Scary Huck!

The GOP candidates, they're all scary one way or another....

In an interview with Beliefnet, Mike Huckabee tries again to dig himself out of his "amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards" hole by ... suggesting there's a slippery slope between homosexuality and bestiality.

Asked whether it wouldn't be a "dangerous undertaking" to try to bring the Constitution into conformity with the Bible -- particularly "given the variety of biblical interpretations" -- Huckabee said: "Well, I don't think that's a radical view to say we're going to affirm marriage. I think the radical view is to say that we're going to change the definition of marriage so that it can mean two men, two women, a man and three women, a man and a child, a man and animal. Again, once we change the definition, the door is open to change it again. I think the radical position is to make a change in what's been historic."

Huckabee said that "the genius" of the Constitution is that it was built to be changed. On the other hand, he said, the Bible "was not created to be amended and altered with each passing culture."

"The Bible was not written to be amended. The Constitution was," Huckabee said. "Without amendments to the Constitution, women couldn't vote, African-Americans wouldn't be considered people. We have had to historically go back and to clarify, because there've been injustices made because the Constitution wasn't as clear as it needed to be, and that's the point."

What Huckabee, a former Southern Baptist minister, doesn't say: As historian Mark Newman writes, many Southern Baptists once "defended segregation in the sincere belief that it formed part of God's plan for the human race," and sometimes "cited biblical verses" in support of racial separation.

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Mike Huckabee, the former Baptist preacher turned Arkansas governor and now Republican presidential candidate, has deep connections to some conservative Christians with radical political ideas. As Salon's Mike Madden details here, while Huckabee talks up his experience visiting Israel in response to questions about foreign policy, he is also campaigning with the support of prominent figures who see Israel as the site of a coming Armageddon. Huckabee's connections within the evangelical movement also extend to leaders whose focus is on the United States; a number of those leaders are working to transform the United States into a Christian nation governed by what they see as biblical principles. On Monday, as Salon columnist Joe Conason notes, Huckabee seemed to hint that he shares at least some of that vision. "It's a lot easier to change the Constitution," said Huckabee, "than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do, is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards."

Ideas like the ones some of Huckabee's supporters hold stem from two radical doctrines, reconstructionism and dominionism. As Conason writes, these ideas come down to "the notion that America, indeed every nation on earth, is meant to be governed by biblical law." Additionally, they stem from a belief that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, then betrayed by secular humanist liberals who created a myth of separation of church and state in the 20th century, leading the country to immorality and godlessness, and that the United States must be taken back by Christians. Some of the proponents of this idea are unashamed about using the word "theocracy" to describe their goal. The most radical among them -- including two of the movement's leading lights and progenitors, R.J. Rushdoony and his son-in-law Gary North -- advocate a return to the practice of stoning as a method of execution, and expanding this death sentence to the crimes of homosexuality, blasphemy and cursing one's parents.

One of the early organizations to promote reconstructionist ideas was the Coalition on Revival. Rushdoony and North were members of its steering committee. In 1986, two years after its founding, the group produced "A Manifesto for the Christian Church," which says, among other things, "[The] Bible is the only absolute, objective, final test for all truth claims ... The Bible is not only God's statements to us regarding religion, salvation, eternity, and righteousness, but also the final measurement and depository of certain fundamental facts of reality and basic principles that God wants all mankind to know in the spheres of law, government, economics, business, education, arts and communication, medicine, psychology, and science." The group also released 17 tracts laying out its prescription for what the "Christian Worldview" should be on topics from government to law, medicine, family and economics. The introduction to these states, "We believe America can be turned around and once again function as a Christian nation as it did in its earlier years. We believe that wherever the pastors of any city in the world join together in unity to make Christ Lord of every sphere of life, and, with Spirit-led strategy, mobilize their people into a unified spiritual army; that city can and will become 'a city set upon a hill.'"

The list that follows is an examination of some of Huckabee's connections within the Christian right, including his most prominent connections to members and supporters of the Coalition on Revival and other proponents of reconstructionist and dominionist theology.

D. James Kennedy: Like Huckabee, Kennedy -- who died in 2007 -- denied that he was a reconstructionist or dominionist. But Kennedy, known in certain circles as the most influential evangelical leader no one outside the evangelical world has ever heard of, long associated himself with prominent members of both disciplines and was an important conduit for their mainstreaming. He was a member of the Coalition on Revival's steering committee and a signatory to the manifesto. Even if he had been just your run-of-the-mill televangelist, Kennedy's reach and influence during his life couldn't have been dismissed: His ministry, Florida's Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, claimed 10,000 members, and his radio and television shows reached millions in the United States and worldwide.

It was from Coral Ridge that Kennedy hosted an annual "Reclaiming America for Christ" conference. In 2005, a packet of information handed out at the conference included a message from Kennedy. "Our job is to reclaim America for Christ, whatever the cost," he wrote. "We are to bring His truth and His will to bear on every sphere of our world and our society. We are to exercise godly dominion and influence over our neighborhoods, our schools, our government ... our entertainment media, our news media, our scientific endeavors -- in short, over every aspect and institution of human society." Kennedy also embraced the standard reconstructionist idea that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and should return to its roots. David Barton, one of the leading revisionist historians in this vein, was a speaker at some of the conferences. Along with Barton, Rushdoony and North were frequent guests on Kennedy's broadcasts. In 2006, Huckabee spoke at an awards dinner during "Reclaiming America for Christ." But Huckabee's primary connection to Kennedy is through his strong ties to Kennedy's followers and former employees.

George Grant: The former executive director of Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries, Grant co-wrote one of Huckabee's books, "Kids Who Kill: Confronting Our Culture of Violence," which was released in 1998. About 10 years before, Grant, a prolific author and, according to Reason Magazine, a "militant" reconstructionist, had written a book called "The Changing of the Guard: The Vital Role Christians Play in America's Cultural Drama." In one now infamous passage from that book, he wrote

Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ -- to have dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness.
But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice.
It is dominion we are after. Not just influence.
It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time.
It is dominion we are after.
World conquest. That's what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish. We must win the world with the power of the Gospel. And we must never settle for anything less...
Thus, Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land -- of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ.

Janet Folger: Folger is the founder of Faith2Action, an antiabortion, anti-gay Christian conservative organization dedicated to winning the "cultural wars." She also hosts her own Faith2Action radio show. In the 1990s, she worked as the national director at the Center for Reclaiming America, D. James Kennedy's group. A longtime associate of Huckabee, she is a co-chair of his Faith and Family Values Coalition, a group of campaign supporters and advisors. Her support of Huckabee became even more vociferous after he won the straw poll that followed the Values Voter Presidential Debate, which Folger organized. (Huckabee was the only leading Republican presidential candidate to attend.) At the debate, Folger personally arranged to have the Grand Avenue Choir of God perform its version of "Why Should God Bless America," a song that asks, "Why should God bless America?/ She's forgotten He exists/ And has turned her back on everything/ That made her what she is." Folger gained notoriety in the liberal blogosphere recently for her satirical prediction that, if elected, Hilary Clinton would imprison all Christians.

Pastor Rick Scarborough: Scarborough is the founder of Vision America, a group dedicated to increasing Christian conservatives' participation in politics. Huckabee depended on Scarborough's group, among others, to win Iowa; Vision America members gave Huckabee supporters rides to the polls. Scarborough describes himself not as a Republican but rather as a "Christocrat." In her book "Kingdom Coming," former Salon reporter Michelle Goldberg quotes from Scarborough's monograph "In Defense of ... Mixing Church and State," where the pastor asserts that the separation of church and state is "a lie introduced by Satan and fostered by the courts." Upon meeting Scarborough, Karl Rove told the pastor that his positions were "too strident and conservative." Tom DeLay, a close friend of Scarborough's, spoke via video at the 2005 "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" conference that Scarborough organized, where conservatives assailed "activist judges" and one speaker suggested the best way to gain control of the U.S. Supreme Court was through Justice Anthony Kennedy's death. Scarborough also led a 2004 national campaign to protest the dismissal of Alabama Supreme Court chief justice Roy Moore, removed from the bench for installing a Ten Commandments tablet in his courthouse. Scarborough opposes all high school sex education courses and vehemently spoke out against Texas Gov. Rick Perry's promotion of HPV vaccines in high schools, stating "the governor's action seems to signify that God's moral law regarding sex outside of marriage can be transgressed without consequence."

Michael Farris: Farris is the co-founder and chairman of the board of the Home School Legal Defense Association, as well as the founder and now chancellor of Patrick Henry College, which is dedicated to educating home-schooled children in right-wing evangelical doctrines so they can pursue, in particular, careers in government. He serves on Huckabee's Faith and Family Values Coalition, and his endorsement is the main reason that home-schoolers were an important force for Huckabee and his victory in the Iowa caucuses. Farris traveled to Iowa ahead of last year's straw poll to organize for Huckabee and -- along with Scarborough -- participated in a conference call with Iowa pastors just before the caucuses, exhorting them to get their congregations out to vote, presumably for Huckabee. In the early 1990s, Farris ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor of Virginia; his campaign was derailed at least in part by charges of extremism stemming from his association with the Coalition on Revival. At the time, he claimed that he was a member of the group in 1984 and 1985, but left before the manifesto was issued in 1986. "It started heading to a theocracy," he said, "and I don't believe in a theocracy." But he was listed as a steering committee member, a signatory to the manifesto, as the coauthor of another of the group's documents, "The Christian World View of Law," and on group letterhead from 1990. "They put my name on stuff. I can't help their print shop," he said at the time. At Patrick Henry, Farris' ideas are put into a strict code for both students and faculty. While on campus, students are prohibited from dancing, kissing and any "prolonged embrace." They are not allowed to drink alcohol or smoke unless they are in the presence of their parents or they are out of the greater Washington, D.C., area while the school is on vacation.

