FOX News has begun to escalate what appears to be a partisan campaign against the people of the state of Wisconsin. The network was caught yesterday using fake footage, stock footage of another protest, in Florida, at another time, where there were physical scuffles going on, while reporting that this was taking place in Wisconsin. A FOX News reporter also repeatedly reported that protesters’ eyes were visibly “filled with hate”, seeking to paint the peaceful demonstrations as dangerous, violent and anti-American.

FOX News’ stepped up reporting of flagrant fabrications comes as the Republican governor of Wisconsin is rapidly forfeiting popularity in the polls, both inside the state and nationally, and Republican governors have diverted millions of dollars in campaign funding to run ads supporting Gov. Walker.

The network has long been accused of fabricating controversies and reporting non-stories to distract attention from real issues of public controversy. This week’s reporting seems to confirm that the network is committed to systematically fabricating fake news and to using its position in the national media to promote Republican party ideology and the radical agenda of politicians like Gov. Walker.

The fake FOX News reports are also being issued at the same time as the governor of Wisconsin —who they claim is waging a patriotic battle against America hating radicals— has ordered the closing of the state capitol, the ejection of protesters and is now attempting to commandeer the state police to arrest “with or without force” any Democratic official who has been absent from the state Senate.

It has been suggested Walker may be in violation of state and federal law for his alleged private discussion of plans to use paid thugs to cause trouble and break up the protests outside the capitol, as well as his alleged consideration of deploying the National Guard to disperse the protesters by force.

FOX is not reporting that Gov. Walker is being accused of abuse of office for his repeated use of coercive threats to ram his agenda through the state legislature, sending police to harass the families of state legislators who have fled the state to deprive his party of a quorum, and threatening to lay off thousands of workers unless the Democratic senators come back to pass his proposal.

The last week has seen mounting protests in Madison, Wisconsin, with crowds occupying the state capitol grounds swelling from 10,000 to 25,000 to 30,000, 40,000 and now on Saturday, 60,000. Schools have been closed, and university faculty and students are striking in order to participate in the protests. The demonstrators oppose Gov. Walker’s plan to strip public employees of all collective bargaining rights.

While the Republican governor, and the two brothers who now lead the Republican majorities in the Assembly and state Senate, seek to give the state what some have described as dictatorial power in negotiation of public sector contracts, wealthy partisans from out of state have hired “astroturf” protesters said to be affiliated with the Tea Party to act as mercenary pro-government protesters and to verbally abuse the protesters at the state capitol.

The paid volunteers coming from out of state, with trips and travel reportedly organized by wealthy donors, are being criticized as the latest in a series of actions taken by Gov. Walker or his supporters to attempt to intimidate Wisconsinites into accepting draconian and sweeping changes to state law.

Last week, Walker drew ire across the nation for suggesting he would use the National Guard to disperse the protesters, an apparent threat to use force against unarmed civilians exercising their basic constitutional right to peaceably assemble. He was threatened with defections from the National Guard, lawsuits and possible criminal filings, should he attempt to call in the National Guard. The following day, Wisconsin guardsmen were seen joining the protesters.

Walker also allegedly ordered the state police chief, father of the two brothers running the legislature, to send troopers to send patrol teams to the homes of the 14 Democratic legislators who have left the state in defiance of the governor’s plan. Again, Walker and his supporters were accused of harassment and intimidation, trying to use force or the threat of force, to intimidate critics and impose his will unilaterally, even as tens of thousands demanded a change to his plan.

On Saturday, the appearance of so-called “Tea Party” activists, shipped in from out of state by wealthy backers of Gov. Walker, has been seen as a cynical attempt to pay working people to participate in a campaign of intimidation against the working people of Wisconsin. Analysts on Sunday talk shows are now describing Madison, Wisconsin as “the Tunisia of collective bargaining rights in America”.

Advocates on both sides of the issue are now saying, “as Wisconsin goes, so goes the nation”, or so it might be, as Republican governors across the country join Walker in his coordinated assault on labor rights. Democrats, civil rights groups and labor activists, are declaring the plans “an attack on the middle class”, and progressive groups are now organizing a campaign to recall every Republican in the state Senate who has been there for more than one year.

Protesters in Madison say they are just ordinary middle class Americans, committed to public service or to supporting their public servants, and that they will not leave the state capitol grounds until the plan to strip public employees of their rights is withdrawn. The Republican hard core of Walker, Fitzgerald and Fitzgerald, say they will not negotiate on any element of the legislation; it will be imposed as is.

The sequence of threats made by Gov. Walker and the apparent attempts to use his office to bully critics have led to suggestions that he should be investigated for abuse of office.

The refusal to negotiate on any terms of the legislation, despite the unions’ apparently confirmed and coordinated agreement to all the fiscal cuts, despite their severity, has led some to speculate Walker is using false claims of a catastrophic budget situation to empower himself to eliminate unions in the state and undermine political opposition to big-money Republican machine politics.

There are suggestions Gov. Walker should be investigated for what might be an elaborate attempt to rig elections in the state, or even for colluding with other Republican governors to do the same in several states, even as they attempt to engineer a pro-Republican redistricting of the national Congressional map.

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?

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell today spoke to the Heritage Foundation, and called on Pres. Obama to compromise by doing what the Senate minority wants. His speech was at intervals irrational and in turn smelled of sour grapes (McConnell did not get to take control of the Senate, so he proposes his party empower him by continuing to obstruct every proposal made to benefit the American people). But perhaps worst of all, McConnell proposed the Republican majority in the House of Representatives misuse its Constitutional authority to control the purse and violate federal law by undermining provisions of the Affordable Care Act designed to ensure sick Americans are not denied care.

McConnell also lied repeatedly about the nature of the issue, claiming that the deficit-reducing reform legislation, designed to expand coverage and reduce the rapid and out-of-control escalation of healthcare costs is a “health spending bill”, and went on to demand the Republicans in Congress vote “repeatedly” on a full repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Repeal would inflate the federal budget deficit by $140 billion, according to the CBO.

McConnell is proposing the Republicans use their electoral victory to 1) obstruct (in order to continue depriving the American people of a complete economic recovery, in order to serve his own, personal political interest), 2) ignore and/or violate federal law, and 3) act on policy proposals founded on lies. He is doing this even as the House majority struggles to figure out how to work with Pres. Obama without disappointing a radicalized base that views any form of complexity, study or compromise as morally degenerate behavior and a betrayal of their ideology.

Mitch McConnell has gone from being the most important Republican in Washington, to the least important leader of either party. The split Congress resulting from Tuesday’s midterm elections, in which a far smaller electorate gave the Republicans in the House the right to participate in a bipartisan process of leadership. The new House majority will have to find a way to work with the Senate majority, still controlled by the Democrats, and with Pres. Obama, who will now see his presidential authority both tested and expanded by the possibility of historically significant vetoes.

McConnell is begging the political landscape not to forget him, and he is seeking very deliberately, and with a very bad attitude, to undermine the very tentative and uncomfortable courtship that must now happen between a Republican majority made up of incumbents who have sought relentlessly to undermine Obama and newcomers who have vowed to be even more ferocious. Republicans look less likely to be able to keep the esteemed discipline that has allowed them to stay on message to a one, throughout the last two years, and bipartisanship is about to show itself to be a lot like herding cats.

Democracy is complicated. Governing is complicated. Mitch McConnell appears to be showing his deep mental fatigue at the difficulty of keeping up with the problems of the world. He would rather everything gravitate toward his ideology. That would be easier. So he is vicious about his attachment to obstruction. It has been the most powerful role he’s had in affecting the Constitutional process. He wanted to be in charge, and he is not.

The question is: can John Boehner stand up to the extremist right wing of his party and to the conscience-free obstructionists in the Senate, and deal honestly with Democrats in the Senate and the White House? Does John Boehner have the courage to be the kind of leader that can help to make reform and recovery viable? Or will he waste this opportunity and condemn the nation to two more years of expanding malice and deepening economic malaise?

With tens of thousands of ideas for how to plug the leaking well or clean up the oil pouring into the official emergency response unified command, sifting through them all in a timely fashion must be a tall order —especially with only 40 people sorting through them—, but one entrepreneur, who has a method using naturally occurring microbes to break down the spreading oil slick, says he has been denied access to beaches where oil can be found for testing. The allegation raises the question as to whether BP is blocking ideas that could help clean up the spill or close the well but which would not allow BP to recover the oil for later sale.

The question must be asked for a number of reasons:

1. BP’s initial attempt to “cap” the well was really not an attempt to close it, but rather to funnel oil to the surface;
2. BP’s second attempt to cap the well was also an attempt to establish a funneling mechanism, so BP could recapture the oil from its damaged well;
3. Both the “top kill” and the “junk shot”, intended to permanently seal the well, were abandoned before even the first full attempt had been made;
4. Top kill and junk shot were the only two plans BP tried in not just quick succession but effectively as part of the same operation, mysteriously rushing them, while not rushing to any other proposed solution;
5. BP will not send supertankers to the spill to collect the oil from the surface and has reportedly sought to stop other firms from doing so;
6. BP has lied to regulators and to Congress about its ability to address such a spill;
7. BP has lied to the public and to the government about the scale of the spill;
8. BP has lied about the scale of its clean-up operations, leaving many coastal areas with no effective emergency response;
9. BP’s CEO has stated his intention to defend first and foremost shareholder interest;
10. Having lost $17 billion in stock value yesterday alone, BP may naturally be calculating that the potential future value of the well, if it can be re-established, outweighs the bad press of failing to close it…

These are all purely speculative reasons for asking the question, but there have been glaring anomalies in BP’s dealing with the oil disaster: the apparently total lack of planning for such an eventuality, the false claim that no such spill has happened before (Ixtoc, off the coast of Mexico, in 1979, is one case; there was a blow-out off the coast of California decades ago which still leaks tar bubbles onto beaches; there is another well, under the name Diamond Offshore, in the Gulf of Mexico also presently leaking, though dwarfed in scale by the BP blow-out).

Now comes the news that while BP has reportedly spent nearly $1.5 billion so far on its response, BP representatives are deliberately blocking access to beaches where clean-up methods can be tested or implemented. If true, that particular piece of news suggests there is a concerted strategy on the part of BP to avoid using techniques that would deprive it of exclusive, long-term access to the oil emanating from the blown-out well.

This also raises the question as to what sort of progress the federal criminal investigation into the causes of the spill has made to date. Is the federal government looking into whether BP has deliberately blocked or opted against using the best methods for closing the well and/or clean-up?

Today, MSNBC reports that BP’s Gulf of Mexico offshore oil disaster response plan improperly cited an expert who died in 2005 and declared it would protect walruses, which live in the arctic, with not one of them living in the Gulf region. The main slick is now reported to be moving close to shore near Mobile, Alabama.

