Originally published at Freedom Scribe. Please leave any comments there.

The New York Times recently reported that President Obama was “furious” with Hillary Clinton over her handling of the Egyptian uprising.  Hillary appeared to support an “orderly” transition, with Mubarak remaining in control for a time.  Obama felt it made him look like he was supporting a dictator, as indeed it did.  The NY Times article implied that Obama wants to fire Clinton from her job as Secretary of State.  It was even floated that Senator Kerry might be offered the job.

Well, after some of the Wikileaks disclosures, Obama probably does need to fire Clinton, but that’s beside the point.  The point is that there is considerable bad blood between them, and it’s about to get much worse.

I think it is a given that Hillary will challenge Obama for the Democratic nomination in 2012.  I couldn’t care less, actually, as I will work diligently to see that neither of these two gets to the White House in 2012 – or ever again – but Hillary is a very odd duck.  Very little seems to stick to her, and absent some overwhelming reason to dislike/distrust her, she could well wax Obama’s you-know-what.  Let’s face it.  Without this Teflon^® characteristic of hers, some of her former business dealings should have landed her in prison long, long ago – although, in fairness, that could be said of most of Washington, DC.  Still, she has some sort of “magic,” if you will, that keeps her smelling like a rose long after the stench of decay should have knocked everyone flat within 100 yards of her.

It won’t work this time.

This last Tuesday, February 15, 2011, Hillary ended her political career.

Ray McGovern is a remarkable individual.  I have never met him, but I have followed his articles and editorials for a very long time.  He was a CIA analyst for 27 years, and during the last few years, he was responsible for the daily briefing of the President, very much including Bill Clinton, so it is fairly certain that Hillary Clinton knows him personally.  Long retired, McGovern now works for Tell The Word, a religious organization, and he is a co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.  He is an brilliant, educated, elegant, soft spoken, gentle man.  He is now 71 years old and rather frail, given that he survived a nasty bout with cancer three years ago.

On Tuesday, Hillary gave a speech at George Washington University.  As it happens, her topic was the failure of foreign leaders to respect individual rights, specifically including freedom of expression.  Ray McGovern attended her speech, and when she began speaking, he stood and turned his back to her.  That’s all.  A totally silent protest against her support of the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It’s bad enough that McGovern was seized by two individuals, one uniformed and one not, dragged out, beaten, handcuffed and thrown into a jail cell while still bleeding.  It’s bad enough that they paused to read his t-shirt (Veterans for Peace) before grabbing him.  It’s bad enough that he was charged with disorderly conduct when he did not speak or disrupt her speech in any way.  Worse, though, was Hillary’s reaction.  She could see clearly what was happening directly in front of her.  She didn’t miss a beat in her speech, not one.  No, she actually smirked, and that expression has to be the most sickening example of sadism I have ever seen in my 56 years.

By contrast, Donald Rumsfeld in 2006 actually prevented something similar from happening to McGovern.  Of course, Rumsfeld thought he could outwit McGovern, but at the end of the day it became, according to the media at the time, Rumsfeld’s “invisceration” by McGovern on national television.  The moral is never cross words with a guy that’s way smarter than you are.

Now, Rumsfeld is not exactly a champion of freedom by any stretch of the imagination, yet he proved himself far more so than Clinton did just this past Tuesday.  In fact, I can almost imagine Secretary Clinton surveying her audience from a hidden vantage point before going to the podium, recognizing McGovern, and telling her security thugs, “Get that guy with the Veterans for Peace t-shirt out of here!  And rough him up good so he doesn’t try it again.”

Here is a picture of McGovern’s injuries.  Frightening!

Now watch the video.  Pay attention to Secretary Clinton’s expression.  Then ask yourself if we want this woman as dogcatcher, let alone Secretary of State or President. Worse, ask yourself if this is the “freedom” our kids are allegedly dying to “defend.”

Originally published at Freedom Scribe. Please leave any comments there.

Most Americans are fed up with the terrorism hype we get fed on a daily basis, so there is a real tendency these days to shut down and stop listening when the words “national” and “security” are spoken together. Nevertheless, there is one real such issue that is almost never mentioned.

America has a huge problem with dual citizens at the highest levels of our government, and that must cease immediately.

Dual citizenship, particularly in certain cases, is quite legal, and it most certainly should be. However, there are high level governmental positions where divided loyalty creates a grave danger to the United States. Congress should draft legislation immediately prohibiting dual citizens – absolutely regardless of specific second nationality – from holding any security clearance higher than “Secret.”

It is time – and past time – for this serious security loophole to be closed. I include the following as proposed text for a letter to your congressional representatives:

***********************

It has come to my attention that there is a looming national security issue that should be addressed immediately by Congress. I am asking you to propose legislation to close this security loophole.

Dual citizenship with many countries is a relatively common thing. It is legal in most cases, and it should be. However, higher security clearances, such as Top Secret and above, should automatically be denied – without exception of any kind – to dual citizens. I am sure you will agree that the government jobs requiring the highest security clearances should not allow for any possibility of divided loyalties of any kind, not even with closely allied and fondly regarded nations such as the United Kingdom or Israel. The simple truth is that their national best interests do not always coincide with our own.

A listing of the dual citizens currently holding very high level jobs in our government – easily obtained over the Internet – is absolutely terrifying, and it should be.

Please introduce immediate and comprehensive legislation to address this issue and keep our nation secure.

***********************

Let’s see if we can get some proper action on this. Please share this as widely as you can (copyright happily waived for this post), sign the petition below and send letters to your representatives.

Petition

Originally published at Freedom Scribe. Please leave any comments there.

This past week, something unprecedented in the history of the Internet occurred.  Revolution broke out in Egypt – and Egypt shut down their Internet, along with just about their entire cell phone infrastructure.  The government says this was done to prevent the protesters using Facebook, Twitter and SMS messages to organize.  The protesters say it was to prevent word of atrocities getting out of the country.

I am inclined to believe both, but especially what the protesters tell us.  Why else would Egypt have tried – unsuccessfully – to shut down Al Jazeera and eject their reporters from the country?  The Egyptian news service – along with most of America’s news services, by the way, led by everyone’s favorite, Faux News – have been playing the whole revolution story down to the point of outright lying.  If you’ve been watching Al Jazeera – and just about the only way you can do that in the U.S. is via the Internet – you know that Mubarak is going to be lucky to get out of Egypt with his skin whole.  It’s just a matter of time now.  Funny how 30 years of repression and torture have a way of making the victims just a tad emotional.

