An opening question: Is the Tea Party GOP trying to force President Obama’s hand into using the 14th Amendment to resolve the debt ceiling morass they created? Thus, adding more fuel to their narrative that he is illegitimate and should be deposed from office?

The debt ceiling debacle is like giving yourself a prostate exam. A few years back, I fondly remember listening to Dr. Dean Edell answer a caller who asked how to perform said procedure on himself. The good doctor said it was possible, but it was not at all easy or particularly pleasant.

There are multiple levels of political mania at work in the Tea Party GOP and the free market fundamentalism jihad and suicide game they are playing with the American economy. On one hand, watching Speaker Boehner being neutered by his own zealots is great sport; the ascension of Michele Bachmann is also a fun spectacle as she lays in wait, sharpening her knives; when Conservative Right-wing low information voter populism runs amok I always enjoy the car wreck…except when I (and all of you) are potentially the collateral damage. But alas, this is serious business and the adults in the room have given in to the impetuous brats in the Tea Party wing on the Republican Party.

Normal politics is dead. The Republican Party (with the help of the Koch brothers) made the monster. Now they are trapped by it.

There are two ironies at work here regarding the Tea Party’s gambit and hostage taking.

First, while the Tea Party GOP are Constitutional fetishists, they have a deep and profoundly childish understanding of said document. In fact, their policy goals are more in line with the Articles of Confederation than the United States Constitution they onanistically worship, while they sit, self-satisfied, rubbing themselves with the political feces produced from their own fat and bloated guts.

Second and most pointedly, the Tea Party brigands are acting like the very definition of a Faction as outlined by The Federalist Papers. Their policies are counter to the Public Interest and speak to how the framers were quite properly worried about the out-sized power of small groups in a democracy to work against the Common Good in the pursuit of their own narrow agendas.

I wonder if the Tea Party GOP highwaymen understand the beauty of that fact?

History is a great teacher, as she always is. The Federalist Papers echo in the debt ceiling debate and I am curious, as I often am about such things, why a talking head among the pundit classes does not call out the Tea Party for the Faction they are? It would make for a clear and easy talking point that would ether those trolls.

I won’t even charge–this time–for the suggestion.

Some words of wisdom from Madison, Hamilton, and John Jay from The Federalist Papers Number 10:

By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects…

The inference to which we are brought is, that the CAUSES of faction cannot be removed, and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its EFFECTS.

If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote. It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution.

When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens. To secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government, is then the great object to which our inquiries are directed.

The NAACP has just passed a historic resolution demanding an end to the War on Drugs. The resolution comes as young Black male unemployment hovers near 50 percent and the wealth gap’s become a veritable gulf. So why is the forty-year-old “War on Drugs” public enemy number one for the nation’s oldest civil rights organization? Well here’s why: it’s not extraneous – it’s central: the war on drugs is the engine of 21st century discrimination – an engine that has brought Jim Crow into the age of Barack Obama.

Author Michelle Alexander lays out the statistics — and the stories — of 21st Century Jim Crow in her ought-to-blow-your-socks off book: “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness.” I had a chance to sit down with Alexander earlier this summer. We’ll be posting the full interview in two parts.

 

More GRITtv
 

“We have managed decades after the civil rights movement to create something like a caste system in the United States,” says Alexander in part one here “In major urban areas, the majority of African American men are either behind bars, under correctional control or saddled with criminal record and once branded as criminal or a felon, they’re trapped for life in 2nd class status.”

It’s not just about people having a hard time getting ahead and climbing the ladder of success. It’s about a rigged system. Sound familiar? Like the Pew Research Center report on household wealth and the Great Recession — the NAACP resolution story was a one-day news-blip – despite the fact that it pierces the by-your-bootstraps myth that is at the heart of – you pick it – the deficit, the stimulus, the tax code – every contemporary US economic debate.

White America just maybe ought to pay attention. With more and more Americans falling out of jobs and into debt, criminal records are a whole lot easier to come by than life-sustaining employment. Contrary to the conventional media version, the “Drug War” story is not a people with problems story – it’s a policing and power story that reminds us that racism’s not a figment — and it just might contain a hint or two, too, about what a high-unemployment America could come to look like — for all of us.