It now clearly appears BP did not have a serious plan for dealing with a blow-out in the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico, that it has systematically lied and obfuscated in this regard, that it has sought to implement well-plugging or clean-up strategies it has not adequately tested and which it does not have the know-how to implement. We have to start asking more seriously whether or not BP is obstructing the emergency response, if so why, and who is directing BP’s response.

The Guardian reports that a proposed piece of legislation up for debate in the Italian senate would mean:

No more reporting of criminal investigations before they come to trial (even if that takes years). No more recording or photographing of anyone, even a Mafia boss, unless that person approves. Only members of the state-approved “National Order of Journalists” allowed to film or record. Fines approaching half-a-million euros for publishers who transgress, with €20,000 per reporter also on the table.

Such extreme limitations on press freedom could undermine the very functioning of democracy in Italy, and may violate basic principles of democratic personal freedom and freedom of information that underpin the European Union and the obligations of its member states to afford and protect basic human rights.

Help inform the debate with specifics about Italian media law, European Union legislation on informational freedom, and the underlying motivations for this proposed radical expansion of the Italian government’s censorship powers…

• Join the discussion now on the Hot Spring Network

Newsmax, the ultra-right-wing political propaganda outfit that calls itself a news service, is once again using its news pages to push financial get-rich-quick schemes on its customers. While railing against any politician who happens to be a Democrat and who is struggling to fix the problems 30 years of Republican de-regulation of wrought on the American economy as anti-American, Newsmax has routinely sought to push its readers into risky foreign currency trading schemes. Now, it’s pitching financial services directly.

Citing a non-descript “market timing system”, or referring vaguely to “this system”, the News organization is pushing an article that purports to be able to guarantee high rates of return for investors, in what appears to be a scheme to profit for itself. The wording of the article is careful in specifying that certain investment guesses, if followed, would have turned out to be profitable advice, but focuses on these cases of advice, without specifying what earned money for any real people.

The “promo” article is linked in emails to articles on totally unrelated topics (like global warming conspiracy theory) and appears to operate on the premise that while a specific type of reader engages their fear glands in reading irresponsible Newsmax confabulation, they can be scared into handing over a huge amount of their own personal savings.

In the unbelievable “Full Disclosure” statement, Newsmax pitches the service, instead of giving full disclosure, calling the mystery “system” a “documented, proven, play-by-play track record that anyone can see”. The “Full Disclosure” statement —meant to be devoted to revealing conflicts of interest— tells readers “these are not risky investments”, but then says they are “little-known ‘niche’ funds”.

The language of the promo article clearly suggests you WILL win big if you follow this “system” of investing. But in a flash of human modesty, the Newsmax “shills” —the word they use for people pushing investment schemes or stocks on TV— actually do note that “Naturally, not all of David’s recommendations were winners. He had some losing trades as well. All investments carry risk, but with proper technique and guidance you can eliminate some of that risk.”

It sounds like that language is not just a disclosure, but a comprehensive correction of tone. Their investment “system” engineer is not so much a super-human never lose wealth-maker, but more like a rainmaker who might earn some cash for the firm and who might benefit some of his clients. But who, exactly, is the firm he is making rain for?

It might just be Newsmax itself. The “Full Disclosure” statement suggests it is, but is vague, evasive and immediately resorts to salesmanship. The sixth paragraph of that section of the article reads: “Newsmax launched David’s service on Sept. 18, 2007″, then adding that they did this at “one of the worst periods in the markets in 80 years” and that his “aggressive portfolio has posted a total return of 37.8%”.

This begs the question: for whom? Who made that gain? Who stands to profit from this investment scheme? What amount of risk is there for the average investor? And is Newsmax behaving like an investment bank or a Wall Street trading firm with no license to do so?

The article is signed, dubiously:

Aaron DeHoog
Publisher, Financial Services
Newsmax Media and Moneynews

Publisher is one of the top jobs at a news outfit, depending on how the executive positions are labeled and how responsibilities are handed out. “Publisher, Financial Services” is not a job description for any news oriented executive position. “Editor, Financial Services News” might be, but Mr. DeHoog’s signature appears to suggest he has a dual role: publishing news for Newsmax and running the “financial services” division of the same company.

Is Newsmax a “financial services” company? Is that why its pseudo-news division uses trumped up claims about an apocalyptic collapse of the dollar to scare readers into foreign currency trading schemes that entail massive risk for the small investor and huge returns for the money trader? Is that why its economic news is wildly propagandistic and in many cases specifically oriented toward the promotion of investment schemes to which it appears to have direct financial links?

There are also the specifics of language: the “system” is described as an “aggressive portfolio”, but is said to carry little to no risk and an almost guaranteed high rate of return. Is this possible? Is this credible? Is this not the language of get-rich-quick con-men and hustlers whose rhetoric is geared to box in the doubtful and persuade them to fund what amounts to a scheme to centralize investments to benefit the chief investor?

Even were Newsmax to have no direct financial interest in taking fees for what they call the “system”, there is the distinct possibility that this aggressive backing of specific financial recommendations is designed to allow wealthy investors to capitalize on a rush to invest in those stocks, then bail before they correct. This is one of the most unethical forms of financial reporting possible, and the promo article specifically reveals that at least two top Newsmax figures are using their money to profit from this scheme.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito last night revealed how deeply unfit he is to serve on the nation’s highest court. When Pres. Obama made the entirely factual statements that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. FEC reversed a century of precedent on campaign finance regulation and would allow foreign corporations to spend money to influence US elections, Alito was seen shaking his head, grimmacing and mouthing something like “simply not true”. While it’s well documented how widely Obama —a Constitutional law scholar— and Alito differ on legal philosophy, Alito crossed a line with his reaction.

Supreme Court justices swear an oath to withdraw entirely from partisan politics, so Alito’s reaction last night, showing an apparently bitter partisan streak, suggests Justice Alito is not living up to his obligation to be impartial in his adjudication of the law. There had long been concern among progressives and mainstream Constitutional scholars that Alito represented a radical activist legal philosophy that sought an overhaul of American jurisprudence, to benefit wealthy interests and the concentration of power.

Alito had denied this during his confirmation hearings, but numerous Democrats remained unconvinced by his protestations and 40 of them voted against confirmation, along with Independent Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords and Rhode Island Repbulican Sen. Lincoln Chafee. That means fewer than 60 senators —the number Republicans now seek to make the minimum number of votes needed for doing business— approved Alito for his lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. His confirmation was, for fear of both the radical political philosophies he supported in the past and his pugnaciously political streak, one of the most controversial in recent decades.

Today on CNN, Jeffrey Toobin told the story of how when Pres. Obama, just prior to being sworn in, paid a courtesy call to the Supreme Court, eight of the nine justices were there to welcome him, Alito the only one not in attendance. That failure to take interest in forming a cordial relationship with the new president was construed by many as either a reaction of partisan anger over the outcome of the election or of personal anger, because as senator, Obama had voted against Alito’s confirmation.

Last night, Pres. Obama criticized a ruling for its potential consequences —which jurists like Alito, who favors a “limited role” for the Court, tend to say they don’t consider when deciding matters of law—; he did not “attack” the Supreme Court. It’s important to remember that four of the nine justices agreed with the president, in a scathing 90-page indictment of their colleagues’ opinion, that the ruling was a travesty of justice and could do significant damage to the Constitutional process of elections.

Alito, however, showed his colors. He revealed with his schoolhouse jeering the kind of intellect he applies to the law: one rooted in partisan rancor, devoted to a morally and intellectually untenable radical legal philosophy, and one apparently hypocritical enough to lie during his confirmation hearings, give slights to the president when he makes a courtesy call, then balk and squirm at the very idea of his own work being called into question. There is a very good chance that with a few more such controversial rulings that radically re-engineer decades or even centuries of jurisprudence, Alito could be demonstrated to have lied under oath in his testimony before Congress.

Senate judiciary committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) today observed that “In his confirmation hearing, Justice Alito [...] testified that the role of the Supreme Court is a limited role”. He added, critically: “That was then when he was seeking confirmation. This is now.” At the time of his confirmation hearing, Alito was seen by many critics to have given evasive answers designed to misrepresent his political philosophy and to conceal both the reasoning at work and the political agenda behind some of his prior rulings. It was suggested at the time that he was hostile to the very process of confirmation and was giving misleading testimony.

Now, as a sitting Supreme Court justice, Alito has shown himself to be a true activist judge, working with the other three ultraconservatives on the Court, and the more centrist Justice Kennedy, to overturn long-standing precedent rooted in the need to protect voters’ rights and the integrity of the democratic process. If Samuel Alito is serving an activist pro-business or Republican party agenda, if he cannot accept that the other two branches of government are entitled to criticize his views, he is not fit to serve on the Supreme Court. For now, it will be up to Congress to craft legislation to limit the fallout from the radical departure from strict constructionist Constitutionalism that has unleashed what will be an unprecedented amount of corporate cash on our electoral process.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has been a relentless defender of the most aggressive tacts used during the Bush era to combat terrorism. The word aggressive applies to the attitude, of course, not the thoroughgoing nature or effectiveness of those policies. He is now attacking Pres. Obama for his response to the alleged terror plot that involved a Christmas Day bombing over Detroit, which was foiled. Yet Senator Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate foreign relations committee, has called Cheney’s criticism unfair, and says Obama’s response has been “strong” and “decisive”.

In fact, if we examine the nature of the policies promoted by former Vice President Cheney, we find a common thread: whether it’s torture, the wish to selectively —which many believe means entirely— abolish habeas corpus, arbitrary detention, snap bombing raids, invasions of whole countries based on deliberately manipulated intelligence, the common thread is a sadistic bloodlust. It is as if Mr. Cheney cannot find it in himself to put democracy ahead of the lust for a violent, unhinged response. He equates the use of brute force to “strength” and considers military action the most intelligent response in every case.

The pro-violence approach espoused by Cheney is not only cited, by both captured terrorists and the intelligence community, as a primary motivator for terrorist recruiting, it also belies a near total inability to think clearly on matters of national security. Whereas Cheney would have us believe he is serious because he is obsessed with carrying out violent acts and dehumanizing those suspected of involvement in terrorist plots, that obsession shows he is not serious about crafting the smartest solution to the problem. He is serious only about developing elaborate vehicles for sadistic behavior, using national security as an excuse.

In more than one way, Mr. Cheney’s dark obsessions endanger our nation. His perverse approach to defending the nation projects an image not of strength, but of cruelty, thus lending credence to the most cruel and deranged of our enemies. The extreme nature of his apparently global plot to dehumanize anyone he deems a potential enemy of the United States suggests this is something the United States routinely does and for which its global influence is used.

And his advocating torture and other sadistic practices actually inflames hatred of the US, produces false intelligence, and undermines intelligence gathering at all levels. It also puts Americans —both in the military and civilians traveling abroad— at greater risk of such treatment, according to every military and intelligence report that has examined the subject. There is also the most often overlooked piece of the Cheney security puzzle: his policies are a direct assault on the very principles of Constitutional democracy in the United States, a capitulation of the highest order to the terrorist mindset.