Intelligent, savvy people throughout the world get their serious news from the Internet, avoiding print and television news like the plague.  This is because it is much harder to hide the truth in cyberspace.  For this reason, politicians in every country despise the Internet, because they don’t find it especially easy to lie to their constituents without getting caught with their britches – well, you can complete that sentence for yourself.

In the case of President Obama and his special buddy, Senator Lieberman, their mutual personal dream is an Internet “kill switch.”  They claim, of course, that this option will only be used to protect U.S. infrastructure from damage in the event of cyber-terrorism.  Do they mean just like the Patriot Act has only been used to pursue and prosecute terrorists?  Have they even read the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s report documenting 40,000 clearly illegal abuses by the FBI between 2001 and 2008?  No, you can be certain they intend to shut down the Internet when the American people have had enough, in order to lock down our communication and sources of information and crush us utterly.  Whether you would be involved in such a situation is not my business, and I’d rather not know.  But – involved or innocent bystander – you will need access to accurate and timely information just to stay alive, which is the focus of this article.

Don’t kid yourself.  President Obama is very well aware that the United States is teetering on the brink of civil unrest – which is the current politically correct terminology for shootin’ revolution – and this keeps him awake and sweating at night.  Thanks to President Obama’s predecessor’s idiotic policies, The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 is dead, and President Obama has a whole division of U.S. troops (Northern Command or Northcom) stationed here at home and being trained to fire on U.S. civilians.  Northcom notwithstanding, unless President Obama is a completely brain dead moron, simple arithmetic must be giving him serious indigestion right about now.  43 percent of Americans admit to owning guns, and given how abhorrent most Americans find giving government information such as this, that 43 percent figure is absolutely certain to be significantly lower than the real figure.  President Obama can’t hope to match those numbers – not even with the entire U.S. armed forces (most of which are kind of busy right now in two illegal wars and a number of other secret actions I don’t even know about) – which is precisely why our founders wrote the Second Amendment into our Bill of Rights.  Our government was designed to serve the people, not the other way around, and it’s only a few power mad crooks in Washington who have forgotten that fact.

On a practical note, President Obama himself is a Blackberry user, so he probably knows more about the Internet than Mubarak, but he’s no network engineer.  A kill switch isn’t going to be as easy as he thinks.  All Egypt had to do was shut down four providers.  The U.S. has literally thousands of providers, counting dial up.  All of our banking info is transmitted via the Internet.  Most government agencies use the Internet to communicate between geographically separate locations.  Even more importantly to the U.S. President, most large corporations use the Internet to communicate between separate locations.  An Internet kill switch that truly did shut it all down would bring American business right to its knees, and it wouldn’t take a revolution to remove Obama from office.  It would be a toss up between Citibank, Bank of America, Blackwater/Xe, AIG, Shell Oil, Halliburton – oh, you figure it out.  President Obama wouldn’t last the day out.  That’s pretty much certain.

As a matter of fact, if our President has been watching events unfold in Egypt, things got a lot more heated and intense the moment Mubarak shut them down.  There is a lesson there for President Obama if he will heed it.

However, if there is one thing I’ve learned in my decades of living, most politicians are not brain surgeons, and if there is a wrong way to do something, you can count on somebody doing it the wrong way.

Because of this, there are large numbers of people who are working on an end run around pretty much any possible Internet kill switch scenario.  One such group that is working to get Egypt back online right now – and to help any future victims of this type of idiocy – is the Open Mesh Project – which can be found at http://www.openmeshproject.org.  These guys are very sharp, but they are working on internal communication rather than the wider Internet.  Don’t sneer at this, though.  Internal communication is very important to Egypt right now, and I can imagine several scenarios where it could be critically important here in the U.S.

As far as wider Internet access is concerned, counter measures could vary widely depending on what method is used to shut the U.S. Internet down.  The mildest form of shutdown would be a few or a large number of websites whose IP addresses cannot be retrieved via DNS.  This method was used over Thanksgiving by the Department of Homeland Security when they seized some 80 websites accused of aiding piracy.  This can be countered easily with a list of important IP addresses, such as those for Facebook (69.63.189.34), Twitter (128.242.240.52) and Google (72.14.204.99).  You would simply plug 69.63.189.34 into your browser instead of, for example, http://www.facebook.com, and presto!  You’ll be there.

If access is being blocked by methods similar to the great Chinese firewall, there are even easier methods.  Tor (http://www.torproject.org) uses an encrypted signal and a chain of proxies to make it appear as though you are connecting from somewhere else, usually another country.  Download Tor and try it.  The instructions are easy to follow.  About half the time you connect to Google using Tor, you may see the site come up in anything from Japanese to Norwegian.  Tor is useful now for reasons of privacy, but it could be especially useful if access to certain important websites is blocked in this country.  Thousands of Tor volunteers around the world would immediately block U.S. exit points if the U.S. Internet were taken down, making their service easy and useful for us to use, just as they are presently doing for Egypt.

I’m not sure what would happen in the event that cell phone service was disrupted, although I think an intelligent government would hesitate to do this, given the huge numbers of people who no longer keep landlines.  I mean, disrupting 911 service is a major step, and it wouldn’t make the U.S. government look benevolent to the rest of the world at all.  Intriguingly, a few months ago, I discovered that accessing the Internet via my cell phone provided me with an IP address from an eastern European country.  Obviously, I can’t depend on that working, but I do wonder if they will manage to plug all of the holes similar to this in the U.S.

Finally, though, and keep this in mind, your best protection is always to keep your land line.  Never use it.  But keep it alive, and keep a long distance service on it.  Why?  Because you can use dial up located in another country, that’s why!  While you have Internet and can do so easily, find and print a list of dial up numbers for later use.  Choose a variety of other countries.  Canada and Mexico are certain to be easiest and cheapest, but we can’t be sure they won’t knuckle under to U.S. pressure and refuse us access.  Venezuela, on the other hand, would be highly unlikely to pull any plugs at U.S. request.  They’d be far more likely, actually, to offer us free Internet on a toll free number.

I realize that some folks out there have never even made an international call.  The syntax is:

011 – [country code] – [area code] – [phone]

There are minor variations.  For example, most Canadian numbers merely need a 1 and an area code, like the U.S.  Smaller countries may have a country code, but no area code.  In most cases, web sites that give you dial up number lists will also tell you how to dial them.

