GalvestonLawyer

The Rude Pundit

2011-03-14T06:59:00.000-07:00

The Rude Pundit

2011

2011-03-13T20:01:00.001-07:00

Haven't posted in a while. I've mainly been using Facebook to annoy people. I will try to do better.

No Posts In A While

2010-06-01T19:22:00.000-07:00

Haven't been posting on this blog much. Been spending most of my time on my Facebook page. I'll try to do better.

Health Care Reform Passes

2010-03-22T17:38:00.000-07:00

Well, let's see how this thing pans out. The fascists are foaming at the mouth. That has to be a good sign.

RIP Howard Zinn

2010-02-02T14:28:00.000-08:00

The progressive movement has lost one of its greatest voices. So long, Professor Zinn. You opened a lot of eyes. Thank you for that.

Creation Science Made Easy

2009-11-30T18:46:00.000-08:00

I'm probably going to catch hell about this from the fundies...

Howard Zinn On The Bill Of Rights

2009-10-15T05:02:00.000-07:00

The Bill of Rights

by Howard Zinn, 1991

from the Zinn Reader, Seven Stories Press

A few years back, a man high up in the CIA named Ray Cline was asked if the CIA, by its surveillance of protest organizations in the United States, was violating the free speech provision of the First Amendment. He smiled and said: "It's only an Amendment."

And when it was disclosed that the FBI was violating citizens' rights repeatedly, a high official of the FBI was asked if anybody in the FBI questioned the legality of what they were doing. He replied: "No, we never gave it a thought."

We clearly cannot expect the Bill of Rights to be defended by government officials. So it will have to be defended by the people.

If you do a bit of research into the origins of the Bill of Rights- and I had to do some because it is a job requirement of the historical profession-you will find that when the new government of the United States adopted the Bill of Rights in 1791, it did not do so with enthusiasm. The Bill of Rights was a political tool to quiet down critics of the Constitution. A Bill of Rights on paper comforts people. You don't have to take it seriously. Like that CIA man, you can smile, and say, they're only Amendments.

Well, in 1791, the first ten Amendments-the Bill of Rights- were added to the Constitution, and the First Amendment says, among other things: "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..." Seven years later, in 1798, Congress passed a law abridging the freedom of speech and the press. It was the Sedition Act of 1798, and it provided jail sentences for people who criticized the government. A number of writers and speakers were imprisoned. They appealed to the court. Now we all learned in junior high school about checks and balances and how if Congress passes a law violating the Constitution, we are very lucky to have the Supreme Court to check that and declare the law null and void. (I was always proud to know such a fancy phrase, "null and void.")

Well, the members of the Supreme Court, apparently having skipped junior high school, or perhaps understanding that the phrase "checks and balances" is just intended to satisfy schoolchildren-did not declare the Sedition Act null and void. Not at all. They said it was constitutional. You may ask: by what legal philosophy can Supreme Court justices explain how Congress can pass a law abridging the freedom of speech when the Constitution says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech? I could tell you how they did that; but it would take a while and cause indigestion. Let us just say that legal training is a wonderful thing, it enables you to explain the unexplainable, defend the indefensible, and rationalize the irrational.

It seems that especially in time of war or near-war (and in 1798 it was such a time), the First Amendment is ignored. You may have noticed that the year 1991 did not start with a celebration of the Bill of Rights, but with a war. And that the government established control over information and the mass media became tongue-tied with patriotic fervor, and the First Amendment was bombed into oblivion. It is a truism of our political culture: if you are at war for freedom and democracy, you can't have freedom and democracy. So, exactly when free speech is most needed, that is, when it is a matter of life and death for the young people about to be sent to the battlefield-exactly at such a moment the government declares it can be suspended.

In 1917, as armies of young men in Europe were slaughtering one another in the first World War, and the United States decided to send its own young men into the butchery, Congress passed the Espionage Act, and the Sedition Act, providing heavy sentences for those criticizing the war. The Supreme Court again put our junior high school lesson to shame: checks and balances? Not in wartime. Not when you need them. The great liberal Oliver Wendell Holmes himself wrote the opinions affirming the constitutionality of the Espionage Act, sending a man named Schenck to jail for distributing a leaflet criticizing the war and the draft. Two thousand people were prosecuted for speaking or writing against the war, including Eugene Debs, the great labor leader and Socialist.

There were ludicrous episodes in all that. A filmmaker who made a movie about the American Revolution was sent to prison for ten years because the movie portrayed the British as the enemy in the American Revolution, and now the British were our allies in the war. The name of the movie was The Spirit of '76 and the title of the court case against the filmmaker was U.S. v. Spirit of '76. And that case sums up the relationship of the government to the Bill of Rights: U.S. v. Spirit of '76. It was the President of the United States, Harry Truman, who instituted loyalty oaths even before Joseph McCarthy waved his lists of Communists in the State Department. It was the Congress of the United States, Democrats as well as Republicans, that set up the House Un-American Activities Committee, and voted con tempt citations against people who refused to bow down to that Committee. It was the Supreme Court that affirmed the convictions of the Hollywood Ten for invoking the First Amendment. It was Republicans and Democrats, it was all three branches of government, all of them swearing to uphold the Constitution of the United States, and all of them violating that oath.

A word about the Supreme Court. We now have nine conservative justices, including one conservative woman and one conservative black man. It's called American pluralism. Many people have been depressed over this. Frankly, I tried to get depressed, but didn't succeed. Sure, it's better to have a liberal Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court at its most liberal has never been a dependable protector of people's rights. One year it will say you have a constitutional right to distribute leaflets in front of a supermarket. Another year it will say you can go to jail for that. One year it will say: high school students have a right to wear black arm bands to protest a war. Another year it will say: high school students don't have the right to put out their own newspapers without censorship by the school authorities. The Supreme Court, when it was liberal, affirmed that Japanese-Americans could be put in concentration camps because we were at war. The Supreme Court, liberal or conservative, sworn to defend the Constitution, has never been a bulwark against unconstitutional wars.

If it were left to the institutions of government, the Bill of Rights would be left for dead. But someone breathed life into the Bill of Rights. Ordinary people did it, by doing extraordinary things. The editors and speakers who, in spite of the Sedition Act of 1798, continued to criticize the government. The black and white abolitionists who defied the Fugitive Slave Law, defied the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision, who insisted that black people were human beings, not property, and who broke into courtrooms and police stations to rescue them, to prevent their return to slavery.

Women, who were arrested again and again as they spoke out for their right to control their own bodies, or the right to vote. Members of the Industrial Workers of the World, anarchists, radicals, who filled the jails in California and Idaho and Montana until they were finally allowed to speak to working people. Socialists and pacifists and anarchists like Helen Keller and Rose Pastor Stokes, and Kate O'Hare and Emma Goldman, who defied the government and denounced war in 1917 and 1918. The artists and writers and labor organizers and Communists- Dalton Trumbo and Pete Seeger, and W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson, who challenged the congressional committees of the 1950s, challenged the FBI, at the risk of their freedom and their careers.

In the 1960s, the students of Kent State and Jackson State and hundreds of other campuses, the draft resisters and deserters, the priests and nuns and lay people, all the marchers and demonstrators and trespassers who demanded that the killing in Vietnam stop, the GIs in the Mekong Delta who refused to go out on patrol, the B52 pilots who refused to fly in the Christmas bombing of 1972, the Vietnam veterans who gathered in Washington and threw their Purple Hearts and other medals over a fence in protest against the war.

And after the war, in the '70s and '80s, those courageous few who carried on, the Berrigans and all like them who continued to demonstrate against the war machine, the Seabrook fence climbers, the signers of the Pledge of Resistance against U.S. military action in Central America, the gays and lesbians who marched in the streets for the first time, challenging the country to recognize their humanity, the disabled people who spoke up, after a long silence, demanding their rights. The Indians, sup posed to be annihilated and gone from the scene, emerging ghostlike, to occupy a tiny portion of the land that was taken from them, Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Saying: we're not gone, we're here, and we want you to listen to us.

These are the people, men, women, children, of all colors and national origins, who gave life to the Bill of Rights.

The Bill of Rights was expanded after the Civil War, with the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, to apply to the states, to prevent them from keeping slavery, to require that they give all people, regardless of race or color, the equal protection of the laws. But these amendments were soon ignored, as blacks were kept in semi-slavery in the South, segregated, humiliated, beaten, Iynched by mobs, unprotected by either the local police or the national government. For almost a hundred years after the 14th Amendment became law, every President, whether liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, violated his oath of office, his pledge to uphold the Constitution, by failing to enforce those Amendments. And the Supreme Court interpreted them so as to make them useless.

And so black people in the South, in the most dangerous towns and cities in the country, decided to give life to the 14th Amendment, at the risk of their own. They boycotted the buses in Montgomery, Alabama, they sat in at segregated lunch counters, they rode the buses as Freedom Riders, they marched through the streets of Albany, Georgia and Birmingham, demonstrated in Alabama, were arrested, set upon by dogs, knocked down by water hoses, beaten bloody by state troopers, and murdered. There were protests in 800 cities in the year 1963. And then the President acted, then Congress acted, then the Supreme Court acted. The 15th Amendment was now being enforced, only a hundred years late.

It is good to have a Bill of Rights, good to have a 14th and 15th Amendment. They are useful as standards. But it is disastrous to depend on them. Words have never been enough. Ask the authors of the Ten Commandments.

For many people there were not even words-not for working people, women, gays and lesbians, disabled people. The Bill of Rights says nothing about the right to work, to a decent wage, to housing, to health care, to the rights of women, to the right of privacy in sexual preference, to the rights of people with disabilities.

But we don't need permission from on high, words approved by the authorities, to tell us that certain truths are self-evident, as the Declaration of Independence put it. That we are all created equal, that we all have rights that cannot be taken from us, the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And so working people went on strike thousands of times, were beaten and killed on the picket line, until they won an eight-hour day, and a bit of economic security. Women created a nation al movement that changed the consciousness of millions of people. Gays and lesbians, disabled people, organized, spoke up, declared: we exist, we must be paid attention to. And people began to pay attention.

We should look beyond the Bill of Rights to the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says that all people, everywhere in the world, are entitled to work and decent wages, to holidays and vacations, to food and clothing and housing and medical care, to education, to child care and maternal care.

The guarantees of the Bill of Rights have little meaning so long as we have a class society with enormous differences of wealth and income. The rights of free speech and press depend on having the resources to use them. The right to legal counsel is different for rich and poor. The right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures is different for a family living in a mansion and another living in a housing project, or out on the street.

In the real world, the fate of human beings is decided every day not by the courts, but out of court, in the streets, in the workplace, by whoever has the wealth and power. The redistribution of that wealth and power is necessary if the Bill of Rights, if any rights, are to have meaning.

The novelist Aldous Huxley once said: "Liberties are not given; they are taken." We are not given our liberties by the Bill of Rights, certainly not by the government which either violates or ignores those rights. We take our rights, as thinking, acting citizens.
And so we should celebrate today, not the words of the Bill of Rights, certainly not the political leaders who utter those words and violate them every day. We should celebrate, honor, all those people who risked their jobs, their freedom, sometimes their lives, to affirm the rights we all have, rights not limited to some document, but rights our common sense tells us we should all have as human beings. Who should, for example, we celebrate?

I think of Lillian Gobitis, from Lynn, Massachusetts, a seventh grade student who, back in 1935, because of her religious convictions, refused to salute the American flag even when she was suspended from school.

And Mary Beth Tinker, a thirteen-year-old girl in Des Moines, Iowa, who in 1965 went to school wearing a black armband in protest against the killing of people in Vietnam, and defied the school authorities even when they suspended her.

An unnamed black boy, nine years old, arrested in Albany, Georgia, in 1961 for marching in a parade against racial segregation after the police said this was unlawful. He stood in line to be booked by the police chief, who was startled to see this little boy and asked him: "What's your name?" And he replied: "Freedom, freedom."

I think of Gordon Hirabayashi, born in Seattle of Japanese parents, who, at the start of the war between Japan and the United States, refused to obey the curfew directed against all of Japanese ancestry, and refused to be evacuated to a detention camp, and insisted on his freedom, despite an executive order by the President and a decision of the Supreme Court.

Demetrio Rodriguez of San Antonio, who in 1968 spoke up and said his child, living in a poor county, had a right to a good education equal to that of a child living in a rich county.

All those alternative newspapers and alternative radio stations and struggling organizations that have tried to give meaning to free speech by giving information that the mass media will not give, revealing information that the government wants kept secret.

All those whistleblowers, who risked their jobs, risked prison, defying their employers, whether the government or corporations, to tell the truth about nuclear weapons, or chemical poisoning. Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner, who have refused to pay taxes to support the war machine, and all their neighbors who, when the government decided to seize and auction their house, refused to bid, and so they are still defending their right.

The 550 people who occupied the JFK Federal Building in Boston in protest when President Reagan declared a blockade of Nicaragua. I was in that group-I don't mind getting arrested when I have company-and the official charge against us used the language of the old trespass law: "failure to quit the premises." On the letter I got dropping the case (because there were too many of us to deal with), they shortened that charge to "failure to quit."

I think that sums up what it is that has kept the Bill of Rights alive. Not the President or Congress, or the Supreme Court, or the wealthy media. But all those people who have refused to quit, who have insisted on their rights and the rights of others, the rights of all human ~t, beings everywhere, whether Americans or Haitians or Chinese or Russians or Iraqis or Israelis or Palestinians, to equality, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That is the spirit of the Bill of Rights, and beyond that, the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, yes, the spirit of '76: refusal to quit.

