Speaker of the House John Boehner has insisted on enforcing a strategy whereby his party dictates all federal budget policy, no matter the law, no matter the makeup of Congress, no matter the risks to the future of the United States of America. Now, after a wasted week of partisan isolationism and refusal to negotiate, he has passed a radical one-sided plan that will hurt most Americans, while doing little to solve the debt crisis or stave off a credit downgrade.

After the Bolshevik revolution swept away centuries of Russian imperial history, Vladimir Lenin’s regime adopted an attitude of benign demolition—the view that destruction was itself a creative force, allowing for positive change that could not otherwise happen. In today’s American political scene, a constitutional scholar, a moderate and a vocational negotiator now finds himself in pitched battle with a Republican House caucus that has adopted Lenin’s reckless approach to governing.

The new Tea Party freshmen in Congress have imposed on their party, on their speaker, on the American people, a politics of allegedly benign demolition. Claiming to be patriots who love austerity, they demand we burn the village—impoverish millions of Americans and slow down the economy for a generation—in order to save it. The argument seems to be that American democracy is wrong, negotiation is wrong, bipartisanship is wrong, and that the more severely the process of governing is obstructed, the better.

It is vitally important to note two key aspects of the bill that passed the House of Representatives on Friday:

1. It contained no constructive vision whatsoever for how to upgrade and sustain vital programs like Medicare and Social Security—only cuts;
2. It did not in fact meet the structural reform demands of most Republicans, but included steep cuts to programs that benefit citizens every day, including at least 39 different radical reversals to environmental protections…

In order to “motivate” the rogue element in the Republican caucus, Speaker of the House John Boehner played a clip from the Ben Affleck movie ‘The Town’, in which Affleck’s character says to a friend, in a somewhat desperate and ominous way: ”I need your help. I can’t tell you what it is. You can never ask me about it later. And we’re gonna hurt some people.”

The use of the clip was widely criticized as bizarre and reckless. The clip clearly suggested there could be value in doing harm to people. The use of the clip as a motivational tool clearly suggested there was a consensus view that hurting people could be a pleasurable bonding experience and a way to feel energized. In short, it seemed to many a shameless revelation of the leadership’s view that the radical first-years could only be brought on board with the promise that someone would be harmed.

Critics denounced the stunt as sadistic and out of bounds, a stain on the Congress. But the motif itself reflects a wider political strategy, by which deliberately harming and hampering the ability of the federal government to operate efficiently is seen as a constructive and patriotic act.

After three decades of one of the two parties committing its entire fiscal policy to the relentless and mounting reduction of taxes, revenues are now at an historic low, just over 14% of GDP—and that is with slow growth—budget policy has become about deprivation. Even in the face of extreme revenue shortfalls, at a time of grudging economic growth and facing a national default, the radicals who favor benign demolition remain convinced they are behaving in the interests of the same entity—the nation—they seek to save.

Under the pressure of pervasive consequence, however, the passion for forced austerity—coupled with a doctrine of oppose, obstruct and eliminate, at all costs—quickly degrades into uncontrolled heat and light, blinding those who argue that setting the building on fire will save it from collapse. In other words, the Republican House caucus has adopted Lenin’s reckless attitude of benign demolition, in which harming innocents is applauded as progress.

This is not news, at least not entirely. Mitch McConnell, who yesterday told Harry Reid on the floor of the Senate that he would not negotiate in any way with him, openly declared that he would dedicate his leadership of the Senate majority to the destruction of Barack Obama’s presidency. Since he made that declaration, it has become increasingly difficult to discern any substantive effort on his part to play a constructive role in economic stewardship.

It may seem extreme to suggest that the Republican party has committed itself to sabotaging the American economy in order to “destroy the Obama presidency” , but when there is little evidence to the contrary, the question has to be raised. And what is so dangerous, given that dynamic, is the train of thought that demands a brutal, painful rearrangement of priorities, and which favors the onset of calamity to make the pain seem like a sensible choice.

It is not in the tradition of American conservatism that the system should be driven to calamity in order to achieve narrow ideological goals that are harmful to the majority of people in material ways. It is not in the tradition of American democracy for one party to put the nation itself in jeopardy in order to get an edge over its opponents.

The House Republican caucus has an absolute moral obligation to abandon this slide into Leninist demolition tactics, and to propose constructive solutions that edify every vital program and protection the American people expect and deserve. Hurting people is not democracy; it is the absence of moral consideration.

Democracy requires service to, not sidelining of the people’s interest. The demolition of a century’s worth of progress toward fairness and personal security in the American economy is a departure from the ethical demands of legitimate government, and the people should be expected to judge such behavior harshly, at their next opportunity to express their will through the vote.

Anyone who wants to drive the nation to default, in order to “hurt Obama” or promote some narrow ideological interest, hates this country. There is no other way to see it. People who lust after, and joke about, and court and urge and instigate, the failure of their nation, with the idea that doing so might elevate their faction in the resulting chaos, harbors a deep and pervasive resentment against the majority of the people who will suffer as a result.

They must… because there must be reason in this universe, to help us make sense of the mess and hold back chaos.

A default of any kind is against our founders’ revolutionary principles, let alone a deliberate one. Default violates the founding principles of American democracy, because the founders put the honor and integrity of the United States Congress, of our executive branch, and our electoral system of government, our revolutionary experiment in democracy, ahead of the interests of party and faction.

George Washington famously warned, in his farewell address:

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.”

At this moment in time, we have a credible opportunity to come together around a common need, the need to defend our system of electoral government, the integrity of its officers and the full faith and credit of the nation, against the slings and arrows of misbegotten disharmony. In other words, we can join together, demand statesmanship from everyone at the negotiating table, and save our nation from our own worst habits.

A Congressional refusal to honor our debt, already incurred by so many majority votes in the Congress, is a violation of our Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States explicitly requires that all debt incurred through normal operation of our system of government be honored. There is no provision that grants the United States Congress the right to invite, make necessary, or cause default.

It would be a gross and perhaps criminal abdication of responsibility, on the part of those members of Congress who would do so, to bring about an end to over two centuries of responsibly honoring the debts we have already incurred.

Is it even within the realm of most citizens’ comprehension that the United States would borrow money, from its own people, from pensioners, from foreign nations, and major investors, all of whom put their faith in the full faith and credit of the United States government, and then refuse to pay those debts?

Make no mistake: those who would invite default in order to score political points, “hurt Obama” or force massive spending cuts, are not only engaged in a kind of hostage-taking; they are proposing that the United States should be a deadbeat country, with all the connotations you might attach to that description.

Default means the US bond rating —which during Barack Obama’s presidency is at such unprecedentedly beneficial status we can actually sell bonds with negative interest, bonds investors pay us to sell to them, solely because they want the security of the full faith and credit of the United States government— will be downgraded. Downgrading the credit-worthiness of the most stable investment product in the world will likely push the rating of every other investment product in the world down as well.

This would destabilize not only bond markets, but other investment products as well. It would destabilize the entire world economy, the banking system, the ability of ordinary Americans and small businesses to borrow, or to fund their existing debt.

The stability of our bond system underpins the entire global economy, helps us to leverage our power in the world, and to hold back forces hostile to democracy and trade, like fundamentalist Islamofascism and totalitarian communism. The stability of our bond system infuses tense seams of global trade and politics with reason and collaborative problem-solving. In other words, peace and democracy are byproducts of a stable, reliable system of American bond investments.

If you are telling people this is a game, or that we can weasel out of our debt, because somehow Obama doesn’t belong where he is, then you are threatening to destroy America’s influence in the world, undermine our alliances, and urge the nations we do business with to treat us like good-for-nothing cheapskates who can’t be trusted and shouldn’t be. That is against our cultural values, an affront to our revolutionary democratic principles, and shows a lack of seriousness, on every level, about anything one might call “conservative” or “patriotic”.

There is something called statesmanship: if you want to serve your nation, you do the thing that serves your nation, not your tribe. You do the thing that benefits everyone, even if your narrow ideology does not comprehend the problem or the solution. When you sit down to negotiate, with a president who says he will give you something from e every one of his party’s sacred cows, so you can do the same, and there can be a middle ground, and you can come together to solve a problem we have spent 50 years creating, as a nation, you negotiate in good faith; you don’t act like a spoiled child, shout out of turn, and make false accusations and false claims and hold symbolic votes that make the entire institution of the US Congress look like a clique of high-school trend-chasers.

If you love this country, demand statesmanship from the leaders on your side of the ideological divide. If you love your families, and your communities, and the democratic principles of this republic, make sure you have the conscience and the integrity to ask of your leaders that they be willing to sacrifice their ideological determination as much as they are asking the other side to sacrifice theirs. That is how we find common ground; that is how we honor the sacrifice and service of those who have come before; that is how we start down the path of fixing something that was broken by several decades of irresponsible and unfunded manipulations.

Nuclear power plants, like the one at Fukushima Daiichi, contain 1,000 times more radioactivity to leak than the Hiroshima bomb. Nuclear scientists estimate 1,000,000 people would be killed or injured in a major accident, were one to occur at the San Onofre plant in southern California. But Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) on Monday compared the risk to a bridge collapse or a plane crash.

Alexander literally suggested that the scale by which the people of the United States should measure the potential risk of a catastrophic nuclear disaster should be according to their fear of a highway bridge collapse. A highway collapse could kill people, and is and would be tragic, but it would be very unlikely to kill more than a few dozen people. It would be tragic to lose those lives, but such a tragedy is not comparable in scale to death or severe long-term injury to a million people.

It is one of the most astonishing examples of pathological ignorance displayed by any public official in this country for years. It is a sign that Sen. Alexander is willing to put his allegiance to industry ahead of his service to the people and the nation he has sworn to serve. Only a very cynical and corrupt mind could dare to make such a comparison or be so willing to mock the tragedy experienced by victims of radiation fallout.

Sen. Alexander may have made some astonishingly ignorant remarks in the past, or he may not. By comparison, it hardly seems to matter now. He has gone on the record telling American citizens he would be as concerned about the grave need for nuclear security as he would be about highway construction.

It should be so far beyond the acceptable limit for politically motivated misstatements for any public servant to make a remark of the kind Sen. Alexander has seen fit to interject into the debate about nuclear power that no intelligent adult would ever make such an irresponsible and flagrantly offensive statement. But it is not.

Sen. Alexander clearly holds one of two views: either he views the American people as so hopelessly benighted that there will be no political backlash whatsoever to his manipulative and grossly negligent lie, or he actually is ignorant enough to believe what he said, that a nuclear catastrophe is no worse than a highway accident.

Either way, it would seem the people of Tennessee have some thinking to do about how they plan to replace this senator with an individual who is willing to use genuine intellect and moral conscience to serve the better interests of the people of his state.

Tennessee deserves better, and the people of the United States deserve better, than a senator so deeply in league with a private, for-profit interest that makes its living on taxpayer subsidies, that he would suggest the public should not have a serious discussion about whether it is safe to put the most dangerous scientific process known to man in our communities.

Mike Huckabee is a (retired?) Christian minister. He has long sought to present himself as moderate, reasonable and trustworthy. But he has now shown himself to be a flagrant liar, determined to manipulate his audience in order to provoke visceral, race-based reactions he can exploit. The evidence for this is his repeated telling of the outright lie that Pres. Obama “grew up” in Kenya. The president NEVER lived there.

If Huckabee did not know this the first time he said it, he clearly knew it the second time. The fact that he had told an abject lie was apparently so unimportant to him that he chose to repeat it, clearly seeking to use the untruth for his own partisan aims. And there is no way that particular lie would be worth anything to him, unless he seeks to provoke a visceral, race-based reaction against Pres. Obama, based on his father’s Kenyan origin.

That a former Christian minister would engage in a malicious smear campaign designed to instill doubt and concern in voters whose personal biases might lead them to agree with the nonsensical smear that someone who grew up inside the United States and spent some years in an American household, attending a Catholic school in a foreign country, would somehow be unfit to lead the American political system.

As if to prove that despite having been corrected on his flagrantly false claim that Pres. Obama “grew up in Kenya”, Huckabee has followed up on his campaign of lies by saying “Most of us grew up going to boy scout meetings and had Rotary Clubs in our communities and not madrassas.” Huckabee is very deliberately, very knowingly, and very maliciously, trying to provoke a race-based, xenophobic reaction, laced with religious hatred, against the sitting Presiden of the United States, who happens to be Christian, not muslim.

He is lying about every aspect of this story: The Boy Scouts is a large organization, but does not include a majority of all Americans. The Rotary Club is an international organization, which had chapters in Indonesia, in Kenya, and around the world, even when Barack Obama was growing up. And Barack Obama grew up in Hawaii, living for four years in Indonesia with his Kansas-raised mother who devotedly worked with him every day to make sure he learned about his own country’s history.

The young Barack Obama, while living in Indonesia, attended a Catholic school, and was not part of a culture of extremist madrassas, as Huckabee so nakedly insinuates. He also said of the president ”This is not a kid who grew up going to boy scout meetings and playing little league baseball.” He has clearly adopted the “White Americans are ‘real Americans’” rhetoric of Sarah Palin’s morally bankrupt —and politically failed— hate-based smear campaign from the summer of 2008.

Huckabee’s attempt to use the Boy Scouts and the Rotary Club to further his desperate and shameful racially divisive smear campaign is shameful and should provoke outrage among anyone associated with either group. People who value the personal dignity and the depth of character that both organizations seek to foster should demand an immediate, comprehensive and nationally televised apology from Huckabee for:

1. lying with malicious intent;
2. smearing their organizations by associating them with his vicious lies;
3. defaming the people of the United States by subjecting them to his campaign of lies;
4. degrading Christianity and democracy by his shameful behavior…

But Huckabee is only one of a number of prominent Republicans desperately seeking to sow racial suspicion in order to win votes. Newt Gingrich has infamously claimed that “Kenyan anti-colonial behavior” is “the most accurate predictive model for his behavior”. A specific philosophy, relating to the plight of people who lived under racially segregated British colonial rule, is the best way to “predict” the policies of an American Constitutional law scholar who grew up in Hawaii?

There is no reason for these lies, other than the total intellectual incapacity of the liars to compete with Pres. Obama in the realm of ideas. If Gingrich, or Huckabee, had anything of worth to offer the American people, if they had the moral fiber and the basic human decency to honor the right of the people to choose the best candidate for office, they would not engage in vicious smear campaigns designed to insinuate visceral race-based conflict into the political debate.

This horrible and un-American campaign of vitriol has its roots in Sarah Palin’s craven use of racist anger to evoke “passion” from rallies she spoke to during the 2008 presidential campaign. At the time, she made a place for herself in history as one of the most unscrupulous and Machiavellian liars in modern campaign history, saying of Obama: “This is not a man who sees America as you and I see America; we see America as a force for good in this world.”

Despite Barack Obama’s having devoted his entire adult life to promoting the core ideals of American democracy, despite his entire campaign being rooted in the firm commitment to the idea that American democratic ideals have always been and must continue to be “a force for good in the world”, Palin sought to suggest that Obama was, somehow, an enemy of the state, offering nothing as evidence for this other than his work to improve public education in Illinois and his apparent foreignness.

Mike Huckabee’s now obsessive attempt to strip Barack Obama of his uniquely American life story is shameful and delusional. He now appears to be urging the people of the United States to view him as relevant to the history and culture of this nation only as a sad symbol of a happily bygone time when racist bias was acceptable as a platform for political action.

When Huckabee, Gingrich, Palin and other pseudo-conservatives devote their energies to promoting malice and untruth, they do so because they do not believe their own views are worthy of public consideration, and they believe the American people can and should be deceived. That implicit confession should be evidence enough to the average voter, Republican, independent, conservative or liberal, that they are not fit to hold public office, let alone the highest office in the land.

The shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who has been targeted by opponents and conservative critics who have put her in gunsights in campaign advertisements and talked of taking her out, has raised ire across the nation for the mounting campaign of extremist rhetoric that over the last four years has seen repeated violent threats against members of Congress, candidates for public office, minority groups and people favoring healthcare reform. Now, the Tea Party Express is raising money, using the shooting and its aftermath as motivation, saying it will not allow anyone to tone down this extremist rhetoric.

The Daily Caller is reporting:

The Tea Party Express, a California-based conservative political action committee, sent out a letter to supporters Monday requesting donations in reaction to Saturday’s shooting at a political event in Tucson, Arizona that claimed six lives.

“It is quite clear that liberals are trying to exploit this shooting for their own political benefit, and they used deception and dishonesty to try and smear all of us and our beliefs,” the letter reads. “You know what the truth is? The truth is that the shooter, Jared Loughner is the one responsible for this atrocity. But liberals are trying to place the blame on society for embracing the tea party movement.”

The shocking manipulation uses a Ronald Reagan quote to diminish the severity of the political attack in Tucson, then attempts to blame the “Left”, claiming to know that Jared Lee Loughner, the accused shooter, was “a far Left anarchist” and saying that he “sought his ideological fulfillment from the Communist Manifesto”. The fundraising letter then accuses liberals in general of a “blame America first” mentality and of habitual flag-burning.

The fundraising letter is an egregious defamation of everyone affected by the mass killing: liberals, public servants, conservatives who care about the democratic system and our Constitutional rights, the victims and their families, and citizens of good will who would never use such an atrocity as an excuse to enrich themselves.

If the Tea Party Express feels a need to fund its voice in defense against an attempt to silence extremist rhetoric, the organization needs to be more honest and open about the recklessness of its past behavior, and own up to the vitriol and distortion it has used to gain a foothold in the American political psyche.

The authors of this fundraising letter should formally apologize to everyone involved in this tragedy, issue a statement to all members that no form of hate-speech, character assassination or violent rhetoric will be tolerated by the organization, then apologize to the American people for this ugly opportunism.

The Tea Party Express letter asks readers to recognize that the organization had nothing to do with the atrocity in Tucson, which is a fair request. The organization did not intend for this to occur, did not hire anyone to commit these acts, did not conspire to carry out such acts. It should not be reputed to have done so. But the vitriol and extremist distortions promoted by the organization to undermine candidates it opposes carry a cost.

That cost might be that the entire national political discourse degenerates into distortionist spin and pejorative slurs and visceral animosity between the parties. It might be that deranged people carry out unforgivable acts, and we are all wounded by the tragedy of that. It might just be that reasonable people begin to view an otherwise upstanding group of people as a fringe group doing bad things, however unfair that characterization may be. The way to avoid this is to be better than one’s worst instincts.

David Frum, with whom this publication frequently disagrees on specific matters of policy, spoke wisely of how people like Sarah Palin, who marked Congresswoman Giffords for elimination with a sniper’s crosshairs, should do when withering public criticism over such incidents begins to mount. Frum told MSNBC on Monday night that they should ask themselves: “What do you want your worst opponent to say about you, then say that thing… think about what you want that person to say about you, then be that thing.”

If the Tea Party Express wants to be known as an organization that respects civil political debate, adversarial but respectful politics, its membership should refrain from trying to use a horrible tragedy as an excuse to raise money and should cease its relentless defamation of all liberals, all liberal ideas or causes, all people who have ideas that are not the ideas their organization backs.

The fundraising letter is full of smears and defamatory generalizations. It suggests that anyone who disagrees with the Tea Party Express view is somehow an enemy of the United States. It asks people to donate money to an organization that relies on vitriol and defamation to attack people whose ideas it disagrees with, so it can defend itself against the charge that it uses defamatory, irresponsible distortions to inflame passions against opponents, by using defamatory irresponsible distortions to inflame passions against opponents.

The Tea Party Express should consider seriously what David Frum suggests: examine your conscience, consider that you don’t want to behave in the ugly and sinister ways your critics say you routinely use, then live up to that best image of yourself you want your opponents to be limited to. If you cannot live up to that best image you hope to defend, then consider why that might be.

If your movement is committed to American Constitutional democracy, it should be respectful of the fact that reasonable people can disagree about matters of policy without hating America. If your movement is committed to American Constitutional democracy, it should be able to engage in that democracy in a way that recognizes that one nation is made of many people, many communities, many points of view, and many valid but competing ideas about how to solve big problems.

That respect can play out in a new model of operating where defamation and vitriol are not necessary elements of your work in the public sphere. It may be that the characterizations of specific individuals or organizations as being to blame for the actions of a deranged gunman are unfair, and so an organization is put on the defensive. But the Tea Party Express hardly seems on the brink of financial disaster, and now it really would be most patriotic, most appropriate, most rational and humane, a sign of the best feelings for our fellow Americans, to retract the fundraising letter, apologize for having acted in bad taste and undertake to hold vitriol-free public debates with political rivals.

Gabby Giffords is a Democrat who works with Republicans and who respects that good people differ on matters of policy. Her career in public service has been devoted to principled, pragmatic service of conscience to all of the people. She is a centrist who labors to build consensus. It is not possible to honor the spirit of her patriotism with divisions, distortions or a campaign of attacks against non-conservatives.

UPDATE, 11 January, 5:25 pm EST: Slate.com today posted the full text of the Tea Party Express fundraising letter, with a footnote explaining some key distortions included as part of a manipulation apparently designed to demonize liberals. The Tea Party Express letter reads as follows:

Dear Friends:

The attack on conservatives and the tea party movement has continued over the past 24 hours.  Media figures and liberal activists continue to falsely suggest that Rush Limbaugh, Gov. Sarah Palin and the tea party movement had anything to do with the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

They’ve launched this attack even though they know it is a total and complete lie.

During the past few days friends of the shooter, Jared Loughner, have stepped forward to say that they knew him to be a political liberal. He admired the Communist Manifesto and burned the American flag.*

But many in the news media and the political Left are nonetheless still trying to use this awful tragedy to make people think that somehow Limbaugh, Palin and the tea party were responsible for this attack.

They are doing it for one reason:  it is an attempt to silence us and make this patriotic, constitutionalist movement controversial – so they can try and stop the momentum this tea party movement has built.

Last night on MSNBC and liberal websites, we here at the Tea Party Express were called despicable and shameless because we won’t back down.

Well guess what, friends – we’re not going to back down. Not when we have nothing to apologize for, and certainly we won’t just sit back while the media and liberals think they can slander us by calling us responsible for a mass murder.

Instead, do you know what we’re going to do?  We’re going to fight back with even more determination and pride.  Since we have to “pay” to get our message heard (the liberal media bias is on display like never before with this tragedy), we’re asking our supporters to help us fight back.

We want to have our largest fundraising day in the history of our organization and we need your help to achieve this success. Please, make a contribution online right now to the Tea Party Express – CLICK HERE TO CONTRIBUTE.

Slate included this footnote, referring to the paragraph marked with an asterisk:

* This is not true, by the way. Loughner’s YouTube page listed The Communist Manifesto among his favorite books, alongside Alice in Wonderland and Ayn Rand’s We the Living. He also included a video of a flag-burning on his “favorite” page — he did not himself burn a flag.

Capping a season of lavish fundraising events where Republican members of Congress raised huge sums from lobbyists, corporate donors and special interests, one Republican freshman is holding a major bash, at $2,500 per person, complete with live performance by Leigh Ann Rimes, $50,000 all-inclusive package deals and luxury suites at the W hotel. Despite Tea Party opposition to corrupt corporate-interest politics, Rep. Jeff Denham is openly positioning himself to be the go-to rainmaker for fellow Republicans.

The party is aimed at collecting donations from major lobbyists and lobbying organizations, on the eve of the Republican party’s being sworn in to serve in the majority in the House of Representatives. Despite a vicious campaign year alleging corruption in Washington and the need to throw out incumbents and vote in the everyman, the Tea Party’s numerous Mr. Smiths have turned out to be more aggressive and more prolific at DC-centered special interest fundraising than any freshman class in recent memory.

One critic of the fundraising said tonight that the higher price of these parties, with the specific focus on lobbyists representing for-profit interests, appears to be attributable to “the higher quality of the services being offered”. The Republican party is reported to be “cringing” at the inauguration-eve banquet, because it so wildly flies in the face of the populist image the party has sought to cultivate to win Tea Party support for the 2010 midterm election, but Rep. Denham’s fundraiser appears par for the course.

The 112th Congress will be sworn in with most Republican freshmen having aggressively courted massive donations from Washington insiders. The Republican party has been orchestrating a coordinated exchange of ideas, money and relationships between members of Congress, corporate interests, campaign donors and special interests more broadly.

According to Politico:

House Speaker-elect John Boehner, whose name was featured on the invitation, is nonetheless skipping the event at the W Hotel, where lobbyists, political action committee managers and others paying the $2,500 ticket price will be treated to a performance by country music star LeAnn Rimes (a $50,000 package includes a block of eight tickets and a “VIP suite” at the W). The office of incoming Majority Leader Eric Cantor, another featured invitee, was noncommittal Monday night when asked whether he’d attend.

“If incoming GOP freshmen were hoping to bring fiscal responsibility and ‘family values’ to Washington, they may have gotten off to an interesting start,” conservative blogger Matt Lewis noted, citing the event’s steep ticket prices, as well as Rimes’s confessed extramarital affair and her recent appearance in a “Sexy Santa” outfit at a gay men’s chorus Christmas performance.

The question is: what will the huge flood of special interest cash being donated to new members of Congress get them? Would any of those pseudo-populist Republicans who took those donations be courageous enough to say those donations have no actual value for those that made them? Would they be courageous enough to admit they do actually mean something?

Andrew Breitbart —a fake journalist whose overt political bias is not only self-declared, but is seething with bile and contempt— is defending his use of rigged reporting and character assassination in a deliberate attempt to distort the truth and sow racist hate. Breitbart posted a clip of a video on his blog, in which USDA official Shirley Sherrod, explained how she came to see beyond race and transcend the temptation to judge people’s character or motives based on the color of their skin.

Breitbart claimed very explicitly that Sherrod is a racist actively involved in using her federal position to discriminate against white people: an outright falsehood. He refused to allow the message of her speech —that all people can and should transcend racial discrimination, no matter what they have suffered— to come through his reporting.

Sherrod was speaking about a single case over 24 years ago, when she worked for a charitable organization, and a case in which despite her personal doubts, she actually helped the individual in question. Breitbart continues, unbelievably, to defend his claims and to literally pretend the speech was somehow entirely different in content and meaning than what anyone can see when watching the full video.

His absurd defense of indefensible and divisive lies goes as far as to falsely assert that members of the audience were applauding racist behavior, which they absolutely were not. In fact, when Sherrod mentioned the temptation to limit her assistance to someone in that isolated incident more than two decades ago, doing so clearly in the context of a speech about transcending racism, the room was silent. This, despite an atmosphere in which those present did second and amen and applaud the nobler elements of the speech: the subject clearly made everyone there uncomfortable.

Breitbart, however, either cannot see this, due to his own flagrant bias, or will not, because he refuses to take responsibility for an ongoing campaign of lies and smears to which he has committed himself wholesale. The scandal involving the community aid group ACORN was the result of a smear campaign, orchestrated by Mr. Breitbart in league with a self-appointed conservative “activist” videographer. Breitbart and his associate falsely alleged that an ACORN employee had given “advice” on how to run a child brothel, when in fact the activist was taking information to report the supposed crime ring to police.

Multiple federal investigations found there was no wrongdoing by anyone at any level in the ACORN organization, and the New York Times was forced to apologize for reporting false information as if it had been verified. There was literally zero substance to the false reporting against ACORN, orchestrated and disseminated by Breitbart, but FOX News continues to routinely push the notion of a sinister criminal enterprise of some kind run through the nation’s leading community aid charity.

Instead of taking responsibility for his actions, Breitbart has declared himself an “enemy” of “the Democratic party, the progressive movement and the Obama administration”. Clearly, this is the stance of a propagandist who is sworn to carry out a political campaign of lies and smears, not the stance of a journalist interested in reporting facts.

But what is still more astonishing is Breitbart’s explanation for why he deliberately took this clip, posted it with no reference to the actual meaning of the speech or this section of it, then overtly lied about what Sherrod was saying and how the audience reacted. Breitbart explained his feelings as follows:

I believe that I’m held to a higher standard. If this video showed a picture of a Caucasian talking in the exact same way but talking about a black person with an audience affirming and clapping that behavior, the reporter would be getting a Pulitzer Prize right now.

First: the audience was not “clapping that behavior”, that behavior being the extolling of racist behavior. And Sherrod was not extolling racist behavior. Breitbart not only lied, spun and distorted the entire atmosphere of the event, due to an apparent disdain for the NAACP, he is now fashioning even more elaborate lies in order to defend his having lied in the first place.

But second, and more importantly, his complaint is worthy of genuine moral outrage from anyone paying even the slightest attention. Andrew Breitbart is complaining that his freedom to be racist is being abridged. He complains very explicitly that if he were to laud or revel in racist behavior —which, again, Sherrod did not—, it would be reported as a bad thing, a sign of injustice and moral bankruptcy and anyone reporting on it “would be getting a Pulitzer Prize”.

The clear meaning is that Mr. Breitbart would like the freedom to be openly racist and he feels constrained by the now near universal consensus in American society, legislation and jurisprudence, which holds that racism is wrong. This is Breitbart’s complaint, which is made more severe and desperate by his need to defend the indefensible action of deliberately lying about Sherrod, her speech, the NAACP and —apparently— anyone else he determines to be his “enemy”.

Adding to his complaint the observation that those who are disgusted by his behavior “smell blood in the water”, Breitbart has promptly left for a vacation, just when, according to himself, the “successes [his] journalism has had” are mounting. He appears to be in a now aggressively defensive posture, as would someone who knows there is in fact no defense for his actions, his mission, his prejudice.

The story of Shirley Sherrod illustrates how injustice and prejudice will flood the scene whenever we give in to a pathological aversion to nuance. Our media culture, our politics, the headline-obsessed pseudo-reporting that passes for “mainstream journalism”, allow loud-mouthed bigots and propagandists like Andrew Breitbart to pervert our free press and ruin lives. Fortunately, the media picked up the mistake, and the White House responded to Sherrod’s resigning with a call for a thorough investigation of the facts surrounding the incident.

“Nuance” has become a dirty word in Washington politics, where anything less than absolute clarity of thesis, absolute consistency of ideas, and absolute allegiance to a pre-determined ideological line, has come to be synonymous with politicians given to spin, expedient change of policies and the “appearance of impropriety”. In fact, the Oxford American Dictionary defines nuance as “a subtle difference in or shade of meaning, expression, or sound”, using as an example “the nuances of facial expression and body language”.

Being prepared to deal with nuance is not a sign of intellectual infirmity, but rather of actually having the intellectual power to accurately measure the truth of a complex and layered reality. Opposition to the exploration of nuance is, then, a sign of deep, even pathological intellectual infirmity, a symptom of a deliberate unwillingness or an innate inability to deal with complexity. Those who rage against nuance as a sign of some sort of morally relativistic libertine ideology are in fact the moral relativists, promoting the idea that predetermined assessments (bias) and entrenched ideology can substitute for reasoned examination of evidence and fair judgment of fact.

