Former Right-Wing Insider Frank Schaeffer Calls Republican Party Profoundly Anti-American and Pro-Fascism

UPDATE: 2:14 AM, August 8,2009

The Republicans and the conservative movement in America has become unhinged according to Frank Schaeffer because...

"They can't compute that their white man-led conservative revolution is dead. They can't reconcile their idea of themselves with the fact that white men like them don't run the country any more -- and never will again. To them the black president is leading a column of the "other" into their promised land. Gays, immigrants, blacks, progressives, even a female Hispanic appointed to the Supreme Court... for them this is the Apocalypse.

...No, I don't believe that these people are about to take over the country. No, the sky is not falling. But the Republican Party is. It is now profoundly anti-American"
Above Quote from Frank Schaeffer

"...FDR once met with a group of activists who sought his support for legislation. He listened to their arguments for some time and then said, "You've convinced me. Now go out and make me do it."

He understood that the more effectively people created a sense of urgency and crisis, the easier it would be for him to push for progressive legislation."

above quote from We Need More Protest to Make Reform Possible by Peter Dreier at The Nation , August 7, 2009

Todays Menu:

Town Hall meetings still being disrupted by Phony Grass-roots protesters

Their aim is to shut down civil and meaningful discourse

Having lost the election in November Republicans are determined to have Obama and America fail

The chief orchestrator of these angry mobs works for healthcare industry

One of the main spokespersons against healthcare reform Rick Scott defrauded the US government & was ordered to pay fines of over one billion dollars

Anyway Brave New Films has released a video in support of healthcare reform to fight back against lies, propaganda, misinformation of the Republican shills for the healthcare industry:

" Denied Claims Placed At Health Insurance CEO's Doorstep " by Arthur Delaney at Huffington Post Aug.6, 2009

"A new video puts denied health insurance claims on United Health Care CEO Stephen Hemsley's doorstep.

The video, made by Brave News Films' Robert Greenwald, intercuts stories of people suffering because of denied claims with images Hemsley's fancy homes, along with details about how much money Hemsley's got ($744,232,068 in unexercised stock options, for example)."

Rick Scott's healthcare corporation was found guilty of defrauding the government and taxpayers and paid out fines of over one billion dollars and yet claims the people should trust criminals like him and be against any real healthcare reform. These healthcare corporations are no better than Halliburton and other corporations which defraud the US government on a regular basis and see this as merely part of the way to do business in America by cheating as much as possible and to cut corners to increase profits. Will Americans once again fall for this sort of propaganda and spin.

"Rick Sanchez Grills Rick Scott On Town Halls, Medicare Fraud" by Rachel Weiner at Huffington post August 6,2009

CNN's Rick Sanchez went hard after Rick Scott, leader of Conservatives For Patients' Rights, first on his role in the anti-reform town hall protests and then on his old company's Medicare fraud.

Scott questioned the organization's role in disruptive protests at Democratic town halls

So Sanchez went after Scott's stance as an unbiased observer, given that he founded Columbia/HCA, a health care company found guilty of huge Medicare fraud.

Scott was ousted by his own board of directors in 1997 in the midst of the biggest health care fraud scandal in U.S. history, a scandal that ultimately led to a payment of $1.7 billion to settle charges including the overbilling of state and federal health programs.

Scott defended his former company, saying other health care companies had paid fines too. Sanchez cut in: "You are the guy that is sitting here telling us we can't allow the government to do this because it won't work and they might take over or do some things that are wrong. How much more wrong can you be than what you just said? Not only has your company screwed up and you just admitted it ... You are saying, look at all the other companies, they did the same thing."

Scott dodged the accusations, denying any involvement in the fraud or in paying the fines. After accusing him of "playing with the facts," Sanchez concluded:

I guess the point I am making, though, is look... some people are going to look at your record and some of the things that you and I just talked about and say, this is the guy who is leading this charge. Is he the one that we should be listening to? Not exactly a perfect past when it comes to what's right for taxpayers and patients.

"Right-Wing Turncoat Gives the Inside Scoop on Why Conservatives Are Rampaging Town Halls" By Frank Schaeffer, AlterNet. August 7, 2009.

The GOP is willing to disrupt the health care debate if they can't win it. Yesterday in Tampa, a mob of Glenn Beck supporters nearly caused a riot.

Having failed at the ballot box, having watched their Fox News-organized "tea parties" fizzle the intimidation tactics which the Republicans have embraced are being used in a well-financed, top-down orchestrated fake grass roots campaign by corporate interests to try and protect the profits of the insurance business. Armey's FreedomWorks is organizing against health care reform. Armey's lobbying firm represents pharmaceutical companies including Bristol-Myers Squibb. Armey's lobbying firm also represents the trade group for the life insurance industry. FreedomWorks is supporting the status quo at all costs. (They are also fans of fossil fuels. Armey's lobbying firm represents Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Prime Minister of the UAE, on energy related issues.)

Last year, the Wall Street Journal exposed FreedomWorks for building "amateur-looking" websites to promote far right interests of Armey. FreedomWorks represents a top-down, corporate-friendly approach that's been the norm for conservative organizations for years. How do I know this is the norm? Because I used to have strategy meetings with the late Jack Kemp and Dick Army and the rest of the Republican gang about using their business ties to help finance the pro-life movement to defeat Democrats. I know this script. I helped write it.

...Democratic members of Congress are being harassed by angry, sign-carrying mobs and disruptive behavior at local town halls. It's the tactic we used to follow abortion providers around their neighborhoods. "Protesters" surrounded Rep. Tim Bishop (D-NY) and forced police officers to have to escort him to his car for safety. We used to do the same to Dr. Tiller... until someone killed him.

How Can The Right Stoop So Low?

I used to know Dick Armey quite well. One of my sons even worked for him as an intern. I knew Armey in the context of his being a fan of my late Evangelical Religious Right leader father Francis Schaeffer. (Back in the day when I was a right wing "pro-life" organizer who has long since quit the Republicans in disgust at their -- our -- descent into extremism and hate.) Armey was once a decent guy, whatever his political views. How could he stoop so low as to be organizing what amounts to America's Brown Shirts today?

I think I know what happened to him, Gingrich and the rest: They can't compute that their white man-led conservative revolution is dead. They can't reconcile their idea of themselves with the fact that white men like them don't run the country any more -- and never will again. To them the black president is leading a column of the "other" into their promised land. Gays, immigrants, blacks, progressives, even a female Hispanic appointed to the Supreme Court... for them this is the Apocalypse.

...No, I don't believe that these people are about to take over the country. No, the sky is not falling. But the Republican Party is. It is now profoundly anti-American.

...What Can Be Done?

It's time that this whole shabby (and insane) business be exposed, vilified in run out of town on a rail by whatever responsible Republicans -- if any -- that are still in the party and who want to see the fortunes of their party revived. Republican leaders taking insurance industry money via lobbying firms and using it to organize what amounts to roving bands of thugs not only need to be exposed but thrown out of the public debate forever. They should become absolute pariahs.

It's time to give this garbage in name: insurance industry funded fascism.

"Fists Pounding on Glass, Right-Wing Violence Stops Tampa Town Hall" by jeffrey Feldman, at Huffington Post,August 6, 2009

With fists pounding on exterior windows like a street mob out of a 1930s newsreel, a crowd of right-wing agitators against health insurance reform descended on a town hall meeting in Tampa, Florida, "banging on windows" until police and organizers were forced to end the event. The result? A violent mob silenced the voices of each and every American desperate to find a way out of the endless cycle of fear, shame and family bankruptcy brought on by an inhumane, profit-driven health insurance market. Moreover, by using violence to shut down civic discussion between neighbors, this right-wing horde trampled underfoot one of the most sacred and historic symbols of American democracy.

...Today in Tampa, that bright American town hall tradition came crashing down at the hands of another, ignominious trend in political life: the politics of intimidation, threat, and violence. This is the brand of politics that wields the toxic force of fists and the sound of breaking glass to cut off healthy civic exchange. This is the brand of politics that fills the public square first with talk of violence, then promises of violence, and then violence itself.

This is also the brand of politics that media coverage is quick to gloss over -- quick to conceal behind some false notion that violence is on both sides. Do not believe it.

Americans trying earnestly to gather with their neighbors and engage in discussions about health insurance reform should beware of every account they read that depicts town hall disruptions as generic, two-sided violence. Beware, because these descriptions are false.

