One Man’s Waste Is Another Man’s Bonanza

One Man's Waste Is Another Man's Bonanza
By Robert Higgs | Thursday September 1, 2011 at 9:33 AM PDT

In a recently released report, the Commission on Wartime Contracting concludes that waste and fraud have consumed at least $31 billion and perhaps as much as $60 billion of the $190 billion or so that the U.S. government has expended in grants and contracts with private individuals and companies for work in Iraq and Afghanistan since fiscal 2002.  According to an article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, "The report faults poor decision making, vague requirements and a lack of training as the chief causes and says that the waste and fraud could have been avoided with better oversight and safeguards."

To which I am inclined to respond, not bloody likely.

Think about it: $30 billion is a helluva lot of money. At my current rate of earning, I will have to work more than 300,000 years to earn this amount­and it's entirely possible that I will not last that long. Of course, what is called "fraud and waste" is not a sum of money that simply evaporated in the hot desert sun. Aside from the small amount literally lost, every dollar of this sum ended up in someone's pocket.

The report tells us that the contractor workforce has sometimes included as many as 260,000 persons. Let us err on the side of a probably unwarranted presumption of innocence and suppose that only 10 percent of them are outright crooks. We have, then, 26,000 crooks pocketing an increment of at least $31 billion, or approximately $1.2 million per crooked contract worker.

Are we supposed to believe that 26,000 civilians in the contracting corps have reaped not only their already handsome, legally contracted compensation, but enough additional loot to make each of them a millionaire on top of that compensation, and nobody noticed until now? Are we simply to attribute this massive amount of misspent taxpayer money to "poor decision making, vague requirements, and a lack of training" without asking, But who got the dough?

The report's all-too-typical way of looking at the matter may satisfy you, especially if you are given to belief in fairy tales. I am more inclined to view this whole business as not so much a mass of incompetence (though there is undoubtedly plenty of that, too) as a deliberate ongoing embezzlement on the grandest scale.

Back in the 1930s, the legendary Marine general Smedley Buter, having spent his military career running errands for U.S. banks and other companies in various parts of the world, concluded that war is not what most people take it to be.

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

Can anyone say with a straight face that he was wrong, or that the same conclusion cannot be reached today?

http://blog.independent.org/2011/09/01/one-mans-waste-is-another-mans-bonanza/

The Road to the Permanent Warfare State

The Road to the Permanent Warfare State
by Gregory Bresiger, Posted August 10, 2011

In modern political society it is probably a fact that national leadership can heighten foreign crises to the point where war becomes almost inevitable and public approval, at least for a time, automatic. -- Arthur A. Ekirch Jr. Ideas, Ideals, and American Diplomacy

War is Peace. -- George Orwell, 1984

The U.S. government today is a contradiction. It presides over a nation supposedly at peace. Yet it is always preparing for war. It is a perpetual warfare state -- a government under which liberty and property are less and less secure.

It is one in which the average citizen must pay higher and higher taxes for the skyrocketing costs of a leviathan state that spends $671 billion a year on "defense" so that it can police the world. The citizen, in the supposed interest of safety, must yield more and more liberties. He must endure more intrusions owing to "national security." That's because the U.S. government's imperial foreign policy of the past 65 years has made myriad enemies.

But America didn't always have a foreign policy of endless enemies, alliances, countless interventions, and endangered liberty. Indeed, there was a time when the United States shunned all military alliances. It had no huge military establishment.

To become a leviathan, the United States had to undergo a transformation. Much of that transformation happened during the presidency of Harry Truman, who succeeded Franklin Roosevelt in the spring of 1945 and was president until the winter of 1952-53. Under Truman, American policymakers rejected the noninterventionism and trade-oriented foreign policy that had characterized early America.

"The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible," George Washington wrote in his Farewell Address. As a general practice, he recommended against alliances because the nation would be bogged down in quarrels and wars. "It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world," he wrote. He also counseled that the nation "observe good faith and justice towards all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all."

That pacific, no-alliance policy is today what mainstream media often scornfully call "isolationism." Nevertheless, isolationism was the norm of American foreign policy for more than a century. It was a policy that was explained by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, in 1821.

"[The United States] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy," he famously said. "She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own." Adams also warned that if the nation ever veered from this noninterventionist standard, "she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication.… The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force."

An example of the isolationist policy that once characterized the United States was the Greek war for independence in the 1820s. Adams, like most Americans, wanted the Greeks to break away from the Ottoman Empire. Still, the U.S. government ­ unlike many Western governments ­ provided no military aid to the rebels. Americans sympathized with the struggle of people who wanted freedom, but believed that the role of the U.S. government was not to remake nations. It also wasn't its place, Americans believed in the 19th century, to join alliances and become a part in the struggle for world power. That changed in the 20th century.

Sen. Robert Taft was a conservative Republican who in the 1940s and 1950s tried to restore America's noninterventionist tradition. He warned that the policy of alliances would "promote war instead of peace." What should America's foreign policy be in an era of turbulence, of war, and near wars? Taft, in his only book, A Foreign Policy for America, wrote that the United States should work on improving itself rather than going around the world trying to correct other nations: "The United States should set an example of living so well at home that all other nations will wonder, envy and decide to emulate us."


America's traditional foreign policy

Isolationist supporters had spurned empires like those of Britain and France, along with their countless wars. There was another part of this isolationist tradition.

The hostility to empires included a suspicion of large standing armies. That was a libertarian idea. It was based, in part, on the experience of Britain in the English Civil War ­ which ended in a military dictatorship presided over by Oliver Cromwell ­ and the later Glorious Revolution of 1688. Standing armies, many Englishmen believed after the Glorious Revolution that drove out James II, inevitably led to domestic tyranny.

That anti-militarist tradition, as transmitted to America through some of the great English philosophers, called for reduced military budgets once a war was over, in order to protect against undue military influence in society. Many of the Founding Fathers supported the anti-militarist tradition, as expressed in the 18th-century writings of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in The Independent Whig and Cato's Letters.

Their writings charged that James II's attachment to a big military had been dangerous. "King James II wanted no Army to help him to preserve the Constitution, nor to reconcile the People to their own Interest: But, as he intended to invade and destroy both, Corruption and a Standing Army could enable him to do it; and (thank God) even his Army failed him," according to Cato's Letters.

Trenchard's and Gordon's work, which appeared in colonial America, was very popular. Large standing armies, many Americans believed, were inimical to liberty and became one of the causes of the American Revolution. Anti-militarism was an important part of the heritage of liberty of the United States.

George III, American revolutionaries wrote in the Declaration of Independence, "kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies, without the consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power."

Those policies resulted in an anti-militarist sentiment in early America that developed into a tradition dominant for a century and that took another century to extinguish. Still, in the 19th century it was strong.

"Has not the experience of the past demonstrated," warned Rep. William Baker of Kansas late in the 19th century, "that just as you increase the army and the navy of a country you deprive a people to that extent of their liberties?"

Indeed, in his book The Civilian and the Military, Arthur A. Ekirch Jr., quotes Grant administration Interior Secretary Carl Schurz as saying Americans should be proud of not needing a large navy. "This is their distinguishing privilege and it is their true glory," said Schurz, who had fled his native Germany in 1848 because of its militarism.

America's often misinterpreted isolationist tradition was also alive in the 20th century, although it was growing weaker. In the 1930s, Sen. William Borah said that in matters of trade the United States "has never" been isolationist. But "in all matters political, in all commitments of any nature ... we have been isolationist."


Weakening the tradition with war

The process of destroying America's noninterventionist tradition began around the turn of the 20th century, with the tragic Spanish-American War of 1898. Like George W. Bush's war on Iraq in the early part of the 21st century, the Spanish-American War was justified by extremely questionable evidence ­ in this case the role that Spain was thought to have played in the blowing up of the American battleship Maine, which had been sent to Havana on a "goodwill tour" during a time of heightened tensions between Spain and Cuba.

