Senfronia Thompson is a member of the Texas legislature. She tells the truth about the religious right wing in America. These are her remarks about the amendment to the Texas constitution to ban gay marriage. If things keep going the way they are in America Texas is a peek at an American future. Be very afraid.
"I have been a member of this august body for three decades, and today is one of the all-time low points. We are going in the wrong direction, in the direction of hate and fear and discrimination. Members, we all know what this is about; this is the politics of divisiveness at its worst, a wedge issue that is meant to divide.
"Members, this is a distraction from the real things we need to be working on. At the end of this session, this Legislature, this leadership will not be able to deliver the people of Texas fundamental and fair answers to the pressing issues of our day.
"Let's look at what this amendment does not do: It does not give one Texas citizen meaningful tax relief. It does not reform or fully fund our education system. It does not restore one child to CHIP [Children's Health Insurance Program] who was cut from health insurance last session. It does not put one dime into raising Texas' Third World access to health care. It does not do one thing to care for or protect one elderly person or one child in this state. In fact, it does not even do anything to protect one marriage.
"Members, this bill is about hate and fear and discrimination... When I was a small girl, white folks used to talk about 'protecting the institution of marriage' as well. What they meant was if people of my color tried to marry people of Mr. Chisum's color, you'd often find the people of my color hanging from a tree... Fifty years ago, white folks thought interracial marriages were 'a threat to the institution of marriage.'
"Members, I'm a Christian and a proud Christian. I read the good book and do my best to live by it. I have never read the verse where it says, 'Gay people can't marry.' I have never read the verse where it says, 'Thou shalt discriminate against those not like me.' I have never read the verse where it says, 'Let's base our public policy on hate and fear and discrimination.' Christianity to me is love and hope and faith and forgiveness -- not hate and discrimination.
"I have served in this body a lot of years, and I have seen a lot of promises broken... So... now that blacks and women have equal rights, you turn your hatred to homosexuals, and you still use your misguided reading of the Bible to justify your hatred. You want to pass this ridiculous amendment so you can go home and brag -- brag about what? Declare that you saved the people of Texas from what?
"Persons of the same sex cannot get married in this state now. Texas law does not now recognize same-sex marriages, civil unions, religious unions, domestic partnerships, contractual arrangements or Christian blessings entered into in this state -- or anywhere else on this planet Earth.
"If you want to make your hateful political statements then that is one thing -- but the Chisum amendment does real harm. It repeals the contracts that many single people have paid thousands of dollars to purchase to obtain medical powers of attorney, powers of attorney, hospital visitation, joint ownership and support agreements. You have lost your way. This is obscene...
"I thought we would be debating economic development, property tax relief, protecting seniors' pensions and stem cell research to save lives of Texans who are waiting for a more abundant life. Instead we are wasting this body's time with this political stunt that is nothing more than constitutionalizing discrimination. The prejudices exhibited by members of this body disgust me.
"Last week, Republicans used a political wedge issue to pull kids -- sweet little vulnerable kids -- out of the homes of loving parents and put them back in a state orphanage just because those parents are gay. That's disgusting.
"I have listened to the arguments. I have listened to all of the crap... I want you to know that this amendment [is] blowing smoke to fuel the hell-fire flames of bigotry."
Remember How Bush said He Wanted to Restore Honor to the Oval Office
Well how do you think Shrub is doing in the Honor deparment now? Here's more on how the current collection of idiots in the White House are destroying the moral character of our country.
I am talking about the war-on-terrorism P.O.W. camp at Guantánamo Bay. Just shut it down and then plow it under. It has become worse than an embarrassment. I am convinced that more Americans are dying and will die if we keep the Gitmo prison open than if we shut it down. So, please, Mr. President, just shut it down.
If you want to appreciate how corrosive Guantánamo has become for America's standing abroad, don't read the Arab press. Don't read the Pakistani press. Don't read the Afghan press. Hop over here to London or go online and just read the British press! See what our closest allies are saying about Gitmo. And when you get done with that, read the Australian press and the Canadian press and the German press.
It is all a variation on the theme of a May 8 article in The Observer of London that begins, "An American soldier has revealed shocking new details of abuse and sexual torture of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay in the first high-profile whistle-blowing account to emerge from inside the top-secret base." Google the words "Guantánamo Bay and Australia" and what comes up is an Australian ABC radio report that begins: "New claims have emerged that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay are being tortured by their American captors, and the claims say that Australians David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib are among the victims."
Just another day of the world talking about Guantánamo Bay.
Why care? It's not because I am queasy about the war on terrorism. It is because I want to win the war on terrorism. And it is now obvious from reports in my own paper and others that the abuse at Guantánamo and within the whole U.S. military prison system dealing with terrorism is out of control. Tell me, how is it that over 100 detainees have died in U.S. custody so far? Heart attacks? This is not just deeply immoral, it is strategically dangerous.
I can explain it best by analogy. For several years now I have argued that Israel needed to get out of the West Bank and Gaza, and behind a wall, as fast as possible. Not because the Palestinians are right and Israel wrong. It's because Israel today is surrounded by three large trends. The first is a huge population explosion happening all across the Arab world. The second is an explosion of the worst interpersonal violence between Israelis and Palestinians in the history of the conflict, which has only recently been defused by a cease-fire. And the third is an explosion of Arabic language multimedia outlets - from the Internet to Al Jazeera.
What was happening around Israel at the height of the intifada was that the Arab multimedia explosion was taking the images of that intifada explosion and feeding them to the Arab population explosion, melding in the minds of a new generation of Arabs and Muslims that their enemies were J.I.A. - "Jews, Israel and America." That is an enormously toxic trend, and I hope Israel's withdrawal from Gaza will help deprive it of oxygen.
