of our fellow citizens, too.

The same tactic was employed for jobs. "We don't believe government should be in the business of helping people that refuse to help themselves, and we recognize that not every government program works," Obama said. "But we do expect hard work to pay off. We do expect responsibility to be rewarded. We do expect that if you put in enough effort you should be able to find a job that pays off."

Obama also deftly merged the Urban League's mission of equal opportunity into values of the middle class, where prosperity should be broad-based. But in speaking about the tragedies brought on by the senseless deaths from gun violence Obama really integrated his message. "Violence plagues the biggest cities but it also plagues the smallest town," he said. "It claims the lives of Americans of different ages and different races, and it's tied together by the fact that these young people had dreams and had futures that were cut tragically short."

The president spoke of praying for the victims of the massacre in Aurora, Colo.: "We also pray for those who succumb to less publicized acts of violence that plague our communities in so many cities across the country every day. We can't forget about that." Obama's sleight of hand was not just a black-and-white narrative. He delicately drilled deeper into the gun-violence plague without once mentioning gun control.

"I also believe, like other Americans, that AK-47s belong on the battlefield of war, not on the streets of our cities," he said. Then he went on to say he was going to talk to members of the House and Senate to seek "a consensus around violence reduction." That was another hidden message. I read it as this: "We all know all this gun violence is insane, but I can't afford to rile up the gun nuts right now. I've got an election to win."

Cyber columnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed-page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show. He was also the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.

ObamaCare The Game could battle the evil Echo Chamber

While attending the National Association of Black Journalists convention last week in New Orleans, I came up with an idea as to how the Obama Administration could help us understand the historic health care law. I wrote a column about it for The Root website.

'Obamacare,' the Video Game?

This writer says that the repacking of the president's accomplishments would keep his message in play.

By: Monroe Anderson | Posted: June 29, 2012 at 12:48 AM

 

(The Root) -- The Saturday before the 2010 November midterm elections, President Obama's campaign strategist David Axelrod was a call-in guest on a radio show I was co-hosting. Team Obama was already bracing for a shellacking, since for months one Republican after the next had lip-synched right-wing talking points, accusing the POTUS of having accomplished zip.

I knew the Republicans were playing fast and loose with the truth. I knew that, like it or not, in his first two years in office, Barack Obama had scratched more off his to-do list than any other U.S. president since Lyndon Baines Johnson.

So I asked Axelrod why so many voters were so clueless as to how President Obama had spent the first two years of his first term. I dare not try to reconstruct the entire answer from the president's then senior adviser, but I will repeat two words that jumped out at me: "Information gridlock."

That's right. Axelrod's defense for a failure to communicate was that Obama's accomplishments came at such a breakneck pace that the White House press office didn't have the time to make sure that everyone following could keep up with the score. Maybe. Maybe not. But it would seem that the one achievement that is the most momentous since LBJ pushed Medicare and Medicaid through Congress in 1965 might have gotten a little special treatment: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

It hasn't helped that from its conception through passage until now, the right-wing echo chamber has been in superdrive, dogging and demonizing the president's health care law. But I've got an app for that: Obamacare the Game.

Rather than trying to run down all the complicated bennies and perks hidden in the 2,600-page law, a computer game would have players racing through level after level, virtually discovering the rewards or penalties for either being or not being enrolled in the health plan.

It wouldn't matter whether it was a strategy, simulation or role-playing game, as long as it was available for a free download on the Obama-campaign website for every system from iPad to Xbox to desktop -- Facebook, too. The gamification of the president's historic accomplishment could quickly and easily be a mind changer, slaying the stream of poison that the right keeps spewing. With the flick of a click, Americans would be able to go from unenlightened and turned off to informed and engaged.

How to beat the right-wing smear-and-fear machine came to me while I was in "The Gamification of News" session at the National Association of Black Journalists' convention last week. Although the panel was focused on a cutting-edge tactic for engaging readers and viewers in complex news stories, my mind quickly leaped from there to politics.

Since then I have interviewed two of the gamification panelists, Manuel "Mani" Saint-Victor and Scott Anderson, to see what they thought. They both agreed that it could be done and suggested how to do it.

"Have people walk through the process of being a different person with a different illness -- [the] Sim [City] approach," said Saint-Victor, who is a former psychiatry resident physician at Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital and a founder of Marveloper Media. "Let them walk through and let them see it with the Obamacare version and without the Obamacare version, not telling them which is and which isn't."

Scott Anderson, who is my firstborn as well as the co-founder and lead programmer at Enemy Airship and one of Game Developer Magazine's top 50 game developers for 2009, had a similar idea. He thinks the game should be "how to survive without health insurance." In his version of Obamacare the Game, "You have all these setbacks, and you have all these crazy things people will have to do to survive," Scott said. "It might not be fun, but it'll be effective. People will say, 'Oh, wow'; if these things happened to me, I'd be screwed."