Appalachian leader Judy Bonds would have turned 59-years-old on August 27th. Since the passing of the 2003 Goldman Prize-winning hero from Coal River Valley in West Virginia in January, devastating mountaintop removal operations have continued to destroy her beloved Coal River Mountain.

Perched 80-feet high on wooden platforms in the great deciduous forests in the heart of the Bee Tree strip mine site, two women with the RAMPS campaign have entered the 10th day in their historic tree-sit protest to halt the blasting on Coal River Mountain. Being hailed as the longest tree-sit in the area, Becks Kolins, 21, and Catherine-Ann MacDougal, 24, have effectively stalled strip mining operations and forced out-of-state Alpha Natural Resources–who took over the controversial mine site from Massey Energy–to recognize local concerns and the spiraling humanitarian crisis from mountaintop removal mining.

“The tree sitters have for 10 days now halted blasting at the Bee Tree site,” Coal River Mountain Watch Executive Director Vernon Haltom said. “This is 10 days reduced danger of catastrophe from blasting next to the Brushy Fork sludge dam. This is 10 days less toxic blasting fallout for residents to breathe, and less danger from cancer. The tree sitters are providing a valuable service by protecting the community, and for that I appreciate their effort. Judy Bonds would be proud.”

The tree-sitters have dropped two banners from their platforms: STOP STRIP MINING and FOR JUDY BONDS.

photo courtesy of the RAMPS campaign

Tree-sitter MacDougal has cited the health and environmental damages from mountaintop removal areas. In an open statement, she noted:

There is no way that I can begin to detail the comprehensive destruction that surface mining and mountaintop removal wreak on the forest ecosystem of the southern Appalachian mountains. Valley fills choke ephemeral, intermittent, and other headwater streams, eliminating their function in providing organic matter downstream, increasing the sediment load, and causing flooding. Sulfuric acid released during mining leaches heavy metals that poison aquatic life and humans. The forests that are clear-cut before a mountaintop is destroyed cannot begin to grow back on a reclaimed site; the geology, hydrology, topography, substrate, and chemistry of a strip mined site cannot be manipulated to resemble those of the original forest, making reclamation an empty promise2. The soils will take a century to recover, and the mountain itself will be gone forever.

Research has demonstrated these environmental impacts and many more, but those who are drinking tainted water, breathing coal dust, and watching the mountains fall around them don’t need a scientific study to tell them what’s wrong.

Since the first swaths of forests were cleared by bulldozers in the fall of 2009, mountaintop removal activists across the country have drawn a line in the sand at the Bee Tree site on Coal River Mountain as the ultimate battleground to stop mountaintop removal and launch a just transition for clean energy production and jobs. The Bee Tree operation, in particular, bulldozed the local community’s hopes for a Coal River Wind Project that would have provided more tax revenues, energy production and long-term jobs.

photo courtesy of the RAMPS campaign

While Appalachian leaders call on the Obama administration to enact an immediate mountaintop removal moratorium until the federal government can effectively mitigate a spiraling humanitarian crisis, local residents are urging everyone to send in comments on the mine’s renewal permit by August 9th.

To support the tree-sitters RAMPS campaign, you can follow them on twitter or here.

Written by Editor-in-Chief Jodi Jacobson for RHRealityCheck.org. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

See all of our coverage of the IOM report and HHS guidelines here.

Will women’s health insurance be held hostage to the debt ceiling fiasco?

On July 19th, an expert panel convened by the Institutes of Medicine (IOM) released a set of evidence-based recommendations on the range of basic preventive care services for women that should be covered by insurance plans without a co-pay under health reform.  The recommendations were requested by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to guide its final decision-making on these issues, and to put the imprimatur of peer-reviewed public health and medical science as well as evidence from clinical practice behind the final guidelines.

Services recommended by IOM for coverage without a co-pay include an annual well-woman visit as well as contraception, sterilization, gestational diabetes screenings, cervical cancer screenings, HIV/STI annual testing, domestic violence counseling, and breastfeeding support.  The Administration could have included these same services–including those on family planning services and contraceptive supplies–as part of its initial guidelines based on existing evidence. But the IOM process was seen by some as necessary not because these findings were not already self-evident to clinicians and public health experts, but because it is widely known that fanatical anti-choice groups and legislators would object to and fight against anything that improves the reproductive and sexual health of women or enables them to exercise their right to self-determination.