Howard Zinn on Vietnam

2009-10-12T14:41:00.000-07:00

The Impossible Victory: Vietnam

excerpted from a

People's History of the United States

by Howard Zinn

*****

In the fall of 1945 Japan, defeated, was forced to leave Indochina, the former French colony it had occupied at the start of the war. In the meantime, a revolutionary movement had grown there, determined to end colonial control and to achieve a new life for the peasants of Indochina. Led by a Communist named Ho Chi Minh, the revolutionists fought against the Japanese, and when they were gone held a spectacular celebration in Hanoi in late 1945, with a million people in the streets, and issued a Declaration of Independence. It borrowed from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, in the French Revolution, and from the American Declaration of Independence, and began: "All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." Just as the Americans in 1776 had listed their grievances against the English King, the Vietnamese listed their complaints against French rule:

They have enforced inhuman laws.... They have built more prisons than schools. They have mercilessly slain our patriots, they have drowned uprisings in rivers of blood. They have fettered public opinion.... They have robbed us of our rice fields, our mines, our forests, and our raw materials ...

They have invented numerous unjustifiable taxes and reduced our people, especially our peasantry, to a state of extreme poverty.... . . . from the end of last year, to the beginning of this year . . . more than two million of our fellow-citizens died of starvation....

The whole Vietnamese people, animated by a common purpose, are deter mined to fight to the bitter end against any attempt by the French colonialists to reconquer their country.

The U.S. Defense Department study of the Vietnam war, intended to be "top secret" but released to the public by Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo in the famous Pentagon Papers case, described Ho Chi Minh's work:

"... Ho had built the Viet Minh into the only Vietnam-wide political organization capable of effective resistance to either the Japanese or the French. He was the only Vietnamese wartime leader with a national following, and he assured himself wider fealty among the Vietnamese people when in August September, 1945, he overthrew the Japanese . . . established the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and staged receptions for in-coming allied occupation forces.... For a few weeks in September, 1945, Vietnam was-for the first and only time in its modern history-free of foreign domination, and united from north to south under Ho Chi Minh...."

The Western powers were already at work to change this. England occupied the southern part of Indochina and then turned it back to the French. Nationalist China (this was under Chiang Kai-shek, before the Communist revolution) occupied the northern part of Indochina, and the United States persuaded it to turn that back to the French. As Ho Chi Minh told an American journalist: "We apparently stand quite alone.... We shall have to depend on ourselves."

Between October 1945 and February 1946, Ho Chi Minh wrote eight letters to President Truman, reminding him of the self-determination promises of the Atlantic Charter. One of the letters was sent both to Truman and to the United Nations:

I wish to invite attention of your Excellency for strictly humanitarian reasons to following matter. Two million Vietnamese died of starvation during winter of 1944 and spring 1945 because of starvation policy of French who seized and stored until it rotted all available rice.... Three-fourths of cultivated land was flooded in summer 1945, which was followed by a severe drought; of normal harvest five-sixths was lost.... Many people are starving.... Unless great world powers and international relief organizations bring us immediate assistance we face imminent catastrophe....

Truman never replied.

In October of 1946, the French bombarded Haiphong, a port in northern Vietnam, and there began the eight-year war between the Vietminh movement and the French over who would rule Vietnam. After the Communist victory in China in 1949 and the Korean war the following year, the United States began giving large amounts of military aid to the French. By 1954, the United States had given 300,000 small arms and machine guns, enough to equip the entire French army in Indochina, and $1 billion; all together, the U.S. was financing 80 percent of the French war effort. Why was the United States doing this? To the public, the word was that the United States was helping to stop Communism in Asia, but there was not much public discussion. In the secret memoranda of the National Security Council (which advised the President on foreign policy) there was talk in 1950 of what came to be known as the "domino theory"-that, like a row of dominoes, if one country fell to Communism, the next one would do the same and so on. It was important therefore to keep the first one from falling.

A secret memo of the National Security Council in June 1952 also pointed to the chain of U.S. military bases along the coast of China, the Philippines, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea:

Communist control of all of Southeast Asia would render the U.S. position in the Pacific offshore island chain precarious and would seriously jeopardize fundamental U.S. security interests in the Far East.

Southeast Asia, especially Malaya and Indonesia, is the principal world source of natural rubber and tin, and a producer of petroleum and other strategically important commodities....

It was also noted that Japan depended on the rice of Southeast Asia, and Communist victory there would "make it extremely difficult to prevent Japan's eventual accommodation to communism." In 1953, a congressional study mission reported: "The area of Indochina is immensely wealthy in rice, rubber, coal and iron ore. Its position makes it a strategic key to the rest of Southeast Asia." That year, a State Department memorandum said that the French were losing the war in Indochina, had failed "to win a sufficient native support," feared that a negotiated settlement "would mean the eventual loss to Communism not only of Indochina but of the whole of Southeast Asia, and concluded: "If the French actually decided to withdraw, the U.S. would have to consider most seriously whether to take over in this area."

In 1954, the French, having been unable to win Vietnamese popular support, which was overwhelmingly behind Ho Chi Minh and the revolutionary movement, had to withdraw.
An international assemblage at Geneva presided over the peace agreement between the French and the Vietminh. It was agreed that the French would temporarily withdraw into the southern part of Vietnam, that the Vietminh would remain in the north, and that an election would take place in two years in a unified Vietnam to enable the Vietnamese to choose their own government.

The United States moved quickly to prevent the unification and to establish South Vietnam as an American sphere. It set up in Saigon as head of the government a former Vietnamese official named Ngo Dinh Diem, who had recently been living in New Jersey, and encouraged him not to hold the scheduled elections for unification. A memo in early 1954 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said that intelligence estimates showed "a settlement based on free elections would be attended by almost certain loss of the Associated States [Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam-the three parts of Indochina created by the Geneva Conference] to Communist control." Diem again and again blocked the elections requested by the Vietminh, and with American money and arms his government became more and more firmly established. As the Pentagon Papers put it: "South Viet Nam was essentially the creation of the United States."

*****

During 1965, over 200,000 American soldiers were sent to South Vietnam, and in 1966, 200,000 more. By early 1968, there were more than 500,000 American troops there, and the U.S. Air Force was dropping bombs at a rate unequaled in history. Tiny glimmerings of the massive human suffering under this bombardment came to the outside world. On June 5, 1965, the New York Times carried a dispatch from Saigon:

As the Communists withdrew from Quangngai last Monday, United States jet bombers pounded the hills into which they were headed. Many Vietnamese one estimate is as high as 500 were killed by the strikes. The American contention is that they were Vietcong soldiers. But three out of four patients seeking treatment in a Vietnamese hospital afterward for burns from napalm, or jellied gasoline, were village women.

On September 6, another press dispatch from Saigon:

"In Bien Hoa province south of Saigon on August 15 United States aircraft accidentally bombed a Buddhist pagoda and a Catholic church . . . it was the third time their pagoda had been bombed in 1965. A temple of the Cao Dai religious sect in the same area had been bombed twice this year. In another delta province there is a woman who has both arms burned off by napalm and her eyelids so badly burned that she cannot close them. When it is time for her to sleep her family puts a blanket over her head. The woman had two of her children killed in the air strike that maimed her."

Few Americans appreciate what their nation is doing to South Vietnam with airpower ... innocent civilians are dying every day in South Vietnam.

Large areas of South Vietnam were declared "free fire zones," which meant that all persons remaining within them-civilians, old people, children-were considered an enemy, and bombs were dropped at will. Villages suspected of harboring Viet Cong were subject to "search and destroy" missions-men of military age in the villages were killed, the homes were burned, the women, children, and old people were sent off to refugee camps. Jonathan Schell, in his book The Village of Ben Suc, describes such an operation: a village surrounded, attacked, a man riding on a bicycle shot down, three people picnicking by the river shot to death, the houses destroyed, the women, children, old people herded together, taken away from their ancestral homes.

The CIA in Vietnam, in a program called "Operation Phoenix," secretly, without trial, executed at least twenty thousand civilians in South Vietnam who were suspected of being members of the Communist underground. A pro-administration analyst wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs in January 1975: "Although the Phoenix program did undoubtedly kill or incarcerate many innocent civilians, it did also eliminate many members of the Communist infrastructure."

After the war, the release of records of the International Red Cross showed that in South Vietnamese prison camps, where at the height of the war 65,000 to 70,000 people were held and often beaten and tortured, American advisers observed and sometimes participated. The Red Cross observers found continuing, systematic brutality at the two principal Vietnamese POW camps-at Phu Quoc and Qui Nhon, where American advisers were stationed.

By the end of the war, 7 million tons of bombs had been dropped on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia-more than twice the amount of bombs dropped on Europe and Asia in World War II. In addition, poisonous sprays were dropped by planes to destroy trees and any kind of growth- an area the size of the state of Massachusetts was covered with such poi son. Vietnamese mothers reported birth defects in their children. Yale biologists, using the same poison (2,4,5,T) on mice, reported defective mice born and said they had no reason to believe the effect on humans was different.

On March 16, 1968, a company of American soldiers went into the hamlet of My Lai 4, in Quang Ngai province. They rounded up the inhabitants, including old people and women with infants in their arms. These people were ordered into a ditch, where they were methodically shot to death by American soldiers. The testimony of James Dursi, a rifleman, at the later trial of Lieutenant William Calley, was reported in the New York Times:

Lieutenant Calley and a weeping rifleman named Paul D. Meadlo the same soldier who had fed candy to the children before shooting them-pushed the prisoners into the ditch...
"There was an order to shoot by Lieutenant Calley, I can't remember the exact words-it was something like 'Start firing.' "Meadlo turned to me and said: 'Shoot, why don't you shoot?'

"He was crying. "I said, 'I can't. I won't.'

"Then Lieutenant Calley and Meadlo pointed their rifles into the ditch and fired.

"People were diving on top of each other; mothers were trying to protect their children...."

Journalist Seymour Hersh, in his book My Lai 4, writes:

"When Army investigators reached the barren area in November, 1969, in connection with the My Lai probe in the United States, they found mass graves at three sites, as well as a ditch full of bodies. It was estimated that between 450 and 500 people-most of them women, children and old men- had been slain and buried there."

The army tried to cover up what happened. But a letter began circulating from a GI named Ron Ridenhour, who had heard about the massacre. There were photos taken of the killing by an army photographer, Ronald Haeberle. Seymour Hersh, then working for an antiwar news agency in Southeast Asia called Dispatch News Service, wrote about it. The story of the massacre had appeared in May 1968 in two French publications, one called Sud Vietnam en Lutte, and another published by the North Vietnamese delegation to the peace talks in Paris-but the American press did not pay any attention.

Several of the officers in the My Lai massacre were put on trial, but only Lieutenant William Calley was found guilty. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, but his sentence was reduced twice; he served three years-Nixon ordered that he be under house arrest rather than a regular prison-and then was paroled. Thousands of Americans came to his defense. Part of it was in patriotic justification of his action as necessary against the "Communists." Part of it seems to have been a feeling that he was unjustly singled out in a war with many similar atrocities. Colonel Oran Henderson, who had been charged with covering up the My Lai killings, told reporters in early 1971: "Every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden someplace."

Indeed, My Lai was unique only in its details. Hersh reported a letter sent by a GI to his family, and published in a local newspaper:

"Dear Mom and Dad:

Today we went on a mission and I am not very proud of myself, my friends, or my country. We burned every hut in sight!

It was a small rural network of villages and the people were incredibly poor. My unit burned and plundered their meager possessions. Let me try to explain the situation to you.

The huts here are thatched palm leaves. Each one has a dried mud bunker inside. These bunkers are to protect the families. Kind of like air raid shelters.

My unit commanders, however, chose to think that these bunkers are offensive. So every hut we find that has a bunker we are ordered to burn to the ground.

When the ten helicopters landed this morning, in the midst of these huts, and six men jumped out of each "chopper", we were firing the moment we hit the ground. We fired into all the huts we could....

It is then that we burned these huts.... Everyone is crying, begging and praying that we don't separate them and take their husbands and fathers, sons and grandfathers. The women wail and moan.

Then they watch in terror as we burn their homes, personal possessions and food. Yes, we burn all rice and shoot all livestock."

*****

The massacre at My Lai by a company of ordinary soldiers was a small event compared with the plans of high-level military and civilian leaders to visit massive destruction on the civilian population of Vietnam. Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton in early 1966, seeing that large-scale bombing of North Vietnam villages was not producing the desired result, suggested a different strategy. The air strikes on villages, he said, would "create a counterproductive wave of revulsion abroad and at home." He suggested instead:

Destruction of locks and dams, however-if handled right-might . . . offer promise. It should be studied. Such destruction doesn't kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after a time to widespread starvation (more than a million?) unless food is provided-which we could offer to do "at the conference table." . . .

The heavy bombings were intended to destroy the will of ordinary Vietnamese to resist, as in the bombings of German and Japanese population centers in World War II-despite President Johnson's public insistence that only "military targets" were being bombed. The government was using language like "one more turn of the screw" to describe bombing. The CIA at one point in 1966 recommended a "bombing program of greater intensity," according to the Pentagon Papers, directed against, in the ClA's words, "the will of the regime as a target system."

Meanwhile, just across the border of Vietnam, in a neighboring country, Laos, where a right-wing government installed by the CIA faced a rebellion, one of the most beautiful areas in the world, the Plain of Jars, was being destroyed by bombing. This was not reported by the government or the press, but an American who lived in Laos, Fred Branfman, told the story in his book Voices from the Plain of Jars:

Over 25,000 attack sorties were flown against the Plain of Jars from May, 1964, through September, 1969; over 75,000 tons of bombs were dropped on it; on the ground, thousands were killed and wounded, tens of thousands driven underground, and the entire aboveground society leveled.

*****

In September 1973, a former government official in Laos, Jerome Doolittle, wrote in the New York Times:

"The Pentagon's most recent lies about bombing Cambodia bring back a question that often occurred to me when I was press attaché at the American Embassy in Vientiane, Laos.

Why did we bother to lie?

When I first arrived in Laos, I was instructed to answer all press questions about our massive and merciless bombing campaign in that tiny country with: "At the request of the Royal Laotian Government, the United States is conducting unarmed reconnaissance flights accompanied by armed escorts who have the right to return if fired upon."

This was a lie. Every reporter to whom I told it knew it was a lie. Hanoi knew it was a lie. The International Control Commission knew it was a lie. Every interested Congressman and newspaper reader knew it was a lie....