I believe the stories emerging from Guantánamo are having a similar toxic effect on us - inflaming sentiments against the U.S. all over the world and providing recruitment energy on the Internet for those who would do us ill.
Husain Haqqani, a thoughtful Pakistani scholar now teaching at Boston University, remarked to me: "When people like myself say American values must be emulated and America is a bastion of freedom, we get Guantánamo Bay thrown in our faces. When we talk about the America of Jefferson and Hamilton, people back home say to us: 'That is not the America we are dealing with. We are dealing with the America of imprisonment without trial.' "
Guantánamo Bay is becoming the anti-Statue of Liberty. If we have a case to be made against any of the 500 or so inmates still in Guantánamo, then it is high time we put them on trial, convict as many possible (which will not be easy because of bungled interrogations) and then simply let the rest go home or to a third country. Sure, a few may come back to haunt us. But at least they won't be able to take advantage of Guantánamo as an engine of recruitment to enlist thousands more. I would rather have a few more bad guys roaming the world than a whole new generation.
"This is not about being for or against the war," said Michael Posner, the executive director of Human Rights First, which is closely following this issue. "It is about doing it right. If we are going to transform the Middle East, we have to be law-abiding and uphold the values we want them to embrace - otherwise it is not going to work."
Once again, Molly Ivins is right on the money. Her question at the end of her article should be the question every one of us confronts our Senators, Representatives, and President with. "What are you going to do about this?"
To my fellow citizens: What are you going to do about this?
As Riley used to say on an ancient television sitcom, "This is a revoltin' development." There seems to be a bit of a campaign on the right to blame Newsweek for the anti-American riots in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other Islamic countries.
Uh, people, I hate to tell you this, but the story about Americans abusing the Koran in order to enrage prisoners has been out there for quite some time. The first mention I found of it is March 17, 2004, when the Independent of London interviewed the first British citizen released from Guantanamo Bay. The prisoner said he had been physically beaten but did not consider that as bad as the psychological torture, which he described extensively. Jamal al-Harith, a computer programmer from Manchester, said 70 percent of the inmates had gone on a hunger strike after a guard kicked a copy of the Koran. The strike was ended by force-feeding.
Then came the report, widely covered in American media last December, by the International Red Cross concerning torture at Gitmo. I wrote at the time: "In the name of Jesus Christ Almighty, why are people representing our government, paid by us, writing filth on the Korans of helpless prisoners? Is this American? Is this Christian? What are our moral values? Where are the clergymen on this? Speak up, speak out."
The reports kept coming: Dec. 30, 2004, "Released Moroccan Guantanamo Detainee Tells Islamist Paper of His Ordeal," reported the Financial Times. "They watched you each time you went to the toilet; the American soldiers used to tear up copies of Koran and throw them in the toilet. ... " said the released prisoner.
On Jan. 9, 2005, Andrew Sullivan, writing in The Sunday Times of London, said: "We now know a great deal about what has gone on in U.S. detention facilities under the Bush administration. Several government and Red Cross reports detail the way many detainees have been treated. We know for certain that the United States has tortured five inmates to death. We know that 23 others have died in U.S. custody under suspicious circumstances. We know that torture has been practiced by almost every branch of the U.S. military in sites all over the world -- from Abu Ghraib to Tikrit, Mosul, Basra, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.
"We know that no incidents of abuse have been reported in regular internment facilities and that hundreds have occurred in prisons geared to getting intelligence. We know that thousands of men, women and children were grabbed almost at random from their homes in Baghdad, taken to Saddam's former torture palace and subjected to abuse, murder, beatings, semi-crucifixions and rape.
"All of this is detailed in the official reports. What has been perpetrated in secret prisons to 'ghost detainees' hidden from Red Cross inspection, we do not know. We may never know.
"This is America? While White House lawyers were arguing about what separates torture from legitimate 'coercive interrogation techniques,' the following was taking place: Prisoners were hanged for hours or days from bars or doors in semi-crucifixions; they were repeatedly beaten unconscious, woken and then beaten again for days on end; they were sodomized; they were urinated on, kicked in the head, had their ribs broken, and were subjected to electric shocks.
"Some Muslims had pork or alcohol forced down their throats; they had tape placed over their mouths for reciting the Koran; many Muslims were forced to be naked in front of each other, members of the opposite sex and sometimes their own families. It was routine for the abuses to be photographed in order to threaten the showing of the humiliating footage to family members."
The New York Times reported on May 1 on the same investigation Newsweek was writing about and interviewed a released Kuwaiti, who spoke of three major hunger strikes, one of them touched off by "guards' handling copies of the Koran, which had been tossed into a pile and stomped on. A senior officer delivered an apology over the camp's loudspeaker system, pledging that such abuses would stop. Interpreters, standing outside each prison block, translated the officer's apology. A former interrogator at Guantanamo, in an interview with the Times, confirmed the accounts of the hunger strikes, including the public expression of regret over the treatment of the Korans."
So where does all this leave us? With a story that is not only true, but previously reported numerous times. So let's drop the "Lynch Newsweek" bull. Seventeen people have died in these riots. They didn't die because of anything Newsweek did -- the riots were caused by what our government has done.
Get your minds around it. Our country is guilty of torture. To quote myself once more: "What are you going to do about this? It's your country, your money, your government. You own this country, you run it, you are the board of directors. They are doing this in your name. The people we elected to public office do what you want them to. Perhaps you should get in touch with them."
Molly Ivins is a best-selling author and columnist who writes about politics, Texas and other bizarre happenings.