Rev. Don Wildmon: The Huckabee campaign has embraced the "significant endorsement" of Wildmon, the chairman and founder of the American Family Association, a virulently antiabortion, anti-gay Christian conservative group, and Wildmon joined Huckabee on the campaign trail in Iowa. On his campaign Web site, Huckabee said of Wildmon that "Rev. Wildmon and I share the same values on faith and family, which are key issues for the Republican party." A member of the steering committee of the Coalition on Revival, since founding the AFA in 1977, Wildmon has dedicated much of his time to advocating for the censorship of such "controversial," "offensive" television programs as "Donahue," "The Wonder Years" and "Seinfeld." In 1988, Wildmon attracted attention for his claim that Mighty Mouse snorted cocaine in one of the show's episodes. Wildmon has also spearheaded boycotts against Ford and Ikea because of the companies' portrayal of gay consumers in their advertisements. Wildmon has frequently been accused of being anti-Semitic for numerous comments alleging Jewish control of the media.

Steven Hotze: When Huckabee went to a fundraiser at Hotze's home in December 2007, even conservative columnist Robert Novak had to stand up and take notice. Hotze, a signatory to "A Manifesto for the Christian Church," was for a time influential in Texas Republican Party politics, bringing reconstructionist ideals with him. A practicing doctor, Hotze is also, as the Houston Press revealed in a long investigation in 2005, a quack who claims board certifications he apparently does not hold, offers treatments without scientific basis for medical problems not ever documented to exist, and "tells his patients it's their fault if they don't get better." Later in 2005, the president of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists sent CBS a letter complaining about Hotze's appearance on the network.

James Robison: The president of the Christian organization Life Outreach International, Robison is best known as a television evangelist and minister, but he was also Huckabee's religious mentor in the late 1970s. Huckabee worked in Robison's church as an announcer and public relations spokesman before leaving to establish a ministry of his own. Robison is firmly opposed to homosexuality. He came under scrutiny in the early 1980s for saying on his television program that he was "sick and tired of hearing about all of the radicals and the perverts and the liberals and the leftists and the Communists coming out of the closet," that it was "time for God's people to come out of the closet, out of the churches and change America." Huckabee's national media job at the time was to defend his boss's words. In 2002, Robison co-wrote a book, "The Absolutes: The Indisputable Principles of Civilized Society," with George Grant.

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Ask Mike Huckabee if being governor of Arkansas gave him enough foreign policy experience to be president of a nation at war, and he's got a ready answer. At a press conference here Thursday, he ticked off 12 countries and two continents he'd visited to prove his experience. Usually, one country in particular stands out from the list. "I've been to Israel nine times," he said.

Huckabee said the same at a debate in New Hampshire a couple of weeks ago, also mentioning Iraq and Afghanistan at the time. A few days after that, at another debate in Myrtle Beach, S.C., he lectured Ron Paul on the Middle East. "We've got one true ally in the Middle East, and that's Israel," Huckabee said. "It's a tiny nation ... I've literally traveled from Dan to Beersheba, and I understand something of that nation and the vulnerability of it." Again and again on the campaign trail, Huckabee cites his trade missions as governor -- as well as his earlier, church-affiliated trips to the Holy Land -- as proof that he'd make a credible commander in chief.

Huckabee's posturing on foreign policy boils down to two things: Get tough on terrorists, and stand strong with Israel. "As president, I will always ensure that Israel has access to the state-of-the-art weapons and technology she needs to defend herself from those who seek her annihilation," Huckabee states in a brief on his campaign Web site.

Huckabee's frequent Holy Land name-dropping is no doubt part of his campaign strategy -- he's a small-state governor trying to burnish his foreign policy credentials in a race against rivals, including a war hero. But there could be less than meets the eye with his professed experience with Israel. Indeed, his background with visiting the close U.S. ally appears to have much more to do with his religious beliefs than issues of U.S. national security.

A former Baptist pastor, Huckabee is aggressively courting votes from his fellow evangelical Christians, which could have much to do with all the Israel talk. One of his prominent supporters of this ilk is the Rev. Tim LaHaye, who has mixed foreign policy and radical theology into a bestselling formula. LaHaye's "Left Behind" books -- more than 65 million copies sold -- use the Middle East as the backdrop for a story involving the Antichrist (the U.N. secretary-general), Armageddon (a massive Mideast war) and the Second Coming (but only after the Rapture brings true believers to heaven and leaves non-Christians behind). LaHaye and his wife, Beverly, the founder of the right-wing advocacy group Concerned Women for America, have known Huckabee for 25 years. They endorsed Huckabee last month around the same time that Huckabee formed the Iowa Pastors Coalition, a group of ministers backing his campaign. The group helped win him enough support from conservative Christians to beat Mitt Romney in the key opening caucuses there.

LaHaye's books seem like what you might get by crossing Jerry Falwell and Tom Clancy. The novels combine the Book of Revelation with international intrigue, using a literal interpretation of the Bible. After believers are whisked away in the Rapture, the Antichrist-led United Nations rules the world during a time of war, earthquakes and plagues. Only by accepting Jesus as their savior can people make it through the chaos. Israel is important mostly as a setting for the battle between good and evil that takes place there.

LaHaye's Web site makes clear that he often uses the same literalist approach to interpret current events. "Satan, and radical Islamists, would like nothing better than to thwart the plan of God to warn mankind with chaos (like we are now experiencing) before the rapture when all Christians will be taken suddenly to heaven," he wrote after Hamas won Palestinian elections two years ago. After Sept. 11, LaHaye said the world was in a "time of stage setting" for the seven years of "severe judgment and persecution" the Bible says is coming before Christ returns. U.S. foreign policy isn't as important to the novels as events in the Middle East, LaHaye explains in a FAQ on his Web site: "It's not explained in the Scriptures, thus we give it such a minor role. There are no clear prophecies regarding the U.S. in the Bible."

By talking up his trips to Israel, and with his ties to figures like LaHaye, Huckabee may be looking to win support from people who share the books' radical vision, without scaring off other voters who don't spend time thinking about the Apocalypse.

"We need to stand behind Israel, because I belive that Israel is God's chosen country, and Israelites were his chosen people," said Gloria Questad, who heard Huckabee speak Wednesday at North Greenville University (motto: Where Christ Makes the Difference). "That's what it is according to the Word." Questad and her husband, Bruce, live in Vancouver, Wash., but they were visiting Greenville, S.C., to see their son, who goes to college here. They're firmly behind Huckabee. "He's a God-fearing man and a Christian," Bruce Questad said.

Religious leader Don Moore downplays Huckabee's fascination with the end times. "That never was something that seemed to be a preoccupation of his," Moore said, who served as the executive director of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention when Huckabee was its president in the 1990s. "I would doubt that Mike would be too interested in that." And Huckabee advisors insist that he doesn't bring his personal religious beliefs into discussions on foreign policy or otherwise. "The only time it comes up is when you guys (in the press) ask," said Jim Pinkerton, a senior policy advisor to the campaign.

But that's not exactly the case. In the battle for South Carolina, Huckabee is spending considerable time at churches or church-affiliated institutions upstate, in places like North Greenville. Still, when he talks about his faith, he tends to place it in the context of social justice and economic populism, rather than foreign policy.

In fact, Huckabee's Israel trips seem to have little bearing beyond the surface talk in his campaign linking it with foreign policy readiness. Huckabee led one trip as governor of Arkansas to Israel in 1999, at which point he met with some Knesset members. But when asked about the trip by Salon, Huckabee's press secretary at the time, Rex Nelson, didn't even remember that the trip took place -- he recalled only trade missions to places like Japan and Mexico. And Huckabee's nine trips to Israel between 1973 and 1999 were mostly focused on the Middle East of a few millennia earlier. Huckabee aides said he led church groups, not government delegations, when he went, and the itineraries were narrowly tailored to religious sites.

Huckabee maintains that his foreign travel, including the trips to Israel, was good presidential preparation. "If you make a trip overseas, you have a better perspective of the world," he told Salon during a news conference on Thursday. "Some of the most enlightening trips, quite frankly, were the trips that were made in a personal capacity, because I didn't have anybody sort of leading me through the official version of what they wanted me to see and hear," he said.

In a Republican campaign that his rivals are trying to make about foreign policy, Huckabee has spent relatively little discussing what his would be.

"You have to forgive us -- in the middle of Michigan and South Carolina, we're not issuing 35-page policy papers on NATO," his advisor Pinkerton said.

But if his campaign doesn't start issuing them soon, voters may begin to wonder whether he's taking strategy tips for handling global affairs solely from a higher power.

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Pure Unadulterated Dementia

One sick fuck....

The longest baby ever born at the Albany, N.Y., hospital, at least as of May 5, 1926, who grew up to be my strapping father, passed away last Friday morning.

As Mother and I stood at Daddy's casket Monday morning, Mother repeated his joke to him, which he said on every wedding anniversary until a few years ago when Lewy bodies dementia prevented him from saying much at all: "54 years, married to the wrong woman." And we laughed.

John Vincent Coulter was of the old school, a man of few words, the un-Oprah, no crying or wearing your heart on your sleeve, and reacting to moments of great sentiment with a joke. Or as we used to call them: men.

When he was moping around the house once, missing my brother who had just gone back to college, he said, "Well, if you had cancer long enough, you'd miss it."

He'd indicate his feelings about my skirt length by saying, "You look nice, Hart, but you forgot to put on your skirt."

Of course, he did show strong emotion when The New York Post would run a photo of Teddy Kennedy saying the rosary. I can still see the look of disgust. I saw that face in "How To Read People Like a Book" and it was NOT a good chapter.

Your parents are your whole world when you are a child. You only recognize what is unique about them when you get older and see how the rest of the world diverges from your standard of normality.