Although gamification hasn't come to politics in a big way yet, it is already being played out in advertising through reward cards and loyalty systems, Saint-Victor said. Of course, almost everybody is familiar with the SimCity games, and there's even a game called Cut Throat Capitalism, which explores the economics of Somali pirates and why they do what they do. "You basically pick what ships they go after and how you'll treat the hostages," Anderson said.

The Supreme Court may have upheld the individual mandate on Thursday, but hold up on the high fives. Just how badly the Obama administration and campaign need to get beyond the information gridlock is patently obvious.

A majority of Americans -- 54 percent -- still believe that Obamacare should be repealed. Republicans have spent three times more money bad-mouthing the president's health law than Democrats have spent explaining it. Right now there are 3 million small-business people who qualify for a health care tax credit.

A mere 170,000 have applied.

Cyber columnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed-page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show. He was also the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.

Ten years after 9/11, America needs 911

 

 

    On the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy, the Chicago Sun-Times assigned all its Sunday op-ed columnists to write on the subject. Below is what I wrote. I've cut and pasted it from a wingnut website, Free Republic. If you'll notice, I got honored with a very grown-up "Barf Alert."

    Well, five years have passed. We're Bush-free but still stuck in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    We're also still afraid.

    We can't catch a flight without going shoeless first and we're more than likely to have to show our private parts to a TSA agent before we're allowed to board. Osama bin Laden is dead but his terror lives on. So does his toll on American freedom and finances. We've spent ourselves into a hole by occupying two countries in our pursuit of invisible men. While we've been blowing things up for the past decade, China has been building and building and building.

We're still stuck in the quagmire with President Obama afraid to pull the plug, rightly fearing that the Republicans will successfully label him our soft on terror, anti-American, pro-Arab, freedom-hating commander-in-chief.

Ten years after 9/11, we're still nation-building in the Middle East while the Midwest in our nation is falling apart. So, for this next presidential election, I think Obama should be making a 911 call for America--we need the emergency services.

   

Just in time for elections, Bush campaigns on fear (BARF ALERT)
Chicago Sun-Times ^ | September 10, 2006 | MONROE ANDERSON

Posted on Sun Sep 10 09:47:18 2006 by Chi-townChief

 

Just in time for elections, Bush campaigns on fear

by Monroe Anderson

Five years after the 9/11 tragedy, the kingpin of Abraham Lincoln's party is still dead set on fooling most of the people most of the time.

President Bush and his chorus of Republican pols, Cabinet members and neo-con sycophants would have us believe we're safer or, depending on political expediencies, not that safe. According to the president's pre-9/11 anniversary speeches on the progress of the war on terror, we're safer than we were before the attacks but not yet safe enough to steer clear of his failed stay-the-course strategy. As Bush explains it, al-Qaida's leadership is decimated but remains dangerous enough to destroy the entire civilized world.

There he goes again.

With midterm congressional elections less than two months away, the Bush subterfuge machine is in full spiel and spin. Too incompetent to manage problems that are all too real to mainstream America, such as high gas prices, 45 million citizens without health insurance and a sliding income for middle-class workers -- or capturing Osama bin Laden for that matter -- the president and his forces are back to wheeling and dealing terror. They're playing the same fear-mongering three-card monte game that worked so well in the 2002 and 2004 elections: See if you can find the terrorist threat under here or here or there. Find Saddam Hussein's ethereal weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Watch the politically timed color alert rise and fall on cue.

There's a book just out with a title that sums it all up: Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War. Authors Michael Isikoff and David Corn report that Bush hated Saddam so much that he privately let loose expletive-laden tirades against the dictator. In March 2002, months before Bush asked Congress for authority to attack Saddam, he bluntly exposed his true intentions in an unguarded moment with two aides. When told that White House correspondent Helen Thomas was questioning the need to oust Saddam, Bush snapped: ''Did you tell her I intend to kick his sorry m - - - - - - - - - - - - ass all over the Mideast?''

The president's anger was understandable. ''After all,'' Bush said six months later while speaking at a fund-raiser in Houston, ''this is the guy who tried to kill my dad.''

I think that's admirable that Bush 43 loves his dad, Bush 41, enough to try to revenge Saddam's botched assassination attempt in 1993. I loved my late dad as much as Bush loves his, and while I too would have been livid if the Iraqi dictator tried to whack my father, I wouldn't have set into motion a wave of international shock and awe that would result in the deaths of more than 2,600 U.S. military men and women and more than 41,000 innocent Iraqi civilians.