Just as there was never any evidence uncovered establishing that there were WMDs in Iraq, which President Bush had used to justify war on Iraq, so too no evidence was found linking the Spanish government to the explosion of the Maine. U.S. Navy Adm. Hyman Rickover affirmed that lack of evidence in his book El Maine y La Guerra de Cuba. He noted that, when the Maine exploded, Spanish sailors rushed to save Americans. A few weeks afterwards, when America had been stampeded into war, some of those Americans would be trying to kill their rescuers.

The isolationists were the Americans who opposed the Spanish-American War. They were the ones who formed the Anti-Imperialism League. They were also the Americans who opposed American entry into World War I.

They were suspicious of secret agreements that Franklin Roosevelt made in the 1930s to bail out the British. They are also the ones we will meet in this article who objected to the militarization of American foreign policy. But, with each war and near war, the strength of isolationism declined.


Truman triumphant

Finally, in the decade after World War II, the isolationist influence on American foreign policy was shunted to the margins of American life. That's when America turned its back on what was left of its isolationism. The United States entered its first peacetime military alliance, NATO. The U.S. National Security Council in 1950 wrote a then- secret government paper, NSC-68, that justified a significant increase in military spending. Although declassified two decades later, there has been little public discussion about its significance and even today few people have ever heard of it. Americans also passively accepted the Truman Doctrine, a policy stating that the United States would support Greece and Turkey with economic and military aid to prevent them from failing under the control of the Soviet Union.

This time, owing to the Truman Doctrine, the United States became involved in a war in Greece. It intervened with the justification of fighting communism. Without a doubt, it was a major turning point in American history.

We will explore in this series how, why, and when the transformation happened. It was roughly from the end of World War II in 1945 until about a decade later.

That's when all of the major elements of an America as a national-security state were adopted: an imperial presidency that unilaterally made war, sometimes secretly; a huge military establishment; permanent military alliances; and a permanent spying organization, the CIA.

http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd1105d.asp

xxx

The Road to the Permanent Warfare State, Part 2
by Gregory Bresiger, Posted August 31, 2011

[George} Kennan's policy was based on the idea that we must "regard the Soviet Union as a rival, not a partner in the political arena." ­ Walter Lippmann

What President Truman accomplished in the 1940s and 1950s with the help of men such as George Kennan was to jettison the historic idea of isolationism and to gain widespread acceptance for the policies of a national-security state. That signal change is now rarely debated, just as few people challenge the ideas of the welfare state. Empire is now "a way of life," wrote historian William Appleman Williams in 1959 in his book The Tragedy of American Diplomacy.

Those changes dramatically transformed the political landscape in America. Both major political parties, no matter how much they criticized each other then and since, are fully committed to the garrison state, now in place for the last 65 years. Almost all major political figures in post–World War II America not only accepted the garrison state, they also used it to further American "interests."

Yet the road from isolationism to garrison state followed a strange, ironic path in the case of Kennan.

George Kennan was an obscure State Department official in Moscow in the 1930s and through most of World War II. A specialist in Soviet affairs, his State Department writings and complaints about Stalin were dismissed by amateur diplomats such as U.S. ambassador Joe Davies, the author of Mission to Moscow ­ a silly book with inscribed photos from Stalin and a Soviet prosecutor. Davies insisted that the Soviet show trials of the 1930s were fair. He sent out Kennan, his translator, for sandwiches during trial breaks.

Yet by the end of the war and for about five years after World War II until he was exiled to academia in 1950, this ex-sandwich order-taker was arguably the most important foreign policy advisor in the Truman administration. He became the head of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff. His quick rise was based on two signal documents, a long telegram from Moscow in 1946 and a subsequent article in the influential Foreign Affairs magazine. Those documents were the basis of the containment doctrine adopted by Truman.

Kennan's words were seized upon during a time when the Soviet Union's supreme leader, Joseph Stalin, was making postwar speeches in which he said that capitalism and communism were enemies and could never be reconciled. Yet that was the kind of Stalin speech that had been standard before the Soviet Union's World War II alliance with the Americans.

Kennan's writings, which had been ignored for years, were suddenly closely read by policymakers, including the president. They used his writings to transform America into a garrison state by the early 1950s. The new order would eventually be accepted by both major parties. That's when the philosophy of isolationism fully expired, with the United States taking on the role of confronting the Soviets everywhere around the globe.

"It will be clearly seen," Kennan wrote in 1946, "that the Soviet pressure against free institutions of the Western World is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy." Kennan's ideas were mostly accepted by subsequent administrations.

Yet ironically, Kennan, in the first volume of his memoirs, later disowned a large part of U.S. foreign policy. "Much of it," he wrote, "reads exactly like one of those primers put out by alarmed congressional committees or the Daughters of the American Revolution, designed to arouse the citizenry to the dangers of the Communist conspiracy."

Kennan, one of the intellectual godfathers of the garrison state, believed that many of his ideas were distorted to justify alliances, huge military budgets, and interventions around the world with little or no strategic import.


Kennan's doubts

Kennan later said he thought the United States should confront the Soviets in only five strategic points around the world. He conceded that his writings were not clear on that point and were used as a rationalization for interventions all over the world.

Kennan opposed NATO and National Security Council Paper 68 (NSC-68) and criticized many of the principles of Truman Doctrine, all of which we will review in this series. He opposed the Vietnam War and called for nuclear disarmament. The irony is that, by the 1990s, he came to believe that the isolationist tenets of John Quincy Adams, albeit with certain adjustments, "are entirely suitable" and "greatly needed as a guide for an American policy in the coming period."

Also toward the end of his life, Kennan tried to persuade George W. Bush ­ a man he called "extremely shallow" ­ not to go to war against Iraq. But the damage had already been done 60 years before.

American elite policymakers embraced the ideas of the Truman Doctrine, NATO, and the National Security Act of 1947 (which created the National Security Council and the CIA), even though most Americans then or now know little of the National Security Act or the Truman Doctrine or a myriad other creations of the warfare state that have become a permanent part of our society.

NSC-68, along with sweeping changes outlined in the NATO charter and in the Truman Doctrine, was a watershed. After World War II, America indeed went abroad in search of "monsters to destroy," from the Near East to Korea to Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan.

NSC-68 became one of documents that justified a state of permanent war or near war. It was initiated by the first modern Defense secretary, James Forrestal, just after World War II. It was Forrestal who coined the term "semi-war."

The term is defined as a "condition in which great dangers always threaten the United States and will continue doing so into the indefinite future," according to Andrew Bacevich, a former career military officer and author of the 2010 book Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War.

Semi-war, Bacevich adds, means the nation faces the prospect of hostilities "beginning at any moment, with little or no warning. In the setting of national priorities, readiness to act becomes a supreme value."

Kennan, in the 1970s, attacked the concept of semi-war. He complained that the overemphasis on military policy combined with a view that one could never effectively negotiate with the Soviets were two of the great mistakes of foreign policy.

It resulted, he warned, in the "extreme militarization not only of our thought but of our lives that has become the mark of our postwar age. And this is a militarization that has profound effects not just on our foreign policies but also on our society."

It also had another danger, according to Kennan:

It has led to what I and many others have come to see as a serious distortion of our national economy. We have been obliged to habituate ourselves to an expenditure annually of a great portion of our national income on the production and export of armaments, and the maintenance of a vast armed force establishment ­ purposes that add nothing to the real productive capacity of our economy, and only deprive us every year of tens of billions of dollars that might otherwise go to productive investment.

Yet supporting the military-industrial complex became the dominant political strategy in post–World War II America. Major candidates rode the issue to power. Accepting the leviathan became a way of demonstrating to mainstream media, an accomplice in the garrison state, how serious they were about national-security issues.

Sen. John Kennedy, successfully running for president in 1960, argued there was "a missile gap." The United States, he claimed, was falling behind the Soviet Union and must expand its military faster.

Yet White House aide and Kennedy family historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in his book A Thousand Days, later conceded it was a canard. He says that Kennedy's Defense secretary, Robert McNamara, in "a candid background talk to newspapermen, was ready to dismiss the gap as an illusion."

Therefore, a superfluous military buildup in Kennedy's presidency went ahead, as it had in Truman's and Eisenhower's. There had been so many scares followed by military buildups in post–World War II America that Eisenhower would publicly warn about "a military-industrial complex" in his Farewell Address. Nevertheless, Eisenhower did little to dismantle it.

