Diplomatic Cables Based on U.S. Intelligence Reports — Published by Whistleblower Web Site WikiLeaks — Reveal North Koreans Sold 19 Nuclear-Capable IRBM Missiles to Iran Capable of Striking Targets Throughout Europe and in Russia; Documents Show Arab States Called for Attack on Iran’s Nuke Facilities — China Admits It’s Fed Up With North Korea’s Belligerence, Wants Peninsula Reunified Under Seoul’s Control

FOR ONCE, WIKILEAKS PERFORMS A VITAL WORLD PUBLIC SERVICE — Contrary to demands by Representative Peter King (R- New York) that the whistleblower Web site WikliLeaks be “designated a foreign terrorist organization” for making public thousands of previously secret U.S. diplomatic cables, the Web site should be honored for performing a vital public service to the world by revealing that North Korea sold 19 nuclear-capable R-27 missiles — such as these on display in a recent military parade in Pyongyang — to Iran, giving Tehran the potential to fire them at targets throughout Europe and even toward the Russian capital, Moscow. The documents, if accurate, show that Iran and North Korea pose a far greater threat to world peace and stability than previously thought. (Photo: Yonhap News Agency via European Pressphoto Agency)

(Posted 5:30 a.m. EST Tuesday, November 30, 2010)
(Updated 11:15 a.m. EST Tuesday, November 30, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

Memo to Representative Peter King (R-New York):

Shut the hell up!

The ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee — who will take over as chairman in January — called on Attorney General Eric Holder to prosecute Julian Assange, founder of the whistleblower Web site WikiLeaks, under the Espionage Act and for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to designate the site “a foreign terrorist organization,’ in reaction to its posting on Sunday of more than 250,000 secret U.S. diplomatic cables.

“This is extremely damaging to U.S. troops, U.S. interests and U.S. intelligence,” King told Fox News on Monday. “They [WikiLeaks] are engaged in terrorist activity. What they’re doing is clearly aiding and abetting terrorist groups. Either we’re serious about this or we’re not,” adding that putting the Web site on the State Department’s list of known foreign terrorist organizations would enable the U.S. to shut down WikiLeaks by seizing its assets and to stop other entities — including news media outlets — from cooperating with it.

Excuse us, Congressman King, but since when is it “aiding and abetting terrorist groups” to expose the fact that Iran and North Korea pose a dangerous threat to world peace — a threat much more dangerous than previously thought — to the point that even China is reportedly “fed up” with North Korea’s belligerence?

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CHINA CONFIRMS IT WANTS KOREAN PENINSULA REUNIFIED UNDER SEOUL’S CONTROL, ADMITS ‘FRUSTRATION’ WITH PYONGYANG

The officials admitted to a sense of frustration in Beijing over North Korea’s recent actions, including its nuclear and missile tests – which China opposed – and last week’s lethal artillery bombardment of a South Korean island.
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Instead of prosecuting Assange and attempting to shut down WikiLeaks — which, by the way, would clearly violate the U.S. Constitution’s guarantees under the First Amendment of a free and unfettered news and information media — WikiLeaks should be honored for performing, for once, a vital public service by alerting the world to the mounting threat to world peace and stability posed by Tehran and Pyongyang — a danger that has been building since 2003 and is now approaching a dangerous flashpoint on the Korean Peninsula.

The whistleblower site made public what the State Department should have told the world months ago: That North Korea sold to Iran 19 intermediate-range R-27 ballistic missiles — missiles that could be armed with nuclear warheads and, when fired from Iran, could strike cities throughout Europe.

Even the Russian capital Moscow could potentially be threatened by nuclear-armed Iranian IRBMs, the U.S. diplomatic cables show, based on intelligence reports. That revelation comes just four months after relations between Russia and Iran began to deteriorate over Iran’s nuclear program.

MISSILE THREAT TO EUROPE, RUSSIA DETAILED IN U.S. MEETINGS WITH RUSSIAN OFFICIALS

According to the cables obtained by WikiLeaks — accounts of which were published Sunday by The New York Times — top Russian officials were alerted to the Iranian missile threat in February during a meeting in Moscow with a U.S. delegation led by Vann Van Diepen, a top official of the State Department’s nuclear nonproliferation division.

Van Diepen, while working in his previous capacity as a national intelligence officer, “played a crucial role in the 2007 assessment of Iran’s nuclear capacity,” according to the Times account of the cables.

Iran’s acquisition of the North Korean-built R-27 missiles — which, ironically, were originally designed by the Russians during the Soviet era — gives Tehran the capability of striking cities throughout Europe and that even Moscow lies within the missiles’ striking range, the cables show.

The U.S. delegation warned their Russian counterparts that the missiles, which have an advanced propulsion system that the North Koreans developed, would bring Iran closer to developing its own arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) at a time when the two former Cold War adversaries reached a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) — yet to be ratified by the U.S. Senate — aimed at further reducing the U.S. and Russia’s ICBM stockpiles.

CABLES REVEAL GROWING WORLDWIDE ALARM OVER IRANIAN NUKE PROGRAMS

The nuclear development program of Iran been the source of increasing alarm by the United States for the past half-decade. Now, it appears, the alarm has spread worldwide — nowhere more so than in the Arab world.

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah is so worried about Iran’s nuclear program that he repeatedly called on the U.S. to launch a pre-emptive strike and destroy the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities — as the Israelis did to Iraq’s nuclear plant in a 1981 air strike, according to an account of the cables published Sunday by Britain’s The Guardian newspaper.

And Saudi Arabia isn’t alone, according to the cables. They reveal that Arab governments are just as suspicious as the U.S., Israel and the European Union are that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. One cable recorded King Abdullah as having “frequently exhorted the U.S. to attack Iran to put an end to its nuclear weapons program.”

According to Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., the king, in an April 2008 meeting in Riyadh with General David Petraeus, then the commander of the U.S.-led multinational force in Iraq, told him to “cut off the head of the snake,” referring to Iran’s nuclear program, the Guardian reported in its account of the cables.

ARAB COUNTRIES DEMAND ACTION AGAINST IRAN’S NUKE FACILITIES, CABLES SAY

Other Arab countries, notably Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, referred to Iran as “evil”, an “existential threat” and a power that “is going to take us to war,” according to the cables. Jordan and Bahrain have even gone so far as to openly demand that Iran’s nuclear program “be stopped by any means necessary” — including military action.

The Arab countries’ demand for action against Iran marks a dramatic departure from widely-held perceptions that to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities would have triggered a much wider war in the Middle East, with Tehran likely to retaliate with a massive missile strike against Israel.

