I report on how consciousness and community are transcending god and state, locally in Washington, DC, and globally, where ever I see progress - or backsliding, including on the feminist front! "Imagine there's no countries, and no religion, too." Most active 2007-17. See my public Facebook/CarolMoore1776 for daily posts.
Some Vermont Democratic Party male operative who was pissed off that I did not agree 100% with his assertions and theories about whatever decided to ridicule me by putting up this absurd photo on his blog to show that he's the man. It was entitled "Hi Carol!" (I saved the whole page to my hard drive before he deleted it, probably after complaints from outraged Hillary Clinton supporters.)
I guess I was supposed to run away crying and never opine again in the male world of power. Of course, any female - and most men - can guess what my real response to it was. (Hint, where's the rubber bands - or the anesthetic and the proper tools.)
If you want to see another example of left wing male hatred of women see my article "Internet Hatred of Women." Grow up, boys, Women are here to stay and flashing your balls at us isn't going to drive us away. +++ Update 2011: Despite their unconvincing denials, the two most likely suspects for being the sexist anonymous blogger "Thomas Rowley" of "VermontSecession" (an anti-secession blog heavily given to innuendo, guilt by association, exaggerated accusations and flat out libel) are J.D. Ryan, a nasty male blogger whose writing style greatly resembles the referring blog, and/or his buddy John Odum of Green Mountain Daily, who has worked for Bernie Sanders and written for the Huffington Post and whose wife is a Commissioner for the Vermont Commission on Women. Ryan says he doesn't have to blog anonymously to protect his job; but of course his buddy Odum does, whatever his current employment may be. (He even quit blogging for a time to protect his then-job when he was initially linked with Rowley.) Rank woman hating sexism like the Rowley-created "NotCarolMoore" blogcould get you fired from a liberal democratic political employer in Vermont. And it sure wouldn't help your wife's feminist reputation. Graphic below from Vermont Commons blog entry. The least one can say is that Odum and Ryan have no problem with being associated with - or even mistaken for - a woman hater like "Thomas Rowley."
I remember the good old days when I used to dread the whole year before a presidential election because we would have to hear every day for a whole year about the presidential election. But the 2008 presidential election started on November 7, 2006!
Anyone who watches cable tv as much as I do knows that it has been the Number One topic since then. Little issues like a failing economy, war and genocide against Arabs and Muslims, the escalating arms race among the US, Russia and China, the rising cost and falling availability of food worldwide, rising sea levels (whatever the cause), the absurd foisting of impossible loans upon unsuspecting consumers, the doubling of health care costs as thousands die from lack of it, the fact that marijuana is STILL illegal -- barely make a bleep.
WHO WILL BE FUHRER? WHO WILL BE FUHRER? Who will inherit the total power to run the lives of the American people, to arrest us as terrorists, torture us and send us away to camps for the rest of our lives without warrants or trial should we not kiss his or her butt?? Who will inherit the right to nuke any non-nuclear nation that doesn't kiss our butt? Who will take the FUHRER suit from George Bush Junior??
MIKE HUCKABEE? Not this time around. But Mike "I'll shove my confederate flag pole up your black ass" Huckabee is the perfect nazi. He promises both welfare for his supporters and warfare against the infidels. (Yes, he'll put my ass in his prison camps should he be elected in 2012.)
RUDY GIULIANI? Luckily, Mr. "I Divorced My Wife in a Press Conference while My Fiance looked on and laughed her ass off" has proved himself to be an idiot at political strategy, as well as a liar, a cheat and a good friend to crooks.
MITT ROMNEY? Mr. "I'm really a liberal and lying to all these dumb conservatives, vote for me" is the handsomest dude running. Reminds me of that charming liar Don Draper on that sexy tv series "MAD MEN."
JOHN MCCAIN? Mr. "Don't pay attention to that 'Saturday Night Live' skit about I'm a psychologically damaged war prisoner who can't wait to get my finger on the nuclear red button."
JOHN EDWARDS? Well, it would be fun to watch him arrest all those big corporate lawyers, but he'd probably destroy the economy.
HILLARY CLINTON? Yeah, eight more years of hearing about all the women Bill Clinton seduced, assaulted and raped. But Hillary can solve that problem by LOCKING UP the great right wing conspiracy... send them all to the work camps!
BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA? Well, maybe if he locks up all the neocons and Israel lobbyists after he has his revelation on January 21, 2009 that MOHAMMED WAS RIGHT!!