After all, the lies did serve to keep something from somebody, and the somebody was us."

By early 1968, the cruelty of the war began touching the conscience of many Americans. For many others, the problem was that the United States was unable to win the war, while 40,000 American soldiers were dead by this time, 250,000 wounded, with no end in sight. (The Vietnam casualties were many times this number.)

Lyndon Johnson had escalated a brutal war and failed to win it. His popularity was at an all-time low; he could not appear publicly without a demonstration against him and the war. The chant "LBJ, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" was heard in demonstrations throughout the country. In the spring of 1968 Johnson announced he would not run again for President, and that negotiations for peace would begin with the Vietnamese in Paris.

In the fall of 1968, Richard Nixon, pledging that he would get the United States out of Vietnam, was elected President. He began to withdraw troops; by February 1972, less than 150,000 were left. But the bombing continued. Nixon's policy was "Vietnamization"-the Saigon government, with Vietnamese ground troops, using American money and air power, would carry on the war. Nixon was not ending the war; he was ending the most unpopular aspect of it, the involvement of American soldiers on the soil of a faraway country.

In the spring of 1970, Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger launched an invasion of Cambodia, after a long bombardment that the government never disclosed to the public. The invasion not only led to an outcry of protest in the United States, it was a military failure, and Congress resolved that Nixon could not use American troops in extending the war without congressional approval. The following year, without American troops, the United States supported a South Vietnamese invasion of Laos. This too failed. In 1971, 800,000 tons of bombs were dropped by the United States on Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam.

*****

... In August of 1965, 61 percent of the population thought the American involvement in Vietnam was not wrong. By May 1971 it was exactly reversed; 61 percent thought our involvement was wrong. Bruce Andrews, a Harvard student of public opinion, found that the people most opposed to the war were people over fifty, blacks, and women. He also noted that a study in the spring of 1964, when Vietnam was a minor issue in the newspapers, showed that 53 percent of college educated people were willing to send troops to Vietnam, but only 33 percent of grade school-educated people were so willing.
It seems that the media, themselves controlled by higher-education, higher-income people who were more aggressive in foreign policy, tended to give the erroneous impression that working-class people were superpatriots for the war. Lewis Lipsitz, in a mid-1968 survey of poor blacks and whites in the South, paraphrased an attitude he found typical: "The only way to help the poor man is to get out of that war in Vietnam . . . These taxes-high taxes-it's going over yonder to kill people with and I don't see no cause in it."

The capacity for independent judgment among ordinary Americans is probably best shown by the swift development of antiwar feeling among American GIs-volunteers and draftees who came mostly from lower-income groups. There had been, earlier in American history, in stances of soldiers' disaffection from the war: isolated mutinies in the Revolutionary War, refusal of reenlistment in the midst of hostilities in the Mexican war, desertion and conscientious objection in World War I and World War II. But Vietnam produced opposition by soldiers and veterans on a scale, and with a fervor, never seen before.

It began with isolated protests. As early as June 1965, Richard Steinke, a West Point graduate in Vietnam, refused to board an aircraft taking him to a remote Vietnamese village. "The Vietnamese war," he said, "is not worth a single American life." Steinke was court-martialed and dismissed from the service. The following year, three army privates, one black, one Puerto Rican, one Lithuanian-Italian-all poor-refused to embark for Vietnam, denouncing the war as "immoral, illegal, and unjust." They were court-martialed and imprisoned.

In early 1967, Captain Howard Levy, an army doctor at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, refused to teach Green Berets, a Special Forces elite in the military. He said they were "murderers of women and children" and "killers of peasants." He was court-martialed on the ground that he was trying to promote disaffection among enlisted men by his statements. The colonel who presided at the trial said: "The truth of the statements is not an issue in this case." Levy was convicted and sentenced to prison.

The individual acts multiplied: A black private in Oakland refused to board a troop plane to Vietnam, although he faced eleven years at hard labor. A navy nurse, Lieutenant Susan Schnall, was court-martialed for marching in a peace demonstration while in uniform, and for drop ping antiwar leaflets from a plane on navy installations. In Norfolk, Virginia, a sailor refused to train fighter pilots because he said the war was immoral. An army lieutenant was arrested in Washington, D.C., in early 1968 for picketing the White House with a sign that said: " 120,000 American Casualties-Why?" Two black marines, George Daniels and William Harvey, were given long prison sentences (Daniels, six years, Harvey, ten years, both later reduced) for talking to other black marines against the war.

As the war went on, desertions from the armed forces mounted. Thousands went to Western Europe-France, Sweden, Holland. Most deserters crossed into Canada; some estimates were 50,000, others 100,000. Some stayed in the United States. A few openly defied the military authorities by taking "sanctuary" in churches, where, surrounded by antiwar friends and sympathizers, they waited for capture and court-martial. At Boston University, a thousand students kept vigil for five days and nights in the chapel, supporting an eighteen-year old deserter, Ray Kroll.

Kroll's story was a common one. He had been inveigled into joining the army; he came from a poor family, was brought into court, charged with drunkenness, and given the choice of prison or enlistment. He enlisted. And then he began to think about the nature of the war.

On a Sunday morning, federal agents showed up at the Boston University chapel, stomped their way through aisles clogged with students, smashed down doors, and took Kroll away. From the stockade, he wrote back to friends: "I ain't gonna kill; it's against my will...." A friend he had made at the chapel brought him books, and he noted a saying he had found in one of them: "What we have done will not be lost to all Eternity. Everything ripens at its time and becomes fruit at its hour."

The GI antiwar movement became more organized. Near Fort Jackson, South Carolina, the first "GI coffeehouse" was set up, a place where soldiers could get coffee and doughnuts, find antiwar literature, and talk freely with others. It was called the UFO, and lasted for several years before it was declared a "public nuisance" and closed by court action. But other GI coffeehouses sprang up in half a dozen other places across the country. An antiwar "bookstore" was opened near Fort Devens, Massachusetts, and another one at the Newport, Rhode Island, naval base.

Underground newspapers sprang up at military bases across the country; by 1970 more than fifty were circulating. Among them: About Face in Los Angeles; Fed Up! in Tacoma, Washington; Short Times at Fort Jackson; Vietnam Gl in Chicago; Graffiti in Heidelberg, Germany; Bragg Briefs in North Carolina; Last Harass at Fort Gordon, Georgia; Helping Hand at Mountain Home Air Base, Idaho. These newspapers printed antiwar articles, gave news about the harassment of GIs and practical advice on the legal rights of servicemen, told how to resist military domination.

Mixed with feeling against the war was resentment at the cruelty, the dehumanization, of military life. In the army prisons, the stockades, this was especially true. In 1968, at the Presidio stockade in California, a guard shot to death an emotionally disturbed prisoner for walking away from a work detail. Twenty-seven prisoners then sat down and refused to work, singing "We Shall Overcome." They were court-martialed, found guilty of mutiny, and sentenced to terms of up to fourteen years, later reduced after much public attention and protest.

The dissidence spread to the war front itself. When the great Moratorium Day demonstrations were taking place in October 1969 in the United States, some GIs in Vietnam wore black armbands to show their support. A news photographer reported that in a platoon on patrol near Da Nang, about half of the men were wearing black armbands. One soldier stationed at Cu Chi wrote to a friend on October 26, 1970, that separate companies had been set up for men refusing to go into the field to fight. "It's no big thing here anymore to refuse to go." The French newspaper Le Monde reported that in four months, 109 soldiers of the first air cavalry division were charged with refusal to fight. "A common sight," the correspondent for Le Monde wrote, "is the black soldier, with his left fist clenched in defiance of a war he has never considered his own."

Wallace Terry, a black American reporter for Time magazine, taped conversations with hundreds of black soldiers; he found bitterness against army racism, disgust with the war, generally low morale. More and more cases of "fragging" were reported in Vietnam-incidents where servicemen rolled fragmentation bombs under the tents of officers who were ordering them into combat, or against whom they had other grievances. The Pentagon reported 209 fraggings in Vietnam in 1970 alone.

Veterans back from Vietnam formed a group called Vietnam Veterans Against the War. In December 1970, hundreds of them went to Detroit to what was called the "Winter Soldier" investigations, to testify publicly about atrocities they had participated in or seen in Vietnam, committed by Americans against Vietnamese. In April 1971 more than a thousand of them went to Washington, D.C., to demonstrate against the war. One by one, they went up to a wire fence around the Capitol, threw over the fence the medals they had won in Vietnam, and made brief statements about the war, sometimes emotionally, sometimes in icy, bitter calm.

In the summer of 1970, twenty-eight commissioned officers of the military, including some veterans of Vietnam, saying they represented about 250 other officers, announced formation of the Concerned Officers Movement against the war. During the fierce bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong, around Christmas 1972, came the first defiance of B-52 pilots who refused to fly those missions.

On June 3, 1973, the New York Times reported dropouts among West Point cadets. Officials there, the reporter wrote, "linked the rate to an affluent, less disciplined, skeptical, and questioning generation and to the anti-military mood that a small radical minority and the Vietnam war had created."

But most of the antiwar action came from ordinary GIs, and most of these came from lower-income groups-white, black, Native American, Chinese.

A twenty-year-old New York City Chinese-American named Sam Choy enlisted at seventeen in the army, was sent to Vietnam, was made a cook, and found himself the target of abuse by fellow GIs, who called him "Chink" and "gook" (the term for the Vietnamese) and said he looked like the enemy. One day he took a rifle and fired warning shots at his tormentors. "By this time I was near the perimeter of the base and was thinking of joining the Viet Cong; at least they would trust me. " Choy was taken by military police, beaten, court-martialed, sentenced to eighteen months of hard labor at Fort Leavenworth. "They beat me up every day, like a time clock." He ended his interview with a New York Chinatown newspaper saying: "One thing: I want to tell all the Chinese kids that the army made me sick. They made me so sick that I can't stand it."

A dispatch from Phu Bai in April 1972 said that fifty GIs out of 142 men in the company refused to go on patrol, crying: "This isn't our war!" The New York Times on July 14,1973, reported that American prisoners of war in Vietnam, ordered by officers in the POW camp to stop cooperating with the enemy, shouted back: "Who's the enemy?" They formed a peace committee in the camp, and a sergeant on the committee later recalled his march from capture to the POW camp:

Until we got to the first camp, we didn't see a village intact; they were all destroyed. I sat down and put myself in the middle and asked myself: Is this right or wrong? Is it right to destroy villages? Is it right to kill people en masse? After a while it just got to me.

Pentagon officials in Washington and navy spokesmen in San Diego announced, after the United States withdrew its troops from Vietnam in 1973, that the navy was going to purge itself of "undesirables"- and that these included as many as six thousand men in the Pacific fleet, "a substantial proportion of them black." All together, about 563,000 GIs had received less than honorable discharges. In the year 1973, one of every five discharges was "less than honorable." indicating something less than dutiful obedience to the military. By 1971, 177 of every 1,000 American soldiers were listed as "absent without leave," some of them three or four times. Deserters doubled from 47,000 in 1967 to 89,000 in 1971.

One of those who stayed, fought, but then turned against the war was Ron Kovic. His father worked in a supermarket on Long Island. In 1963, at the age of seventeen, he enlisted in the marines. Two years later, in Vietnam, at the age of nineteen, his spine was shattered by shellfire. Paralyzed from the waist down, he was put in a wheelchair. Back in the States, he observed the brutal treatment of wounded veterans in the veterans' hospitals, thought more and more about the war, and joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He went to demonstrations to speak against the war. One evening he heard actor Donald Sutherland read from the post-World War I novel by Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun, about a soldier whose limbs and face were shot away by gunfire, a thinking torso who invented a way of communicating with the outside world and then beat out a message so powerful it could not be heard without trembling.

Sutherland began to read the passage and something I will never forget swept over me. It was as if someone was speaking for everything I ever went through in the hospital.... I began to shake and I remember there were tears in my eyes.

Kovic demonstrated against the war, and was arrested. He tells his story in Born on the Fourth of July:

They help me back into the chair and take me to another part of the prison building to be booked. "What's your name?" the officer behind the desk says.

"Ron Kovic," I say. "Occupation, Vietnam veteran against the war."

"What?" he says sarcastically, looking down at me.

"I'm a Vietnam veteran against the war," I almost shout back.

"You should have died over there," he says. He turns to his assistant "I'd like to take this guy and throw him off the roof."

They fingerprint me and take my picture and put me in a cell. I have begun to wet my pants like a little baby. The tube has slipped out during my examination by the doctor. I try to fall asleep but even though I am exhausted, the anger is alive in me like a huge hot stone in my chest. I lean my head up against the wall and listen to the toilets flush again and again.

Kovic and the other veterans drove to Miami to the Republican National Convention in 1972, went into the Convention Hall, wheeled themselves down the aisles, and as Nixon began his acceptance speech shouted, "Stop the bombing! Stop the war!" Delegates cursed them: "Traitor!" and Secret Service men hustled them out of the hall.

In the fall of 1973, with no victory in sight and North Vietnamese troops entrenched in various parts of the South, the United States agreed to accept a settlement that would withdraw American troops and leave the revolutionary troops where they were, until a new elected government would be set up including Communist and non-Communist elements. But the Saigon government refused to agree, and the United States decided to make one final attempt to bludgeon the North Vietnamese into submission. It sent waves of B-52s over Hanoi and Haiphong, destroying homes and hospitals, killing unknown numbers of civilians. The attack did not work. Many of the B-52s were shot down, there was angry protest all over the world-and Kissinger went back to Paris and signed very much the same peace agreement that had been agreed on before.