Enter Andrew Breitbart: the hothead blogger is in fact a pseudo-conservative a figurehead of the conservative media landscape who pushes ideology as a way of promoting his own wealth, who routinely ignore facts in evidence —an affront to traditional conservative values of reason and forthrightness— and who make irrational leaps of reasoning with the specific purpose of impugning the integrity of decent people.

Breitbart has quickly risen to prominence by falsifying and distorting news items that appear to promote the conservative cause by putting someone linked to the progressive segment of the political spectrum. He is implicated in a rogue conservative reporter’s “sting” operation on ACORN, in which both Breitbart and the videographer falsely claimed that ACORN employees had provided advice on how to run a prostitution ring. The New York Times has since apologized for not fact-checking significant portions of the false report.

Shirley Sherrod has said she does not want a personal apology from the president of the United States, though she would like to meet with him. Sherrod has said she is the victim of Breitbart’s deliberate distortion of news and of Fox News’ latent “racism”. She says Fox is flagrantly biased and blames the network for propagating an entirely false story regarding an excerpt from a speech.

The controversy emerges from a speech Sherrod gave on the issue of race relations. She explained that having grown up in a climate where so much harm came to so many African Americans at the hands of white racists, she had to struggle herself with the temptations of racial bias. She explained that when a white farmer came to her looking for help, 24 years ago, while working for a non-profit organization, she felt he was trying to impose himself and appear superior and she contemplated how much help she should give him.

She referred him to a white lawyer, and gave him the assistance necessary to keep his case moving forward, but did not go above and beyond. When he called her, because he was experiencing some of the worst abusive treatment of any poor farmer she had dealt with, she realized the real problem was poverty and that she had allowed personal bias to interfere with her performance. She explained that from that moment on, she had a deeper understanding of all sides of the race-relations issue and she would never again discount someone because of their race.

Breitbart’s distortion was a flagrantly inflammatory attempt to sow racial hate and division and to smear an administration that has done more to get beyond the problems of bias and discrimination in real, everyday practice, than any before it. He deserves the outrage of all decent people and should be disavowed by true conservatives across the country. Ms. Sherrod had her character assassinated, in a 24-hour period, by a media culture obsessed with headlines that work more like bludgeons than like information, and where fact-checking is discarded as old-hat.

The viral nature of the web does not give mainstream media outlets carte blanche to report any distortion they come across, without regard for the truth or the impact on actual people’s lives. A media culture that is hostile to nuance and that has no time for evidence or explanation is not a free media culture, but one in which bias and error will dominate our views of the world and of each other. We all have the responsibility to be better than such degenerate practices; our freedom, and our ability to be decent to each other, hinges on it.

Glen Beck is a menace to the integrity of the American media. His fabrications and falsehoods are a deliberate and immoral attempt to distort the American political mind, to create visceral divisions and to force hostility to undermine productive progressive action to make the country more just and more egalitarian. His lies are shameless and his relentless attempts at character assassination of anyone not in agreement with his fringe politics are an insult to all people everywhere.

But his obsession with the president’s 11-year-old daughter is perverse and dangerous in a unique way that should once and for all discredit him with even his most ardent ultra-conservative ideological supporters. Beck’s relentless mocking of the young girl is not only a violation of the traditional media promise not to attack the children of public officials, but it suggests a perverse obsession and a fundamentally inhuman disregard for the emotional wellbeing and personal dignity of an innocent child.

If Mr. Beck’s disdain for common human decency is so extreme as to not only allow him to mount an always-on campaign of lies and distortions, designed to undermine our Constitutional system, but also to attack with extreme hostility an innocent 11-year-old girl, then he is the kind of broken and dangerous person who should not be leading the opinions of anyone.

His work in our media culture is not one of “a competing voice” or “a voice of reason”, but rather as saboteur to all that is good and worthy in the American media. This perverse mockery —which if you’ve heard it, leaves Beck sounding legitimately like a deranged clown of whom any parent, or any child for that matter, should be genuinely afraid— makes the choice clear: either you recognize Beck as a man of little intellectual integrity and grave anti-social tendencies, or you accept his perverse behavior as somehow part of your worldview and do not voice any complaints.

His viewership, and his listening public, should plummet due to this sick behavior, and whether or not it does will be an important measure of where we stand as a media culture. Do we care about things like decency, integrity, truth-telling and honor in reporting? Or are we more interested in the pornographic shock-value of lunatics and crazy-makers? Would we rather know about the world others live in, and what we can do to be of help, or simply watch the tragic flame-out of a circus performer?

I believe the American people care about truth-telling and human dignity, and I believe Mr. Beck’s star is falling fast, even though his corporate backers claim he is a ratings machine and good for business. It seems this latest stunt is yet another opportunity for us to ask: are people like Beck supported by big money because they are good for ratings, or because they are good for distracting the public from issues of real public import and the fate of the nation?

Glen Beck has apologized for mocking the president’s daughter, but he has not taken responsibility for the perversity of his behavior, the lascivious, nasty way in which he actually performed the mockery. That perversity is intimately intertwined with all that he does as a media figure and helps to drive his campaign of lies and innuendo on a daily basis. There should be a blanket corporate and public boycott of any program or network involving Glen Beck. Unless, of course, he relents and agrees to practice something resembling responsible journalism.

Today on Meet the Press, Republican strategist Ed Gillespie asked why has the United States Senate become so polarized, when Pres. Obama “ran as a post-partisan”. The association was deliberately disingenuous; there is nothing about Pres. Obama’s 1st year in office that suggests the climate should be brutally, relentlessly partisan, except the Republican party’s collective vow to oppose him everywhere they can, to undermine his presidency and the credibility of the Democratic majority.

Few presidents have made so many attempts to bring a virulent opposition into a process of bipartisan negotiation. His question-and-answer with the Republican House caucus was an historic vote in favor of engagement and dialogue. His 7-hour healthcare policy summit at Blair House, where the president actually presided over a far-reaching, frank and sometimes testy policy debate, was a major innovation in the process of negotiation and adversarial contest of ideas between the White House and the Congress.

But Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate minority leader, has been steadfast in what amounts to an unbelievable determination to sabotage progress on all fronts. He has condoned or invited the most flagrant obstructionism seen in the history of the United States Senate. He protested not at all when Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) hijacked the federal government, opposing over 70 nominations, while demanding over $40 billion in payouts to private interests in his state.

McConnell has presided over his party’s radical distortion of Senate process, in which it is not nearly accepted that major legislation requires 60 votes for passage, though this is Constitutionally 100% untrue. Cloture requires 60 votes, which means that bringing the process of debate to an end requires 60 votes. The 60-vote threshold is supposed to apply only when one or more members literally refuse to stop talking during an open floor debate.

Once they leave the floor and relent, debate can end and a 50-plus-one simple-majority vote for passage can be held. The Democratic leadership have mysteriously and unfortunately caved to the Republicans’ strategy of procedural blackmail —we will oppose everything you do from now on, unless you allow our threat of a filibuster to actually be a filibuster—, lending credence to the idea that the Senate requires 60 votes for passage. But, this is a calculated defense against what amounts to a no-holds-barred assault on the Constitutional process of legislation.

Why Sen. McConnell is so committed to the slash-and-burn do-nothing let-nothing-be-done strategy —when the nation is facing two wars, a major economic crisis and over 50 million people with no health insurance, at least 45,000 of which die each year due to the abusive practices of underperforming for-profit enterprises, and the rise of new world powers like China—, why he would rather tell the lie that Pres. Obama is not tough on fighting terrorism than be part of a constructive security policy to keep Americans and innocents around the world safe from psychopaths, is hard to explain, but it seems to have something to do with an inability to lead.

Sen. McConnell has been utterly unable to marshall any sort of even tiny minority within his minority caucus to craft useful solutions that will fit into Democratic proposals and help protect the nation against the ravages of these major crises. He has relentlessly invested his party’s political capital in the idea that the failed policies of the last decade, which plunged the nation into these very crises, are the best way to escape them. He has overseen and promoted a process of defamation and absurdism, in which his party has accused the president of being an enemy of the people, a foreign conspirator, a terrorist sympathizer and a Bolshevik.

It would appear that the rank rhetorical chaos of the Republican assault on Pres. Obama and the Democratic agenda —chaos because there are so many conflicting an mutually exclusive wild-eyed lies involved, and because so much of it verges on violence and the desperate circular logic of hate— is rooted in a fundamental incapacity among the leadership to be part of constructive problem solving, i.e. government.

It is Sen. McConnell, whose term as Republican leader has seen a catastrophic collapse of the party’s electoral and legislative power, who appears to be at the center of a firestorm of irresponsible Pontius-Pilate leadership, washing his hands of egregious violations of process or common decency, all in an attempt to sabotage efforts to work for the good of the American people. So we must ask:

Is Sen. McConnell an ideological radical who would sacrifice human lives, American prosperity, the Constitutional process and our nation’s standing in the world, for the opportunity to push his fringe ideology? Or is he just so poor a leader and so unprincipled an individual that he would rather condone hate-speech and calls to armed rebellion, which have become hallmarks of Republican rallies over the last two years, than use a sense of pragmatic responsibility and imagination to help craft solutions that will make our nation’s future brighter?

Either way, Mr. Gillespie’s suggestion that somehow it is Pres. Obama who has presided over the collapse of Senate collegiality is, beyond absurd, an affront to all reasonable minds. Mr. Gillespie makes that suggestion for the very reason that Sen. McConnell is unable to do anything but entertain a lust for the destruction of his political rivals, while Rome burns, so to speak. People are dying, while Mitch McConnell fiddles with one after another falsehood designed to undermine Senate process and kill needed legislation.

Whether or not the Republican party succeeds in sabotaging healthcare reform ultimately, or whether they succeed in making it more of a giveaway to insurers than a help to those in need or a fix to our nation’s perverse and parasitic system of selective insurance, Sen. McConnell has made a place for himself in the annals of the United States Senate, as a party leader who demonstrated the least commitment to any kind of collaborative working relationship or seriousness about doing the people’s business.

One can only hope he has conscience enough to mend his ways, before too much damage is done. Maybe the mystery of the Massachusetts senate contest for the late Ted Kennedy’s seat comes a little clearer, when we see that Scott Brown (R-MA) has already begun working closely with top Democrats, has crossed the aisle, voted with the majority on jobs, and is working on other key legislation as we speak. Maybe it is such figures, willing to demonstrate moderation and pragmatism, who might allow the Senate to build itself back to being the august body of committed public servants it has in the past been imagined to be.

There is a fundamental difference between the logic of military tribunals for battlefield captures and the Constitutional order of criminal prosecution and due process: the Constitutional criminal justice system is designed to deal with people who violate laws; military tribunals are meant to be an ad-hoc legal variation of that standard, reserved for representatives of enemy states that violate the laws of war in a battlefield setting. By inveighing against the US criminal justice system’s ability to handle terror prosecutions, the Republican party is not only actively promoting lies, but working to elevate Al Qaeda to the status of a legitimate, sovereign government.

Not only is the Republican party attack on the federal criminal justice system an attack on the US Constitution itself and a frightening departure from the committed service to democratic ideals expected of all elected officials, it suggests both the legitimation of Al Qaeda’s claim that they are entitled to practice warfighting against US interests and that the United States territory is now, legally speaking a “battlefield”. This creates a very real, very distinct threat to long-standing civil liberties that in case of invasion could be curtailed for the general welfare or the security of the state.

The Republican position on terror prosecutions has been nakedly irresponsible for years: refuting the Supreme Court’s determination that there is literally no circumstance conceivable where the United States government could deny any prisoner, detainee or suspect the fundamental legal rights promised by the Constitution —which not only grants rights to individuals, but limits government power to powers specifically enumerated in written law— and promoting the use of abusive tactics and prosecutions that deny access to evidence and adequate defense has led to a disastrous legal situation in which some very dangerous detainees may have a legitimate legal case on appeal.

That the Republican party has sought to create a new judicial precedent in which certain criminal prosecutions are not eligible for any kind of appeal is not a sign of being tough on terror; it is a sign of the party’s willingness to throw away essential Constitutional protections in exchange for the elevation of a gang of thugs and murderers to special status, solely for the purpose of covering up the failings of its own policies. The collective result of the Republican party’s hard-line approach, which has ignored federal law, defamed the Supreme Court and eroded the Constitutional system, has been to endanger the nation by making it easier for suspected terrorists to win in court.

The United States has long been credited with having the most evolved, most open, most dynamic and legitimate, system of trial-based justice. That legitimacy depends on the consistent upholding of fundamental democratic principles for organizing fair trials, examining actual evidence, and demanding that the state not have the power to arbitrarily detain people who have not violated the law. Allegations are not convictions, in such a system, and if they become so, then we will have lost our democracy to a band of terrorist thugs.

The will of elected officials to uphold the Constitution they are sworn to serve should be stronger and more resilient than the frail logic of would-be authoritarians who believe —or simply believe it is convenient to promote the idea— that democracy is weak and dangerous, tantamount to “appeasement” and that only belligerence and disregard for the rule of law can show strength. The entire history of the United States has been about a concerted, society-wide effort to overthrow, comprehensively and for good, the logic of authoritarianism, the police state and the exercise of power for the benefit of power.

We now need to guard against the most perilous failure of imagination, the failure that allows frail minds to perceive the exercise of cynical brute force and arbitrary detention as superior to the vast history of accomplishments of a free people demanding something better of the world, and of themselves. It is also necessary to recognize that there can be no legitimate explanation for using the issue of terrorism to promote one’s own party over another during an election year. Republican attacks on the Constitutional justice system in an attempt to sow fear of Democratic leadership are, if nothing else, in direct service of the interests of terrorism.

Promoting the degradation of the Constitutional justice system in the interest of pre-arranging rigged trials to permanently imprison anyone accused of terrorist acts, without a Constitutional process, is to degrade the Constitutional system of government in service of the radical ideology of terror and hate, promoted by Al Qaeda. It is capitulation, because the very aim of terrorists is to alter the society they attack, by using fear as a lever to alter their reactions to attacks on their way of life.

The aim of terrorists is to cause us to violate our own ideals, erode the rule of law, apply the logic of fear and hate, and in the process lose the dynamism and security that stems directly from our Constitutional system and its hard-won freedoms. Republican politicians have a responsibility to defend not only “the homeland”, but to defend our cherished system of democratic values and processes, to uphold the rule of law and a permanent ban on arbitrary detention, torture and the other instruments of authoritarianism. They have, like the rest of us, an always-active responsibility to defend the virtues of democracy against the logic of fear and extremism, not capitulate to the logic of fear.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is alleging “back-room dealmaking” and what he believes to be a misuse of office in Sen. Ben Nelson’s securing additional federal funding for his state’s Medicaid program, which is facing a severe budget shortfall. He wants the attorney general of his state to investigate whether anything unconstitutional was done in the dealmaking process. But Graham was part of numerous “dealmaking” sessions in the Bush-era Senate, in which corruption was not only alleged but was more or less publicly demonstrable.

Sen. Graham said that negotiating with individual senators amounted to offering “bribes”, and wants the specifics to be investigated, though nothing that is not part of the normal legislative process was done in the case of healthcare reform. On the other hand, there remain numerous cases in which real allegations of illegal threats and illegal bribery were alleged but have never been investigated. In the most infamous case, Republican House leaders not only extended voting in order to twist arms and let lobbyists roam the floor of the House making offers and claims to no-voters, but they allegedly threatened Rep. Nick Smith (R-MI) and offered a cash bribe (in the form of campaign money).