What do you think of when someone mentions the word “Kansas”? Maybe what leaps to your mind is that it is a farming state that is flat as a pancake, or if you’ve been following current events, the recent kangaroo court/monkey trial, or perhaps it is the drab counterpart to marvelous Oz. It isn’t exactly first on the list of glamourous places. I admit that I tend to read different books than most people, so I have a somewhat skewed perspective on Kansas: the first thing I think of is a magic word.
Niobrara.
Late in the 19th century, there was a stampede to the American West to search for fossils of those spectacular beasts, the dinosaurs. Entrepreneurs everywhere were in on it—P.T. Barnum bought up old bones for his shows—and even scientists got caught up in the bone fever. Edward Drinker Cope of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences and Othniel Charles Marsh of Yale were famous rivals in the bone wars, sending teams of men to Wyoming and Utah and Colorado and other Rocky Mountain states to collect the bones of the extinct terrestrial behemoths of the Mesozoic. Kansas was also a target, most famously by the Sternberg family, but it had a different reputation: Kansas is the place to go to find sea monsters.
There is a geological formation in Kansas called the Niobrara Chalk. Actually, it’s not just in Kansas; it extends all the way up into Canada, but the Niobrara has been exposed by erosion over much of northwestern Kansas, making it easy to dig into. And this is where the Sternbergs and Cope and Marsh went hunting for sea monsters.
Chalk is interesting stuff. It’s made of a mineral calcium carbonate, that is formed into the shells of microscopic, one-celled golden brown algae. These Chrysophyceae are photosynthesizing organisms that float in large numbers at the surface of the sea, gather sunlight for energy and scavenging calcium dissolved in the water to build their protective shells. They occasionally shed the the minute calcium plates, and when the plants die, their skeletons drift slowly downward. The seas have a slow, soft, invisible rain of tiny flecks of calcium carbonate that very, very slowly builds up at the bottom.
The Niobrara Chalk formation is 600 feet thick.
It was building up for a long, long time, tens of millions of years. The exposed chalks of northwestern Kansas are also old, dating to between 87 and 82 million years ago, near the end of the Mesozoic era and deep in the Late Cretaceous (not up on your geological time scale? Here’s a simple chart of geological eras.)
The inescapable conclusion is that Kansas was under water during the age of the dinosaurs. During the Mesozoic, the world was warm and the oceans were at a high level, and the entire central part of North America was a great, shallow, inland sea, a warm soup rich in microorganisms that were busily living and dying and slowly accumulating into deep dense chalk beds on the bottom. The world looked a bit like this:
It wasn’t just coccolithophores living there, though. Shallow seas are fertile places for life, and there were vast shoals of fish and nautiloids, dense layers of bottom-dwelling molluscs and echinoderms, and amazing predators. Here’s a bulldog-jawed, snaggle-toothed Xiphactinus—over 20 feet long and 800 pounds of ferocious muscle.
Xiphactinus
There were also snaky-necked plesiosaurids feasting on the smaller fish. These are genuinely weird animals—we have nothing comparable to them today—yet they were diverse and successful and found in numbers in the Niobrara Chalk.
The predatory king of the Niobraran Sea was this fellow, Tylosaurus, a mosasaurid that reached lengths of up to 50 feet. It’s a giant, air-breathing reptile, and is probably most comparable to a killer whale.
I’ve only briefly visited modern Kansas, but the Kansas of my imagination is a fiercely exotic ocean, a warm and savage sea richer than any place still extant. Try mentioning the magic word “Niobrara” to a paleontologist, or any enthusiast familiar with Mesozoic reptiles…their eyes will light up as it conjures visions of the world of 85 million years ago, a world well documented in the incredible fossil beds of Kansas. It’s a powerful, evocative word that links us to a wealth of evidence and a complex, fascinating history.
Reading about the ridiculous anti-evolution trial going on there was rather depressing. It isn’t just that the creationist arguments are so poor, but that they are making them in Kansas, where beneath their very feet are the relics of an ancient world that show them to be wrong. Don’t schoolchildren there take pride in the paleontological wealth of their home? Do the people bury their imaginations and avoid thinking about the history that surrounds them?
During the course of the hearings, the lawyer on the side of science, Pedro Irigonegaray, asked several of the witnesses for Intelligent Design creationism what they thought the age of the earth was. It’s a simple, straightforward question with a simple answer: about 4.5 billion years. The Intelligent Design creationists found it difficult. Some answers were ludicrous, such as Daniel Ely’s and John Sanford’s assertion that the earth was between 10 and 100 thousand years old. Others were evasive: Stephen Meyer and Angus Menuge refused to answer. Some of these “qualified witnesses” were embarrassingly ignorant: William Harris could only say, “I don’t know. I think it’s probably really old.”. All of this is in line with the intellectually flaccid position of the godfather of the Intelligent Design movement, Phillip Johnson, who has bravely announced that “I have consistently said that I take no position on the age of the earth”.
Mention “Niobrara” to these people and their eyes will not light up. At best you might get dull-eyed incomprehension, and more likely you will see shifty-eyed evasion. Yet these are the characters who want to dictate the scientific content of our children’s educations. I swear, if there were any truth to their metaphysical codswallop, the shades of Cope and Marsh and the Sternbergs would have manifested in that courtroom to denounce them, and the floor would have cracked open beneath their feet to allow a spectral tylosaur to rise up and gulp them down.
There are greater truths in the stones of Niobrara than in the dissembling and ill-educated brains of the fellows of the Discovery Institute. We need to teach the evidence, not this phony, ginned-up controversy from a gang of poseurs and theocrats.