The United States withdrew its forces, continuing to give aid to the Saigon government, but when the North Vietnamese launched at tacks in early 1975 against the major cities in South Vietnam, the government collapsed. In late April 1975, North Vietnamese troops entered Saigon. The American embassy staff fled, along with many Vietnamese who feared Communist rule, and the long war in Vietnam was over. Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, and both parts of Vietnam were unified as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

Traditional history portrays the end of wars as coming from the initiatives of leaders-negotiations in Paris or Brussels or Geneva or Versailles-just as it often finds the coming of war a response to the demand of "the people." The Vietnam war gave clear evidence that at least for that war (making one wonder about the others) the political leaders were the last to take steps to end the war-"the people" were far ahead. The President was always far behind. The Supreme Court silently turned away from cases challenging the Constitutionality of the war. Congress was years behind public opinion.
In the spring of 1971, syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, two firm supporters of the war, wrote regretfully of a "sudden outbreak of anti-war emotionalism" in the House of Representatives, and said: "The anti-war animosities now suddenly so pervasive among House Democrats are viewed by Administration backers as less anti-Nixon than as a response to constituent pressures."

It was only after the intervention in Cambodia ended, and only after the nationwide campus uproar over that invasion, that Congress passed a resolution declaring that American troops should not be sent into Cambodia without its approval. And it was not until late 1973, when American troops had finally been removed from Vietnam, that Congress passed a bill limiting the power of the President to make war without congressional consent; even there, in that "War Powers Resolution," the President could make war for sixty days on his own without a congressional declaration.

The administration tried to persuade the American people that the war was ending because of its decision to negotiate a peace-not because it was losing the war, not because of the powerful antiwar movement in the United States. But the government's own secret memoranda all through the war testify to its sensitivity at each stage about "public opinion" in the United States and abroad. The data is in the Pentagon Papers.

In June of 1964, top American military and State Department officials, including Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, met in Honolulu. "Rusk stated that public opinion on our SEA policy was badly divided and that, therefore, the President needed an affirmation of support."

Diem had been replaced by a general named Khanh. The Pentagon historians write: "Upon his return to Saigon on June 5 Ambassador Lodge went straight from the airport to call on General Khanh . . . the main thrust of his talk with Khanh was to hint that the United States Government would in the immediate future be preparing U.S. public opinion for actions against North Vietnam." Two months later came the Gulf of Tonkin affair.

On April 2, 1965, a memo from CIA director John McCone suggested that the bombing of North Vietnam be increased because it was "not sufficiently severe" to change North Vietnam's policy. "On the other hand . . . we can expect increasing pressure to stop the bombing . . . from various elements of the American public, from the press, the United Nations and world opinion." The U.S. should try for a fast knockout before this opinion could build up, McCone said.

Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton's memo of early 1966 suggested destruction of locks and dams to create mass starvation, because "strikes at population targets" would "create a counterproductive wave of revulsion abroad and at home." In May 1967, the Pentagon historians write: "McNaughton was also very deeply concerned about the breadth and intensity of public unrest and dissatisfaction with the war . . . especially with young people, the underprivileged, the intelligentsia and the women." McNaughton worried: "Will the move to call up 20,000 Reserves . . . polarize opinion to the extent that the 'doves' in the United States will get out of hand-massive refusals to serve, or to fight, or to cooperate, or worse?" He warned:

There may be a limit beyond which many Americans and much of the world will not permit the United States to go. The picture of the world's greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1000 non-combatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission, on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one. It could conceivably produce a costly distortion in the American national consciousness.

*****

One sign that the ideas of the antiwar movement had taken hold in the American public was that juries became more reluctant to convict antiwar protesters, and local judges too were treating them differently. In Washington, by 1971, judges were dismissing charges against demonstrators in cases where two years before they almost certainly would have been sent to jail. The antiwar groups who had raided draft boards- the Baltimore Four, the Catonsville Nine, the Milwaukee Fourteen, the Boston Five, and more-were receiving lighter sentences for the same crimes.

The last group of draft board raiders, the "Camden 28," were priests, nuns, and laypeople who raided a draft board in Camden, New Jersey, in August 1971. It was essentially what the Baltimore Four had done four years earlier, when all were convicted and Phil Berrigan got six years in prison. But in this instance, the Camden defendants were acquitted by the jury on all counts. When the verdict was in, one of the jurors, a fifty-three-year-old black taxi driver from Atlantic

City named Samuel Braithwaite, who had spent eleven years in the army, left a letter for the defendants:

To you, the clerical physicians with your God-given talents, I say, well done. Well done for trying to heal the sick irresponsible men, men who were chosen by the people to govern and lead them. These men, who failed the people, by raining death and destruction on a hapless country.... You went out to do your part while your brothers remained in their ivory towers watching . . . and hopefully some day in the near future, peace and harmony may reign to people of all nations.

This Is The Kennedy Who Should Have Been President

2009-09-01T19:51:00.000-07:00

As I've said before, I am an RFK fan.

You've Waited Long Enough, Senator Feinstein

2009-08-31T07:10:00.000-07:00

I just saw Sen. Dianne Feinstein on television opining that she wishes that AG Holder would have waited to begin his investigation of CIA interrogation practices.

Well Senator, the waiting has gone on long enough.

You had your shot.

You and your spineless cronies sat by for 8 years while George Bush and Dick Cheney destroyed Constitutional liberty.

You did nothing.

It's too late for you and your colleagues to do anything meaningful.

Go back to your Senate chamber and be ineffective.

You've already proven how good you are at that.

We'll Never See His Kind Again

2009-08-29T09:11:00.000-07:00

RIP Senator Kennedy.

Edward Moore Kennedy

2009-08-26T16:47:00.000-07:00

Sad loss for America. A true progressive lion has passed from the scene.

How Health Care Reform Will Help Texas

2009-08-08T09:50:00.000-07:00


	HOW HEALTH INSURANCE REFORM WILL BENEFIT TEXAS Topics on this page: The Health Care Status Quo: Why Texas Needs Health Reform Stable and Secure Health Care for Texas Stable and Secure Health Care for Texas How Health Insurance Reform will Benefit Texas LOWER COSTS FOR RESIDENTS OF TEXAS Ending the Hidden Tax – Saving You Money: Right now, providers in Texas lose over $5.4 billion in bad debt which often gets passed along to families in the form of a hidden premium “tax”.¹ Health insurance reform will tackle this financial burden by improving our health care system and covering the uninsured, allowing the 409 hospitals² and the 59,797 physicians³ in Texas to better care for their patients. Health Insurance Premium Relief: Premiums for residents of Texas have risen 104% since 2000.⁴ Through health insurance reform, 4,876,100 to 5,456,700 middle class Texas residents will be eligible for premium credits to ease the burden of these high costs.⁵ Strengthening Small Businesses: 273,011 employers in Texas are small businesses.⁶ With tax credits and a health insurance exchange where they can shop for health plans, insurance coverage will become more affordable for them. Reforms that Reduce Your Costs: Under health insurance reform, insurance companies will be prevented from placing annual or lifetime caps on the coverage you receive. Insurance companies will also have to abide by yearly limits on how much they can charge for out-of-pocket expenses, helping 132,900 households in Texas struggling under the burden of high health care expenses.⁷ INCREASE YOUR CHOICES: PROTECTING WHAT WORKS AND FIXING WHAT'S BROKEN Insurance Stability and Security: Health insurance reform will strengthen our system of employer-based health insurance, with an additional 202,000 people in Texas potentially getting insurance through their work.⁸ Health insurance reform will also ensure that you will always have guaranteed choices of quality, affordable health insurance if you lose your job, switch jobs, move or get sick. Eliminating Discrimination for Pre-Existing Conditions, Health Status or Gender: 10% of people in Texas have diabetes⁹, and 28% have high blood pressure¹⁰ – two conditions that insurance companies could use as a reason to deny you health insurance. Health insurance reform will prevent insurance companies from denying coverage based on your health, and it will end discrimination that charges you more if you’re sick or a woman. One-Stop Shopping – Putting Families in Charge: With the new health insurance exchange, you can easily and simply compare insurance prices and health plans and decide which quality affordable option is right for you and your family. These proposals will help the 5,832,900 residents of Texas who currently do not have health insurance to obtain needed coverage, and it will also help the 1,043,300 Texas residents who currently purchase insurance in the individual insurance market.¹¹ Guaranteeing Choices: The largest health insurer in Texas holds 44% of the market, which limits the choices that you have for finding coverage.¹² With a competitive public insurance option, you will have more choices and increased competition that holds insurance companies accountable. ASSURE QUALITY, AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE FOR AMERICANS Preventive Care for Better Health: 44% of Texas residents have not had a colorectal cancer screening, and 25% of women have not had a mammogram in the past 2 years.¹³ By requiring health plans to cover preventive services for everyone, investing in prevention and wellness, and promoting primary care, health insurance reform will work to create a system that prevents illness and disease instead of just treating it when it’s too late and costs more. Improving Care for Children and Seniors: 26% of children in Texas have not visited a dentist in the past year,¹⁴and 34% of seniors did not receive a flu vaccine¹⁵. Health reform will ensure coverage for kids’ dental, vision, and hearing needs, and will promote quality coverage for America’s seniors, including recommended immunizations. ¹ Hospital uncompensated care cost is estimated using a GAO model and the Hospital Cost Reports. Total uncompensated care is computed as hospital uncompensated care divided by 63% (Hadley and Holahan’s study on “The Cost of Care for the Uninsured” for Kaiser in 2004 found that hospitals account for 63% of total uncompensated care). Data expressed in 2009 dollars using Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, “National Health Expenditure Data.” ² 2007 AHA Annual Survey Copyright 2009 by Health Forum LLC, an affiliate of the American Hospital Association, special data request, March 2009. Available at http://www.ahaonlinestore.com. ³ American Medical Association, Physicians Professional Data, year of data 2008, copyright 2008: Special Data Request. ⁴ Center for Financing, Access and Cost Trends, AHRQ, Medical Expenditure Panel Survey - Insurance Component, 2000, Table II.D.1. Center for Financing, Access and Cost Trends, AHRQ, Medical Expenditure Panel Survey - Insurance Component, 2006, Table X.D. Projected 2009 premiums based on Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, “National Health Expenditure Data.” ⁵ U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey. Annual Social and Economic Supplements, March 2007 and 2008. ⁶ Center for Financing, Access and Cost Trends, AHRQ, Medical Expenditure Panel Survey - Insurance Component, 2006, Table II.A.1a. ⁷ Center for Financing, Access and Cost Trends, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, 2006. ⁸ U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey. HIA-4 Health Insurance Coverage Status and Type of Coverage by State--All Persons: 1999 to 2007, 2007. Calculations based on Congressional Budget Office. Letter to the Hon Charles Rangel on America’s Affordable Health Choices Act, July 14, 2009. ⁹ Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Survey Data. Atlanta, Georgia: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2008. ¹⁰ Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Survey Data. Atlanta, Georgia: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2007. ¹¹ U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey. Annual Social and Economic Supplements, March 2007 and 2008. ¹² American Medical Association. (2008,2009). "Competition in health insurance: A comprehensive study of U.S. Markets: 2008 Update," American Medical Association. ¹³ Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Survey Data. Atlanta, Georgia: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2007. ¹⁴ Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative. 2007 National Survey of Children's Health, Data Resource Center for Child and Adolescent Health. ¹⁵ Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Survey Data. Atlanta, Georgia: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2007. The Health Care Status Quo: Why Texas Needs Health Reform Congress and the President are working to enact health care reform legislation that protects what works about health care and fixes what is broken. Texans know that inaction is not an option. Sky-rocketing health care costs are hurting families, forcing businesses to cut or drop health benefits, and straining state budgets. Millions are paying more for less. Families and businesses in Texas deserve better. TEXANS CAN’T AFFORD THE STATUS QUO Roughly 12 million people in Texas get health insurance on the job¹, where family premiums average $13,525, about the annual earning of a full-time minimum wage job.² Since 2000 alone, average family premiums have increased by 104 percent in Texas.³ Household budgets are strained by high costs: 17 percent of middle-income Texas families spend more than 10 percent of their income on health care.⁴ High costs block access to care: 20 percent of people in Texas report not visiting a doctor due to high costs.⁵ Texas businesses and families shoulder a hidden health tax of roughly $1,800 per year on premiums as a direct result of subsidizing the costs of the uninsured.⁶ AFFORDABLE HEALTH COVERAGE IS INCREASINGLY OUT OF REACH IN TEXAS 25 percent of people in Texas are uninsured, and 75 percent of them are in families with at least one full-time worker.⁷ The percent of Texans with employer coverage is declining: from 57 to 50 percent between 2000 and 2007.⁸ Much of the decline is among workers in small businesses. While small businesses make up 70 percent of Texas businesses,⁹ only 32 percent of them offered health coverage benefits in 2006 -- down 5 percent since 2000.¹⁰ Choice of health insurance is limited in Texas. HCSC (Blue Cross Blue Shield ) alone constitutes 39 percent of the health insurance market share in Texas, with the top two insurance providers accounting for 59 percent.¹¹ Choice is even more limited for people with pre-existing conditions. In Texas, premiums can vary based on demographic factors and health status, and coverage can exclude pre-existing conditions or even be denied completely. TEXANS NEED HIGHER QUALITY, GREATER VALUE, AND MORE PREVENTATIVE CARE The overall quality of care in Texas is rated as “Weak.”¹² Preventative measures that could keep Texans healthier and out of the hospital are deficient, leading to problems across the age spectrum: 20 percent of children in Texas are obese.¹³ 25 percent of women over the age of 50 in Texas have not received a mammogram in the past two years. 44 percent of men over the age of 50 in Texas have never had a colorectal cancer screening. 66 percent of adults over the age of 65 in Texas have received a flu vaccine in the past year. ¹⁴ The need for reform in Texas and across the country is clear. Texas families simply can’t afford the status quo and deserve better. President Obama is committed to working with Congress to pass health reform this year that reduces costs for families, businesses and government; protects people’s choice of doctors, hospitals and health plans; and assures affordable, quality health care for all Americans. ¹ U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey. HIA-4 Health Insurance Coverage Status and Type of Coverage by State--All Persons: 1999 to 2007, 2007. ² Center for Financing, Access and Cost Trends, AHRQ, Medical Expenditure Panel Survey - Insurance Component, 2006, Table X.D. Projected 2009 premiums based on Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, "National Health Expenditure Data," available at http://www.cms.hhs.gov/nationalhealthexpenddata/. ³ Center for Financing, Access and Cost Trends, AHRQ, Medical Expenditure Panel Survey - Insurance Component, 2000, Table II.D.1. Center for Financing, Access and Cost Trends, AHRQ, Medical Expenditure Panel Survey - Insurance Component, 2006, Table X.D. Projected 2009 premiums based on Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, "National Health Expenditure Data," available at http://www.cms.hhs.gov/nationalhealthexpenddata/. ⁴ Center for Financing, Access and Cost Trends, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, 2006. ⁵ Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Survey Data. Atlanta, Georgia: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2007. ⁶ Furnas, B., Harbage, P. (2009). "The Cost Shift from the Uninsured." Center for American Progress. ⁷ U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey. Annual Social and Economic Supplements, March 2007 and 2008. ⁸ U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey. HIA-4 Health Insurance Coverage Status and Type of Coverage by State--All Persons: 1999 to 2007, 2007. ⁹ Center for Financing, Access and Cost Trends, AHRQ, Medical Expenditure Panel Survey - Insurance Component, 2006, Table II.A.1a. ¹⁰ Center for Financing, Access and Cost Trends, AHRQ, Medical Expenditure Panel Survey - Insurance Component, 2001, 2006, Table II.A.2. ¹¹ Health Care for America Now. (2009). "Premiums Soaring in Consolidated Health Insurance Market." Health Care for America Now. ¹² Agency for Health Care Research and Quality. 2007 State Snapshots. Available http://statesnapshots.ahrq.gov/snaps07/index.jsp. ¹³ Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative. 2007 National Survey of Children's Health, Data Resource Center for Child and Adolescent Health. ¹⁴ Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Survey Data. Atlanta, Georgia: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2007.