If you don’t know how to find such a search service, try here:  http://www.budgetdialup.com/html/prod.htm

Zone C seems to have access numbers from a number of interesting countries.

I’d pick for myself a sampling of land line dial up numbers from Canada, Mexico, Europe, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Chile and so on.  Print the list on real, physical paper.  Store it in a safe place.

You may need it one day soon.

Originally published at Freedom Scribe. Please leave any comments there.

Who Really Wants To Destroy Israel?
There is much talk in the independent media right now about the power of the Israeli-owned major media in the United States.  One little word critical of Israel’s behavior – as a country – automatically seems to get anyone labeled as an anti-Semitic creep.  This fact is so well known by now that it is completely discounted by anyone with two brain cells to rub together.  Calling criticism of the actions of Israel’s government anti-Semitic makes just about as much sense as calling criticism of the treasonous actions of Clinton, Bush or Obama (criticisms which an awful lot of patriotic Americans have been making lately) anti-American.

All the same, let’s be very clear here and state a couple of things absolutely before I discuss the real danger of harm to Israel – and where it really comes from.

*  Whether or not Israel had a moral right to exist when it was created – and that is a debate for another day – the pragmatic fact is that at least two generations of native Israelis have now been born there, so it is just stupid to even question whether Israel has a right to exist now.  Those who argue that the Palestinians owned Israel before the Jews got there are correct, but it is equally correct to say that Israel owned Palestine before that.  I mean, how far back are you going to go to establish ownership?  That land has several thousands of years of history behind it, and such a debate could get very, very messy. The Israelis are about as likely to leave today as hundreds of years of native born American citizens are likely to pull up stakes and turn North America back over to the Native Americans.  It’s just a non-issue.

*  The Holocaust really happened.  I wasn’t born then, but I have known at least one genuine Holocaust survivor, and scores of American veterans who were haunted for the rest of their lives by what they saw when they liberated those all-too-real concentration camps.  What is horrifyingly and terribly true as well is that the German Holocaust was not limited to Jews.  Every American schoolchild knows that six million Jews were killed. Very few Americans know that at least 21 million human beings were killed – Poles, Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and pretty much any group that wasn’t good “clean” Aryan stock.  Hitler was out to “cleanse” the German (Aryan, in his view) race, an appallingly sick and evil goal.  My point is that the Jews, while certainly singled out, were most definitely not alone as victims.

*  I do not support the use of terror against non-combatants – ever.  Period.  End of story.  Violence is acceptable only in self-defense.

*  As a woman and a feminist, I am even less personally fond of Islam than I am of rabid, Protestant Christianity.  That doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in common decency and any people’s absolute right to self-determination and worship in their own fashion.

So call me an anti-Semite if it makes you feel better.  I know what I am – and I know what I am most definitely not.

Since Israel was created in the late 1940s, it has been besieged and bitterly hated by the Islamic world, most of which would like nothing better than to push Israel into the sea.  That is a fact.  This constant state of fear has had terrible psychological consequences for the Israelis, causing them to develop a siege sort of mentality.  The most sickening part of this tragedy is that it has transformed many Israelis, who were themselves or their parents or grandparents survivors or victims of ethnic cleansing, into exactly the same sort of genocidaires they most rightly despise and fear.

If Israel as a nation is to have any hope of long term survival and/or peace, the Israelis must learn to move past that fear, and they must help the Palestinians do so as well.  The simple truth on the ground at this moment is that one country exists – and two peoples have (at least today) quite legitimate claims to that country.  The only possible solution is that they must somehow learn to live together, either side by side, or by dividing into two countries.  The Israelis have given lip service to doing so, but their siege of Gaza proves that they would actually prefer that the Palestinians die off and disappear.  One Israeli politician actually said quite recently that they were “putting the Palestinians on a diet.”  Well, it is a starvation diet, and it is killing Palestinian children.  As I have said, I don’t love Islam in any form, but I also know that if my own children were starving, I might be driven to lobbing a few rockets over the wall myself, as it would come under the heading of self-defense and absolute desperation.  That’s a no-brainer.  A people without hope will turn to horrible and violent solutions.

The sane answer is not to wipe said people out – the only decent and practical answer is to merely to allow them the same hope and social, educational and business opportunities that the Israelis enjoy.  The current problems would almost certainly begin to ease immediately, along with the hatred.  Jewish and Palestinian children growing up as friends – wow!  Difficult to imagine today, but with some effort on both sides, a quite practical and achievable goal.  Racial hatred can indeed be overcome – who would have believed 50 years ago that a black man would become President of the United States one day?  It’s even easier to overcome this sort of ethnic hatred when both peoples are Semitic and there is no outward, visible difference.

Sadly, none of Israel’s behavior should prove any great surprise today.  Israel’s savage behavior has always been a problem for the Palestinians and the rest of the world, right from the very beginning.  From the bulldozing of Palestinian villages in the 1940s to the deliberate sinking of the USS Liberty in the 1960s to Israel’s recent and unbelievably brutal treatment of a humanitarian flotilla aimed at breaking the Gaza siege, nothing has changed in the slightest degree.  Israel seems to want the whole world to believe that they are totally insane, out of control, and that they might do absolutely anything.  Fine.  They’re pretty convincing.  I believe it.

But there is a large fly in the ketchup, and that fly is approximately 200-400 nuclear warheads that Israel has only recently even admitted that they possess.  The Israeli government is deliberately alienating Israel’s friends so that the possibility of using those nukes can be used to threaten Iran in the very near future.  After all, a nation without friends has nothing to lose and might do absolutely anything.

The overwhelming danger is that Israel might really do it, forgetting that a nuclear war will affect every life on this planet.  And the whole “nothing to lose” thing is a complete fallacy.  A lack of friends is a very different issue from a world of active enemies, which such an action would create.

Why does Obama seem to be aiding and abetting them in this behavior?  None of us can really know, but I have a strong suspicion.  Since the earliest days of organized intelligence activities, blackmail has been a tool of the intelligence services.  The Mossad are masters of the art.  The “birther” controversy is, I am sure, a disinformation campaign meant to distract from the real issue, which will almost certainly turn out to be Barry Soetoro’s passports and travel history.  Remember the theft of passport info and the resulting controversy awhile back?  That had Mossad fingerprints all over it, at least in my view.  And, while it would be spectacular news to learn that Obama was not born in the United States, I am actually fairly certain that he was, indeed, born in Hawaii.  Legal issues aside, however, he had no control over his birth.  The citizenships that he claimed as an adult – whether as cover for his alleged CIA activities or not – are a much more serious issue and deserve far more of our attention.  This is the sword that I believe the Mossad is holding over Obama’s head, and it is a very effective sword indeed.  I believe that Obama already sees the handwriting on the wall.