As you might guess from reading the description of this blog, I consider macho sectarianism a big problem, and certainly NOT the solution! It is as ridiculously silly to me as these two male hamsters going at it! (See the video.)
This entry continues the one below entitled: “Ron, Lew, et al - apologize for old bigotries and move on!” about 10 racist and anti-gay comments discovered in Ron Paul newsletters from 1987-1994. In a frothing New Republic article 20 news letter entries were attacked; a Reason article debunked most of those attacks, focusing on the most obnoxious statements about gays and blacks. Paul and other's responses are described in more detail below.
Anyway, what is interesting to me is that the problems doubtless arose from efforts twenty years ago by one group of ideological males (who included the now deceased Murray Rothbard and the still active Lew Rockwell and Burt Blumert) to take power in an organization (the Libertarian Party) run by another, more disparate group of ideological males. In the 1987-89 period Rothbard/Rockwell/Blumert used Ron Paul and his large conservative following as their intended route to power, and doubtless pandered to some bigots using inflammatory language. However, as libertarians especially are supposed to know: power - and the seeking of power - corrupt.
Specifically: * There was anger that the coronation of Ron Paul as the 1988 presidential candidate was replaced by a desperate battle against the infamous Russell Means who was supported by radicals, angry pro-choicers, pot smokers, and even sexual libertines.
* There was the incisive nitpicking by Eric Garris and Justin Raimondo, then running the “Libertarian Republican Organizing Committee”described in my first blog entry on this topic.
* There was Carol Moore and her allies in Pro-Choice Libertarians threatening to organize a “strip in” if Ron Paul didn’t promise NOT to use the campaign to promote outlawing abortion. (Which he did eventually promise, a promise he largely kept.)
* There was the group of middle and lower middle class party leaders who were ever so fair and respectful to Means, Garris, Raimondo, Moore, et al.
* Right after the 1988 election, there was the embarrassment of having to admit (or try to cover up?) that Ron Paul’s chief aide Nadia Hayes, who also ran the cash-flush national Ballot Access drive, had been stealing money from Paul for years.
* There was the rage after the 1989 LP national convention when the Rothbard/Rockwell/Blumert candidate for chair of the party was trounced on the first ballot by just one vote, in large part because of distrust of the handling of the “Nadia Hayes” affair. (That that single decisive vote came from ME! when I panicked and switched my promised first ballot vote from a buddy to the winner, must have been galling.)
* There was Murray Rothbard's 1989 heated denunciation of "The Revenge of the Luftmenschen” (“air people” or impoverished ideologues) in an “American Libertarian” article. He bemoaned his faction’s failure to "transform the LP from a tiny social club for juvenile misfits and losers into a growing mass party of adults with regular jobs in the real world." He mostly blamed Nadia Hayes for the failure as Rothbard, Rockwell and friends angrily left the party.
* There was the declaration of a new variation of libertarianism published in 1990 by Lew Rockwell in "The Case for Paleolibertarianism." A furious Lew wrote that conservatives only could be attracted when “libertarianism is deloused” of those who believe in “freedom from cultural norms, religion, bourgeois morality, and social authority.” He assailed the “hatred of western culture,” he asserted that “pornographic photography, ‘free’-thinking, chaotic painting, atonal music, deconstructionist literature, Bauhaus architecture, and modernist films have nothing in common with the libertarian political agenda” and asserted “we obey, and we ought to obey, traditions of manners and taste.” And he denounced the Libertarian Party, “which as been their diabolic pulpit.” (Rockwell talks about those days here. And admitted in 2007 he no longer calls himself a paleolibertarian.)
Given the above political struggles as a context, attempts to pander to any well-heeled bigots on Paul's mailing lists by feeding them outrageous attacks on blacks and gays - not to mention pot smokers and free thinkers - makes more sense, not that it excuses it. It was macho sectarian power struggle at its worst.
Besides fading memories, why did so many libertarians, including Justin Raimondo, Eric Garris and me, forget these nasty battles over the years? Mostly it was due to the depredations of the state bringing libertarians together. There was the first Gulf War in 1991, which many thought Bush Senior had provoked; the massacre of 82 Branch Davidians at Waco in 1993 (I wrote a book about it); Ron Paul’s re-election to the U.S. House as its most libertarian member by far; Clinton’s various statist machinations, including his starving of the Iraqi people and his war against Serbia, which perhaps only libertarians noticed resulted in the exchange of nuclear threats between the U.S. and Russia. And since the September 11 there was the rise to the pinnacles of power of the neoconservatives and their wars on terror - not to mention Iraq, Afghanistan, and Americans' civil liberties.