Here, Look At This, You Dumbass Birthers

2009-07-31T16:42:00.001-07:00

http://travel.state.gov/visa/immigrants/info/info_3195.html
...
Birth Certificates

Each applicant will need to obtain an original birth certificate issued by the official custodian of birth records in the country of birth, showing the date and place of birth and the parentage of the alien, based upon the original registration of birth.

The certificate must contain the:

* Person's date of birth
* Person's place of birth
* Names of both parents, and
* Annotation by the appropriate authority indicating that it is an extract from the official records
...

I suggest you review the rules for a valid birth certificate for the US Government

FROM THE PASSPORT APPLICATION FOR US CITIZENS

1. PROOF OF U.S. CITIZENSHIP
APPLICANTS BORN IN THE UNITED STATES: Submit a previous U.S. passport or certified birth certificate. A birth certificate must include your full name, the full name of your parent(s), date and place of birth, sex, date the birth record was filed, and the seal or other certification of the official custodian of such records.

THE COLB YOU CONSIDER INVALID CLEARLY QUALIFIES ON ALL REQUIREMENTS ----

EVEN IF BERG WINS ALL THE GOVERNMENT CAN REQUIRE BY THEIR OWN STANDARDS APPEARS TO BE THE COLB WE ALL HAVE SEEN, ONLINE VERION.

According to the REAL ID ACT (passed by a Republican Congress in 2005 under a Republican President) which is failing miserably due to unfunded cost issues for the states only required the following (less than is required for a US PASSPORT) on a birth certificate to prove citizenship according to the state of Oklahoma -- (FYI: That is a red state near Texas, last time I checked)

http://www.dps.state.ok.us/dls/dlid.htm

Primary proof of identification for a United States citizen
...
A certified birth certificate, as issued by the appropriate state agency from the state of birth. The birth certificate shall include the person's name, date of birth, and sex, shall be signed and sealed, and shall include the certificate number.

SO much for any need for a "LONG FORM" Birth Certificate -- not according Federal Requirements to prove citizenship. It appears even the Republicans in control of Congress disagree with your assertions there is a need for a "LONG FORM" birth Certificate after 9/11.

Senator Posey's bill HR 1503 the birthers are so proud of does not indicate any minimum requirements for a birth certificate (Do your kinds have any paper and crayons?)

IN ADDITION, IT IS THE ONLY DOCUMENT ISSUED BY HAEAII TO ANY BIRTH CERTIFICATE REQUESTERS.

http://hawaii.gov/dhhl/applicants/appforms/applyhhl

"Applying for Hawaiian Home Lands
Loa'a Ka 'Aina Ho'opulapula

Aloha Kakou!

...

Primary Documents

Birth certificates (Certificates of Live Birth and Certifications of Live Birth) and Certificates of Hawaiian Birth are the primary documents used to determine native Hawaiian qualification."

The Department of Hawaiian Home Lands accepts both Certificates of Live Birth (original birth certificate) and Certifications of Live Birth because they are official government records documenting an individual?s birth. The Certificate of Live Birth generally has more information which is useful for genealogical purposes as compared to the Certification of Live Birth which is a computer-generated printout that provides specific details of a person?s birth. Although original birth certificates (Certificates of Live Birth) are preferred for their greater detail, the State Department of Health (DOH) no longer issues Certificates of Live Birth. When a request is made for a copy of a birth certificate, the DOH issues a Certification of Live Birth.

Last night the US House of Representatives voted unanimously that Obama was a citizen of Hawaii 378 For, 0 Against and 55 Not Voting.

H. RES. 593

Recognizing and celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the entry of Hawaii into the Union as the 50th State.

RESOLUTION

Recognizing and celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the entry of Hawaii into the Union as the 50th State.

...

Whereas the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama, was born in Hawaii;

Socialist v. Fascist

2009-07-26T10:43:00.000-07:00

I'm starting to get pretty sick of right-winger's bleating about "Obama's socialism", blah, blah, blah.

Here's a thought:

Look up the word "fascism" in the dictionary/encyclopedia (or just the convenient link I have provided). That's what George Bush/Dick Cheney were steering us toward.

So from now on, I am going to refer to the R's as what they are when they bitch about "socialists" in the public discourse.

Even Peggy Noonan Hates Her

2009-07-12T19:30:00.000-07:00

Peggy rips Palin.

Ha-ha-ha! This Is Funny!

2009-07-08T18:01:00.000-07:00

100 reasons why Palin is the queen of idiocracy.

I Just Lost All Respect For Texas Tech

2009-07-07T18:50:00.001-07:00

Fredo finds employment!

Of Course, It's The Media's Fault

2009-07-07T18:48:00.000-07:00

The liberal media playing gotcha journalism should be ashamed of itself.

WTF Is A "Department of Law"???????????

2009-07-07T17:10:00.000-07:00

I love this moron. She should give interviews every day for the next 3 1/2 years.

More Teabagging Fun!

2009-07-07T08:25:00.000-07:00

Here's our illustrious Senator Cornyn meeting the wing-nut wack-jobs he loves so much. Except it didn't quite turn out the way he expected...

It Was The Paperwork...

2009-07-07T08:14:00.000-07:00

What is wrong with this stupid fucking woman?

Tea-Bag This, Again

2009-07-06T14:52:00.000-07:00

There was a gathering of these dumbasses in Cass County, too.

Inbred Bastards

2009-07-06T14:45:00.000-07:00

This is great.

Interesting Article From The Secular Web

2009-07-05T19:58:00.000-07:00

The Human Origin of the Bible: How Nicaea Defined God with a Vote

Gary Lenaire

"The main point is not the names of the religionists who edited the first Bibles; nor is it the dates that those events occurred on. My Christian critics attempt to distract you with such trivia in order to evade the real issue here. What does matter is how the church fathers produced what is called 'God's Word.'"

The circular argument is so persuasive that many people seldom realize the error no matter how often it's pointed out to them. As a younger man I was a prime candidate for this deception. In many cases I honestly thought that a circular argument was valid or didn't even realize that it was circular to begin with.

What is a circular argument? When a series of statements in an argument is made such that the conclusion is assumed in one or more of the premises the argument is circular. For example:

The Bible is the true, perfect, and inerrant word of God. How do I know this? Because the Bible says so.

If scholars were to set out to verify whether the Bible (or any other religious book) is truly divine and perfect, they would make inquiries and comparisons with an independent, rational, and logical source. They would not let the early architects of the Bible go unchecked simply because they claim that it is God's Word. Likewise, the same scholars would not accept the authenticity of a newly found Shakespeare manuscript until examination and verification had taken place.

It's called a circular argument because the premise gives the illusion of creating or reinforcing the conclusion. The following example further illustrates a circular argument:

Miracles happen and many ministers have witnessed them. We know that ministers witnessed miracles because these ministers say so. If the miracles were not witnessed, ministers would not say that they were. Therefore, the miracles happened and were witnessed.[1]

Roman Emperor Flavius Valerius Constantinus (Constantine) became the Eastern ruler of Rome in 305-306 CE (Common Era). Though the date of his conversion to Christianity is unclear, Constantine experienced his infamous "in hoc signo vinces" (in this sign you shall conquer) vision around 312 CE before his victory at the Milvian Bridge battle. History states that he had a vision of those words on a Christian cross prompting him to pledge to convert if he actually did win the battle. Since Constantine did succeed in the fight, the alleged vision eventually led to his conversion. And because of that the world will never be the same. Crusades? Inquisitions? Male chauvinism? Forbidding condom usage in AIDS-stricken Africa?... So glad Christianity is improving the world!

When Jesus and the Apostles are said to have existed, the Roman Empire ruled the Palestinian region. The empire destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE thus scattering the Jews. At that time the Jesus Movement and Christ Cult, in their many diverse forms, were growing in influence throughout the Mediterranean. Because many of these believers would not worship the Roman emperors or serve the magistrates, they experienced persecution and political conflict over the next two centuries. In this respect I sort of liked the early Christians--you know, sticking it to Caesar and all... but I digress.

In 313 CE Constantine shared the Roman throne with emperor Licinius. The two met at Milan and issued the Edict of Milan, confirming that Christianity would be legal throughout the empire. The edict made Christianity lawful but had not yet made Christianity the official state religion. When Constantine defeated Emperor Licinius in 323 CE, he ended the conflicts against the Christian church and took full control of the Empire. Shortly after that time Christianity was branded the primary religion of the Roman Empire. Up until then the various Christian movements were spread out and disorganized. Many disciples didn't associate the earthly Jesus of Nazareth with a spiritual Christ. Some simply followed the Gnostic teachings of the earthly Jesus Movement while others believed in a Jesus that never actually lived in the flesh. Many Christians did not regard any writings as inspired by God. Please notice that up until Constantine's reign there was no "official" and unified understanding of Jesus, the Father, and the Holy Spirit within the church. Under Constantine's rule the many various versions of Jesus were fused into one messiah. The other messiahs were then branded "heresy." Thus the "I am right you are wrong" fundamentalist tradition continues in Judeo-Christian religions. (Islam now shares that same brand of orthodox arrogance.)

Constantine, in keeping with Roman logic and politics, brought order to the various Christian groups. How he did it, however, was very clever. He knew that there must be a unified creed to bring ecumenical peace between congregations throughout the empire. (Religion and politics are sisters in Western culture; the one is most always influenced by the other.) If Christianity was to be the Roman religion then it must be brought under submission to Constantine's interests. Written edicts were a Roman tradition and those edicts were used as legal creeds. Legal creeds were used to control and punish. Henceforth Christianity ruled, tortured, and murdered with an iron fist.

Constantine's actions are very important. In the years before he took the throne, the various forms of the Jesus Movement were rapidly gaining influence in the minds of various Roman citizens, including many philosophers. Before Constantine, the emperor Diocletian tried to hinder the growth of Christianity by way of persecution. He failed. By that time, the church was too large and its leaders too resourceful to be eradicated. Christianity could not be destroyed by persecution. The refusal of Christians to honor the traditional gods, and hence to worship the Roman Emperor, created a conflict for the Roman leaders. By forcing the choice between the accepted Roman gods and Jesus, the emperors badly misjudged the resiliency of Christians. Many Christian fathers and mothers died for their faith thereby abandoning or endangering their children and elderly dependents. That fact becomes even less noble when we remember that Muslim suicide bombers and other martyrs die for their faith quite often. Faith is no reason to kill yourself or others.

By 323 CE Constantine was sympathetic to the church. He devised a plan to make room for the Christian faith under the umbrella of a genial monotheism. In granting the church ecclesial legitimacy, Constantine not only diffused a tense situation, he harnessed Christian allegiance to the Roman State. Constantine had previously been the Eastern ruler of a divided Rome. Now that the consolidated throne wielded absolute power over the empire he was not about to see it divided again.

Constantine commissioned the Council of Nicaea to vote on the orthodox (accepted / adjudicated) view of Jesus' identity. Columbia University published this statement:

When Constantine defeated Emperor Licinius in 323 CE he ended the persecutions against the Christian church. Shortly afterwards Christians faced a trouble from within: the Arian controversy began and threatened to divide the church. The problem began in Alexandria, it started as a debate between the bishop Alexander and the presbyter (pastor, or priest) Arius. Arius proposed that if the Father begat the Son, the latter must have had a beginning, that there was a time when he was not, and that his substance was from nothing like the rest of creation. The Council of Nicaea, a gathering similar to the one described in Acts 15:4-22, condemned the beliefs of Arius and wrote the first version of the now famous creed proclaiming that the Son was "one in being with the Father" by use of the Greek word homoousius.[2]

I want to stress the importance of this fact. In mandating the vote, Constantine directed the path of Christianity for centuries to come. Consider this: Flavius Constantine (the ruler of the known world) instituted Christianity as the official religion and then later demanded 40-50 copies of the "agreed upon" Bible be published to govern the church. This not only radically and exclusively defined Christianity; it changed the trajectory of history. The Holy Roman Empire was born. That "Christian" (yes folks, very Christian) Empire dominated humanity with a bloody sword for the next ten centuries. Perhaps the actual human rabbi "Jesus" had something very different in mind regarding his teachings. Selah?