I also love my two sons as much as I'm sure he loves his twin daughters. If we're really in danger of Apocalypse Soon, as Bush keeps insisting, then we ought to act like it. The president should re-institute a mandatory military draft. I'll tearfully send my sons off to war, right after Bush tearfully sends his daughters to sign up in our co-educational military. If the war against Islamic terrorists compares to the fight against Nazis, as Bush insists, and if a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq would lead to its conquest by our nation's worst enemies, then we ought to have a military reflecting that clear and present danger. There were 16 million Americans fighting to keep the world safe for democracy in World War II. There are 130,000 in Iraq.

I'm afraid Bush's plan to save the world from Islamic fascism is way too modest. He wants Congress to pass his terrorist surveillance act and authorization to try the al-Qaida detainees held in his secret CIA torture prisons. For reasons too simple for many Americans to understand, he's not interested in following the 9/11 Commission's recommendations to shore up security at U.S. harbors or keep a close watch on checked airplane luggage. Those measures, which would obviously make America safer from the inevitable al-Qaida strikes in the future, would cost big business big money.

But what fool would want to take those measures when it's so much more politically practical to scare most of the people one more time?

'Fox And Friends' Defends News Corp. In Phone Hacking Scandal (VIDEO)

Fox and Friends clumsily defended News Corp. on Friday morning, inaccurately defending the company as a victim of hacking instead of the one that did the hacking. Host Steve Doocy said, “It’s too ...

Fox and Friends clumsily defended News Corp. on Friday morning, inaccurately defending the company as a victim of hacking instead of the one that did the hacking. Host Steve Doocy said, “It’s too ...

Dilenschneider also said that News Corp has done "all the right things" in its response to the scandal. He then likened News Corp. to companies that have been the victims of hacking, such as Citigroup, American Express and Bank of America. It was an odd analogy, given that News Corp is not a hacking victim, but has been found guilty of hacking others.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

Looks like Rupert Murdock is going down. It's about time. But Fox and Friends are making a clumsy attempt to defend the big bad boss and the evil media empire's unethical practices. Is Doocy right? Is this much to do another nothing? Or should the MSM keep reporting on this and should the Justice Department make sure it gets to the bottom of the barrel of rotten apples.

The Chickens Come Home to Roost on Right's Hate Spews

    The blame game started Saturday within hours after reports of the Gabrielle Giffords assassination attempt in Tucson. The left correctly blamed the right for all the hate speech and political vitriol that may have fed the madness of accused murdered Jared Loughner. The right defensively played the moral equivalency card much like a bunch grade schoolers on the play ground, whining that while they got caught name calling, the other kids were doing it too.

What the right and left have done may be the same thing but was done at different times. In the late 1960's the left was almost as bad then as the right is now. I say almost because the left’s political leadership wasn’t behaving as badly back then as the right’s political leadership is right now. The Left’s extremist talk and actions some four decades back helped swing the nation to center right. My sense is that the right's extremism will surely move the pendulum back.

But while talking about bad talk is satisfying, we need to talk more about the pink elephant in the room: gun control.

A mentally ill, hate-filled 22-year-old armed with a butcher knife may have killed and maimed, but his toll would have been a lot less than six dead and 20 wounded. Here's a column I wrote four and a half years ago for the Chicago Sun-Times. It's painfully personal.

 

We're killing ourselves more effectively than terrorists

Chicago Sun-Times

July 30, 2006

by Monroe Anderson

 

My kid brother, Dariek, gave me the only handgun I've ever owned: a target gray, stainless steel .357 Magnum. This gun was the not-so- little cousin to the .44 that co-starred in "Sudden Impact," when Clint Eastwood, as "Dirty Harry," told a bad guy: "Go ahead, make my day."

The weapon came into my possession right after Dariek had a bad night. Voices from his stereo speakers had kept him awake, talking to him, telling him to blow his girlfriend's brains out. He had fought valiantly to ignore the voices but feared the next time he heard them he might not be as strong.

"Are you taking your medicine?" I asked.

"No," he grunted. "I stopped taking it. That stuff is poison."

"You've got to take your medicine," I said, worried but grateful he had managed not to become another statistic in one more tragic news story.

Back in 1977, Dariek dropped out of Indiana University to be all that he could be in the Army. About a year and a half into his tour of duty, he was yanked out of the American nuclear missile silo he was guarding in Germany after he suddenly suffered a mental breakdown. He was flown to an Army hospital in New York where he was diagnosed as schizophrenic, then given a medical discharge.

By the time the voices in the stereo speakers were telling Dariek to shoot to kill, he had been in and out of the hospital and on and off medications designed to treat his delusions of grandeur, paranoia and schizophrenia several times. His nervous condition, as my mother always referred to it, had proved not to be a barrier to legally buying the .357 from an Indiana gun shop.

"I need to borrow the gun," I said, with all the authority a brother 11 years older can wield.

"Why?" he asked, distracted from repeating his descriptions of what the speaker voices had to say.