Progressives who think warnings about "theocracy" are an exaggeration should take a closer look at "Justice Sunday: Filibustering People of Faith," the Christian Right telethon headlined by Senate Majority Leader William Frist. Envision the carefully designed image that the far-right Family Research Council, the main organizer of the April 24 event, beamed into conservative churches across the country: a political rally from a large, comfortable mega-church in Louisville, with a middle-class audience listening with rapt attention to political operatives who self-identify as religious leaders-and at the bottom of the screen, streaming video with the photos, names and phone numbers of targeted U.S. senators. The visual message was clear: the church is dominant over the state and senators should toe the line on eliminating the filibuster and confirming Bush judges or pay the price.
There is a right way and a wrong way to engage religious voices in the public square. I believe "Justice Sunday" reflects the latter and highlights several disturbing trends. I agree with the Rev. Dr. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, president of the Chicago Theological Seminary, who called "Justice Sunday" sacrilegious and said, "The radical religious right turned a sanctuary into a political platform." As a Baptist minister for more than 40 years with a profound respect for religious freedom and pluralism, I fear it will get worse. In fact, I think we are teetering on the brink of theocracy and the Christian Right could conceivably use the battle over the judiciary and weakening support for reproductive rights to push us over the edge. Unfortunately, although Frist has been vigorously, and appropriately, criticized for his poor judgment and political opportunism in taking part in the telethon, the greater problem of sectarian religious manipulation of public policy debates has been minimized. President George W. Bush brushed off a question about the role of faith in politics at his April 28th press conference with the innocuous response that "people in political office should not say to somebody you're not equally American if you don't agree with my view of religion." Rather than give a high school civics lesson, he should have had the courage to disavow the religious arrogance and extremism of "Justice Sunday."
The Christian Right's posture in the showdown over the "nuclear option" has been a stark lesson in how religious language and imagery are inappropriately seeping into government and politics. First, of course, religion is defined as a particular religion and then defined further as a particular brand of that religion so as to exclude all other views and versions as irreligious, immoral, or wrong. Moreover, in this worldview, Christianity and Country are inseparable. One of the "Justice Sunday" speakers, Dr. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, put it in terms as chilling to religious liberty and diversity as any I've ever heard. Like other fundamentalists, Mohler believes there is only one correct interpretation of the Bible-his-and he equated the inerrancy of his interpretation of the Bible with the inerrancy of the Constitution, based on his biblical beliefs. In bringing the Bible and the Constitution together, fundamentalists like Mohler are moving toward mainstreaming their biblically based interpretation of the Constitution. Judges would be held to the standard of biblical teachings, as interpreted by fundamentalists. I don't doubt the sincerity of Mohler and other fundamentalist ministers who share this view that the Bible is literally true and they alone know what it means, but they are on dangerous ground when they then suggest that they alone also know what the Constitution means-and that anyone who thinks differently is anti-Christian. Christians have strong differences of opinion on the meaning of scriptures and most of us don't want to see a particular brand of Christianity held up as the only real Christianity. We certainly don't want a particular brand of Christianity enacted as the law of the land.
The theocracy envisioned by the Christian Right centers around their interpretation of "family" and "values," with the U.S. Supreme Court portrayed as the font of the anti-religious moral decay that is destroying America. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, another "Justice Sunday" speaker, railed against the Supreme Court as "arrogant and imperious and determined to redesign the culture according to their own biases and values," holding up the 1973 Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision for special scorn. Roe v. Wade, abortion rights, and women's rights generally are among the favored code words for the America that the Christian Right loves to attack-an America of women and families where equality is possible. Reproductive justice is an issue on which they hope to divide and conquer progressives.
In my view, the intensifying battle over the courts has brought progressives face-to-face with the need to take a firm stand on the morality of reproductive rights. Not only must we overcome the polarization generated by the Christian Right, we also must find a way to come together in compassionate concern for women and families. Speaking as a minister, I believe that the realities of women's lives must be included in any vision of a moral society that honors individual dignity and worth. I believe that women, and men, cannot live in dignity and equality if they cannot render for themselves their most intimate family decisions. We must affirm that women's reproductive health and decisions about bearing children and forming a family are an integral part of a just society, related to and interdependent with health, legal, economic, racial, environmental, and peace commitments. We must acknowledge that poverty, physical and sexual violence, lack of education, poor health care, lack of affordable quality child care, and other economic and social injustices affect women's options and decisions about childbearing. Whether we are pro-choice or not on the issue of abortion, we must not ignore or further marginalize an aspect of life that is important to both women and men and essential to women's full participation in society. If we do so, we will cause irreparable harm to our own principles of justice and equality.
"Justice Sunday" gave progressives an opportunity to watch the Christian Right at work, stoking fears about change and inciting religious divisiveness. We have also seen, in the past few weeks, other religious and social justice leaders speak out about this divisiveness, including leaders of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the National Council of Churches USA, Presbyterian Church (USA), African Methodist Episcopal Church, Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, and The Interfaith Alliance. Millions of mainstream, moderate people of faith, and people who profess no faith, are concerned about more than the filibuster and confirming a handful of judges-they are concerned about the direction of their country and the future of a vibrant, inclusive democracy. Decades of progress for minorities, women, religious freedom, the environment, workers' rights, and other issues and groups that had been relatively powerless cannot be lost. Let "Justice Sunday" be a wake-up call; unless we are unified on all of these issues, we are vulnerable.
Reverend Veazey, a minister in the National Baptist Convention USA, has been president of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice since 1997. Founder of the Coalition's Black Church Initiative, he is a leader in progressive social justice causes.
As I read this great analysis by Alterman, I can't stop myself from making comparisons to a mid 20th Century German political party that systematically attacked, and then took over or created it's own media empire. I'm afraid in America today it's unacceptable to mention the other N word with comparisons to our Republican Party. While we won't exactly re-create the Germany of the late 20's through the mid 40's of last century, we may get taken on a similar society destroying ride.