So why does Dick Cheney persist in promoting sadistic, ill-advised policies that are more likely to harm us than help us, that have already failed in spectacular fashion, which our enemies use to recruit a new generation of militant thugs to wage war on our civilians, all while deliberately and actively seeking to forfeit our freedoms and our Constitutional democracy? Does Mr. Cheney benefit personally in some way from this campaign of horrors? Is he in the torture-for-profit business?

Maybe he has some money invested in firms that profit from war. But it would be easier to continue lying about the evil of our enemies to provoke wars for profit than it would be to add to that already very tall order an always-on campaign in favor of torture, ignoring habeas corpus and undoing the fundamental principles of a democratic society. So the profit-motive is not an adequate explanation for Cheney’s rants.

There’s always the issue of defending his past actions, to avoid prosecution. And this is a good argument. It’s been all but evidentially established that Dick Cheney was integral in crafting a number of key Bush-era policies that violated US law, including the Constitution, and that he was at the top of a conspiracy to conceal those activities from the Congress, the public and the world. Allegedly. If proven in a court of law, such allegations could lead to his prosecution as the most serious criminal saboteur of the Constitutional order in US history (barring the Civil War period).

So getting the public and the government to agree that his acts were not crimes and his policies were “strong” and heroic could be a way of preventing eventual prosecution. But Cheney’s “defense” —which his very public ranting against Pres. Obama’s counterterrorism policies is widely accepted to be— has been bizarre, to say the least: in order to argue that he did not violate the law by advocating torture, kidnapping, arbitrary detention and random killings, Cheney now advocates for them. He even goes as far as to attack Obama for changing counterterrorism policy by not doing those things. One of the strangest defenses one could ever mount, surely.

To some extent, Cheney is a man who is intimately involved in the industry of war-making and who has already made millions from the Iraq war, through his former company, the “oil services” firm Halliburton, which conveniently morphed into a war services firm when Iraq was invaded, and which continued to pay him throughout his time as vice president. Cheney lied about having “severed” his ties with the company, but an investigation by the Congressional Research Service found he had a special arrangement that gave him stock options and substantial deferred compensation.

During the year 2004-2005, Cheney’s stock option holdings in his former firm shot up by an astonishing 3,281%, rising in value from $241,498 to more than $8 million. By 2005, Halliburton had been paid more than $20 billion in no-bid contract fees for work in the Iraq war zone. Cheney said he would give the proceeds from his stock options to charity, but has never relinquished ownership. His profit-making seems more than secure, and there may yet be investigations into the specifics. (The firm was even paid tens of millions of dollars in bonuses for work that killed US troops, and numerous investigations have been launched.)

But again, it would be easier to gain from such business ties or to defend his claim that he never violated the law if he did not so actively promote and pursue the use of torture and other flagrantly unhinged uses of executive power that violate US law and endanger the nation. The conclusion one is left to draw is that Cheney’s motivation is not strictly financial or related to mounting a legal defense in the court of public opinion, but that he desires to see such policies spoken about, advocated, and embraced, by wide swaths of the US public, regardless of the harm it would do to our way of life and to our national security and standing in the world.

That desire would be evidence of a deep sadistic streak, pervasive enough in his way of seeing the world that he is blinded to both the moral and practical arguments against what he proposes. Uncaring about his torture policy flagrantly violating US law, uncaring about whether the selective suspension of habeas corpus by a chief executive erodes our Constitutional system, uncaring about whether terrorists use his policies to propagate their influence and rally an army to their twisted cause, uncaring about whether torture and rigged intel directly endanger national security, Cheney persists.

Those of us who know the virtues of American democracy, who prize the right to say we live in a “free country”, know that we cannot permit extreme abuses of power like torture and the suspension of habeas corpus. We know that the Constitution and the rule of law must be more sacred than any one man’s lust for power. And we know, in our hearts, that cruelty and deviant behavior do not make us safer. Mr. Cheney’s arguments are sadistic and deeply dangerous for America.

He argues for a primitive defense policy that ignores information and uses no intelligent planning to achieve noteworthy aims. He argues that our values, as a democratic society, are weak and must be cast aside in the grand project of torturing and killing accused terrorists. He argues for wars that create horrific proliferations of risk for US security, with little to no long-term strategy, just guesses and self-praise, put into the planning. His sadistic agenda is an abject failure, and his political voice must be treated accordingly.

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?

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) is fond of calling the entire global field of climate science “a hoax”, and not only advocates inaction to curb the unraveling of climate systems, but devoutly champions the expansion of the very activities that are driving the planet to crisis. Had he been in office during the catastrophic 1930s “Dust Bowl” and had he had any success in convincing government and farmers to apply such an approach, Oklahoma could have been turned into a permanent desert with the characteristics of a failed state in perpetual need of food aid and expensive imports.

As reported by the EnergyCollective:

Whatever the agreement from COP15 is called, one “delegation” heading to Copenhagen – the so-called “one-man truth squad” of infamous climate change denier Senator James Inhofe (reportedly now joined by Roger Wicker and John Barasso) – comes here to Copenhagen with the message that president Obama’s hands are tied in helping forge a global climate deal by the power Inhofe and his cronies wield (real or imagined) to sink any cap-and trade legislation that comes before it.

Inhofe, ignoring literally centuries’ worth of scientific data, insists the international scientific consensus on climate destabilization is a conspiracy aimed at undermining US industrial and commercial might and overthrowing democratic states with a global socialist regime. The ferocity of his attacks on the actual process of scientific research, peer review, and honest attempts at coordinating public service oriented responses, has made him infamous among mainstream scientists and political activists.

But Sen. Inhofe represents a rural state that is highly dependent on the stability of fundamental climate systems to be able to be productive as farmland and sustainable as an economic entity. In the 1930s, unsustainable farming practices, driven by widespread environmental degradation, the economic Great Depression, and price wars among farmers competing for the dwindling resources of consumer markets, led to the near total depletion of topsoil and farmland productivity in Oklahoma.

The Dust Bowl remains to this stay one of the most startling, sudden and catastrophic environmental failures, and much of the American government’s response to farming issues is now based on the lessons learned from that human-induced environmental catastrophe. Sen. Inhofe, who routinely votes for funding and regulation aimed at protecting Oklahoma farming interests, all of which is based on the kind of science used in climatology, now opposes the world doing anything at all to address the rapidly mounting global environmental climate crisis.

So far, over the last decade, as climate destabilization has taken root and accelerated across the planet, farming infrastructure has collapsed on land that feeds hundreds of millions of people. Efforts to respond to this spreading environmentally-driven agricultural degradation have shifted unprecedented amounts of international food aid, making the global aid system less flexible and less able to respond in times of immediate crisis.

Food prices have soared to record highs, as grain yields are pressured by reduced availability of arable land, soil erosion, water scarcity and increasing worldwide demand. Those record high prices have coincided with an escalation of transportation costs and a worldwide recession, thus contributing significantly to economic hardship even in the industrialized world.

Such market conditions may allow some farming interests to rake in windfall profits over the short term, but scarcity and increased demand also incentivizes over-cropping and price-wars. The stability of the farming sector is questionable, and Oklahoma has to grapple not only with market trends, but with the very real threat of the environmental fallout of climate destabilization itself, which could dry the skies and interrupt vital weather cycles on which the states’s entire agricultural output is dependent.

Had Sen. Inhofe been making the same case for how to deal with the evident environmental fallout of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s as he now makes for dealing with global climate change, and had he succeeded in establishing the view that nothing should be done to deal with what was so apparently a human-induced crisis, Oklahoma could have been relegated to desertification, chronic poverty and the economic status of a failed state.

What should Oklahomans think now of their senior senator’s zealous quest to obstruct progress on urgently needed measures to address climate destabilization and guard against its worst long-term environmental fallout? Perhaps they should question whether the senator is really interested in the science, or whether he seeks at all to serve the best interests of his state, or whether, he is actually motivated by an embarrassment of riches in donations from carbon-intensive firms?

The Democrats celebrated a major legislative victory last night, when they passed historic health reform legislation. Only one Republican joined in passing the measure, despite a last-minute success in attaching a partial ban on federal funding for abortions. With that provision in the final bill, the near unanimous Republican no-vote was effectively a vote against the party’s own idea of barring federal funds from paying for abortion procedures.

The same Republican party that attacks every opponent who ever voted against anything attached to any larger bill has just voted against a bill containing a provision that restricts federal funding for abortions, one of their main stated goals as a party. They would argue, clearly, that they didn’t wan the larger bill to pass, so they voted for the amendment but against the bill: they want to have their cake and eat it too.

Abortion was at issue last night and the Republican party abandoned their own cause, for political reasons. Dozens of GOP lawmakers represent states whose populations desperately need comprehensive health insurance reform, with millions having no insurance or on the verge of having none and de facto monopolies choking the entire state economy with extortionate prices. They had an opportunity to support refom that would ensure most of those people, save thousands of lives, reduce costs and revive their local economies, and not even an amendment barring federal funds from subsidizing insurance that covers elective abortions could move them to vote for it.

They told us why a long time ago: they believe they can hurt Pres. Obama, perhaps even “break” him, if they were to defeat health reform legislation. But, with every level of government in need of a solution to the crippling weight of mounting health costs, with personal bankruptcies at an all-time high, a record number linked to healthcare costs and those costs projected to jump by 10% or more next year alone, they put their opposition to Pres. Obama above service to their constituents or to the pro-life cause.

It can be fairly said that the 176 Republicans who voted against the entire health reform package, including the anti-abortion provision, felt that opposing Pres. Obama was a moral and political priority, that they needed to oppose what they view as undue “interference” in a flawed healthcare system. But that should be remembered the next time any of them ask to be taken seriously as devoutly pro-life politicians: 176 Republicans in the House of Representatives will subsume their defense of life to a petty partisan scheme, even if a successful no-vote would mean crippling costs for government out into the future and tens of thousands of innocents dying each year, even when they know the House will pass the bill.

Even then, they will fail to support passage of a momentous pro-life provision included in the legislation, in order to serve two interests they view as higher: 1) hurt Obama politically and 2) preserve the profit margins of anti-market insurers whose business model is bleeding American businesses, failing to treat the sick and dying and bankrupting families.

The Republican party has adopted one of the most mind-bending political stances seen in recent times: after decades of defaming every Democrat, every liberal of any kind, progressive politics in general and anyone who opposes their party’s line, as “weak on defense” or “soft on crime”, often using the most convoluted rhetoric to make the defamatory claims, 28 Republican senators and 131 Republican House members have now voted to cut off funding for the US military in order to give special rights to violent criminals driven by hate.

These 159 Republicans in Congress voted against the Defense funding authorization bill, because it included the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which expands federal hate crimes law to punish attacks motivated by bias against gays. Some Republicans said their opposition was not to passing a hate crimes extension but to attaching it to a Defense spending bill. But how many of those Congresmen objected to procedural abuses when the Republican majority called midnight votes and neglected to even inform Democrats?