Ron Paul’s success as a presidential candidate has been an increasing irritant to both neoliberals and neocons. It might have been the issue of secession that helped bring it all to a head. The blood pressure of statists left and right must have shot to the moon when Ron Paul said during a December 23, 2007 “Meet the Press” interview that he opposed Lincoln’s war against Southern Secessionists, that it would have been cheaper to buy the slaves than wage a war that killed 600,000 people, did massive economic damage and caused a century of bitterness that southern whites took out on blacks. On December 24th a New York Times blog published a charge about Paul’s alleged racist ties by an unreliable source, which they had to retract the very next day.
The January 8, 2008 New Republic expose made a big deal of Paul’s connection to Lew Rockwell’s Ludwig Von Mises Institute and its connections to the League of the South founders. The Southern Poverty Law Center has written several long screeds filled with 10 and 20 year old accusations against the League of the South, its founders and members that they rarely bother to document.
Of course, a few of the more believable accusations against the League of the South are worrisome. Not to mention current activities like the South Carolina group plan to protest Martin Luther King day activities because of the insults to their heritage. See Harold Thomas in his Ohio Republic blog’s balanced discussion of the issue - and some interesting replies from League of South members, opponents and me. A welcome relief from anonymous asses with blogs that merely smear people as racists, nazis, etc.
The New Republic attack on Ron Paul for “bigotry” was meant to destroy Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, the Ludwig Von Mises Institute and as many other libertarian organizations as they could bring down with them. So “TNR” itself was just engaging in the kind of macho sectarianism that got Rockwell and crew in trouble in the first place; "TNR" is quite willing to instigate their own “civil war.” Of course, they’ll never admit that another reason they hate Paul, Rockwell at al is because real libertarians are hold outs unwilling to join the bigoted anti-Arab and anti-Muslim war on terror which “TNR” supports. See my recent examples of this and some other mainstream bigoted statements.
Unfortunately, neither Paul nor Rockwell nor supporters reacted very well to the "TNR" attacks and libertarians’ concerns. Paul had hemmed and hawed for months before on January 8 issuing a statement of moral responsibility which did not name the actual editors. A few days later his chief of staff wrote an open letter to Lew Rockwell asking him to confess.
Rockwell denied to The New Republic that he wrote the statements and called the discussions "hysterical smears." Angry LewRockwell.Com writers’ and allies’ focused their anger on "Beltway libertarians" (Reason Magazine and its writers, Cato people, and others), for expressing legitimate concerns about some of the statements. This smacked of the same old sectarian power struggles.
Old nemesis, now good friend, Justin Raimondo in “Why the Beltway Libertarians are Trying to Smear Ron Paul” accuses the Reason crowd of making the same accusations about pandering that Raimondo himself made 20 years ago. But he also points out how some were too quick to condemn Paul for politically defendable statements. Still his obnoxious statements about their disliking Paul and middle and working class Americans because they are too hip, and obsessed by drugs and big tax breaks, sounds like the bad old days of paleo-libertarianism. LewRockwell.Com writer Thomas DiLorenzo actually attacked “‘cosmopolitan,’ libertine libertarians.”
Considering the Libertarian National Committee recently decided in a secret meeting to ask Ron Paul to be the LP presidential candidate in 2008, I had to wonder for a few minutes if Lew Rockwell and Burt Blumert are seeking their final revenge - taking back the Libertarian Party. If so, they might face some resistance - started by the North Carolina party. I certainly hope Paul et al have larger ambitions - like taking Paul and his delegates all the way to the Republican convention, nominating him and having Paul give a speech from the podium that will excoriate Republican warmongers, big spenders and civil liberties abusers.
Bigotry, hate, sectarianism and machismo are problems that crop up in too many secessionist movements worldwide. I certainly hope that culturally conservative and culturally liberal secessionists are not going to either condone bigotry and hate, or to be drawn into any such silly power struggles and sectarian battles.
My listing of bigotry in the previous did not even mention the most pervasive and acceptable form of bigotry in the United States, Europe and Israel today - bigotry against Arabs and Muslims, also known as anti-Arabism, Arabophobia or Islamophobia. Such bigotry is often also classified as racism since most Arabs and Muslims, including those who technically would be considered "caucasian," are browned skinned, African or Asian. The button above is just a symbol of the attitude towards and pervasiveness of this form of bigotry.