In The Nation this week, I wrote a long cover story on what I call "The Bush Attack on the Press." You can read ithere. Missing from the story, however, is the historical background of the 40-year conservative offensive to undermine the media that the Bush administration has now come to lead. What follows is that history, and I hope it helps to explain why all of the Bush tactics—the lies, the secrecy and the fake news—are all part and parcel of the same ideological offensive designed to undermine democratic accountability.
Though he helped save the world from the Nazis and was twice elected president of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower was never more enthusiastically applauded than the night—long after he retired from public life—when he told an adoring crowd of Goldwater conservatives at the 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco to beware "sensation-seeking columnists and commentators" who sought to undermine their party and their country.
San Francisco marked not merely the successful culmination of right-wing hopes to dominate the Republican Party but also just the beginning of their hopes to win the country as well. Members of the mainstream media in attendance, however, found these newly politicized minions alternately frightening—Teddy White likened them to "shock troops" and John Chancellor declared himself to be "somewhere in custody" when caught inside one of their noisy demonstrations—and ridiculous. Following Goldwater's landslide defeat, The New York Times' James Reston wrote that Goldwater's conservatism "has wrecked his party for a long time to come." The Los Angeles Times interpreted the election outcome to mean that if Republicans continued to hew to the conservative line, "they will remain a minority party indefinitely." Political scientists Nelson Polsby and Aaron Wildavsky speculated that if the Republicans nominated a conservative again he would lose so badly "we can expect an end to a competitive two-party system." Unbeknownst to just about everyone at the time, however, was the fact that the old-fashioned Eastern Establishment Republicans so favored by both academics and media mavens were on their way to extinction. A new species of Republican had been born, and soon, it would rule the earth.
Indeed, this reflected a consistent tendency both in the elite media and among liberal intellectuals of the moment to look with disdain upon right-wing advocates of unfettered laissez-faire; John Kenneth Galbraith thought the right wing of the GOP "the stupid party." In The End of Ideology, Daniel Bell, like Lionel Trilling and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. before him, focused exclusively on the consequences of left-wing ideas. Liberals were therefore caught entirely unready for the right-wing resurgence of the late '70s and beyond.
A key prophet of the new order was multimillionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. Having spent most of his then-young life getting drunk and looking for some purpose for his inheritance, Scaife found it in ferrying Barry Goldwater around the country in his private plane for campaign events. The 1964 campaign convinced Scaife that no genuinely conservative candidate could succeed in a nationwide election without first overcoming the advantage that liberalism appeared to have both in the media and in the war of political ideas that provided its ideological foundation. So Scaife began funding his own media. Literally hundreds of right-wing think tanks, pressure groups, alternative media outlets, and eventually, media empires owe their existence to this insight of Scaife's and to the billions that would eventually pour into their coffers as a result.
As the '60s grew more adversarial on both the left and the right, much of the media's reporting on Vietnam and civil rights made it appear they were allying themselves with the counter-culture. The right's view grew angrier and more paranoid. President Nixon complained privately to Billy Graham of "a terrible liberal Jewish clique" that "totally dominates the media" and "erodes our confidence, our strength." Vice President Agnew gave public voice to these sentiments, in words penned by a then-White House speechwriter, denouncing both the "nattering nabobs of negativism" and the "effete corps of impudent snobs" who sought to sink the nation's morale.
Agnew did not merely kvetch about the media, however; he offered a reasoned critique that might not sound so out of place in a Noam Chomsky/Edward Herrman collection. "Is it not fair or relevant to question its concentration in the hands of a tiny and closed minority of privileged men, elected by no one and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by government?" Meanwhile, a similar, complementary critique was formulating inside the nascent Neoconservative movement, in which the media stood accused of providing shock troops for a peaceful "New Class" revolution, as Irving Kristol put it, "to propel the nation from that modified version of capitalism we call 'the welfare state' toward an economic system so stringently regulated in detail as to fulfill many of the anticapitalist aspirations of the left."
The Watergate scandal, through which these forces had engineered what Norman Podhoretz termed a "coup d'etat," helped convince big business to pony up the kind of cash necessary to create an alternative media establishment. Kristol, together with former Nixon Treasury Secretary William E. Simon and soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis H. Powell, working with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, undertook to join Scaife and his fellow gazillionaires (with names like Hunt, Coors and Moon) in a parallel effort to fashion the foundation of a new set of institutions both to challenge and, where possible, replace those members of what they considered to be a morally and intellectually bankrupt establishment. Their chief spokesperson during these decades was Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Robert Bartley, who instructed his readers on the danger of the New Class ideology that looked "suspiciously like a concerted attack on business."
The many successes of these efforts during the 1980s and 1990s need not be recounted here. Let us merely note that the creation of a vast network of complementary institutions, including think tanks, pressure groups, publications, and eventually, entire radio and television networks, did successfully create a new world for right-wingers; one in which their ideological arguments soon counted for more than mere "facts" or "evidence" as previously understood by reporters. The results of this effort have more than born out the hopes of its visionary founders.
Take the Iraq war, for instance. A more ambitious political program can hardly be imagined than to launch a war against a nation that represents no threat to our own. And yet the Bush administration was able to do this in part because of the power of the new conservative political institutions inside and outside the media to dominate discourse. As the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes discovered, the only Americans who fully supported the war were those misinformed by the Bush administration and its ideological allies in the media and the policy world. Fully 80 percent of Fox News' audience bought into one of the key falsehoods pushed by the administration about postwar Iraq—that there was clear evidence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein worked closely with the Sept. 11 terrorists; that U.S. forces had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; or that people in foreign countries generally either backed the U.S.-led war or were evenly split between supporting and opposing it. Only among those who believed at least one of these three key lies was there majority support for the war. Of those who had not been systematically misinformed, and who rejected all three phony canards, fewer than a quarter were willing to take a trip on Bush and Cheney's not-so-excellent adventure.