Ronald Reagan in 1980 also rode to power on the specious claim that the United States was a crippled giant that needed a 1,000-ship navy. The Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) ­ a 1970s committee many of whose members would serve in the Reagan administration and some of whom had worked on NSC-68 ­ argued that the Soviet Union had a first-strike nuclear capability. The CPD claimed that the Soviet Union could impose nuclear blackmail on the United States. It was a dubious claim, given that the United States retained a triad of nuclear capabilities, including land- and sea-based strike forces. And it had been so for decades following World War II.


The sky is always falling.

But, as we will see in this series, the claims of pending doom worked again and again. Those claims were overdone, enabling the garrison state to grow relentlessly in war and peace no matter how baseless or overblown the threat, creating a spiral of useless defense spending, wars, and near-wars. Even when a threat was exposed as a hoax, the budget increase was never reversed. The same had occurred in the 19th-century British Empire, as detailed in Richard Cobden's masterful pamphlet The Three Panics.

The change to an American leviathan to combat the supposedly monolithic threat was also the result of the Truman Doctrine, which was born out of the containment idea. Truman, in a famous speech to Congress in 1947, succeeded in spooking the nation. He persuaded the country that the Soviet Union, with all communist countries united behind it, was moving toward world domination. Both were absurd claims, as we will see.

But how could the president sell them?

Truman would have to make an overwhelming case that America and most of the world was threatened. He needed a set of principles, a doctrine, to guide the nation. What he got was a doctrine that would outlast his administration and the enemy it was designed to confront.

http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd1106d.asp

Re: segregation is back ... in the north

You know what I was referring to. You don't play dumb well, and thats
a compliment.

On Sep 1, 10:12 am, plainolamerican <plainolameri...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, as long as they're "seperate, but equal"
> ---
> people are not equal, racially or otherwise
>
> equality under the law and being equal are two different things
> those who promote trying to make people equal are socialist dreamers
>
> On Sep 1, 7:29 am, GregfromBoston <greg.vinc...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > Well, as long as they're "seperate, but equal"...
>
> > Jesus
>
> > On Aug 30, 1:00 pm, plainolamerican <plainolameri...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > A high school has defended its decision to segregate students by race
> > > and gender.
>
> > > The scheme, at McCaskey East High School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania,
> > > separates black students from the rest of the school pupils, and then
> > > further breaks it down into black females and black males.
>
> > > Today the school's principal defended the policy.
> > > Bill Jimenez said the school noticed that black students were not
> > > performing as well as other students, and that research had shown that
> > > same-race classes with strong same-race role models led to better
> > > academic results.
>
> > > Mr Jimenez admitted that no other students were divided by race at the
> > > school, but he added that academic data dictated the school take a
> > > different approach with its black students.
>
> > > He told Lancasteronline.com: 'One of the things we said when we did
> > > this was, "Let's look at the data, let's not run from it. Let's
> > > confront it and see what we can do about it".'
>
> > > The idea came from Angela Tilghman, an instructional coach at McCaskey
> > > East.
>
> > > She said statistics had shown about a third of McCaskey's African-
> > > Americans scored proficient or advanced in reading on last year's
> > > Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests, compared with 60 per
> > > cent of white students and 42 per cent of students overall.
>
> > > In mathematics, only 27 per cent of black students scored proficient
> > > or advanced.
> > > McCaskey East High School
>
> > > She said research had shown that grouping black students by gender
> > > with a strong role model could boost both academic achievement and
> > > self-esteem.
>
> > > Some students, staff and parents were against the segregation, saying
> > > that it ran against everything the school stood for - with students
> > > from diverse backgrounds.
>
> > > But it was something Mr Jimenez thought was worth trying.
>
> > > In all segregated classes, mentors track their students' grades, test
> > > scores and attendance.
>
> > > One such mentor is Michael Mitchell, who hopes to inspire his black
> > > male students during their short daily meetings.
>
> > > He said he often quoted the Reverend Martin Luther King, who said:
> > > 'Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and
> > > conscientious stupidity.'
>
> > > Mr Mitchell recently used the quote when he found that some of his
> > > students were failing gym.
>
> > > He said: 'They're all young. They're all strong. They're all athletic.
> > > But they're failing because they chose not to participate.
>
> > > 'That's an example of "conscientious stupidity". You can do but you
> > > choose not to do. These are the things we need to get away from.'
>
> > > Read more:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1350864/School-defends-separa...- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

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Re: Ron Paul: Why a Top-tier Candidate Is Ignored by Republicans

Au contrare PlainOl'.  I believe in an America that is "The" world power, with a very limited government predominately focused upon protecting  its borders and it citizenry, providing for a strong national defense, and an America that is not  isolationist.  I don't believe that there is enough gold in the world to fund a national, much less an international currency, and I don't subscribe to a naive "Obamaesque/Paulesque" foreign policy that somehow believes that if we talk to murdering thugs who want to see Western Civilization as we know it destroyed,  that everything will be alright.

 

Pretty plain and simple.  Maybe I should be called, "PlainOl'American"?    I seem to share the majority of Americans' viewpoint.....

 

 

 

On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 10:10 AM, plainolamerican <plainolamerican@gmail.com> wrote:

Keith, let us address your question this time next year. When things
really blow up in our face in the middle east.
---
Keith believes in the interventionist policy
they are willing to sacrifice American interests for the animals in
the middle east

Internationalism is a political movement which advocates a greater
economic and political cooperation among nations for the theoretical
benefit of all. Partisans of this movement, such as supporters of the
World Federalist Movement, claim that nations should cooperate because
their long-term mutual interests are of greater value than their
individual short term needs.
Internationalism is by nature opposed to ultranationalism, jingoism,
realism and national chauvinism. Internationalism teaches that the
people of all nations have more in common than they do differences,
and thus that nations should treat each other as equals.

Washington advised the United States, in his Farewell Address, to
remain a neutral player in the international political game. He urged
the new republic to avoid conflicts and alliances with other nations.
Although he felt that economic ties with other nations should be
promoted to encourage trade and commerce, political ties should be
minimal. He was concerned that having close relations could force the
United States to unite with allies to promote their interest and be
drawn into their war.

Thomas Jefferson, stated as early as 1799 that "Commerce with all
nations, alliance with none, should be our motto", and in 1801 "I deem
[one of] the essential principles of our government [to be] peace,
commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances
with none."



On Aug 31, 12:09 pm, lbiglee75 <leroys...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Keith, let us address your question this time next year. When things
> really blow up in our face in the middle east.
>
> On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 12:48 PM, Keith In Tampa <keithinta...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > Michael,
>
> > Do you consider Ron Paul's foreign policy "conservative"?
>
> > I also find it humorous, that all of the Ron Paul supporters are now crying
> > foul,  now that Paul is getting all of the media attention that last week,
> > the Paul supporters were complaining that he wasn't receiving.....