So it took me awhile to realize that by telling my friends that Father was an ex-FBI agent and a union-buster whose hobbies included rebuilding Volkswagens and shooting squirrels in our backyard, I was painting the image of a rough Eliot Ness type, rather than the cheerful, funny raconteur they would meet.

Besides being very funny, Father had an absolutely straight moral compass without ever being preachy or judgmental or even telling us in words. He just was good.

He would return to a store if he was given too much change -- and this was a man who was so "thrifty," as we Scots like to say, he told us he wanted to be buried in two cardboard boxes from the A&P rather than pay for a coffin.

When I was bombarded with arguments for baby-killing as a kid, I asked Father about the old chestnut involving a poverty-stricken, unwed teenage girl who gets pregnant. (This was before they added the "impregnated by her own father" part.) Father just said, "I don't care. If it's a life, it's a life." I'm still waiting to hear an effective counterargument.

Father hated puffery, pomposity, snobbery, fake friendliness, fake anything. Like Kitty's father in "Anna Karenina," he could detect a substanceless suitor in a heartbeat. (They were probably the same ones who looked nervous when I told them Father was ex-FBI and liked to shoot squirrels in the backyard.)

He hated unions because of their corrupt leadership, ripping off the members for their own aggrandizement. But he had more respect for genuine working men than anyone I've ever known. He was, in short, the molecular opposite of John Edwards.

Father didn't care what popular opinion was: There was right and wrong. I don't recall his ever specifically talking about J. Edgar Hoover or Joe McCarthy, but we knew he thought the popular histories were bunk. That's why "Treason" was dedicated to him, the last book of mine he was able to read.

When Father returned from the war, he used the G.I. Bill to complete college and law school in three years. In order to get to law school quickly, he chose the easiest college major -- a major that so impressed him, he told my oldest brother that if he ever took one single course in sociology, Father would cut off his tuition payments.

As a young FBI agent fresh out of law school, one of Father's first assignments was to investigate job applicants at a uranium enrichment plant, the only suitable land for which was apparently located on some property owned by the then-vice president, Alben Barkley, in Paducah, Ky.

One day, a group of FBI agents saw the beautiful Nell Husbands Martin at lunch with her mother. They asked the waitress for her name and flipped a coin to see who could ask her out first. Father lost the coin toss, so he paid off the other agents. And that's how Nell became my mother.

Mother swore she'd never marry a drinker, a smoker or a Catholic, and she got all three, reforming Father on all but the Catholicism. Even in foreign countries where none of us spoke the language, Father went to Mass every Sunday until the very end.

Of course, toward the end, he probably didn't even remember he was a Catholic. But on the bright side, he didn't remember that Teddy Kennedy was a Catholic, either.

Father spent most of his nine-year FBI career as a Red hunter in New York City.

He never talked much about his FBI days. I learned that he worked on the Rudolf Abel case -- the highest-ranking Soviet spy ever captured in U.S. history -- during one of my brother's eulogies on Monday. But when Father read a paper I wrote at Cornell defending McCarthy and came across the name William Remington, he told me that had been his case.

Father mostly had contempt for Soviet spies. In addition to damaging information, such as military plans and nuclear secrets, the spies also collected massive amounts of utterly useless information on things like U.S. agricultural production. These were people who looked at a flush toilet like it was a spaceship.

He told me Soviet spies reveled in the whole cloak-and-dagger aspect of espionage. One spy gave weirdly specific details to a contact before their first meeting: He would have the New York Herald Tribune folded three times, tucked under his left elbow at a particular angle.

When the spy walked into the hotel lobby for the rendezvous, Father nearly fell off his chair when the man with the Herald Tribune folded under his elbow just so ... was also wearing a full-length fur coat. But he couldn't have told his contact: "I'll be the only white man in North America wearing a full-length fur coat."

In the early 1980s, as vice president and labor lawyer for Phelps Dodge copper company, Father broke a strike against the company, which culminated in the largest union decertification ever -- at that time and perhaps still. President Reagan had broken the air traffic controllers' strike in 1981. But unions recognized that it was the breaking of the Phelps Dodge strike a few years later that landed the greater blow, as described in the book "Copper Crucible."

There was massive violence by the strikers, including guns being fired into the homes of the mine employees who returned to work. Every day, Father walked with the strikebreakers through the picket line, (in my mind) brushing egg off his suit lapel.

By 1986 it was over; the mineworkers voted against the union and Phelps Dodge was saved. For any liberals still reading, this is what's known as a "happy ending."

To Mother's lifelong consternation -- until he had dementia and she could get him back by smothering him with hugs and kisses -- Father wasn't demonstrative. But all he wanted was to be with Mother (and to work on his Volkswagens). They traveled the world together, went to DAR conventions together, engaged in Republican politics together and went to the New York Philharmonic together -- for three decades, their subscription seats were on the highest landing, or as we Scots call it, the "Music Lovers" level.

When Mother was in a rehabilitative facility briefly after surgery a few years ago and Father was not supposed to be driving, we were relieved that a snowstorm had knocked out the power to the garage door opener, so Daddy couldn't get to the car. It would just be a week and then Mother would be home.

My brother came home to check on Father the first day of this arrangement to find that he had taken an ax to the side door of the garage, so he could drive to the rehab center and sit with Mother all day.

When she left him for five days last summer to go to a family reunion in Kentucky, at some point, Father, who hadn't been able to speak much anymore, looked up and asked his nurse, "Where is she?"

And last Friday morning at 2 he passed away, in his bedroom with Mother. The police and firemen told my brother that they kept trying to distract Mother to keep her away from the bedroom with Father's body, but she kept padding back into the bedroom to be close to him.

Now Daddy is with Joe McCarthy and Ronald Reagan. I hope they stop laughing about the Reds long enough to talk to God about smiting some liberals for me.

Source: http://www.townhall.com/columnists/AnnCoulter/2008/01/10/john_vincent_coulter?page=full&comments=true

Meet Our Leaders!

A former congressman and delegate to the United Nations was indicted Wednesday as part of a terrorist fundraising ring that allegedly sent more than $130,000 to an al-Qaida and Taliban supporter who has threatened U.S. and international troops in Afghanistan.

The former Republican congressman from Michigan, Mark Deli Siljander, was charged with money laundering, conspiracy and obstructing justice for allegedly lying about lobbying senators on behalf of an Islamic charity that authorities said was secretly sending funds to terrorists.

A 42-count indictment, unsealed in U.S. District Court in Kansas City, Mo., accuses the Islamic American Relief Agency of paying Siljander $50,000 for the lobbying - money that turned out to be stolen from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Siljander, who served two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, was appointed by President Reagan to serve as a U.S. delegate to the United Nations for one year in 1987.

He could not immediately be reached for comment Wednesday.

The charges are part of a long-running case against the charity, which was formerly based in Columbia, Mo., and was designated by the Treasury Department in 2004 as a suspected fundraiser for terrorists.

In the indictment, the government alleges that IARA employed a man who had served as a fundraising aide to Osama bin Laden.

The indictment charges IARA with sending approximately $130,000 to help Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whom the United States has designated as a global terrorist. The money, sent to bank accounts in Peshawar, Pakistan in 2003 and 2004, was masked as donations to an orphanage located in buildings that Hekmatyar owned.

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Chinese Law And Order

Wei Wenhua was beaten to death after he snapped photos of a confrontation on the street between village residents and authorities. His death has sparked controversy in Chinese media, and the blogosphere:

Wei Wenhua was a model communist and is now a bloggers' hero -- a "citizen journalist" turned martyr. The construction company manager was driving his car when he witnessed an ugly scene: a team of about 50 city inspectors beating villagers who tried to block trucks from unloading trash near their homes.

Wei took out his cell phone and began taking pictures. The city inspectors saw Wei and then attacked him in a beating that lasted five minutes. By the time it was over, the 41-year-old Wei was slumped unconscious. He was rushed to the hospital but was dead on arrival.

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More here and here.

Watch The Crazy Man!

Here!

Straight Talk!

Early last year, John McCain seemed to lash his political fortune to the success or failure of the troop "surge" in Iraq. Backing the surge fit his carefully tended reputation as a maverick; his allies noted that McCain was bravely risking his political career to do what he believed was right. "I have just finished an election campaign," Sen. Joe Lieberman said last January when he and McCain pushed the surge at a meeting at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "If rumors are correct, he may be starting one," Lieberman said of McCain, standing at his side. "He is not taking the easy way out here. But he is taking the way that he believes is best for the safety of our children and grandchildren and the values and the way of life that America has come to represent."

A year later, leaving aside the question of its long-term effects, the surge has had a tangible short-term security impact in Baghdad. And McCain, in his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, isn't going to let us forget that he knew better all along. "I'm proud to have been one of those who played a key role in bringing about one of the most important changes in recent years," McCain trumpeted during the GOP debate in Manchester, N.H., on Jan. 6. "And that was the change in strategy from a failing strategy in Iraq pursued by Secretary Rumsfeld." Two days later, McCain won the Granite State primary.

In fact, lately former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has become quite the punching bag for McCain on the campaign trail. Part of the McCain mantra, whether recited on the stump or to reporters on his campaign bus, is that he knew that Gen. David Petraeus' surge of troops would work better than Rumsfeld's light footprint approach. It's his way of supporting the war while criticizing the way it was executed by the Bush administration without ever uttering the word "Bush." It is also meant to be proof of the gravitas McCain would bring to the job of commander in chief. "I have the knowledge and experience and judgment, as my support of the Petraeus strategy indicated, and my condemnation of the previous Rumsfeld strategy," said McCain in a Jan. 9 NBC "Today" show interview. "No other candidate running for president did that on either side."