Keith Olberman of the incredibly conservative MSNBC has demonstrated the hypocrisy of Dobson and his ilk. This is from Media Matters.
MSNBC host Keith Olbermann noted that the Family Research Council (FRC), which is currently campaigning to stop filibusters of President Bush's judicial nominees by Senate Democrats, was quite vocal in the late 1990s in defending the right to filibuster another presidential nominee, James C. Hormel, who was nominated by President Clinton as ambassador to Luxembourg.
On the April 25 edition of MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann, host Olbermann recounted a statement made July 2, 1998, on National Public Radio by FRC senior writer Steven Schwalm:
OLBERMANN: As mentioned, the filibuster stretches back not merely to Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, but to the presidential administration of Franklin Pierce 152 years ago. And, as a last measure of the defense of the minority, it has had many supporters over the years, like the very people of faith who sponsored yesterday's "Justice Sunday," the group Family Research Council.
Yesterday, it was opposed to filibusters. Seven years ago, it was in favor of them. That's when Clinton and a then-Democratic plurality in the Senate wanted a man named James Hormel to become the ambassador to Luxembourg. Hormel, of the Spam-and-other-meats Hormels, was gay, as the Senate minority bottled up Hormel's nomination with filibusters and threats of filibusters, minority relative to cloture, to breaking up a filibuster.
They did that for a year and a half. The Family Research Council's senior writer, Steven Schwalm, appeared on National Public Radio at the time and explained the value, even the necessity, of the filibuster.
"The Senate," he said, "is not a majoritarian institution, like the House of Representatives is. It is a deliberative body, and it's got a number of checks and balances built into our government. The filibuster is one of those checks in which a majority cannot just sheerly force its will, even if they have a majority of votes in some cases. That's why there are things like filibusters, and other things that give minorities in the Senate some power to slow things up, to hold things up, and let things be aired properly."
It's been said many times, many ways, that was then, and this is now.
After his original nomination in 1997 and re-nomination in January 1999 were blocked by Senate Republicans, Hormel was granted a recess appointment to the post by Clinton in June 1999. He served until December 2000.
Posted to the web on Tuesday April 26, 2005 at 5:03 PM EST
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The fascistic Republican ideology is best illustrated in how far they will go to deny objective reality and to try to deny that there is such a thing. Add their attack on science to the Orwellian attack on language, and their Big Lie politics.
We find ourselves in a bewildering world. We want to make sense of what we see around us and to ask: What is the nature of the universe? What is our place in it and where did it and we come from? Why is it the way it is?
Great questions... questions that a number of influential rightwingers would like to answer for you.
The Republican war on science is not always obvious. There is a subtle and disturbing trend toward the propagation of what I call "GOP pseudoscience". One example is the claim that global warming is a hoax. Another example is the push toward teaching "intelligent design" as an alternative to evolution. Rick Santorum says that evolution is one of the "big social issues of our time," along with abortion and gay marriage (as quoted in Newsweek).
What would Charles Darwin think? And what would Watson, Crick, and Rosalind Franklin (the folks responsible for the discovery of the structure of DNA) have to say?
It was 52 years ago this month that Watson and Crick published their findings... but the history of DNA really began with Charles Darwin, way back in 1859.
In 1859, Charles Darwin published his famous work, "The Origin of Species", in which he presented his observation that the organisms that are the best adapted to their environment are the ones that survive. They do so by passing their genetic information on to future generations. The species that aren't adapted as well tend to die off. This process is known as "natural selection", or "survival of the fittest".
However, Darwin couldn't explain exactly how the "fittest" organisms passed their genetic traits along, since he didn't know about genetic material as such (i.e. he didn't know about DNA).
A great example of "survival of the fittest" is the natural selection of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The bacteria that aren't killed by a certain (or multiple) antibiotics survive. They multiply, infect new hosts, and the process continues, much to our disadvantage. They pass their genetic traits on to successive generations (they can also exchange genetic information with other bacteria, but for the sake of brevity, we won't go into that here. Ew. Bacteria sex).
Fast-forward to the 20th century: the discovery of DNA
1928: Frederick Griffith
In 1928, Frederick Griffith performed what is now known as Griffith's experiment. He was able to show that bacteria can acquire exogenous DNA (DNA from outside the cell), and thus acquire new genetic traits. This is actually a type of "horizontal evolution" (or "bacteria sex", as Beavis and Butthead yours truly mentioned above. No, that is not the best way to describe it, but it's one way to remember it). Griffith knew that the genetic traits were conferred by a molecule, but he didn't know which molecule.
Avery and Macleod were able to show that Griffith's genetic transforming molecule was the nucleic acid described by Levene. It was previously thought that the transforming material was a protein. In 1952 Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase used viruses to prove the same thing.
1951: Rosalind Franklin
Note: Without Rosalind Franklin's work, Watson and Crick would have had a pretty hard time deducing that DNA was not only a helical molecule, but a double helix.
Rosalind Franklin used X-ray diffraction to determine that DNA has a helical structure. The image to the right is her famous X-ray diffraction image known as "photo 51". Click it for a flash presentation of "the anatomy of photo 51".
1953: Watson and Crick
In 1953, James Watson and Frances Crick took Rosalind Franklin's X-ray diffraction data and made an important deduction: not only was DNA a helical molecule, but it was a double helix (two helical molecules together, one running opposite to the other). In other words, they discovered that DNA is sort of like a twisted ladder. Rosalind Franklin did not share their Nobel Prize in 1962, as she died of ovarian cancer in 1958, at the age of 37.