Of course, there are lots of sites that deal in and pander to such bigotry, like FrontPage.Com, FreeRepublic.Com, LittleGreenFootballs.Com, RushLimbaugh.Com, not to mention the more subtle brands promoted by the neoconservative and pro-Israel lobbies listed here.
Item: A Haaretz report (December 9, 2007) documents a civil rights poll showing that ‘Israel has reached new heights of racism…’, citing a 26% rise in anti-Arab incidents (Association for Civil Rights in Israel Annual Report for 2007). The report cites the doubling of the number of Jews expressing feelings of hatred to Arabs. Fifty percent of Israeli Jews oppose equal rights for their Arab compatriots. According to a Haifa University study, 74% of Jewish youth in Israel think that Arabs are ‘unclean’.
Item: The founding principal [of the Khalil Gibran school, New York City’s first school based on the theme of Arabic language and culture], Debbie Almontaser, was forced out in August after she defended the T-shirt slogan. When she was asked by The New York Post about the phrase “Intifada NYC,” which had been printed on T-shirts sold by a Brooklyn organization, she said, “The word basically means ‘shaking off.’” Of the T-shirts, she said, “I think it’s pretty much an opportunity for girls to express that they are part of New York City society” and “shaking off oppression.”
Item: A new book "Islamophobia: Making Muslims the Enemy" by Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg explores the “deeply ingrained anxiety” some Westerners, and especially Americans, experience when considering Islam and Muslim cultures.
Item: President Bush had ended his crusading trip through the Middle East to occupied Palestine (Israel), some Gulf States (Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE, and Saudi Arabia), and Egypt before returning home. The main goals of this crusade was to support and to legalize Israeli terror against the Palestinians, specifically against their democratically elected Hamas leadership in Gaza, to bully the Arab Gulf States to help oppress Palestinian resistance and to accept Israeli occupation of Palestine, to accept the un-needed billions of Dollars worth purchase of American weapons in order to buttress the falling American economy, and to help American, and Israeli, efforts to contain Iran and to limit its expanding power throughout the region. Secondary goals were to solicit Arab’s help to control Iraq and to increase oil production.
Item: A federal appeals court has reversed the bank and wire fraud conviction of an Anchorage Arab-American businessman in a case that developed after he reported his print shop vandalized and the words "We hate Arabs" spray-painted across an inside wall. A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday that District Court Judge James Singleton erred by not granting a request to move the trial of Nezar Khaled "Mike" Maad out of Anchorage after the extraordinary publicity that followed the vandalism, which occurred soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
While I was busy having fun writing about the macho power struggles that helped lead to a dozen or so bigoted statements in radical fringe 15-30 year old Ron Paul newsletters, per the below, modern day bigotry by more main stream types came pounding out of the television set and wafting over my computer. So I thought I’d devote an entry to them, just to put the Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, et al story in perspective.
Item: Bill Clinton attacked Barak Obama on his anti-Iraq war position saying "this whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen." Was he saying that a black man for president was a "fairy tale?" There were two days of media blathering about that ambiguous statement.
Item: Hillary Clinton makes a less ambiguous diss of Martin Luther King Jr. when she asserted his dream "began to be realized when President Lyndon B. Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964." She said “It took a president to get it done.” Like the public pressure from the black community would have just faded away if it wasn’t for their white male protector??
Item: Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson Arun Gandhi, a long time proponent of nonviolence who has visited Palestine, blogs a psychological analysis of the roots of Israeli violence in historic grievances and ends up making several overly broad statements about all Jews. He apologized with a much better statement making his points - and of course was still attacked as an anti-Semite. Gandhi wrote as a participant in a Newsweek/WashingtonPost religion discussion site edited by Sally Quinn and Jon Meacham. Despite their apology for the post, and repeated questions in the comments section, neither revealed if they in fact had approved the initial post, which would make them clear co-conspirators in the "infamy." They have not kicked Gandhi off the blog and he's posted on another topic.
Item: Golfweek magazine fired its editor for depicting a noose on the cover of the latest issue to illustrate a story about a sports caster who said on air that Tiger Wood’s opponents might have to "lynch him in a back alley" in order to win. Yes, the joke-cracking bigot in assumedly sophisticated media types does live on, does it not?