The Council of Nicaea numbered around three hundred bishops and other Christians. In his writings, Eusebius lists many of them and their country of origin. Several of the believers present had, because of recent conflicts, faced the threat of death for their faith. Consider the fact that Nazis killed people for less than a generation; the Romans killed Christians for the first two hundred years of the first millennium! At any distance we can see the possibility of Christians on the Nicene council being politically persuaded in the aftermath of persecution. It is also significant to note that the Jews canonized their Old Testament Bible upon returning from their oppressive Babylonian Exile in 515 BCE (Before Common Era). Reactions to war and persecution have caused some similar subsequent patterns in those who suffered. After converting to Christianity, the Holy Roman Empire embarked upon its prestigious record of murder, torture, persecution, inquisitions, and crusades that lasted for centuries.

The "born-again" Christian Emperor Constantine murdered his wife Fausta and son Crispus in the year 325 CE. That's right, he murdered, killed... ended his own personal family. Only a very Christian-like figure (in the traditional sense) can dream of abandoning personal kin (see Matthew 19:29). These senseless killings happened just over a year after he ordered the Council of Nicaea to convene. The Nicene Christians voted on whether Jesus of Nazareth was merely a man, Christ, and or the Son of God. Under Constantine's mandate to vote, the log Nicene council also decided that Jesus was consubstantial with the father. Therefore, it was a family murderer who was ultimately responsible for directing the church to settle the debated question of the so-called divinity of Jesus.

Violence runs thick in the history of Christianity. Don't think so? Jesus' description of his own worldwide judgment in the Revelation of John is the bloodiest and most violent text of the Bible. Eternal hell is Jesus' way of dealing with people who are not born with the ability to believe in him. That's because the early church fathers (Bible architects) chose a violent and eternally angry God instead of a forgiving one. Why?

From its beginning, Christianity has faced a huge problem: many people refuse to convert. In order to maintain control over the people, the priests have had to insist on the "universal sin" of Adam while denying "universal salvation" of Jesus. The reason for this is to make converts! If you tell the people that "all" will be saved, then very few people will convert to Christianity and then the church has no money, influence, or power. The writers (priests, bishops, etc.) of the Bible understood this fact very well. This is probably why the Apocalypse of Peter was rejected from the final New Testament canon. Peter wrote that Jesus would eventually save all people from hell.[3]

How did the Nicene Council decide the ontological status of the "Son of God"? Again, they literally voted on it![4] The Holy Spirit's inspiration had nothing to do with the voting. Humans were the ones who made their choice in the election. Because Constantine mandated the ballot, these bishops had no choice but to do it. The voting bishops were under Constantine's authority and therefore had vested political and financial interests in following his orders.

The Nicene Council, which included the highly influential church father Eusebius of Caesarea (263-339), produced a creed that preceded a collection of books that would later become the first Bible. Constantine, looking to promote and organize Christianity in the growing number of churches in Constantinople, directed Eusebius to have at least forty copies of the scriptures made by practiced scribes and written legibly on prepared parchment. Eusebius became acquainted with Bishop Agapius, presbyter Dorotheus in Antioch, and Pamphilus of Caesarea. With the help of Origen's Hexapla and commentaries collected by Pamphilus, Eusebius prepared the first version New Testament. According to Eusebius:

Such were the emperor's commands, which were followed by the immediate execution of the work itself, which we sent him in magnificent and elaborately bound volumes of a threefold and fourfold form.[5]

Keep in mind the events that led up to this important first version of the New Testament. The Christians on the Nicene Council voted on the divine status of Jesus of Nazareth. Council member Eusebius, in concert with Dorotheus, Agapius, Pamphilus, Origen, and other believers, published their version (and that's all it was) of what they thought the Christian God was all about. Hundreds of other texts were thrown out as unorthodox or uninspired. Emperor Constantine took those New Testament copies and instituted them as authoritative.

The commentary from scholars, as well as from American Founding Father Thomas Paine (1737-1809), sees the Council of Nicaea as an election body because they did indeed vote upon various important issues concerning Jesus and the Church. The fact that the so-called Holy Spirit would depend on a few hundred mortal, fallible men to decide upon his words and characteristics with a mere vote should be enough to prove that the Christian religion and theology is man-made. Thomas Paine said this:

But by what authority do you call the Bible the Word of God? For this is the first point to be settled. It is not your calling it so that makes it so, any more than the Mahometans calling the Koran the Word of God makes the Koran to be so. The Popish Councils of Nice [Nicaea] and Laodicea, about 350 years after the time the person called Jesus Christ is said to have lived, voted the books that now compose what is called the New Testament to be the Word of God. This was done by yeas and nays, as we now vote a law. The Pharisees of the second temple, after the Jews returned from captivity in Babylon, did the same by the books that now compose the Old Testament, and this is all the authority there is, which to me is no authority at all. I am as capable of judging for myself as they were, and I think more so, because, as they made a living by their religion, they had a self-interest in the vote they gave.[6]

Constantine, the Council of Nicaea, and Eusebius are all responsible for the events leading up to the first version of the New Testament scriptures. Therefore, they are responsible for the Roman Empire's first official and decreed version of God and Christianity. They dictated to the world by force the message of Jesus. They proselytized by the sword in order to convert the helpless and hopeless. They sold the message of damnation while claiming to own the only antidote to the curse. The Christian priests bathed in riches as they collected money from the poor. These wretched practices have been the church's calling card to this day.

God did not drop the original Bible from the windows of heaven. No, it was human politics, violent religion, and compulsory votes that eventually determined the divinely extraterrestrial message of the so-called God. Human opinion, and opinion alone, determined God's Word! Because of that there have been many versions of the Bible since. The Church, in its 20,000+ denominations and sects, still argues about which books should be included. (Side note: the fact that the council could at least vote is ironically a positive thing; a voting body is better than just one monarch forcing his choice on the people.)

OK, forget the previous paragraphs for a moment. There is something exceedingly more important than the names and dates of the people and events that formed the first Bibles. The main point is not the names of the religionists who edited the first Bibles; nor is it the dates that those events occurred on. My Christian critics attempt to distract you with such trivia in order to evade the real issue here. What does matter is how the church fathers produced what is called "God's Word." If you claim that the Holy Spirit guided the early Christians in the process of "receiving" God's Word then I would like for you to prove that assertion (fantastic claims require fantastic proof). There is no evidence that an invisible Holy Sprit even exists. Further, if you think you can discern the voice and words of God better than someone else then you are claiming the same authority as Eusebius and his cronies. That is, you think you know what God is and isn't saying to the world. That thinking is arrogant, irrational, and unfounded. You can claim that your invisible friend is better than someone else's but the only people who will agree with you are the ones sharing your religious membership! A quote from my first book, An Infidel Manifesto (2006):

The argument is made by many Christians that the books that are now referred to as the Bible have been miraculously preserved by the Holy Spirit. Even if God had performed this miracle, it doesn't change the historical fact that people (not God) wrote the books in the first place. Again, if you decide who heard from God and who didn't, then you are using the same process as those who canonized the Bible. To accept the Bible's inerrancy is to accept the group of men who canonized it as inerrant. By making this choice you also are determining what is inerrant and what is not. You have become a part of the process that dictates to the world what God's inerrant word really is. Logically, then, you are claiming that your judgment is inerrant! Many Christians shrug this reality off by saying, "the Holy Spirit leads my thinking." Like love, circular logic can be blinding.

The decision to include or exclude any particular book in the canon was made under the same influence that all other political and religious decisions have been made. That influence is love, money, power, vengeance, forgiveness, families, sex, unity, greed, loss, royalty, revenge, fear, geography, and all other human issues. It is naive to assume that your religious heroes were immune to the weaknesses and circumstances that all humans face. It is equally naive to think that your religious heroes possessed some kind of supernatural infallible powers.[7]

The idea of authority is called into question as we approach the topic of Jesus' identity and the canonization of the Bible. A group of Bishops on the Nicene Council literally voted to decide Jesus' divinity. Did they have magic or spiritual powers to discern God's characteristics? Of course they didn't; they were human, just like you and me. They voted like we vote for our laws and politicians; it's a popularity, political, and cultural race. Eusebius's publication was simply the first Roman version of the new orthodox Bible. It wasn't even close to perfect. The traditional Christian Bible, in all of its inconsistencies, contradictions, and anachronisms... frankly--sucked. That's why people have been trying to improve upon it since its beginning. Richard Carrier notes:

Contrary to common belief, there was never a one-time, truly universal decision as to which books should be included in the Bible. It took over a century of the proliferation of numerous writings before anyone even bothered to start picking and choosing, and then it was largely a cumulative, individual and happenstance event, guided by chance and prejudice more than objective and scholarly research, until priests and academics began pronouncing what was authoritative and holy, and even they were not unanimous. Every church had its favored books, and since there was nothing like a clearly-defined orthodoxy until the 4th century, there were in fact many simultaneous literary traditions. The illusion that it was otherwise is created by the fact that the church that came out on top simply preserved texts in its favor and destroyed or let vanish opposing documents. Hence what we call "orthodoxy" is simply "the church that won.[8]

Let me ask a very important question to evangelical Christians: How did you come to place your trust in the early church father's decision to choose the inspired books from the uninspired? Whatever your answer to that question is, you still had to make that decision for yourself. You chose to believe in their version of God and his word as published in the Bible. That means you, like the early church fathers, think you know what God says and what he doesn't say. By this logic you also know that the Apocalypse of Peter is uninspired and should not be in the Bible. You have become an authority on the validity of God's words. Bible Christians, for example, claim the authority to say that the Bible is God's Word but the Koran is not. Put simply Christians claim to know God's voice and insist that non-Christians do not. The Bible has no more authority than the Koran. If you don't already, you would do well to doubt the veracity of the Jewish-Christian Bible writ. More educated (and honest) believers tend to base their faith on nonwritten ideas about spirituality and gods.

Again, the main point here is not the names of the religionists who edited the first Bibles; nor is it the dates that the events occurred on. Christian apologists attempt to distract you with those things in order to evade the non divine truth about the Bible. The importance dwells with how the church fathers produced what they called "God's Word." It was and is a human fabrication. Even though there is some historical accuracy in the scriptures, the miracles and other fantastic claims are simply mythology.

Constantine died in 337 CE. The city of Rome was founded in the year 753 BCE. Before Constantine, Rome had survived over a thousand years as a multicultural and polytheistic nation. In 410 CE Rome was conquered by the Visigoths, just 86 pathetic years after the commencement of Constantine's new Christian church-state empire. Constantine is, in my opinion, the most important figure in Western history. He changed the face of religion, politics, and the world. He set the stage for modern Christianity and holy war.

The Roman Catholic popes that Constantine gave birth to would later go on to design a bloodbath second to none. The Crusades, Inquisition, wars, torture, sexual oppression, pedophilia, witch hunts, persecution of scientists, and ignorance are all trademarks of the Roman Catholic Church. It all started with one man who married Christianity to the Roman state: Constantine. His existence has troubled the lives of millions since.

Let's take moment and reflect upon the prestige, longevity, domination, privilege, and power the Church has held for the last 1,700 years. No one has done it better; the killing, torture, rape, pedophilia, nonsense, delusion oppression, and perversion the Church has enjoyed for centuries are second to none! The Church, if you will pardon my blunt edge, has partied with the best of them. And let's give credit where credit is due: the European Church has maintained its supreme royalty where their competitors have failed in comparison. Here in the States religion has prospered wholesale as the puritan and Baptist revolution gave way to the milquetoast and watered-down megachurches. From begging televangelists to greedy faith healers, America has lost that warm, heavenly, religious vibe of the pomp and ceremony that is the Roman Catholic and Orthodox (Eastern, Russian, Greek, etc.) churches. But what hasn't been lost is the Christian fundamentalist Bible-believing thirst to conquer the world for the Nicene version of Jesus.

Notes

[1] Gary Lenaire, An Infidel Manifesto: Why Sincere Believers Lose Faith, p. 73

[2] http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/sbrandt/nicea.htm

[3] Gary Lenaire, An Infidel Manifesto: Why Sincere Believers Lose Faith, p. 44

[4] Schaff's History of the Christian Church, Volume III, Nicene and Post-Nicene

[5] Vita Const. 4.36.37

[6] Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

[7] Gary Lenaire, An Infidel Manifesto: Why Sincere Believers Lose Faith, p. 91

[8] Richard Carrier, "The Formation of the New Testament Canon," (2000)

More Sarah

2009-07-05T19:22:00.000-07:00

As I stated in response to a comment to a previous post, watching this white trash harpy grifter unravel is like watching a car wreck in slow motion. I just can't look away...

What A Bitch

2009-07-05T09:31:00.000-07:00

Oh, Sarah, Sarah, Sarah...

Bible Spice Delivers Again!

2009-07-05T08:52:00.001-07:00

Please, please, please nominate this woman in 2012!

This Guy Is Great

2009-07-04T12:06:00.000-07:00

Kind of a rant, but I agree with him.

The Greatness Of America

2009-07-03T16:24:00.000-07:00

You know, one of the most searing images in American history is that of LBJ taking the oath of office in Air Force One in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Immediately to the new President's left is a young, recently widowed lady named Jaqueline Bouvier Kennedy. This photo bespeaks volumes about what our American republic means.

Happy Fourth.

Bennett's Criminal Defense Book List

2009-06-27T08:08:00.001-07:00

Mark Bennett's list (pretty cool).

16 Books For Trial Lawyers

2009-06-27T08:03:00.000-07:00

Came across this list on Evan Shaeffer's blog (Via Mark Bennett).

Please, Please Do This, You Fucking Lunatics!

2009-05-13T10:14:00.000-07:00

Does anybody at the Republican Party have one iota of sense? It appears not.

Dick Cheney

2009-05-12T04:45:00.000-07:00

I am pretty sick of hearing Dick Cheney bleat about how "torture worked--release the memos that show that the programs worked, blah, blah, blah."

Whether they worked or not isn't the point. Hitler's policy for eradicating Jews from eastern Europe was highly effective, too. This doesn't mean that the policy was right, morally or legally.