The health insurance reform debate in this country is not a fight between two violent sides. It is a peaceful discussion that right-wing mobs are trying to stop and prevent. Tonight they used violence in Tampa to successfully stop that peaceful discussion from happening.

and Peter Dreier argues that those who in favor of reform of the healthcare system and other policies must make their voices heard by peaceful demonstrations and by using the internet and media effectively and if necessary to be willing to take part in acts of civil disobedience :

We Need More Protest to Make Reform Possible by Peter Dreier at The Nation , August 7, 2009

..People have to believe not only that things should be different but also that they can be different. Anger has to be mixed with hope. And to be effective politically, that hope has to be mobilized through collective action--in elections, meetings with elected officials, petitions, e-mail campaigns, rallies, demonstrations and even, at times, civil disobedience.

Protest--including civil disobedience, demonstrations and large-scale marches--is not the same as mindless militance. It is not riots and rock-throwing. To be effective, protest must be strategic and disciplined, and it must capture the public's imagination and conscience. People must view the cause as just and empathize with the protesters. As Martin Luther King Jr. explained in his famous "Letter From Birmingham Jail," civil disobedience makes sense only when all other means of reaching decision-makers have been exhausted and people's frustrations have boiled over.

...We confront the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression, with tens of millions of Americans suffering privately and silently while Republicans and centrist Democrats thwart efforts to bring about much-needed reform.

...FDR once met with a group of activists who sought his support for legislation. He listened to their arguments for some time and then said, "You've convinced me. Now go out and make me do it."

He understood that the more effectively people created a sense of urgency and crisis, the easier it would be for him to push for progressive legislation.

Having a president who inspires people to act collectively on their own behalf can make a difference. It gives people hope and courage to defy obstacles.

and so it goes,
GORD.

US Healthcare Ponzi Scheme And "Brown Shirt" Anti-Free Speech Republicans

UPDATE: 10:28 AM & 11:38 AM, August 7, 2009

The "town hells," in short, don't represent populism, they're a display of hysteria fed by lies peddled by GOP leaders and corporate interests. And it's getting worse.

Who'd have imagined that our first black president would turn out to be a Nazi? Just when you think political discourse can't get any uglier, Rush Limbaugh is comparing President Obama to Hitler and calling all Democrats Nazis, while the frothing right-wingers turning Democrats' town halls into "town hells" routinely refer to Obama and his supporters as "brownshirts." Right-wing blogger Steve Gilbert has transformed Obama's healthcare reform logo into a Nazi symbol by cleverly adding a swastika; meanwhile, some Republicans insist Democrats are lying about "town hell" rowdies carrying signs with swastikas, but they're the ones with a problem telling the truth.

If you thought right-wingers' claim that Obama is a racist was projection, here's another case study for psychology students everywhere. At district meetings Democrats are being shouted down by angry mobs inflamed by corporate interests spewing lies about healthcare reform -- Maryland Rep. Frank Kratovil was hung in effigy. Rep. Tim Bishop needed a police escort to his car, Rep. Brad Miller reports death threats, while Republican Todd Akin of Missouri joked -- to cheers from his GOP audience -- that his Democratic colleagues "almost got lynched" by the "town hell" rowdies. Glenn Beck is joking about poisoning Nancy Pelosi's wine -- but it's the Democrats who are Nazis, fascists and brownshirts. Got it.

Above Quote From: "Our first black president is a Nazi?" by Joan Walsh at Salon.com, August 7,2009

Healthcare system in the U.S. is just an elaborate Ponzi scheme which robs citizens when they are at their most vulnerable while leaving 45 million Americans without any Healthcare insurance.

Profits trump citizens medical needs

Time for America to modernize its healthcare system & stop living in the 19th century of Social & capitalist style Darwinism



The Healthcare system in the United States is a profitable industry in which the needs of consumers come second to that of profits. Some 45 million Americans are left uninsured by the current system and those who are insured often discover when they are in need of Healthcare that health insurance they have will only cover a small fraction of their medical costs. It is in effect just another elaborate Ponzi scheme to rob citizens when they are most in need.

Former health Insurance executive goes public exposing the rapacious health insurance industry and how it undermine accessible good quality affordable Healthcare.


US Mainstream Media Distorting The Reality of healthcare Reform
Compared to the lies and misinformation fed to the American public by the Mainstream Media to sell them Bush's unnecessary war in Iraq.

Bernie Sanders on AstroTurf Health Care Protesters in Town Hall Meetings
August 4, 2009

As orchestrated efforts continue to disrupt civil discourse on the future of health insurance coverage in America, Sen. Bernie Sanders spoke with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann about these tactics.

Bill Moyers :CIGNA Exec Says Michael Moore Was RIGHT! Pt 1

With almost 20 years inside the health insurance industry, Wendell Potter saw for-profit insurers hijack our health care system and put profits before patients. Now, he speaks with Bill Moyers about how those companies are standing in the way of health care reform.




The Whitehouse Website THE BLOG AUGUST 4TH, 2009 Facts Are Stubborn Things by Macon Phillips

Opponents of health insurance reform may find the truth a little inconvenient, but as our second president famously said, "facts are stubborn things."

Scary chain emails and videos are starting to percolate on the internet, breathlessly claiming, for example, to "uncover" the truth about the President’s health insurance reform positions.

In this video, Linda Douglass, the communications director for the White House’s Health Reform Office, addresses one example that makes it look like the President intends to "eliminate" private coverage, when the reality couldn’t be further from the truth.

and check out article exposing some of the lies and misinformation being promulgated by Republicans and the Conservative Movement and their buddies in the Healthcare industry.

"Obama wants to kill your grandma Five right-wing myths about healthcare reform, and the facts" By Mike Madden at Salon.com, Aug. 6, 2009

also see:article by Mike lux in which he argues that if Obama continues to try to appease Republicans, Blue Dog Democrats and the Healthcare Insurance industry the resulting legislation will be a hollow victory in which no real reform would be achieved .

Health Reform: If Everyone Is Happy, Nothing Is Getting Done by Mike Lux, Open Left, August 6, 2009.

If Democrats take the easy path, and get that big bipartisan love fest on the White House lawn, health care will still be messed up in all the ways it's messed up now: health care costs (and the federal budget deficit) will still be spiraling up and up, the number of uninsured will keep going up as well, people who lose their jobs or have pre-existing conditions will still be priced out of the ability to get insurance. And instead of congratulating us for our great bipartisan compromise, voters will be pissed. President Obama and Congressional Democrats need to grit their teeth and stick to the business of comprehensive reform. It will make the insurance companies, and the Republicans, really mad. But failing to actually solve the problem AGAIN is a train wreck. Stick with it, folks, put your noses to the grindstone, and do what needs to be done.

And so it goes,
GORD.

Time To Rev up Obama's Supporters For healthcare Reform To Drown Out The Noise Of The Healthcare Industry & Fox News

UPDATE: 12:54 AM, August 6, 2009


Go ahead, shoot me. I like the status quo on health care in the United States. I've got health insurance and I don't give a damn about the 47 million suckers who don't. Obama and Congress must be stopped. No bill! I'm better off the way things are.
from Jonathan Alter,Newsweek

By every objective measure, the United States has a second-rate health care system -- and the only way to fix it is to create a public option.

The United States has the most-expensive, least-efficient and, in many ways, most-ineffective health care system in the world
Quote from Guy Saperstein, Alternet

The Obama administration needs to mobilize all of those energetic supporters who helped get him elected to promote healthcare reform

Supporters of healthcare reform need to inundate the internet and the media with passionate appeals for healthcare reform to drown out the noise of the healthcare industry's hired hooligans and thugs



Rachel Maddow compares the Tea Bagging & Healthcare Faux Populist movement to the phony mob which was sent to Florida to shut down the vote counting in 2000 election - the count if it had taken place Bush might have lost the presidency to Al Gore.

The point Maddow makes is that using a mob to bring about the results the Republicans wanted worked and now they are using the same tactics to defeat Healthcare Reform in America. Once again the Republicans and the big lobbyists show their disdain for the Democratic process. In their view the loudest and the most well funded wins and they will shout down any who dare defend Healthcare reform And they will lie about what the Healthcare reform will do to America.