That was 2003. Smith voted no anyway, then went public. The House Democratic leadership sent a letter to then Attorney General John Ashcroft [PDF], urging a thorough investigation, and alleging the following:

Conservative columnist Robert Novak wrote in a November 27 column, “On the House floor, Nick Smith was told business interests would give his son $100,000 in return for his father’s vote. When he still declined, fellow Republican House members told him they would make sure Brad Smith never came to Congress. After Nick Smith voted no and the bill passed, Duke Cunningham of California and other Republicans taunted him that his son was dead meat.”

This is a clear violation of USC Title 18, Section 201 which addresses the bribery of public officials and witnesses. The law states, a person commits bribery if he or she “directly or indirectly, corruptly gives, offers or promises anything of value to any public official or person who has been selected to be a public official, or offers or promises any public official or any person who has been selected to be a public official to give anything of value to any other person or entity, with intent to influence any official act…:”

The Attorney General himself was accused of helping to “foster this kind of atmosphere” by ignoring numerous cases of similar allegations substantiated by credible testimony and even hard evidence. The letter chastised Ashcroft, saying: “Mr. Attorney General, your repeated unwillingness to uphold the law is creating a wild west atmosphere in the Capitol where rules and regulations mean nothing. Republican officeholders feel free to openly and repeatedly break the law.”

It would later be learned that much of the Republican “dealmaking” was in fact part of an illegal campaign of bribery, engineered through the office of “super-lobbyist” Jack Abramoff, with ties to key Republican leaders, a number of whom would later resign in disgrace or be charged with federal crimes. It’s little wonder Sen. Graham is wary of “bribes” becoming part of the legislative process.

But, while most of the specific cases in which it was alleged Republican Congressional leadership deliberately engineered votes and voting processes to illegally exclude Democrats, allow lobbyists onto the floor of the House of Representatives, or even make offers and threats to members of their own caucus, remain unexplored by prosecutors, Sen. Graham is calling for an investigation into legislative negotiations in which there is no evidence anything other than legislative matters were negotiated. This raises the question of Sen. Graham’s own standing on the issue of Congressional corruption.

During the Senate confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, Sen. Graham made at least two oddly defensive comments that raised questions about his possible involvement with Mr. Abramoff. While Graham has not been implicated in the investigations into Abramoff’s illegal dealings, one of his major political backers was. The corruption allegations involving Abramoff’s network in South Carolina have never been thoroughly investigated.

What’s more, Abramoff reportedly claimed he knew the US would invade Iraq even before the attacks of 11 September 2001. If that’s so, and Abramoff’s corruption network was involved in a deliberate attempt to manufacture a war, or at least to “manufacture consent” in Congress, it could be the most important instance of systematic corruption of the Congress in the nation’s history. It has never been thoroughly investigated.

Sen. Graham has, mysteriously, never called for sweeping prosecutions of these already very well known cases of apparent or confirmed corruption. He has not asked that members of Congress involved in those incidents be investigated or prosecuted. Quite the contrary, he very insistently declared, during Justice Alito’s confirmation hearings that “Guilt by association is going to drive good men and women away from wanting to sit where you’re sitting. And we’re going to go through a bit of this ourselves as congressmen and senators.”

Graham clearly has sought to promote the idea that Bush-era Congressional corruption, under Republican leadership, should be ignored, brushed aside in favor of moving ahead. But while Sen. Graham now wants to open frivolous corruption investigations for whether an effort to help Nebraska cover the costs of providing medical treatment to the poor amounts to a “kickback” to Sen. Nelson, there is no way to avoid the problem of the Bush-era allegations that remain unexplored.

Sen. Graham should either call for a new round of thorough investigation into the allegations of systematic corruption, illegal intimidation, bribery and misuse of office, related to Jack Abramoff’s network, the Congressional leadership under Tom DeLay and the planning —and selling— of the war in Iraq. The links between Abramoff’s network and the campaign operations of Sen. Graham, Sen. DeMint, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, should also be part of that investigation, because there is little explanation for Graham’s meek and defensive response to corruption allegations against his own party, given his reflexively aggressive assault on Sen. Nelson, aside from knowing tolerance of corruption in his own party.

That might be inferring too far, but then, this writing is just an exploration of the kind of reasoning Sen. Graham appears to be applying to the healthcare process. For him, it appears that any legislative outcome he finds unfavorable to himself must be the product of corruption, while any allegations of corruption unfavorable to his party must be unfair or false. There’s something not right about that approach to the question of corruption. Is it Sen. Graham alone who should decide the facts?

The leadership of the Republican party is relentlessly championing a rhetoric of armed rebellion and hate-speech. Seasoned evangelical leader Frank Schaeffer says those who condone this extremist language are “trawling for assassins”. He called those engaged in such extremism “the American version of the Taliban”. He called on Republican leaders who have refused to denounce the rising extremism in their party and evangelical leaders who refuse to denounce the maniacal trend in their midst to stand up in moral “horror” and denounce it, saying they are culpable for whatever comes of it, if they do not.

The language of violence and hate has intensified dramatically over the last few months, with cries for rebellion, far-right protesters bringing loaded firearms to political town-hall meetings, and in some cases literal death threats. Now, t-shirts and other products are being marketed that cite a Bible quote calling for the assassination of a tyrant. The use of that quote is very unmistakeably a direct suggestion of assassination; it is also, however loosely or tightly construed one’s interpretation, a blasphemous use of God to justify murder.

When mentioned in direct connection with the president’s name, this is both criminal incitement and something very close to treason. The biggest untold story in American politics over the last few years has been the intensifying campaign for total “ideological purity” in the Republican party, a coordinated national effort that has directly resulted in the emergence of extreme ideology into mainstream political discourse. Extremist rhetoric is increasingly standing in for civic engagement or productive problem solving, on the conservative side of the political spectrum, and the conservative movement is fast losing relevance to the problems of the times and credibility both in terms of morality and public policy.

The Republican party itself has also seen its fortunes decline in recent years, leaving followers worried about a cultural sea change and leadership baffled about how to counter the steady decline in membership. The confused behavior and insufficient outreach that has accompanied moves by leadership to change the dynamic is in part attributable to desperation related to this apparent lack of insight into the trending public mindset.

While some top Republicans argue for a “big-tent” approach to climb out of the morass, hardliners have seized on the atmosphere of desperation and uncertainty to push for “purity”, which they seem to misread as a quest for strength through unity. Misread, because paring down membership until there is consensus does not equate to building unity. It is just more recklessness to follow the foregoing recklessness.

This use of the Bible as a basis if moral support is nothing new. The Ku Klux Klan has always claimed to be a protestant army doing God’s work. But the use if holy scripture to foster hate and violence is no less perverse in the context of the increasingly high-profile Republican fringe than in the past or within other faiths. Violent extremist fundamentalism is antithetical to American democracy and fits together with a profound hatred for the principles of republican government (small ‘r’) on which out nation is founded, no matter what religion the fanatics claim to represent.

It’s not just a matter of criticizing the Republican party by grouping everyone in with the worst among them: it’s that the safety and well-being of our democracy depends on every sane citizen standing up to oppose in no uncertain terms and without equivocation this kind of violent extremism. Any leader who refuses to speak against this dangerous hate-mongering and incitement to violence is actively condoning it; they have a moral and ethical choice to make, an nothing speaks more directly of their character than a willingness to countenance violent hate-speech and threats against the individuals elected by the people to serve and protect their democracy.

With new regulatory restrictions on predatory lending practices, including constraints on the freedom of banks to raise interest rates to unsustainable levels, major banks have told federal regulators that they will be hiking interest rates and slashing credit limits for millions of customers, even where payments have not been missed. According to CNN, “a minority of banks” have said they will reduce penalties for good customers; economists worry the credit-card cost hikes will impede economic recovery.

The question many are asking is: what ethical or economic justification can there be for the same banks whose bad-faith practices have led to millions of consumer bankruptcies and home foreclosures, as well as the consumer-protection regulations to take effect next year, using the crisis they created to punish those who can least afford it? Is this not just a return to the same unethical, predatory business practices that led to near total economic collapse?

The fact is, analysts have become much more comfortable over the last year exploring the possibility that the banks were actually the worst deadbeats in a failed credit system, “borrowing” against fictional future wealth claims based on flagrantly unsustainable business practices not founded in any sensible mathematical analysis of real value (of outstanding debt liabilities).

This is the problem the banks are trying to fix: they need to cover the cost of massive projected “losses” that are really just a byproduct of the natural and inevitable correction of their flawed profit projections. They are, quite simply, persisting in the pervasive fiction that pins all responsibility for failed credit relationships on the borrower. The banks seek to sustain the myth that they are only lenders, never borrowers.

Regulators, however, not to mention market analysts, need to look harder at the banks’ relentless push to deflect attention away from their policy of counting future interest-based profits as actual wealth against which they borrow to fund their unsustainable business practices. The manner in which banks have been accounting for current and future assets flies in the face of basic arithmetical reasoning, and has been rooted in fundamental distortions of the reality of both the real extant wealth available to them and their future potential earnings.

The banks have behaved just like irresponsible consumer borrowers who know they cannot pay for the credit they are taking out, but continue to take out more to pay off what they can’t pay. They have done this for at least a decade, by inflating the value of their investment holdings, counting unrecoverable loan valuations as actual wealth, and borrowing against business they knew they could not sustain.

This made them far more vulnerable to the housing bubble, and in fact meant that their actions were not just intimately intertwined with the inner workings of the housing bubble, but were a big part of what created the bubble in the first place. Banks’ need for more consumer revenue drove them to lend in sometimes reckless, sometimes predatory fashion, to borrowers who would not, ultimately, be able to use the loans as they believed they would, and the banks knew they were doing this.

They covered the extreme risk inherent in such deals, or sought to cover it, by “bundling” high-risk loans into derivative packages they then sold off to third parties, or used the questionable practice of credit-default swaps to insure against disaster. The practice was questionable, because the bad loans were so widespread, so fundamental, that the swap system was clearly over-extended and could not reasonably have been expected to work in a crisis.

In 2008, that crisis hit, when one after another major financial institution was suddenly “discovered” to have been too heavily invested in this complex of ill-wrought financial dealings. Some would say it was pervasive systemic fraud, others that it was just a misunderstanding on the part of executives who became overly enthusiastic about the potential ROI of what used to be considered risky business. But when the crisis hit, the wealth was not there to insure against disaster, and the house of cards began to come down.

Now, after tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded bailouts, the banks want to milk those same taxpayers, their customers, for still more money, on top of the already extortionate compounded interest rates, in the midst of the worst foreclosure crisis in American history, with household bankruptcies at record highs, to sustain the same unsustainable business practices that generated the crisis.

The banks’ declaration that their rates will be going up not only represents a draconian disregard for the well-being of their own customers; it clearly illustrates how pervasive is the unwillingness to grow, heal and change with the times and the market environment. The banks argue they are now trying to be “more responsible”, but in effect, they are using the same strategy that pits their bottom line against their customers’ freedom to cover the costs of life as they know it.

In short, to avoid going bankrupt themselves, they plan to bankrupt their customers, without a second thought as to whether such a strategy might make their long-term business plan untenable. If there is no money to pay for their exorbitant profit projections, there is no money. Putting severely increased pressure on consumers in an already severely pressurized economic environment will only exacerbate the underlying consumer-economy crisis: more families closer to bankruptcy, more homes in foreclosure.

The banks have to learn to innovate, and that means they have to learn to do more with less, like everybody else. They have to learn to treat their customers like human beings who cannot magically make money appear out of nowhere and who have priorities like keeping a roof over their heads, food on the table and paying for their children’s healthcare and education. A continued refusal to do this amounts to an assault on the American family and a pathologically determined attempt to prolong this economic crisis.

Dick Armey is the latest Republican to use language of incitement to promote lies about Pres. Obama’s health reform agenda. Armey says proposed reforms are “ruthless” in their treatment of healthcare recipients. But just about the only truths in his comments are that there are in fact health reforms being proposed and that they have something to do with healthcare recipients.

Armey’s flagrant fabrications are rooted in lies his party has consistently championed with the specific and even stated goal of “killing” any reform that would place an enhanced competitive or regulatory constraint on private insurers’ freedom to interfere with patient care or drop or exclude patients in order to pad their profits.

The signal that Armey is drawing directly from this tradition of lies and innuendo is the facile recourse to fictional vocabulary like “Obamacare”, a name no Democratic supporters of the proposed reforms use and which is clearly a nostalgic bid to return to the days when Republican collaboration with an insurer-backed PR campaign sunk the Clinton plan for health reform by spreading lies and fear and mis-labeling the plan “Hillarycare”.

Such terms are inflammatory in a subtle way, because they are designed to elicit a visceral response of aggravation and fear. Such terms are aimed at sounding alien and megalomaniac, implying for people who voted for someone else that the targeted figure aims to impose an arbitrary and binding personal worldview, barring others, limiting choice, and eroding democracy.

Armey’s specific use of the term ‘ruthless’ puts him in the category of politico or pundit using language of extreme moral grievance to mischaracterize reforms aimed at helping patients, in such a way as to make patients fear the very thing that would help them and hate the people working to make it happen.

To demonstrate how relentless and even compulsive the Republican recourse to violent hate speech is becoming, we should take note of Rush Limbaugh’s comparing the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Pres. Obama to a suicide bombing. Aside from the hysterical departure from anything resembling the known universe, the use of that term to talk about a gesture of good will and recognition for work to reduce violence is a cruel assault on anyone whose life has been devasatwd by that particularly twisted form of violence.

But Limbaugh surely feels free to make such inhuman claims and to speak with such naked hatred for the president of the United States. The question is why. The answer is because he’s being given cover by prominent conservative figures, including elected Republicans, who can hardly conceal their glee at the potential electoral benefits to be derived from spreading hateful lies about the president.

Rush’s hate-filled rhetoric is at once more extreme than ever and yet closer than ever to rhetoric used by mainstream elected Republicans, because of the reckless claims made by people like Dick Armey, or Sen. Lindsey Graham who recently predicted Obama was leading the nation toward “Armageddon”.

The language of hate and incitement has gone so far that the Republican leader in the House of Reoresentatives has called for “rebellion” and Sen. DeMint (R-SC) now sees fit to travel to Honduras to give support to a rogue military regime not recognized by the United States and urge them to “resist” the foreign policy of the very country he is sworn to serve.

From spin to lies to partisan hyperbole, the perverse evolution of the present-day Republican public discourse is not just poisonous to the party and it’s moral character, it’s also toxic to our democratic process and now has planted the conceptual seeds of extremist violence in the middle of our two-party system. The party that has so sought to claim the nation’s flag and basic appeal to “freedom” as its symbols is now more persistently the source of disturbing insinuations of hatred for and violence against the nation’s highest elected official, who won a significant majority of the vote leas than one year ago. Is that irony? Or travesty? Or just the flip side of a cynical campaign to work the political system against the interests of the people while cloaking that intention in violent, misplaced effusions of outrage?

The media is also complicit (perhaps unwittingly) in the radicalization of the rhetoric used to oppose Pres. Obama (and to his efforts to reform American government and restore reason and balance to the market system). The media have condoned and participated in the spread of extremist rhetoric and wildly false claims by spreading the falsehood that attributes confusion about health reform to a lack clarity by the president an the “success” of Republican “arguments” against him.

Far too little media resources have been devoted to debunking the health opponents’ deliberate distortion machine. And the dirty little secret that has received even less attention is the massive amount of money those opponents are spending to confuse the public, buy members of Congress and corrupt the process.

In just a few months, insurers have spent $380 million lobbying Congress, advertsing wildly false claims, and donating tens of millions to the campaign coffers of most members of Congress. That is the salient fact about the healthcare reform debate that Republican opponents and “blue dog” Democrats hope will be drowned out by all the irresponsible shouting and innuendo.