The problem always was that the IOM recommendations were scheduled to be delivered in late July 2011, and that HHS set a date of August 1, 2011 for issuing its final guildelines.  Those dates, we already knew, would fall squarely at the beginning of the 2012 Presidential campaign.  And, given that the Obama Administration has not exactly shown itself to be a strong voice on women’s health and rights when there is any political cost involved, delaying this decision until now has always been a political gamble.

Continue reading….

Ask a working parent how they feel about summer and you may be surprised. Thoughts of beaches, barbeques, and balmy days at the ballpark are often overshadowed by something much less exotic – concerns about childcare.

If you have children under the age of 13, and you need childcare so that you can work, look for work, or attend school full-time, you are in luck. Dependent care flexible spending accounts (”FSAs”) can save you up to 40% on a wide range of childcare-related costs.

I’m continually amazed at how many people have access to this valuable benefit at work, but don’t utilize it. The three most common reasons I hear for people not taking advantage of this employee benefit are: (1) A belief that dependent care FSAs only cover a few scenarios, (2) A perception that the cost savings aren’t that great, (3) A feeling that there is too much paperwork involved to make participation in a dependent care FSA worthwhile.

That’s why I’ve teamed up with WageWorks on a nationwide campaign to help hard working employees better understand this valuable workplace benefit. So let’s take a look at each of these three common concerns.

1. What exactly is covered by a dependent care FSA? You can use these funds for before- or after-school care or special programs, a babysitter or nanny, and even the cost of day camps during the summer or other school holidays for any children under the age of 13. For a full list of eligible dependent care expenses, click here. And since it’s the rare family who isn’t feeling a tightening of the wallet, it’s worth noting that there are summer camp options in almost all budget ranges. According to the American Camp Association fees for a full week of day camp can start at as little as $75 while the upper end can be in the $800 plus range (note: overnight camp fees are not FSA eligible expenses). On top of this, over 90% of camps offer some form of financial assistance (”camperships”) while others offer discounts for things like multiple enrollments from one family. Combining all available discounts with a dependent care account can make summer childcare much more affordable.
2. How much money you can save by using a dependent care FSA? Let’s start with a quick review of how these accounts work. As with pre-tax accounts for healthcare and commuter costs, a dependent care FSA allows parents to select a specific amount of money during their firm’s open enrollment period to have deducted from their paycheck throughout the year before taxes. This lowers both your taxable income and the amount of income taxes you owe. And the money you withdraw from your FSA for eligible expenses is not taxed either. Or said slightly differently, using an FSA to pay for qualified expenses is like being handed a coupon for up to 40% on a purchase you were going to make anyway. (Click here for a nifty calculator you can use to assess the cost savings of your particular situation).
3. Are FSAs too much work? FSA participation is a simple three-step process.  First, review the list of eligible expenses and estimate how much you will be spending in the coming year. Second, during open enrollment season (typically during the fall) you decide how much you want to contribute to your dependent care (and/or healthcare and commuter) FSA.  In the case of dependent care FSAs, the maximum amount that can be contributed at present is $5,000. Note, healthcare and commuter FSAs are subject to different contribution limits, you can read more about all types of FSAs at SaveSmartSpendHealthy.com and FSAFeds.com). Also note that if you have what is called a “qualifying life event” such as getting married, divorced, widowed, birth or adoption of a child, or if you experience a significant rate hike in the cost of your childcare… you can adjust what’s called your “FSA election” or how much you are choosing to contribute. Third, you pay those dependent expenses and then simply submit a claim with supporting receipts – and you will get those funds reimbursed back to you (and many firms allow you to receive those funds via direct deposit).

If you’ve already signed up for a dependent care FSA, this is a great time of year to ensure you are making the most of those FSA dollars. And if you haven’t enrolled yet, let this article inspire you to talk to your Human Resources department ahead of this fall’s open enrollment period so you are in the best shape possible to maximize the fun and sun of summer.

Are you making the most of your Dependent Care FSA?