But to buy into the McCain-knows-best version of the Iraq war, you have to ignore a lot of history. McCain was among the most aggressive proponents of a preemptive strike against Saddam Hussein, cosponsoring the resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq. He also expressed full faith in the way it would be executed -- a war plan conceived and executed by Rumsfeld.

He did call for more troops in Iraq sooner than some, but later than others who made the same argument before the first shots were even fired. And McCain's support for Rumsfeld only evaporated over time, as it became painfully clear that the war in Iraq was going south.

Bert Rockman, the head of the political science department at Purdue University, said McCain's commander-in-chief argument is tarnished because he advocated "the right tactics and the wrong strategy."


"It was a mistake probably to have gone in, that is the real issue," Rockman explained. "We have discovered there are worse things than Saddam Hussein."

During the run-up to the war, McCain argued vociferously in favor of an invasion, quoting the logic of Vice President Dick Cheney. "As Vice President Cheney has said of those who argue that containment and deterrence are working, the argument comes down to this: Yes, Saddam is as dangerous as we say he is," McCain said in a saber-rattling speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Feb. 13, 2003. "We just need to let him get stronger before we do anything about it," he added sarcastically.

In the period leading up to the war, McCain sounded, at times, less like a straight-talking maverick and more like the neoconservative former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. "It's going to send the message throughout the Middle East that democracy can take hold in the Middle East," McCain said about the war on Fox's "Hannity & Colmes" on Feb. 21, 2003. He seemed to think Iraq would be a cakewalk, predicting that the war "will be brief."

He also sounded like Wolfowitz's boss, Donald Rumsfeld, as far back as late 2002. Despite all his talk now about more troops, as the war drums built toward a crescendo, McCain argued that better technology meant fewer troops were going to be needed in Iraq. "Our technology, particularly air-to-ground technology, is vastly improved," McCain told CNN's Larry King on Dec. 9, 2002. "I don't think you're going to have to see the scale of numbers of troops that we saw, nor the length of the buildup, obviously, that we had back in 1991." It was pure Rumsfeld.

But even back then, not everyone was so sure that the war would be brief or that Rumsfeld's smaller force would be sufficient. On Feb. 25, 2003, then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki famously warned the Senate Armed Services Committee that "several hundred thousand" soldiers would be needed to take and hold Iraq. Rumsfeld publicly disagreed with Shinseki's estimate.

If McCain shared Shinseki's position, he didn't say so at the time. "I have no qualms about our strategic plans," he told the Hartford Courant in a March 5 article, just before the invasion. "I thought we were very successful in Afghanistan."

And while he was quiet about Shinseki, McCain shouted down some naysayers who proved to be much more prescient than he. On the cusp of the invasion, West Virginia Democrat Sen. Robert Byrd took to the Senate floor on March 19, 2003, to denounce the war. It was a speech that predicted the future debacle so accurately that it now seems that the senior senator from West Virginia had a crystal ball in his Senate desk. "We proclaim a new doctrine of preemption which is understood by few and feared by many," Byrd warned. "After the war has ended, the United States will have to rebuild much more than the country of Iraq. We will have to rebuild America's image around the globe."

McCain pounced, taking to the Senate floor to predict that "when the people of Iraq are liberated, we will again have written another chapter in the glorious history of the United States of America."


By June 2003, McCain was still generally in the "Mission Accomplished" camp. "I have said a long time that reconstruction of Iraq would be a long, long, difficult process," he told Fox News on June 11. "But the conflict, the major conflict is over ... The regime change is accomplished."

It was during an August 2003 visit to Iraq that McCain seems to have realized that the Iraq tale was not unfolding as another chapter in the glorious history of the United States. (It is not entirely clear when he came to the realization, since the McCain campaign failed to return my call asking for a staffer to go through this history with me.) While he was in Iraq, insurgents used a truck bomb to blow up the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad on Aug. 19, killing U.N. envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello. McCain told NPR on Aug. 29, 2003, that "we need more troops" in Iraq. "When I say more troops, we need a lot more of certain skills, such as civil affairs capability, military police. We need more linguists," McCain added.

And McCain was not always sour on Rumsfeld. As late as May 12, 2004, in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, McCain was asked on "Hannity & Colmes" whether Rumsfeld could still be effective in his job. "Yes, today I do and I believe he's done a fine job," McCain responded. "He's an honorable man."

It is true that by late 2004, McCain was down on the secretary of defense, telling the press that he had "no confidence" in Rumsfeld. But the clips show that he stopped short of calling for Rumsfeld's resignation, saying it was the president's prerogative to pick his own national security team.

To be fair, McCain has been calling for more troops for years now. And political experts do think McCain's argument on the surge may still gain some traction among GOP voters. "We still have about two-thirds of Republicans who support the effort in Iraq," explained Stephen Wayne, a professor of government at Georgetown. "It certainly would work with the Republican audience he is appealing to." That may depend, in part, on the memories of the people in that audience.

Link.

The Problem With The Dems

Mike Davis' take.

My less-informed take: Do they really want to win? Can they, would they really improve things significantly? And a somewhat realted rhetorical question: The Big Tent that is the GOP combines Big Money corrupters of democracy with Christofascists: isn't that some sort of untenable conflict?

Billy Kristol: Asshole

William Kristol’s appointment as a weekly columnist for the New York Times was announced at year’s end and precipitated public excoriation—in blogs, mainly, and in complaints to media writers—from those who saw it as a neo-con assault on the integrity of the New York Times’ op-ed page, the supreme court of opinion in the United States. A less vociferous private view was that getting Kristol was like, say, the Yankees hiring a player from a second-tier club who was an MVP a decade ago, a tired choice.

I was literally half a world away in China at the time and my first thought was substantially different. Kristol is a full-time employee of Rupert Murdoch. He edits the Weekly Standard on which Murdoch has spent and lost millions of dollars. He is also a regular contributor to Fox News. So it is fair to say that he must be a valued member of the Murdoch team, who still finds time to dash off (more on the dashing off part below) for well-paid freelance gigs like the regular column he had in Time magazine in 2007. So, the New York Times recruited a prime Murdoch property at exactly the moment Murdoch had taken over the Wall Street Journal with its own stable of conservative columnists and said he was taking on the New York Times in an aggressive contest for influence.

If this paradox did not cross the minds of the New York Times’ management or Murdoch’s News Corporation, they would all be clueless—which they are not. This was, I’m betting, a transaction that has a subtext that is at least as much about business, one outfit luring another’s asset, as it is about political journalism.

Was Kristol worth the fracas? I am not a reader of the Weekly Standard (except when flying the Shuttle to Washington where it was and perhaps still is, given away). So I pulled a stack of Kristol’s signed editorials from the Weekly Standard and his Time columns. Setting aside his point of view, with which I mostly disagree, what struck me most about them is that they read, without exception, like they were written in a hurry, by a person whose fluency cannot conceal what is superficial judgment and reporting. Kristol had nothing to add in perspective or voice to a great many other conservatives that any casual consumer of the category will find in print, online, and on the air. After considering the Kristol question, the New York Times’ own arbiter, Clark Hoyt, concluded that taking him on was a mistake (New York Times “Week in Review,” January 13). Still, he wondered whether the degree and scale of denunciation—hundreds of fulminating e-mails against; one in favor—was disproportionate to the error.

For at least a generation now, New York Times columnists—including William Safire who came from Richard Nixon’s White House—have been known for their distinctive styles. Many of the best of them—Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd, Nicholas Kristof, Frank Rich, and earlier, the much-missed Russell Baker and Anthony Lewis—were completely home-grown. They became columnists because of their superb reporting for the New York Times that they then combined with a persona that makes or made them consistently interesting to read.

David Brooks, like Safire, came to the New York Times as a conservative writer. But Brooks is a real pundit who breaks ground with his insights that significantly shape the news and social change in ways readers didn’t already know when they picked up the newspaper. I enjoy reading his columns, which are largely free of the cant and demonizing peculiar to so many right-wing oracles. That is what is confounding about the anointment of Kristol to the New York Times pantheon: he gets away with being what seems to be cursory on every subject in the limited spectrum about which he writes. The opening sentence of his inaugural column on January 7 was this: “Manchester, N.H.—Thank you, Senator Obama. You’ve defeated Senator Clinton in Iowa. It looks as if you’re about to beat her in New Hampshire. There will be no Clinton Restoration. A nation turns its grateful eyes to you.”

In the genre of political opining, that would be hard to top for facile, dreary, and as it turned out, wrong. His column this week was equally thin. Let’s assume that Kristol could do better, but he is just too busy editing a weekly magazine and appearing on television. Columns should reflect hard work in writing and reporting, or at least enough of a perfervid approach to the world to make reading them a pleasure or a poke. A regular piece in the New York Times is not something you can dash-off on the way to a television studio, where more often than not, you will say exactly the same thing. I think Kristol is a lost opportunity not because of what he says, but of the lazy way he says it.

In any case, now that Kristol works for the New York Times as well as the company owned by its avowed fierce competitor, his supervisors at both places should demand that he prove he’s up to his many, many jobs.

Link.

How They Do It

"'Don't you know he's a fag?' Tommy must have said a dozen times before the meeting.... For some people, even the GOP is too diverse a community. Anyone with first-hand knowledge of the upper levels of the Republican power structure knows it could give the audience at a Rent marathon a run for its money. So you'd think party hacks like Tommy would have gotten over it by now."

——Allen Raymond, How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative

In a witty touch, the cover of former Republican operative Allen Raymond's new memoir sports a nifty design feature: On the title How to Win an Election, the word "Win" is crossed out. He's changed his mind; he's going to tell the truth. Over the word "Win" is inscribed "Rig."