The excrement is about to contact the rotating blades, and if Israel believes that Obama can control the millions of outraged Americans that would besiege the White House in the event of American support, tacit or otherwise, for a nuclear war that threatens the existence of all life, they are simply dreaming.  Americans are very slow to wake up, but the majority of us have slowly awakened to the truth.  We know that Islamists did not carry out 9/11, or at least not alone.  We know that we have been lied to and manipulated since long before the fictional Gulf of Tonkin incident that led to the loss of 50,000 American lives.  We know that the largest chunk of foreign aid we send goes to Israel, mostly in the form of weapons, at a time when our economy is bleeding out.  The vast majority of us are growing seriously angry.  This pot is approaching a boil, and anyone who doesn’t want to get splashed needs to get out of the way with all due haste.

So the idiots that are forcing Israel onto an utterly suicidal course, idiots like Benyamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman, with Barry Obama blackmailed into helping them – they are the ones who really threaten Israel’s existence as a nation.  And the Israelis themselves need to wake up and do something about that pretty damned quickly if they hope to survive the next 20 years.  I don’t believe I have ever met a native Israeli, but the American Jews I have known in a lifetime in and around the entertainment industry are some of the finest, most decent and courageous human beings on the planet.  If they can’t do this, no one can.  And that is something that we, as a nation, would benefit ourselves by helping them accomplish.  With the possible exception of China, America has the most to gain of any major country from a stable and peaceful Middle East.  It just doesn’t make sense that we are acting almost daily against our own national interest.

The worst failing of my countrymen, and one cause for our own brutal and senseless wars, is that we all too often mistake hate talk for tough talk.  We need to elect strong leaders who cannot be influenced and cannot be blackmailed, but who also cannot be stampeded into stupid wars for no reason.  We need to learn that a soft-spoken man can be a strong man, too.

Most of all, we need to stop supporting genocide.

We have such a leader in Washington right now.  His name is Ron Paul.  Maybe it is finally time to listen to him.

Originally published at Freedom Scribe. Please leave any comments there.

Our grandchildren will look back on this past Sunday and realize it was the day when Americans sold the last shred of their freedom to the insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Sold? No, you’ve bought – bought the bill of goods that the pharmaceutical and insurance companies were selling to you and to Congress, bought it hook, line and sinker – and you didn’t even have the common street sense to dicker. The price? Slavery. And payment is due in full by 2014.

It doesn’t break my heart in the least that Obama and our Congress critters have just committed very messy political seppuku, but it won’t make any real difference to America either. The GOP is crying about the corruption involved in this health care bill – but that’s only because they are in a perfect position right now to blame it all on the Democrats. When they are in power again – January, I should think, after this fiasco – the rhetoric will certainly change a little and our guns might even be a little safer from confiscation for a couple more years, but the ulimate outcome will be precisely the same. Unless a politician starts out extremely wealthy indeed, no one makes it to DC these days without winding up beholden to these corporations. It just cannot be done. And if your career has made you that kind of wealth, why would you even be willing to trade it for heartache and stomach ulcers in DC? Ron Paul did it all on his own dime, he’s dead honest and not beholden to anyone but his constituents, and you’ve seen how much serious attention he is given by the pundits and the media.

If this bill becomes law and takes full effect, you will be required to purchase medical insurance from a private insurance company or pay a hefty fine. You will become (as you probably already are) part of a huge medical database – and medical privacy will be forever a thing of the past. What treatments you will be allowed to receive under this system will be mandated by pharmaceutical companies and accountants trying to “keep costs down,” and the costs of the program will still spiral out of control. Did you know that if you have terminal cancer, it is already illegal to seek alternative treatments in another country? A number of people who have gone to Mexico for Laetrile have actually been jailed upon their return. I have no opinion on whether Laetrile works or not, but I have a powerful belief that you have the absolute right to try to save your own life in any way that you see fit! You can expect that situation to become even worse. A cancer treatment that is cheap, doesn’t make you literally sicker – and actually works – will cost the companies controlling your healthcare millions of dollars. Naturally it is illegal, and it will remain illegal for as long as the corporations control Congress.

Some folks are relieved to see that multiple states are gearing up to challenge this legislation at the Supreme Court level, and even more states are working on legislation to mandate lawsuits against the federal government if this bill is enacted. One figure I read recently was 37 states – if that is actually true, this is unprecedented in the history of the United States. Unfortunately, it is also doomed to failure before it even begins. The judges who would hear such lawsuits were appointed by politicians – like George W. Bush – who are heavily invested in the pharmaceutical and insurance companies. Before you can bring suit against the federal government, you first have to be awarded “standing” by such a federal judge – meaning that you must be judged by a federal court to have the legal right to sue. These suits, if they are filed, won’t even get that far, I am sure. And if any challenges are filed at the Supreme Court level, all SCOTUS has to do is refuse to hear the case. This is all a distraction, meant to keep us passive until it is far too late to do anything about this bill.

Or so they believe.

There is a ray of hope, actually, although it does not come from an expected quarter. My parents survived the Great Depression. During those years, back alley medicine was practiced by a large number of healers. Some were licensed physicians offering services in secrecy and off the books – like abortions when they were illegal. Others were perfectly competent physicians who had lost their medical licenses for little or no reason at all. Some were what we would call naturopaths today. Some were indeed crooks and charlatans, but as with any tradesman, the successful were those who gave good value for a reasonable price – either cash or barter – and entirely off the books.

This sort of underground economy is called “agorism,” and it is the only way to fight a behemoth like our government. You can’t win politically, and going head to head or toe to toe with an out-of-control government is just suicidal. But a medical underground for those folks who don’t want or can’t afford insurance – or who just don’t want their medical records to become public property – would be a very good thing. I foresee several things about such a medical underground:

1. Common sense would rule. Your family doctor wouldn’t be sending you for $10,000-12,000 in unnecessary medical tests because he is afraid of being sued, all when he knows perfectly well that you have a kidney infection and just need a round of antibiotics. Your doctor can’t really piss you off without going to jail, and you can’t really report him without going to jail yourself – and you sure as hell can’t sue him in open court. So both of you would behave like rational human beings.