Astonishingly, a significant number of Republicans actually used extremist rhetoric to express what seems to be sympathy for bigots and murderers. Todd Tiahrt, a Republican representative from Kansas who opposed the hate crimes bill said it was “a cowardly move by far left Democrats to use this bill as a vehicle for their radical views.” Radical views? Rep. Tiahrt is actually making the argument that it is a “radical view” that in the United States a person should not be brutally murdered due to his or her sexual orientation.

Tiahrt railed against the idea of punishing anti-gay violence, saying the legislation creates a special class of victim and gives them more rights “than a veteran or a pregnant woman”. His choice of “veteran” and “pregnant woman” as rhetorical flourish appears to be designed to suggest that gays are not worth to society what veterans and pregnant women are, not capable of such implicit heroism or vulnerable generosity and therefore somehow less deserving of protection from random acts of cruelty and violence.

Tiahrt says in his view “every crime is a hate crime”, but what he utterly fails to understand is that hate crimes laws are not designed to give special treatment to any particular group, but rather to take note of the “special” negative treatment they receive, by being subject to bias and related violence, and try to ensure that the law rules out any justification for using bias to harm those individuals. The point is to return to them the dignity and equality stripped away by hate-driven attacks.

Rep. Walter Jones, Republican of North Carolina, voted against the Defense authorization act specifically stating his sympathy for people whose illegal actions are driven by hate. He questioned the very idea of hate crimes legislation of any kind, suggesting it violates the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection before the law. Rep. Jones apparently shares Rep. Tiahrt’s confusion over whether the average person is routinely subject to violent hate, but endures it due to a devotion to protecting the rights of violent hate-motivated criminals.

In both cases, these Congressmen are arguing not against the principle of hate crimes legislation, but against the principle of a democratic society being able define and punish criminal acts at all. According to their argument, it is unfair and unconstitutional to class hate crimes differently from other crimes, which means it would be unfair to class intentional murder differently from accidental manslaughter or to class mass murder as different from painting graffiti on the crumbling walls of abandoned buildings.

These extremists seem to be arguing that a murderer’s intent is not relevant to the crime in question; why should a murderer be deprived of the freedoms enjoyed by someone convicted of minor vandalism, or indeed how can we justify meting out any punishment whatsoever, when so many millions of citizens enjoy the legal “privilege” of never having been charged with a crime and so are “arbitrarily” allowed to remain free?

That this perversion of reason is part of the Republican attack on hate-crimes legislation is made all the more evident by the repeated allegation that preventing or punishing random acts of violence driven by hate is a “radical social agenda”. Rep. Jones even expressly stated that he believes the Republican party has no room at all for such opposition to violent hate, calling such efforts “one party’s radical social agenda”.

Jones also issued a statement containing numerous fabrications and distortions, such as his claim that “The ‘Hate Crimes’ provisions raise the possibility that religious leaders or members of religious groups could be prosecuted criminally based on their speech or other protected activities”. The legislation does not punish thought, but rather acts of violence or cruelty rooted in hate, or in a campaign of hate designed to incite violence. Jones is lying.

What’s more, Jones’ statement is absurd on its face, because no law can punish “protected activities”. Constitutional protections can be eroded, or inappropriately repealed, as under several provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act, but Constitutional protections by definition outweigh any lower-level legislation. The US Constitution can be ignored, and hijacked, as when Congress voted to approve war in Iraq on totally false premises (a vote for which Jones has begged forgiveness from God, literally), but protected activities remain protected.

The distortions put out by those who seek to give cover to violent hate, and whose views, like Jones’, are so extreme as to cause them to vote against an entire fiscal year’s Defense authorization —which Jones feebly claims he supports by arguing that he wrote provisions of the bill he ultimately voted against— are disturbing in the extreme, because these individuals actually believe it is rational and justifiable to privilege the protection of violent hate above the adequate provision for our military men and women’s needs, or they just don’t want to make the effort to explain otherwise.

Newsmax had in recent weeks tried to debunk Keith Olberman’s report that conservative blogs, political action committees and front groups were buying Sarah Palin’s book in massive quantities to rig book sales, by claiming they are doing the opposite, with the following claim:

But the truth is that Newsmax has not purchased one book from Amazon.

In fact, we are offering the book both FREE and at an incredible discount to Amazon.

The defense is so transparent as to be an explicit confession: we’re not buying in bulk to rig bestseller lists, we’ve just bought so many, we plan to give the book free to booksellers so they can sell it for $20 off the list price (that’s 69.85% off), before it even comes out!

Newsmax is also offering free copies to anyone who subscribes to their propaganda rag, where they will continue to pitch foreign currency schemes they’re invested in and the shoddy wares of pseudo-politicos like Palin, who left her job as Alaska’s half-term governor to escape prosecution and to go on the paid-speech and talk-show circuit.

Newsmax not only fails to refute any element of Olberman’s report that they are trying to rig the book sales for Palin’s memoir, they actually confirmed the entire report by proudly championing their own efforts to provide free copies to readers of their material and to booksellers, in a flagrant attempt to promote their agenda of distortion and tribalization (i.e. discrimination) politics through Palin’s own distortions of major political issues.

In fact, beyond simply confirming Olberman’s allegation, Newsmax has once again provided concrete proof that it is not just an organization with editorial sympathies for the right-wing ultra-conservative agenda, but rather a tactical and organizational outlet providing practical assistance to the political and business interests of the right-wing ultra-conservative movement. It is, in fact, a marketing and campaign-services provider for a narrow focus of special interests.

UPDATE, 18:55 GMT: Newsmax proudly announces it has never so aggressively marketed a book as Sarah Palin’s memoir. In a mass email to its general online subscriber list, the faux news organization ascribes the massive number of copies it has bulk-ordered to public demand, saying “Americans are very anxious to read this book”, but then explains its efforts to distribute the book either free or far below cost.

The Newsmax editors pitch the book as flush with “sensational revelations” and free of “media spin”. Newsmax then goes on to explain that it will provide the book free of charge or at 70% off the cover price, far below wholesale costs. The aggressive Newsmax marketing effort marks its single most aggressive marketing and distribution of any book.

That the “sales” it claims are not in fact sales but promotional giveaways is made more and more evident with each new revelation about the Newsmax strategy for mass distribution of the book. The question is: what about Palin’s memoir is of such value to the Newsmax “news” team? It would seem that Palin offers a number of distortions akin to those routiney espoused and propagated by the Newsmax organization.

The vehement opposition being engineered by the Republican party against the market-oriented “public option” is proof the party does not favor market diversification or consumer choice, but rather rigged games that give huge payouts to specific interests. The Republicans’ argument is that private insurers should not diversify the plans they offer or have to compete in a more dynamic and diverse marketplace.

The healthcare reform debate is showing the clearest signs yet of the Republican party’s distorted view of what a “free market” is supposed to be. Rather than allow for new competitors, including, if necessary, a publicly managed competitor, aimed at lowering prices and raising standards, the Republican party’s emerging fixed-market ideology dictates that major market players should not be forced to compete with upstarts or with low-cost options capable of delivering better quality.

Of course, the argument is usually made that “markets” —as if they were independent actors, interested in the quality of life of actual citizens— automatically create new “efficiencies”, which through competition bring prices down and push quality up. This is true in terms of flat-screen televisions and special features originally introduced in luxury cars that eventually become standard, like power-steering, airbags and anti-lock brakes.

But it is not the case with the American health insurance market. The existing system is a rigged game in which consolidation is not only permitted, but encouraged, and competition is virtually non-existent. In some parts of the country, one company controls more than half the entire private health insurance market for a single state. In California, 6 major insurers denied fully 22% of all medical treatments over a 7 year period.

The system as it exists now is a rigged market, not a functioning market. It is not only fraught with inefficiencies, it encourages greater inefficiency, as insurers seek to “profit” from plans that do virtually none of what policy-holders believe they will or should do. People are paying twice what they were 10 years ago for insurance that almost never works as they expect it will and in rapidly increasing numbers, actually drops them when they need care.

But the Republican party is now firing salvo after salvo of vicious invective at Pres. Obama and the Democratic leadership for trying to fix this problem by making the marketplace actually work more like a marketplace. Make no mistake: the Democratic plans are geared toward restoring productive, efficiency-generating market dynamics to the American health insurance system, and the Republican party is devoting all of its energies to preventing that from happening.

Consumer choice and consumer quality of life could be seen to be the key overarching issue in the 2008 election. Barack Obama ran on a platform of fundamental change intended to enhance the role of the individual in choosing and shaping his or her destiny. The eight years of Pres. Bush’s two terms had revealed a scorched-earth pro-corporate deregulatory ideology that left individual citizens and families vulnerable to some of the most aggressive, unscrupulous and reckless predatory lending the nation has seen.

The result was not only the near collapse of the American financial system, but a global recession and the fundamental rejection of the laissez-faire policies that had so disadvantaged a generation of hard-working Americans. Now, one after another Republican candidate, for the House, the Senate or for the 2012 presidential primary, is swearing allegiance to the wild-eyed, pathological opposition to any role for government in preventing such abuses.

They are very deliberately trying to dupe conservative voters into abandoning the political center, by lying to them about the nature of the reforms Pres. Obama seeks. Because Obama now firmly holds the political center, and the Republican party remains more unpopular even than the fractious, ineffectual Democratic Congress, the Republicans have made a calculated decision to paint him as an outsider, an anti-American, a socialist who doesn’t believe in democracy.

But Pres. Obama’s reform plans are exactly what he campaigned on, pragmatic, centrist measures designed to both diversify markets and restore some measure of the human dignity of the little guy, the individual citizen, family or small business. It is Obama whose political program is specifically, thoughtfully and genuinely, designed to restore and enhance democracy in a system too long deprived of democratic principles.

While Obama is doing what voters have demanded for years but never gotten, the Republicans are screaming bloody murder about fictitious socialist takeovers, because they are not on the side of the little guy, not on the side of the individual… in short, because they are determined to stop any reform that would interfere with the bottom line of their most unscrupulous and rapacious corporate contributors.

The Republican leadership is intellectually bankrupt: there are no ideas among them that are relevant to doing the hard work of governing in the 21st century, and most of them still refuse to recognize the colossal failure of their last 40 years of policy. They are trying to defend and promote a pro-corporate ideology in a post-AIG world by falsely accusing responsible reformers of “socialist” leanings.

That strategy is one of the most morally reprehensible we have seen in recent decades, and a clear sign of how severely lost is the party itself. The best of American ingenuity and innovation, freedom and prosperity, has always come through periods that combine allegiance to the human individual with requirements that large entities behave responsibly in society. On the healthcare issue, the Republican party is on the wrong side of history and throwing tantrums for lack of thoughtful, relevant policy.

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.

Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) presided over 200 executions between taking office in 2001 and June of this year. During that time, Texas executed three times more people than the next three states combined had executed since 1976. New investigations are now raising the question of just how many innocent people were sent to their deaths by a governor and a system that ignore legal obligations to examine new evidence or counter prosecutorial or judicial misconduct?

Perry has been one of the most radical proponents of capital punishment in American politics, refusing to issue a posthumous pardon to Tim Cole, an innocent man, proven to be so, who died in prison and ignoring exculpatory evidence in what appears to be a standard procedure that mystically discounts the possibility of wrongful conviction in capital cases.

Gov. Perry may either be a moral coward, afraid to offend a radical hard-right base that believes society will unravel without an aggressive death penalty system, or he may be more eager to put people to death than he is to achieve justice.

As detailed in a lengthy New Yorker feature for the Sept. 7, 2009, issue, “Trial by Fire”, Perry ignored a raft of damning scientific evidence showing an arson case against a man on death row was unsubstantiated “junk science”.

On 17 February 2004 —after Gov. Perry refused to stay his execution and falsely claimed to have judged the “facts of the case” to show guilt—, Todd Willingham was executed for a crime scientific examination appears to show he did not commit.

For the first 18 years the Texas death penalty system was in place, Texas executed 238 people, or about 13 per year. Since Perry took office, the figure has risen dramatically, to 22 per year. That particular statistic raises questions about what has changed under Rick Perry’s governorship. For one, more cases are coming to the fatal moment of execution that are affected by Republican control of the State Court of Criminal Appeals.

Since 1995, when elected Republican judges won a majority of seats on the Court, the rate of execution has skyrocketed. And those judges openly pledged during their campaigns for elected judgeship to favor the prosecution and be “tough on crime”, a strange claim for a judicial candidate whose job is to be tough on adherence to facts and to the law, not tough on the accused in particular, who are supposed to be presumed innocent.

With at least one judge accused of professional misconduct for making summary judgment on a death penalty appeal and a review panel that is reported to essentially not carry out its investigative responsibilities, operating on the assumption that the system does not fail and never actually meeting to discuss a case, Texas is not only facing the likelihood it will be proven to have executed an innocent man; it is the state considered most likely to have failed its legal responsibilities in that way.

That under Gov. Perry, the rate of executions has so dramatically accelerated has raised the ire of human rights groups that say the state’s actions are putting the US on short lists of major violators of habeas corpus and fundamental judicial rights that include Iran, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and China. Some death penalty advocates say that only with aggressive application of the stiffest penalty allowed by law can violent crime be curbed, but there is mounting consensus among legal experts that Texas’ system is riddled with serious due process flaws that significantly increase the likelihood of carrying out executions of innocent people.

Opponents of the Texas system say instead of deterring crime, the open bias of politicians and judges toward the prosecution and toward the application of the death penalty means the state is collaborating in the escape of those who really did commit crimes that innocent people have been convicted of. With a growing problem of human trafficking and drug running, and the attendant violence, Texas may need to halt all executions until the system is fixed and at last there is a means for determining when prosecutorial mistakes or misconduct have let the guilty off by targeting the wrong suspect.

The Republican party is suffering a period of decline and isolation. Certain elements in its leadership seek an ideological “purification” of the party, ousting anyone who does not agree with a hardline right-wing philosophy of evangelical conservatism — often with a near messianic devotion to militarism or to Machiavellian manipulations as a means to an end.

Nevermind that overt ideology was considered, traditionally, by the Republican party to be a sign of enmity with the ideals of the American republic. Now, we are seeing on one issue after another how prominent Republicans appear to literally fear doing the right thing. Votes that might assist poor children (SCHIP) or allow single, working mothers to put food on the table (food stamps or extended unemployment insurance) are so taboo, conservatives in Congress seem to fear they will be targeted for expulsion if they vote to be decent to their constituents.

For the post-Nixon Republican party, healthcare reform is not about preventing the mass death of innocents or curbing human suffering; it’s not about the grandness or the humane and credible success of our Republic: it’s about labels and the need to show absolute allegiance to certain labels, paying for that demonstration of allegiance by condoning and/or contributing to the deaths of tens of thousands of American citizens.

Absolute fabrications about impending “socialism” —false claims Republicans now routinely use to cast any act that favors human well-being over a rapacious and conscious-free marketplace as totalitarian in nature— are being used to shout-down reforms that would save tens of thousands of lives, because those spreading the fabrications are terrified of appearing to support reform that would be useful to patients.

Helping people has become the great bogey-man for Republican politicians. A radical, fundamentalist ideology of virtuous self-interest, in which any attempt to provide protection or consideration to the defenseless or the voiceless —those whose ability to take advantage of their liberties and individual rights is hampered by lack of resources and a system rigged against those who lack resources— is treated as potentially evil, has taken over the bedrock of common decency that is supposed to motivate American conservatism.

On the issue of race, there are plenty of conscientious Republicans who are demonstrably not racists, who don’t have racism in their hearts. But as comic political debate moderator Bill Maher pointed out last week, the modern Republican party appears incapable of seeing true racism, wherever it occurs, while being riled to a frenzy over any sign of “reverse racism”, where minorities appear to feel race-based emotional responses to tense situations or the majority group appears to have historic advantages diminished.

Maher’s point: this is a sign of lacking empathy, an incapacity to witness or care about real human suffering. Lack of empathy is now en vogue in the Republican party, a rallying cry for a kind of false posture of self-reliance that is really more about shaping a club with certain criteria for entry than it is about moral principle or political praxis.

Somehow, and hopefully to the chagrin of genuinely conscientious religious conservatives, a refusal to consider the position or the plight of the other is now taken as an automatic proof of being a badge-worthy conservative. The more disdain one can show for the plight of the downtrodden, the more clearly one is defined as a “movement conservative” in today’s twisted politics of ideological division.

On the issue of abortion, the post-Nixon Republican party has organized an increasingly monolithic dogma: no abortion, ever, no matter the mother’s risk of major long-term ill-health or even death. Moderates and pro-choice Republicans are ever fewer, at least in a nationally visible sense; party leaders have even waffled over the issue of whether the murder of abortion doctors is a moral outrage.

Efforts to ban “late-term abortion”, which is the most rare form of abortion and the only form exclusively applied for emergent medical necessity —i.e., the high risk of death to the mother— demonstrate a callous indifference to the health risks women face, while using abstract rhetorical arguments to claim a false moral high-ground. The reasoning behind this strategy is that anyone who opposes such a ban must be a “baby-killer” and therefore morally unfit to serve in public office.

It is a manipulation of the highest order and constitutes a direct assault on the fundamental right of any and all women to know that medical professionals have the tools and the training and the obligation to work to save their lives, if such a tragic circumstance should occur. How does that constitute the moral high ground? Simply and exclusively because the morality behind that position is imagined and is about grandstanding, not a Christian ethic devoted to the worth of the human being as such.

On healthcare reform, we now see major national figures in the Republican party taking seriously some of the most mentally unhinged conspiracy theories about a secret plot to destroy America by “nationalizing” all healthcare procedures and enterprises. We see some Republicans openly encouraging the public to be driven rabid with anger over the idea that the White House and the Congress are conspiring to murder their loved ones through an anti-American totalitarian plot.

Last fall, perhaps the most important moment of the presidential campaign came when a woman whose motivating was clearly extreme prejudice and whose level of information was clearly next to zero asserted that then-Senator Obama was “an Arab” and that this meant he could not be trusted. Sen. McCain did the statesmanlike thing and admonished her, saying that she was incorrect, that Obama was a “decent family man” and a Christian.

That was the sole nationally visible moment of Republican straight-shooting on that issue throughout all of the 2008 campaign, and it said something very important about John McCain and about his party (not to mention his running mate). While his party, and his vice-presidential choice, were willing to whip up public outrage over a lie, Sen. McCain was not; he wanted the democratic process to work and for that reason, he wanted people to know the nation’s other major party would not choose an enemy of the people for its candidate.

The ideological clashes based in false rumors about proposed healthcare reform had already reached fever pitch last month, when members of Congress received death threats both indirectly and in person, from opponents of proposed reforms who had been misled by such rumors. This month, they turned literally violent, when a fist-fight at a California event ended with one man nearly assaulting a much smaller woman, then having his finger bitten off by someone else.

While there is room for interpretation and for politicking on the fine points of any issue of major public controversy, fabricating false claims and spreading rumors about plots to murder the elderly or infirm, accusing the president of wanting a totalitarian takeover of the country —when all that’s being proposed are reforms to the insurance markets that will make insurance more affordable for the average person—, are morally reprehensible.

At this writing, a moderate Republican Congressman from Louisiana, representing a traditionally Democratic district, is being prepped to deliver a “rebuttal” to Pres. Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress, on the issue of healthcare reform. Rep. Boustany is a physician; he has saved lives; he is in favor of health insurance reform; he believes that the current system is causing needless deaths.

Boustany might just be a sacrificial lamb, a decent man trying to do right by real people, sent to the unenviable task of crafting a speech to counter a major Obama address on an issue central to national future well-being. Or he might be a man cunning enough to carve out a leadership role for himself by becoming the Republican the White House wants to do business with.

But he will be pressured by his party to reject out of hand every major pillar of the current proposed reforms, and to falsely allege that they are designed to reduce access to and quality of care. He faces this dilemma for one reason alone: his party has gone off the rails in terms of ethical responsibility to speak the truth and to work for the public interest.

What the Republican party needs to do in order to really rebuild itself for the hard work of governing in future decades, amid all the long-term evolving crises it will have to face, is to rebuild the socio-ethical basis for its central platform planks. Right now, the party is organized around the shaky rhetorical ground of a spin-first/serve-later political philosophy.

Reversing that foundational idea will be arduous, but responsible Republicans must begin the work in earnest, understanding that some sacred cows, both party elders and issues of unshakeable passion, must be ushered one way or another from the altar. The 21st century is a time that could be all about hope, civics, integrity and achievement, regardless of one’s party, but only if one’s party doesn’t stand in the way.

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.

Why is Glenn Beck, the pseudo-emotional apocalyptic faux-evangelical conservative big mouth, bad news even for FOX News and its nakedly ideological content skew? In short, because even the most biased and uninformed viewers feel stupid listening to his lies. His antics are insulting to those he attacks, but also to those he seeks to woo, and his work is directly harming the conservative cause.

FOX News has carved out a niche for itself among specific groups, some of which overlap, but which are characterized by one or more of the following tendencies: a tendency to vote Republican, perhaps without knowing what policy issue motivates this vote; a desire to cry out loudly “I am conservative” or “I am patriotic”; a tendency to fear the foreign or to worry that poor people are plotting a communist takeover; an unwillingness to admit that they are themselves poor; a secret or latent racism; a passion for character assassination as a political tool; blind faith in the idea that conservatives are virtuous and liberals are morally lax.