According to the Bill Moyers Journal, Max Baucus (D-MT), the head of the Senate finance committee —which has been holding up the Democratic reform proposal in an effort to eliminate the so-called “public option” for low-cost, non-profit insurance— has taken fully $1.5 million from lobbying organizations and linked groups representing private,  for-profit health insurers.

We can explain the language of incitement as part of a reckless and distracted climate of distortion that has sprung up around an insincere Congressional debate, but that cannot, under any circumstances, explain it away. Every day, we have more examples of self-proclaimed “conservative” political figures and pundits expounding or condoning extremist language clearly intended to elicit a violent emotional response.

The leadership in both parties in both houses of Congress should hold a bipartisan conference to discuss the need to moderate language to avoid overt incitement to violence. This seems like a surreal suggestion, but our political discourse has degenerated to that point. No leader in either party in Congress should be allowed to hold their leadership position if they do not visibly and legitimately disavow all language of incitement to hate, bias or violence.

Something seems very wrong with Max Baucus. The Democratic senator whose party placed him in the chairmanship of the Senate finance committee, charged by Pres. Obama with crafting legislation that could achieve the president’s stated goals, while bringing centrist Republicans on board, has become one of the chief proponents of the very arguments entrenched corporate-interest Republicans are making to try to kill the Democratic reforms.

Baucus’ own staff say they cannot reveal whether he voted his conscience or whether he made a political, electorally motivated vote, when he voted against including any form of the so-called “public option” in his committee’s health reform bill. He had claimed that the months of slow-going and excruciating silence on the issue of what would come out of the finance committee’s deliberations, was owing to the fact that he was engaged in such a struggle to achieve consensus on the public option.

But at his first opportunity, Baucus cast not one but two votes against the public option, on a single afternoon. His staff say he believed there was “no way to get the votes” for the public option to pass his committee. Of course, if everyone votes against it for that reason, there will never be enough votes. It appears, in fact, that after all the posturing and all the protesting about what a hard labor it was to sell the public option, it was Baucus himself who opposed it.

There is something not right about this because:

1. It is integral to the framework for reform put forth not only by the president, but by the leadership of his own party, and by all four of the other committees that passed bills for open debate;
2. a majority of the public actually believe it’s “important” or necessary to include a public option that will compete with private, for-profit insurers;
3. Baucus’ language in talking about the public option’s weaknesses very closely mirrors the language used by Republican opponents and by the health insurers’ lobbying efforts, language that is based on a number of patently false assumptions;
4. Baucus has consistently said he would vote his conscience, and not be driven to go against his party or the public good simply for the sake of appearances (before the electorate);
5. Baucus has clearly been given too much influence over the course of the national debate, for a member of the majority party who doesn’t even fully believe in the reforms he’s supposed to be championing;
6. it seems the Montana senator has been living in a Washington echo-chamber, dominated by hardline pro-business voices, ignoring the outcry from across the landscape of his party’s supporters, in Montana and elsewhere…

Nationwide, 73% of the public say the option to purchase a low-cost no-cutoff public insurance policy should be part of health reform. Voters in Ohio support public option 57% to 35%, according to recent Quinnipiac poll, this despite House minority leader John Boehner (R-OH) claiming he’s never met or spoken to anyone not in government or the media who thinks the public option’s a good idea.

The Boehner claim closely mirrors the dubious claim by Max Baucus that citizens of his own state neither would benefit from nor would support the type of public option being proposed. In both cases, there appears to be a knee-jerk willingness to accept the critique of well-financed interest groups who seek to maximize profit by killing reform, and a near total aversion to the idea that explaining in plain language what the public option is might help create consensus.

Reports emerging from Washington say the health insurance industry has lobbied Congress to impose possible jail sentences for individuals who fail to purchase health insurance coverage. Sources cited by Howard Fineman, as reported on MSNBC, last week, indicate the senator that introduced this idea into debate was none other than Sen. Max Baucus.

This raises the question as to whether proffering such a shockingly irresponsible and inhumane idea as to jail the working poor and/or paycheck-to-paycheck middle class for nothing more than being both poor and barred access to medical care might be part of a deliberate effort to sink the reforms altogether or further erode the president’s political capital. A key question has to be: how much money is Max Baucus taking from private insurers?

Each of the ‘Gang of Six’ senators, as well as Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA) and Rep. Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin (D-SD), all of whom oppose even including a public option for affordable health insurance, voted last year to extend the federal flood insurance corporation, a universal, government-backed insurance system that protects insurance firms and property, not people.

Astonishingly, the logic behind the federal flood insurance system is that private insurers claim they cannot take the risk of something as “unpredictable” as flooding, so the government assumes 100% of the risk, while the insurers simply administer sales and take the profits. It’s been called a ”mandatory, socialized, government-run property insurance” and amounts to a $1 billion giveaway to private insurance firms.

What possible reason could there be for backing that government-insurance program and opposing the public option for low-cost healthcare, other than favoring what’s good for insurers’ bottom line? The question is increasingly relevant, as momentum seems to be gaining to find a way to compromise on the public option in a way that allows the principles of large-scale non-profit competition to be part of the ultimate national reforms.

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) proposes the finance committee’s bill should provide for states to be empowered to create their own state-level public option for individuals living at 133% – 200% of the federal poverty level, if they have no option for affordable private insurance through their employer. As reported by The Hill:

[Cantwell] scored a significant win Thursday when her proposal to direct federal dollars to optional state-based public plans was attached to the bill with the support of Baucus, Conrad and all of the panel’s Democrats except Sen. Blanche Lincoln, who is up for reelection in the conservative state of Arkansas.

Meanwhile, Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) has been feeling out his fellow Democrats on a kind of all-in-one compromise. Under Carper’s plan, states would decide to use federal money to found a private co-op, set up state-based or regional public plans or allow people to buy into the state employees’ healthcare plan.

And finally, there’s Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe (Maine). Obama and Senate Democratic leaders ardently want Snowe to join their cause and be probably the lone Republican on their side. Snowe opposes a national public option but has floated a proposal that would “trigger” a public option in states where insurance companies are not adequately serving the market.

The three proposals suggest the Democrats will ultimately be able to put forward a comprehensive health reform bill that will win at least 60 votes in the Senate, a figure that would allow them to put the bill on Pres. Obama’s desk by year’s end. Senate leadership have said debate will open on 12 October 2009, and may come to a vote as soon as a week later.

Caster Semenya, the 18-year-old track-and-field phenomenon from South Africa, is a woman whose hormonal chemistry is unusual for the average adult female. Test results are reported to show that her body naturally secretes three times the normal female levels of testosterone, the dominant “male” hormone, which some competitors say gives her an “unfair advantage”. The issue has raised perhaps the most serious challenge to the notion of fairness in sport, and to conventional attitudes about gender.

For instance, should Semenya be weaker than she is, if she were “fully” female? Is that idea in itself not demeaning to women? Is there even a specific provision in international sporting regulations that requires women to be notably weaker than or slower than men? Semenya was born female and has always been treated like a girl, but now the argument is that her body developed in such a way that she is too powerful, too strong, too fast, to be a woman.

The question is fundamental to the very structure of organized sports, and goes far beyond the question of gender. For instance: it is easy to understand why it is wrong that one athlete use a “performance-enhancing” substance that is banned, and that should not be tolerated. Uppers, steroids and human growth hormone, are dangerous to athletes and harm the physical and spiritual quality of competition.

But the logic of the Semenya question is very different: if she suffers from a naturally occurring condition, and her body is as it is through no direct action of her own, is barring her from competition not comparable to excluding athletes whose legs are too long, or whose muscles have too much ease with fast-twitch reflex? How can one determine who is too naturally advantaged to compete?

In American football, there are running backs, wide receivers and defensive backs that can run two or even three times faster than some of the stockier linemen on the field. Is this not “an unfair advantage” over those players that might have to chase them? Is a team not buying its way into victory if it contracts a world-class sprinter (like Herschel Walker or Bo Jackson) to compete against opponents whose defensive linemen might be overweight and sluggish?

It would be hard to make such an argument, certainly. And there are examples of why that kind of reasoning is flawed, even where the two athletes being compared are in fact performing the same competitive function (running the same race, for instance, instead of playing two different roles on a football field). Tiger Woods was once “supernatural”, “unbeatable”, until a new generation of players emerged, and some of the veterans adapted their game; now there is more competition, at a higher level.

The Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, were thought to be not only dominant, winning nearly every grand slam for years, they were said to have an “unfair advantage”, because they were “bigger” and “stronger” than female tennis players traditionally were. (There was clearly an element of racial bias in some of that criticism, but it was also fundamentally untrue — their advantage came with skill, precision, power [which in tennis means smooth strokes making solid contact] and hard work.)

It turns out, they are extremely good, but also fallible, mortal, and not at all invincible. Players who played differently, or adapted their games to compete, were able to compete at a higher level, and women’s tennis has improved dramatically over the last 12 years. Some players are bigger and more powerful, or simply better athletes, able to run faster and play longer, but some have just become more precise, more resilient, learned how to “counter-punch”.

Though specific content from Semenya’s tests has not been made public, reports about the gender identification exams she underwent suggest she does not have a uterus or ovaries and that she may have internal glands like male testicles producing an inordinate amount of testosterone, as compared to the average woman. It is suggested this means she might be all or part male.

Those who challenge Semenya’s right to compete in the international track-and-field women’s division argue that these biological variations make her not adequately female to participate. This particular question may never have been asked in so deliberate, so comprehensive, so problematic and so judicious an environment before, and how to assign Semenya to one category or another may indeed be a task for which international sporting organizations are not philosophically or legally sophisticated enough.

Part of the problem with the “science” of these gender tests is that they don’t give any scientific assessment of the actual health or competitive impact of Semenya’s condition. While certain tests can determine hormone levels, can even determine if those levels are biologically inborn or not, can determine if she has glands that more closely resemble testicles or ovaries, located inside her body, it is not clear that any of those findings gives “scientific proof” of gender.

That question aside, the tests also provide little to no information on the overall metabolic impact of Semenya’s condition: has she had to struggle with physical difficulties related to this condition? has it impacted the way in which her body metabolizes certain nutrients? In effect, has her condition made it necessary for her to work harder or not?

Unless the testing she has been forced to undergo is able to decide whether or not her performance is based on hard work or not, there is no way whatsoever to even begin to judge “fairness”. And there exists the very real problem of Caster Semenya’s basic rights. South Africa has threatened to take the issue to an international human rights tribunal, and says it will use all possible legal avenues to defend its champion athlete.

Some reports suggest that the IAAF rules, which govern international track-and-field competition, would allow Semenya to compete anyway, if “her condition was treated”, but of course, it remains to be determined what the nature of that “condition” is, and what sort of treatment would make her body comparable enough to the average female athlete’s body to make her eligible for competition.

That point, again, may open a legal and ethical Pandora’s Box, which might call into question what is considered to be a “fair” or an “unfair” naturally occurring physique. Should basketball players not be allowed to be taller than 6’10″? Why not 6’9″ or 6’11″? Who should be excluded, and on what grounds? Is world class athletics supposed to be a competition among the average, or among the extraordinary? Or is that too simplistic?

All in all, the question of who is Caster Semenya and what rights does she have is a human riddle as deep and perplexing as any other. It is impossible to assign a single identity to a person, especially if the proposed task is to first identify an inborn essence and then illustrate proofs of that essence in the individual’s behavior. Ethically, this is a dangerous game, because it allows for assigning different values to different people, stratifying rights and leading to a justification for bias or segregation.

In South Africa, such an approach to the ethics of fairness is, perhaps more than anywhere else, offensive, to say the least. Semenya’s ethical responsibilities and her ethical status should not be judged based on a hormone test, but on her choices and her actions. If she has not committed deliberate acts to cheat or to seize an unfair advantage, then how can she be banned from something just for being better than everyone else?

If she has flagrantly violated fundamental and established existing rules of fair play, if she has somehow sought to game the system, then one can see there is room for some sanction. But the feeling seems to be that she is a hapless victim who fell into this problem through no fault of her own. The ethical bind is not one of her own making or which should hold her fate in its grip, but rather one that pertains to us all, that comments on the rights of all people, as people.

Any new ethical rationale invented to apply specifically to her case will have to be broadened and will apply to others, so getting it right isn’t just about Semenya’s gender categorization according to conventional science… it’s about what kind of questions we want athletes to answer, and how, before being allowed to compete… it’s about whether we want global society to organize itself around an idea of “fair play” that disqualifies certain people from  participation, based solely on their uniqueness.

FOX News has relentlessly smeared and defamed the umbrella organization for volunteer community groups, ACORN, openly participating in a concerted nationwide effort to promote false charges of illegal activity and force the group to stop all involvement in efforts to bring urban and minority voters to the polls.

In its latest broadside against the group, FOX News has spent two months consistently parroting charges made by Republican members of Congress, who say ACORN is a “criminal enterprise”, apparently due to those Congressmen’s misunderstanding of criminal law and alleging sweeping responsibility for the actions of people who actually defrauded ACORN itself. Essentially, ACORN is being accused of fraud because it was the victim of fraud.

This is like elected officials, whose job is to adhere to the highest standards of public service, telling people victimized by identity theft or credit card fraud that they, as victims, are in fact the fraudsters. Or worse, it would be like law enforcement telling accusing someone who is violently assaulted through no fault of their own that they are the assailant and should serve jail time as a result.

What’s worse, in the case of the accusations against ACORN, is that this is not just a misallocation of blame or an unfair slander; this is part of a prolonged, coordinated effort to derail effective public service activities aimed at extending the right to vote to more Americans. Millions of Americans cannot vote because they are not registered, or because they don’t know where to register or that they need to.

The current controversy regarding ACORN has to do with the unsubstantiated accusation that its voter outreach efforts are “voter fraud”. The false charges tie in to the scandal over the politically motivated firing of 9 US attorneys by then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. One of those federal prosecutors came forward to testify that he had been dismissed because he refused to initiate federal prosecutions for the very accusation being leveled again now, because there was no evidence.

Multiple judges have already ruled that ACORN had no responsibility for the alleged fraud, and that ACORN was in fact the victim of the fraud, who brought the fraud to light and sought legal retribution for those individuals who violated both their contracts with ACORN and the law. No court of law and no federal prosecutor found any evidence that ACORN sought to inflate voter-registration numbers in order to then permit anyone to vote more than once.

ACORN is being accused of the crime committed in a situation in which ACORN was actually the victim. FOX News takes this perversion of basic reasoning, and then broadcasts the headline time and again throughout the summer that ACORN is “a criminal enterprise”. Is not FOX News, by this same standard, a criminal enterprise? Taking money from groups whose agenda is to “rig” elections, spreading lies that favor those groups, and doing material harm to not just ACORN but hundreds of community organizations that depend on it.

FOX News, which refused to run ads previewing Michael Moore’s film Sicko, documenting the systemic failure of healthcare in the United States, is now running ads by a shadowy front group called Conservatives for Patients’ Rights —known to be affiliated with the team behind the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth smear campaign—, whose specific goal is to derail Pres. Obama’s healthcare reform plan.

Immediately before that ad ran, anchors read a FOX News headline “Pres. Obama’s healthcare plan scarier than cancer; meet the woman who fears for her life” and after the ad, a preview of Sean Hannity’s slam campaign against “government-run healthcare”, which, by the way, is not actually on the table in the current healthcare debate.

These facts clearly demonstrate not just a political leaning, but a willingness to refuse specific information to the public and to present false information, distortions and even outright lies, in order to push a specific political agenda. The FOX News headline “Pres. Obama’s healthcare plan scarier than cancer; meet the woman who fears for her life” may refer to a woman who is “afraid” and who may tragically be suffering from cancer, but it overtly lies about Pres. Obama’s reform plans.