2. Most likely you could get in to see your doctor within an hour or two, rather than waiting a month until he feels like taking new patients.

3. Some doctors, in the interest of acquiring and keeping patients, might even offer house calls. It’s far safer, when you are doing something illegal, to move around and not have an office that can be targeted.

4. Doctors would learn to diagnose again. A good doctor can tell far more with his eyes, ears, fingers and nose than an expensive CT scan or MRI is likely to tell him.

5. Folks wouldn’t be going to hospitals unless they were actually in real danger of dying. “Take two aspirin, drink plenty of water, and call me in the morning,” was generally wise advice for 90 percent of health concerns, but doctors forgot it somewhere along the line under the ever present fear of lawsuits.

6. More babies will be born at home, under the care of underground doctors or midwives, and both mothers and children will be safe from hospital infections.

7. Such a system will fight unemployment and help the economy. The old country gal whose granny taught her to treat Brown Recluse bites with sugar water, treat bronchitis or even Tuberculosis with raw garlic and who makes that hellacious linament for a sore back really deserves to get paid for her knowledge. She will now get paid – cash under the table, or a couple of chickens or even a pig – all of which will certainly go to feed her family and no part of it will help to support foreign wars or other stupidities of empire.

I am actually finding this quite amusing. Congress has definitely given us real health care reform, just not quite in the way that they or Obama intended.

Originally published at Freedom Scribe. Please leave any comments there.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are always bad men.
Lord Acton

Seldom has anyone uttered a truer phrase, and if you believe it, it actually helps you to navigate the maze of politics.

For example: health care. If my government is truly powerful (and it is), do I want this powerful government (i.e., these powerful men) to take over control of my health care?

Absolutely not! My health care decisions are personal decisions, and I would far rather be unable to afford a doctor at all than have any government dictate those decisions to me – or even know the full state of my health or lack of it. Bluntly, that’s nobody’s business but my own – and it never will be. Government health care would simply mean that I could never again visit a health care professional in this country without having my privacy violated. And my privacy is important enough to me that this means that I could never again receive health care within the borders of the United States.

Actually, that’s not such a large problem for me personally. After my last doctor tried to kill me a few years ago, I’ve stuck with nutritional supplements and haven’t seen another MD. I don’t think very highly of the profession. If those supplements that keep me healthy are banned by an out-of-control government, I’ll be moving to Mexico in short order where I can get anything I could ever want over the counter for cash with zero record of the transaction. Dead simple.

But power corrupts should be remembered in other ways, too. I recently read Seymour Hersh’s remarks about Cheney operating an assassination program out of the White House. This shouldn’t surprise any student of human nature who actually watched Cheney, as he is a walking advertisement for clinical sadism and power corrupts. My conservative friends (all two of them) tell me defensively that this program was just great. It “kept us safe” from Al Qaeda (a CIA invention, anyway). They should remember instead that because power corrupts, it is no stretch at all from offing a jihadist here and there to offing your political rivals. My friends need to remember that forgetting that universal principle is not a survival characteristic.

So now it appears that Obama is pursuing many of these programs himself. I have to admit that makes me smile a bit when I think about my conservative buddies. Anything that increases the power of government will be abused eventually. We see this in action every single day, and now it’s their turn to sweat about it.

Why is this so difficult for Americans to understand? Because, by comparison with the rest of the world, our government did seem reasonably benign for many generations – or at least, it managed to fool us into thinking so. But no government is ever truly benign. Ever. Some are just better at secrecy than others.

Power corrupts! If you give any organization, public or private, power over your life, that power will, sooner or later, be abused. There are no exceptions.

The only possible way to slow this process (and you cannot stop it until you abolish government altogether) is to hold government to as nearly universal human moral standards as possible. The Christians think they have the only morality that is valid, but they are deluded. Hell, they can’t even define “adultery,” let alone the difference between “kill” and “murder.”

We need to look for points of agreement among pretty much all of us. We do nearly all agree that murder is wrong, so why do we allow our government to do it?

Don’t look at me! I haven’t got a clue. I personally believe that anyone who gave the order for an assassination right down to the poor bastard that pulled the trigger should be subject to immediate trial, and if convicted of murder, subject to the death penalty also. War is a little different if it is unavoidable, but war in anything other than self defense is murder also. Make no mistake about that.

We pretty much all agree that torture is wrong. Not only is it wrong morally, it is just plain stupid, because the victim of torture will tell you all kinds of lies to get the torture to stop. Torture is only good for one thing – getting folks to tell you what you want or need to hear. Like maybe getting Al Qaeda folks to confess to 9/11 when it was an inside job? I have that dirty suspicion, yes. What about you? Cheney is certainly capable of it. I suspect he actually enjoyed ordering torture and watching it. So why is it difficult to imagine those as his underlying reasons?

Until we get over our national reluctance to talk about basic morality in anything other than the framework of fanatical religion – which many of us reject out of hand – we’re going to have a government that is immoral and dangerous to all of us.

It might do every one of us good to remember the last successful anarchist society – the American “Old West.” Contrary to history’s lies and Hollywood fiction, blood did not run in the streets. There were only a few dozen high noon type gunfights on this continent over a span of a hundred years, and collateral damage was slight. Most folks never came within 1,000 miles of such a fight in their lifetimes. But no one ever questioned the carriage of arms, openly or concealed, and a woman could walk the streets at night without fear of kidnap or rape.

It was also the most generally prosperous society in history.

Would that really be so awful?

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Originally published at Freedom Scribe. Please leave any comments there.

Obama is Scared, He is on the Run . . .

I recently read the above headline in an email from Newsmax.  Yes, I do sometimes read that rag, although it leaves me needing to wash my hands every single time.  I actually get news from dozens of sources, domestic and foreign, leaning left, right and even toward the Twilight Zone.  I attempt to compare and contrast them and boil them down to something resembling truth, which is frequently found by noticing what is not even mentioned in the MSM (mainstream media, for the uninitiated).  Of course, I do have my most valuable news sources, the very best of which is the Wayne Madsen Report.  Mr. Madsen is one of the very last of a dying breed – an honest-to-goddess investigative journalist.  So is Greg Palast.  So what if both tend to lean a little left?  It doesn’t make the facts they turn up any less real or valid.  As John Galt said in Atlas Shrugged, “A equals A.”  Facts are still facts, even when we don’t like them.  I have been capable of distinguishing fact from opinion since I was ten years old.  These two journalists have excellent sources and excellent brains, and they dig up real facts with unrelenting excellence.  Their personal politics couldn’t interest me less.