For its part, Israel let it be known to American officials in June 2009 that it was prepared, if necessary, to “go it alone” and attack Iran’s nuclear facilities unilaterally, according to the Guardian account of the cables. They quoted Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak as saying that there was a window of “between six and 18 months from now in which stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons might still be viable,” beyond which any military action “would result in unacceptable collateral damage.”

According to Barak’s timetable, that window will close at the end of this year.

Iran lashed out at the WikiLeaks disclosures Monday, with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dismissing the leaks as a “worthless” psychological warfare campaign by the U.S. against his country. “We don’t think this information was leaked,” Ahmadinejad said during a televised news conference in Tehran. “We think it was organized to be released on a regular basis and they are pursuing political goals.”

Ahmadinejad insisted to reporters that Arab nations’ demand for action against Iran’s nuclear program would have no impact on his country’s relations with them. “We are friends with the regional countries and mischievous acts will not affect relations,” he said.

CABLES REVEAL CHINA ‘FED UP’ WITH ‘SPOILED CHILD’ NORTH KOREA’S BELLIGERENCE

Disclosure of North Korea’s sale of the R-27 missiles to Iran could not have come at a more sensitive time, as tensions on the Korean Peninsula have reached a crisis stage after North Korea launched an artillery barrage on a South Korean island, killing four South Korean civilians and bringing the peninsula to the brink of war.

Among a second cache of U.S. diplomatic cables made public by WikiLeaks on Monday include a bombshell revelation that China, North Korea’s longtime ally, is “fed up” with the increasingly belligerent regime in Pyongyang, with senior Chinese officials quoted as derisively branding North Korea “a spoiled child.”

While Beijing publicly has refused to condemn Pyongyang for its November 23 attack on the South Korean island of Yeongyeong and has called for a resumption of the six-party nuclear talks, the cables reveal China’s mounting private frustration with North Korea in the four years since Pyongyang’s provocative underground nuclear tests and test firings of its long-range Taepodong-2 ballistic missiles.

In a February 17 cable, South Korea’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Chun Yung-woo, told Kathleen Stephens, the U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, that senior Chinese officials told him that Beijing “is fed up with the North Korean regime’s behavior and would not oppose” the unification of the Korean peninsula under South Korean control.

S. KOREAN OFFICIAL; N. KOREA ‘ALREADY COLLAPSING’

Chun, who heads the South Korean delegation to the six-nation talks aimed at dismantling North Korea’s nuclear program, said China “would not be able to stop North Korea’s collapse” following the death of its ailing, 68-year-old dictator, Kim Jong-il, according to the cable. The North, Chun said, “had already collapsed economically and would collapse politically [within] two to three years” after Kim’s death — despite Pyongyang’s apparent grooming of the dictator’s 27-yer-old son, Kim Jong-un, to take over.

Chun dismissed South Korean media reports that Chinese companies had agreed to pump $10 billion into the North’s economy, the cable said. “Beijing had ‘no will’ to use its modest economic leverage to force a change in Pyongyang’s policies,” Chun said.

In a sign of the deteriorating relations between Beijing and Pyongyang, the cable quotes Chun as saying that North Korea has a low regard for Wu Dawei, China’s deputy foreign minister and chief representative at the six-party nuclear talks, with the North Koreans characterizing him as “the most incompetent official in China.”

For his part, Wu is quoted in an April 2009 cable as telling U.S. officials that Pyongyang was behaving like “a spoiled child” to get Washington’s attention by carrying out its missile tests — which severely jangled nerves in Japan, where the government in Tokyo regarded the tests as a direct threat to Japan’s national security.

Another sign of tension between the two countries has been a series of violent incidents along the Chinese-North Korean border — the most highly publicized of which was the deadly shooting in July by North Korean border guards of three Chinese citizens and the wounding of a fourth.

The four Chinese were shot on the North Korean side of the border, after North Korean guards suspected them of “crossing the border for trade activities,” according to Qin Gang, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry. Beijing filed a formal diplomatic protest to Pyongyang over the incident.

WHY WIKILEAKS: LACK OF FEDERAL ‘SHIELD LAW’ TO PROTECT JOURNALISTS’ SOURCES

Congressman King and other politicians, in their condemnation of WikiLeaks, have forgotten the reason why WikiLeaks came into being in the first place: The refusal of the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005 to review federal court rulings ordering two investigative reporters to reveal their confidential sources.

It has been a longstanding practice of investigative journalists uncovering corruption in and wrongdoing by the government and private entities to keep the identities of confidential sources secret to protect them from retaliation for their disclosures. The Valerie Plame affair undermined that practice, prompting many sources to remain silent, out of fear of discovery and retribution.

Courts ordered then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller and then-Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper to reveal their sources for information about the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame in apparent retaliation for the public challenge by her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, to the credibility of the Bush administration’s claim of an alleged Iraqi stockpile of weapons of mass destruction as the rationale for invading Iraq in 2003.

WIKILEAKS ‘CREATED TO PROTECT WHISTLEBLOWERS’

As Peter Scheer, a journalist and practicing attorney who is also executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, writes in a November 16 blog posting on the coalition’s Web site, “WikiLeaks emerged as a technological solution to this hole in the fabric of legal rules implementing the First Amendment’s free press and free speech guarantees.”

WikiLeaks is designed “to foil subpoenas or other assertions of judicial power,” Scheer wrote. “Because the Web site is not tied to any single real-world venue and apparently was built with layers of redundancy, court injunctions issued against WikiLeaks, whether directed to its Internet service providers (ISPs), its lawyers or other entities, are unlikely to disable it.”

More important, Scheer wrote, “WikiLeaks claims to use technology that erases the fingerprints of sources, rendering leaked documents untraceable. By contrast, the same documents leaked to a newspaper, such as The Washington Post, whether by means of e-mail, ‘cloud’-based Internet services or other electronic communications, would be vulnerable to interception and tracing.

“Even if the documents, instead, were hand-delivered to the Post, its reporter could be subpoenaed and forced to testify,” Scheer added.

It is a both a tragedy and a disgrace that it took a Web site such as WikiLeaks to alert the world to the dangers to world peace and security that Iran and North Korea pose — a job that the mainstream media should have done but has been intimidated by the court rulings in the Plame case into not doing.

WikiLeaks should not be prosecuted for that. It should instead be given a great deal of thanks for performing a vitally needed public service.