They will fear monger and scare Americans by calling such attempts to reform Healthcare a move towards "socialism" , Communism, Fascism and a totalitarian state . They will say whatever necessary in order to defeat the Obama administration on this issue or any other they disagree with . Unfortunately most Americans seem to believe whatever these lobbying groups tell them. This is especially true when the mainstream media acts as an echo chamber for these individuals and lobbyists who are all for maintaining the status quo because it is in their own interests even though at odds with the interests of the American Meanwhile Obama 's administration tries to play by the rules and attempt to be bipartisan which may end up being his undoing once again. Obama needs to speak more passionately about why Healthcare reform is absolutely necessary for America to move forward towards a more just society .In the current situation millions of Americans are at the mercy of the rapacious profiteering healthcare industry .The issue should be treated as seriously as past issues such as the civil rights movement

Rachel Maddow: History Of The Republican's "Thugs"




Fox News Propagandists for Healthcare Industry- out to defeat Obama
Haelthcare Industry only interested in increasing their profits and have no interest in the health of average Americans.

How To Fake A Protest: Right-Wing Media & Corporate Lobbyists Pretend To Be Grassroots
http://mediamatters.org





Jeffrey Feldman at Huffington Post argues that Healthcare Reform supporters in the Democratic Party and those who were mobilized to help put Barack Obama in the Presidency should present their arguments for Healthcare Reform with more passion and emotion so they can be heard over the noise of the Teabaggers & their phony grassroots uprising against Healthcare Reform. The recitation of statistics about healthcare will not cut but rather true life stories of those who are being neglected or who have gone bankrupt because of the present private healthcare system in America.


Anodyne Town Halls are the Problem, Not Teabaggers by Jeffrey Feldman at huffington Post, August 4, 2009

In other words, it is the Senate, Congressional, and White House Democratic Party communication teams that have created the ideal, quiet conditions for a half-dozen fever-pitched teabaggers to shout "tyranny!" and disrupt the hushed sessions.

...Because the Democrats treated the town halls as information sessions rather than symbolic stages, they left the emotional terrain wide open for a few voices to exploit, which is exactly what the teabaggers have done.

...Thus, while a vast majority of Americans, for example, want a new public option to replace their current health insurance, those same Americans do not see or hear that story being passionately argued in the media.

It is astounding that, even with control of the Congress and the Executive branch, Democrats still do not understand the symbolism implicit in these health care town halls, whereas a ragtag bunch of teabag protesters does get it.


... Democrats need to see the town halls as symbolic arenas to be dominated, not mere meeting locations to attend. To dominate a symbolic arena, Democrats need to literally fill the proceeding with the most compelling reasons for reform that exist: ending injustice, averting personal bankruptcy, eliminating the paralyzing fear of illness, preventing systemic financial collapse, ending the personal and economic humiliation of living with chronic illness in America. Never before in the history of political debate have there been more passionate arguments to be made and more people willing to step up and make them than for the health care debate.

... Every elected Democrat in Washington, DC, has an office full of talented staffers with experience mobilizing the media to cover their bosses. These staffers need to be enlisted to put the town halls on the front pages and in the lead position of every broadcast from now until September.

... Democrats need to enlist and energize the grassroots of their party. After the election, the Obama campaign left one of the greatest legacies in political history: hundreds of thousands of Americans centrally organized via the internet and willing to turn out to push for real change. These people need to be mobilized with the same passionate arguments that got them to turn out to walk door-to-door in cold weather to elect a President...

... a real public option (not some phony baloney "co-op") must be put front and center of the debate by leading Democrats including the President. Without the public option at the center of the debate, the very people who would be the most passionate voices in the health care discussion are hamstrung. They cannot argue passionately for what they believe if the moral core of the debate has been stripped away...

Lastly, the President needs to cut his vacation down to size so he can climb back on the bully pulpit as only he can....He needs to tell everyone -- each and every day -- that this is the fight of his life...


If the Democrats put aside their anodyne approach and restart the health care debate with a level of passion worthy of the issue, neither the teabaggers nor any other protest group will have much peace and quiet to disrupt...

and some critics conclude that Obama's healthcare reform has already been watered down to such an extent that it is not worthy of being called reform

: The Incredible Shrinking Healthcare Reform by Norman Solomon at CommonDreams,Aug. 5,2009

Like soap in a rainstorm, "healthcare reform" is wasting away.

As this week began, a leading follower of conventional wisdom, journalist Cokie Roberts, told NPR listeners: "This is evolving legislation. And the administration is now talking about a glide path towards universal coverage, rather than immediate universal coverage."

Notions of universal healthcare are fading in the power centers of politics -- while more and more attention focuses on the care and feeding of the insurance industry.

Consider a new message that just went out from Organizing for America, a project of the Democratic National Committee, which inherited the Obama campaign's 13-million email list. The short letter includes the same phrase seven times: "health insurance reform."

The difference between the promise of healthcare for everyone and the new mantra of health insurance reform is akin to what Mark Twain once described as "the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."

And yet America's healthcare is not no. 1 or eve tenth in the world but is ranked as 37th by the World Health Organization compared to the rest of the world. But still there are those who ignore the reality and so repeat the mantra that it is the best in the world. This attitude is a direct consequence of the erroneous myth of American Exceptionalism.It is difficult if not impossible for President Obama to cut through this sort of delusional thinking which is ingrained in the American psyche.

The Only Option for Health Reform Is the Public Option By Guy T. Saperstein, AlterNet. August 5, 2009.

By every objective measure, the United States has a second-rate health care system -- and the only way to fix it is to create a public option.

The United States has the most-expensive, least-efficient and, in many ways, most-ineffective health care system in the world.

But you wouldn't know it if you listened to Republicans talk about the private health care insurance system or Democratic Blue Dogs whine about the costs of reform and complain about how unfair it would be to have private health insurance companies compete with a public health care option.

The World Health Organization ranks health care systems based on objective measures of medical outcomes, and the United States' health care system ranks 37th in the world, behind Colombia and Portugal (which both spend far less on health care than the U.S.).

The United States ranks 44th in the world in infant mortality, behind many impoverished Latin American countries. Although infant mortality in the United States is skewed toward poor people, who have rates double the wealthy, the top quintile of the U.S. population has infant mortality rates higher than Canadians in the lowest quintile of wealth.

and here's a somewhat funny bit from Jonathan Alter at Newsweek:

"What’s Not to Like? Reform? Why do we need health-care reform? Everything is just fine the way it is."by Jonathan Alter,Jul 31, 2009

Go ahead, shoot me. I like the status quo on health care in the United States. I've got health insurance and I don't give a damn about the 47 million suckers who don't. Obama and Congress must be stopped. No bill! I'm better off the way things are.

I'm with that woman who wrote the president complaining about "socialized medicine" and added: "Now keep your hands off my Medicare." That's the spirit!

Why should I be entitled to the same insurance that members of Congress get? Blue Dogs need a lot of medical attention to treat their blueness. I'm just a regular guy and definitely deserve less.

I had cancer a few years ago. I like the fact that if I lose my job, I won't be able to get any insurance because of my illness. It reminds me of my homeowners' insurance, which gets canceled after a break-in. I like the choice I'd face if, God forbid, the cancer recurs—sell my house to pay for the hundreds of thousands of dollars in treatment, or die. That's what you call a "post-existing condition."

and so it goes,
GORD.

"Brown Shirted" Republicans & Healthcare Industry Hooligans & Thugs Hired To Defeat Reform And Olbermann Naming Names of Paid Off Democrats

UPDATE: 1:19 PM & 1:25 PM, Aug. 5, 2009

" You were elected to serve the people. And if you fail to pass or support this legislation, the full wrath of the progressive and the moderate movements in this country will come down on your heads. Explain yourselves not to me, but to them. They elected you, and in the blink of an eye, they will replace you.

If you will behave as if you are Republicans - as if you are the prostitutes of our system -you will be judged as such. And you will lose not merely our respect. You will lose your jobs!

Every poll, every analysis, every vote, every region of this country supports health care reform, and the essential great leveling agent of a government-funded alternative to the unchecked duopoly of profiteering private insurance corporations. Cross us all at your peril."