Raymond's a stylish writer—or perhaps it's his ghostwriter who's a stylish writer—and a smart guy, so I'd like to fancy the title as a bit of a homage to a great right-wing hustler of the past: Stephen Shadegg, who ran Barry Goldwater's Senate campaigns in corrosively manipulative fashion, and published a book in 1964 bragging about it called How to Win An Election. The book became the subject of a thundering New York Times editorial scoring Shadegg's "sublime indifference to all considerations of decency and fairness," and also Shadegg's admission that his secret weapon was borrowing Mao Tse-Tung's technique of infiltrating villages using "cell groups."

"Will he recruit such groups this year from among the Minutemen...which trains its members in guerrilla warfare against a possible Commnist takeover?" the Times asked. "They have pledged to support the Republican nominee thorugh the use of just such infiltration methods, and Mr. Goldwater has not repudiated them."

What goes around comes around: our own modern-day Minutemen—which trains its members in guerrilla warfare against a possible Mexican takeover—have endorsed Mike Huckabee, and Mr. Huckabee has not repudiated them. Truly inspiring, the conservative movement's commitment to historical continuity in these fast-changing times.

Anyway, back to Mr. Raymond. He went to jail for what he did to rig an election on behalf of orders from the Republican National Committee. More on that later. I want to start by writing about how frankly this book—which everyone should buy and read—exposes the absolute, abject horror that the culture of one of our two great American political parties has become. It's a tell-all, and Mr. Raymond truly tells all:

In GOP circles in 2002 it seemed preposterous that anything you did to win an election could be considered a crime. For ten years I'd been making phone calls with the intent to manipulate voters; hell, I'd been handsomely rewarded for it. In my business, communication devices were all lethal weapons—and every fight was dirty.... Even the guys who didn't expose undercover CIA operatives, proposition congressional pages, and send other people's children off to die in an impossible war wouldn't rat on the ones who did.... I was truly beginning to understand how few metaphysical limitations a person is up against once he decides that the truth is what he makes it. From then on, two plus two would equal whatever sum I found most useful."

At one point he reflects on the novelty that he was about to take out his opponent with the truth. "Still, the truth needs the most careful handling of all; it always comes with a lot of inconvenient facts that could lessen its value in the hands of an amateur." His client's opponent, it turns out, had covered up an incident in which he ran over a cop and dragged him around a parking lot, crippling him. His client makes as if he has just learned this--but knew it all along. "He'd been planning this whole thing and waited until the polls had us in a dead heat to use it.... I didn't know whether to be horrified or impressed.

"In the end, I couldn't help but admire the man."

Here is what it takes to become a Republican operative: Avoid your clients' spouses. "[T]hey always reminded me of the candidate's humanity, which hampered my ability to remain cold and calculating."

And Raymond is quite explicit that "both sides do it" is a myth: " When it came to playing in the gutter, we were the professionals—the Dems weren't even junior varsity."

These conservatives are a charming bunch, all right. When our hero asks for an extra two days for his honeymoon—he hasn't had a vacation in years—his congressman boss bellows in front of all his coworkers, "What the fuck? He's been fucking her for seven years! What's he need another two days for?"

He also acknowledges that the name of the game for Republicans is making sure as few ordinary people vote as possible—by way of telling the story of the time an Exxon lobbyist handed him a fat check in his boss's congressional office, and was incredulous at his scruples when, following federal law, Raymond insisted on waiting until they were off federal property (on the curb in front of the Capitol, to be exact) to accept it. "He looked at me like I was out of my mind, then handed over the check."

He demonstrates pretty damned convincingly that the fine phrases about good government in Newt Gingrich's Contract for America were but a carnival hustler's come on. New congressman Sonny Bono stands up at a caucus meeting and enthuses about the Republicans' chance to clean up government. "'How in God's name,' we wondered, 'did this nutty hippie get to be one of us?'... The Southerners just weren't going to do that. They had a mandate. Their strategy was to play to the base at all costs." He was, indeed, incredulous to see them take up the Lewinsky impeachment as their defining issue—"hate-based nonsense," he thought. He thought "they'd all gone nuts."

The dirtiest fights, of course, are between Republicans. When he joins the Steve Forbes campaign in 2000 tasked with gathering petition signatures in New York, he rents an unfindable office in Queens, installing a security camera and 24-hour security guards and triple-locked doors and fireproof filing cabinets for the room containing the petitions, whose walls he also festoons with fire-proof blankets. "It's not enough to know how to fight dirty against the competition; you've also to prevent them from using those unsavory tactics against you."

The competition is Karl Rove and company, about which more later. You'll have to buy the book to learn the Bush campaign's actual unsavory tactics against Forbes in 2000. No spoilers.

♦ ♦ ♦ 

As for that age-old question—do right-wing operatives believe their own propaganda?—for his part, Raymond doesn't. Chalking up the 1994 Gingrich windfall to Bill Clinton's '93 tax hike, he wonders, "Who would have thought that we could convince so many blue-collar workers that raising taxes primarily on white-collar workers was intrinsically wicked enough that they and other voters should give us both the House and the Senate?"

He holds the Evangelical base in utter contempt—providing, in timely fashion, useful insight on why the Republican establishment is so horrified by the ascendency of Preacher Mike Huckabee, the Happy Mullah. "The mouth-breathers who decide GOP primaries might allow people who steal their money and send their children to impossible wars to get away with anything, but they'll cut no such slack for baby-killers," Raymond writes. But if that's the political hand he was dealt, that was the hand he was willing to pay—in one case learning a West Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate who dared sponsored a bill to support a course on human development for school kids, then laundering RNC and National Republican Senatorial Committee money for an "independent" issues ad proclaiming: "Charlotte Pitt proposed teaching first-graders about condoms. Surprised? You shouldn't be. Senator Pritt also voted to permit the sale of pornographic videos to children." (His own candidate was "able to claim total ignorance of the ad's origins, because it ended with the line 'Paid for by the West Virginia State Victory Committee.") He fantasizes about telling another client—this one is running for Republican National Cmomittee co-chair—"Show up with a fetus in a jar and you might stand a chance." Instead, his—successful—strategy is to uncover a donation she once made to Jesse Helms' African-American opponent Harvey Gantt, slipping the relevant FEC documents under every RNC delegate's hotel room door.

If that's the contempt he harbors for RNC members—the party elite—you can imagine how he talks about "the Jesus-loves-guns crowd" with their "pro-life, snake-handling babble" and "religious doggerel." In one memorable phrase, he regrets he did it all just "so some platitude-spewing hack could be elected Grand Cyclops"—thus, from the inside, weighing in on the debate over whether today's conservative movement is racist or not: "Grand Cyclops" is the title for the leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

He's rather thrilled to be able to demonstrate just how authoritarian-minded these "knuckle-draggers" are, picking up his cell phone from the Republican convention, telling him to watch his TV set, then barking "U-S-A! U-S-A!" while pumping his fist in the air.

Soon the whole section has picked up the chant: "That shit's fucking scary, man!" his friend says. Responds Raymond: "What else do you want them to say?"

After which, he he gathers the evidence to conclude that the "convention for the 'families values' Party was, in the end, really just a sweaty, slippery boozefest that put some of your less temperate frats to shame. Walking back to my hotel after the 'Melee for Haley' fund-raiser, I found one of my esteemed colleagues face-down in a puddle of mud. This guy was forty-five years old and the mud was literally bubbling around his face because the son of a bitch was drowning in it. I picked him up, strapped him to a golf cart where the clubs belonged, and drove what was left of him right into the lobby of his hotel."

But make no mistake, they're godly drunks. Preciously, he recalls the first time he saw "a grown man at the height of power wearing a dainty little charm bracelet." It's the RNC's political director, at his job interview, and Raymond's wife has to explain to him that the letters on the bracelet—WWJD?—stand for "What Would Jesus Do?"

WWRNCD? Raymond soon learns. Tune in next time, same rat time, same rat channel.

Link.

Detroit's Problems; Fascism Is Still The Politics At Ford

Ford claims photos of owners' cars cannot be published because Ford owns the images. Comments of the involved owners are here. Some of the pages and links to portraits of the "models" are here.

A Conservative View Of The Economy

We're happy to report that after reciting his modest litany of woe, the president, in an attempt to cheer up the audience, not to mention the rest of the country, which happens to have a large contingent of those worried ordinary folk, declared he was optimistic. Of course, that's easy for him to say: After all, he knows, come what may, his job -- and the perks and paychecks that go with it -- are 100%-guaranteed for the next 11½ months.

Let's not beat around the bush: Who told the president that the economy isn't great?

Someone sure did, because last Monday in Chicago, Dubya came right out and informed an audience of business brass that in contrast to what he has been saying loud and clear for lo! these many months now, the economy isn't going gangbusters; in fact, it's looking a tad peaked.

Why, he even went so far as to admit that jobs, which he had consistently exulted that, thanks to his tax cuts, were growing in glorious profusion, are drying up like over-the-hill peonies left out in an unforgiving sun.

Just to show how thoroughly clued in Mr. Bush has suddenly become, he disclosed in muted fashion that housing had fallen off a cliff, that a lot of mortgages weren't worth the paper they're written on, that oil prices have gone through the roof and that ordinary folk, as they are wont to do, are worried. Golly.

We, personally, couldn't help feeling a heck of a lot better when we learned that Mr. Bush, now that he's alert to the sad facts that the economy may be slowing and homeowners especially are hurting, isn't content with a do-nothing policy. The inside poop is that to keep the feral forces of recession at bay he is determined to push hard as he can to extend his tax cuts, rather than letting them become history.

An admirable plan, whose only tiny hitch is that said tax cuts are not slated to expire for three years. Perhaps it's some genetic incapacity on our part, but we don't quite understand how extending the lower rates beyond 2010 will do all that much to dispel those masses of dark clouds hovering over today's economy, much less what ordinary folk do in the meantime -- except get a bicycle to counter runaway gasoline prices, munch leaves and finger nails to avoid the upward spiral in the cost of food and pitch a tent in the nearest vacant lot (and please don't forget the sleeping bags for the wife and kiddies) after foreclosure.