Item: Mike Huckabee makes an obnoxious comment that certainly could be interpreted as being directed specifically at blacks. In reference to the South Carolina’s past flying of the confederate flag, which angry blacks protested into oblivion, he said: "You don't want anyone from out of state comin' down and telling you what to do with your flag. In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag we'd tell them where to put the pole." Considering some New York cops sodomized a black arrestee Abner Louima with a stick a few years back, one has to assume the worst about what Huckabee was thinking! This is the same Mike Huckabee who shot off a loaded gun just over the heads of reporters and then joked about the birds he killed: "Well ... these three birds all said they would not vote for me on caucus day. You see what happened?" Thank heavens we aren’t likely to get this probably bigoted and homicidal maniac for president.
The moral of the story? Except for Huckabee, who stonewalled on the pole issue, these people all apologized for their stupid mistakes and moved on. Of course, the “noose editor” was fired. And major Jewish organizations raised such a fuss that Gandhi had to offer his resignation to the University of Rochester board of his Gandhi Institute of Nonviolence. We’ll see if he is punished for his foolishness after he meets with them next week. At least Ron Paul and Lew Rockwell don’t face such nasty sanctions for their long ago follies of, at the very least, oversight of the writings of their employees and interns - and at worst promoting bigotry for fun and profit. Just like Mike Huckabee?? Bleah...
In a day when any anonymous ass can start a blog and smear people as racists, nazis, pedophiles, democrats or republicans, it can be hard to take any exposes about alleged bigotry seriously. So it took reading The New Republic article “Angry White Man” for me to become convinced allegations against Ron Paul were not just another case of hysterical liberals, neo-liberals and neo-conservatives yelling bigotry over some minor politically incorrect mis-statement. The New Republic article also got into Paul’s views on secession and alleged ties to the League of the South network. (Later update: See my February 2008 Vermont Commons article on Secession and Sectarianism.) (Later Note: Reason magazine has a fairly balanced article with lots of good links on this topic here.)
Anyway, I discovered there was some real bigotry going on here. You know like all the smears, slurs, “Patriot Acts,” phony prosecutions and convictions, "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Acts," etc. directed at American Arabs and Muslims by neoconservatives, neo-liberals and congress and the White House. Not that you’ll probably read much about that in The New Republic or most of the blogs screaming for Ron Paul’s head. In fact a quick internet review of relevant terms shows some The New Republic contributors are neo-con and neo-liberals promoting just such bigotry.
You can read The New Republic’s listing of and links to 20 PDF’s of the extremely obnoxious pages from Ron Paul newsletters and fund raisers in the 1980s and 1990s. I agree the ten examples provided about blacks and gays range from macho flash, to extreme insensitivity to outright bigotry.
Ron Paul should apologize for writing these or, as he claims, letting such writings go out under his name. (I guess in Paul's case "taking moral responsibility" is about the same thing.) Those who have been accused of approving or really writing them (most prominently Lew Rockwell and Jeffrey Tucker - per The Economist) also should fess up - or get any other people who wrote them to fess up.
Confession is good for the soul. And it convinces people that you still do not hold or express such obnoxious views, that they are not central to your political philosophy and that you are not a raving lunatic. If they don’t confess and apologize, they will lose a lot of respect and credibility within the libertarian movement and the broader world. And they hurt all other libertarians via guilt by association.
I think. Actually it is surprising to me that in the last few days I’ve seen little real media concern about this issue - perhaps for the reason explained in the first sentence on this article. See the Wolf Blitzer CNN interview with Ron Paul on the newsletters.
While I didn’t look at the other ten PDFs as carefully, I get the impression that they are at worst macho flash political rants safely within libertarian, conservative and even left wing political non-bigoted political discourse. One link to a brief article about the Israel Lobby contains no slurs or any language more extreme than you’ll see in a lot criticism of the state of Israel now a days. In fact looking through my dozen copies of circa 1987-88 Ron Paul Political Reports, I see a relatively low key coverage of the topic and a lot of information that professors Walt and Mearsheimer could have used in their best seller The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, a big favorite among Paul supporters. So unless I missed something, in these ten examples there probably is nothing anyone has to apologize for substance, or perhaps even style wise
Another charge was wallowing in “conspiracy theories.” Talk about calling the kettle black! Isn’t it amazing the conspiracies government officials (and the neo-con/neo-liberal supporters’) fear the people are planning against them? Another reason they need their "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act."