>
> > On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 8:30 AM, MJ <micha...@america.net> wrote:
>
> >> "Let us be blunt: The stone cold truth is that for all of their talk of
> >> "conservative" principles and the like, Paul's Republican opponents in
> >> Washington and the so-called "alternative" or "conservative" media are not
> >> now, nor have they ever been, genuinely conservative. Whether we are
> >> discussing Fox News contributors -- a shocking number of which are refugees
> >> from George W. Bush's administration -- the writers at The Weekly Standard

> >> and National Review, or such talk radio personalities as Rush Limbaugh, Sean

> >> Hannity, Bill Bennett and all of the rest, such "conservative" commentators
> >> aren't conservative at all; they are neoconservative."
>

> >> Ron Paul: Why a Top-tier Candidate Is Ignored by Republicans

> >> Written by Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.
> >> Friday, 26 August 2011 00:00
>
> >> It is hard not to be amazed by the blackout of media coverage of Ron
> >> Paul's presidential campaign. Had Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum,
> >> Jon Huntsman, or any second-tier candidate been performing remotely as well
> >> as Paul has, he would no longer be regarded as a "second-tier" candidate. To
> >> the credit of such left-leaning outlets as Jon Stewarts' The Daily Show and
> >> The Huffington Post, this phenomenon has not gone unnoticed by everyone.
>
> >> Let's think about this.
>

> >> In spite of the extent to which Paul has been ignored by the establishment

> >> media in both of its leftist and rightist varieties, he unfailingly elicits
> >> explosive applause in every GOP presidential primary debate in which he has

> >> participated. A Fox News poll, of all places, shows that the overwhelming

> >> majority of its respondents hold that Ron Paul achieved a decisive victory
> >> over all of the other candidates in the most recent debate in Iowa. Of 7,991
> >> "active" cities nationwide that participated in the poll, and 43,293 total
> >> votes, 27,459 people thought that Paul won the debate. Newt Gingrich came in
> >> second place -- with 5, 906 votes.
>
> >> Statistically speaking, Ron Paul practically tied with Michele Bachmann
> >> for first place in the Ames Straw Poll, a contest that is evidently so
> >> significant that "top-tier" contender Tim Pawlenty's third place showing
> >> compelled him to abandon his campaign. Bachmann beat Paul by a meager 152
> >> votes.
>

> >> A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll released back in May showed that

> >> among possible Republican contenders (Perry may not have been a
> >> consideration as of yet), Paul stands the best chance of beating President
> >> Obama. This poll showed Obama leading Paul by only seven percentage points,
> >> while he led Romney by 11. Since then, however, things have changed.
>

> >> A Gallup poll from August 23 shows that if the election were held today,

> >> Mitt Romney would beat Obama by two percentage points (48 percent-46
> >> percent) and Rick Perry would tie with him (at 47 percent). It is true that

> >> this same poll has Obama beating Paul by (only) two points (47 percent-45

> >> percent); but it has Obama beating "top-tier" candidate Bachmann by four
> >> points (48 percent-44 percent)! However, when it comes to that much

> >> cherished "independent" vote, Paul leads Obama by three points. The
> >> significance of this vis-à-vis my contention that Paul is a top-tier

> >> candidate himself and should be recognized as such becomes obvious once we
> >> grasp that Romney is the only other Republican candidate who leads Obama

> >> among independents by this much (but only this much). "Top-tier" candidate

> >> Perry leads Obama in this category by two points while "top-tier" candidate
> >> Bachmann trails Obama among independents by six points.
>

> >> In a Texas poll among "882 highly active Republican voters," these voters

> >> said that if the Texas primaries were held at the time that the poll was
> >> taken, they would vote for Congressman Paul before they would vote for any
> >> other Republican contender ­ including their own Governor, Rick Perry (who
> >> was second choice).
>
> >> As I write this, a Gallup Presidential Nomination preference poll shows
> >> that Paul has leapt ahead of "top-tier" candidate Michele Bachmann and is
> >> now third place behind Perry and Romney. Twenty-nine percent of those polled
> >> prefer Perry; 17 percent are partial to Romney; and Paul picks up 13 percent
> >> of the vote against Bachmann's 10 percent.
>
> >> Polls fluctuate. In any event, they are no substitutes for actual votes.
> >> Still, the point here is not that Paul is likely to get his party's
> >> nomination or that he would actually win the general election if he did; in
> >> these propositions it is not my purpose to either affirm or deny. Rather,
> >> the point is only to show that by the very standards by which establishment
> >> pundits and pollsters determine top-tier candidates, Paul should be
> >> considered a top-tier candidate.
>
> >> But he is not.
>
> >> The reason for this, I think, is pretty clear.
>
> >> Even though he is the partisan for constitutional or "limited" government
> >> par excellence, Paul is despised and feared by the party of "limited
> >> government." That is, he is anathema to the GOP establishment, for while he
> >> has proved prescient regarding the economic collapse of 2008, and while an
> >> ever increasing number of Americans generally and Republican-minded voters
> >> in particular have gravitated toward embracing many of his views over the
> >> last three years, Paul's uncompromising repudiation of his party's foreign
> >> policy vision has earned him quite a few enemies within it.
>
> >> Let us be blunt: The stone cold truth is that for all of their talk of
> >> "conservative" principles and the like, Paul's Republican opponents in
> >> Washington and the so-called "alternative" or "conservative" media are not
> >> now, nor have they ever been, genuinely conservative. Whether we are
> >> discussing Fox News contributors -- a shocking number of which are refugees
> >> from George W. Bush's administration -- the writers at The Weekly Standard

> >> and National Review, or such talk radio personalities as Rush Limbaugh, Sean

> >> Hannity, Bill Bennett and all of the rest, such "conservative" commentators
> >> aren't conservative at all; they are neoconservative.
>

> >> In all fairness, it may be a lack of familiarity with the conservative
> >> intellectual tradition or even a reliable history of the conservative

> >> movement in America that accounts for why some of these folks wrongly, but

> >> sincerely, confuse their commitment to neoconservatism with conservatism
> >> proper.  As for many of them, though, I suspect that they know exactly what
> >> they are doing when they deceptively identify themselves as "conservative."
>
> >> My intention here is not to criticize Paul's detractors for being
> >> neoconservatives. The term "neoconservatism" is not, or at least should not,
> >> be interpreted as a slur. As I and others, including its apologists, have
> >> argued, neoconservatism is a distinct political-philosophical orientation,
> >> an expression of the Enlightenment liberal rationalism that continues to
> >> dominate our political imagination. But philosophically, neoconservatism is
> >> as far from classical conservatism as is socialism.
>
> >> There is no more shame in a neoconservative arguing and defending his
> >> convictions than there is shame in anyone else doing the same. There is,
> >> however, shame in a neoconservative pretending that he is something other
> >> than he is.
>
> >> And, like today's "progressives" who pretend they are not "socialists"
> >> because of the unpopularity of the idea of "socialism," our neoconservatives
> >> pretend they are "conservatives" because of the unpopularity of
> >> neoconservatism.
>
> >> To sum this all up, Ron Paul has proven to be, at the very least,
> >> competitive with the best that this GOP primary race has to offer. However,
> >> as long as his party remains dominated by neoconservatives, he will face an
> >> uphill battle.
>

> >>http://www.thenewamerican.com/opinion/jack-kerwick/8751-ron-paul-why-...
>
> >> --

> >> Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups.

> >> For options & help seehttp://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum
>
> >> * Visit our other community athttp://www.PoliticalForum.com/

> >> * It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls.
> >> * Read the latest breaking news, and more.
>

> > --

> > Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups.

> > For options & help seehttp://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum
>
> > * Visit our other community athttp://www.PoliticalForum.com/

> > * It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls.
> > * Read the latest breaking news, and more.

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Re: Right-Wing Think Tanks and Bloggers Conducted Secret 10-Year Campaign to Fan Fear of Muslims

Jim Lobe,  the Washington Bureau Chief for far left extremist publication IPS News;  an al Jazaeera reporter extraordinaire;  and a member of alternet,  Antiwar.org,  and of course, the well funded (by George Soros)  "Lobe Log". 

 

Thanks once again, for providing such credible, newsworthy information Michael.

 

 

On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 11:01 AM, MJ <michaelj@america.net> wrote:

Exposed: Right-Wing Think Tanks and Bloggers Conducted Secret 10-Year Campaign to Fan Fear of Muslims
By Jim Lobe, IPS News
Posted on August 29, 2011

A small group of inter-connected foundations, think tanks, pundits, and bloggers is behind the 10-year-old campaign to promote fear of Islam and Muslims in the U.S., according to a major investigative report released here Friday by the Center for American Progress (CAP).

The 130-page report, 'Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America', identifies seven foundations that have quietly provided a total of more than 42 million dollars to key individuals and organisations that have spearheaded the nation-wide effort between 2001 and 2009.

They include funders that have long been associated with the extreme right in the U.S., as well as several Jewish family foundations that have supported right-wing and settler groups in Israel.

The network also includes what the report calls "misinformation experts" - including Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy (CSP), Daniel Pipes of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum (MEF), Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, David Yerushalmi of the Society of Americans for National Existence, and Robert Spencer of Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) - who are often tapped by television news networks and right-wing radio talk shows to comment on Islam and the threat it allegedly poses to U.S. national security.