Knowing that Dariek kept up with the news daily and that there was yet another Lincoln Park rapist running loose, I told him we needed it so that my wife, Joyce, could carry it for protection. He understood. The next day, I drove to my parents' home in Gary, where he handed over the gun and the Indiana gun permit.

I recalled that unsettling episode last week as reports of sniper fire in Indiana hit newspaper headlines and broadcast news. Zachariah Blanton, 17, confessed to the series of Downstate Indiana highway shootings that killed one man, wounded another and left four vehicles shot up. He allegedly went on a shooting rampage after arguing with family members over gutting a deer during a hunting trip. Two days later, after the alleged Blanton sniping, a copycat sniper was reportedly taking potshots at vehicles in Northwest Indiana.

Gunplay in our nation is almost as much a national pastime as baseball. And, with the never-ending, inadequately controlled abundant supply of firearms, we're killing ourselves more effectively than any terrorist organization could. In 2003, the most recent year that data is available, there were 30,136 gun deaths in the United States. Forty percent were homicides; 56 percent were suicides.

When the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, stating that "a well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed," was ratified in 1791, the good citizens were worried about the Indians successfully stopping the theft of their land and the African slaves rebelling, violently reclaiming their freedom. Those are all dead issues now. And yet, even as tens of thousands of Americans die year in and year out from firearms, conservatives carp and babble about Second Amendment rights whenever any lifesaving gun control proposal rears its logical head. As the National Rifle Association likes to sloganeer, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people."

But had the angry Indiana teenager bore stones instead of a firearm, he'd be charged with vandalism, not murder.

 

Thank the lord for the Teabaggers

 

 

I think I owe the Teabaggers an apology for all the nasty things I've written about them since they started stupidly protesting against the healthcare reform bill that will benefit them as much as most other Americans.

Sure, some of them may be racist. Others may be the dull knives in the drawer. A few may even be well-meaning but misguided in their cause without a cause. But no matter who they are or what they say, I've got two words that says they're okay with me: Rand Paul.

As a result of their successful effort to put one their own on top in the Kentucky Republican senate primary, the Teabaggers have accomplished what Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have only dreamed of doing: Leaving the echo chambering Republican establishment leadership speechless.

Within a 24-hour news cycle, Ron Paul's boy, Rand, had Michael Steele, Eric Cantor and Jim DeMint morph from their "just say no" political policy to a "no comment" stance on the the Kentucky Republican senate candidate's stance on the Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act and The Americans with Disabilities Act.

Libertarian Paul has a nit to pick with all three established, USA seal-of-approval laws. When it a choice between the citizens or business, big or small, he's not with the citizens. Of course, less than a day after Paul confessed on NPR and the Rachel Maddow Show that he was in favor of the 1964 Civil Rights Act--except for the part that would allow businesses to prevent Americans who look like me from sitting at their lunch counters--he made a mad scrabble to a saner position.

But it's too late. He's now the poster boy of what the whole conservative movement really is about. And for that, we've got to thank the Teabaggers for giving us the gift that's bound to keep on giving.

In Search of Intelligence in the Multiverse--Not anywhere where Glenn Beck just happens to be

 
 

    During yesterday's fleeting hour, while he was interviewing the very troubled former New York congressman, Eric Massa, Glenn Beck was out of his mind. 

This was the first time the whining, weeping conservative talk show host sounded, sounded, sounded, well.....thoughtful as he tried to get freshly-resigned Massa to dump all over his fellow Democrats and the Obama Administration.

When I say Beck sounded thoughtful, let me be clear: I'm speaking relatively here.

Any other time Beck favors staying stuck on stupid, saying stuff like President Barack Obama is a racist who "has a deep-seated hatred for white people."

As Media Matters points out, Beck "has flirted with the idea that FEMA is building detention camps, suggested that President Obama is purposefully "tanking" the economy to force young people to work for ACORN and AmeriCorps, and said that Obama and former President George W. Bush are 'moving us away from our republic and into a system of fascism.'"

Beck, who was named Media Matters' Misinformer of the Year, also thought the Tea Baggers march on Washington was 1.7 million strong--about seven times as much as the number of anti-reform protesters that actually showed up. He apparently thinks the ideas enumerated in his banal 912 Project, with its nine principles and 12 values, are something new, necessary or profound.

But right after I saw Beck's broadcast yesterday, which left me hoping against hope that he wasn't the dullest knife in the drawer, I read that on Monday he was urging the listeners of his syndicated radio show to leave churches that preach social justice.

As it turns out, Beck thinks that the term many Christian churches use to describe efforts to tackle poverty and promote human rights is a "code word" for communism and Nazism. 

Who would dare think the teachings of Jesus Christ were the ambitions of commies and Nazis? Glenn Beck.

This commentary was cross-posted on the AgoraVox website.