In this blog post I wrote a bit about my experience with Dr. Ron Paul and friends during the 1987 Libertarian party nominating process for president and the 1988 campaign. (Paul ran against Russell Means, in 1987 photo with me at left.) My main memory was the fight over abortion. However, this latest revelation forced me to dig out a couple boxes from the back of a storage closet and remember and relive some rather heated days and debates of 20 years ago.
I found some other documents that reinforce the idea that whoever is responsible for offensive entries should make very public mea culpas. I also found my own writings alleging that Paul was pandering to right wingers for financial and political support. Specifically: . ** There were a couple of long listings of all the non-libertarian bills Ron Paul had voted for during his time as a Republican congressman. Justin Raimondo and Eric Garris, now of AntiWar.Com, then were two very radical and counterculture guys organizing as the “Libertarian Republican Organizing Committee” (or LROC). They put out a four page piece criticizing Paul’s statist votes in congress on social security, the CIA, disarmament, NASA, welfare for veterans, and state assaults on womens and gay rights. They pointed out Paul had been on the board of “Christian Voice,” an “anti-civil liberties lobbing and campaign-fundraising organization,” a couple of whose newsletters I still have. . ** There was the article in the March 1987 "The Ron Paul Investment Letter," for which Lew Rockwell was listed as a contributing editor, where Ron Paul announced he was running for president. In it someone wrote a hysterical article alleging AIDS can be transmitted through sweat, saliva and tears; mentioning “children shedding the viruses from every orifice”; and writing about the government forcing schools to take AIDS students or businesses to employ AIDS victims which in context sounded more anti-victim than anti-government. This entry was roundly criticized by Garris and Raimondo in a two sided leaflet reprinting the original article and including their piece comparing Ron Paul to Lyndon LaRouche. It attacked Paul’s “extremist rhetoric” and failure to bring up libertarian concerns about government intervention. However, in January 1988, after Ron Paul won the nomination, he held a press conference where he proved he could speak about libertarian solutions to the AIDS problem without sounding like a paranoid fool. . ** There were the John Birch Society newsletters showing Paul as a contributing editor. In “Ron Paul and the John Birch Society” eight page expose Garris and Raimondo decried Paul’s being listed on the masthead of the Bircher’s “The New American” as a contributing editor; his obsession with the Trilateral Commission and the Council of Foreign Relations; his saying that South African apartheid wasn’t as bad as communist treatment of dissidents (which sounds like apologies for Israeli apartheid today, including by contributors to The New Republic). They declared “Rothbard & Company have decided to write off the vast majority of the American people, and instead focus on the fringe....the right wing fever swamp.” (“Mr. Libertarian” Murray Rothbard was returning to his old right roots by supporting Paul, Rockwell, etc.) ** There was a bunch of criticism of the state of Israel but even Jewish libertarians did not complain that Paul was anti-Semitic rather than anti-state terrorism. My main complaint was that Ron Paul refused to criticize Israel as harshly in public as he did in his newsletter, suggesting he was pandering to whatever percentage of his readership was anti-Semitic. Of course, currently he’s pandering to Israel supporters by claiming ending U.S. aid to Israel would be good for Israel, inferring it would let the nation fight all the wars and steal all the land it wants. (Name one other congressperson who doesn’t pander to Israel supporters in one way or another.) This belies his long time criticisms of Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians. (Of course, savvy Americans know that ending aid and alliances with Israel means when it wars with its longtime enemy Russia and Russia's Arab allies, Israel can get in a nuclear war without the U.S. ending up a Russian nuclear target.) ** In March of 1988, just when we thought Ron Paul had gotten the right wing nuttiness out of his system, his campaign issued a press release denouncing “Jesse ‘Drug War’ Jackson” that included too many seemingly gratuitous attacks on Jackson’s alleged misuse of welfare money and socialist ideas. There was no real proof of the allegation Jackson supported tougher drug laws that hurt blacks. There was another brouhaha, doubtless followed by Ron Paul promises to Libertarian Party leaders to exercise more control of his staff writers. That was the last of the non-abortion related controversies during the campaign of which I found evidence in my files.