[This post originally appeared at ManishaThakor.com.] Want more financial love? You can follow personal finance expert & author, Manisha Thakor, on Twitter at @ManishaThakor, sign up to get her email updates delivered right to your inbox here, and enroll in her innovative online basic personal finance course called “Money Rules.”

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has repeatedly cautioned that Right-wing Conservative extremists would be among the groups most likely to commit an act of mass violence in the United States. Their most recent warnings have come in the form of a training tape which is part of the “See Something, Say Something” program.

This production has garnered much attention as Conservatives are appalled at its seeming suggestion that the person most likely to conduct an act of domestic terrorism in the United States would be a middle class white person. In an eerie coincidence, days after the release of the video a white man in Norway committed an act of Right-wing, Christian Nationalist inspired domestic terrorism that killed 76 people. What was an apparent validation of the DHS’s prophetic warnings.

Each time I sat down to write something about the Norway Massacre and the DHS report, another American right-wing bloviator would produce a stupifying mouth utterance regarding the tragedy in Norway that would give me a moment of head-shaking pause. When they keep piling on, it is hard to produce something timely, as the target keeps on moving.

I routinely listen to Right-wing talk radio in order to gather intelligence on the opposition. And as expected, their commentary on the Norway Massacre has followed a predictable script in which the responses by Beck, Levin, Savage, Cunningham, et al. are, as always, no less detached from reality. In their land of make believe, Anders Behring was a liberal, he was not a Christian, and any effort to link him to the faith is an intentional smear of the Judeo-Christian community. And funny if it were not so tragic, the Right-wing deploys the same arguments used by liberal critics of profiling in the case of racial minorities, to defend themselves against such an “injustice.”

And of course, Rush Limbaugh is doing a dance where he connects all evil in the world, here being the soul searching that Norwegians are doing in the aftermath of the Anders Behrings’ murder spree, to President Obama because he is “an enabler” of terrorism and an “America hater.”

The reaction to the Department of Homeland Security’s warnings about Right-wing violence and the “See Something, Say Something” program is powerful not because of the obvious: Given the seditious political atmosphere ginned up by the Tea Party GOP in the Age of Obama would such worries about domestic terrorism really be that unexpected or surprising?

Rather, the response by the New Right to the Department of Homeland Security’s initiatives is a damning reveal of the myopia of Whiteness and Conservatism…to the degree that in the American political and social context, the two can be separated from one another.

If the very same warnings had been issued about Muslim Americans, a member of a different racial minority group, or even “liberals,” the Right would have jumped to defend the report as necessary and to be heeded in a time of terror. There would hearings on the matter.

Following the logic of the Right-wing playbook, only traitors would boo hoo about racial profiling and the trampling of their Constitutional rights. If you have nothing to hide why be so fearful?

The Right’s reaction to the DHS and the Norway Massacre speak to an additional pathology of Whiteness. The shock and awe by racism deniers and white victimologists, that a white person, a white middle class man especially, would ever be a priori suspect of a crime is a mirror for the gross narcissism of the White Soul. Whiteness never imagines itself as anything other than benign, kind, non-threatening, wholesome, and good. Criminals and terrorists are “those people.” Whiteness sees itself as perennially decent, moral, and just.

By definition, Whiteness can never be the stuff of terrorism, threat, or violence.

As Toni Morrison so sharply argues in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination, Whiteness and White people have been sources of terror for black and brown people, both here and around the world.

For many, the White Man is a frightening thing; he is to be run from; he brings death and destruction; the bogeyman is not some amorphous figure, historically he was a white man brandishing a gun or whip, wearing the colors of Imperial Power, the hood of the Grand Cyclops, or donning a business suit and carrying an ID for the World Bank. The White Man’s Burden was never benign…regardless of how it was framed and mythologized.

Moreover, in the American experience it is verboten and anathema to call attention to the fact that the largest terrorist group in the history of the United States was the Ku Klux Klan, a civil society organization that killed thousands of African Americans and others in its one hundred plus year reign of terror. It is equally inconvenient to call to light that white people have systematically terrorized people of color (the genocide against our indigenous brothers and sisters; the slaveocracy; Jim and Jane Crow; racial pogroms in cities such as Tulsa and East St. Louis) in the pursuit of the psychological and material wages of Whiteness, and that the Racial State’s reign of terror was a central feature of American democracy, and not an aberration from it.