From Keith Olbermann's HEALTH CARE SPECIAL COMMENTS

Public Opinion Polls show an overwhelming number of American want real substantive Healthcare Reform- but many of their political representatives have become hired Schills for the Healthcare industry -

Healthcare industry is in it for the profits not for the health of average Americans and they will indeed resort to all and any means necessary to stop Healthcare reform

Americans for Prosperity & Freedom Works to oppose what they characterize as the socialist agenda of President Obama in his attempt to reform healthcare


More on "Brown Shirted Republicans Insurrection"- Orchestrated anti-Democratic Disturbances

Hooliganism & Mob Mentality NAZI style harassment
Intimidation By Lobbying Organizations working for the Republican Party in concert with the Big Pharmaceutical and Health insurance industry

Rachel Maddow: "GOP Thugs" At Health Care Forums-August 3,2009



Near-Riots at Townhall Meetings Are Fake
The Young Turks -Aug. 3,2009
Watch more at http://www.theyoungturks.com



HEALTH CARE SPECIAL COMMENTS BY KEITH OLBERMANN

Polls show that a majority of Americans support Healthcare Reform Yet "Blue-dog Democrats" and Republicans don't work for the people but for The Greedy Private Health Care Industry





HEALTH CARE SPECIAL COMMENTS BY KEITH OLBERMANN(PART2)



And from Desert Beacon blog some more information on the organizations behind the Faux Populist anti-Healthcare Reform.

This Disrupted Town Hall Meeting Brought To You By Sheldon Adelson & Companions, Desert Beacon, July 31, 2009

Freedom Works the right wing organization funded in part by Nevada's very own casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, [DS] is contributing to the din of opposition to any form of significant health care reform in this country. [TP] According to the Atlantic we can expect a coalition of organizations to promote more “Tea Parties” such as the American Liberty Alliance (message board group), FreedomWorks, and Americans for Prosperity, coordinated by the Chicago based Sam Adams Alliance (which does not disclose its donors) and the American Majority political training institute. The Sam Adams Alliance is run by former “Americans for Limited Government” activist Eric O'Keefe, who backed ballot initiatives for “Taxpayer Bill of Rights” in Colorado and in several other states. [NYT]

FreedomWorks and the American Future Fund will provide members with lists of town hall meetings, sites, times, and locations, along with prepared questions. The Atlantic article posts three examples of the prepared questions. Americans for Prosperity has launched an anti-Obama-health-care-reform bus tour of 13 states. [Atlantic] The American Future Fund is led by political professionals who worked for former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney's 2008 presidential nomination bid. [NPR]

Americans for Prosperity is the successor organization to “Citizens for a Sound Economy,” and initially worked on behalf of the tobacco industry to defeat smokefree workplace laws and tobacco product taxation. In 2008 the group sponsored a Hot Air tour calling advocacy of climate change mitigation legislation “alarmist.” Former McCain Campaign spokesperson, Nancy Pfotenhauer, was the first president of the organization which is funded by the Roe Foundation, the Ruth & Lovett Peters Foundation, the Lambe Foundation, and the ever present right wing funding source – the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. [Sourcewatch]

The American Majority political training institute is run by Ned Ryun, son of former U.S. Congressman Jim Ryun, and a former writer for President George W. Bush. The organization espouses: “Training and equipping a national network of conservative leadership committed to helping America remain a strong and free nation through limited government, individual freedom and the free market system". It gives examples of these principles, such as strengthened property rights, educational freedom for individuals, reduced corporate taxes and decreased government spending.” [SR]

These are the groups distributing the “Rocking the Town Halls – Best Practices” political action memos, which advocate disrupting and attempting to create the impression that there is widespread opposition to health care reform.

In case you missed it here is the article on the "staged protests" from Think Progress

Right-Wing Harassment Strategy Against Dems Detailed In Memo: ‘Yell,’ ‘Stand Up And Shout Out,’ ‘Rattle Him’ by Lee Fang,ThinkProgress.org , July 1, 2009

This morning, Politico reported that Democratic members of Congress are increasingly being harassed by “angry, sign-carrying mobs and disruptive behavior” at local town halls. For example, in one incident, right-wing protesters surrounded Rep. Tim Bishop (D-NY) and forced police officers to have to escort him to his car for safety.

This growing phenomenon is often marked by violence and absurdity. Recently, right-wing demonstrators hung Rep. Frank Kratovil (D-MD) in effigy outside of his office. Missing from the reporting of these stories is the fact that much of these protests are coordinated by public relations firms and lobbyists who have a stake in opposing President Obama’s reforms.

The lobbyist-run groups Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, which orchestrated the anti-Obama tea parties earlier this year, are now pursuing an aggressive strategy to create an image of mass public opposition to health care and clean energy reform. A leaked memo from Bob MacGuffie, a volunteer with the FreedomWorks website Tea Party Patriots, details how members should be infiltrating town halls and harassing Democratic members of Congress:

Tea Bagger Memo

– Artificially Inflate Your Numbers: “Spread out in the hall and try to be in the front half. The objective is to put the Rep on the defensive with your questions and follow-up. The Rep should be made to feel that a majority, and if not, a significant portion of at least the audience, opposes the socialist agenda of Washington.”

– Be Disruptive Early And Often: “You need to rock-the-boat early in the Rep’s presentation, Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the Rep’s statements early.”

– Try To “Rattle Him,” Not Have An Intelligent Debate: “The goal is to rattle him, get him off his prepared script and agenda. If he says something outrageous, stand up and shout out and sit right back down. Look for these opportunities before he even takes questions.”

The memo above also resembles the talking points being distributed by FreedomWorks for pushing an anti-health reform assault all summer. Patients United, a front group maintained by Americans for Prosperity, is currently busing people all over the country for more protests against Democratic members. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), chairman of the NRCC, has endorsed the strategy, telling the Politico the days of civil town halls are now “over.”

Meanwhile, AHIP, the trade group and lobbying juggernaut representing the health insurance industry is sending staffers to monitor town halls and other right-wing front groups are stepping up their ad campaign to smear reform efforts. The strategy for defeating reform — recently outlined by an influential lobbyist to the Hill newspaper as “delay” then “kill” — is becoming apparent. By delaying a vote until after the August recess, lobbyists are now seizing upon recess town halls as opportunities to ambush lawmakers and fool them into believing there is wide opposition to reform.

and so it goes,
GORD.

Obama And The Class Struggle ;Chris Hedges " So Much For the Promised Land "

UPDATE: 4:31 PM August 4,2009

Take Action Bulletin from People For The American Way
Speak Out Against Town Hall Mobs

Remember those right-wing activists who organized Tax Day "tea parties" to protest the Obama administration? They're back, but this time, it's to disrupt town hall meetings being held by Democratic elected officials in order to intimidate, avoid honest debate and, ultimately, derail the health care reform Americans so desperately need.

Send a message to your U.S. representative and senators urging them all to reject these tactics and let town hall meetings serve their purpose.

Courtiers come in different colors in America but their function is the same. They are hedonists of power. They are invited into the inner circles of the elite, including the White House and Harvard University, as long as they faithfully serve the system. They are offered comfort and privilege, but they pay with their souls.

“Loose and easy language about equality, resonant resolutions about brotherhood fall pleasantly on the ear,” Dr. Martin Luther King once said, “but for the Negro, there is a credibility gap he cannot overlook. He remembers that with each modest advance, the white population promptly raises the argument that the Negro has come far enough. Each step forward accents an ever-present tendency to backlash.” Chris Hedges

Elitist Middle Class African Americans including President Obama and his circle of friends it can be argued have little interest in Speaking For Lower Class African Americans. Since they have prospered they have little or no sympathy or empathy for average African-Americans. Now middle class African Americans have bought into the same stereotyping of average Black Americans which white Americans have been promoting for decades if not the the last 150 years or more in America. The reality of the average black person in America is outside the realm of experiences of the Elitist all too comfortable Middle Class & upper Class Black Americans. In fact they promote the same erroneous view that Black Americans have already achieved equality with the rest of American society and yet the facts ie unemployment rates, racial profiling, incarceration rates, unjust draconian drug laws etc. show that America is far from being post-racial. This may be one possible explanation for why Obama appears somewhat disconnected on the issues concerning race. It may also help explain why he has spent so much time and money bailing out Wall Street and wealthy CEOs while giving little help to lower class Blacks or Hispanics. It is as if Obama believes that it was not racism, segregation, Jim Crow & lynchings & the KKK which held Blacks back but rather that they are themselves somehow wholly responsible for not prospering. Does this also also explain why Obama in his fight for Healthcare Reform has to a great extent already given in to the Republican & conservative Democrats who owe their allegiance not to the American people but to Big Pharmaceutical companies and the powerful Health Insurance giants who operate their own legalized Ponzi schemes.