"Together, this core group of deeply intertwined individuals and organisations manufacture and exaggerate threats of 'creeping Sharia', Islamic domination of the West, and purported obligatory calls to violence against all non-Muslims by the Quran," according to the report whose main author, Wajahat Ali, described the group as "the central nervous system of the Islamophobia network."

"This small band of radical ideologues has fought to define Sharia as a 'totalitarian ideology' and legal- political-military doctrine committed to destroying Western civilization," the report said. "But a scholar of Islam and Muslim tradition would not recognise their definition of Sharia, let alone a lay practicing Muslim."

Nonetheless, the group's messages receive wide dissemination by what the report calls an "Islamophobia echo chamber" consisting of leaders of the Christian Right, such as Franklin Graham and Pat Robertson, and some Republican politicians, such as presidential candidates Representative Michele Bachmann and former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich.

Other key disseminators include media figures, especially prominent hosts on the Fox News Channel and columnists in the 'Washington Times' the 'National Review'; as well as grassroots groups, such as ACT! For America, local "Tea Party" movements, and the American Family Association, which are behind current efforts by Republican-dominated state legislatures to ban Sharia in their jurisdictions.

The report also cited the Middle East Media and Research Institute (MEMRI), a press-monitoring agency created here in 1998 by former officers in the Israel Defence Force that translates selected items from Middle Eastern print and broadcast media, as a key part of the broader network, providing it with material to bolster its claims regarding the threat posed by Islam. MEMRI, which has just been awarded a State Department contract to monitor anti-Semitism in the Arab media, has often been accused of selectively spotlighting media voices that show anti-western bias and promote extremism.

Judging by recent polls, the network has proved remarkably successful, according to the report which cited a 2010 'Washington Post' poll that showed that 49 percent of U.S. citizens held an unfavourable view of Islam, an increase of ten percent from 2002.

The same network also succeeded in inciting a national controversy around the proposed construction of an Islamic community centre in Lower Manhattan - the so-called 'Ground Zero Mosque' - which, according to Gaffney and others, was intended celebrate the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and "to be a permanent, in-our-face beachhead for Sharia, a platform for inspiring the triumphalist ambitions of the faithful."

"It's remarkable what a small number of people have achieved with a small group of committed and generous donors," said Eli Clifton, a co-author of the report and a national-security reporter at CAP, a think tank which is close to the administration of President Barack Obama, who has himself been a prime target of the Islamophobic network.

The report, which was funded by the financier George Soros' Open Society Institute (OSI), comes at a particularly sensitive moment - just two weeks before the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and less than a month after the murders of 76 people in Norway by Anders Breivik whose Internet manifesto not only echoed themes propagated by the key U.S. Islamophobic ideologues, but also quoted directly from their writings in dozens of passages.

Indeed, Spencer's blog, 'Jihad Watch', a programme of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, another group identified by the report as part of the Islamophobic network, was cited 162 times, while Pipes and the MEF receive 16 mentions, and Gaffney's CSP another eight.

According to the report, 'Jihad Watch' has been supported via the Horowitz Center primarily by the Fairbrook Foundation, which is run by Aubry and Joyce Chernik. Between 2004 and 2009, Fairbrook provided nearly 1.5 million dollars to Islamophobic groups, including Act! For America, CSP, the Investigative Project, and MEF.

The Cherniks also supported the far-right Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) and Aish Hatorah, a far-right Israeli group behind the U.S.-based Clarion Fund, which produced the video, 'Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West' that was, in turn, heavily promoted by the Islamophobic groups featured in the report. Breivik praised it in his manifesto.

Some 28 million DVD copies of the 'Obsession' film were distributed to households in key swing states on the eve of the 2008 presidential elections in an apparent effort to sway voters against Obama. Some 17 million dollars in funding for their distribution was provided by a Chicago industrialist, Barry Seid, according to a 'Salon.com' report published last year, and was channelled through Virginia-based Donors Capital Fund, which includes several prominent right-wing and neo-conservative figures on its board.

Donors to the Fund have also contributed 400,000 dollars to the Investigative Project and 2.3 million dollars to the MEF between 2001 and 2009, according to the report.

Other major donors to Islamophobic groups include several foundations controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife; including 2.9 million dollars to CSP and 3.4 million dollars to Horowitz' Freedom Center. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which has often coordinated its political philanthropy with Scaife's foundations, provided some 300,000 dollars to MEF, 815,000 dollars to CSP and 3.4 million dollars to the Freedom Center. In addition to more traditional charitable activities, both Scaife and Bradley have long been major supporters of far-right and neo-conservative causes.

Other major donors included the Newton D. and Rochelle F. Becker foundations, the Russell Berrie Foundation, and the Anchorage Charitable Foundation and William Rosenwald Family Fund, according to the report.

In its mission statement, the Russell Berrie Foundation cited as one of its principal goals "fostering the spirit of religious understanding and pluralism".

"The intellectual nexus of the network is well understood," said Faiz Shakir, CAP's vice president. "We know it's driven primarily by hatred against Muslims; what we don't know is what are the motivations of the funders. We don't know to what extent they are aware of what is being funded," he said.

Horowitz denounced the report in a statement issued on its website, calling it a "typical fascistic attempt to silence critics and scare donors from supporting their efforts to inform the American public about the threats we face from the Islamic jihad."

Efforts to obtain comments from MEF and CSP were not successful.

Jim Lobe is the Washington bureau chief for Inter Press Service.


http://www.alternet.org/story/152197/exposed%3A_right-wing_think_tanks_and_bloggers_conducted_secret_10-year_campaign_to_fan_fear_of_muslims?akid=7484.273364.8C0MKU&rd=1&t=27

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"WHAT KIND OF A PANSY-ASSED QUESTION IS THAT?"

 

 