Whiteness finds this hard if not impossible to process. Many white folks, however benign or good or otherwise socially progressive, often have a hard time accepting that White people are perceived as dangerous by many of their fellow Americans. Liberals and others may respond to such realities with cultivated guilt and shame; Conservatives respond with rage, pleading feigned victimhood, and denial.

In these matters, I am left grappling with a set of meta level questions.

Although they are an ocean apart, are the white terrorists, the McVeighs, the Tides shooter, the Hutaree militia, the Birther Tea Party 9/12 party political thugs and seditionists, part of the same collective political subconscious, an outgrowth of the same ether and spirit of an age? Is the right-wing echo chamber in the United States, with its eliminationist “commonsense” notions that liberals are a disease to be destroyed, a cousin to the echoes and chorus which fueled the Norway Massacre?

Ultimately, are Anders Behring and the white middle class domestic terrorists that the Department of Homeland Security has warned the American people about a function of the same pathological Whiteness?

Written by Martha Kempner for RHRealityCheck.org. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

Track Palin gets far less attention than his now famous sister Bristol, his nephew Tripp, and even his little brother Trigg who was born just five months before the family was thrust into the national political spotlight. Even I, who seems to write about this family every week, pretty much forgot about him. I even missed the announcement in May that he had married his high school sweetheart Britta Hanson in a small, family-only ceremony on an Alaskan ski-slope.

Last week, Track made headlines again when it was reported that his new wife is expecting and seems to be rather far along. Though the couple has only been married for two months, pictures of her on Facebook show her very pregnant and surrounded by what appear to be baby shower gifts (something most moms-to-be don’t get until somewhere around month eight). Gossip headlines screamed shotgun wedding but that doesn’t seem exactly fair.

First of all, they’re adults; Track, 22, was on active duty in Iraq for a year and is currently an Army reservist and commercial fisherman in Alaska, Britta, 21, is a nursing student at the University of Alaska. And, from all accounts they’re in a stable, long-term relationship that spans most of their lives. So, it does not surprise me that they had sex before they got married (in fact, it would surprise me if they hadn’t). The fact that she probably got pregnant before they got married does, however, suggest that the pregnancy was unplanned and once again makes one question the Palin family’s views on abstinence education.

Continue reading….

Filmed on the lawn of the Tate Modern museum in London, the newest episode of our video podcast Reverend Billy’s Freakstorm features Reverend Billy preaching to a crowd of activists and on-lookers after performing an exorcism of BP’s oil money sponsorship of the museum’s Miro exhibit. For video and pictures of the exorcism, visit http://revbilly.com/liberate-tate

Exorcism – the act of driving out a dark spirit that has possessed a person or a place, by commanding it to leave in the name of a more powerful power, in our case the life of the Earth – this is one of the oldest of our human rituals.  However, exorcisms are also embedded in the arts of our culture like little noticed but powerful micro-climates.

We want to find a new kind of power to use against the destroyers of life, the coal companies and the Pentagon, the marketers setting the bait for babies, and the Wall Streeters with their damaging false prosperity.   Our protests that look like parodies of 60’s marches –  and I’ve served my country in a hundred of ‘em! – that’s a form of dissent that has “lost its magic.”  The on-line petitions, the “encourage your congressperson!”, – well that’s a pale imitation of the magic of democracy.  Democracy as actual magic?  Example:  When Abraham Lincoln gave his Malice Toward None speech and Frederick Douglas followed him into the White House with his analysis of it.  That political speech is artful magic.

Tim DeChristopher out-bidding the oil companies for pristine southern Utah.  THAT was magic.  He called the auctioneers on their theater, and taught us all how naked the Emperor had become.  His hex-prayer was to just recite higher and higher numbers of imaginary wealth.  Tim declared that he was the richest man in the room.  He imitated their empty power ritual – and then became powerful himself.  His jail time will have its magic too, and we will walk in the land he saved from George Bush’s friends while we wait for him and he waits for us.   What Tim did – you could call it art, or politics, or law, or medicine – all of those words and none of them.  The Earth spoke through him and re-united all those old categories.  The feds want to keep it legal, but his power is deeper than that.