So Much for the Promised Land Aug 3, 2009 By Chris Hedges TruthDig.com,Aug. 3, 2009

LeAlan Jones, the 30-year-old Green Party candidate for Barack Obama’s old Senate seat in Illinois, is as angry at injustice as he is at the African-American intellectual and political class that accommodates it. He does not buy Obama’s “post-racial” ideology or have much patience with African-American leaders who, hungry for prestige, power and money, have, in his eyes, forgotten the people they are supposed to represent. They have confused a personal ability to be heard and earn a comfortable living with justice.

“The selflessness of leaders like Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Harold Washington and Medgar Evers has produced selfishness within the elite African-American leadership,” Jones told me by phone from Chicago.

“This is the only thing I can do to have peace of mind,” he said when I asked him why he was running for office. “I am looking at a community that is suffering because of a lack of genuine concern from their leaders. This isn’t about a contract. This isn’t about a grant. This isn’t about who gets to stand behind the political elite at a press conference. This is about who is going to stand behind the people. What these leaders talk about and what needs to happen in the community is disjointed.”

Jones began his career as a boy making radio documentaries about life in Chicago’s public housing projects on the South Side, including the acclaimed “Ghetto Life 101.” He knows the world of which he speaks. He lives in the troubled Chicago neighborhood of Englewood, where he works as a freelance journalist and a high school football coach. He is the legal guardian of a 16-year-old nephew. And he often echoes the denunciations of black leaders by the historian Houston A. Baker Jr., who wrote “Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era.”

Baker excoriates leading public intellectuals including Michael Eric Dyson, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Shelby Steele, Yale law professor Stephen Carter and Manhattan Institute fellow John McWhorter, saying they pander to the powerful. He argues they have lost touch with the reality of most African-Americans. Professor Gates’ statement after his July 16 arrest that “what it made me realize was how vulnerable all black men are, how vulnerable are all poor people to capricious forces like a rogue policemen” was a stunning example of how distant from black reality many successful African-American figures like Gates have become. These elite African-American figures, Baker argues, long ago placed personal gain and career advancement over the interests of the black majority. They espouse positions that are palatable to a white audience, positions which ignore the radicalism and structural critiques of inequality by W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. And in a time when, as the poet Yusef Komunyakaa has said, “the cell block has replaced the auction block,” they do not express the rage, frustration and despair of the black underclass.

The conditions for black men and women in America are sliding backward, with huge numbers of impoverished and unemployed removed from society and locked up. Baker acidly calls this “the disappearing” of blacks. The unemployment rate in most inner cities is in the double digits, and segregation, especially in city schools and wealthy states like New Jersey, is the norm. African-American communities are more likely to be red-lined by banks and preyed upon by unscrupulous mortgage lenders, which is why such a high percentage of foreclosures are in blighted, urban neighborhoods. The Village Voice’s recent exposé that detailed brutal and sometimes fatal beatings of black and Hispanic prisoners by guards at New York’s Rikers Island was a window into a daily reality usually not seen or acknowledged by the white mainstream.

“I have three people within my immediate family that are men that have come home within the last 24 to 36 months from being incarcerated,” Jones said. “They are tired of going to jail. They don’t want to go to jail anymore. But there are no jobs. What service can they provide? My belief is those individuals coming home, these ex-felons, have more credibility to stop the violence in the inner city than the police do. It is their sons and nephews and their immediate families that are being the provocateurs of that violence. But if we are asking them to stop crime, what incentive are we providing them to do that?”

“How much money did the American economy lose because of the derivatives and the credit default swaps?” he asked. “There have been only two men prosecuted for that level of crime, Bernard Madoff and Allen Stanford. How much is the drug industry worth in the United States? It is not worth $45 trillion. How many African-American and Hispanic men are incarcerated for being the same kind of capitalist? If we swap dope for derivatives there wouldn’t be a Wall Street because they would be behind bars. If we prosecute derivatives the same way you prosecute dope, which is not different in how it undermines a family, Wall Street wouldn’t exist.”

“A bunch of guys on Wall Street have done more to devastate the white community than any black man ever could,” he added. “I would have bailed out the pension funds, retirement funds, 401(k)s and funds attached to everyday people. If Wall Street and the banks couldn’t survive, they couldn’t survive, but the people’s money would not have been impacted. If you would have killed personal wealth you would have killed personal wealth. They took the pension funds of state, city and local governments and misappropriated that capital. How can you reward them on the front end when they messed up the people’s money on the front end?”


“The only difference between the world of high finance and drug dealers are the commodities they deal,” he added. “The mentality is the same.”

The most prominent faces of color, such as Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, mask an insidious new racism that, in essence, tells blacks they have enough, that progress has been made and that it is up to them to take advantage of what society offers them. And black politicians and intellectuals, including Obama and Gates, are the delivery systems for the message. We blame the victims, those for whom jobs and opportunities do not exist, while we orchestrate the largest transfer of wealth upward in American history. We sustain with taxpayer dollars a power elite and oligarchy that is responsible for dismantling the manufacturing base and social service programs which once gave workers and their families hope. Apologists for the system call their demands for black personal responsibility “tough love.” But the stance, music to the ears of the white elite, is to Baker and Jones morally indefensible. It ignores the harsh reality visited on the poor by the cruelty of unfettered capitalism. It ignores the institutional racism that makes sure the poor remain poor.

“The most published and publicized blacks on the American public scene today are well-dressed, comfortably educated, sagaciously articulate, avowedly new age, and resolutely middle class … , ” Baker wrote. “The evolution of their relationship to the black majority during the past three decades can be summed up in a single word: good-bye!”

“Things are deteriorating,” Jones said of the inner city. “There are no natural relationships because of the decentralization of the street gangs. You don’t have a leadership structure that can be talked to by members of the community to bring peace. You have basically guerrilla warfare going on in the inner city of Chicago. There is no structure or hierarchy where you can go talk to one person in the neighborhood that can then go down the pecking order to bring peace. You have different groups that have different motivations, and that factionalism is at the base of the violence. But there is no alternative when you don’t have jobs, when you have an educational system that has failed and bad home environments.”

Jones said Obama’s silence was illustrated during a recent fundraising trip to Chicago. The president called Chicago White Sox pitcher Mark Buehrle to congratulate him for pitching a perfect game. Obama made no comment, however, about the shooting of nine people in Chicago, including a 9-year-old girl, a few days earlier.

“When Barack Obama does not speak to these issues, it is almost a double devastation to a certain degree,” he said. “It is different if President Bush doesn’t say anything or Bill Clinton doesn’t say anything. But when Barack Obama can’t say the obvious, it does a double devastation to those young men who wanted to hope and wanted to believe in the system to redress these issues.”

August Wilson wrote his last play, “Radio Golf,” about the black elite that sold out the African-American community in exchange for personal power and wealth. He portrayed them as tools and puppets of the white mainstream. It was the final salvo from one of the country’s most courageous playwrights on behalf of the forgotten. The show, despite being named best American play by the New York Drama Critics Circle and earning a Tony nomination for best play, was one of the least attended shows on Broadway and closed after less than two months. There are African-American leaders and writers with Wilson’s integrity who have refused to accommodate an economic and political system that increasingly punishes the poor, especially the poor of color, but you do not see them on CNN or writing Op-Ed pieces in The New York Times. Dick Gregory, James Cone of Union Theological Seminary, Thulani Davis, Komunyakaa, Angela Davis, Baker and Ishmael Reed still harbor the radical fire of our greatest civil rights leaders.

And, of course, there is Harry Belafonte, whose invitation to speak at the funeral of Coretta Scott King was withdrawn so President George W. Bush, whom Belafonte had called a “terrorist,” would not be offended when he spoke there. This last slight illustrates how craven many in the black elite, including some of Dr. King’s children, have become and how hard it is to hear the anguished cries of those being beaten down in the age of Obama.

Courtiers come in different colors in America but their function is the same. They are hedonists of power. They are invited into the inner circles of the elite, including the White House and Harvard University, as long as they faithfully serve the system. They are offered comfort and privilege, but they pay with their souls.