DOES HE HAVE A VOCABULARY OR WHAT....? For the few of you who have missed him, R. Lee Ermey is the host of The History Channel's " Mail Call " and played the Drill Instructor in the movie, " Full Metal Jacket. " He recently played the totally unsympathetic psychiatrist in a GIECO commercial. He is a retired Marine Gunnery Sergeant and a very plain speaker, as you will soon read. So, for your entertainment, here is Retired Marine Gunnery Sergeant R. Lee Ermey at his first press conference. The main topic of discussion is the Marine in Iraq who shot an Iraqi insurgent to death. ANYWAY, THE STORY GOES: We pick up as a reporter asks about " how this potential war crime will affect our image in the world ": Ermey: "WHAT KIND OF A PANSY-ASSED QUESTION IS THAT?" Reporter 1: "Well, sir I think...." Ermey: "THINK, FANCY BOY ??! GET THIS THROUGH THAT SEPTIC TANK ON TOP OF YOUR SHOULDERS, MORON : I DON'T GIVE A DAMN WHAT YOU THINK, DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?? THAT MARINE SHOT AN ENEMY COMBATANT, SHITHEAD. SO GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR ASS AND DEAL WITH IT BEFORE I MAKE YOU MY OWN PERSONAL PIN CUSHION!!! NEXT QUESTION: YOU IN THE BLUE SUIT." Reporter 2: Don't you think that the world's opinion of our operations is important ? Ermey: "OH SURE! YOU DON'T KNOW THE TIMES I HAVE CRIED MYSELF TO SLEEP WORRYING ABOUT WHAT SOME GODDAMNED FRENCH PANSY THINKS! OH THE DAYS I HAVE HAD TO WEEP, BECAUSE SOME SHIT EATING TERRORIST SCUMBAG MIGHT BE MAD AT US, BECAUSE WE WENT INTO WHATEVER GOD FORSAKEN HOLE IN THE SHIT THAT HE LIVES IN AND KILLED HIM. WHAT THE HELL KIND OF DUMBASS QUESTION IS THAT YOU PETER-PUFFING JACKASS? WE ARE THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA , AND WHEN YOU ATTACK US, WE ARE GOING TO COME TO YOUR HOUSE AND BLOW YOUR STINKING CAMEL-LICKING CARCASS INTO PIECES SO SMALL WE WILL BE ABL E TO BURY YOUR SORRY ASS IN A THIMBLE! YEAH, I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE THINKING. YOU ARE PROBABLY AFRAID, THINK ING THAT I HAVE SUCH AN "EXTREME" ATTITUDE AND THAT I NEED TO BE MORE "SENSITIVE" TO OTHER PEOPLE'S FEELINGS. WELL LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING YOU POLE-SMOKING PANSY! I DON'T GIVE A DAMN WHAT YOU OR ANYBODY ELSE THINKS! THIS IS A DAMN WAR, AND IF YOU CAN'T HANDLE THAT, THEN YOU SHOULD GO HOME AND SUCK ON MAMMA'S TIT! DO YOU HEAR ME YOU RUNT? NOW GET THE HELL OUT OF MY PRESS ROOM BEFORE I GO CRAZY AND KICK THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF YOU!! NEXT QUESTION: YOU WITH THE UGLY-ASSED TIE, LOOK AT THAT THING! IT IS HIDEOUS!" Reporter 3: "Aren't you going against the freedom of the press by.." Ermey: "FREEDOM? WHAT IN BLUE HELL DO YOU KNOW ABOUT FREEDOM? I HAVE SWEATED MY ASS OFF IN JUNGLES, WHILE BEING SHOT AT FOR THIS NATION! WHAT IN THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE YOU LITTLE SHIT-SUCKING WEASEL? WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU PUT YOUR ASS ON THE LINE FOR ANYTHING? AND YET YOU HAVE THE UNMITIGATED TEMERITY TO SHOW UP HERE AND MONDAY-MORNING QUARTERBACK THE ACTIONS OF A BRAVE MARINE, WHO WAS DEFENDING HIMSELF AND HIS UNIT FROM AN ATTACK BY SOME MURDEROUS AL-QUEDA SYMPATHIZER!! YOU WANNA KNOW WHAT I AM CONCERNED ABOUT, NUMB-NUTS? I AM CONCERNED ABOUT A BUNCH OF GRABASSTIC, ORGANIZED MORONS WITH CAMERAS AND MICROPHONES DOING THEIR BEST TO PORTRAY OUR BRAVE MEN AND WOMEN AS WAR CRIMINALS! I AM CONCERNED ABOUT CHICKEN-SHIT PANSIES THAT WANT US TO NEGOTIATE WITH TERRORISTS AND WHINE ABOUT THEIR PISS-ANT "FREEDOMS"!! NEXT QUESTION. Reporter 3: "I...I.." Ermey: "DID YOU HAVE A BIG BOWL OF STUPID FOR BREAKFAST THIS MORNING, NUMB NUTS? I DON'T WANT TO HEAR ANOTHER WORD OUT OF THAT COMMIE CRY HOLE IN THAT SHIT-PILE YOU CALL A HEAD! AND THAT GOES TRIPLE FOR THE REST OF YOU PANSY-ASSED MORONS! NOW GET THE HELL OUT OF MY PRESS ROOM BEFORE I SHOVE MY BOOT SO FAR UP YOUR ASS THAT YOU CHOKE TO DEATH ON MY SHOELACES!!!!" Marine DI's have a language all their own. God bless them all.

 

 

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Check Out The 22 Caliber Defense Handgun Disguised As A Cell Phone !

Cell phone guns have arrived.  And they are real. Beneath the digital phone face is a .22 caliber handgun capable of firing four rounds in rapid succession using the standard telephone keypad. European law enforcement officials are stunned by the discovery of these deadly decoys. They say phone guns are changing the rules of engagement in Europe . Only when you have one in your hand do you realize that they are heavier than a regular cell phone.

 

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Right-Wing Think Tanks and Bloggers Conducted Secret 10-Year Campaign to Fan Fear of Muslims

Exposed: Right-Wing Think Tanks and Bloggers Conducted Secret 10-Year Campaign to Fan Fear of Muslims
By Jim Lobe, IPS News
Posted on August 29, 2011

A small group of inter-connected foundations, think tanks, pundits, and bloggers is behind the 10-year-old campaign to promote fear of Islam and Muslims in the U.S., according to a major investigative report released here Friday by the Center for American Progress (CAP).

The 130-page report, 'Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America', identifies seven foundations that have quietly provided a total of more than 42 million dollars to key individuals and organisations that have spearheaded the nation-wide effort between 2001 and 2009.

They include funders that have long been associated with the extreme right in the U.S., as well as several Jewish family foundations that have supported right-wing and settler groups in Israel.

The network also includes what the report calls "misinformation experts" - including Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy (CSP), Daniel Pipes of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum (MEF), Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, David Yerushalmi of the Society of Americans for National Existence, and Robert Spencer of Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) - who are often tapped by television news networks and right-wing radio talk shows to comment on Islam and the threat it allegedly poses to U.S. national security.

"Together, this core group of deeply intertwined individuals and organisations manufacture and exaggerate threats of 'creeping Sharia', Islamic domination of the West, and purported obligatory calls to violence against all non-Muslims by the Quran," according to the report whose main author, Wajahat Ali, described the group as "the central nervous system of the Islamophobia network."

"This small band of radical ideologues has fought to define Sharia as a 'totalitarian ideology' and legal- political-military doctrine committed to destroying Western civilization," the report said. "But a scholar of Islam and Muslim tradition would not recognise their definition of Sharia, let alone a lay practicing Muslim."

Nonetheless, the group's messages receive wide dissemination by what the report calls an "Islamophobia echo chamber" consisting of leaders of the Christian Right, such as Franklin Graham and Pat Robertson, and some Republican politicians, such as presidential candidates Representative Michele Bachmann and former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich.

Other key disseminators include media figures, especially prominent hosts on the Fox News Channel and columnists in the 'Washington Times' the 'National Review'; as well as grassroots groups, such as ACT! For America, local "Tea Party" movements, and the American Family Association, which are behind current efforts by Republican-dominated state legislatures to ban Sharia in their jurisdictions.

The report also cited the Middle East Media and Research Institute (MEMRI), a press-monitoring agency created here in 1998 by former officers in the Israel Defence Force that translates selected items from Middle Eastern print and broadcast media, as a key part of the broader network, providing it with material to bolster its claims regarding the threat posed by Islam. MEMRI, which has just been awarded a State Department contract to monitor anti-Semitism in the Arab media, has often been accused of selectively spotlighting media voices that show anti-western bias and promote extremism.

Judging by recent polls, the network has proved remarkably successful, according to the report which cited a 2010 'Washington Post' poll that showed that 49 percent of U.S. citizens held an unfavourable view of Islam, an increase of ten percent from 2002.

The same network also succeeded in inciting a national controversy around the proposed construction of an Islamic community centre in Lower Manhattan - the so-called 'Ground Zero Mosque' - which, according to Gaffney and others, was intended celebrate the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and "to be a permanent, in-our-face beachhead for Sharia, a platform for inspiring the triumphalist ambitions of the faithful."

"It's remarkable what a small number of people have achieved with a small group of committed and generous donors," said Eli Clifton, a co-author of the report and a national-security reporter at CAP, a think tank which is close to the administration of President Barack Obama, who has himself been a prime target of the Islamophobic network.

The report, which was funded by the financier George Soros' Open Society Institute (OSI), comes at a particularly sensitive moment - just two weeks before the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and less than a month after the murders of 76 people in Norway by Anders Breivik whose Internet manifesto not only echoed themes propagated by the key U.S. Islamophobic ideologues, but also quoted directly from their writings in dozens of passages.

Indeed, Spencer's blog, 'Jihad Watch', a programme of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, another group identified by the report as part of the Islamophobic network, was cited 162 times, while Pipes and the MEF receive 16 mentions, and Gaffney's CSP another eight.

According to the report, 'Jihad Watch' has been supported via the Horowitz Center primarily by the Fairbrook Foundation, which is run by Aubry and Joyce Chernik. Between 2004 and 2009, Fairbrook provided nearly 1.5 million dollars to Islamophobic groups, including Act! For America, CSP, the Investigative Project, and MEF.