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Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Republican Leadership Faces a Crisis as It Prepares to Take Control of House in January: Congress Must Vote on Raising the Nation’s ‘Credit-Card Limit’ by Spring, But Newly-Elected Tea Party Hard-Liners Vow They Won’t Support Raising Debt Limit — Raising the Threat of a Government Default That Could Set Off Another Financial-Market Meltdown, Plunging the U.S. Economy Into a Free Fall

AFTER ROUTING DEMOCRATS, REPUBLICAN RIFT BLOWS WIDE OPEN — Less than three weeks after routing the Democrats in the midterm elections, Republicans already are in the throes of a major rift that threatens to destroy party unity. Newly-elected Tea Party-backed Republicans are causing a huge headache for the GOP leadership by vowing not to vote to raise the national debt ceiling — which Congress must vote on by next spring. Essentially the nation’s de facto credit-card limit, the debt ceiling is due to max out by that time. If Congress fails to act, the government would legally default on paying its debts — forcing the government to shut down and setting off chaos in the financial markets that could plunge the U.S. economy into a free fall. (Photo: Steve Bloom/Barcroft Media)

(Posted 5:30 a.m. EST Tuesday, November 23, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

WASHINGTON — As the nation prepares to celebrate Thanksgiving, the euphoria and boldness expressed by Republicans in the three weeks since they routed the Democrats to take control of the House of Representatives in January already has given way to bitter internal feuding as the GOP leadership confronts having to make a decision by next spring on raising the nation’s de facto credit-card limit.

House Republican Leader John Boehner, who will take over as speaker from Democrat Nancy Pelosi, said Thursday that the GOP-controlled House will have to act on the national debt ceiling, now set at $14.3 trillion. The actual national debt now stands at $13.87 trillion and is expected to hit the ceiling by next spring.

But the speaker-to-be already is facing an open revolt by newly-elected Tea Party-backed hard-liners, many of whom have vowed to vote against raising the national debt ceiling, insisting that voters gave them a clear mandate to reduce government spending and that raising the debt limit would only encourage more spending.

TEA PARTY-BACKED REPUBLICANS WANT SPENDING CUTS FIRST

Representative-elect Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) told The Wall Street Journal on Monday that “The [debt ceiling] vote will garner a lot of attention and provoke a lot of pain and anxiety, but there are consequences to all votes. The question is, when are we going to stop the way we are going? I think we have to stop it now.”

And Senator Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” November 7 that he would vote against raising the debt ceiling, “unless it’s combined with some path to balancing our budget, returning to 2008 spending levels,” and repealing the health-care reform law passed by Congress last spring without a single Republican vote.

“We have got to demonstrate that we have the resolve to cut spending,” DeMint said. “We cannot allow that to go through the Congress without showing the American people that we are going to balance the budget, and we’re not going to continue to raise the debt in America.”

FAILURE TO RAISE DEBT CEILING WOULD TRIGGER ECONOMIC CHAOS

But Boehner, in a series of closed-door meetings with Republican freshmen, bluntly warned the Tea Party-backed firebrands that Congress has little choice but to raise the debt limit. “I’ve made it pretty clear to them . . . that Congress is going to have to deal with this,” Boehner said in a Thursday news conference. “We’re going to have to deal with it as adults. Whether we like it or not, the federal government has obligations and we have obligations on our part.”

Failure to raise the debt ceiling would force the government to default on paying its bills and shut down. A default would, in turn, trigger severe economic shock waves, damaging, if not destroying, the nation’s credit rating.

Interest rates would soar dramatically, making it all but impossible for individuals or businesses to obtain or maintain credit. Foreign investors — who, according to the Treasury Department, now hold more than $4 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities — would be prompted not to buy any more, causing the dollar to plummet in value against other currencies and triggering chaos in world financial markets.

That, in turn, would cripple the already-struggling U.S. economy, throwing millions more Americans out of work.

COBURN AIDE: ‘ECONOMY IS GOING TO COLLAPSE’

Those dire predictions don’t appear to faze Senator Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma). According to Coburn spokesman John Hart, “We know the American economy is going to collapse, so why don’t we start the hard work of cutting spending now? We’re already in a crisis, and the time to reduce spending is immediately.”

Hart told The Washington Times last Sunday that Coburn was prepared to tie up the debt-ceiling measure unless it’s accompanied by major spending cuts. “He’s willing to block it, to put a hold on it, to use all procedural tools available, to ensure Congress reduces spending,” Hart said.

Other newly-elected Republican firebrands weren’t swayed by Boehner’s warning, either. Representatives-elect Kristi Noem of South Dakota, >Tim Scott of South Carolina, Reid Ribble of Wisconsin, Steven Stivers of Ohio and Lou Barletta of Pennsylvania all insisted to Boehner that they will vote against raising the debt limit.

Ribble called raising the debt limit “unconscionable” and “insane.” Stivers denounced it as “a reckless desire to spend money we don’t have, and borrow money we can’t afford to pay back.” Barletta compared the national debt to slavery, denouncing both congress and President Obama of “spending our country into servitude.”

FOR TEA PARTY FRESHMEN, A DIFFICULT TRANSITION FROM CAMPAIGNING TO GOVERNING

Boehner faced a difficult task in convening the freshmen on the need to raise the debt ceiling from the start, as many of the freshmen made the national debt and government spending the top-priority issues in their campaigns to unseat Democratic incumbents — and they’re in no mood to do anything to increase the debt further.

At the same time, however, the debt-ceiling vote poses a stark challenge for many of the newly-elected lawmakers to make the transition from campaigning to actually governing.

“A lot of these Tea Party Republicans made a lot of sweeping pronouncements on the campaign trail about cutting government spending and reducing the debt,” said a Democratic strategist who spoke on condition of anonymity. “But once they’re sworn into office, they’re going to get a hard dose of fiscal reality and they’ll be forced to do things they swore on the campaign trail they would never do.”

WILL OBAMA, DEMOCRATS HANG TOUGH ON BUSH TAX CUTS?

With the Tea Party Republican freshmen likely to insist on deep spending cuts as the price for their support to raise the national debt ceiling, will the Democrats be equally insistent that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest one percent of Americans expire as scheduled at the end of the year as the price for their support for spending cuts?

While Republicans have sounded the mantra of tax cuts for more than 30 years, an 18-member bipartisan commission appointed by President Obama to find ways to reduce the more than $1 trillion federal budget deficit made it clear that spending cuts alone cannot close the deficit — it has grown far too large for that.

In their 50-page preliminary report, released November 10, commission co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Allan Simpson conclude that a combination of spending cuts, tax increases and revisions to existing government programs and departments — as well as a revision of the tax code — are necessary to create more sustainable budgets.

Whether Democrats like it or not, spending must be decreased to reduce the deficit. But whether Republicans like it or not, taxes must be increased to close the deficit as well — and since neither the poor nor the middle class can afford to bear the burden of higher taxes, they must be increased on those who can most afford to bear the burden: The wealthiest one percent of Americans.