The reform as written —in line with the framework laid out by Pres. Obama for health reform, and as he repeated time and again in speeches, not just this year, but going back to before he announced his campaign for the presidency— is designed to guarantee that no one would be denied treatment for pre-existing or costly conditions. The woman with cancer need not fear; she would be more likely to have her care fully covered under proposed reforms than she is now.

But FOX News chooses to exploit her, to use her sad situation to spread terror among the American public. Is this done in order to hurt Pres. Obama politically? Is it done to help specific monied interests? Is it done to serve the interest health insurance companies have in prolonging a status quo in which the market for health treatment is rigged to favor their profits over positive health outcomes or cost-effectiveness?

Or is it all part of a blanket assault on the rights of Americans to know the truth about the world, as told by a free and independent media, not bound by the influence motive either of government or of private power brokers? Is it of a kind with the ACORN story? A crude attempt to kill off a network of community-level non-profits whose aim is to lift up the voiceless and defend the rights of those who can’t defend themselves?

What motivates FOX News to so persistently use terror as a storytelling mechanism, even when the facts have nothing to do with the version of events FOX News staff report? What motivates this cable network to use its media influence to knowingly repeat lies as if they were facts and to smear public servants, community groups, its own critics, and anyone who strays from the Republican party line, as enemies of the nation?

Maybe it doesn’t matter what the underlying reason for the lies and the bias and the promotion of terror in the minds of its viewers might be… maybe in the end, it only matters that FOX News has taken upon itself the goal of undermining anything and anyone who works against the political leadership of the Republican party, and the often deranged worldview it projects, are all symptoms of the same illness: a pathological incapacity to see and to relay evidence or truth.

To study the reporting of FOX News from one day to the next, from one week to the next, from one year to the next, is to witness a range of ongoing, deep-seated pathologies, an almost obsessive allegiance to certain themes, even to the passion for delivering certain claims as fact, despite the lack of evidence to support those claims.

This if FOX News, but is it really, in any traditional sense of the word, a news organization? Or is it just a 24-hour-a-day 7-days-a-week always-on campaign advertisement for one political party? And if that’s what indeed it is, should its funding and its ability to profit from its activities, its ability to broadcast in the weeks before an election, be curtailed under campaign finance laws?

FOX News is accusing ACORN of running afoul of electoral laws, without evidence, while every day we see evidence that FOX News is a Republican ad campaign masquerading as something else. Does that make it criminal? Does that mean its lies are strategic? Does that make it responsible for deaths that might result from the lies it has told about healthcare reform, if its efforts to kill the reform are successful?

One could imagine a campaign where activists who oppose the message and the methods of FOX News were to request that all federal tax breaks (federal funding, in another form) be barred from going to any of FOX News’ owners or directors, until there is a thorough and complete investigation of the organization and the manner in which it crafts a pre-packaged political message to be conveyed through its distortions of the news of the day.

Why is FOX News using images from the attacks of 11 September 2001, including voice-overs such as “enormous death toll”, to advertise its own airing of a documentary called “9/11: Timeline of Terror”? The ads are flagrantly disrespectful to all those who lost someone on that day: the tone is almost pornographic in nature, highlighting violence, terror and death as a point of attraction for those who might want to view their report.

Commemorating the tragedy of the 9/11 attacks, honoring the memory of those lost, or reporting on the history of not just the attacks, but what role they played in policy choices in the ensuing months and years, are a necessary reflective examination for our society, and worthy of important journalistic activity. But the deliberate and concentrated use of images and voiceovers from that day, as if to celebrate the events that took place, is simply amoral.

While FOX News spends millions every day crafting story lines and spreading tabloid-like rumors intended to chastise or even defame public figures as morally degenerate or irresponsible, its own programming is apparently free of any moral consideration or responsibility to the public good. FOX News is clearly using the terror and the tragedy of 11 September 2001 to promote its own production and to court viewership.

If the documentary is worthy of consideration as a piece of legitimate journalistic exploration and reflection, if it takes in the full sweep of the story, not only the horrors of the day and the government’s subsequent rhetoric, but also explores the potential long-term impact of political decisions made in the period to the future of American democracy, and explores the views of critics and investigators outside the mainstream, then it should be advertised in a more dignified fashion, given the gravity of the event.

It would be acceptable to frame the documentary as an exploration of the events of that day, using titles, dates, and a voiceover explaining the purpose of the documentary and the time it will air. To blitz viewers with images of the terror and tragedy of that day, however, is almost an abusive act, disregarding in every way the very real emotional trauma that might be recalled by sending those images racing into living rooms around the country, unannounced.

FOX News would do well to stop editorializing away the moral legitimacy of any and every public figure aside from the few the network chooses to prop up and look at very real questions of its own moral legitimacy: Can a news network with a radicalized ideological point of view really do “the news” at all? Can a news network willing to use the emotional trauma its viewers may have experienced 8 years ago to sell one of its products be treated as anything other than a common villain without human conscience?

It would be worth exploring how to mount a grass-roots opposition to this particular kind of crazy-making, organizing principled conservatives with a genuine dedication to a shared moral order and community fabric in society. No decent person wants society to be badgered by compulsive manipulators and by people or organizations whose callous disregard for the humanity of viewers —or for the responsibilities of the press, conservative, liberal or otherwise—, would allow them to see such images as flashy commercially appealing flashback scenery.

FOX News has a fundamental moral and ethical obligation to cease commercial use of images created by mass-murderers for the purpose of terrorizing innocent people on a massive scale. The advertisements FOX News is running are a deliberate and callous commercialization of the worst terrorist attack the United States has ever experienced, and, frankly, defy comprehension. The ads appear to be nothing less than an attempt to capitalize on the brutal mass murder that they portray in so produced a fashion.

The New York Times is reporting that major Wall Street investment banks are looking for a replacement “exotic” brand of investment for the failed bundled mortgage-backed securities, and that they are planning to launch a brazen market in the resale of already-resold life insurance policies. The scheme carries the risk of bundling and reselling high-risk mortgages, perhaps higher, as longevity of the original policy-holder will determine return-on-investment.

Elderly people strapped for cash can sell their life insurance policies for pennies on the dollar (maybe up to $400,000 on a $1 million policy), and Wall Street wants to buy them, bundle them and sell them to investors. Securitization of a commodity is, in many ways, a sound business practice, especially if you’re the banker doing the selling. But, just as mortgage-backed securities carried a level of risk that made them more like gambling than investing, life-insurance bundling means the security sold is not what it seems.

As the original policy-holder’s life is extended, day after day, the value of the payoff for the insurance policy goes down. More deaths coming sooner means the securitized life insurance policies will pay the bundle-buyers more in profits; longer life means they will see their return go down, or even pass zero into negative territory.

This is because the policy holder has already taken a cut, the investment bank has taken a cut, and what’s left may not be enough to cover the price paid by the investor (which has to be higher in order to make any of this worth the investment banks’ doing). Like mortgage-backed derivatives, life-insurance derivatives deal with a finite pool of money whose value will not increase over time: at some point, one of the gambling investors will find there is not enough money to cover initial investment plus interest.

Unless, that is, there is such zeal among investors to buy into life insurance derivatives that their “investment value” escalates far beyond their initial cash value. This is the nature of a derivative: a finite financial investment value becomes a commodity and the derivatives are the “bets” placed on the the long-term “investment value” (what future investors will pay to get into the game) of the bonds.

But like mortgage-backed derivatives, life insurance derivatives have a fatal flaw in terms of long-term investment value: at the end of the day, someone somewhere will be unable to resell the bonds based on specific policies, because the high investment value will no longer be supported by the cash payout. This is the definition of a pyramid scheme: there is only the money people are putting in, and eventually, when one after another investor takes their payout, there is nothing left for those who stay in the game too long.

Wall Street’s investment banks are trying to blur the line between securitization and pyramid schemes, because if they can (in legal, ethical and commercial terms) they can make a fortune. Life insurance derivatives would not be a pyramid scheme, so goes the argument, because they would be securitized, backed up and buffered, by a complex bundling process within a market of extremely wealthy and reliable firms whose long-term vision allows for the bottom never to fall out.

When the policy in a given bundle into which you bought comes due, and pays too little, your stake in the bundled derivatives is simply shifted forward to the investment value of the as yet extant policies. In other words, everyone buys into one pool; you never have to worry about selling an individual policy that paid out too little.

It sounds like securitization, but in fact, it is not. Securitizing a private company, selling its stocks and bonds, allows investment firms to help marshal broad-market resources, from individual investors and major funds, into the coffers of actual companies that produce value for the market, acquire their own revenue stream and build future value. Investors can track that value, and get in or get out at will.

But the value of the company is securitized through a process that allows for calculated risk and in most cases, doesn’t subject the investor to the possibility that the entire market for stocks of a given kind will just evaporate on any given day or over one week during one summer of confusion. Life insurance derivatives are not that kind of security: they are a bet on the fictional value of an actual financial asset that cannot increase in value and cannot produce a new revenue stream through its own activity.

In this way, life insurance derivatives have the same fatal flaw as mortgage-backed derivatives: they are a gamble based on nothing but other gambles, and with an underlying financial logic that says such an investment should not be considered, over the long-term, over the whole market, wise.

What’s more, there’s the ethical abyss which is betting on the shortening of human lives. For investors to be gambling their money away on a lottery based only on the value of other gambles is bad enough, and very unwise for the market and for investors, but to have a financial stake in the shortening of human lives is fundamentally inexcusable.

In practical terms, investors would never know who the policy-holders are or how long they are likely to live, and there is no way an individual investor could take deliberate action to shorten anyone’s life in order to gain a profit, in theory. But as a matter of legal and moral integrity, there is something fundamentally improper about placing bets that pay off when people die sooner rather than later.

Life insurance derivatives are bundled, securitized fixed-value financial assets that (much like high-risk mortgages) allow investors to buy into a betting pool that is not a genuine long-term investment in the value of a productive commercial entity. They amount to a pyramid scheme whose overall value will be determined solely by the money put in by investors, meaning that no investor can derive a profit without in effect taking that income away from another investor.

They are a pyramid scheme cloaked in the complexities of financial product derivatives, and they should be banned outright. There is no legitimate way that such financial exotics can be sold honorably, through a legitimate marketplace, and pay off the full value of what investors would hope to receive in return for their contribution to the pool.

Such products put investors’ money at risk, but also endanger the entire structure of Wall Street’s investment system. The contemplation of these exotics, in the immediate aftermath of the most severe banking crisis in 80 years, and the attendant record amounts of taxpayer investment required to keep the banking system functioning, shows a reckless disregard for the integrity of the financial system and for the resilience of the market system itself.

In an interview with the McAlester News-Capital newspaper, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) —the senior senator from his state— strung together one lie after another, in an apparent effort to slander Pres. Obama and derail healthcare reform. There are no softer words for Inhofe’s incessant lies and fabrications. He has apparently pledged his time and energy to the hard labor of being an inveterate and unapologetic professional slanderer.

Not satisfied with the false claim that Obama secretly wants to “socialize America”, the read-nothing senator —he recently said he doesn’t need to read or even know what’s in legislation to vote on it— claimed “Everything that made this country great has been disavowed by this president”. However imaginative Sen. Inhofe may be, there is not one single example of Pres. Obama disavowing or speaking against the great achievements, or principles, of American democracy.

Inhofe might be talking about the president’s opposition to the use of torture, or his attempts to prevent the destruction of American capitalism by rampant industrial-scale bank fraud, or efforts to expand educational opportunity. Surely Sen. Inhofe is not arguing that torture, systematized bank fraud and unfair obstacles to quality education are what “made this country great”.

Or maybe he’s concerned that efforts to improve the health of American citizens, reduce their suffering or prolong their lives are contrary to the American ideal that proudly forces people into grave suffering and premature death, because somehow that’s better for the bottom line. Is that the greatness that Inhofe is so passionately defending with so few ideas and so few words referring to any verifiable truth?

He falsely accused Obama of being “the most anti-military president in the history of America”. This is a lie not only because it is dishonest interpretation. It is a lie, because Obama received, as senator, the highest rating national veterans groups can give an elected official for work on behalf of veterans’ rights and welfare. And as president, he has continued to fight to expand healthcare for injured or psychologically affected veterans of the US military, at all levels.

It is also a lie, because his budget actually expanded funding for the military, provided for a regularized process for budgeting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, trimmed waste and sought to expand pay and benefits to servicemen and women in combat zones, as well as to their families back home.

Inhofe did admit, however, that his focus is not so much on the wellbeing of the members of the US armed forces, but rather on the pocket-books of specific arms manufacturers, when he added: “I’m talking national defense; I’m talking future combat systems; I’m talking ground systems”. Inhofe equates “national defense” to specific, failed “combat systems”, and that is indicative of his attitude toward public service, it would seem.

He would like to benefit the big players that back him, and the needs of individual citizens, their rights, freedoms and quality of life, can take a backseat to arbitrary, unproven ideological assumptions. How does he know “global warming” is a socialist conspiracy to destroy democracy? He just believes it. He knows it because he wants to know it, and he won’t do the reading to find out if his ideas are those of shameless hacks or of thinking souls.

Pres. Obama’s choices on funding for “future combat systems” has been in line with the requests of military commanders to trim waste and focus on systems that will help protect American lives and improve actual combat capability — a notable change of course from prior administrations that had prioritized heavy spending on unproven systems, which did nothing to improve military performance or capability, wasted years, if not decades of planning and research, but consistently lined the pockets of specific defense contractors.

Amazingly, Inhofe persists in claiming that all the money spent on bank bailouts was just a scheme to steal taxpayer money and use it for socialist schemes to sabotage democracy, saying “That money is gone for good”, and calling it “the most egregious vote in the history of the U.S. Senate.”

The senator seems completely unafraid to wade into the most ludicrous conspiratorial ranting, based on nothing but his own will to believe the false claims he is making. In fact, it has just been reported that taxpayers have made a $4 billion profit to date on bailout money paid to 8 major national banks. As MarketWatch reported on Monday:

U.S. taxpayers have seen a profit of about $4 billion, or the equivalent of about 15% annually, now that eight of the biggest banks have fully repaid their obligations to the government as a result of the financial bailout, the New York Times reported Monday, citing its own analysis.

The analysis is partial, but while there is still a substantial amount of bailout funding outstanding, the Financial Times of London has reported that the Federal Reserve has already turned a $14 billion profit on loans to banks and commercial lending institutions. Inhofe’s claims are baseless lies, with no foundation other than his lust to destroy the Democratic party and serve the interests that back his campaigns and keep him in a seat he openly refuses to use for what it’s intended to be: a way to craft responsible legislation to serve the people.

On one issue after another, James Inhofe has chosen to use his seat in the United States Senate to spread vile lies or to whitewash misdeeds he is not ethically serious enough to oppose. On the now well-established evidence of pervasive, programmed, persistent abuse [PDF] and violent mistreatment of prisoners, he says simply, fantastically: “There has never been a case of torture there. The people there are treated better than in the federal prisons”.

Revealing his motivations in the baldest language possible, Inhofe said, in language that appears ever more desperate: “If we can hold on for another 16 months, I think we’ll be able to change Congress enough to stop these socialist programs from going through”. There are no plans to socialize America, and healthcare reform proposals contain zero plans to give government control over medical decisions. Inhofe is lying.