The Cherniks also supported the far-right Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) and Aish Hatorah, a far-right Israeli group behind the U.S.-based Clarion Fund, which produced the video, 'Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West' that was, in turn, heavily promoted by the Islamophobic groups featured in the report. Breivik praised it in his manifesto.

Some 28 million DVD copies of the 'Obsession' film were distributed to households in key swing states on the eve of the 2008 presidential elections in an apparent effort to sway voters against Obama. Some 17 million dollars in funding for their distribution was provided by a Chicago industrialist, Barry Seid, according to a 'Salon.com' report published last year, and was channelled through Virginia-based Donors Capital Fund, which includes several prominent right-wing and neo-conservative figures on its board.

Donors to the Fund have also contributed 400,000 dollars to the Investigative Project and 2.3 million dollars to the MEF between 2001 and 2009, according to the report.

Other major donors to Islamophobic groups include several foundations controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife; including 2.9 million dollars to CSP and 3.4 million dollars to Horowitz' Freedom Center. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which has often coordinated its political philanthropy with Scaife's foundations, provided some 300,000 dollars to MEF, 815,000 dollars to CSP and 3.4 million dollars to the Freedom Center. In addition to more traditional charitable activities, both Scaife and Bradley have long been major supporters of far-right and neo-conservative causes.

Other major donors included the Newton D. and Rochelle F. Becker foundations, the Russell Berrie Foundation, and the Anchorage Charitable Foundation and William Rosenwald Family Fund, according to the report.

In its mission statement, the Russell Berrie Foundation cited as one of its principal goals "fostering the spirit of religious understanding and pluralism".

"The intellectual nexus of the network is well understood," said Faiz Shakir, CAP's vice president. "We know it's driven primarily by hatred against Muslims; what we don't know is what are the motivations of the funders. We don't know to what extent they are aware of what is being funded," he said.

Horowitz denounced the report in a statement issued on its website, calling it a "typical fascistic attempt to silence critics and scare donors from supporting their efforts to inform the American public about the threats we face from the Islamic jihad."

Efforts to obtain comments from MEF and CSP were not successful.

Jim Lobe is the Washington bureau chief for Inter Press Service.


http://www.alternet.org/story/152197/exposed%3A_right-wing_think_tanks_and_bloggers_conducted_secret_10-year_campaign_to_fan_fear_of_muslims?akid=7484.273364.8C0MKU&rd=1&t=27

Re: The Decade's Biggest Scam

Exaggerating, manipulating and exploiting the Terrorist threat for
profit and power has been the biggest scam of the decade; only Wall
Street's ability to make the Government prop it up and profit from the
crisis it created at the expense of everyone else can compete for that
title. Nothing has altered the mindset of the American citizenry more
than a decade's worth of fear-mongering
----
try since the 1940's

we must control the warmongers in our nation or watch the USA go down
the tubes

we know who they are ... it's way past time to silence them

On Aug 31, 3:04 pm, Travis <baconl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> **
>     <http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/author/amcogore/> The Decade's Biggest
>Scam<http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/2011/08/30/06-690/>
> *Harold <http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/author/amcogore/>* | August 30, 2011 at
> 8:08 am | Categories: CIA <http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/?cat=29199>,
> Corruption <http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/?cat=22388>, Criminal
> Activity<http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/?cat=398859>,
> Executive <http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/?cat=53796>,
> FBI<http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/?cat=68079>,
> Government <http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/?cat=2311>,
> Legislative<http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/?cat=217843>,
> NeoConservatives <http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/?cat=152793>, PATRIOT
> Act<http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/?cat=29195>,
> Pentagon <http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/?cat=31632>, Police
> State<http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/?cat=1955>,
> Privacy Rights <http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/?cat=162861>,
> Progressives<http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/?cat=182563>,
> Propaganda <http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/?cat=13722>,
> Sovereignty<http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/?cat=69462>,
> U.S. Constitution <http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/?cat=51155> | URL:http://wp.me/pmtmV-6uk
>
> Glenn Greenwald, Salon 8/29/2011 The Los Angeles Times examines the
> staggering sums of money expended on patently absurd domestic "homeland
> security" projects: $75 billion per year for things such as a Zodiac boat
> with side-scan sonar to respond to a potential attack on a lake in tiny
> Keith County, Nebraska, and hundreds of "9-ton BearCat armored vehicles,
> complete [...]
>
> Read more of this post <http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/2011/08/30/06-690/>
>
> Add a comment to this
> post<http://a4cgr.wordpress.com/2011/08/30/06-690/#respond>
>
>   [image: WordPress]
>
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Re: segregation is back ... in the north

Well, as long as they're "seperate, but equal"
---
people are not equal, racially or otherwise

equality under the law and being equal are two different things
those who promote trying to make people equal are socialist dreamers

On Sep 1, 7:29 am, GregfromBoston <greg.vinc...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Well, as long as they're "seperate, but equal"...
>
> Jesus
>
> On Aug 30, 1:00 pm, plainolamerican <plainolameri...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > A high school has defended its decision to segregate students by race
> > and gender.
>
> > The scheme, at McCaskey East High School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania,
> > separates black students from the rest of the school pupils, and then
> > further breaks it down into black females and black males.
>
> > Today the school's principal defended the policy.
> > Bill Jimenez said the school noticed that black students were not
> > performing as well as other students, and that research had shown that
> > same-race classes with strong same-race role models led to better
> > academic results.
>
> > Mr Jimenez admitted that no other students were divided by race at the
> > school, but he added that academic data dictated the school take a
> > different approach with its black students.
>
> > He told Lancasteronline.com: 'One of the things we said when we did
> > this was, "Let's look at the data, let's not run from it. Let's
> > confront it and see what we can do about it".'
>
> > The idea came from Angela Tilghman, an instructional coach at McCaskey
> > East.
>
> > She said statistics had shown about a third of McCaskey's African-
> > Americans scored proficient or advanced in reading on last year's
> > Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests, compared with 60 per
> > cent of white students and 42 per cent of students overall.
>
> > In mathematics, only 27 per cent of black students scored proficient
> > or advanced.
> > McCaskey East High School
>
> > She said research had shown that grouping black students by gender
> > with a strong role model could boost both academic achievement and
> > self-esteem.
>
> > Some students, staff and parents were against the segregation, saying
> > that it ran against everything the school stood for - with students
> > from diverse backgrounds.
>
> > But it was something Mr Jimenez thought was worth trying.
>
> > In all segregated classes, mentors track their students' grades, test
> > scores and attendance.
>
> > One such mentor is Michael Mitchell, who hopes to inspire his black
> > male students during their short daily meetings.
>
> > He said he often quoted the Reverend Martin Luther King, who said:
> > 'Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and
> > conscientious stupidity.'
>
> > Mr Mitchell recently used the quote when he found that some of his
> > students were failing gym.
>
> > He said: 'They're all young. They're all strong. They're all athletic.
> > But they're failing because they chose not to participate.
>
> > 'That's an example of "conscientious stupidity". You can do but you
> > choose not to do. These are the things we need to get away from.'
>
> > Read more:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1350864/School-defends-separa...

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Re: Ron Paul: Why a Top-tier Candidate Is Ignored by Republicans

Keith, let us address your question this time next year. When things
really blow up in our face in the middle east.
---
Keith believes in the interventionist policy
they are willing to sacrifice American interests for the animals in
the middle east

Internationalism is a political movement which advocates a greater
economic and political cooperation among nations for the theoretical
benefit of all. Partisans of this movement, such as supporters of the
World Federalist Movement, claim that nations should cooperate because
their long-term mutual interests are of greater value than their
individual short term needs.
Internationalism is by nature opposed to ultranationalism, jingoism,
realism and national chauvinism. Internationalism teaches that the
people of all nations have more in common than they do differences,
and thus that nations should treat each other as equals.

Washington advised the United States, in his Farewell Address, to
remain a neutral player in the international political game. He urged
the new republic to avoid conflicts and alliances with other nations.
Although he felt that economic ties with other nations should be
promoted to encourage trade and commerce, political ties should be
minimal. He was concerned that having close relations could force the
United States to unite with allies to promote their interest and be
drawn into their war.