Torture is a war crime. Period.

Check This Documentary Out

2009-05-10T14:00:00.002-07:00

This is fascinating.

This Michael Steele Is A Dumbass, Too

2009-05-02T10:42:00.000-07:00

Where the hell did they dig this guy up?

More Dumbass Rick Perry

2009-05-01T16:10:00.000-07:00

Please don't let us all die of swine flu, Mr. Obama, just don't make our rich friends pay their fair share of taxes!

Tea-Bag This, Too

2009-05-01T15:49:00.000-07:00

These people are really stupid.

Dumbass Rick Perry

2009-05-01T15:42:00.001-07:00

Secession really worked last time, dipshits.

Sean Hannity Is An Idiot And An Asshole

2009-04-30T19:00:00.000-07:00

Olbermann bitch-slapped Hannity on this issue.

An Anti-Torture Memorandum for President Obama

2009-04-30T18:35:00.000-07:00

Please read this, Mr. President. You too, Bob.

Who Would Jesus Torture?

2009-04-30T07:17:00.001-07:00

An interesting essay by a gentleman named Glenn Melancon I thought worthy of repeat here:

My oldest son will enter the US Army in June. In all likelihood he will go overseas with thousands of our brave men and women. If captured by the enemy, do I want him water boarded? Do I want his captors to strip him naked, to throw freezing water on him, to slap his face or to slam him repeatedly against a wall?

When I think about torture, I’m reminded of the story told in almost every Roman Catholic Church. Hanging on the walls are the Stations of the Cross. They tell how the Romans tortured and then murdered Jesus.

Who would Jesus torture? No one. Torture is wrong. It clearly violates the Golden Rule: “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 7:12).

Torture is also un-American. President Barack Obama was right to let the American people see the torture memos. Now it’s time for him to appoint a Special Prosecutor to conduct a nonpartisan investigation. Here’s why.

Our founding fathers rejected torture, and so should we. They specifically wrote two amendments to our Constitution to prevent it—the Fifth and Eighth Amendments. These Amendments outlawed torture.

The Fifth Amendments says, “No person . . . shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” In the Eighteenth Century European monarchies routinely “compelled,” or tortured, suspected criminals. The founders of our Republic wanted America to be different. They recognized the fact that government officials are not infallible. They make mistakes. Torturing an individual to gain information is wrong.

The Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution says, no “cruel and unusual punishments [shall be] inflicted.” Torture is both cruel and unusual. It is cruel and unusual to strip a person and put them in a box. It is cruel and unusual to strap a person to a board, invert the board, place a rag in the person’s mouth and then pour water down his throat. Our founders rejected this barbaric conduct.

In 1882 the United States signed the Geneva Conventions and committed itself to the humane treatment of prisoners captured in war. As a treaty, the Geneva Conventions are the “supreme law of the land,” and the President must obey it (US Constitution, article VI, paragraph 2). Article Three of the Conventions clearly states that parties to the treaty may not torture detainees and must treat detainees humanely. Can anyone say with a straight face that the CIA treated detainees “humanely?”

Torturing Al Qaida members also threatens our national security. The torture sessions produced unreliable information. Tortured prisoners simply made up information to end the physical pain and sent our intelligence officials on wild goose chases. The most useful information came by treating the captives humanely. They had been told that Americans were barbaric. When they discovered the truth, they opened up and betrayed their cause.

We can’t move forward without accountability. The Bush Administration tried to sweep this information under the rug. President Bush himself repeatedly lied to the American people, saying his administration did not torture. Thanks to President Obama we know the truth.

The only way to prevent future offenses against our values and our laws is to hold the architects of torture accountable. We must do to ourselves what we would do to others. After World War Two the United States prosecuted Japanese leaders for water boarding Americans. President Obama must appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate and charge those responsible for this potential crime. To ignore his duty as President would be wrong.

Filibuster This!

2009-04-28T18:51:00.000-07:00

That will make 60 when Franken gets to Washington. So long, Fascists!

Tea-Bag This!

2009-04-27T16:26:00.000-07:00

Wow! Despite the wing-nut's best efforts it appears our President is uncommonly popular. I am still getting used to a chief executive who can read and speak in complete sentences.

Appoint A Special Prosecutor NOW!!!!

2009-04-24T16:25:00.000-07:00

I don't know why we're even debating this on the cable news shows. The President should appoint an independent counsel now, and prosecute the war criminals (Republican AND Democrat) who signed off on torture. Period.

This Is Why We Need To Reform Our Criminal Justice System

2009-04-08T19:36:00.000-07:00

This is damn infuriating to read.

What Legacy? War Crimes?

2009-04-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

Does anyone really take this clown seriously anymore? He should be at the Hague on trial, along with Cheney, Rumsfeld and that idiot Fredo Gonzalez.

About Damn Time

2009-04-01T05:58:00.000-07:00

I wonder if they'll let me be a special prosecutor. I would work pro bono.

More On Vince--The Sham Wow Guy

2009-03-29T09:06:00.000-07:00

Seems he likes hookers. Until they bite his tongue.

Religulous

2009-03-26T17:42:00.000-07:00

Just ordered the new Bill Maher movie. Guess I'll offend more fundamentalists...

Ahh...Mr. President!

2009-03-24T18:00:00.000-07:00

Just finished watching President Obama's primetime press conference. It is quite refreshing to see someone in the office with the intellectual heft to intelligently discuss the issues confronting our nation. Quite a contrast with the retard who occupied the office a mere three months ago.

GOP Begs Dick Cheney To Go Back Into Hiding

2009-03-23T18:58:00.000-07:00

Seems they want Dick to get off their side. I love it when this freaky Bond-villain comes out of his cave!

Kudos To New Mexico

2009-03-23T18:56:00.000-07:00

New Mexico joins the civilized world and bans the barbaric death penalty. Good for you , Bill Richardson.

MoJo's Six-Year Coverage Of The Iraq War

2009-03-21T13:23:00.000-07:00

Yes, I am a subscriber and reader of Mother Jones magazine. A fine liberal rag. Here is their 6 year anniversary list of war coverage.

They Have Truly Lost Their F****ing Minds, Pt. 2

2009-03-11T18:38:00.000-07:00

My god! These people are insane.

Open Letter To Republican Traitors

2009-03-09T17:31:00.000-07:00

This is pretty good.

Rush Limbaugh - Fat, Stupid Bastard

2009-03-09T16:50:00.000-07:00

I hope this guy keeps on playing into Obama's hands. What a tool.

While You're At It--Check This Little Number Out

2009-03-06T19:32:00.000-08:00

John Lennon with a few friends (and yes, the guitarists are Eric Clapton and Keith Richards). I would have loved to have been in the room for this little jam.

Jim Morrison Interviews University President

2009-03-06T19:12:00.000-08:00

Check this video out from the early '60's where Jim Morrison acts in and interviews a Florida State University official about projected student enrollment. Bet this cat was never as hip as Jim.

Was Hunter S. Thompson Murdered???

2009-03-04T19:10:00.000-08:00

Was HST murdered?

Prosecute These Damn War Criminals

2009-03-04T16:40:00.000-08:00

Republicans sure don't like investigations when they're not about relevant things like blowjobs and blue dresses. Goddamn hypocrites.

This Guy Is My Hero

2009-03-01T12:58:00.000-08:00

What's wrong with Jell-O wrestling at the South Pole?

R.I.P. Paul Harvey

2009-03-01T07:25:00.000-08:00

I've had a dirty little secret for some time: I love listening to Paul Harvey.

Despite the fact that he is a wing-nut that makes Rush Limbaugh look like a big old liberal, I still can't turn Paul Harvey off when he hits the airwaves. But, I also understand just what his angle or twist on the story happens to be. Here is an article about Mr. Rest of the Story from F.A.I.R.:

The Right of the Story
Paul Harvey peddles tall tales--with a conservative kick

By Dan Wilson

ABC probably doesn't want people to think it's in the business of passing off urban folklore stories as real news, or altering the facts of stories to fit a conservative spin. But that's what one of its most listened to broadcasters does--six days a week.

Paul Harvey is regarded as a broadcasting icon. An institution. His radio show, distributed by the ABC Radio Networks, is carried on more than 1,200 radio stations and, according to his own press releases, is heard by 23 million listeners six days a week.

Even if you make allowances for self-promotion, his audience exceeds that of talkmeisters Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura Schlesinger. Harvey is advertised as the most listened-to broadcaster in the world.

For more than 40 years, Harvey has been charming listeners with his folksy, down-home style. He calls his broadcasts "visits." While he is perhaps best known for his Rest of the Story feature, three generations have been brought up on his twice-daily newscasts, a 5-minute morning version and a 15-minute noon broadcast. These newscasts consist of a combination of rip-and-read wire copy, with Harvey's patented pregnant pauses and unique inflections, along with a sprinkling of anecdotes passed off as news.

Here's a typical story from his May 1, 1997 broadcast:

For what it's worth, San Antonio, Texas, woman motorist, 45, arrested when a mechanic told police he found 18 bags of marijuana under the hood of her car. The woman is indignant. She asked that the mechanic only check her oil, not look under the hood.

A cute story, but one that set off my BS detector. I called the San Antonio Police Department and read the piece to a spokesperson for their public information office. "I have been here two years and never heard of that story," he said. I also e-mailed the San Antonio News Express. The on-line managing editor, Jon Donley, replied, "I've been a journalist here for 14 years and I can't believe I missed this story."

Urban Legends

Others have tried without success to track down the sources of some of Harvey's "news."

The following story aired on May 5:

When a bird crashes through an airplane cockpit windshield it's a hazard to plane, to crew and to passengers. Our Federal Aviation Administration a while back experimented with several transparent windshields before discovering one which would bounce the bird off without cracking. A special gun developed at Texas A&M launched a dead chicken against the aircraft window until engineers could determine the precise angle of impact which would prevent the window from breaking.

Well, British engineers having a similar problem with the front windows of high-speed locomotives asked to borrow our chicken launcher and they loaded a chicken into their cannon and they fired against their locomotive window. Well, the ballistic chicken shattered the windshield, it went through the engineer's hair, it embedded itself in the back wall of the engine cab. The British, stunned, asked our FAA to review their test procedure to see what they did wrong.

The FAA did review it. And replied with a four-word recommendation. Quote, "Try a thawed chicken."

After this story aired, Jenny Nelson, a reporter for the Bryan-College Station Eagle, Texas A&M's local paper, checked into it (5/6/97). She called Paul Harvey's Chicago office and talked to June Westgaard, his secretary, who told her, "To the best of my knowledge, the story was passed on to Mr. Harvey by a news stringer."

If so, there's no telling where the stringer got it from. "There's a great deal of advanced transportation research going on here, but none of it involves chickens," Bernie Fette, spokesperson for A&M's Texas Transportation Institute, told Nelson. "I've heard it for at least 15 of the 20 years I've been in Bryan-College Station," a spokesperson for the university said. "I think it's a story that shows up occasionally. I think it's kind of an urban legend."

Jan H. Brunvand is an author and columnist who has published several books on urban legends (among them
The Choking Doberman, The Mexican Pet and Curses! Broiled Again). "I have a copy of Harvey's book For What It's Worth (1991) which I annotated for the urban legends I found," Brunvand wrote in response to my inquiry--"Nine stories, for sure, including several classics. Thus, I take his title to signify that these are 'worth' little as truth, but perhaps more as amusing fiction. The trouble is that many Americans get much of their 'news' from Paul Harvey."

Brunvand listed several familiar urban legends documented as folklore in his books--and presented in Harvey's book as fact, often with names, places and dates attached to lend them spurious credibility. These include the story of the drunk who drives home in a police car; the old, rich woman who rams the car that steals her parking space; the woman who puts an ice-cream cone in her purse upon meeting a movie star. Harvey retells the popular tale of the women who drop to the floor of an elevator when the owner of a Doberman tells the dog to "sit"; usually the dog-owner is a famous black man, but in Harvey's version his name and race are not mentioned. Writes Brunvand:

Paul Harvey seems to present as "news" mostly the whimsical, offbeat, slightly cockeyed stories, but delivering them in his deep, resonant, fatherly sort of voice which apparently lends credence to them. Perhaps some of his fans receive them more as tabloid entertainment than hard news; at least some of his listeners regularly send me notes saying they heard such and such a legend on Paul Harvey. Relying as he does at least partly on listener input, Paul Harvey might be thought of as an amateur part-time folklorist, except that he doesn't distinguish folklore from fact. To my mind he's the epitome of the old (journalistic?) slogan, "The truth never stands in the way of a good story."

Beyond Tall Tales

If Harvey were just telling cutesy tall tales, his lackadaisical attitude toward fact might be more easily dismissed as harmless. But much of his news consists of stories re-cast into Harvey's conservative mold, presenting a world under attack by welfare recipients, big government and labor.

Take this shot at labor unions broadcast last April 16:

Would you agree to pay taxes to support labor union activity? Well, you do. Federal employees whose salaries you pay may also be labor union officials whose salaries you pay. Even when they are taking time away from their jobs for union activity.

Heritage Foundation discovers that you are spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on government workers performing non-government work. In just one agency of government, the Social Security Administration, it amounts to the total pay of 200 full-time workers. In the postal service, 838 workers. In the IRS, 253 full-time workers. If the employee is a union official, then he or she is allowed to collect full-time pay while off on union activities.

Unfortunately, here, as in many other cases, Harvey failed to tell the rest of the story. As anyone familiar with labor contracts would tell you, it is customary for union representatives to be paid for their work-related union activities, such as handling grievances or conducting collective bargaining talks. This would apply to both public and private sector unions. Hardly the scandal Paul Harvey would have you believe--leaving aside the fact that his biggest example of "taxes" paying for union activity is the postal service, which derives all its revenue from sales of postage.

Another story reflects either outright carelessness or deliberate distortion. This was contained in his April 10 broadcast:

Well, United States congressmen are learning Old World ways. Democrat David Obey and Republican Tom DeLay climaxed a debate on the house floor yesterday with some shouting, escalating into shoving and vulgarisms. Spectators say Obey initiated it and the vulgar language was his.