Whole sections of our culture have slid into a kind of provincialism, because they aren’t singing about, poeming about, painting about – the Earth’s crisis.  You can’t be hip ignoring life itself.  The wasteland of the arts is a painful thing for those of us who grew up in that world.  Now serious actual magic – even just the possibility of it – is forgotten.   What we have now is technique and careerism.  Broadway has become the provinces.  It is not primary culture.  Whole theater seasons go by without life of the Earth in the storyline of any play, at a time when the physical life of the Earth is in the throes of dramatic pain.

But the incredible six-months long Miro exhibit at the Tate Modern – with BP money backing it?   Here we have the destruction of meaning.  If the Director of the Tate meets you at a cocktail party and says, “Well mobsters have been financing the arts since the Medicis.”  You tell that guy to look in the window.  The Thames is an oceanic estuary which at high tide is about 4 feet below the edge of the Tate’s lawn.  The Tate has actually hung a climate change exhibit, paid for by fossil fuels money, while the Thames rises in the window.  Doesn’t that being-possessed-by-dark-spirits-is-the-real-world-honey cycle need to be broken by some high-velocity mockery?

Beauty wants to begin again.  We climate change resisters need to go back to when communicating wasn’t separate from life.  Miro has much in his work that is from the Earth, bio-morphic shapes, as if he knows where life comes from.  He is at home with the comedy of fundamental particles.  He could be painting at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, that is, before the dark spirits of British Petroleum changed the picture.

In February 2009, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) received some very good news. A woman named Brigitte Gabriel had been disinvited from speaking at the United States Air Force Academy, due to MRFF’s year-long battle to stop the U.S. military from allowing Islamophobic fear-mongers to speak at our military’s colleges and service academies under the guise of anti-terrorism training.

Just about a year earlier, in February 2008, the Air Force Academy had invited a group called the “3 ex-Terrorists” to speak at its 50th Annual Academy Assembly on the topic “Dismantling Terrorism: Developing Actionable Solutions for Today’s Plague of Violence.” One member of this trio of self-proclaimed ex-terrorists turned evangelical Christians was Walid Shoebat.

After repeated demands for equal time to counter the anti-Muslim preaching of these so-called terrorism experts, the Air Force Academy eventually allowed MRFF founder and president, and Academy graduate, Mikey Weinstein, MRFF Advisory Board member and Islam scholar Reza Aslan, and MRFF Board member and former Ambassador Joe Wilson to speak to the cadets.

If the name Walid Shoebat sounds familiar, it’s because CNN just did an exposé on him a few weeks ago (article, video: part 1, part 2). As CNN reported, Shoebat is still being hired to speak to Homeland Security and law enforcement agencies, despite the fact that he has repeatedly been exposed as a fraud by both journalists and academics. Shoebat’s mission is clear — to spread a fear of Muslims and rail against all that liberal political correctness that’s causing so many Americans to treat Muslims just like everyone else.

The message of Brigitte Gabriel, founder of ACT! for America and author of Because They Hate is the same as Shoebat’s. In June 2007, Gabriel, who has also been brought in as a terrorism expert by several government agencies, delivered a lecture at the U.S. military’s Joint Forces Staff College (JFSC) as part of the JFSC’s Islam elective for American military and national security personnel.

During the Q & A part of this lecture, a JFSC student asked Gabriel, “Should we resist Muslims who want to seek political office in this nation?” This was Gabriel’s answer:

“Absolutely. If a Muslim who has — who is — a practicing Muslim who believes the word of the Koran to be the word of Allah, who abides by Islam, who goes to mosque and prays every Friday, who prays five times a day — this practicing Muslim, who believes in the teachings of the Koran, cannot be a loyal citizen to the United States of America.”