Still, we're just as glad that Dubya seems resolutely opposed to any of those hare-brained schemes that are being bandied about by irresponsible politicians (forgive the redundancy), whose primary aim is snaring votes from people in a pickle. Even in the novel instances when its intentions are not grounded in greed, stupidity or lust for power, Washington demonstrates an unerring talent for ineptitude.

If breathes there a pure soul so innocent as to be unaware that Uncle Sam is at best all thumbs, we cite the government's efforts to rescue victims of the subprime disaster. As ISI Group's Tom Gallagher and Andy Laperriere relate, back in late August, Mr. Bush, with the usual official fanfare, unveiled a plan to bulk up the Federal Housing Authority so it could help 60,000 borrowers who otherwise might not qualify for FHA financial aid. Well, at last count, nearly a full five months later, that heralded program has provided succor to a grand total of 266 -- that's right, 266 -- distressed borrowers.

None of this, we realize, answers the question of the identity of the babbler who spilled the beans on the state of the economy to the president. We won't keep you in further suspense: We have every reason to believe it was Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve.

That kind of raises a question, we suppose, since Mr. Bernanke has been nearly as much in the dark on the state of the economy as Mr. Bush. More properly, it changes the question to: Who told Mr. Bernanke?

And, gentlemanly as ever, Ben provided the answer himself in a speech in the nation's capital last Thursday -- the market did! Or, to quote the chairman's somewhat circuitous confession verbatim: "Financial market conditions have been sensitive to the evolving economic outlook."

Too bad Mr. Bernanke didn't take the market's message to heart earlier. Conceivably, as a recovering academic he was too conscious of the estimable Paul Samuelson's famous formulation that the stock market had predicted 11 of the past five recessions. Still, Ben should know, that's still way better than the performance of most economists.

MR. BERNANKE COULDN'T have been too pleased with the markets' second thoughts on his vow to take decisive action if things go from bad to worse. And we don't blame him for a minute. Gee whiz, what do those pesky investors want, anyway?

The chairman, looking most funereal, flexes his biceps and flaunts his new machete-wielding stance. The crowd goes wild and the market takes off late Thursday afternoon, obviously goosed by Mr. Bernanke's words and manner both. For he was plainly betokening a half percentage point cut in interest rates when the Fed next meets in solemn two-day conclave, beginning Jan. 29 (breaking only for the traditional jolly lunch). What's more, he all but promised kindred action as needed in the months ahead.

The betting among Street savants is that before Ben's good right arm gets sore from swinging that old machete he'll have sliced rates from 4.25%, where they now rest, to less than 3%. Just the kind of stuff the market loves to hear.

So no doubt Mr. Bernanke went home happy Thursday night, only to have the rug pulled out from under him on Friday, when those fickle investors took it all back and stocks tanked across the board. So what happened to turn sentiment from roused to roiled?

Possibly, a little reflection (which is about all most Street denizens indulge in) revealed that the Fed's whacks out of rates last year provided a quick lift to stock prices, followed by renewed queasiness. It may have been enough, in this instance, to raise doubts anew as to just how much wallop the Fed still packs in the rate-making arena (put us down as believing "not very much").

And it hardly helped sustain the uptick in investor mood when the New York Times reported that Merrill Lynch stands to take a tidy $15 billion write-down, nearly twice the original official reckoning, and a heap more than even the Street's upwardly revised estimates have anticipated. If nothing else, it's a painful reminder that the great credit squeeze, easily the most malign and encompassing one since the Depression, is still very much with us.

The hard truth is, as the Merrill disclosure and the shotgun wedding of Bank of America and the putatively bankrupt Countrywide Financial furnish lugubrious evidence, the hemorrhaging among lenders of virtually every description and everywhere is far from stanched. Something on the order of $100 billion in write-downs have been grudgingly owned up to by the red-faced banks, and it'll likely be years and another $200-$300 billon before the dreary process sighs to an end.

It's a running, virulent wound, and the fragile financial system and the economy are destined to continue to suffer from it for a long, long while. And despite seizures of vertigo -- Friday's plunge is only the most recent -- the stock market, we fear, has yet to face up to the full measure of the damage being wrought and to be wrought.

The big washout we alluded to a few weeks back has still to come and remains a necessary prelude to any semblance of stability in the equity market.

***

A GOOD FRIEND OF OURS who keeps a sharp eye on the investment scene and has been more than a fair investor points out that besides wretched credit conditions, slowing global economies, gathering inflationary pressures and currency debasement, the spectacular run in gold to $900 an ounce owes something to the burgeoning popularity of exchange-traded funds that specialize in gold. The ETFs, it emerges, are required to hold bullion to back up their shares. As demand for the latter mounts, so inexorably does demand for the metal.

Link.

How And Why The Subprime Mess Is Worse Than You'd Think If You Rely On Big Media Coverage

Or sweeping under the carpet, you know, failing to shine that journalistic light.

Delinquent loans create huge liquidity problems for loan servicers like Countrywide because the servicer becomes a middleman between the borrowers and the people who bought their loans.

When the borrower misses payments, as a record number of Countrywide's borrowers are doing now, these contracts require that the company advance those missed payments to investors until it's clear that the amounts won't be recovered.

With Countrywide having a $1.5-trillion servicing portfolio, that puts tremendous strain on its cash flow, Cannon said.

There are a lot of weird incentives here. A company like Countrywide generally doesn't want to foreclose on underwater homes, on the other hand if they have cash-flow problems they'll need to push those foreclosures through so they can stop making payments.

Innovation!!

Link.

Jimmy Carter Opines

Sometimes I'm a little stupid, maybe, a little slow in the head, so I'm wondering if you can help me get something straight. Maybe you can help me understand one fucking thing right now, America, and explain to me what in the Christ is going on here. 'Cause, unless I'm missing something, this country is in the middle of a motherfucking shitstorm, and I have no fucking idea what you're gonna do to get out of it. I mean, are you seriously considering voting for one of these shitbags you got here in '08? Fat fucking chance.

Way I see it, America needs a president who's gonna somehow un-royally screw up the Middle East, do some serious cleaning up after you dropped your pants and took a steaming dump all over the fucking environment, and—boom!—restore dignity, honor, and all that shit to these United States.

See, I got solutions to all your problems—I got 'em right here in my big, hairy ballsack.

You better get down on your hands and knees and kiss Jimmy Carter's rosy-red Georgia-peach-picking ass and beg me to run your fucking country again, because there's no way I'm ever gonna come to you fuck-knobs and politely ask you if I might please be a presidential candidate in your precious fuckin' election. So you can just bite my cock. I've had it with you jerkoffs and your jerkoff candidates.

You actually seem to think one a' these assholes is gonna prance in and wave a magic wand and make everything all nice again. Look at you, sitting there like a common fucking schnook and eating all their bull about bi-fucking-partisanship, and how they have all the goddamn answers. Let me tell you something: These fags are dogshit compared to Jimmy fucking Carter, all right? I was arbitrating Mideast crises when this bunch was still sucking on their mamas' titties.

But who comes to me, huh? Fucking nobody. Why ask old Jimmy anything? What the fuck could he know about peace in the Middle East? It's not like he fucking won the Nobel Peace Prize for that shit. You myopic pricks. Back in '79, I sat Sadat and Begin right down and made those two dicklicks shake hands. It was beautiful—I had all the pieces lined up and I smiled and waved in my best fucking suit and tie right there on TV. And what do you do, you pieces of shit? You screw the whole goddamn pooch.

Cocksuckers.

Oh, what's that I hear? The weather's all screwy? You got a global warming problem? Boo-fucking-hoo! I was telling you morons to turn off your lights and unplug all your shit at night to conserve energy in 19-fuckin'-75, for chrissake. Gee, I wonder what woulda happened if we'd all switched to solar power like I fucking did back when we had a fucking chance to do something about it. Think we'd still be sucking Saudi Arabia's dick like a five-dollar whore? I sure as fuck didn't get no fancy Oscar for that little spiel, though, did I? No. But Al Gore, that cum-sucking pig, steals the shit from me and now he's the greatest thing since Jesus Christ made a fucking sandwich.

Well, he can lick my asshole right after George W. Bush, that fuck.

You want compassion? Somebody who's looking out for the little guy? Why don't you take a look at Jimmy Carter, 'cause unlike, oh, every motherfucking candidate out there, he spent the last fucking quarter-century building houses for the homeless. And what does he get for it? A fucking hernia. Some fucking gratitude, you selfish twats. You talk to me about compassion? I'll shove a crucifix so far up the Democrats' asses they'll be asking me to buy them dinner and kiss them good night.

Funny thing about me: I actually fucking know shit! Not like these goombas trying to weasel their way into the White House. I practically wrote the book on collapsing bridges, inflation, and the working poor, fuck-o. I even got a degree in nuclear engineering or some shit. You know how easy I could swoop down right now like a guardian angel and solve all your fucking problems? Snap. Bam. Do it in my fucking sleep. Just fucking try me.

So you want me to run for president again? Yeah, sure, absolutely, I'll do it. I'd be honored to do it—with my fucking dick in your mouth, you worthless scumbags.

You had your chance with Jimmy Carter, and you fucking blew it. So get fucked. Fucking country.

Link.

Scoop??

You must see it to believe it, or not.

Again, What Sibel Knows

If a new article just published Saturday in the Times of London based upon information provided by US government whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, we have not only solid evidence of prior knowledge of 9-11 by high up US government officials, but evidence of treasonous activity by many of those same officials involving efforts to provide US nuclear secrets to America's enemies, even including Al Qaeda.