He is lying in order to give false information to the people of Oklahoma and to ensure that the democratic process in the United States is frustrated and corrupted by lies and by interests other than the public good. The kind of vile slander that has become standard operating procedure for Sen. James Inhofe is nothing less than a disgrace to the greatness of American democracy and an insult to the people of Oklahoma.

He has slapped them on one cheek promising to vote against legislation that could save lives, without so much as reading it, then slapped them on the other by becoming a mouthpiece for an unscrupulous rumor-mill whose sole aim is to sow confusion, hatred and political inefficacy.

At some point, one would think, the people of Oklahoma will simply demand a more conscientious, more relevant, more thoughtful and genuine public servant, someone who puts democracy and the public good ahead of his own bizarre fantasies and his lust to destroy political opponents. Those of us who value our democracy and believe that public servants are there to work for us can only hope they do.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) has told a town hall meeting that he doesn’t need to read legislation on healthcare reform or to know any details of what’s in it, he will oppose it out of hand. Astonishingly, the senator told the citizens gathered that “I don’t have to read it, or know what’s in it. I’m going to oppose it anyways“. He didn’t say “let them die” about people in need of medical care who are uninsured, but the sentiment just might be there.

He also suggested that his position on the issue is driven by public opinion polls and his concerns about the 2010 elections. Inhofe’s statements should come as no surprise to those who have expressed continuing outrage at his radical positions, including the false allegation that global climate change is an elaborate “hoax” crafted by a shadowy network of totalitarian socialist schemers to destroy democracy.

But Inhofe’s nakedly partisan and unapologetically detached position on healthcare reform, his apparent opposition to any fix of any kind that would remedy the life-threatening situation in which tens of millions of American find themselves, due to non-coverage and insurance companies’ rationing of care, is startling. Inhofe says he doesn’t need to read legislation to vote against it or to deny its purported benefits to his constituents.

One wonders on what other issues Inhofe flatly refuses to read the legislation he votes for or against. He opposes healthcare reform 1) because he assumes, in error, that the proposals would “socialize medicine” and “ration care”, though they are designed to remedy the gaps in the current system that lead to denial of care, and 2) because he wants to hurt Pres. Obama.

Has he voted for gun-related legislation that he assumed was good for gun-owners, but in fact put new constraints on the right to bear arms? Has he voted against legislation that he assumed would cause abortion to proliferate or would be “pro-abortion”, when in fact what he voted against was designed to limit the number of abortions carried out or steer women to other options?

Has Sen. James Inhofe, arch-conservative of Oklahoma, voted against legislation he assumed would deny his state the ability to create new jobs, when in fact the legislation he voted down was designed to steer new, lasting jobs to his state, spurring higher rates of education, income gains and long-term economic prosperity?

What other bills has James Inhofe voted against, simply because he decided it would be more fun to vote against them, without knowing anything about the legislation before him? Sen. Inhofe’s confession that he doesn’t need to read and doesn’t care what’s in the healthcare reform legislation he plans to vote against is not just an assault on the physical and civic dignity of the people whose lives will be less care for as a result, it is a confession that he is not fit to serve in the United States Senate. Period.

Sen. Inhofe has finally confessed openly that his political career is an elaborate ruse to defraud the people of his state and deny them full representation in the Senate. What Sen. Inhofe does with his time, I guess someone else will have to determine: the voters’ confidence that he is in Washington preparing, reading, debating and negotiating legislation, is apparently misplaced, because Sen. Inhofe doesn’t read legislation before opposing it ferociously and with venom for all those whom it might assist.

What’s more: Sen. James Inhofe has admitted that he routinely lies about healthcare reform, specifically in order to kill it and to deny needed medical care to the tens of millions of American who currently cannot get it. He has admitted he routinely lies, because he is daily making claims and spreading false rumors about legislation he himself refuses to read.

How can he know, actually know, what’s in the legislation, if he won’t read it? How can he speak with any authority whatsoever about the proposed reforms, the president’s intentions, the nature of the interests of Congressional leadership, the benefits or lack thereof to the American people, if he will not read the legislation? He cannot.

Sen. Inhofe is like Donald Rumsfeld making the ludicrous and obviously false claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction stashed secretly “to the north, south east and west of Baghdad”. No specifics. No facts. No truth. Just a vague claim that overreaches by an astonishing amount. An insult to the public trust. An insult to the idea of public service. A defamation of the body in which he serves.

In a frenzy of partisan posturing, the Republicans repeatedly demanded that Democrats on Capitol Hill read the entire healthcare bill out loud, line by line, into the record, on live television. That Sen. Inhofe himself was unwilling even to look at the bill or find out what’s in it is one thing, but that the Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has also reportedly not read the entire text of the legislation.

Sen. Jim DeMint, who famously said he wanted to use healthcare to “break” Obama, has denounced lawmakers who don’t read legislation before voting on it, saying it outrages voters to learn of it. DeMint has been spreading some of the most egregious false claims about healthcare reform at town hall meetings, raising the question of whether he has read the legislation being proposed, or whether he really sees the life and death issue of healthcare as nothing more than a partisan electoral tool.

Sen. Inhofe should be invited to a meeting where constituents who favor reform read the bill, line by line, to him. It might take three days. He might have to listen to all the legislative legalese that goes into something like this, and maybe his ability to understand and to comment on such procedural jargon, to understand, in effect, the work he is in Washington to do, would be tested.

If Sen. Inhofe does not want to be a member of the United States Senate, then he should depart his position without delay. He is doing a grave and unconscionable disservice to the people of Oklahoma, if he casts even one vote without having read the material he is voting down. He is an elected, paid public servant: his absolute moral obligation is to the people who voted him into that office, and his refusal to even do his homework is a disgrace to the Senate, to the people of Oklahoma and to the United States broadly.

Pres. Barack Obama and Sen. Orrin Hatch, two men whose views differ in countless ways, but who became, each in his time, close and trusted friends to Sen. Ted Kennedy, should meet privately, then with Congressional leaders, to hammer out workable reform to extend healthcare coverage to all Americans, and honor the life’s work of the late senator. After an initial agreement to commit firmly to weeding out obstructionists and working toward virtuous compromise, Hatch and Obama should gather together a panel of key senators to establish a commitment to passing reform that extends coverage to all Americans.

The panel should include Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Chris Dodd, Sen. Olympia Snowe and Sen. Susan Collins, Sen. Chuck Grassley, Sen. Harry Reid —the majority leader—, Sen. John McCain, Sen. Mary Landrieu, Sen. Max Baucus, and Sen. Joe Lieberman. Other key Democratic allies should also come to the table, and the final agreement should deliberately recognize not only the devoted work of half a century put in by Sen. Kennedy, but the principle of ensuring that the rights to life and the pursuit of happiness are not infringed by a morally bankrupt and inadequate healthcare system.

In other words, the agreement should establish that building on the current hybrid system requires a full menu of options, expanded choice, and access to care for all Americans. As Sen. Kennedy once said of civil rights and the right to be free from discrimination in a free society governed by the rule of law: this is not a political issue; this is a moral issue. The tributes of the last several days have left nothing so clear as the moral and human foundation for Sen. Kennedy’s devotion to healthcare reform, and every public servant has an obligation equal to his to put that moral and human responsibility before politics.

In a third meeting, the Pres. and Sen. Hatch should call on House leadership and conservative Democrats, to help shape an approach to establishing comprehensive reform that will pass both houses and achieve all the major goals of Pres. Obama’s framework for reform. In a fourth meeting, again Pres. Obama and Sen. Hatch, with select members of both houses of Congress, should meet with leading stakeholders, including patients rights groups and the AARP, and hold meaningful point by point discussions on how and why the reforms under consideration would meet their needs and serve their long-term interests.

As Sen. Kennedy’s son Edward said in today’s funeral service in Boston, “He was not perfect; far from it, but my father believed in redemption”, and he firmly believed in the moral obligation to help those in need. One of Ted Kennedy’s most outstanding talents was his ability to see that the very people with whom me most vehemently disagreed on politics and rhetoric could be redeemed to him, or he to them, as friends and allies in the work of public service.

The lesson of his life, as of the process of national mourning now underway, is that rivals in this issue of heated public controversy can be redeemed to one another, by speaking for the voiceless and showing the greatness of a nation and its politics, by doing what is just and morally necessary. To find common ground in seeking the common good, regardless of party or of ideology, is the supreme obligation of all who are sworn to serve and to uphold the Constitution of the United States and its foundational order that the government serve the people.

Pres. Obama and Sen. Hatch are ideally positioned, in their relationship to this outstanding example of a public servant, to spur the process of redemption, steel the will of uncertain legislators, and bring together the parties necessary to making comprehensive reforms that cure the sick, heal the nation and establish a better quality of justice, a reality. They should hold this meeting during the coming week, to lay the groundwork for the return to substantive cooperative work in the crafting of such needed legislation, while the memory of Sen. Kennedy and his human way of negotiating and finding consensus holds the center of Washington’s attention.

Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin has adopted a brazen approach to countering Pres. Barack Obama’s proposed healthcare reforms: outright fabrication and unscrupulous lying. She has begun to make the 100% false allegation that Pres. Obama’s reforms would create a “death panel” tasked with promoting euthanasia, and she is now calling reform “downright evil”. It is perhaps the single most irresponsible and reprehensible lie told in the American political sphere in recent years.

Palin even chose to use her infant son as a prop in her smear campaign, suggesting that Obama’s “bureaucrats” would use the fictional “death panel” to have children like her son —who has Down’s Syndrome— euthanized. Despite having repeatedly accused “the media” of using her children to attack her, she has once again used her children to attack someone else, and she has done so, as on other occasions, by using them to support false claims.

Palin wrote in a Facebook posting that:

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care.

There is not one word in any of the reforms proposed by four separate committees in the two Houses of Congress devoted to contemplating such a plan. There is no “death panel”, there is no plan to explore or to promote euthanasia. Either Sarah Palin herself has fabricated this disgusting lie, or she is parroting something she heard somewhere else and cared not enough to investigate.

What’s more, the language of her lies revives the rhetorical strategy she used last summer and fall, when angry crowds began chanting “kill him” in reference to Barack Obama, because she had spread the lie that he was “palling around with terrorists” and that he hated America. Her use of the word “evil” to describe reforms that are designed to save lives and rescue millions of families from the persistent threat of bankruptcy is a sign that she is willing to slander and libel opponents with totally false claims, even to the point of callous indifference as to the negative impact it might have on real people.

While Pres. Obama did not mention Palin herself, he used his weekly address to counter the smears and explain what healthcare reform entails. Countering the lies, Obama said:

… let me start by dispelling the outlandish rumors that reform will promote euthanasia, cut Medicaid, or bring about a government takeover of health care. That’s simply not true. This isn’t about putting government in charge of your health insurance; it’s about putting you in charge of your health insurance.

Obama sought to remind the public that such “outlandish rumors” and “absurd attacks” are nothing more than cynical politicking, luring Palin and others to entrap themselves by continuing and exaggerating the practice of focusing on crazed language rooted in lies and personal political interest, while serious people do the work of trying to help average Americans.

Specifically, Obama rounded out his weekly address, saying:

There are those who are focused on the so-called politics of health care; who are trying to exploit differences or concerns for political gain.  That’s to be expected. That’s Washington. But let’s never forget that this isn’t about politics. This is about people’s lives. This is about people’s businesses. This is about America’s future. That’s what is at stake.

Obama will not dignify Palin’s smear campaign with a personal mention or with the most direct language possible, but anyone not in such high elective office who cares about this country, or about the future of its democracy and the well-being of its people, must: Sarah Palin is a liar who is willing to sabotage plans to save tens of thousands of lives through meaningful, pragmatic, market-based reform, by sowing terror among the public and seeking to promote the idea that the country is being run by some with an “evil” agenda.

Her rhetoric is so far out of bounds, it is almost unethical to repeat any part of it in any way, but in the interests of countering the lies, her remarks need to be taken note of, deconstructed and consigned to the dustbin of shameless attempts at character assassination. The fact is, for millions of people whose children have health problems or disabilities, the reforms currently under consideration are the ONLY hope they have of receiving best quality care.

Sarah Palin’s unscrupulous fabrications and hate-mongering are specifically engineered to stop that laudable goal from being achieved. Her compulsive use of fear-linked apocalyptic rhetoric and false claims to attack her political opponents is an insidious and unpatriotic attempt to sabotage work that is being done on behalf of real people whose lives and livelihoods are directly threatened by a failing system.

Sarah Palin is the one who is engaging in rhetorical terror; Sarah Palin is the one who is actively trying to sow fear in the mind of the most radical supporters that the president of the United States is their enemy; Sarah Palin is the one who is using her children as props in a propaganda campaign with no ties whatsoever to the truth of the world; Sarah Palin is the one inviting those who do research or who have moral fiber in their character to dismantle, disprove and cast off her arguments as the rantings of an empty Machiavellian soul.

She would say, we can be sure, that calling her evil for inventing vile lies about someone working for the good of the people would be to cross a line. So let’s not cross any lines; let’s not blur any lines. Let’s just say that Sarah Palin was once governor of Alaska, that she struggles with the basic syntax of American English, that she refuses to stop using her children as props, that she routinely demonstrates a near total lack of precise knowledge about political issues, and that she lies, openly, constantly, and with malicious intent.

Those are the sad facts of a young rising star who doesn’t seem to know what it is to take the high road, what it means to be above the slime and filth that infect politics wherever the worst instincts of the uninformed or the vengeful might intervene. She could have been a contender, if only she knew how to adhere to principle and speak in noble truths; but she has cast her lot on playing the “pit bull” role, and now she seems chained to the lies, unable to speak the truth.

The political action group Conservatives for Patients’ Rights is running ads that say “when Congress gets involved” costs go up, citing the infamous $600 toilet seat that was part of a Pentagon contract for special submarine toilets. It was the Pentagon, not Congress, that was behind the outrageously priced toilet seats, special $800 hammers, and no-bid contracts that threw billions of dollars of taxpayer money, in some cases in violation of federal law, at private for-profit firms.

In fact, the solution, according to our Constitutional system, would be to give Congress far more direct supervisory control over how the Pentagon spends its enormous budget. In every case, the no-bid contracts, over-priced tools and bathroom accessories —not to mention decorating incidents like then Attorney General John Ashcroft’s exorbitant spending to cloak two “nude” statues representing liberty and justice in navy-blue velvet— have been the result of Congress exercising less than aggressive oversight of executive spending.

The watchdog SourceWatch is now reporting Conservatives for Patients’ Rights is a “front group” for the political and commercial agenda of Richard Scott and his allies in the for-profit hospital industry. CRC Public Relations, formerly Creative Response Concepts, the firm that staged the infamous “Swiftboat” campaign that smeared 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry’s decorated record of service in Vietnam, is orchestrating the Conservatives for Patients’ Rights campaign.

According to SourceWatch:

Maggie Mahar at the Century Foundation’s Health Beat blog reports that Scott previously started the for-profit hospital chain in 1987 that later became the $23 billion Columbia/HCA. He was ousted from this post in 1997 after an FBI investigation of Columbia/HCA that led to 14 felony convictions and $1.7 billion in criminal and civil fines for Medicare fraud.

The new campaign is rooted in the argument that 1) Congress always robs taxpayers of their money and 2) Pres. Obama and the Democratic party are pushing a system of “socialized medicine”. The fact is 1) Congress has the Constitutional “power of the purse” and spends much of its time to scale back and curb government spending and 2) NO part of the current plans for healthcare reform would establish anything resembling “socialized medicine”.

The Conservatives for Patients’ Rights campaign also suffers from the forked-tongue problem: making too many competing arguments at once to really speak the truth. The campaign argues that Congress makes things cost more, that socialized medicine lets people die, that officials elected by the democratic US system of government are trying to establish a kind of healthcare dictatorship. The front group is using scare tactics to kill meaningful reform that would save tens of thousands of lives every year.

