A collection of articles defining our times.
Over here, articles live forever...
The pages contain clickable links, don't let
The titles fool you; some of the best articles
have very non-descript titles, and there are usually
more articles on the matters in the days and weeks
The links land on, so it's a sort of treasure hunt
through history, Enjoy! /\ \/
After you click on a page, just scroll down to see the links.
In the United States, the Supreme Court has final say over whether
any law is constitutional. So in a way it's the final barrier that
prevents any legislators from getting too crazy or racist in the laws
they pass.
But the Supreme Court itself is not made up of gods or wizards. They
are just people, with agendas. And sometimes they have rendered opinions
that make you wonder if the whole legal system isn't just full of crazy
people from the top down. For instance, the court has ruled ...
#5. A Business Can Kick You Out of Your House if It Wants to Build There
#4. Scientists Can Create Life (And Corporations Can Own It)
#3. You Can Imprison an Entire Race, if You Have a Good Reason
#2. Mining Companies Can Go "Scorched Earth" on the Environment, if They Get Permission
#1. The Government Can Sterilize You in the Name of Eugenics
Friday, 27 April 2012 14:25
By Michael Stafford and D R Tucker, Truthout | Op-Ed
Editors' Note: After Mike Lofgren's seminal "Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult"
comes a cry for a reinvented conservatism from two Republicans
disillusioned with what their party has become and convinced that the
conservative political tradition is salvageable.
Truthout is posting this piece to stimulate a healthy dialogue
about whether there is a conservative political tradition that can
actually work with progressives. Or is that just naïve? We hope that you
read and comment with your reaction.
In mythology, the phoenix is a beautiful bird that bursts into flames
at the end of its life as it dies. From the ashes of the old, a new
phoenix emerges. This cycle of birth, fiery death and rebirth, makes the
phoenix a symbol of hope and renewal.
Today, American conservatism has degenerated into an intellectually
and morally bankrupt ideology. It offers nothing more than
bumper-sticker slogans that pander to the prejudices and ignorance of
the lowest common denominator in order to enrich and empower an
oligarchic elite. Angry, cruel and sneering, it is exemplified by the
carnival barkers on talk radio and Fox News. High in volume, but devoid
of substance, it has no long-term future because it lacks credible
solutions to the range of very real problems American society is facing. READ MORE
Limbaugh poaches material from obscure conservative writers
and disseminates their feverishly conspiratorial and racially charged
content to his national audience.
March 9, 2012
One aspect of Limbaugh's radio
career that often goes overlooked is his role as a conduit for wild and
pernicious conspiracies born on the right-wing fringe to migrate to a
broader audience. Limbaugh frequently poaches material from obscure
conservative writers and enthusiastically disseminates their feverishly
conspiratorial and racially charged content to his national audience.
1. Vince Foster
On
July 20, 1993, the body of deputy White House counsel Vince Foster was
found in Northern Virginia's Fort Marcy Park. According to multiple investigations,
Foster died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. But conservatives, led
by Rush Limbaugh, incessantly cast doubt on Foster's suicide, suggesting
instead that the Clinton White House had murdered Foster and covered it
up. On the March 11, 1994, broadcast of his television show, Limbaugh
reviewed "some of the key questions" surrounding Foster's death:
LIMBAUGH:
His body was found lying face-up and straight. His head was at the top
of an incline; his feet at the bottom, an unusual position for someone
who had shot himself while standing on an incline. Looked like he was
ready for the coffin, in other words. [via Nexis]
Neither
time nor the end of the Clinton administration has dampened Limabugh's
ardor for Vince Foster conspiracy theorism. During the 2008 Democratic
primary, Rush ofteninvoked Fort Marcy Park when commenting on Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign: READ MORE
In Arizona, the answers given by the presidential contenders mattered less the questions never asked.
In the seemingly endless series of
debates between the Republican presidential candidates that has so far
marked the 2012 campaign, debate #20, at the Mesa County Arts Center in
Arizona, where the state G.O.P. will hold its presidential primary next
week, was something of a dud. There were no moon colonies or $2.4 trillion "blank" checks or "oops" moments. No applause for executions or booing of gay soldiers.
Well, okay, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich did accuse President
Barack Obama of voting, while in the Illinois state legislature, to
"legalize infanticide" (because of Obama's vote against a bill designed to chip away at abortion rights), but that's about as crazy as it got.