Gabriel then proceeded to give the following reason for a Muslim’s oath of office being meaningless:

“A Muslim is allowed to lie under any situation to make Islam, or for the benefit of Islam in the long run. A Muslim sworn to office can lay his hand on the Koran and say ‘I swear that I’m telling the truth and nothing but the truth,’ fully knowing that he is lying because the same Koran that he is swearing on justifies his lying in order to advance the cause of Islam. What is worrisome about that is when we are faced with war and a Muslim political official in office has to make a decision either in the interest of the United States, which is considered infidel according to the teachings of Islam, and our Constitution is uncompatible [sic] with Islam — not compatible — that Muslim in office will always have his loyalty to Islam.”

Gabriel also expressed her views on immigration:

“Those Al Qaeda members and Hezbollah members who are coming into the United States, they are immediately going from the Mexican border into the major cities where there is large Islamic concentration in the United States, such as ‘Dearbornistan’ Michigan…”

So, what does all this have to do with Norwegian Christian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik? Well, Walid Shoebat and Brigitte Gabriel are two of the anti-Muslim activists who show up in his manifesto. Shoebat is quoted about fifteen times throughout the manifesto, and a link to a 45-minute Brigitte Gabriel video is provided for further information on one of the sections.

But the most frequently cited author in the manifesto is Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam. Spencer is quoted by Breivik over three dozen times, in several places at great length, and Breivik wrote, “About Islam I recommend essentially everything written by Robert Spencer.” Breivik even used a take-off on Spencer’s book title for a section of his manifesto, which he titled “A politically incorrect guide to the lynching of multiculturalist traitors.”

MRFF is quite familiar with Robert Spencer’s book, having received numerous complaints over the past few years from service members who want it removed from the military’s PXs and BXs, where it is usually displayed right next to the military Bibles.

Three other authors quoted or recommended by Breivik — Serge Trifkovic, Bat Ye’or, and Abdullah Al Araby — all appeared in the same Islamophbic pseudo-documentary with Shoebat and Spencer, “Islam: What the West Needs to Know.”

In 2008, when the politically useful anti-Muslim film Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West was being distributed by the millions in swing states via DVDs inserted in major newspapers, MRFF discovered that this same film, which featured both Shoebat and Gabriel, was being used by the U.S. military. MRFF was able to stop some of the screenings of this film, but many others did take place. The packaging of the “campaign” version even carried the endorsement of a professor from the Naval War College, lending the credibility of the U.S. military to this piece of Islamophobic propaganda.

In short, all of the popular anti-Muslim writers and speakers cited in Breivik’s manifesto have essentially the same message — Muslims are taking over the “Christian” world and must be stopped. And these same writers and speakers all have multiple connections to each other. They appear in the same films, link to each other’s websites, promote each other’s books and videos, are listed by the same speakers bureaus, serve in various capacities in each other’s organizations, etc.

Because I work for MRFF, my focus needs to be on stopping the tide of Islamophobia within the military, but, after reading Breivik’s manifesto, it would be impossible for me not to be thinking about the other dangers posed by these Islamophobic fear-mongers, who are feeding countless Americans — some of whom might be unstable enough to carry out a “mission” like that of Breivik — a steady diet of justification for their twisted religious or political ideologies.

While it is clear from Breivik’s manifesto that he began to formulate his ideas several years before the post 9-11 “popularization” of Islamophobia, I think it’s completely legitimate to ask the question: Just how much did the constant validation of these ideas by the likes of Gabriel, Shoebat, and Spencer play a role in Breivik’s ultimate decision to actually carry out his terrorist attacks?

Rupert Murdoch puts George W. Bush into the White House

Rupert Murdoch has had a profound influence on the state of journalism today. It’s a kind of tribute, in some sense, that the general coverage of his current troubles has reflected the detrimental effect of his influence over the years.  Right now, the media, by and large, are focusing on tawdry “police blotter” acts of the very sort that have historically informed Murdoch’s own tabloid sensibility, while the bigger picture gets short shrift.

To be sure, the activities and actions of Murdoch’s that dominate the public conversation at the moment are deeply troubling, leaving aside their alleged criminality.  Still, what is really pernicious about Murdoch is not his subordinates’ reported hacking of phones, payments of hush money, etc., or the possibility that Murdoch may have known about, tolerated, enabled, or even encouraged such acts.

It is, instead, the very essence of the man and his empire, and their long-term impact on our world and our lives. (For a detailed look at his practices, see for example this, this and this.)