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Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Iowa Voters Tossed Out Three Justices of the State Supreme Court Solely Because They Declared Unconstitutional a State Law That Barred Gay and Lesbian Couples From Marrying; Vote Sends a Clear Message That Anti-Gay Bias Trumps Gays’ Constitutional Rights — and Sets a Dangerous Precedent for Protecting the the Rights of Other Minorities

A VICTORY FOR HOMOPHOBIA — Three justices of the Iowa Supreme Court who struck down as unconstitutional a state law that barred gay and lesbian couples form marrying were tossed out of office on November 2 solely because of that decision. Never mind the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court declared in its 1996 Romer v. Evans decision that no state can deliberately exclude gays and lesbians from the constitutional rights and freedoms enjoyed by everyone else. The vote sets a dangerous precedent that state judges can be tossed out of office by the whims of a fickle electorate for protecting the constitutional rights of all minorities, not just gays and lesbians. (Image courtesy KCBS-TV, Los Angeles)

(Posted 5:30 a.m. EST Tuesday, November 16, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

Here we go again.

In yet another state, the voters sent a clear and unmistakable message on November 2: That gay and lesbian couples have no constitutional right to marry — regardless of what the courts say to the contrary.

That message came loud and clear when voters in Iowa ousted three justices of the state Supreme Court who participated in Varnum v. Brien, the court’s unanimous 2009 ruling that struck down as unconstitutional a state law that barred gay and lesbian couples from marrying.

Chief Justice Marsha Ternus and Associate Justices David Baker and Michael Streit were all denied reconfirmation with roughly 54 percent voters saying “no” and 46 percent saying “yes.”

Under Iowa law, the governor appoints justices to the state Supreme Court, with the assistance of a judicial selection committee. Each justice, however, is subject to a retention election five years after his or her appointment.

Under normal circumstances, a Supreme Court justice does not remain on the bench if he or she is accepting bribes or has become incompetent or is simply not doing his or her job. But the circumstances in which Justices Ternus, Baker and Steit were ousted were anything but normal.

JUSTICES WERE DUTY-BOUND TO UPHOLD RIGHTS GUARANTEED BY IOWA CONSTITUTION

The justices, acting on an appeal of a lower court decision, ruled unanimously on April 3, 2009 that the state law defining marriage exclusively as a union between a man and a woman violated the equal-protection clause of the Iowa Constitution.

Article I, Section 6 of the Iowa Constitution states quite explicitly that “All laws of a general nature shall have a uniform operation; the [Iowa] General Assembly shall not grant to any citizen, or class of citizens, privileges or immunities, which, upon the same terms shall not equally belong to all citizens.”

The court also rejected civil unions, declaring that “A new distinction based on sexual orientation would be equally suspect and difficult to square with the fundamental principles of equal protection embodied in our Constitution.”

The justices made it clear they were duty-bound by their oath of office to uphold the Iowa Constitution — and the rights of individuals that it guarantees. “Our responsibility . . . is to protect constitutional rights of individuals from legislative enactments that have denied those rights, even when the rights have not yet been broadly accepted, were at one time unimagined, or challenge a deeply ingrained practice or law viewed to be impervious to the passage of time.”

APPEAL TO U.S. COURTS DEEMED ‘TOO RISKY’ IN FACE OF FEDERAL LAWSUITS AGAINST PROP. 8, DOMA

Yet despite the clear and unmistakable language of the Iowa Constitution’s equal-protection clause, opponents of same-gender marriage adamantly refused to accept the court’s decision — and vowed an all-out campaign to reimpose the ban.

An appeal to the federal courts was not in the cards, since the justices based their ruling on the Iowa Constitution and — in the absence of a direct conflict with the U.S. Constitution — the federal courts lacked the jurisdiction to intervene.

An appeal also carried with it a high risk of losing, as California’s voter-approved Proposition 8 — which amended the California Constitution to ban same-gender marriage — is presently under challenge in federal court on the grounds that it violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

There are also at least four lawsuits now pending in the federal courts — two of them filed just last week — challenging the constitutionality of the federal Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, which denies federal recognition of same-gender marriages that are legal in six states and the District of Columbia and bars federal spousal benefits to legally married gay and lesbian couples.

RIGHT-WING ANTI-GAY GROUPS FROM OUTSIDE IOWA TARGET JUSTICES

Instead of filing an appeal, opponents of same-gender marriage launched a drive to oust the justices solely because of their ruling in the Varnum case, rallying voters to lash out against an interpretation of the state Constitution that was deeply unpopular with conservatives.

In the process, Iowa Constitution itself — that the justices were duty-bound to uphold — came under attack.

The right-wing National Organization for Marriage and other anti-gay groups from outside the state launched a multi-million-dollar campaign to oust Chief Justice Ternus and Associate Justices Baker and Streit, whose five-year terms were up for retention votes.

The campaign quickly became a cause celebre for the Religious Right, whose utter contempt toward the idea of two men or two women who love each other getting married is so strong that they’ve taken a Constitution-be-damned attitude in an all-out jihad to make marriage the exclusive province of opposite-gender couples.

Not only did they target the justices for ouster, they also campaigned hard to get conservative, anti-gay Republicans elected to the Iowa Legislature, with the ultimate goal of amending the Iowa Constitution to restrict marriage to opposite-gender couples. In the end, the Republicans took control of the Iowa House, but the Democrats kept control of the Iowa Senate, making passage of a marriage amendment to the state constitution — a very cumbersome and difficult process to begin with — highly unlikely.

OUSTER VOTE SETS DANGEROUS PRECEDENT FOR PROTECTING RIGHTS OF ALL MINORITIES

While the removal of the three Iowa Supreme Court justices over their ruling in the Varnum case cannot, on its own, overturn the decision, it nonetheless sets a dangerous precedent for the protection of the constitutional rights of not only gays, but of all minorities at the state level. Imagine if there had been retention votes to oust the judges a generation ago had they declared that a ban on interracial marriages was unconstitutional — as the California Supreme Court did in Perez v. Sharp nearly 20 years before the U.S. Supreme Court did so in 1967.

Unlike federal judges, who are appointed for life and can be removed only by impeachment by Congress for clear malfeasance and/or crimes, state judges are subject to retention votes by the electorate and county and municipal judges are directly elected to the bench. This raises the specter of undue political influence that can run directly counter to judges’ sworn duty to uphold the U.S. Constitution and the constitution of their home state.

The Iowa retention vote also raises the specter of state judges across the country being targeted for ouster for daring to uphold the constitutional rights of anyone — let alone gays and lesbians. It sends an unmistakable message to any judges who might be inclined to rule in a manner that is consistent with the Constitution, but inconsistent with the vagaries of popular opinion.