“Loose and easy language about equality, resonant resolutions about brotherhood fall pleasantly on the ear,” Dr. Martin Luther King once said, “but for the Negro, there is a credibility gap he cannot overlook. He remembers that with each modest advance, the white population promptly raises the argument that the Negro has come far enough. Each step forward accents an ever-present tendency to backlash.”

and so it goes,
GORD.

Obama Racial Profiling and Elitism & "Rankism" & The Beer Summit

"A Man's A Man For A'That & A That"
Robert Burns

Racism ELITISM RANKISM & OBAMA & GATES

Obama and racial profiling -Does Obama only object to racial profiling when it involves upper class Blacks.

Yes Obama is Black but does he also have an elitist point of view-

Is this why Obama is able to surround himself with white , Black and Hispanic elitists

Is Obama able to step outside his own privileged position to understand or be empathetic to the concerns of average Black and Hispanic Americans and their experiences of being racially profiled by police and other people in authority

Some critics argue that African-Americans are deluded if they think Obama will make bold moves to help ordinary African-Americans. Barack Obama appears to actually believe that the race issue is no longer as serious as it was thirty years ago. Obama like other well off or privileged Black American is the spokesperson for the upwardly mobile African-Americans and tends to blame ordinary blacks for their problems or that ordinary African-Americans are blowing the race issues all out of proportion.

In the recent incident involving the police and Professor Gates Obama quickly labeled the incident as one in which the police acted "stupidly". Was Obama merely pointing out the injustice of racial profiling of Blacks and Hispanics & others or did he mean something else by his remarks. Glen Ford argues that to Obama the incident was unjust and stupid because the African American involved was a professor at a university and is obviously part of the upper middle class and is well connected-these facts should have been obvious to the police officers involved and should therefore acted appropriately.

The question which arises is whether Obama would have been so quick to judge the police in a similar case involving a working class or a poor African-American. In other words does Obama buy into the same erroneous stereotyping of African Americans as do white Americans. Are other upper middle class and privileged and wealthy African Americans as prejudiced as white Americans in the way they perceive lower class or poor African Americans.

It reminds one of the notorious idea of what is referred to as "the brown paper bag test" by which those African Americans who see themselves as superior to African Americans who are darker in skin color and so they keep those of darker skin color out of their exclusive schools and country clubs etc. The test as it were they use is if the individual African American is darker than a brown paper bag they are not allowed to join these exclusive clubs or schools. Obama's prejudice is similar in the sense that he using material and professional success as a means of judging which African Americans are more worthy or more equal than others. If this is true then Obama is not a true Egalitarian but holds to a different set of prejudices.

Professor Fuller in a recent article in the Huffington Post offers a slightly different explanation which he refers to as "Rankism".

But first Glen Ford at The Real News Network.

The Real News Network The beer summit and race in America
Glen Ford: Upward mobility for black elite has not translated into a better life for ordinary blacks July 31,2009



Rankism: The Elephant in Professor Gates's House by Robert Fuller at Huffington Post, July 27,2009

We were quick to look at the Gates affair through the lens of race. But it soon became clear that race was not the whole story. To bring things fully into focus, we need a second lens -- that of rank. The lens of race highlights the well-known injustices of racism. The lens of rank reveals the less well recognized indignities of rankism.

Rankism has not received the attention that racism has. Perhaps its time has come. But, before looking through the lens of rank, a common misconception must be cleared away. Rank, in itself, is not the problem. Like race, rank is just a fact of life. Rank tells us who's in charge. Used properly, it's a useful organizational tool. The problem lies not with rank per se, but in rank abuse. By analogy with racism, sexism, and ageism, abuse of the power signified by rank is rankism. Once you have a name for it, you see it everywhere.

Rankism is the principal source of man-made indignity. As indignities accumulate, it becomes harder to repress the indignation they seed. Beyond a threshold that varies according to personal history, indignation erupts. It is not hard to understand why Professor Gates felt humiliated by treatment he interpreted as another instance of the racial profiling that has long dogged African-Americans and others lacking the protections of social rank. On top of that, a pillar of common law has it that "a man's home is his castle." Homeowner Gates might reasonably have assumed that he outranked a law enforcement officer on his home turf.
While giving vent to his indignation can be questioned, it's not difficult to understand his anger.

Now turn the lens of rank on the attending police. Police are trained to assume command of unruly situations. While on duty, the understanding is that our guardians outrank us, precisely so they will have the authority they need to stabilize volatile situations. We expect the police to exercise their authority according to strict rules that safeguard individual rights and the public interest. On those occasions when our guardians do abuse their rank, victims' only resort is to take the matter to higher authority. That minorities and the poor, more than others, must pursue justice in this way is evidence that rankism falls disproportionately on them.

The Gates affair, and the discussion it has provoked, were incubated in America's racial history and aggravated by confusion about rank and its proper use. To reach a judgment on the Gates affair, one must decide whether or not Professor Gates improperly attempted to assert his rank -- as a Harvard professor or as homeowner -- over the policeman. It is equally germane to ascertain whether or not Sergeant Crowley overstepped his legitimate authority in arresting Professor Gates. My purpose here is not to rehash, let alone try to pass judgment, but rather to find, in our obsession with the incident, a clue to the crux of the matter. The Gates affair is that rarest of teachable moments -- one that provides an opportunity to drive home an old lesson while offering us a new one.

The Gates affair reminds us of our sorry history of racial profiling and gives new impetus to ending it. It also suggests that we're more likely to eradicate profiling if we show our guardians the same dignity that we seek for ourselves.

But, more important than assigning blame in the case is turning the lens of rank around and seeing what it tells us about ourselves and our relationships. The clash between Professor Gates and Sergeant Crowley grips us because it mirrors our own struggles with rank and its rightful use.

How much deference is due our boss, our spouse, elders, children, teachers, doctors, religious leaders, and elected officials? Where does the proper use of rank end, and rankism begin? When it is we who are outranked, do our superiors treat us respectfully? If not, why not? In those areas where we hold rank over others, do we protect their dignity as we would have them protect our own?

At long last, we've got racism in our sights. But rankism is still largely below the radar. Like racism and sexism before they were identified, rankism is endemic, ubiquitous, and seemingly impregnable. It's an unrecognized source of dysfunctionality in families, schools, the workplace, religious institutions, and heath care. Like the more familiar isms, now finally on the defensive, it too will have to be rooted out of our social institutions if we are to perfect our union.

The Gates affair offers an opportunity to widen our lens so as to take in all varieties of rank abuse and to recognize the indignities that arise from them. The professor and the policeman will have served us well if the incident with which they are identified is seen as a milestone towards an America in which, without exception, everyone -- the public and the police, employees and employers, students and teachers, blacks and whites, young and old, gays and straights, everyone -- is accorded equal dignity.

Anna Deavere argues that there is a long way to go to eliminate racism in America. Police are still involved in racial profiling of African Americans, Muslim Americans and Hispanic Americans. The perception of America Blacks and other ethnic groups have about America is different from that of White Americans. White Americans and even upwardly mobile black Americans either do not understand that racial profiling is a serious issue with serious consequences in which an innocent black American is treated unfairly by the police or is beaten or even killed . Are these middle class & upper class privileged African Americans unwilling to face or accept that racial profiling is a real problem in contemporary America.

Before We All Have A Beer Anna Deavere, Huffington Post, July 30,2009

Will we all be having a beer tonight? As soon as the first stones from the edifice of post-racialism began to tumble, the media labeled the conversations of excited onlookers as "a heated national debate about race." That suggests to me that Professor Gates, Officer Crowley and President Obama haven't been the only ones talking. We've all been involved. Maybe theirs won't be the only beer. Will the media folk be raising a toast, for example about a story well told? A word of caution before the wrecking team slaps high fives over their own cold beers in newsrooms, blog rooms, chat rooms, radio stations etc, and erupts in a national "Way da go!" If "way da go" means we have a long way to go, I'd take a suds too. If it means "job well done", the job's hardly begun.

and she talks about an incident in Phoenix Arizona:

...Phoenix, Arizona: I spoke to a middle class white woman - an executive in a well known national non-profit who was stopped for drunk driving just as she was leaving the parking lot of a bar after a happy hour event with people from her office. Her alcohol level was slightly above what is allowed in Arizona. The police were being rougher with her than her boyfriend thought was necessary. He intervened. He had been drinking in the bar too, but he was not driving. The officers immediately threw him onto the ground with such force that she thought for sure his head would crack open. They threw handcuffs on him. When he would not agree to a sobriety test, arguing that he was not driving - they threw him into the police car and took him to a hospital. In an open ward, they strapped him to a gurney, and catheterized him to take urine. When he screamed out in pain - the white officer said to him, in the presence of his colleague, a black officer, "Stop acting like a nigger."