Glenn Beck likes to think he can take advantage of all the intellectual weaknesses he presumes to be characteristic of his audience, and so he fabricates lies in his head, or on paper, or in connection with venomous political action groups, and he spells out those vicious lies, in order to create a climate of fear in which his audience is supposed to feel safe.

But his lies are so bald-faced and stupid, it is hard to imagine anyone not being insulted by his maniacal rants. He recently accused Pres. Obama, whose much beloved mother and grandparents were white, of hating all white people. Beck is a hate-monger openly seeking to turn his viewers against their own country by sowing terror among them.

Any rational person can see through these claims. Even the most libera-reviling arch-conservative is aware enough of the world of fact to understand that political views do not make evil, evil actions do. They can understand that Barack Obama’s African ancestry does not make him hate America any more than Pres. Bush’s English ancestry would lead him to hate the nation that rebelled against his ancestors’ monarch.

They can understand that self-interested television personalities like Glenn Beck have no reason to be responsible with information if they can profit from their viewers’ ignorance, and they understand that their own conservatism is not decided or aggrandized by watching one television network over another. Those facts are made far more obvious by Mr. Beck’s inane and morally disgusting use of false logic to sow hate.

Somewhere, in the gut of any rational or decent human being, there’s an automatic reflex that alerts the mind to the onset of an imposed rash of hate or aggression. People who watch FOX News because they find it “entertaining” or because they want to hear that conservative views are infinitely virtuous, also have this feeling when their ears inform their gut that they are being nudged down a road of violent unthinking revulsion and hate.

Glenn Beck does not offer any substantive critique, any policy choices, any useful background information, or any independently verifiable statistical claims, to make his screeds worth a viewer’s time or spiritual equilibrium. He is spending “political capital” as if it were an infinite resource, when he has always been one of the weakest links on cable television, and is now descending into something like unabashed sociopathy.

FOX News does not make much of an effort, as a network —though some of its anchors do— to appear to be a news-oriented fact-gathering machine. The network is fairly confident in its strident and unrelenting full-court-press extreme conservatism. Some of its leading voices are so far out of the mainstream, their views are unrecognizable even in the increasingly conservative terms of the Republican party’s platform.

But, Beck’s radicalism is unhinged, haphazard, violent and even full of hateful assertions and lies. His is not just an all-spin zone; it’s a terrain where the human intellect is set aside in exchange for a false thought process which takes great comfort in the idea that reacting with anger, desperation, resentment and vitriol somehow always justifies even the wildest remarks.

As more and more sponsors now refuse to back his show, and criticism of his hysterics and distortions spreads even to the conservative media establishment, Beck has now begun to be ridiculed for unthought antics, like spelling oligarch as “oligarh”, saying there’s a letter missing, then adding a “y” to the end, in order to make a false claim about liberal politics that is literally irrelevant to the meaning of the word oligarch.

FOX News’ permissive attitude toward the bizarre and the ridiculous as proffered by Mr. Beck is indicative of a news culture that is unserious and holds overtly insulting views of its own audience. Beck’s antics have offended mainstream conservatives in increasing numbers for this very reason, because he makes a mockery of their causes and allows opponents to paint them in broad strokes with labels like “bigot”, “biased”, “hate-monger”, and “fringe”, a rhetorical problem no one who is serious about conservative values wants to have.

The British government has ordered the UK-appointed governor of Turks and Caicos to suspend the ministerial government and assembly and institute direct rule, after an investigation turned up evidence of systemic official corruption. The order of direct rule will also suspend the right to jury trial in the Turks and Caicos, and the UK says the imposed rule could last up to 2 years.

Turks and Caicos is a former British colony with autonomy, but still linked constitutionally to the UK. Elections are scheduled for 2011, and the UK Foreign Office says it intends to see those elections held either at or before the scheduled time, in order to return self-rule to the Caribbean nation.

The Foreign Office says the UK government did not take this decision lightly, and that it is using established constitutional processes to prevent systemic corruption from undermining democracy and transparency in the island nation. But some worry that the legal basis for the intervention is too vague, a reaction to the commission of inquiry’s May report, which found “information in abundance pointing to a high probability of systemic corruption and/or serious dishonesty”.

It is unclear whether this standard opens other former British colonies, now self-governing but with strong political and legal ties to the UK, to similar efforts to seize control of local government in order to prevent corruption. When Prime Minister Michael Misick was implicated in the alleged systemic corruption, he resigned, in March 2009, before the final commission of inquiry report was issued.

Misick’s successor, Galmo Williams, has said the UK’s imposed rule is an effective “coup”. He denounced the takeover, saying “Our country is being invaded and recolonized by the United Kingdom, dismantling a duly elected government and legislature and replacing it with a one-man dictatorship”.

It remains unclear if the language used by the Foreign Office in explaining the takeover was vague due to lax standards for such an intervention or whether it was simply diplomatically worded. The Foreign Office has explained:

This, together with clear signs of political amorality and immaturity and of general administrative incompetence, demonstrated a need for urgent suspension in whole or in part of the constitution and for other legislative and administrative reforms.

Gorden Wetherell, the British governor of the Turks and Caicos islands specifically took issue with the allegation the suspension of local government was a coup, saying “This not a ‘British takeover’”, adding that the “people of the Turks and Caicos Islands” will continue to operate public services, but that the move was intended to ensure they enjoyed better performance and cleaner politics.

It is too early to know how the imposed governorship will operate and what measures will be taken to combat corruption. Since the move effectively suspends the right to jury trial, there are concerns that efforts to prosecute officials under the British governorship could be seen as illegitimate, possibly even empowering the same allegedly corrupt officials once local rule is restored.

The United States Congress, in both houses, has entered August recess without passing a comprehensive healthcare reform package, setting the stage for a withering month-long national debate, in which opposing sides are likely to attack each other as threatening to undermine the nation’s future. Anti-reform groups, reportedly linked to the Republican party, have orchestrated interruptions and heckling of officials seeking to explain the grave need for proposed reforms.

Republican figures like former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) have have pitched some of the most extreme lies openly and without nuance, alleging that reforms would lead to euthanasia for the elderly or for children with birth defects. Such totally untrue statements have become hallmarks of the opposition to comprehensive healthcare reform, and there is mounting speculation that the Republican party is collaborating with political action groups that seek to spread the rumors in order to kill reform by sowing confusion.

The White House has spent significant political capital on pushing for comprehensive healthcare reform, with Pres. Obama’s job-approval rating slumping, down 10 percentage points in just six weeks, despite his personal approval rating remaining high. The intense multi-media effort to explain healthcare reform proposals to the public and to calm fears that are spreading among the public about what reforms might mean to them and their families, has not put a stop to the smear campaign.

Republican leaders appear emboldened by their success in spreading false allegations about the proposed reforms, and the national media continue to treat as legitimate certain claims that are entirely fabricated and irrelevant to the four actual proposals under consideration in the House and Senate. Even CNN is running nakedly interested faux “policy” ads that include abject falsehoods about spending cuts aimed at curbing quality of care to the elderly.

The propaganda mill is spinning at full speed and the national media are AWOL from the job of investigating questionable assertions and refusing to report lies as fact or opinion. The opinion/fact divide has been so blurred that Republican leaders are now actively promoting the idea that citizens who express entirely false misapprehensions about reform designed to kill the elderly or children with birth defects are justified by their right to express “opinions”.

The healthcare reform debate is highlighting a consciousness divide that has grown deeper in recent years across the United States, where guesses and ideological bias pass for legitimate commentary, due to the blurring of opinion and fact. Reporting about the fact of certain opinions existing has come to pass for serious journalism, where TV reporters proudly tout their knowledge and awareness of opinion-based groups which are actually telling lies, not expressing opinions about fact or policy.

The US Congress has shown itself to be unwilling or unable, as an institution, to take on the toxic consequences of this blurring. Individual members of Congress have shown real electoral fear at the very idea of speaking truth to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, who are actively mythologizing the entire process of debate about healthcare reform, speaking of Stalinist conspiracies and Nazi-like eugenics programs.

Only now, after the failure to pass reform before the August recess, are Democratic members of Congress going out into the country, to interact with constituents in town hall meetings and to counter the lies that are being told and try to steer debate back toward the practical issues around which it has actually been playing out in Congress and in talks with the White House.

The goal of reform may in fact now be in jeopardy, due to the mainstream media’s taste for spreading vitriol and fabrication as if it could pass for fact. Members of the Republican party need to start disavowing and denouncing the hostile and in some cases violent —there have been reports of death threats to members of Congress and to the president— mob-like activity being orchestrated in opposition to even debate on the substantive issues of reform.

Pictures and video from Tehran yesterday showed government forces storming into huge crowds of unarmed civilians, many of them gathered to support the opposition leaders who had gone to Tehran University to listen to Ayatollah Rafsanjani, a leading cleric and former president, deliver a sermon at Friday prayers. The security forces rode motorcycles into crowds of demonstrators and used teargas and batons to assault those assembled.

Even as Rafsanjani was denouncing the government for violence against unarmed civilians, recalling how the Prophet Mohammed had “respected the rights” of the people and how revolutionary leader Khomeini had said the legitimacy of the system must be rooted in the consent of the governed, even as he warned that such brutal oppression as followed the disputed election could destabilize and embarrass the Republic, the Ahmedinejad/Khamene’i bloc ordered security forces to gas civilians.

That this reportedly occurred while Friday prayers were ongoing suggests the government will even attack and reject Islam itself in order to enforce the logic of intimidation and of undemocratic expressions of power. Rafsanjani urged that in order to return to a state of consensus and to found the role of government on a sense of legitimacy, all restrictions on the freedom of the press and the freedom of assembly be lifted and all political prisoners be released.

The immediate crackdown appears to be a sign that the power bloc represented by Pres. Ahmedinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i is ever more conscious that its leadership is democratically unsustainable. The crackdown was so extreme and indiscriminate that one of the opposition candidates, Mehdi Karoubi, was reportedly physically assaulted and beaten about the head as he emerged from Friday prayers.

A direct physical assault on one of the leaders of the reformist movement suggests the government has either lost control of its paramilitary militia or has decided to abandon constitutional processes and use violence to dissuade any continued dissent from the opposition. Rafsanjani said the nation is now in “crisis” and criticized the powerful Guardian Council for not adequately investigating evidence of election fraud.

He said the Council “did not use wisely the time the supreme leader gave it to investigate”, suggesting that the processes used by the government to affirm the legitimacy of the disputed vote-count have only further increased the widespread “doubt” across Iran about whether the election was free and fair.

As the New York Times reports:

He said he had discussed a possible solution with members of the Expediency Council and the Assembly of Experts, two powerful state institutions he leads. He said his proposal was based on two principles: that everything must be done within a legal framework; and that there must be a free and open debate.

Rafsanjani did not address the specifics of his proposed solution, but many have speculated the Expediency Council could reverse the findings of the Guardian Council and call for a new process to resolve the election dispute, or that Assembly of Experts might open hearings into the constitutional legitimacy of the supreme leader, given his brazen support for one candidate in a vote-count so fraught with irregularities and alleged fraud.