Would a not-for-profit public option, with hospitals already agreeing to lower costs for Medicare and Medicaid, really cost more than treatment delivered in conjunction with a for-profit enterprise, or more than one, seeking to extract maximum surplus cash from the consumer? The existing US healthcare system, which leaves between 47 million and 63 million people without coverage of any kind, actually directly leads to the deaths of tens of thousands of people per year who are denied the treatment they need.

The argument that Congress is inept at achieving “return on investment” is often made by pro-corporate interests, usually in order to seize control of public services they would like to use for their own profit. For instance, private package delivery services argue the government is inept at running the Postal Service —a public service whose regular functioning is itself a vital part of any free society’s functioning and the logic of which is to spend more than it earns, by definition of being a public service— because they want to eliminate less expensive competition.

The direct result of “privatizing” the Postal Service has been the dramatic escalation of costs and the reduction of quality of service for the consumer. Amtrak is another public service that was “spun off” and is chronically unable to compete. It’s growth has been hampered, outside the northeast, and the movement to privatize it was in part funded by the oil and automotive industries, which sought to reduce the competition posed by a cost-effective national transportation alternative.

The Associated Press is the most widely distributed news wire service in the world. Credible impartiality is vitally important to its reputation as an unbiased source of global reporting. However, that journalists might have opinions, perhaps informed opinions, on matters on which they are not reporting for pay should never be in and of itself cause for reprimand. The AP, like any reputable news agency, has a moral obligation to honor the inherent value of press freedom, and that includes the right of individuals to express their views in other venues.

The AP cannot safeguard its journalistic integrity or promote itself as a bastion of impartiality if it uses the hierarchy of agency governance to silence journalists who voice opinions. What’s more, Facebook is a private social network; the default privacy settings limit access to most content to whatever circle of friends the user chooses to grant access to. Some privacy advocates think social networks should be more rigorous in guaranteeing privacy, while free speech advocates say social networks should be treated like private conversations among friends, not cause for reprimand or firing on grounds of defaming an institution or its backers.

According to Wired magazine’s Threat Level blog:

Private-sector workers have little, if any, protection from being fired or reprimanded for what they say online or off, said Wendy Seltzer, a First Amendment lawyer at American University. “If you put it onto a Twitter stream or a Facebook page, if they get word of that, they can fire you,” Seltzer said. “Electronic communications are more persistent, and more likely to find their way into the boss’ hands.”

Federal employees, she said, generally have a First Amendment protection against being fired for their speech, unless it “impedes the ability to do the job,” Seltzer said.

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The AP, or McClatchy, might well file a federal lawsuit to demand the right to publish information, even if that information has not been 100% verified. It may also sue to protect the privacy of confidential sources, without which some key forms of investigative journalism could not be effectively practiced. But in the private social network posting of one of its own, the AP has sought to officially reprimand the reporter for violating its code of conduct.

The First Amendment protects news organizations in cases of confidentiality, and it protects individuals who exercise their right to free speech. Some argue that Facebook is also a case of the right to freely assemble, because people connect with friends and acquaintances to share their news, their photos, their comments and moods. That the site is designed for this makes it something very different than the kind of “publication” the AP ethics code would contemplate, though it is, admittedly, a “public forum”.

What’s worse, in this case, is that the comment is one that might embarrass one of the news organizations participating in the AP wire service. That makes the official reprimand a demonstration of the AP’s apparent willingness to ignore a grave conflict of interest and attack an individual for criticizing those in positions of influence within or related to the organization.

But the AP case is another in a long series of such cases where management have very directly abused the implicit trust of a personal social network relationship in order to punish someone who did nothing more than express a personal opinion to a closed group of friends. There is the case of the Philadelphia stadium employee who was fired after calling the Eagles “retarded” for making a trade he did not approve of, and two New Jersey restaurant workers who allege their boss logged into a MySpace account using a false identity in order to uncover their criticism of his management style, then fire them.

The Eagles case is obviously a completely unserious reason to fire someone. And the restaurant manager has obviously demonstrated the criticism of the two employees to be true, and should perhaps seek some help for obsessive tendencies. Is it wrong for us to make such assumptions based on the little information we have? Perhaps. But in both cases, the employers raised the specter of public outrage or backlash by taking such extreme actions for such harmless “offenses”. They made the cases a matter of public record by revoking someone’s livelihood in retaliation for a single comment.

The AP needs to very closely examine its policies and come to a more philosophical understanding of its position in all of this: the AP is irrelevant to that comment regarding McClatchy, and should stand aside. Its intervention demonstrates an extreme bias by management, and its authoritarian approach to employees private lives demonstrates a fundamental disregard for the principles that allow such a vibrant demonstration of the free press to exist at all.

Its employees are citizens as well, and they have a right to treat certain online activity as private-sphere activity. Not every media venue is a public forum in the strictest sense, anymore, because privacy protections have advanced to the point where in fact, yes, we can have some expectation of privacy when we use those services. Someone at the AP is out of line, and behind the times.

Pres. Barack Obama has proposed the closure of the extralegal prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where hundreds of accused terror suspects have been held for years without charge and without access to the due process guaranteed by our Constitution. With critics defaming the president as somehow wanting to “release terrorists on US soil”, an absurd claim, Obama has now muddied the soaring poetry of his defense of our Constitution and its values with an as-yet unspecified plan to establish a “legal regime” of “prolonged detention” without charge or due process.

Obama should be given the benefit of the doubt when he says that any system established to deal with the potential threat posed by detained terrorist masterminds would be done “in accordance with our laws and values”, because he has been such a steadfast proponent of that standard, and has taken bold and politically risky action since becoming president in order to defend that principle. But, with the pro-Bush camp actively seeking to whip up a furore over the threat posed by terror suspects being detained on US soil, we must be careful not to assume that inexcusable reasoning and false choices will not enter into the debate.

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We have the most effective known system of prosecution of wrongdoing, despite incidence of wrongful conviction, because our system is not based on the assumption that every accusation is a verdict, but rather on the truth that where guilt cannot be proven, a free society cannot allow a guilty verdict to be imposed by the state. When we hear that “public opinion” says x or y or z should happen with accused terrorists, no one ever seems to observe that a jury of 12 citizens represents “the public” and will adjudicate guilt or innocence based on their interpretation of the evidence available.

The government is not imposing anything on the American people by allowing accused terrorists to have trials that abide by the rule of law: in fact, it is the American people who impose on the government the rule that such due process laws must never, under any circumstances, be broken by the government. That is the meaning of government of the people, by the people and for the people: that government cannot arbitrarily act against anyone or circumvent the laws that protect individual citizens against arbitrary persecution, no matter the reason.

Supporters of Pres. Obama have been severely critical of language in last week’s speech that seemed designed to moot the arguments of past officials like Dick Cheney, who are accusing Obama of being lax on the detention of “high value” terror suspects. Some have seen the language announcing a potential “legal regime” of indefinite detention as a radical departure not only from Obama’s own promises about a fierce defense of the Constitution’s values and established structures, but also from the history of US law.

On the day he announced his candidacy for president of the United States, in February 2007, Obama pronounced his commitment to the integrity of the Constitutionally based system of government. He demanded the “active participation of an awakened electorate”, and infused his campaign throughout with the poetic vibrato of a ferocious defense of democracy and the rule of law. A new legal regime that would expand executive power and establish a system of “preventive” adjudication of guilt, or likely bad actions, as yet uncommitted, without judicial review or due process, flies in the face of Obama’s own history of allegiance to the Constitutional separation of powers and the goal of defending democracy against the whims of those who would undermine it, from within or without.

It is clear that Obama seeks in part to undermine the attacks being leveled against him and to give some political comfort to members of his own party who are worried about their own 2010 re-election bids, should they back the closure of the Guantánamo Bay prison facility. But to what extent does the effort to assuage such fears, from liberals and conservatives alike, have to give way to a defense of the value of Constitutional constraints on the power of the executive? It could be argued that in every way, in every case, Constitutional constraints must prevail.

Of course, Barack Obama is an unusually gifted political martial artist, and his more prickly pronouncements, like this non-specific talk about “prolonged detention”, have sometimes resulted, perhaps deliberately, in the fierce opposition of Republican critics to ideas that they themselves would have promoted. This frees Obama to pursue his own agenda, while showing perceived “strengths” the Republican party has sought to claim as their own, being the “listener” who is sensitive to “real people’s concerns”, and reaffirming his commitment to abstract democratic principles, which are suddenly mainstream and allow him to make his party’s tent more inclusive.

While Obama has been a relentless critic of Bush-era detention policy and interrogation tactics, his go-slow, moderate talk on the prospect of prosecuting former officials for crimes against the Constitution or against international treaty obligations has led to some, like former VP Cheney, nearly talking themselves into prosecution, by protesting so loudly their innocence and their right to have done what they did. By Obama saying legal considerations would have to rule and that he would not accuse former officials outright of illegal “torture”, the entire sphere of public debate turned to why Obama would not prosecute torture, and even defenders of the enhanced interrogations began using the word more casually.

Obama let then Sen. Clinton talk her way into trouble last spring, and still Sen. John McCain talk himself into trouble last fall. He has been extremely artful in triangulating points of debate so that his own preferred vocabulary eventually takes precedence, and it is possible that this speech on detention policy, which was full of his lofty defense of Constitutional principles, was designed to do just that: to reposition the public consciousness of this issue closer to his preferred position, where the criminal justice system would be the apt venue for legitimate prosecutions. But we have to be watchful that no program of indefinite detention emerges to undo his legacy, and ours.

The president of the United States has taken what is perhaps his most problematic decision, in terms of following through on bold promises about ethics and transparency reform. The decision to withhold Pentagon photographs reportedly showing extreme interrogations was made due to concern the images could inflame violence against US personnel overseas.

There had been mounting pressure on Pres. Obama, largely from Republicans, to consider that releasing new images of US personnel engaged in acts of torture of terror suspects could “inflame the theaters of war” and lead to otherwise less likely casualties among US troops. Obama’s decision puts the White House at odds with a federal court order to release the images.

Obama told the press today that the images of concern are “not particularly sensational” compared to the well-known Abu Ghraib images, but that they still posed a serious risk of inflaming anti-American sentiment and spurring a rash of violence against US troops in Afghanistan, as insurgents emerge from the spring thaw to step up attacks.

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The president added that the images are linked to “closed investigations”, which have been thorough, lengthy and conducted in a good-faith effort to uncover the facts, so “this is not a case where the Pentagon has concealed” evidence of wrongdoing. He will still have to argue in court that the order to release the photos cannot be enforced, due to the national security implications of an imminent and special risk to troops.

Having promised the most transparent administration in US history, and created websites designed to allow the public to monitor government spending and activity on economic and social policy, Pres. Obama’s choice to reject the findings of the court is either motivated by very clear and present security considerations, or is a stepping back from his commitment to complete transparency.

The public has a right to know what its government is doing and/or has done. This is the meaning behind the First Amendment’s numerous provisions empowering individuals to criticize the government, engage in unabridged press activity, seek redress for grievances and assemble for political or non-political reasons. This is the logic behind due process standards that require evidence be shown and ordinary citizens be allowed to challenge any claims made against them by the government.

The photos may be used as propaganda if released. This is a legitimate concern. But the problem is not the images; it’s the actions. If the actions are so abhorrent as to spark spontaneous moral outrage at home and abroad, it is such acts that fundamentally endanger US personnel. Suspicion of such acts is already being used worldwide as a form of perpetual propaganda to promote violence against US troops.

Pres. Obama’s actions to put a definitive end to abusive interrogations have been one of the best pieces of news for those who know that countering defamatory propaganda with positive truths is helpful in reducing the drive of fringe groups to commit violent acts against random representatives of the US. Nothing is more effective at countering the ‘America tortures’ propaganda than putting an end to that dark chapter of violent acts, confused legal theory and official impunity.

If We the People do not know what in fact was done, we cannot effectively pressure our representatives to ensure that such acts are not undertaken on our behalf. If we are able to bear witness to the degree of abuse and trace that abuse to its source in policy-making, then every individual, including those who may not yet have seen their moral outrage piqued, can fairly judge where they stand and demand the Constitution remain paramount to the whims of the powerful.

The photos were ordered released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the purpose of which is to allow the public to provide an added level of oversight over government activity, to prevent or uncover wrongdoing. Nobody wants photos of past and already banned behavior, or any other policy choice, to unnecessarily endanger military personnel. It may be that Obama’s choice was his best and only, under sincere consideration for human life, but we need to know that the public’s watchful eye will be able to penetrate the veil of secrecy that can be used to hide bad acts by government.

The Egyptian government has ordered a 100% blanket cull of its entire pig stock in response to the outbreak of “swine flu” in Mexico and the US. The problem is, the new strain of the virus, technically influenza A H1N1, has not been found in pigs. The H1N1 strain is a flu virus that affects the human population and is spread by person to person contact. It contains genetic material showing it is a hybrid flu containing genetic segments linking it to avian-borne, swine-borne and human-borne flu viruses.

It is believed the initial infection may have some link to a particular pig farm in rural Oaxaca state, in southern Mexico. But as yet, this has not been confirmed, nor has it been confirmed that any livestock were responsible for transmission of the virus to the first affected individual. Egypt’s culling of pigs has been declared unnecessary by the World Health Organization, and the nature of Egypt’s apparent severe overreaction to the theoretical threat of a flu pandemic is made more clear by the fact that no one in Egypt has contracted the H1N1 flu infection.

What we are faced with, then, is the problem of genetic discrimination. In this case, pigs are being killed as a precaution, due to the genetic markers linking members of their species to a new strain of flu, on the other side of the world. But there is an immediate and direct human impact, for the pig-farmers whose livelihood is being destroyed by the blanket cull. There is even a clear cultural and ethnic component to the impact of the cull, as many of the farmers are Coptic Christians, a minority in Egypt, where the majority muslim population consumes far less pork of any kind.

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This means we have a clear case where an exaggerated reaction, based on inaccurate assumptions about genetic information, is effectively producing a new form of ethnic discrimination, with a measurable economic impact. It is not hard to see how this sort of situation could exacerbate, or even generate, prejudice and cultural isolation of minorities in the human population, using genetic information and false assumptions about public health as the basis on which to carry out the discriminatory policy.

It is unimportant, ethically speaking, whether such a regime of genetically-based discrimination would be the deliberate intent of such actions or the inadvertent byproduct of aggressive measures taken with no ethical or civil liberties protections. Using genetic information to isolate or discriminate against any part of the human population, based on their “genetic markers” is an ethical violation with no sound justification; we must, therefore, take the Egyptian H1N1 pig cull as a crucial warning…

Individual genetic information needs to be protected and individual liberties need to be sanctified in law above the yearnings of a public-policy apparatus that seeks to exploit such information, make blanket judgments, or determine who is entitled to what treatment and in the interests of whom. We must become conscious of how the abuse of such information is related to the buying and selling of human beings.

It cannot be permitted for economic or political interests to take precedence over the sanctity of the individual’s right to make choices about his or her health and related biological information. Where there is a public interest to be considered, such information can be used to make sound judgments about tactical specifics, such as the pattern by which an infection spreads or the reaction of a given population, on average, to a given treatment, but transforming genetic clues into blanket policies of discrimination must not be permitted by democratic societies.

• Daily updates from the World Health Organization on the H1N1 flu outbreak
• Daily updates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the H1N1 flu outbreak
• Café Sentido’s ongoing coverage of the H1N1 flu outbreak