It
should have been a whole lot crazier, revealing once again the
derangement of the 21st-century Republican Party, but moderator CNN
moderator John King apparently thought it his job not to challenge the
candidates too terribly hard, lest he be derided as a member of the
media elite. So "elite" was one thing King proved he certainly was not
-- at least not in the realm of debate moderators.
Now
pulling ahead of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in the
national polls, former U.S. senator Rick Santorum saw his position in
the debate line-up change, occupying the center stage with Romney.
Santorum
has not failed to make news in the last several weeks, as his
opposition to the use of birth control has come to light, not to mention
the resurfacing, thanks to Right Wing Watch, of a 2008 speech
he delivered at Ave Maria University in which he claimed that Satan,
"the father of lies," had set his sights on the United States, and that
explained why universities were teaching bad things and why mainline
Protestant churches were no longer really Christian. READ MORE
If Santorum gets to bear the standard for the GOP, the party
moves even further to the right. Here's a taste of what's on that
plate.
February 22, 2012
It says quite a lot about the state of the Republican Party that the
right-wing extremist Rick Santorum -- a politician so despised by his
own Pennsylvania constituents that he lost his U.S. Senate seat by an
18-point margin -- is now the frontrunner for the GOP presidential
nomination. And not by a little, I might add -- by 10 points, according
to that latest national tracking poll by Gallup.
As increasing numbers of people identify themselves as independent voters
-- independent of the major political parties, that is -- the essence
of the Republican Party has distilled into a toxic brew of resentment,
prejudice, anti-intellectualism and misogyny. In truth, the party has
been headed this way for a long time, but the election of Barack Obama
-- a moderately liberal African American man with an African-Islamic
name -- offered the perfect catalyst for the alchemists of the right to
convert their everyday potion of pique into something far more
fortified.
Enter Rick Santorum, a presidential candidate regarded as little more
than a joke a mere month ago. Santorum presents himself as everything
Obama is not, and represents the opposite of everything those anti-Obama
right-wing tropes, the lies both whispered and shouted, purport the
president to be. There are liberals who relish the possibility of a
Santorum nomination; at the Daily Kos, founder Markos Moulitsas is
urging liberals to vote for Santorum in open primaries, on the
reasonably sound theory that Santorum is too crazy to win the
presidency. Perhaps. READ MORE
Mitt Romney's personal wealth is double that of the last eight US presidents combined. Photograph: TJ Kirkpatrick/Corbis
Dollars play a decisive role in US politics. And more so since the supreme court allowed unlimited campaign contributions Gary Youngeguardian.co.uk,
Republican presidential debates
are not for the faint-hearted. Last week in Jacksonville, Florida, Rick
Santorum warned of the "threat of radical Islam growing" in Central and
South America. Newt Gingrich advocated sending up to seven flights a
day to the moon, where private industry might set up a colony, and
reaffirmed his claim that Palestinians were invented in the late 70s.
Mitt Romney argued that if you make things tough enough for undocumented
people, they will "self-deport".
Given the general state of the
Republican party, such comments now attract precious little attention.
Truth and facts are but two options among many. The party's base,
overrun by birthers, climate change deniers and creationists, floats its warped theories and every now and then one makes it to the top and bobs out into the airwaves.
So
the oft-touted notion that these debates have been responsible for
shifting the trajectory of this primary race would be worrying if it
were true. It is difficult to think of anywhere else in the western
world where these debates would have any credibility outside of a fringe
party (even if the fringes in Europe are now spreading). Far from
indicating America's exceptionalism, it looks more like an awful parody
of the stereotypes most outsiders already believed about American
politics at its most bizarre. "Those who follow this race daily may have
long since lost perspective on how absurd it is," said the German
magazine Der Spiegel last week. "Each candidate loves Israel. They all love Ronald Reagan. Each loves his wife, a born first lady, for a number of reasons."
The
good news is, with the exception of Perry's demise, the debates have
not been pivotal. The bad news is that the truly decisive element has
been something even more insidious: money. Lots of it. READ MORE
The fallout has led the Democratic Speaker of the NJ Assembly to call the governor "disgraceful," and that she is "beginning to wonder if Gov. Christie is mentally deranged." READ MORE The audio file and transcripts are here