Khamene’i has been so vehement in his support for Ahmedinejad, calling his re-election a “divine assessment” within minutes of the polls being closed on election night, that he is seen to have lost the air of impartiality that was integral to his having the support of ordinary Iranians. Rafsanjani was critical of the government, but mostly on points of process, and his demand for a process based in law and open debate suggests he seeks to take the high ground of impartiality vacated by the supreme leader.

In what is perhaps the boldest and most high-profile defense of the opposition cause, and language so heavily pro-democracy that it must offend the very logic of the current leadership, Rafsanjani said “Everything in our Islamic republic is based on votes”, adding that “Without the people’s vote, things cannot go on”. He is clearly urging the government to recognize its mistakes in the dispute and join a serious, national process to resolve the facts of the presidential election in a way that is transparent and demonstrable.

• Rafsanjani Decries Iran Crackdown, Urges Release of All Political Prisoners (updated)
• Mousavi, Karoubi to Attend Friday Prayers Led by Rafsanjani
• Iran Security Forces Rush Demonstrators, Who Chant “We are Not Afraid”
• Iran Association of Researchers & Teachers of Qom Declares Vote-count Illegitimate
• Iran’s President Ahmedinejad Orders Probe into Shooting Death of Neda Soltan
• Mir Hossein Mousavi’s official message to Iranians abroad (transcript)
• Kalemeh, Mousavi’s Web Site, Shut Down by Iranian Authorities
• Detained Reformists Reportedly Tortured to Induce Testimony About ‘Foreign Plot’
• What Happened at Baharestan Square?
• Iran Protesters Reportedly Attacked ‘Like Animals’ by Security Forces
• Iran’s Guardian Council Finds Ballots Cast Exceeded Number of Voters in 50 Cities
• Update on State Violence Against Demonstrators in Iran (video)
• Reports of Shots Fired at Iranian Demonstrators (video, links & updates)
• Khamene’i Demands End to Protests, Says Disputed Results Will Stand
• Open Letter from Iranian Academics to UN Sec. Gen. Ban Ki-moon
• Massive Opposition Rally in Tehran Mourns Slain Demonstrators (video)
• Pro-Mousavi Demonstrations & Iranians’ Constitutional Rights (video)
• Iran Opposition Movement Forces Khamenei to Investigate
• Iran Crackdown: Is it Tacit Admission Vote was Rigged?
• Iran Declares Ahmedinejad Winner, Results Widely Questioned as Fraudulent
• Rivals Ahmedinejad & Mousavi Both Declare Victory in Iran Election

The Wall Street Journal has reported that the secret CIA program, allegedly ordered concealed from Congress by then vice president Dick Cheney, was a plan to kill or capture Al-Qaeda operatives, in response to a 2001 directive of Pres. George W. Bush. The secret program’s existence —though not its details— became known last week when sources involved in the CIA director’s testimony on the issue made known Cheney’s involvement in ordering the CIA not disclose the program’s existence to Congress.

According to the Wall Street Journal report:

The precise nature of the highly classified effort isn’t clear, and the CIA won’t comment on its substance.

According to current and former government officials, the agency spent money on planning and possibly some training. It was acting on a 2001 presidential legal pronouncement, known as a finding, which authorized the CIA to pursue such efforts. The initiative hadn’t become fully operational at the time Mr. Panetta ended it.

Since the story broke late Saturday, Democratic leaders have been calling for investigations and alleging the former vice president broke the law by ordering the CIA to conceal evidence of the program. The news came as numerous reports called into question the effectiveness and/or legality of Bush-era practices, such as backing of Afghan warlords, the use of warrantless wiretapping and CIA secrecy.

The Minneapolis St. Paul Star Tribune reports that “Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California, the head of the intelligence committee, suggests the Bush administration broke the law by concealing the program from Congress.” Numerous sources have suggested the plan was kept secret precisely because its methods and/or aims involved fundamental violations of US or international law.

The UK’s Telegraph newspaper reports:

A small unit examined the potential for killing al-Qaeda members, despite the fact Gerald Ford banned assassinations following CIA abuses in Latin America in the 1970s, according to former intelligence officials.

Advocates of the plan wanted to create co-ordinated teams of CIA agents and special forces troops to hunt down terrorist leaders.

Targeted killings of that kind would be a violation of international law, and would violate not only US law regarding executive powers and military action, but also the constraints of the US constitutional system, which requires due process of law, within a recognized judicial process, before punishments, up to and including capital punishment, can be meted out.

Many members of Congress, from both parties, have already said the concealing of the program is worrying and may violate the law, but some have also added that there needs to be an accounting of whether or not the reportedly “not fully operational” status of the secret program might mean some field “tests” had been carried out. There is concern that force may have been used in one or more cases in order to “study” the efficacy of the proposed CIA program.

According to the Journal report:

Senior CIA leaders were briefed two or three times on the most recent iteration of the initiative, the last time in the spring of 2008. At that time, CIA brass said that the effort should be narrowed and that Congress should be briefed if the preparations reached a critical stage, a former senior intelligence official said.

Congress was not briefed until 24 June 2009, one day after the current CIA director Leon Panetta was first briefed on the program, and had ordered its cessation. No clear information has been given as to why the CIA did not brief Congressional intelligence leaders after the 2008 recommendation to do so.

The argument has been made that Cheney and other top officials may not be legally “guilty” of crimes against the Constitution, if their intent is seen somehow not to have been to circumvent or flout the law. But even an article arguing that Cheney may have “meant well”, suggests that “the media’s kneejerk acceptance of this framing, its buying the idea that this dispute is typical Washington posturing, is both lazy and cynical.”

The news of an alleged secret assassination program, deliberately concealed from Congress, comes as Pres. Obama has ordered an investigation into the alleged killing of as many as 2,000 Taliban prisoners of war by CIA-linked warlords, during the invasion and ousting of the Taliban government in 2001-2002.

As revelations of worrying alleged violations of law seem to pile up, the mood in Washington appears to be shifting toward some sort of investigation into the security policies of the two Bush terms, from 2001 to 2009, and the “war on terror”. The Telegraph notes:

Justice department officials have said [Attorney General] Holder’s own view has also shifted as he has reviewed reams of classified material which suggested that some interrogators may have violated anti-torture statutes as well as the new parameters set by the Bush administration.

His department is obliged to investigate such possible violations.

Obama has persistently said he wants to look to the future and not to the past, but has also said he would like Holder to examine the legal foundation for allegations of wrongdoing and to make recommendations regarding the possible need for legal action to investigate or prosecute such acts, if they are found to have occurred. No formal decision has been made on prosecution of officials for alleged crimes, though Obama has voiced support for the immunity of government agents who were told their actions were within the law.

Over the weekend, the nationwide media in the US were overtaken by a firestorm of speculation that Michael Jackson’s premature and sudden death, at the age of 50, was the result of a deadly cocktail of powerful painkillers and anti-depressants. Family and friends have complained of a close entourage of “enablers”, helping to intensify a long-running addiction and lead the pop star to his demise. One is tempted to ask, however: where were the doctors?

A growing movement of people inside and outside the medical profession is voicing concern that medicine in the US has morphed into a drug-delivery system, the functional logic of which is to expand the reach and ubiquity of powerful pharmaceutical medications, often without giving enough attention to the real effects on long-term patient health.

A culture of quick fixes and mechanical processing of health issues, coupled with a dysfunctional insurance system that incentivizes doctors to prescribe costly treatments and medicate to avoid personal financial fallout, has led to an American medical system in which the best science in the world is available but is also often ignored in pursuit of practices pushed by pharmaceutical conglomerates.

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There are more and more doctors who resist this trend and who openly chastise fellow doctors for irresponsible medication prescription. The issue of peer pressure as related to antibiotics is especially severe: patients often don’t understand that antibiotics cannot cure viruses, are only effective against certain types of bacteria, and that implementing their use always enhances the likelihood of a stronger, evolved, more resistant strain.

They also tend not to understand the genetic turnover from generation to generation in a bacterial colony can be so rapid that this enhanced resistance could materialize in the same patient, before the infection is cured, thus harming the patient. Antibiotics need to be prescribed with care, and in the cases where they are most medically appropriate. Multi-resistant TB and MRSA are two bacterial strains that are now so evolved they have to be treated in all cases with a “cocktail” of carefully phased in and overlapping antibiotic treatments — a risky process that aims to wipe out all individual bacteria at once, but heightens the risk of a super-resistant bug for which no effective treatment has yet been developed.

Painkillers are also an evolutionary problem. Patients develop a “tolerance” to their effects. Cancer patients suffering with constant excruciating pain in all the bones in their body can be prescribed morphine, which has an initial palliative effect. But the dosage has to be constantly increased as the body becomes dependent. A patient taking the drug for months, with a persistent deterioration in bone and nerve health, can end up receiving 10 or 20 or even 30 times the dose that would be instantly lethal for a normal person.

If Michael Jackson, with his immense wealth and vast entourage, and a private lifestyle some have compared to the rarefied privileges of royalty —including the fear of those around him to deny his requests—, were developing an addiction to painkillers, it is conceivable that the habit would actually lead to a crippling lifestyle in which he would feel intense physical pain and discomfort from simply not upping the dose regularly.

A doctor should have seen this and prescribed a cure. The drugs should have been difficult to obtain, even given his wealth. But a medical culture that is oriented toward the delivery of medication, where prescription drugs cost considerably more —even many times more— than in any other industrialized nation, facilitates the flow of dangerous medications to individuals who should not be taking them.

What is clear, should any of the rumors that are circulating regarding Jackson’s medication regime be true, is that proper medical supervision of those treatments was not exercised. His personal doctor may not have been the source of the prescriptions, may or may not have known about it, and was probably lied to, if this was a real addiction. But the system could work better for patients’ health, with less focus on expanding the reach of prescription pharmaceuticals.

The state of Minnesota, and of course the netroots, are in a flurry of speculation today that the Minnesota Supreme Court may be preparing to hand down a ruling in the election contest between Norm Coleman and Al Franken. There is no news from the Court confirming the speculation that a verdict is imminent, but the hearing was more than two weeks ago, and Minnesota has been without its 2nd senator since January.

A report citing a Twitter post said that both Franken and Coleman flew to Washington, DC, yesterday, on the same flight. There is speculation they could be traveling there in order to take office immediately upon hearing the announcement that a verdict has been reached. Others speculate that Coleman seeks to use the federal courts to block Franken being seated as the 100th US Senator.

Several courts have already found that the existing vote-count for Minnesota’s 2008 US Senate race is complete and legitimate, handing a victory to challenger Al Franken by a razor-thin margin of just 312 votes. Norm Coleman has also been ordered to pay tens of thousands of dollars in Franken’s court costs. A coalition of progressive groups has already raised $167,400 from donors pledging $1 per day until Coleman gives up his fight to stop Franken being sworn in.