This is unacceptable and dangerous. The U.S. Supreme Court declared in its 1996 Romer v. Evans decision thatno state can deliberately deny to its gay and lesbian residents the constitutional and civil rights enjoyed by everyone else, solely because they are gay.

In that case, the high court struck down an amendment to the Colorado constitution that would have prevented the Legislature or any city, town or county in the state from passing legislation to protect gays and lesbians from discrimination. “The amendment imposes a special disability upon [gay and lesbian] persons alone,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court. “Homosexuals are forbidden [under the amendment] the safeguards that others enjoy or may seek without constraint. . .This the state cannot do.”

DO GAYS HAVE A CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO MARRY? RECENT COURT PRECEDENTS STRONGLY SUGGEST YES

While the question of whether gay and lesbian couples have a constitutional right to marry under the Fourteenth Amendment is one that has yet to be addressed by the U.S. Supreme Court, past rulings by the nation’s highest tribunal strongly suggest — and this column strongly asserts — that they do.

The freedom of two single, mature adults who deeply love one another to marry is a freedom that the U.S. Supreme Court declared more than four decades ago is guaranteed by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, when the justices, in Loving v. Virginia, unanimously struck down laws in 16 states — all of them in the South — that barred interracial couples from marrying.

Writing for the court, then-Chief Justice Earl Warren declared, “The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry — or not marry — a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the state.”

Gay and lesbian couples, in the opinion of this column, effectively earned to right to marry when the Supreme Court, in Lawrence v. Texas, fully decriminalized same-gender sexual relations in 2003 by striking down the last remaining anti-sodomy laws on the books in 13 states.

Although the court’s six-justice majority made it clear that its decision in the Lawrence did not directly address the issue of same-gender marriage, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, in a bitter dissenting opinion, wrote that the ruling cast into doubt the constitutionality of laws that outlaw same-gender marriage.

“If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is ‘no legitimate state interest’ for purposes of proscribing that conduct,” Scalia wrote, “what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising ‘the liberty protected by the Constitution?’ Surely not the encouragement of procreation, since the sterile and the elderly are allowed to marry.”

Between past precedents in Loving, Romer and Lawrence and the pending challenges in federal court to California’s anti-gay Proposition 8 and DOMA, it’s only a matter of time when the U.S. Supreme Court will have the final word on whether gay and lesbian couples have the same Fourteenth Amendment constitutional right to marry that interracial and interfaith couples have.

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Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Congratulations, Voters: You Swept Out the Last Remaining Republican Moderates in the GOP Primaries and Democratic Moderates in Last Week’s Elections — Leaving Both Parties in Congress Totally Dominated by Hard-Line Ideologues of Both the Right (GOP) and the Left (Dems). Bipartisan Cooperation? Forget About It!

WELCOME TO GRIDLOCK CITY, AMERICA — You were warned in last week’s column not to vote to return control of Congress to the Republicans, but you wouldn’t listen. Now that you’ve turned over control of the House to the GOP, you’ve guaranteed that the next two years will see nothing but total ideological warfare on Capitol Hill, for the Democrats you swept out of office were mostly moderate-to-conservative Democrats — replaced by conservative Republicans — including several hard-line Tea Party ideologues — and leaving behind a Democratic caucus dominated by liberals determined not to be intimidated by the so-called “Red Wave.” Congratulations, America — You’ve now got a Congress that you said for months you didn’t want: A Congress completely dominated by unrepentant ideologues of both the left and the right, to whom the word “compromise” is as alien as a Martian. (Image courtesy Wikipedia.org)

(Posted 5:30 a.m. EST Tuesday, November 9, 2010)

Dear Readers:

Congratulations, America. You did the exact opposite of what Guest Columnist Russell King strongly urged you not to do last Tuesday.

Now, for the next two years, you’re going to have to suffer the consequences.

For months, you’ve told pollsters that you were sick and tired of the partisan wrangling in Washington. Yet when you went to the polls — in both the primaries and in last week’s general election — you elected what is destined to be the most ideologically polarized Congress in American history since the Civil War — the 150th anniversary of which, ironically, is next year.

In the Republican primaries, you defeated one moderate Republican after another, going instead with conservatives, many of them backed by the Tea Party movement. In last Tuesday’s election, you swept out one moderate-to-conservative Democrat after another, going instead with even more conservative Republicans.

ONE AFTER ANOTHER, MODERATES OF BOTH PARTIES GET SWEPT OUT BY FIREBRANDS

Indeed,, instead of ending the partisan gridlock, you, the electorate, did the exact opposite, voting in a Congress with a near-total absence of moderates of either party — especially in the House — guaranteeing that the hyper-partisanship you so thoroughly despise will only intensify, as both parties become even more ideologically rigid than before, to whom the word “compromise” is as alien as a Martian.

Of the 49 Democrats you tossed out of the House, 24 of them were moderate-to-conservative “Blue Dogs,” including Mike Arcuri of New York, Baron Hill of Indiana, Jim Marshall of Georgia, Glenn Nye of Virginia, John Salazar of Colorado and Earl Pomeroy of North Dakota.

In the Senate, the most prominent “Blue Dog” who lost was Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas — who barely survived a fierce primary challenge from party liberals angered by her opposition to a government-run “public option” as part of the health-care reform law passed last May.

Among Republicans, one moderate after another found themselves swept away by a right-wing tsunami driven by the Tea Party movement in the GOP primaries. Among the moderates who got thrown under the Tea Party bus: Mike Castle of Delaware, Charlie Crist of Florida, Trey Grayson of Kentucky, Bob Bennett of Utah, Rick Lazio of New York and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

(Murkowski, however, may well have gained sweet revenge for her primary defeat by beating her Tea Party-backed opponent, Joe Miller, in last week’s general election as an independent write-in candidate. Murkowski’s win, if confirmed, would be a bitter blow to former Governor Sarah Palin, who ousted Murkowski’s father, Frank, as governor in 2006 and strongly supported Miller.)

But by far the biggest loser of all was Republican-turned-Democrat Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. He abandoned the GOP when it became clear that he would lose in the primary to conservative former Representative Pat Toomey — only to lose the Democratic primary to liberal-backed Representative Joe Sestak. In the end, though, Toomey narrowly defeated Sestak, 51 percent to 49 percent.

RESULT: GOP MORE RIGHT-WING THAN EVER; DEMS MORE LEFT-WING THAN EVER

Left standing on Capitol Hill after the “Red Tsunami” is a Republican caucus that is the most right-wing in its history and a Democratic caucus that is equally the most left-wing in its history.