The woman was sentenced to go to Sherriff Arpaio's "tent city" jail. She acknowledged throughout her talk with me that she was wrong wrong wrong to drive under the influence regardless of how few hundredths of a percentage her blood was above the acceptable level. Arpaio's jail is fashioned after what he says soldiers can endure in Iraq. It is a series of tents in hot sun, or cold nights. Whatever the weather in Phoenix provides. The inmates wear striped uniforms and pink underwear in case they try to escape and in doing so take off their uniforms. There is a large neon VACANCIES sign over the jail. One would gawk at the theater of many aspects of the sheriff's policing if it weren't so serious. Her boyfriend was traumatized and the relationship ended.

---
Arthur Delaney points out that the problem of over reaction by Police is an ongoing concern for even some white Americans. The police use certain laws such as "disorderly Conduct" as an excuse to harass and arrest citizens who for whatever reason they want to punish for their behavior or their speech. So if a police officer is annoyed by something someone says it appears that in many US cities the police have the authority to arrest such a person and few dare question the police officer's decision.

Disorderly Conduct: Conversation About Gates Arrest Precedes Arrest by Arthur Delaney, at Huffington Post, July 29,2009

A lawyer who moments earlier had been complaining to friends about police overreaction in the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., got a taste of the Gates treatment himself after loudly chanting "I hate the police" near a traffic stop in Northwest Washington, D.C.

Pepin Tuma, 33, was walking with two friends along Washington's hip U Street corridor around midnight Saturday, complaining about how Gates had been rousted from his home for not showing a proper amount of deference to a cop. "We'd been talking about it all day," said Tuma. "It seems like police have a tendency to act overly aggressively when they're being pushed around," Tuma recalled saying.

Then the group noticed five or six police cruisers surrounding two cars in an apparent traffic stop on the other side of the street. It seemed to Tuma that was more cops than necessary.

"That's why I hate the police," Tuma said. He told the Huffington Post that in a loud sing-song voice, he then chanted, "I hate the police, I hate the police."

One officer reacted strongly to Tuma's song. "Hey! Hey! Who do you think you're talking to?" Tuma recalled the officer shouting as he strode across an intersection to where Tuma was standing. "Who do you think you are to think you can talk to a police officer like that?" the police officer said, according to Luke Platzer, 30, one of Tuma's companions.

Tuma said he responded, "It is not illegal to say I hate the police. It's not illegal to express my opinion walking down the street."

According to Tuma and Platzer, the officer pushed Tuma against an electric utility box, continuing to ask who he thought he was and to say he couldn't talk to police like that.

"I didn't curse," Tuma said. "I asked, am I being arrested? Why am I being arrested?"

Within minutes, the officer had cuffed Tuma. The charge: disorderly conduct -- just like Gates, who was arrested after police responded to a report of a possible break-in at his home and Gates protested their ensuing behavior.

D.C.'s disorderly conduct statute bars citizens from breaching the peace by doing anything "in such a manner as to annoy, disturb, interfere with, obstruct, or be offensive to others" or by shouting or making noise "either outside or inside a building during the nighttime to the annoyance or disturbance of any considerable number of persons."

The local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has said that the city's disorderly conduct law is "confusing, overbroad, frequently used by police to harass disfavored individuals" and that it "violates constitutional rights of free speech, assembly and petition."

----
But over-reaction by police is nothing knew and there are examples of it everyday as police use Taser's on people for no apparent reason which sometimes results in death. But according to the Law and Order crowd anyone stopped by the police or tasered or beaten and handcuffed and arrested must have done something wrong and therefore deserve whatever treatment police rationalize as necessary. The police as it were are more embolden as they come to believe that they are a law unto themselves and can act anyway they want to.

The Gates Affair: Was it Racism or Rankism? by Byron Williams Huffington Post July 30,2009

What should we make of the incident involving Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates and Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department now that the calming balm of time has offset the outbreak of emotion?

There is an undeniable absurdity associated with a story that involves arresting a disabled man, as is Prof. Gates, who is sitting in his home with proper identification, because a neighbor mistakenly thought he was breaking in.

But such absurdity is not beyond the comprehension for scores of men of color. For black and brown men, in particular, it is almost a rite of passage into manhood to have a part of your day interrupted by local authorities because you "fit the description," regardless of guilt.

The lens of race by which many view this fiasco is legitimate, but may not fully explain why this story rose to national prominence. While much of the conversation around Prof. Gates' arrest has centered on race, we might also examine the role "rankism" plays into this conundrum.

Rankism, a term coined by former president of Oberlin College, Dr. Robert Fuller in his book "Somebodies and Nobodies," is an abusive, discriminatory, or exploitative behavior towards people who have less power.

Rankism underlies many of the social ills of society such as racism, sexism, and homophobia, but it is also based on an abuse of power inherent to one holding a superior rank in life.

As Dr. Fuller recently wrote on the Huffington Post, "Rankism is the principal source of man-made indignity."

and so it goes ,
GORD.

Republicans Brown Shirted Mobs Out To Undermine the Democratic Process In America & Lou Dobbs "Truth is Relative"

It has become obvious that Republicans use various forms of propaganda , misinformation and lies to attack Obama and his administration and his policies. They also use strategies such as "Tea Partys" and "Tea Baging" to create the false impression of a populist grass roots uprising against Obama which are in fact not a spontaneous grass roots populist movement but rather is a well choreographed well-funded "faux populist protest movement" created by Republican operatives and ad agencies & lobbyists for various industries who are anti-Obama.

And now we discover that the shouting and disruptions by groups or individuals at Town Hall Meetings are in fact well planned strategies of the Republican party and affiliated groups who are anti-Obama.

These strategies to disrupt and undermine these Town Hall Meetings and press conferences etc. remind one of the sort of tactics used by the "Brown-Shirts of the NAZI. party in the 1920s and 1930s to shut down any reasonable discourse. Their paranoid fantasies about Obama and the Socialist take over of America is being transformed into a fanatical movement which is only concerned with maintaining the "status quo" or returning America to an idealized, romanticized non-existent "Golden Era." During That Mythical Golden Era of course minorities such as Blacks, Hispanics and other ethnic groups knew their place while Gays & Lesbians were forced to stay in the closet or were treated as criminals who spent a great deal of time in prison and women too knew their place was as a help mate of their men-folk.

Right-Wing Harassment Strategy Against Dems Detailed in Memo: 'Yell,' 'Stand Up And Shout Out,' 'Rattle Him' by Lee Fang at Think progress, July 31, 2009

This morning, Politico reported that Democratic members of Congress are increasingly being harassed by "angry, sign-carrying mobs and disruptive behavior" at local town halls. For example, in one incident, right-wing protesters surrounded Rep. Tim Bishop (D-NY) and forced police officers to have to escort him to his car for safety.

This growing phenomenon is often marked by violence and absurdity. Recently, right-wing demonstrators hung Rep. Frank Kratovil (D-MD) in effigy outside of his office. Missing from the reporting of these stories is the fact that much of these protests are coordinated by public relations firms and lobbyists who have a stake in opposing President Obama's reforms.

The lobbyist-run groups Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, which orchestrated the anti-Obama tea parties earlier this year, are now pursuing an aggressive strategy to create an image of mass public opposition to health care and clean energy reform. A leaked memo from Bob MacGuffie, a volunteer with the FreedomWorks website Tea Party Patriots, details how members should be infiltrating town halls and harassing Democratic members of Congress:

Rocking the Town Halls -- Best Practices

A Political Action Memo

We here in Fairfield County Connecticut conducted an action at Jim Himes's Town Hall meeting in May 2009. We believe there are some best practices which emerged from the event and our experience, which could be useful to activists in just about any district where their Congressperson has supported the socialist agenda of the Democrat leadership in Washington.