Thomas Jefferson, stated as early as 1799 that "Commerce with all
nations, alliance with none, should be our motto", and in 1801 "I deem
[one of] the essential principles of our government [to be] peace,
commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances
with none."

On Aug 31, 12:09 pm, lbiglee75 <leroys...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Keith, let us address your question this time next year. When things
> really blow up in our face in the middle east.
>
> On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 12:48 PM, Keith In Tampa <keithinta...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > Michael,
>
> > Do you consider Ron Paul's foreign policy "conservative"?
>
> > I also find it humorous, that all of the Ron Paul supporters are now crying
> > foul,  now that Paul is getting all of the media attention that last week,
> > the Paul supporters were complaining that he wasn't receiving.....
>
> > On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 8:30 AM, MJ <micha...@america.net> wrote:
>
> >> "Let us be blunt: The stone cold truth is that for all of their talk of
> >> "conservative" principles and the like, Paul's Republican opponents in
> >> Washington and the so-called "alternative" or "conservative" media are not
> >> now, nor have they ever been, genuinely conservative. Whether we are
> >> discussing Fox News contributors -- a shocking number of which are refugees
> >> from George W. Bush's administration -- the writers at The Weekly Standard
> >> and National Review, or such talk radio personalities as Rush Limbaugh, Sean
> >> Hannity, Bill Bennett and all of the rest, such "conservative" commentators
> >> aren't conservative at all; they are neoconservative."
>
> >> Ron Paul: Why a Top-tier Candidate Is Ignored by Republicans
> >> Written by Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.
> >> Friday, 26 August 2011 00:00
>
> >> It is hard not to be amazed by the blackout of media coverage of Ron
> >> Paul's presidential campaign. Had Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum,
> >> Jon Huntsman, or any second-tier candidate been performing remotely as well
> >> as Paul has, he would no longer be regarded as a "second-tier" candidate. To
> >> the credit of such left-leaning outlets as Jon Stewarts' The Daily Show and
> >> The Huffington Post, this phenomenon has not gone unnoticed by everyone.
>
> >> Let's think about this.
>
> >> In spite of the extent to which Paul has been ignored by the establishment
> >> media in both of its leftist and rightist varieties, he unfailingly elicits
> >> explosive applause in every GOP presidential primary debate in which he has
> >> participated. A Fox News poll, of all places, shows that the overwhelming
> >> majority of its respondents hold that Ron Paul achieved a decisive victory
> >> over all of the other candidates in the most recent debate in Iowa. Of 7,991
> >> "active" cities nationwide that participated in the poll, and 43,293 total
> >> votes, 27,459 people thought that Paul won the debate. Newt Gingrich came in
> >> second place -- with 5, 906 votes.
>
> >> Statistically speaking, Ron Paul practically tied with Michele Bachmann
> >> for first place in the Ames Straw Poll, a contest that is evidently so
> >> significant that "top-tier" contender Tim Pawlenty's third place showing
> >> compelled him to abandon his campaign. Bachmann beat Paul by a meager 152
> >> votes.
>
> >> A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll released back in May showed that
> >> among possible Republican contenders (Perry may not have been a
> >> consideration as of yet), Paul stands the best chance of beating President
> >> Obama. This poll showed Obama leading Paul by only seven percentage points,
> >> while he led Romney by 11. Since then, however, things have changed.
>
> >> A Gallup poll from August 23 shows that if the election were held today,
> >> Mitt Romney would beat Obama by two percentage points (48 percent-46
> >> percent) and Rick Perry would tie with him (at 47 percent). It is true that
> >> this same poll has Obama beating Paul by (only) two points (47 percent-45
> >> percent); but it has Obama beating "top-tier" candidate Bachmann by four
> >> points (48 percent-44 percent)! However, when it comes to that much
> >> cherished "independent" vote, Paul leads Obama by three points. The
> >> significance of this vis-à-vis my contention that Paul is a top-tier
> >> candidate himself and should be recognized as such becomes obvious once we
> >> grasp that Romney is the only other Republican candidate who leads Obama
> >> among independents by this much (but only this much). "Top-tier" candidate
> >> Perry leads Obama in this category by two points while "top-tier" candidate
> >> Bachmann trails Obama among independents by six points.
>
> >> In a Texas poll among "882 highly active Republican voters," these voters
> >> said that if the Texas primaries were held at the time that the poll was
> >> taken, they would vote for Congressman Paul before they would vote for any
> >> other Republican contender ­ including their own Governor, Rick Perry (who
> >> was second choice).
>
> >> As I write this, a Gallup Presidential Nomination preference poll shows
> >> that Paul has leapt ahead of "top-tier" candidate Michele Bachmann and is
> >> now third place behind Perry and Romney. Twenty-nine percent of those polled
> >> prefer Perry; 17 percent are partial to Romney; and Paul picks up 13 percent
> >> of the vote against Bachmann's 10 percent.
>
> >> Polls fluctuate. In any event, they are no substitutes for actual votes.
> >> Still, the point here is not that Paul is likely to get his party's
> >> nomination or that he would actually win the general election if he did; in
> >> these propositions it is not my purpose to either affirm or deny. Rather,
> >> the point is only to show that by the very standards by which establishment
> >> pundits and pollsters determine top-tier candidates, Paul should be
> >> considered a top-tier candidate.
>
> >> But he is not.
>
> >> The reason for this, I think, is pretty clear.
>
> >> Even though he is the partisan for constitutional or "limited" government
> >> par excellence, Paul is despised and feared by the party of "limited
> >> government." That is, he is anathema to the GOP establishment, for while he
> >> has proved prescient regarding the economic collapse of 2008, and while an
> >> ever increasing number of Americans generally and Republican-minded voters
> >> in particular have gravitated toward embracing many of his views over the
> >> last three years, Paul's uncompromising repudiation of his party's foreign
> >> policy vision has earned him quite a few enemies within it.
>
> >> Let us be blunt: The stone cold truth is that for all of their talk of
> >> "conservative" principles and the like, Paul's Republican opponents in
> >> Washington and the so-called "alternative" or "conservative" media are not
> >> now, nor have they ever been, genuinely conservative. Whether we are
> >> discussing Fox News contributors -- a shocking number of which are refugees
> >> from George W. Bush's administration -- the writers at The Weekly Standard
> >> and National Review, or such talk radio personalities as Rush Limbaugh, Sean
> >> Hannity, Bill Bennett and all of the rest, such "conservative" commentators
> >> aren't conservative at all; they are neoconservative.
>
> >> In all fairness, it may be a lack of familiarity with the conservative
> >> intellectual tradition or even a reliable history of the conservative
> >> movement in America that accounts for why some of these folks wrongly, but
> >> sincerely, confuse their commitment to neoconservatism with conservatism
> >> proper.  As for many of them, though, I suspect that they know exactly what
> >> they are doing when they deceptively identify themselves as "conservative."
>
> >> My intention here is not to criticize Paul's detractors for being
> >> neoconservatives. The term "neoconservatism" is not, or at least should not,
> >> be interpreted as a slur. As I and others, including its apologists, have
> >> argued, neoconservatism is a distinct political-philosophical orientation,
> >> an expression of the Enlightenment liberal rationalism that continues to
> >> dominate our political imagination. But philosophically, neoconservatism is
> >> as far from classical conservatism as is socialism.
>
> >> There is no more shame in a neoconservative arguing and defending his
> >> convictions than there is shame in anyone else doing the same. There is,
> >> however, shame in a neoconservative pretending that he is something other
> >> than he is.
>
> >> And, like today's "progressives" who pretend they are not "socialists"
> >> because of the unpopularity of the idea of "socialism," our neoconservatives
> >> pretend they are "conservatives" because of the unpopularity of
> >> neoconservatism.
>
> >> To sum this all up, Ron Paul has proven to be, at the very least,
> >> competitive with the best that this GOP primary race has to offer. However,
> >> as long as his party remains dominated by neoconservatives, he will face an
> >> uphill battle.
>
> >>http://www.thenewamerican.com/opinion/jack-kerwick/8751-ron-paul-why-...
>
> >> --
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>
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> >> * Read the latest breaking news, and more.
>
> > --
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>
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