Within days after the election, Republican leaders — and their Tea Party allies — made it abundantly clear that they’re in no mood for compromise. Senator-elect Rand Paul told ABC News on Sunday that compromise with the Democrats — or even with his own party’s leadership — was out of the question.

“We’re coming,” Paul said. “We’re — we’re proud. We’re strong. We’re loud. And we’re going to co-opt. And, in fact, I think we’re already shaping the debate.”

House Democratic leaders, however, aren’t about to roll over and play dead. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California), who will lose the speakership to GOP House leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), declared Friday that she was in the running for House minority leader. In a letter to fellow House Democrats, Pelosi vowed to fight to preserve her party’s legislative achievements — especially the health-care reform law that Republicans have vowed to repeal.

“Our work is far from finished,” Pelosi wrote. “As a result of Tuesday’s election, the role of Democrats in the 112th Congress will change, but our commitment to serving the American people will not. We have no intention of allowing our great achievements to be rolled back.”

Pelosi has reason to strike a defiant tone: Her congressional district is one of the bluest in the country. While the outgoing speaker has only a 30 percent job-approval rating in national polls, she won a record 13th term in her overwhelmingly liberal San Francisco district with 80 percent of the vote, breaking the record set by her predecessor, the late Phillip Burton.

She also has the numbers on her side: Although several moderate-to-conservative House Democrats are likely to oppose Pelosi, they’re now badly outnumbered by the liberals, thanks to the loss of nearly half of the House Democrats’ conservative caucus in the election.

For his part, Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell sharply defended his comments that his party’s top priority in the next two years will be to ensure that President Obama becomes a one-term president. “Some have said it was indelicate of me to suggest that our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term in office,” McConnell said Thursday in a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank.

“But the fact is, if our primary legislative goals are to repeal and replace the health spending bill, to end the bailouts, cut spending and shrink the size and scope of government, the only way to do all these things is to put someone in the White House who won’t veto any of these things,” McConnell asserted.

IT ISN’T ALL BAD: WORST OF TEA PARTY EXTREMISTS — AND A LIBERAL FIREBRAND — GOT THE BOOT

However, to your credit, voters, you did say “no” to several hard-line right-wing Tea Party-backed extremists who proved to be an embarrassment to the GOP and incurred the wrath of Latino voters angry at their anti-immigrant, anti-Latino campaigns, including Sharron Angle of Nevada and Tom Tancredo of Colorado.

And, also to your credit, you resoundingly rejected the totally off-the-wall campaigns of Christine O’Donnell of Delaware and Carl Paladino of New York — both of whom clearly demonstrated that they were unfit to serve in the U.S. Senate and the New York governor’s office, respectively.

In Florida, you threw out a left-wing firebrand, Democrat Alan Grayson, voting in a Republican with, ironically, one of the most famous names in American history: Daniel Webster.

And in Kentucky, you said “no” to Democrat Jack Conway after Conway made the foolish mistake of mocking his GOP opponent Rand Paul’s religious faith — or lack thereof — in his now-infamous “Aqua Buddha” TV campaign ad, which angered conservative Christians in a deeply conservative state.

Frankly, this column is surprised that Conway’s ad didn’t also anger practitioners of Buddhism — the world’s fourth largest religion, with 360 million adherents worldwide — who could rightly accuse Conway of mocking their faith.

SENATE FACES TOTAL PARALYSIS AS BOTH PARTIES CAN NOW FILIBUSTER BILLS

But with the Democrats now more firmly under liberal control with the ouster of so many “Blue Dogs” — and under tremendous pressure from liberal activists and public-sector labor unions not to give in on health-care reform — a knock-down, drag-out ideological war is almost certain.

Republicans have vowed to repeal the health-care reform law passed by Congress without a single GOP vote. But the repeal effort is almost certain to fail, with Obama wielding his veto stamp and Republicans fully aware they lack the two-thirds majority required to override.

A repeal bill is unlikely reach the president’s desk anyway; with the Senate still under Democratic control, Senate Republicans lack the 60 votes required to choke off an expected Democratic filibuster. Indeed, with neither party able to choke off each other’s filibusters, the Senate could fall into total paralysis.

GRIDLOCK COULD PROVE DANGEROUS AS DEBT-CEILING VOTE NEARS

This could prove extremely dangerous next year, when Congress will be required by law to vote on raising the national debt ceiling. Essentially the nation’s credit-card limit, the debt ceiling, now set $14.3 trillion, could max out as early as next spring.

The national debt is now estimated at $13.7 trillion. If Congress fails to raise the limit, the government would legally default on its debts, destroying the nation’s credit rating and causing a panic on Wall Street that would make the Meltdown of 2008 seem tame by comparison.

Already, there is a bitter debate among Republicans over what to do about the debt ceiling, with some newly-elected Tea Party hard-liners vowing to vote no. GOP national chairman Michael Steele declared that his party won’t approve any debt-limit increase. “We are not going to compromise on raising more debt. We are not going to compromise on raising the debt ceiling,” Steele said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on the Sunday before the election.

But soon-to-be Speaker Boehner warned that failure to raise the debt limit is not a viable option. “Increasing the debt limit allows our government to meet its obligations,” Boehner told ABC News, “and I think that there are multiple options for how you deal with it. But for our [GOP] team, I think we’re going to have to demonstrate that we’ve got to have reductions in spending. The government’s spending more than what we bring in. We can’t afford it.”

PARTY POLARIZATION SEEPING DOWN TO STATE LEVEL

Under these circumstances, do you really expect the hard-line ideologues of the right and the left who now control both major parties to find common ground and compromise — especially since they’re already sounding white-hot belligerent rhetoric? If you do, we have a bridge in Brooklyn that we want to sell you.

The really bad news is that the ideological polarization in Congress is seeping down to the state level, as state after state is seeing one party or the other take total control of both the legislatures and the governor’s offices — essentially bifurcating the nation into red states and blue states and leaving moderate voters out in the cold.

While much of the country was swept in a tsunami of Republican red, The Northeast and the West Coast, particularly California, have become fortresses of Democratic blue. Democrats swept all but one of the nine statewide offices in California for the first time in the state’s history and tightened their control of both houses of the legislature — as well as both U.S. Senate seats and the majority of the state’s congressional delegation.

In Vermont, Democrat Peter Shumlin, a champion of a state-run “single-payer” health-care system, was elected governor and Democrats retained their overwhelming majorities in both houses of the Vermont legislature. Connecticut will have a Democrat as governor for the first time in 20 years as Dan Malloy narrowly defeated Republican Tom Foley.

For all the bemoaning and bewailing by voters about the partisan polarization of the two major parties, the results of the 2010 elections clearly show that, to the contrary, America is a more deeply polarized nation now than at any time since the Civil War — and perhaps in all of American history.