Which spectators were those? According to news reports, written mainly by journalists who were in the press gallery at the time, the incident occurred when Obey confronted DeLay with a newspaper clipping that disputed a point DeLay was making on the floor. The Boston Globe's account of what happened next (4/10/97) was typical: "'That's chicken shit,' Delay, the third-ranking Republican in the House, shouted away from the microphone but in hearing range of reporters. He jabbed a finger into Obey's chest, then shoved him. Several bystanders . . . leaped forward to separate the pair." While some reporters noted aggressive finger-pointing on the part of Obey, even DeLay acknowledged (Milwaukee Journal, 4/14/97) that the Wisconsinite hadn't said anything off-color.

Something Smells

But it can't be carelessness that would account for the next story (4/26/97). It has to be read in its entirety to be appreciated:

In a courtroom in Essex County, New York, in front of family and friends, Glenda Duell was shackled by the sheriff, taken from her husband and two young children. Court ordered to serve six months in prison. And to pay a fine of $68,000. And when she gets out of prison Glenda Duell must spend the next five years on probation. Then when she gets out of prison her husband, Kent Duell, must begin a six-month sentence. He must pay another $68,000 in fines and he must then do five years on probation. The sentence must be stayed on appeal for the moment.

But what in the world could the Duells have done? Robbed a bank? Murdered somebody? No, District Attorney Ronald Briggs says what they did was violate environmental law. And indeed, under existing environmental law that family could have been sentenced to 1,200 years with fines exceeding $30 million. All because their home's septic system malfunctioned.

Even though, now hear this, even though their family's septic system had been designed and approved by the department of Housing and Urban Development. Now there wasn't any proof that raw sewage had spilled out of the system, but even if it had it was a HUD system which had failed. Nonetheless, it was the Duell family which got sued.

The judge in the case admitted he didn't understand what law the family had violated. He asked the prosecutors for help but the prosecutor couldn't understand the law either. The prosecutor finally put in a call to the government environmental lawyers and it was their opinion that got the family convicted, quote, for serious criminal behavior. And one looks on and wonders.

A clipping from the Adirondack Journal (1/17/97) tells a much different tale. It seems the Duells owned an apartment building in Olmstedville, N.Y., which, five years ago, developed a broken pipe in the septic system. The Duells refused to make repairs despite repeated warnings. The Journal reported:

As a result of their failure to repair an open sewer pipe, raw sewage ran directly from the apartment toilets to the lawn and down to a nearby stream. . . . In November 1996 a jury convicted the couple of 164 felonies and misdemeanors for knowingly allowing sewerage to run out of their septic system at the Olmstedville building for an intermittent period of five years.

According to the assistant district attorney, "You could see a broken pipe from the road, and the raw matter was flowing out in recognizable form onto the lawn where it would wash down to a nearby stream. The town of Minerva, Essex County officials, and people from the Department of Environmental Conservation all followed up on complaints but there was no compliance."

In a month of listening to Harvey, there were several other stories that lacked the ring of truth, but contained insufficient information to make fact-checking possible. However, of all the shows I monitored, none was as disturbing as his response to the Heaven's Gate suicides (4/12/97): "Someday, I am sad to say, our Supreme Court is going to have to specify limits on speech rights and on religious rights."

It's troubling to hear such a popular broadcaster making a pitch for restrictions on freedom of speech--especially when he's used his own freedom to spread folklore, half-truths and propaganda.

Sidebar: The Rest of the Story

On June 9, I wrote the following letter to Paul Harvey:

Dear Paul Harvey News,

I am a writer preparing an article on Paul Harvey and his newscasts. I have researched a number of his news stories and found some appear to be fictitious or have had their facts changed enough to render the story of dubious value.

I would like to interview Paul Harvey on these issues to include his response in my article. Please contact me at the above address so we can arrange a suitable time for a telephone interview.

On June 30 I received the following response, signed by Harvey's secretary, June Westgaard:

Thank you for your June 9 letter and for the vote of confidence it included. Because of Mr. Harvey's confining schedule we must ask that he be excused from anything extracurricular at the present time. Thank you for your loyal listening.

--D.W.

Dan Wilson is a reporter for the Appleton (Wisc.) Post-Crescent.

Lincoln & Habeas Corpus

2009-02-26T20:24:00.000-08:00

Interesting article from Newsweek (note to Bob: I don't just read Wonkette and Huffington Post) about Abraham Lincoln and his wartime suspensions of Habeas Corpus.

The Wingnut Revolution

2009-02-26T19:00:00.000-08:00

These damn Republicans have ruined our nation. I'm sick of screwing with them.

That Progressive Auto Insurance Chick

2009-02-09T09:09:00.001-08:00

I've had this weird crush on the Progressive Auto Insurance chick ("Flo") for some time. While cyber-stalking her, I found the article at the link. Seems I'm not the only one who thinks she's hot.

What An Idiot

2009-02-08T19:33:00.000-08:00

God, I hope you stupid-ass Republicans run this woman for president in four years!

Stupid Bastards

2009-02-08T19:09:00.000-08:00

Who gives a damn if Obama wears shirtsleeves in his office while trying to rescue this country (and world) from the mess left by the total fuck-up who preceded him in office? Jerk offs. I hope the new AG prosecutes these criminals. Let them then bitch about the dress-code in another section of the federal government:

Federal prisons!

Galveston Update

2009-02-08T14:44:00.000-08:00

I finally returned to the Island this weekend. It was the first time I had been there since before Hurricane Ike.

Things really suck for a lot of folks down there. I hope things get better.

Sorry I didn't get a chance to call, Bob. We were in a capital murder seminar all day Thursday and Friday and just had time for a one night trip to Galveston after that. I will be down for several days in late March and will take you up on the steak and absinthe.

The People v. Dick Cheney

2009-01-29T06:15:00.000-08:00

Good article by my friends over at Mother Jones (a fine progressive magazine everyone should subscribe to).

These Are The Kinds Of Chicks Democrats Date

2009-01-27T19:04:00.000-08:00

Yeah, baby! Check this out, Bob--those closeted homosexual Republicans you vote for can't compete with this!

I have to give credit to Wonkette for this story: http://wonkette.com/405755/obamas-27-year-old-speechwriter-gets-sexytime-with-hot-white-house-staffer-gal

Why The Hell Doesn't This Guy Just Go Away?

2009-01-26T19:58:00.000-08:00

Governor Blagojevich:

PLEASE RESIGN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Rush Limbaugh = Crazy Bastard

2009-01-22T18:34:00.000-08:00

This election has been hard on old Rush. Somebody give him an Oxy!

They Have Truly Lost Their Fucking Minds...

2009-01-08T17:59:00.000-08:00

Ahhhh...Bible Spice...you keep delivering!

A Bailout I Support

2009-01-07T17:38:00.000-08:00

This is for you, Phil and Bob...something all three of us can agree upon.

Al Franken, US Senator

2009-01-05T19:52:00.000-08:00

Looks like Mr. Franken is going to be the new Senator from Minnesota.

Congratulations to Mr. Franken, if that is the case. While I miss his show on Air America, he may better serve progressive ideals from the floor of the Senate.

I hope he continues some broadcasting, though. He is one smart bastard. I highly recommend every one of his books (one of which I have an autographed copy in which he inscribed: "Why do you hate America?").

So Long Bush, Cheney & The Rest Of The War Pigs

2009-01-05T15:55:00.000-08:00

No way Black Sabbath could have ever known that they were pegging the 43rd President and his criminal administration when they wrote the following little bit of poetry. Even the little ditty about the politicians hiding themselves away while leaving the fighting to the poor. Here's your theme song Georgie and Dick:

Generals gathered in their masses
Just like witches at black masses
Evil minds that plot destruction
Sorcerers of death's construction
In the fields the bodies burning
As the war machine keeps turning
Death and hatred to mankind
Poisoning their brainwashed minds, oh lord yeah!
Politicians hide themselves away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that role to the poor
Time will tell on their power minds
Making war just for fun
Treating people just like pawns in chess
Wait 'till their judgment day comes, yeah!
Now in darkness, world stops turning
As the war machine keeps burning
No more war pigs of the power
Hand of god has struck the hour
Day of judgment, god is calling
On their knees, the war pigs crawling
Begging mercy for their sins
Satan, laughing, spreads his wings
ALL RIGHT NOW!

Viva Fidel!!!!!

2009-01-01T13:39:00.000-08:00

The Revolucion turns 50 today. Too bad Che didn't live to see it...

Interesting GQ Article About Bush

2008-12-29T19:11:00.000-08:00

I want to pick up Robert Draper's book Dead Certain.

David Vitter--Another Sick Republican

2008-12-29T15:24:00.000-08:00

Another fun one from the GOP Senate. This one's a few months old, too--but who's keeping score?

The Family Values Party

2008-12-28T08:02:00.000-08:00

Hey Bob--why can't your party keep the pedophiles out?

More Of Brilliant Sarah Palin

2008-12-25T09:43:00.000-08:00

It's all someone else's fault...

And They Call Themselves Capitalists...

2008-12-10T19:12:00.000-08:00

Socialism for the Rich

By Robert Scheer

December 10, 2008

Let the record show that it was George W. Bush, the rich Texas Republican, who brought socialism to America, so don't blame it on that African-American Chicago Democrat community organizer who made it into the White House. The government takeover of the banking and automobile industries not only happened on President Bush's watch, it was also the deregulatory mania of this president's family, beginning with his father, which took this country into such starkly unfamiliar territory.

What a betrayal of free-market capitalism. And who would have thought that it would be the candidates backed by conservative pundits Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh who made it possible? You actually could trace the destruction of corporate capitalism to the much-ballyhooed "Reagan Revolution" of the movie actor who got his main training for the presidency as a huckster for General Electric, where he honed the message of "getting government off our backs." The revolution of unfettered corporate capitalism led to an era of unfettered corporate greed, which sowed the seeds of its own destruction.

True, the Democrats deserve much blame. The Wall Street runaway wouldn't have happened if President Bill Clinton hadn't cheered it on. The Great Triangulator provided seamless continuity between the administrations of the two Bushes in systematically dismantling the proven regulatory system, introduced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, that saved capitalism from itself during the Great Depression. The danger with the incoming Democratic president is that Barack Obama has turned to some of the Clinton alums, most prominently former Clinton treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, to get us out of the mess that the Clinton administration worked mightily to create.

At least in the auto bailout there is some talk from the Democrats that the failed corporate leaders must be fired as a condition of salvaging their corporate entities--and stock options. Both political parties are tougher in the auto bailout than they were in the Wall Street rescue, but what do you expect when leadership on this issue is coming from Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson? Like Robert Rubin, Clinton's first treasury secretary and now Obama confidante, Paulson came to government service immediately after heading up Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street powerhouse at the epicenter of the banking collapse. For the key practitioners of America's brave new game of corporate socialism, failure has its own lush reward.

It's enough to drive one back to the invisible hand of Adam Smith. Personally, I would rather we took our chances these days with letting the corporations sink or swim on their own without government interference. If tough love was good enough for troubled families cut off the public dole by Clinton's welfare reform, which summarily ended the federal poverty program, why have a poverty program for troubled corporations?

Forget saving the auto companies; let them become Japanese- or South Korean-owned, but sweeten the deal with US government guarantees of extended unemployment insurance, health care, retirement plan protection and job retraining for laid-off autoworkers. Be generous on the worker end, and figure out ways to reclaim the big bucks from the banking and auto moguls who ripped off the American dream. The only reason the moguls are not going to jail for their shenanigans is that they got their supplicants in Congress from both parties to rewrite the laws to legalize activities that should have been judged as crimes.

If we are to have an expansion of government on this scale, we should start with extending health coverage to all Americans rather than with government bureaucrats micromanaging auto companies. Government-insured health care works. All the doctors I see want me to be on Medicare, and not one of them is eager to deal with the medical insurance provided to me as a retiree after thirty years of employment by the Los Angeles Times--insurance now threatened by my once-proud capitalist employer seeking bankruptcy protection. A protection, incidentally, that a bipartisan congressional majority made much more difficult for individuals to use when we get in personal financial trouble.

With the exception of my years as an undergraduate, when I sorted mail late into the night at the post office near Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal, I have never been on the public payroll. Thanks to the Reagan Revolution, and its endgame of socialism for the rich, we all may end up on the public dole, scrambling for droppings from a too heavily laden nationalized table. Socialism for the rich is not the way to go.

Robert Scheer, a contributing editor to The Nation, is editor of Truthdig.com and author of The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America (Twelve) and Playing President (Akashic Books). He is author, with Christopher Scheer and Lakshmi Chaudhry, of The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq (Akashic Books and Seven Stories Press.) His weekly column, distributed by Creators Syndicate, appears in the San Francisco Chronicle. more...

Christopher Hitchens

2008-12-10T17:31:00.001-08:00

I just read this book a few months ago. I highly recommend it (are you listening Bob?).

Wonkette's War On Xmas Guide

2008-12-10T16:51:00.000-08:00

In honor of Bob (who loves Jesus and hates Wonkette), here's some great holiday gifts. I especially like the "Build Your Own Bong"-- just don't forget to tell the arresting officer it's really some sort of new sexual device.

Rod Blagojevich = Sleazy Bastard

2008-12-09T16:20:00.000-08:00

Never let it be said that I don't call out corrupt-ass Democrats, too. This guy belongs in prison.

John McCain = Sleazy Bastard

2008-12-09T16:15:00.000-08:00

Read the NYT article about the good Senator (linked in the Wonkette article). What a scumbag.

Prop 8: The Musical

2008-12-05T17:54:00.000-08:00

This is hysterical. Jack Black kicks ass as Jesus.

Happy Repeal Day!

2008-12-05T17:45:00.001-08:00

I need a drink!!!!

Fox News Dumbasses

2008-12-03T17:24:00.001-08:00

This is from back in July, but I can't believe I missed it. Dumb bastards.