Click here for a simple drawing of the structure of DNA.
Franklin, Watson, and Crick changed history. They made history. So many things in biology suddenly made sense.
The intelligent-design movement is a small but growing force on US university campuses. For some it bridges the gap between science and faith, for others it goes beyond the pale. Geoff Brumfiel meets the movement's vanguard.
For a cold Tuesday night in March, the turnout is surprisingly good. Twenty or so fresh-faced college students are gathered together in a room in the student union at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, the state's largest public university. They are there for the first meeting of Salvador Cordova's Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness (IDEA) club.
"I have a great deal of respect for the scientific method," Cordova tells his attentive audience as he outlines the case for intelligent design. Broadly speaking, he says, the concept is that a divine hand has shaped the course of evolution. The arguments are familiar ones to both advocates and opponents of the idea: some biological systems are too complex, periodic explosions in the fossil record too large, and differences between species too great to be explained by natural selection alone.
[snip]
But despite researchers' apparent lack of interest, or perhaps because of it, the movement is catching on among students on US university campuses. Much of the interest can be traced to US teenagers, more than three-quarters of whom believe, before they reach university, that God played some part in the origin of humans.
(click the image to the right to see the results of more polls)
(Emphasis mine).
The article goes on to mention that many scientists "feel that the very presence of intelligent design in universities is legitimizing the movement and eroding the public's perception of science." The article continues:
It is that distinction that has helped propel the small community of intelligent-design proponents to the forefront of US politics. In 1987, the US Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law that mandated teaching 'creation science' in schools because the premise of the research was based on biblical texts. As intelligent design does not draw directly from biblical sources, Christian fundamentalist groups have seized on it as a possible way to force creationism back into the classroom. Last October, a school board in Dover, Pennsylvania,voted to include intelligent design in its local curriculum. And similar plans are now being considered in at least six states including Kansas, Mississippi and Arkansas. These plans include giving teachers new guidelines, and placing stickers on biology textbooks that question the scientific status of evolutionary theory.
So, despite mountains of evidence, they are proposing not only that Darwin's work be questioned, but that "creation science" be taught in public school classrooms. Isn't that a violation of that Constitution thing, you know, separation of church and state?
The Christian right and "intelligent design"
Emphasis on the word "right": Here at dKos, we're the left, and many Kossacks are Christian. So, please don't think I'm attacking Christianity. Just wanted to make that clear.
Focus on the Family
That image to the right is a Focus on the Family publication. I mean, we all know that Dobson is an esteemed scientist, right? Sorry about the sarcasm, but their so-called "science" is heinous stuff, and I'm sure most of you would agree, whether or not you're a scientist.
Here's the text to go with The Evolution Set, two DVDs sold by Focus on the Family:
The theory of evolution is just that -- a theory -- but most students learn it as scientific fact. These fascinating documentary films give an unbiased, scientific look into the emerging theory of intelligent design and the debate over Darwin's theory.
And, as we all know, Frist and Dobson are really tight.
I'm sure Dr. "I can diagnose a patient by watching a videotape" Frist thinks evolution is just a "theory".
Well, that's it for Science Friday. You also might want to check out some excellent diaries on evolution:
From DailyKos. More data on the Republican attack on the middle class in America. The same middle class that returned Bush to the office he stole with the help of the Supreme Court in 2000. Of course, none of this matters if the Republican Party can keep the collective middle class panties in a bunch over the dreaded issues of gay marriage and that blockbuster of national security issues Terri Schiavo. The radical religious right Repuclican party wants to intrude into every private intimate aspect of our lives, and they want to turn us all into wage slaves while they do it. bondad has done the grunt work. Read.
Update [2005-4-30 17:47:57 by Armando]: From the diaries by Armando.
For the last week, I have run a series of diaries titled "It's the Economy, Stupid", highlighting the negative effects of Bush's policies on the middle class. Because we are already moving into the beginnings of the 2006 election cycle, I wanted to take all of these diaries and construct one coherent argument that all Democrats could use for the upcoming elections. I have added some new information and arguments, and taken out some of the editorial fat.
The economy will be very important for all candidates for office. It is imperative they have the ability to concisely describe Bush's failures. Bush continually talks about an ownership society. What he really means is a society where the corporations own the workers.
I have documented where information comes from if you want more information. None of my material is copyrighted. Please copy it and use it wherever and whenever you want. Whenever you hear the Republican talking points about how they are better at the economy - hit them with these facts and make them think about what is really going on.
From 2001-2002, the US economy lost a large number of jobs that either make things or require technical knowledge. Notice, how new jobs do not involve new products or technologies. This information is from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Manufacturing - 1.1 million jobs The information industry - 225,000 jobs, Professional, scientific, and technical services - 225,000 jobs, Computer systems and design - 140,000 jobs Wholesale Trade - 120,000
And what areas of the economy increased their number of employees from 2002-2003?
Finance and insurance + 22,000 Health Care and Social Assistance + 442,000 Food Service and drinking + 153,000 Education + 93,000 Government + 373,000
Let's move forward 1 year, from 2002-2003, the last full year of information in the BEA's database. The following industries lost jobs.
Manufacturing - 740,000 Information - 185,000 Computer and Electronic Products - 145,000 Professional, scientific and technical -15,000
And the following industries added jobs
Food Service and Drinking Places 151,000 Government + 85,000 Education + 64,000 Health Care and Social Assistance + 345,000
Why does an economy have to make new products to grow? Because in the natural chain of economic events one product naturally leads to new products. Let me use computers as an example. First, there is the actual computer that has to be assembled. This requires parts and labor, creating one group of jobs. The computer needs software, which requires programmers - more jobs. The computers have to be sold, which requires wholesalers, retail outlets and sales people yet more jobs. And lets not forget all of the ancillary products that resulted from computers - networks and the internet.