Former President Jimmy Carter, in an interview broadcast on “NBC Nightly News” in September, said that the country has become “astonishingly” polarized to a degree that he’s never seen before. “President Obama suffers from the most polarized situation in Washington that we have ever seen,” Carter said, “even maybe than the time of Abraham Lincoln and the initiation of the War between the States,” as most Southerners, including Carter, refer to the Civil War.

For those who complain bitterly about the poisoned partisan atmosphere in the nation’s capital, it may already be too late to do anything to bring a halt to it.
Which is why the next two years could prove to be America’s worst political nightmare.

Sincerely,
Skeeter Sanders
Editor & Publisher
The ‘Skeeter Bites Report

Copyright 2010, Skeeter sanders. all rights reserved.

An Open Letter to Conservative Americans: This Is the Same Bunch of Republicans Who Caused Our Economic Meltdown in the First Place and Have Embarked on a Disgusting Campaign of Stoking Irrational Fears of People of Color, Muslims, Gays and Anyone Else Who Isn’t a So-Called ‘Red-Blooded Patriotic American” — If You Vote to Put These Paranoiacs Back in Charge of Congress, You Will Send Our Country Plunging Down the Toilet

ARE YOU REALLY GOING TO VOTE FOR A BUNCH OF REPUBLICAN FEARMONGERERS AND HYPOCRITES? — Today is Election Day and the time has come once and for all to end the denial: If you plan to vote to put the Republicans back in charge of Congress, then you’re going to condemn America to at least two years of total political chaos, for the Republican Party of 2010 is farther to the right — and loaded with more out-and-out fearmongering demagogues and paranoiacs — than at any other time in its 146-year history, according to an “open letter to conservative Americans” by guest commentator Russell King. (Cartoon by David Horsey/Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

(Posted 5:30 a.m. EDT Tuesday, November 2, 2010)

NOTE TO READERS: Today is Election Day in the United States. As millions of voters across America cast their ballots in this midterm congressional and state election, polls show many races for Congress too close to call, with party control of both the House and Senate hanging in the balance. In a commentary first posted on his own blog, Russ’ Filtered News, in March, Russell King, a Wisconsin-based blogger and lobbyist for progressive causes, wrote a lengthy “Open Letter to Conservative Americans” that lays bare the case against voting for the Republicans in today’s election. The ‘Skeeter Bites Report is republishing King’s article — with his permission, even though it is not copyrighted — in a last-ditch effort to persuade voters to not make a grave mistake with their ballot. – Skeeter Sanders, Editor & Publisher

By RUSSELL KING

Dear Conservative Americans,

The years have not been kind to you. I grew up in a profoundly Republican home, so I can remember when you wore a very different face than the one we see now. You’ve lost me and you’ve lost most of America. Because I believe having responsible choices is important to democracy, I’d like to give you some advice and an invitation.

First, the invitation: Come back to us.

Now the advice. You’re going to have to come up with a platform that isn’t built on a foundation of cowardice and fear of people with colors, religions, cultures and sex lives that differ from your own; fear of reform in banking, health care, energy; fantasy fears of America being transformed into an Islamic nation, into social/communo-fascism, into a disarmed populace put in internment camps; and more. But you have work to do even before you take on that task.

Your party — the Republican Party — and the conservative end of the American political spectrum has become irresponsible and irrational. Worse, it’s tolerating, promoting and celebrating prejudice and hatred.

Let me provide some examples — by no means an exhaustive list — of where the Right as gotten itself stuck in a swamp of hypocrisy, hyperbole, historical inaccuracy and hatred.

If you’re going to regain your stature as a party of rational, responsible people, you’ll have to start by draining this swamp:

A LONG RECORD OF GOP HYPOCRISIES

You cannot flip out — and threaten impeachment — when Democrats use a preliminary procedure (deem and pass) that your party used repeatedly (more than 35 times in just one session and more than 100 times in all!), that’s centuries old and which the courts have supported. Especially when your leaders admit it all.

You cannot vote and scream against the stimulus package and then take credit for the good it’s done in your own district (happily handing out enormous checks representing money that you voted against is especially ugly) — 114 of you (at last count) did just that — and it’s even worse when you secretly beg for more!

You cannot fight against your own ideas just because a Democratic president endorses your proposal.

You cannot call for a pay-as-you-go policy, and then vote against your own idea.

Are they “unlawful enemy combatants” or are they “prisoners of war” at Guantanamo? You cannot have it both ways.

REPUBLICANS KINGS OF CORPORATE WELFARE EVEN AS THEY BLAST RUNAWAY SPENDING

You cannot carry on about the evils of government spending, when your family has accepted more than a quarter-million dollars in government handouts!

You cannot refuse to go to a scheduled meeting, to which you were invited, and then blame the Democrats because they didn’t meet with you.

You cannot rail against the president using TelePrompTers while using TelePrompTers yourselves. Repeatedly.

You cannot rail against the bank bailouts when you supported them as they were happening.

You cannot be for immigration reform, then be against it. You cannot enjoy socialized medicine, while condemning it.

A DOUBLE STANDARD IN BLACK AND WHITE

You cannot flip out when America’s first black president puts his feet on the presidential desk when you were silent about white presidents doing the same. George W. Bush did it. Gerald Ford did it.

You cannot complain that the president hasn’t closed Guantanamo, yet campaign to keep it open.

You cannot flip out when America’s first black president bows to foreign dignitaries, as appropriate for their culture, when you were silent when white presidents did the same. Bush did it. Richard Nixon did it. Even Dwight Eisenhower did it. You didn’t utter a peep when Bushheld hands — and even kissed on the mouth — leaders of countries that are not on “kissing terms” with the U.S.

You cannot complain that the Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called “Underwear Bomber,” was read his Miranda rights under Obama when Richard Reid, the so-called “Shoe Bomber,” was read his Miranda rights under Bush — and you remained silent (And, no, Newt Gingrich, Reid is not a U.S. citizen either, so there’s no difference.).

You cannot attack a Democratic president for not publicly condemning a terrorist event for 72 hours when you said nothing about his Republican predecessor, who waited six days to comment on an eerily similar incident (and even then, he didn’t issue a condemnation). The Obama administration did so the day of the event.

You cannot throw a hissy fit, sound alarms and cry that Obama freed Guantanamo prisoners who later helped plan the failed Christmas Day underwear bombing, when, in fact, only one former Guantanamo detainee — released by Bush — helped to plan the failed attack.

You cannot condemn those blaming the Republican former president for an attempted terror attack on his watch — then blame the Democratic incumbent president for an attempted terror attack on his.