The story also casts a chilling light on the so-called "accidental" flight of six nuclear-armed cruise missiles aboard an errant B-52 that flew last Aug. 30 from Minot AFB in North Dakota to Barksdale AFB in Shreveport, Louisiana.

The Sunday Times reports that Edmonds, whose whistleblowing efforts have been studiously ignored by what passes for the news media in American news media, approached the Rupert Murdoch-owned British paper a month ago after reading a report there that an Al-Qaeda leader had been training some of the 9-11 hijackers at a base in Turkey, a US NATO alley, under the noses of the Turkish military.

Edmonds, who was recruited by the FBI after 9-11 because of her Turkish and Farsi language skills, has long been claiming that in her FBI job of covertly monitoring conversations between Turkish, Israeli, Persian and other foreign agents and US contacts, including a backlog of untranslated tapes dating back to 1997, she had heard evidence of "money laundering, drug imports and attempts to acquire nuclear and conventional weapons technology." But the Turkish training for 9-11 rang more alarm bells and made her decide that talking behind closed doors to Congress or the FBI was not enough. She had to go public.

Edmonds claims in the Times that even as she was providing evidence of moles within the US State Department, the Pentagon, and the nuclear weapons establishment, who were providing nuclear secrets for cash, through Turkey, to Pakistan's intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, agencies within the Bush administration were actively working to block investigation and to shield those who were committing the acts of treason.

Pakistan's ISI is known to have had, and to still maintain close contacts with Al-Qaeda. Indeed, the Times notes that Pakistan's nuclear god-father, General Mahmoud Ahmad, was accused of sanctioning a $100,000 wire payment to Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, immediately before the attacks.

Edmonds claims, in the Times article, that following the 9-11 attacks, FBI investigators took a number of Turkish and Pakistani operatives into custody for questioning about foreknowledge of the attacks, but that a high-ranking US State Department official repeatedly acted to spirit them out of the country.

Edmonds was fired from her FBI translating job in 2002 after she accused a colleague of having illicit contact with Turkish officials. She has claimed that she was fired for being outspoken, and in 2005 her position was reportedly vindicated by the Office of Inspector General of the FBI, which concluded that she had been sacked for making valid complaints.

One of those whom Edmonds claims in the Times report was being investigated in connection with the nuclear information transfers was Pentagon analyst Lawrence Franklin. Franklin was convicted and jailed in 2006 for passing US defense information to American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobbyists and sharing classified information with an Israeli diplomat. Franklin, in 2001, was part of the Pentagon Office of Special Plans, a kind of shadow intelligence unit set up by the Bush administration inside the Pentagon whose job it was to gin up "evidence" to justify a war against Iraq. In that capacity, he (along with several other OSP members and arch neocon schemer Michael Ledeen) was also identified by Italian investigative journalists working for the newspaper La Republican, as having been at a crucial meeting in December 2001 in Rome with the Italian defense and intelligence service ministers. La Republicca reports that at that meeting a plan was hatched to fob off forged Niger embassy documents as evidence that Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium ore from Niger.

If Edmonds' story is correct, and Al-Qaeda, with the aid of Turkish government agents and Pakistani intelligence, with the help of US government officials, has been attempting to obtain nuclear materials and nuclear information from the U.S., it casts an even darker shadow over the mysterious and still unexplained incident last August 30, when a B-52 Stratofortress, based at the Minot strategic air base in Minot, ND, against all rules and regulations of 40 years' standing, loaded and flew off with six unrecorded and unaccounted for nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.

That incident only came to public attention because three as yet unidentified Air Force whistleblowers contacted a reporter at the Military Times newspaper, which ran a series of stories about it, some of which were picked up by other US news organizations.

An Air Force investigation into that incident, ordered by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, claimed improbably that the whole thing had been an "accident," but many veterans of the US Air Force and Navy with experience in handling nuclear weapons say that such an explanation is impossible, and argue that there had to have been a chain or orders from above the level of the base commander for such a flight to have occurred.

Incredibly, almost five months after that bizarre incident (which included several as yet unexplained deaths of B-52 pilots and base personnel occurring in the weeks shortly before and after the flight), in which six 150-kiloton warheads went missing for 36 hours, there has been no Congressional investigation and no FBI investigation into what happened.

Yet in view of Edmonds' story to the London Times, alleging that there has been an ongoing, active effort for some years by both Al Qaeda and by agents of two US allies, Turkey and Pakistan, to get US nuclear weapons secrets and even weapons, and that there are treasonous moles at work within the American government and nuclear bureaucracy aiding and abetting those efforts, surely at a minimum, a major public inquiry is called for.

Meanwhile, there is enough in just this one London Times story to keep an army of investigative reporters busy for years. So why, one has to ask, is this story appearing in a highly respected British newspaper, but not anywhere in the corporate US media?

Link.

And The Times piece itself:

A WHISTLEBLOWER has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets.

Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency’s Washington field office.

She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.

Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.

Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.

The name of the official – who has held a series of top government posts – is known to The Sunday Times. He strongly denies the claims.

However, Edmonds said: “He was aiding foreign operatives against US interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.”

She claims that the FBI was also gathering evidence against senior Pentagon officials – including household names – who were aiding foreign agents.

“If you made public all the information that the FBI have on this case, you will see very high-level people going through criminal trials,” she said.

Her story shows just how much the West was infiltrated by foreign states seeking nuclear secrets. It illustrates how western government officials turned a blind eye to, or were even helping, countries such as Pakistan acquire bomb technology.

The wider nuclear network has been monitored for many years by a joint Anglo-American intelligence effort. But rather than shut it down, investigations by law enforcement bodies such as the FBI and Britain’s Revenue & Customs have been aborted to preserve diplomatic relations.

Edmonds, a fluent speaker of Turkish and Farsi, was recruited by the FBI in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Her previous claims about incompetence inside the FBI have been well documented in America.

She has given evidence to closed sessions of Congress and the 9/11 commission, but many of the key points of her testimony have remained secret. She has now decided to divulge some of that information after becoming disillusioned with the US authorities’ failure to act.

One of Edmonds’s main roles in the FBI was to translate thousands of hours of conversations by Turkish diplomatic and political targets that had been covertly recorded by the agency.

A backlog of tapes had built up, dating back to 1997, which were needed for an FBI investigation into links between the Turks and Pakistani, Israeli and US targets. Before she left the FBI in 2002 she heard evidence that pointed to money laundering, drug imports and attempts to acquire nuclear and conventional weapons technology.

“What I found was damning,” she said. “While the FBI was investigating, several arms of the government were shielding what was going on.”

The Turks and Israelis had planted “moles” in military and academic institutions which handled nuclear technology. Edmonds says there were several transactions of nuclear material every month, with the Pakistanis being among the eventual buyers. “The network appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States,” she said.

They were helped, she says, by the high-ranking State Department official who provided some of their moles – mainly PhD students – with security clearance to work in sensitive nuclear research facilities. These included the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico, which is responsible for the security of the US nuclear deterrent.

In one conversation Edmonds heard the official arranging to pick up a $15,000 cash bribe. The package was to be dropped off at an agreed location by someone in the Turkish diplomatic community who was working for the network.

The Turks, she says, often acted as a conduit for the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s spy agency, because they were less likely to attract suspicion. Venues such as the American Turkish Council in Washington were used to drop off the cash, which was picked up by the official.

Edmonds said: “I heard at least three transactions like this over a period of 2½ years. There are almost certainly more.”

The Pakistani operation was led by General Mahmoud Ahmad, then the ISI chief.

Intercepted communications showed Ahmad and his colleagues stationed in Washington were in constant contact with attachés in the Turkish embassy.

Intelligence analysts say that members of the ISI were close to Al-Qaeda before and after 9/11. Indeed, Ahmad was accused of sanctioning a $100,000 wire payment to Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, immediately before the attacks.

The results of the espionage were almost certainly passed to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist.

Khan was close to Ahmad and the ISI. While running Pakistan’s nuclear programme, he became a millionaire by selling atomic secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea. He also used a network of companies in America and Britain to obtain components for a nuclear programme.

Khan caused an alert among western intelligence agencies when his aides met Osama Bin Laden. “We were aware of contact between A Q Khan’s people and Al-Qaeda,” a former CIA officer said last week. “There was absolute panic when we initially discovered this, but it kind of panned out in the end.”

It is likely that the nuclear secrets stolen from the United States would have been sold to a number of rogue states by Khan.

Edmonds was later to see the scope of the Pakistani connections when it was revealed that one of her fellow translators at the FBI was the daughter of a Pakistani embassy official who worked for Ahmad. The translator was given top secret clearance despite protests from FBI investigators.

Edmonds says packages containing nuclear secrets were delivered by Turkish operatives, using their cover as members of the diplomatic and military community, to contacts at the Pakistani embassy in Washington.

Following 9/11, a number of the foreign operatives were taken in for questioning by the FBI on suspicion that they knew about or somehow aided the attacks.

Edmonds said the State Department official once again proved useful. “A primary target would call the official and point to names on the list and say, ‘We need to get them out of the US because we can’t afford for them to spill the beans’,” she said. “The official said that he would ‘take care of it’.”

The four suspects on the list were released from interrogation and extradited.

Edmonds also claims that a number of senior officials in the Pentagon had helped Israeli and Turkish agents.

“The people provided lists of potential moles from Pentagon-related institutions who had access to databases concerning this information,” she said.

“The handlers, who were part of the diplomatic community, would then try to recruit those people to become moles for the network. The lists contained all their ‘hooking points’, which could be financial or sexual pressure points, their exact job in the Pentagon and what stuff they had access to.”