Obama is indeed scared, as is the entire federal government, and they very definitely should be scared.  The level of rage I am sensing from my fellow Americans has reached new heights in the last few months, between Obama mortgaging our great grandchildren with the trillion dollar gift he delivered to the Federal Reserve and his attempts to federalize our health care system.  I caught a brilliant quote on the latter – and I am ashamed I cannot remember the source – but whoever it was said that this would result in “DMV service at Pentagon prices.”  I couldn’t have said it better myself, which is a shameful thing for any writer to admit.  While I freely admit that our health care system is badly broken, government meddling is NOT the answer!  On the contrary, government meddling caused the current problems, and more government meddling will only make matters worse than they already are.

Yes, our federal government is terrified, and the planning for countering “civil unrest” (media speak for shootin’ revolution) are becoming more and more transparent.  One of the ways our frightened federal government is trying to hit back is by lumping all dissatisfied and unhappy Americans into one big group – right wing fanatics, militias, domestic terrorists – many different names, all with negative connotations to the sane.  Negative connotations even to me, frankly, as I despise both racism and Christian fanaticism.

All media confusion aside, even at the most basic level, we are two different groups.

The first group – Group A, for convenience – are right wing conservatives.  Most are Christian fanatics, who would prefer that evolution not be taught in public schools (they’ve forgotten the A equals A lesson).  Many believe in conversion by the sword – i.e., those who are not Christians and who are unwilling to convert to the one true faith should all be killed.  Many truly believe in Armageddon and the Rapture and honestly do believe these things are almost upon us (yes, some of these folks need medication to cope with reality at all).  Many are very racist and are either KKK or would have been KKK in past decades.  They can be spotted fairly simply by pretty much any one of the following methods:

1.  Excessive Bible quoting (out of context, of course).
2.  “Praying about” everything from what car to buy to when to go to the bathroom.
3.  Serious discussion of creative design as if it were a scientific principle.
4.  An insistence that all of the U.S. founders were devout Christians (historically untrue).
5.  Racial hatred against both blacks and hispanics.
6.  Vocal defense of torture as an interrogation method and aggressively informing the rest of us that we should be grateful for the men and women who have and do use it, supposedly on our behalf.
7.  Loud and irrational defense of our Middle Eastern wars, stating that they are “keeping America safe for democracy” – as if America was a democracy, which it isn’t, and democracy was a desirable political form, which it isn’t (being two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner).
8.  Loud and irrational defense of the cruel behavior of INS in incarcerating and deporting illegal aliens, even when they are being deported to starvation or even far worse.

Despite calling themselves gentle and loving Christians, this right wing group can be characterized at the most basic level by a sociopathic lack of compassion or empathy for anyone outside their select group – and a fundamental desire to control others.  When these people talk about “freedom,” freedom is most definitely not what they mean.  “Freedom” is about doing what they believe you should be doing, and if you don’t agree with what they believe you should be doing, you become an outsider and therefore fair game.

By contrast, libertarians and other genuine freedom lovers – Group B, for convenience – are a homogeneous group of all races and all religions.  At the most fundamental level, their philosophy is to live and let live.  They don’t even want to mess with the right wing wackos beyond the extent necessary for self defense.  Everybody should be allowed to live and pursue happiness in their own way, without interference from others or from government – even nutcases, so long as they harm no one.  Some libertarians are certainly Christians, but they aren’t trying to cram their beliefs down anyone’s throat.  Some are Pagans.  Some are atheists.  All will defend to the death your right to believe anything you choose.

How these two groups can be confused is honestly beyond my understanding.  Libertarians are the political and philosophical descendants of Thomas Jefferson, and their most cherished ethic is never to initiate force to achieve political or social goals.  Initiation of force, however, is not the same thing as response to force.  Libertarians tend to be soft spoken pacifists carrying very large .45s – but they don’t start trouble, ever.  They are merely willing to finish trouble if someone else sends it to visit.

So if there is ever “civil unrest” started or led by libertarians, you can count on it being a real question of self defense.  Frankly, I’m not so sure about that other bunch.

Originally published at Freedom Scribe. Please leave any comments there.

Please note that my copyright notice is null and void for this post.  Anyone who wishes to borrow the text of this letter to use on behalf of Cele Castillo is welcome - and even urged - to do so.

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The Honorable Eric Holder

United States Attorney General

U.S. Department of Justice

950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW

Washington, D.C. 20530-0001

Re: Prosecutorial Misconduct

USA vs. Celerino Castillo, III

SA: 08-CR-00193 (1) - WRF

No. 08- 51144 USA vs. CASTILLO

Dear Attorney General Holder:

I have recently read in the news media about your unprecedented reversal of conviction in the corruption case concerning Senator Ted Stevens, and I applaud your action.  It was very apparent that there was prosecutorial misconduct that did indeed take place in that case.

However, I have recently become cognizant of a similar - and quite possibly even a far worse - example of prosecutorial misconduct, and as an American citizen, I am urgently requesting your assistance in getting to the bottom of this ugly situation.

Mr. Celerino “Cele” Castillo, III, a resident of my own state of Texas, is best remembered for being a whistleblower during the Iran-Contra investigation.  Mr. Castillo submitted his testimony to the House Select Committee for Intelligence and went before a federal grand jury in Washington D.C, to testify to CIA involvement in murder, torture, drug trafficking, and arms smuggling.

After his retirement from the DEA, Mr. Castillo became an educator and an activist for several civil rights organizations, such as People for Peace and Justice, Veterans for Peace, and Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

On March 06, 2008, Mr. Castillo was arrested by ATF agents in San Antonio, Texas.  The charges were filed by U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton for the Western District of Texas.  After eight months, Mr. Castillo’s charges were dismissed under Poke v. U.S.

However, prior to Mr. Castillo’s charges being dismissed, he was told that he was required to plead guilty to new charges of “Selling Guns without a License and Aiding and Abetting.”  ATF agents telephoned Mr. Castillo’s elderly mother on literally a daily basis, threatening this elderly lady with never seeing her son again, until Mr. Castillo pled guilty and was sentenced to 37 months of incarceration.  Such tactics on the parts of the ATF agents in question were at best, disgusting - and at worst, even criminal.  That is, said tactics certainly appear to be felony extortion in my personal view, and I cannot see any other interpretation at this time.