You cannot mount a boycott against singers who say they’re ashamed of President Bush for starting a war, but remain silent when another singer says he’s ashamed of President Obama and falsely calls him a Maoist who makes him want to throw up and says he ought to be in jail.

HEALTH-CARE HYPOCRISY

You cannot cry that the health care bill is too long, and then cry that it’s too short.

You cannot support theindividual mandate for health insurance, and then call it unconstitutional when Democrats adopt it and then campaign against your own idea.

You cannot demand television coverage, and then whine about it when you get it. Repeatedly.

You cannot praise criminal trials in U.S. courts for terror suspects under a Republican president, and then call them “treasonous” under a Democratic president.

You cannot propose ideas to create jobs, and then work against them when the Democrats put your own ideas in a bill.

You cannot be both pro-choice and anti-choice on abortion.

You cannot condemn someone for failing to pay $900 in taxes, when you’ve paid nearly $20,000 in IRS fines.

You cannot condemn criticism of the president when U.S. troops are in harm’s way, then attack the president yourselves when U.S. troops are in harm’s way — the only difference being the president’s party affiliation (and, by the way, armed conflict does NOT remove our right and our duty as Americans to speak up).

You cannot be both for cap-and-trade policy and against it.

You cannot block debate in the Senate on a bill, then bemoan the lack of “open debate.”

A REPUBLICAN DOUBLE STANDARD EVEN IN EXPRESSIONS OF HOMOPHOBIA

If you push anti-gay legislation and make anti-gay speeches, you should probably take a pass on having gay sex, regardless of whether it’s 2004 or 2010.

This is true, too, if you’re taking GOP money and giving anti-gay rants on CNN (Are you reading this, Carl Paladino?).

Taking right-wing money and GOP favors to write anti-gay stories for news sites while working as a gay prostitute, doubles down on both the hypocrisy and the prostitution (Are you reading this, Jeff Gannon?)

This is especially true if you claim your anti-gay stand is God’s stand, too (Are you reading this, Ted Haggard?).

When you chair the House Committee on Missing and Exploited Children, you cannot send sexually explicit e-mails to 16-year-old boys — which is illegal anyway, but you made it hypocritical as well (Are you reading this, Mark Foley?).

HAVE YOU REALLY FORGOTTEN GOP’S SORRY RECORD WHILE IN POWER?

You cannot criticize Democrats for not doing something you didn’t do while you held power over the past 16 years, especially when the Democrats Democrats have done more in one year than you did in 16.

You cannot decry “name-calling” when you’ve been the most consistent and outrageous at it. And the most vile at that (Remember Joe Wilson?).

You cannot spend more than 40 years hating, cutting and trying to kill Medicare, and then pretend to be the defenders of Medicare.

You cannot praise the Congressional Budget Office when its analysis produces numbers that fit your political agenda, then claim it’s unreliable when it comes up with numbers that don’t.

You cannot vote for extending unemployment benefits under a Republican president, then vote against extending them under a Democratic president. Either you support unemployment benefits or you don’t. And it makes it worse when you change your position merely for the sake obstructionism.

You cannot call the reconciliation process in the Senate “out of bounds” when you used it repeatedly.

You cannot spend taxpayer money on ads against spending taxpayer money.

You cannot condemn individual health insurance mandates in a Democratic bill, when the mandates were a Republican idea.

You cannot demand everyone listen to the generals when they say what fits your agenda, then ignore them when they don’t.

You cannot whine that it’s unfair when people accuse you of exploiting racism for political gain, when your party’s first black national chairman admits you’ve been doing it for decades.

You cannot portray yourself as fighting terroristswhen you openly and passionately support terrorists.

You cannot complain about a lack of bipartisanship when you’ve routinely obstructed for the sake of political gain — threatening to filibuster at least 100 pieces of legislation in one session, far more than any other since the procedural tactic was invented — and admitted it. Some admissions are unintentional; others are made proudly.

This is especially true when the bill is the result of decades of compromise between the two parties and is filled with your own ideas.

You cannot question the loyalty of Justice Department lawyers when you didn’t object when your own Republican president appointed them.

SOCIAL CONSERVATIVES — AND MORAL HYPOCRITES

You cannot preach and try to legislate “Family Values” when you:

# take nude hot-tub dips with teenagers (and pay them hush money);

# cheat on your wife with a secret lover and lie about it to the world;

# cheat with a staffer’s wife and pay them off with a new job;

# pay hookers for sex while wearing a diaper and cheating on your wife or just enjoying an old-fashioned non-kinky cheating on your wife;

# try to have gay sex in a public toilet;

# authorize the rape of children in Iraqi prisons to coerce their parents into providing information;

# seek, look at or have sex with children;

# replace a guy who cheats on his wife with a guy who cheats on his pregnant wife with his wife’s mother.

FOR YOUR OWN SAKE, YOU’VE GOT TO KICK THESE OFF-THE-WALL LOSERS TO THE CURB

You really need to disassociate with those among you who:

# assert that people making a quarter-million dollars a year can barely make ends meet or that $1 million “isn’t a lot of money;”

# say that “Comrade” Obama is a “Bolshevik” taking cues from Lenin. Lenin died nearly 40 years before the president was born;

# ignore the many times your buddies use a term that offends you and complain only when a Democrat says it;

# liken political opponents to murderers, rapists and “this Muslim guy” that “offed his wife’s head” or call then “un-American;”

# say Obama “wants his plan to fail…so that he can make the case for bank nationalization and vindicate his dream of a socialist economy;”

# equate putting the good of the people ahead of your personal fortunes with “terrorism;”

# smear an entire major religion with the actions of a few fanatics;

# say that the president wants to “annihilate us;”

# compare health care reform with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a Bolshevik plot, the9/11 terrorist attacks, or reviving the ghosts of communist dictators (And, by the way, it’s also not Armageddon, either);

# equate our disease-fighting stem-cell research program with “what the Nazis did;”

# call a bill passed by the majority of both houses of Congress, by members of Congress each elected by a majority in their districts, an “an unconscionable abuse of power,” a “violation of the presidential oath” or “the end of representative government”. . .

I could go on and on, but you get the point.

So, dear conservatives, get to work. Drain the swamp of the conspiracy nuts, the bold-faced liars undeterred by demonstrable facts, the overt hypocrisy and the hatred. Then offer us a calm, responsible, grown-up agenda based on your values and your vision for America.

We may or may not agree with your values and vision, but we’ll certainly welcome you back to the American mainstream with open arms.

We need you.

Sincerely,
Russell King

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(This article, although not copyrighted, is republished with the permission of the author and was edited for length. The full-length version of this article can be found on King’s Web site Russ’ Filtered News.)

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The ‘Skeeter Bites Report Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.