# Artificially Inflate Your Numbers: "Spread out in the hall and try to be in the front half. The objective is to put the Rep on the defensive with your questions and follow-up. The Rep should be made to feel that a majority, and if not, a significant portion of at least the audience, opposes the socialist agenda of Washington."
# Be Disruptive Early And Often: "You need to rock-the-boat early in the Rep's presentation, Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the Rep's statements early."
# Try To "Rattle Him," Not Have An Intelligent Debate: "The goal is to rattle him, get him off his prepared script and agenda. If he says something outrageous, stand up and shout out and sit right back down. Look for these opportunities before he even takes questions."

The memo above also resembles the talking points being distributed by FreedomWorks for pushing an anti-health reform assault all summer. Patients United, a front group maintained by Americans for Prosperity, is currently busing people all over the country for more protests against Democratic members. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), chairman of the NRCC, has endorsed the strategy, telling the Politico the days of civil town halls are now "over."


Meanwhile, AHIP, the trade group and lobbying juggernaut representing the health insurance industry is sending staffers to monitor town halls and other right-wing front groups are stepping up their ad campaign to smear reform efforts. The strategy for defeating reform - recently outlined by an influential lobbyist to the Hill newspaper as "delay" then "kill" - is becoming apparent. By delaying a vote until after the August recess, lobbyists are now seizing upon recess town halls as opportunities to ambush lawmakers and fool them into believing there is wide opposition to reform.

Rush Limbaugh: says Americans are surrounded by those within the United States and by those outside the United States who want to rob Americans or "Real Americans" of their Freedoms and rights.He believes Obama and his supporters are part of a world wide socialist conspiracy or "The New World Order" to radically change America.

The Two Minutes Hate: July 31, 2009

Daily lowlights from right-wing talk radio. http://mediamatters.org



Chris Matthews Responds To Eric Cantor Re "Wack Job" Birthers

"Hardball" host Chris Matthews takes umbrage at House Minority Whip Eric Cantor blaming Matthews for pushing the "birther" issue, so Matthews takes his anger out on Republican strategist Todd Harris, who has "no answer" why this is an issue among the GOP. "The Republican party has gone nativist," Chris proclaims.

Meanwhile, Democratic strategist Karen Finney agrees that "birthers" are "wack jobs" and "a little crazy."

Bill Maher's New Rules: Birthers Must Be Stopped - July 31st, 2009



Racist anti-Obama extremist Lou Dobbs erroneously argues the issues raised by the Birthers should be taken seriously since they have a right to their opinions . Dobbs ignores the fact that it is up to Republicans and Democrats to distance themselves from the Birthers and to show that their "Conspiracy Theory" is not based upon facts but rather is a result of paranoid fantasies & racism which are being fueled by media personalities such as Lou Dobbs. But of course Lou Dobbs is anti-Obama and believes in attacking Obama with whatever one can throw at him. So if undermining Obama can be achieved by propaganda and misinformation then so be it.

According to Lou Dobbs if the price to be paid for undermining Obama is the abandoning of truth and reality and honesty then so be it.

CNNs Racist-in-Chief Dobbs Says Bill Maher's Call to Stop the Birthers Against Freedom of Expression
Via http://www.mediamatters.org )July 31



Scarborough Blast Beck & the Birthers

(Via http://www.mediamatters.org ) Scarborough and Smerconish blast Beck, birthers "Do these people really believe that's how they're gonna win elections."



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and so it goes,
GORD.

Tin Foil Hat Republicans "Immune to Facts" Don't Believe Barack Obama Is A U.S. Citizen

So how serious should we take the "Birthers". The recent poll of Americans who believe Obama is not a U.S. citizen or that his citizenship is in doubt includes some 58% of Republicans.This could be discounted as a fringe crazy "Conspiracy Theory" but the numbers show that a significant number of Republicans agree with the "Birthers".

Their view of reality is therefore distorted and this may lead to some serious consequences such as some sort of violent insurrection or even an assassination attempt . For the Birthers the U.S. government and its laws are thrown into question. They may believe that a number of members of the Obama administration plus the Congress and Senate and the judiciary are all part of this imagined conspiracy to protect Barack Obama and to keep him in power.

This "Conspiracy theory" of a an African-American taking power in the United States by illegitimate means is right out of the paranoid ravings of the far right white supremacist playbook ie the notorious novel The Turner Diaries which describes a future race war in America. Note the book is available on YouTube its a rather nasty and vicious diatribe masking as a novel.



Washington Monthly, Political Animal by Steve Benen, July 31, 2009

ONE OF THESE THINGS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHER.... A new Research 2000 poll conducted for Daily Kos asked respondents a rather straightforward question: "Do you believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States of America or not?" Since the president was born in the U.S., ideally, the results would be around 100%.

They weren't. There was, not surprisingly, a significant partisan gap. Only 4% of Democrats are confused about the president's place of birth. The number is slightly higher among independents, 8% of whom got it wrong. Among Republicans, though, 28% -- more than one in four -- believe President Obama was not born in the United States.

For a crazy, demonstrably false, racist idea, these are discouraging numbers.

But I was especially surprised by the regional breakdowns. In the Northeast, West, and Midwest, the overwhelming majorities realize the president is a native-born American. But notice the South -- only 47% got it right and 30% are unsure.

Outside the South, this madness is gaining very little traction, and remains a fringe conspiracy theory. Within the South, it's practically mainstream.

THE BIRTHERS playing fast and loose with facts and reality still claim Barack Obama is not a U.S. citizen or they have doubts about his citizenship. 58% of Republicans in a recent poll are of the same mindset and are skeptical about Obama's citizenship and therefore his legitimacy in holding the office of U.S. president.


So how significant is it that a greater number of Southern Republicans compared to Northern Republicans are doubtful about Obama's citizenship. This raises the issue of whether the Birthers are in fact motivated by racism.

Newest poll reveals :Large number of republicans don't believe Obama is a US citizen. They are according to Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks "immune to the facts".

How Many Americans Believe Obama Is A US Citizen?July 31, 2009

Watch more at http://www.theyoungturks.com



MSNBC's Keith Olbermann: Obama Birther Movement Is "Southern" - 07/31/09



Rachel Maddow wraps up the Birther conspiracy with McCain birth in Panama on an US Navy Ship
July 31, 2009



Birther Whack Jobs: Citizens of Idiot America By Dan Kennedy, Comment Is Free. Posted July 30, 2009.

Join MoveOn's fight take on Lou Dobbs and put this paranoid and racist movement to an end.

Indeed. The Birthers are ignorant hatemongers, spouting nonsense about Obama's roots as a proxy for their profound disgust that a black man was elected president. And it's tempting to say that the media should simply ignore the Birthers -- not to mention the global-warming deniers, the WTC conspiracists and all the rest. But given the cultural environment in which we find ourselves, such tactics would only lead to conspiracy theories about the liberal media -- as if there weren't enough of those already.

2. How Lou Dobbs Scared Rush Limbaugh Off the Birther Story By Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America. July 31, 2009 via Alternet

The media backlash that Dobbs set off made sure that nobody will ever take the birthers seriously again.

I can think of three (inadvertent) positives that came out of Lou Dobbs' ill-advised embrace of the birther movement:

1) The CNN host has permanently tarnished his reputation

2) The birther movement is officially kaput (like, stick-a-fork-in-it done)

3) Rush Limbaugh is afraid to talk about birthers.

Talk about a win-win-win.

It's true that Dobbs irresponsibly mainstreamed radical right-fringe players by championing their half-baked claims that Barack Obama isn't a natural born citizen and is ineligible to serve as president of the United States. Dobbs, at least indirectly, lent the birther movement some fleeting credence as he dragged its misbegotten detective work into the spotlight. And it's still vitally important to monitor Dobbs and call out CNN management for its dreadful hypocrisy on the birther issue (i.e. The story is "dead" but it's OK for Dobbs to keep flogging it on national TV).

But there was some good news last week, and it came from watching Dobbs' slow motion train wreck unfold on the airwaves. It came from seeing how eagerly -- how convincingly -- the birther claims were debunked, not only online by progressives, but within the mainstream press as well -- the same mainstream press that's often reluctant to show up high-profile media players such as Dobbs, no matter how badly it has botched the facts. And let's not forget conservatives, who dismissed and ridiculed the birther claims.

Also see;
by Melissa McEwan at Shakesville, July 31, 2009

and:

Birthers, the Few, the Proud, Riling Capitol Hill by Mary Ann Akers at The Sleuth, July 30,2009

Health-care reform may be slow going, but the birthers - the few but furious - are gaining steam.

and so it goes,
GORD.