Here are twelve “take-away” points that are being obscured in the daily rush of revelations, and the related specialized coverage (his wife’s wardrobe and demeanor, the effect on his company’s stock price, etc.):

He has transformed world politics for the worse: It was George W. Bush’s first cousin(John Ellis), working as head of Murdoch’s Fox News election night “decision desk,” who, during the Florida voting uncertainties, called the election for Bush and set off a chain reaction from other media. The eight Bush years that followed, and all that came with them, can in this respect be laid at Murdoch’s feet. Once Bush was finally out of power, it was two of Murdoch’s most powerful entities (Fox News Channel and the Wall Street Journal) that provided a regular editorial slot for Bush’s “architect” Karl Rove to attack Bush’s successor.  Murdoch’s role on the state and local level has been no less significant—in New York, for example, he has used his pulpit (including the New York Post) to advance the careers of sympathetic politicians (see the mayoral election of Ed Koch for example) as well as to relentlessly promote local, state and national scandals (Lewinsky, et al) that wounded or destroyed pols and candidates not in his corner. He has similarly influenced and shaped governments in the UK, Australia, and elsewhere for decades.

He has ridiculed and raised doubts about global catastrophes, and about science itself, while elevating absurd theories and hyping minor matters. For example, his outlets have played a leading role in dismissing and deriding scientific consensus on climate change, while creating hysteria about false issues like President Obama’s place of birth.

He has undermined liberty: His outlets led the drumbeat for restriction or elimination of certain fundamental rights, including those under the US Fourth Amendment, while at the same time supporting unrestrained wiretapping, the  harsh treatment of suspects who may have done nothing wrong, and fueling panic justifying the build-up of the national surveillance state.

He has turned the public against the press. By the generally inferior product produced, with a few exceptions, by the majority of the news outlets he controls and the tawdry methods sponsored by many of them, he has eroded the public’s confidence in media in general, tarnishing its belief even in those outfits whose work deserves to be taken seriously. He has also used his outlets to convince the public that other, more conscientious news organizations are ideologically suspect and biased.

He has simultaneously propagandized for “the law” and compromised it. Murdoch properties are the leading hagiographers of law enforcement and the military—while at the same time routinely assailing the patriotism of those who advocate for civil and privacy rights, who question wars, and so forth. Meanwhile, as shown by the unfolding UK drama, Murdoch himself stands accused of compromising the law enforcement establishment—and not just in that country. (See his relationship with former NY police commissioner Kerik, who is now in prison, for example.)

He has undermined essential rules about propriety in the news business, degrading ethical walls put in place through long tradition. He has used his properties to advance his personal interests, and made cross-promotion his trademark.

He has propagandized for many of society’s worst instincts. Whether it involves advancing subtle racism or stoking greed, Murdoch and his minions have been out front. Fox News and the New York Post are best known for this in the US, but examples of various magnitudes may be found in almost all of his properties.

He has until now effectively neutralized many would-be critics in journalism. As the news profession shrinks, his control over an increasing percentage of the paying positions makes journalists reticent to risk their jobs—or the prospects of future employment–by speaking out about his practices. The current flurry of revelations are only possible because of the sheer force of cascading events.

He has relentlessly applied a double standard: Long a vilifier of others as communist sympathizers, he has created a pragmatic, but cynical partnership with the Chinese communist party dictators that has benefited him financially without helping ( in fact, in some ways hindering) the prospects of democracy and freedom in that country.

He has dumbed down the news business and hence the public. His tabloidization of the world has now come back to haunt him with a made-for-Murdoch style story of an ogre-like entity hacking the phone of a murdered 13 year old girl. This kind of story makes it impossible for him to defend himself on more nuanced, big-picture grounds. Nevertheless, where Murdoch and News Corp are concerned, the broader activities hardly look any better.

He has used his wealth regularly to stave off businesses and individuals that his company has illegally damaged. Multi-million dollar payoffs have led plaintiffs and would-be plaintiffs to withdraw their lawsuits and agree to silence.

His campaign contributions and the public support of his media organizations have persuaded politicians to override laws against media monopolies. And with each successive step, his growing dominance made the following step in building an empire easier to achieve.