One of the Pentagon figures under investigation was Lawrence Franklin, a former Pentagon analyst, who was jailed in 2006 for passing US defence information to lobbyists and sharing classified information with an Israeli diplomat.

“He was one of the top people providing information and packages during 2000 and 2001,” she said.

Once acquired, the nuclear secrets could have gone anywhere. The FBI monitored Turkish diplomats who were selling copies of the information to the highest bidder.

Edmonds said: “Certain greedy Turkish operators would make copies of the material and look around for buyers. They had agents who would find potential buyers.”

In summer 2000, Edmonds says the FBI monitored one of the agents as he met two Saudi Arabian businessmen in Detroit to sell nuclear information that had been stolen from an air force base in Alabama. She overheard the agent saying: “We have a package and we’re going to sell it for $250,000.”

Edmonds’s employment with the FBI lasted for just six months. In March 2002 she was dismissed after accusing a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving Turkish nationals.

She has always claimed that she was victimised for being outspoken and was vindicated by an Office of the Inspector General review of her case three years later. It found that one of the contributory reasons for her sacking was that she had made valid complaints.

The US attorney-general has imposed a state secrets privilege order on her, which prevents her revealing more details of the FBI’s methods and current investigations.

Her allegations were heard in a closed session of Congress, but no action has been taken and she continues to campaign for a public hearing.

She was able to discuss the case with The Sunday Times because, by the end of January 2002, the justice department had shut down the programme.

The senior official in the State Department no longer works there. Last week he denied all of Edmonds’s allegations: “If you are calling me to say somebody said that I took money, that’s outrageous . . . I do not have anything to say about such stupid ridiculous things as this.”

In researching this article, The Sunday Times has talked to two FBI officers (one serving, one former) and two former CIA sources who worked on nuclear proliferation. While none was aware of specific allegations against officials she names, they did provide overlapping corroboration of Edmonds’s story.

One of the CIA sources confirmed that the Turks had acquired nuclear secrets from the United States and shared the information with Pakistan and Israel. “We have no indication that Turkey has its own nuclear ambitions. But the Turks are traders. To my knowledge they became big players in the late 1990s,” the source said.

How Pakistan got the bomb, then sold it to the highest bidders

1965 Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s foreign minister, says: “If India builds the bomb we will eat grass . . . but we will get one of our own”

1974 Nuclear programme becomes increased priority as India tests a nuclear device

1976 Abdul Qadeer Khan, a scientist, steals secrets from Dutch uranium plant. Made head of his nation’s nuclear programme by Bhutto, now prime minister

1976 onwards Clandestine network established to obtain materials and technology for uranium enrichment from the West

1985 Pakistan produces weapons-grade uranium for the first time

1989-91 Khan’s network sells Iran nuclear weapons information and technology

1991-97 Khan sells weapons technology to North Korea and Libya

1998 India tests nuclear bomb and Pakistan follows with a series of nuclear tests. Khan says: “I never had any doubts I was building a bomb. We had to do it”

2001 CIA chief George Tenet gathers officials for crisis summit on the proliferation of nuclear technology from Pakistan to other countries

2001 Weeks before 9/11, Khan’s aides meet Osama Bin Laden to discuss an Al-Qaeda nuclear device

2001 After 9/11 proliferation crisis becomes secondary as Pakistan is seen as important ally in war on terror

2003 Libya abandons nuclear weapons programme and admits acquiring components through Pakistani nuclear scientists

2004 Khan placed under house arrest and confesses to supplying Iran, Libya and North Korea with weapons technology. He is pardoned by President Pervez Musharraf

2006 North Korea tests a nuclear bomb

2007 Renewed fears that bomb may fall into hands of Islamic extremists as killing of Benazir Bhutto throws country into turmoil

How The New England Journal Of Medicine Undercounts Deaths In Iraq.

Maybe. Or not. Not exactly anyone's in a situation to do a fully accurate account when the infrastructure is what it is and many deaths involve, I'm sure, dismemberments.

Our Christian Nation

Here is an event I have no intention of honoring: American Religious History Week. OK, it's not official yet. But it is spelled out as Resolution 888 in the bowels of a House committee, sponsored by Republican Congressman Randy Forbes and backed by thirty-one other Representatives. This is an insidious attempt by the radical Christian right to rewrite American history, to turn the founding fathers from deists into Christian fundamentalists, to proclaim us officially to be a Christian nation. If you want to know why Mike Huckabee is dangerous, why his brand of right-wing Christian populism is so frightening, you should read this resolution.

Sent to me by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, the resolution has passages like this: "Whereas political scientists have documented that the most frequently-cited source in the political period known as The Founding Era was the Bible" and "Whereas the United States Supreme Court has declared throughout the course of our Nation's history that the United States is 'a Christian country', 'a Christian nation', 'a Christian people', 'a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being' and that 'we cannot read into the Bill of Rights a philosophy of hostility to religion....'"

The resolution is staggering for its sheer volume of falsehoods about our history, our system of government and our democracy. It asserts that Thomas Jefferson "urged local governments to make land available specifically for Christian purposes, provided Federal funding for missionary work among Indian tribes, and declared that religious schools would receive 'the patronage of the government.'" There are seventy-six preambular clauses like these, leading up to four resolution clauses, the third of which states that the House "rejects, in the strongest possible terms, any effort to remove, obscure, or purposely omit such history from our Nation's public buildings and educational resources."

"House Resolution 888 is perhaps the most disgraceful, shocking and tragic example yet of the pernicious and pervasive pattern and practice of the unconstitutional rape of our bedrock American citizens' religious freedoms by the fundamentalist Christian right," says Michael "Mikey" Weinstein, head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and a former White House counsel for President Reagan.

The resolution may never work its way out of committee, and even if it does, it may never be passed. But it is important because it expresses an increasingly influential ideology. It underlies the ideological appeal of the Huckabee campaign, however adroitly the Republican candidate dodges these issues when speaking to the general public. "I hope we answer the alarm clock and take this nation back for Christ," Huckabee told a Baptist convention in 1998. He assured the crowd that he had not entered politics "because I thought government had a better answer. I got into

politics because I knew government didn't have the real answers, that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives." And this ideology, as illustrated by Mitt Romney's coded appeal to Christian fundamentalists when giving his recent Texas speech on faith, or even John McCain's humbling trip to Liberty University, has a powerful pull on Republican candidates.

I saw a persistent rewriting of history in numerous Christian history textbooks, used by hundreds of thousands of children, when I wrote American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. The revisionists take a minor historical event--in the case of the missionaries, drawing from very rare decisions to provide funds for mission schools or the building of a church on Indian lands--and use it to create a false portrait of a Christian nation. The resolution asserts that the Fourth of July was designed as a Christian holiday, and that in 1977 Congress authorized that Bibles be "printed under their care" and imported for dissemination to the American public. Congress never imported Bibles. But facts matter little.

It is a mistake, despite the seeming implosion of the Republican Party, to count these people out. The Christian radicals have, as the Huckabee candidacy illustrates, broken free from the fetters of their corporate and neocon handlers. They have unleashed a frightening populism that, in the event of an economic meltdown or period of instability, could see the movement ride the wave of a massive right-wing backlash. So when you get tired of the cute sound bites that constitute most coverage of these campaigns, pull out this resolution to remind yourself that we are playing with dynamite, that unless we begin to re-enfranchise tens of millions of Americans--and this means economically--back into the mainstream, unless we again give our workers the chance to earn a living wage, we will fail to blunt this movement and could well fall victim to it.

Link.

The Lives Of Vets: Destroyed By The Iraq Fandango

The New York Times is running an epic length story on murders by returning Iraq Vets. Its a sad and brilliant chronicle and here are the key paragraphs:

The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war. In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment — along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems — appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction.

Three-quarters of these veterans were still in the military at the time of the killing. More than half the killings involved guns, and the rest were stabbings, beatings, strangulations and bathtub drownings. Twenty-five offenders faced murder, manslaughter or homicide charges for fatal car crashes resulting from drunken, reckless or suicidal driving.

This brought to mind a story I was told about an embedded photographer on the first run into Baghdad who said that the medics were handing out so much speed (”go pills”) that you could hear teeth grinding from outside the Bradley Fighting Vehicles. How many of these kids were introduced to amphetamine by the Army during their tour of Iraq? When you read the description of some of the crimes, the paranoia and aggression associated with Meth just jumps out at you:

When Archie O’Neil, a gunnery sergeant in the Marines, returned from a job handling dead bodies in Iraq, he became increasingly paranoid, jumpy and fearful — moving into his garage, eating M.R.E.’s, wearing his camouflage uniform, drinking heavily and carrying a gun at all times, even to answer the doorbell.

“It was like I put one person on a ship and sent him over there, and they sent me a totally different person back,” Monique O’Neil, his wife, testified.

On the eve of his second deployment to Iraq in 2004, Sergeant O’Neil fatally shot his mistress, Kimberly O’Neal, after she threatened to kill his family while he was gone.

—-

On New Year’s Eve, (Sgt. Seth) Strasburg, accompanied by his brother, consumed vodka cocktails for hours at Jim’s Bar and Package in Arnold. Toward evening’s end, he engaged in an intense conversation with a Vietnam veteran, after which, he said, he inexplicably holstered his gun and headed to a party. Outside the party, he drunkenly approached a Chevrolet Suburban crowded with young people, got upset and thrust his gun inside the car.

Mr. Strasburg said he did not remember what provoked him. According to one account, a young man — not the victim — set him off by calling him a paid killer. Mr. Strasburg, according to the prosecutor, stuck his gun under the young man’s chin. (The man died from Gunshot wounds).

The Army’s explanation of all this is PTSD, and the Times make only passing reference to many of the vets being in substance abuse programs. However it might be worth asking the Army Surgeon General about Amphetamine consumption in Iraq.

Link. The Times article is here.