Mr. Castillo was initially ordered to surrender for his term of incarceration on March 05, 2009, but he discovered soon after his sentencing that his attorney, Robert “Eddie” de la Garza, had been under investigation by the state bar throughout his case - and Mr. de la Garza had failed to advise the court that he was in the process of being suspended.  There was a massive issue of conflict of interest on the part of Mr. de la Garza also, because the same agents involved in Mr. Castillo’s case were also involved with another case involving Mr. de la Garza’s son, Andrew de la Garza, who had been arrested by ATF a short time prior on quite similar charges to Mr. Castillo’s.

The judge in Mr. Castillo’s case has extended Mr. Castillo’s required surrender date until July 20, 2009, so that he may have ample time to prepare this case with his new public defender.

On April 10, 2009, Mr. Castillo and his new public defender filed nine counts of Prosecutorial Misconduct and Outrageous Government Conduct related to his case.  The complaints were filed with the Office of the Inspector General and the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, and therefore should be readily available for your review.

I do strongly believe that the prosecutorial misconduct involved in Mr. Castillo’s case was even more severe than that which was involved in Senator Ted Stevens’ case, as I do very strongly suspect that Mr. de la Garza’s son’s predicament was actually used by the ATF agents involved in both cases to blackmail Mr. de la Garza, Mr. Castillo’s defense attorney, into giving Mr. Castillo the worst possible legal advice - in other words, pressuring Mr. Castillo’s attorney to advise him in the strongest terms to plead guilty even though it was never in Mr. Castillo’s best interest to do so.  Put still another way, this situation certainly does make it appear that this was felony extortion again, which I am sure you will agree is never acceptable conduct for anyone, let alone someone in the legal or law enforcement professions.

In light of these facts, I am respectfully requesting an immediate, thorough and very urgent inquiry into the manner in which Mr. Castillo’s case was prosecuted, and I also feel that time is of extremely crucial importance in this matter.  Cele Castillo is one of the last surviving credible witnesses to the government agency abuses that took place during the Iran Contra years, and as a former deep cover DEA agent, the very unfortunate reality is that he will be placed in extremely grave personal danger from the moment he enters the U.S. prison system on July 20th, 2009.

I hope to hear from you concerning this matter at your very earliest convenience.

Respectfully yours,

Kathryn A. Graham

Hooks, Texas

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Originally published at Freedom Scribe. Please leave any comments there.

If you are like most Americans, you’ve been scratching your head over the last decade or two asking yourself what the hell has happened to your country.  After reading about the recent poll numbers showing that churchgoers approve far more often of torture than do their non-church-going friends, I started doing a little bit of serious research into this matter.

I stumbled into an absolute cess pool of “Dominionism” and “Christian Nationalism” that still has me wanting to bow down before the porcelain god and lose my supper.  If you can stomach it, do some reading.  You will discover that a group of Christian fanatics has deliberately hijacked your country and attempted (and is still attempting) to turn it into the most repressive of theocracies.

Said idiots have even tried to rewrite history, claiming that our founding fathers were exclusively Christian.  Off the top of my head, I can name three who weren’t.  Two were Deists, and Ben Franklin, the old goat, was a member of the naughty Hellfire Club.  Jefferson converted a time or two to a relatively mild brand of Episcopalianism, but he always came back to Deism.  I think his flirtation with Christianity was probably just good for business.  So the very idea that we were founded as an exclusively Christian nation is just ridiculous.

Personally, I have a difficult time believing that any woman buys into this Dominionist garbage.  Submit to your husband?  Sorry, gents, but I’ve yet to meet a male that could run his own life efficiently, let alone mine.  These groups supposedly aren’t opposed to birth control - not like the Catholics are - but they don’t want to talk about it either, not even in countries where the birth rate is actually killing folks left and right.  It certainly seems that keeping the little lady barefoot and pregnant is the only way they know to keep her under control.  And spreading disease in poor countries is one way to keep them from ever becoming a “problem” for you.

Unfortunately, I’ve studied enough psychology to recognize a massive male inferiority complex when I see one.  And that tracks on the torture issue as well - apart from clinical sadists, the only folks who would derive satisfaction from torturing a helpless prisoner would be those who were feeling awfully helpless themselves at the time.  Torture must have been very empowering for a certain type of crippled personality.

Incidentally, John Ashcroft was an Assembly of God type, which means he was definitely a Dominionist.  Assembly of God and Pentecostal churches were among the first to accept Dominionist philosophy right after the turn of the last century, and they were followed by most of the evangelical and charismatic churches.  Personally, I am not surprised.  Any group that calls falling down in the floor, foaming at the mouth and making unintelligible animal noises “speaking in tongues” is collectively fruitier than nutcakes in my admittedly biased view.

Back to Ashcroft, the poor SOB was so totally threatened by femininity that he spent $8,000 of taxpayer money to drape the bare breast of a classical statue of Lady Justice.  You’ve really got to feel sorry for a heterosexual guy that goes through life worried that he might catch a glimpse of female skin.

Kind of reminds you of some Muslim fanatics you’ve read about, doesn’t it.  Brand just doesn’t matter - a nut is a nut is a nut . . .

Fanatics have always been the most dangerous of human beings.  Fanatics account for Muslim extremists blowing themselves up with disturbing regularity and trying to take a lot of folks with them.  Fanatics recently bombed Gaza back into the stone age, creating even more Muslim extremists just itching to don high explosive fashion.  Fanatics are the reason Steve Rosen, caught red-handed in espionage against the United States of America, has just walked free to do it again - by fanatics in this case, I refer to the “Amen” corner of Congress and the White House, those folks who believe that Israel can do no wrong at all, no matter what, not ever - it makes one wonder what sort of guilt is behind this blindness.

Fact:  Of all our so-called allies, Israel has the most active and damaging espionage program against the United States.  Fact, not fiction, and incontrovertible.  But Israel can still do no wrong.

I don’t hate Jews at all.  I don’t hate anybody at all these days, and Jews least of all.  Hell, I literally grew up around the entertainment and apparel industries - kind of hard indeed to hate those folks when they helped raise you.  But I never met a single individual who could do no wrong - and as for a whole nation, let’s not even go there.