New products sustain the middle class by providing high-paying jobs. Detroit led the way n the 1950s. The high-tech industry employed millions of workers in the 1990s who benefited from high wages. The information jobs from the 1990s are going away, and we are not replacing them with the next wave of technologically innovative products.
By not creating new products and technologies or products the US is resting on its economic laurels, letting other countries make the products for us. As a result, new jobs on the cutting edge of whatever market are not benefiting the US. Instead, we are importing products we use to make on credit instead of the wages that should result from the "next big thing."
There are several areas of development where the US should take the lead immediately. The first is alternative energy technology. Most of us have recently experienced the pain at the gas pump. There is a huge market for non-oil based energy. The second is nano technology. This is a revolutionary area of micro technology that will literally change the way the world produces goods.
Stagnant Wages
Economists generally agree the economy needs to create 150,000/month to keep up with population changes, lost jobs etc.... According to the Bureau of Labor Services, since 2001, there are only 5 months when the economy created more than 150,000 jobs - March, April, May and October 2004 and February 2005. In other words, we are not creating jobs fast enough to absorb new and displaced workers.
This has lead to an increasingly smaller percentage of the population being employed. In 2000, 64.4% of the population was employed. That percentage has dropped to 62.3% in 2004. In other words, the number of people working as a percentage of the total US population is decreasing.
This leads to poor wage growth because employers can essentially say to prospective employees, "I can get someone who will do the job for lower wages." Wages grew 3.1% in 2002, 1.7% in 2003 and 2.3% in 2004. Compare this wage growth to inflation, which increased 1.9% in 2002, 2% in 2003 and 2.3% in 2004. In other words, wages rose below the rate on inflation for the past 2 years. In other words, the average worker is making less money for the last 2 years.
A little inflation is a good. It indicates the market attaches more value to certain products and that producers have the ability to make a profit. Therefore, to meaningfully participate in the economy, wages have to increase faster than the rate of inflation for workers to maintain their standard of living. Because wages are not increasing, the middle class standard of living is slowly slipping. We are already seeing two very negative effects of this slippage.
Stagnant Wages and Poor Housing
The first area negatively impacted is housing. A report titled The Housing Landscape for America's Working Families issued by the Center for Housing Policy Leadership highlights the problems working families are facing, partly caused by their stagnant wage growth.
The report defines a working family as a family that makes from the minimum wage to 120% of the their state's median income.
The report defines a critical housing need as a household that either lives in dilapidated housing or pays more than half of their income for housing.
Although the number of critical needs households declined slightly to 14.1 million from 2001 - 2003, the number of low-to median income working families increased by 2 million from 1997 -- 2003.
Stagnant Wages and Escalating Medical Costs
The percentage of working families of the total of all families with a critical housing need increased from 23% - 35% from 1997 - 2003.
Let's stop right there and coordinate that number with some other statistics I've found lately. From 2003-2003, the US lost about 2.5 million manufacturing or technology jobs and gained 1.3 million medical, restaurant and drinking establishment jobs. Does anyone see a pattern?
Of the 14.1 million critical housing needs, 2.2 million are immigrants, 3.3 million are elderly, 3.8 million are median to low-income families and 1.2 million are marginally employed.
I have an in idea. Considering Social Security is the sole source of income for most of the elderly, let's privatize it so they can now make less money and more of them can be homeless.
55% of critical needs families own their own homes. That's 7.7 million who either live in dilapidated housing or pay more than half their salary for mortgage payments. I wonder how many have ARMs?
4.37 million are families. This number increased by more than 76%, from 2.4 million in 1997.
2.2 million are single mothers.
Stagnant Wages and Escalating Medical Expenses
Medical expenses are the second area where stagnant wages are destroying the middle class' standard of living. Medical expenses are rising faster than inflation. More importantly, the method of paying for medical care is taking more and more disposable income. The USA Today story (Medical costs prove a burden even for some with insurance) clearly illustrates the problems.
"More workers are facing larger medical bills as employers increase what they must pay for doctor visits, drugs and hospital care in an effort to control health care costs. Some employers are embracing high-deductible policies -- requiring workers to pay $1,000 or more a year in expenses before insurance kicks in. Such policies are also common for the self-employed, who buy their own insurance, because premiums are generally lower."
So, let's say you have a policy that costs $400/month. Not only are you paying the premium, you're also responsible for a larger portion of upfront fees in the forms of deductibles and backend fees in the form of prescription expenses. Now instead of a mere $400/month, you're also responsible for a higher percentage of total expenses, which are rising faster than the rate of inflation, which is increasing faster than wages.
Bush loves to claim that his medical savings accounts will help workers cover these new costs. These accounts have to be used to be effective. And most Americans don't save. Part of this is the excessive materialism run rampant thanks to cheap money and rising housing prices. However, stagnant wages - growing at a rate less than inflation - are also partly responsible. How can you save when you're barely making ends meet?
Conclusion
This is our issue. There are hard-working honest people in the US who want to live the classic American life and can't anymore. They need our help. We have to develop policies that help them achieve what everybody wants - an affordable home, the ability to provide medical care for their family and a safe retirement.
The Republicans only benefit the top 5%. Democrats care about everybody else.
Husband to Gail, former college professor, baby boomer who rejects the self-indulgence of my generation at its worst, but revels in the joyful skepticism of my generation at its best.
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