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The defection last month by Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, from the Republican to the Democratic party, gave the Democrats an effective majority of 59 votes (including two independents). Franken would be the 60th vote, which would enable a Democratic consensus to override any Republican attempt at a filibuster. In such a case, the White House would essentially only have to worry about wooing conservative Democrats to its cause.

Pres. Obama has expressed his aversion to using a 60-vote majority to force through legislation that could not pass by other means, but he has also been insistent that he will not allow dead-pan obstructionists to prevent meaningful reforms, which he has promised and which has majority backing in both houses of Congress. This situation means that either Franken or Coleman would become a far more pivotal member of the Senate, as attention would be shifted back to the president’s agenda and who is responsible for its passage or failure.

Skepticism of the results of Friday’s Iranian presidential vote, which run wildly counter to polling that showed challenger Mousavi with a commanding lead in the days before the vote, is now the accepted reaction across the world. Yet the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i almost immediately declared the dubious figures a “divine” mandate for Ahmedinejad, without any review or investigation into alleged irregularities whatsoever. Reaction to opposition supporters’ calls for an investigation or a new round of voting has been a swift and violent crackdown on demonstrators.

The New York Times reports today that “The authorities closed universities in Tehran, blocked cell-phone transmissions and access to Facebook and some other Web sites, and for a second day shut down text-messaging services”. Pres. Ahmedinejad has suggested those who oppose the official vote-count may be detained. Yesterday, unarmed civilians were beaten in the streets, as security forces charged into crowds of demonstrators. Reports suggest at least one person was shot and killed.

The Times is also reporting that:

Dozens of reformist politicians were said to have been arrested at their homes overnight, according to news reports on Sunday and a witness who worked with the politicians. There were also reports of politicians and clerics being placed under house arrest.

Reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, who has decried the official count as a fraud, is thought to have been arrested to keep him from attending public gatherings supporting his allegations. He has not been seen in public since the night of the election.

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A statement was posted on his website, however, reading “I wrote a letter to the Guardian Council asking them to cancel the result of the recent (presidential) election”. Mousavi also addressed his disillusioned supporters in the statement, saying: “I again emphatically advise you to continue the civil and legal opposition throughout the country peacefully and observe non-confrontation principle”.

Rumors are now circulating of how the count may have been manipulated. One claim, allegedly made by a someone related to a government insider, argues that direct orders were given that 1,000 votes for Ahmedinejad should be recorded as 3,000. There are also allegations the ballot was designed to trap opposition voters into choosing Ahmedinejad. According to Times reporter Bill Keller, “Voters were obliged to choose a candidate and fill in a code. Though Mr. Moussavi was candidate No. 4, the code No. 44 signified Mr. Ahmadinejad.”

An unnamed source in the Interior Ministry reportedly told international press that the fraud was in the works for weeks. The source explicitly speaks of a “purge” of any and all staff members who might not be in agreement with the fraud, and their replacement with “pliable” officials willing to carry out the nationwide vote fraud. Mousavi has called for a cancellation of the election results and a new round of voting, but the Guardian Council is unlikely to act in any way contrary to the will of the supreme leader.

Observers inside and outside Iran are now forced to face the question of whether the regime is openly professing its hostility to the democratic processes mandated by the nation’s revolutionary constitution. The planned use of force against civilians, the president’s promise to detain opposition leaders, reports from insiders about a planned, systematic electoral fraud, and the supreme leader’s immediate declaration of a “divine” mandate for Ahmedinejad, all suggest a flippant and callous use of power —even a blasphemous and cynical use of religion— to impose the will of regime hardliners.

US vice president Joe Biden today said on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ that “There’s an awful lot of questions about how this election was run”. One example is the analysis that found that of the record 85% turnout, over 70% of the voters were from urban centers, which should heavily favor opposition leader Mousavi. Another anomaly cited by the US is the fact that the official results show Mousavi losing even in his own hometown.

With a young population of passionate opposition supporters, non-violent rallies may continue, and security forces may be ordered to disperse the crowds. Disapproval of the hardline taken by Pres. Ahmedinejad is mounting, and the ruling clerics have now clearly aligned themselves with arguably the most reviled political figure in the country, who may have received only one-third as much support as they claim. The democratic credibility of the regime is now firmly in question and the problem of public consent will now be increasingly pressing. The question is: is there any way the Guardian Council can reverse course on the Ayatollah’s endorsement of the results, and if not, what will be done to balance the regime’s interests against those of the people?

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.

New reports from Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) suggest as many as 1 million people may have fled their homes to escape fighting between Taliban insurgents and government military forces. The Pakistani military lifted a curfew in the town of Mingora, in the Swat Valley, for 8 hours to allow civilians to evacuate, in advance of what it says will be a total assault against all militant positions there.

The BBC has reported that much of the civilian population was unable to flee, due to lack of adequate means of transport. Many families grouped together to ride on trucks and other large vehicles moving out of Mingora. The military allowed those who were on the roads already to continue their flight, but imposed the curfew again while civilians were still inside the city.

Numerous eyewitness accounts have been broadcast by radio claiming that both the Pakistan military and the Taliban militants have been killing civilians. There are also accounts of the Taliban fighters in Mingora committing atrocities and dumping bodies in the public square to terrorize the population, and that they may be forcing civilians to take up arms or face brutal acts against their families.

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It has been reported that one resident of Mingora demanded, when contacted by the AFP news agency: “Please, please, please, do not call me again – they will cut my throat and say that I was spying”. The Times newspaper, of London, reports:

Up to 4,000 Taleban fighters are in control of Mingora, Swat’s main town, and have executed seven people on suspicion of being army informers, leaving their bodies unburied in the main square.

Residents said today that the extremists were digging trenches and planting mines as they prepared for the encircling troops to begin their offensive. Army jets and helicopters buzzed over the valley and strafed Taleban positions, and more troops were parachuted into the war zone.

One BBC reporter speaking from the conflict zone said Pakistan is now a nation at war, and that though there are Afghan and Uzbek partisans among the militants, the fight with the Taliban is mainly a civil war in which Pakistan’s military is fighting Pakistani radicals.

The general in charge of operations in Swat has said this struggle is a fight for the future of the country. He says “cohesive military operations” should be over in 1 month and that by year’s end, most military operations will have transitioned to “policing” operations. Pres. Asif Ali Zardari is seeking international aid to help with the emerging humanitarian crisis.

According to the Associated Press:

The military said it has killed more than 800 of the estimated 4,000 militants in the region, but the fighting has triggered an exodus of at least 900,000 people, creating a humanitarian crisis that risks undercutting public support for the offensive.

“Wherever the terrorists are present, they need to be eliminated completely,” said Mian Iftikhar Hussain, information minister of Northwest Frontier Province. Until last month, he was the leading advocate of moves to make peace with the insurgents.

The government has provided no figures regarding human casualties, suspected or confirmed, but refugees fleeing the fighting talk of bodies strewn in the streets and being unable to identify them clearly as soldiers or militants. Some have suggested the military may have a hard time singling out militants, as they tend to dress as and blend in among the civilian population and have a reputation for using non-combatants as human shields.

The release of Roxana Saberi —an Iranian-American journalist sentenced to 8 years for espionage by an Iranian court allowing her little due process and with no known credible evidence against her— is an important victory for advocates of both fair trial and press freedom. But as her story, which played out on a global stage, has highlighted the need for action to curb persecution of journalists, questions are being raised about the treatment of journalists in the US ‘war on terror’.

As Salon.com reports:

Beginning in 2001, the U.S. held Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj for six years in Guantanamo with no trial of any kind, and spent most of that time interrogating him not about Terrorism, but about Al Jazeera.  For virtually the entire time, the due-process-less, six-year-long imprisonment of this journalist by the U.S. produced almost no coverage — let alone any outcry — from America’s establishment media, other than some columns by Nicholas Kristof (though, for years, al-Haj’s imprisonment was a major media story in the Muslim world).

[...] In Iraq, we imprisoned Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein — part of AP’s Pulitzer Prize-winning war coverage — for almost two years with no charges of any kind, after Hussein’s photographs from the Anbar province directly contradicted Bush administration claims about the state of affairs there.

Eventually, the AP reported that US officials had informed the news service Hussein would be charged in Iraqi courts, though no new evidence had come to light. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which led the campaign to free Saberi, denounced the process as follows: “That Bilal Hussein has been held for more than 19 months without charge and on the pretext of unsubstantiated, shifting allegations is deeply alarming”.

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CPJ also noted that while the photographer would at least have a hearing, his due process rights were still in part denied and that his lawyers had not been allowed to see any of the alleged evidence against him. Among the various “shifting allegations” the military has made against Bilal Hussein —many of them later disavowed—, was the charge that he had been part of a plot to kidnap two journalists in the city of Ramadi. An AP investigation discredited the allegations.

It was found that Hussein had lent the journalists assistance after their release, and that there had been no evidence of any kind linking him to the events surrounding the journalists other than photographs he had taken of them. The abducted journalists themselves praised him for the assistance he gave them after their release, his only known involvement in their case.

According to CPJ:

Hussein’s detention is not an isolated incident. Over the last three years, dozens of journalists—mostly Iraqis—have been detained by U.S. troops, according to CPJ research. While most have been released after short periods, in at least eight cases documented by CPJ Iraqi journalists have been held by U.S. forces for weeks or months without charge or conviction. In one highly publicized case, Abdul Ameer Younis Hussein, a freelance cameraman working for CBS, was detained after being wounded by U.S. military fire as he filmed clashes in Mosul in northern Iraq on April 5, 2005.

Bilal Hussein was acquitted by an Iraqi court in April 2006. The court cited lack of evidence to hold or prosecute the photographer. No evidence was found that he was involved with or had knowledge of the plans of Iraqi insurgents. There has been no known change in US policy toward journalists operating in the war zone, though the current US president, Barack Obama, has ordered fundamental changes to many of the detention policies set up by his predecessor.

In another case, that of Reuters freelance photographer Ibrahim Jassam, the US military continues to hold the journalist, without charge and having presented no evidence of his “posing a threat”. An Iraqi court ruled in December that there was no evidence on which to justify his detention and ordered his release. The Pentagon, however, has ignored the order, claiming the photographer is still a potential “threat”.

As noted by Democracy Now!:

The United States is continuing to imprison at least one journalist without charge. Ibrahim Jassam, a freelance photographer for Reuters, has been held in Iraq since September despite objections from the Iraqi government, Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders and Reuters. Unlike Saberi’s case, Jassam’s imprisonment has received little news attention in the United States.

The legal and ethical considerations aside, the injustice of any entity linked to the US government so persecuting journalists is particularly stark, as it is the First Amendment to the US Constitution that established a now global standard that members of the press must be free to seek information, especially when inconvenient to the exercise of power, in the interests of a more comprehensive and authentic democracy.