The fanatics few want to talk about in this country are actually part and parcel of the “Amen” corner problem, because right along with Pat Robertson, those Dominionists and Christian Nationalists think we just have to prevent one single acre of the Holy Land from falling into Muslim hands, and they are cheerfully willing to shed many gallons of American blood to prevent it.  Of course, they find it easy to ignore several million Palestinians who absolutely have to live somewhere, and given the xenophobia endemic to this sort of Christian, it is likely they have some sort of “final solution” in mind for those poor unfortunates even if the Israelis don’t.

How ironic, and how tragic.

And it is ironic indeed that this very hard right wing crew has just handed over western civilization to some of the most rabid socialists imaginable.  Genuine conservatives and small government folks can’t stomach these religious wingnuts at all, and so the GOP has self-destructed messily from the inside - and it has done it almost overnight in historical terms.  As a political party, the GOP is completely washed up.  Finished.  John McCain’s choice of fruitcake Sarah Palin for a running mate only drove a stake through the heart of an already rotting corpse.

No doubt the GOP is hoping that Obama’s socialist programs will worsen things economically in the United States to the point that the populace will accept anything else.  Hell, Rush Limbaugh suicidally stated on national radio that he actually wanted Obama to fail.  On the other hand, I do think this is a once in a lifetime opportunity for advocates of genuine freedom to fill a power vacuum at the very top of American politics, and I hope Ron Paul is listening.

If we libertarians can get our act together - and getting libertarians to work together has been compared to herding cats - but if we can get our act together in the next four years, we have a real chance now to change the landscape of American politics forever.

I, for one, simply will not live in a Christian theocracy.  I am a practicing Pagan, and my life wouldn’t be worth two cents in such a regime, so I will fight these idiots to my dying breath - with words if I can, and with blood if necessary - and I absolutely guarantee I won’t die alone.  Not all Pagans are pacifists.  Not all Pagans are liberals.  I might add that gentle martyrdom is just about the brain dead dumbest idea the Christians ever came up with - right up there with “turn the other cheek.”

Perhaps it is time for the worst domestic enemies of our Constitution that have crawled out from under slimy rocks at any time in the past two centuries to find that out.

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Originally published at Freedom Scribe. Please leave any comments there.

A recent article I spied on the CNN news site made me start thinking, very hard, about the state of religion in the United States.  According to a recent poll:

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified. Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Even though I am not personally a Christian, and I have not been since I was a child, I found those figures extremely shocking - until I began to think about my own experiences with American Protestant Christianity, especially during a recent and particularly difficult year I spent in southeastern Kansas.

Like anyone who lives in the United States, I cannot avoid having some friends who are of the Protestant Christian persuasion, and of those friends that I know very well, there are several that I do respect highly on the grounds of morality, kindness, compassion and charity - including, but not limited to, a specific couple living in southeastern Kansas and at least one man living and caring for his mother in Kansas City, Missouri - right in the heart of the American Midwest.  However, in my experience, such individuals are sadly the exception and not at all the rule for Christians, and this does seem especially true of a particular type of self-styled Christian living in the American Midwest.

The overwhelmingly vocal majority of American Protestant Christians seem to be xenophobic to an absurd degree.  In case you don’t speak English very well, xenophobic is a term that encompasses, among other traits, racism.  If it doesn’t look like you, and if it doesn’t talk like you, it really isn’t fully human and doesn’t deserve the compassion or kindness we would show to one of “our own.”

The term xenophobic doesn’t only refer to race, however.  It literally translates more or less as fear of difference, fear of outsiders or fear of that which is foreign or alien.  Xenophobes are the folks who would love to see illegal immigrants - most of them starving and desperately looking for work - very badly treated or even killed.  Sadly, they are mostly getting their wish these days.

My own personal experience has mostly been with those self-styled Christians who honestly believe that Pagans and/or Witches are devil-worshippers and would like to see all of us dead.  My life and property have been threatened by this sort of Christian on numerous occasions over the last 35 years - and even the lives of my innocent pets.  Knowing what I do know of the purported teachings of Jesus of Nazareth - and my childhood education certainly did not neglect Sunday School - it is more than clear to me that these self-styled Christians have absolutely no idea at all what their faith is even about.

In fact, the only sane response to their behavior toward me over the years can be summed up very succinctly in three one-syllable words, “Lock and load.”

Christianity, because it teaches that life is just a temporary phase on the way to eternal reward or punishment, has always been a faith that lends itself all too easily to cults.  Christians take up monetary collections during their services - shaming even the very poor into giving what they cannot afford - and if you think that isn’t a lucrative practice, just visit your nearest Baptist church on Sunday morning and do the math.  Christian leaders have extremely lucrative reasons to try to control every facet of their followers’ lives from bank accounts to sex lives - and that is the very definition of a cult.  Yet because they call themselves Christian, we dare not say so.

The unfortunate truth is that Christian fanatics have been committing crimes (on this continent) in the name of their faith since the murdered women of Salem, Massachusetts, in the late 17th Century, and even before - they like to call these murdered Salem women Witches, and that somehow makes it all right.  The women involved could not possibly have been modern Witches, as what we called Wicca or Witchcraft today did not even exist at the time.  The play/movie, The Crucible, appears to show that a jealous wife used a slave’s Caribbean Voodoo and the town’s witchcraft hysteria to bring about the multiple murders of her perceived rivals - all in the name of devout Christianity.  I don’t know how accurate the story is, but it certainly rings true.

Today, the Christian cults’ modus operandi seems to be more along the lines of blowing up abortion clinics and threatening President Obama because he is black and - oh, horrors - has the middle name of “Hussein.”

I don’t happen to think Obama is the new messiah as some American folks seem to think.  In fact, I have some very serious issues with the man.  My issues with our current president, however, are political in nature and have zero to do with Obama personally or with his race.

When a religion forfeits its moral compass - as any advocate of torture has surely done, whether the victim of torture is to be Muslim or not, even terrorist or not - and when said religion teaches fear and cruelty instead of faith and love, it no longer deserves the label - or the constitutional protections - of religion.

The Taliban do not deserve the label of Muslim, and neither do the hate-mongers of Al Qaeda.  Why should these sick sects of Christians infesting our Midwest be any different?  I have no more desire to live under a Christian Taliban than under a Muslim one, and in either case, I will defend my life and freedom with my blood.  Nor will I ever allow torture to be done in my name.  If it takes the rest of my life, I will not cease from advocating the trial and punishment of those who ordered, those who justified, and those who carried out torture in the last administration.  If we do not punish them, it may happen again, and that is unthinkable.

I suspect that most Americans would still agree with me.

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