However, the battle in the Libertarian Party over attracting more “middle class Americans” (in truth right wing cultural conservatives) versus letting us hippy pot smokers with a variety of sexual peculiarities rule the Libertarian Party was just beginning. At the time the only bigotry I heard was against low income or intermittently employed libertarian activists who smoked pot or weren’t sexually straight as an arrow. How did Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, et al manage to make so many of us - including Garris and Raimondo - forget about past incidents and indiscretions? (And even ignore rumors about new indignities in his newsletters?) I’ll leave that story for another blog entry.
I've written here before about the "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act" which overwhelmingly passed in the House. The good news is there are a lot more mainstream news articles about it. (News Google here.) The bad news is predictions it will pass the US Senate. Even Senator Barak Hussein Obama is undecided - even though his many Muslim relatives would be on the top of the hit list of the Commission created to investigate groups. Secessionists (see Middlebury Institute and my site Secession.net) doubtless would be next on the list. And of course all those Ron Paul supporters are high on the list of suspicious parties, up there with the black bloc brats who want to smash windows and destroy capitalism. Below is an excellent video about the act, speculating on just how the Commission will define the word force and including some chilling commentary by on-air fascists Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck, who is hardly the best advertisement for either Alcoholics Anonymous or Mormonism!
There were at least 50 news article about the bottoming out of Sunspot Cycle #23 and the beginning of Sunspot Cycle #24. See: New sunspot marks start of latest solar cycle - Sunspot Activity Expected To Disrupt GPS, Cell Phones, Power Grid - Mega-sunspots threaten communications and, of course, Sunspot heralds end of the world, an amused commentary on "a rather hysterical press release from the US warns us that a sunspot heralds a new solar cycle that could 'bring down power grids, disrupt critical threaten astronauts with harmful radiation ... knock out commercial communications satellites and swamp Global Positioning System signals'. Run for the hills! . At the bottom of a cycle there may be only a few sunspots and solar flare in a year. At the top there can be hundreds. The top of the cycle is predicted for sometime in 2011-2012. According to the New Scientist, the debate is over whether it will be a big cycle with lots of spots that peaks earlier or a smaller one that peaks later. They know it's a new cycle because the spots come at the top of the sun, while the old cycle spots linger around the middle of the sun. See more facts about sunspots here. . Of course the BIG FACT that most scientists still refuse to admit is that these sunspots affect human behavior, increasing the tendency to riot, rebel and overthrow - or secede from - governments. For sunspots give off solar flares that increase negative ionization on earth--and increased negative ionization during sunspot maximum periods increases human exciteablity and activity. . As I write in my article "Sunspot Cycles and Activist Strategy": Activists since the 1960s like myself have lived through several sunspot heights - the 1968-71, 1979-82, 1989-1992, 2000-2003 periods. We can think back at our own experiences of several years of frenzied activity, with big meetings and big protests, when the least indignity might lead to riots, rebellions, revolutions, civil wars. And we can remember other periods of years when once vital organizations declined or died, meetings and protests were fewer and smaller, and lethargic peoples seem willing to endure repression. Then, just when the few remaining activists were in deep despair - a magical resurgence of activity! Check it out.
I brought in the east coast New Year on the couch, under the solstice lights, hugging a big black dog and watching the new year come in in New York City, with the big green ecological ball falling. The last song playing in the background over loud speakers in Times Square? John Lennon's "Imagine" - coincidentally (?) a theme of this blog, per my header introduction. I had to jump around the channels to find one that wasn't drowning it out with other music or blabbly telecasters. Strangely, I found it on the FoxNews channel! Of all the songs on the planet to play in the financial capital of the (declining) Empire, Why Imagine? Obviously a rebellious heart still beats in someone at the Times Square Alliance which sponsors the event - that they boast is seen around the world. . Just in case you forget the words: . Imagine there's no heaven It's easy if you try No hell below us Above us only sky Imagine all the people Living for today... . Imagine there's no countries It isn't hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religion too Imagine all the people Living life in peace... . You may say I'm a dreamer But I'm not the only one I hope someday you'll join us And the world will be as one . Imagine no possessions I wonder if you can No need for greed or hunger A brotherhood of man Imagine all the people Sharing all the world... . You may say I'm a dreamer But I'm not the only one I hope someday you'll join us And the world will live as one
Some Vermont Democratic Party male operative who was pissed off that I did not agree 100% with his assertions and theories about whatever decided to ridicule me by putting up this absurd photo on his blog to show that he's the man. It was entitled "Hi Carol!" (I saved the whole page to my hard drive before he deleted it, probably after complaints from outraged Hillary Clinton supporters.)
