Hello Friends of A Gentleman’s View,

I just want to say thank you folks who come here everyday and read my postings. I believe in the good of humanity, in how we interact, communicate and relate to each other. I do believe the basis for for this interaction is politics. I try to share my vision of what I see happening in politics with my postings or my personal opinions essays of current events. I am very thankful for all who come to read my postings and/or comment. I want to thank all of you and wish you the most happy and prosperous holiday season and new year. Thank so much for sharing this experience with me. Please be safe. HAPPY HOLIDAYS                                                                                     A Gentleman

My ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Hit List to stimulate the economy and clean up the process;

Special Election held in 2012 election cycle for 535 seats in Senate and House.

No Senator or Congressperson currently holding a seat will qualify for this election or any at the Federal level for 10 years.

No Corporation donations of any kind, direct, PACs or third party allowed.

Cap individual donations at $250000, personal assets not allowed.

Vote using Facial Recognition Software online. One man, one vote.

Forgive Student loan interest and penalties 1995 forward to present and continue thru 2015. During which time system reform developed and implemented.

Immediate complete re-instatement of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 separating commercial banks from investment ones.

Adjust all mortgages to remove underwater status for all mortgages 2000 forward.

One year of unemployment benefits for the 99ers who have dropped off the numbers counts having lost benefits long ago or any part thereof…

Forfeiture of 50% all CEO/Directors/ VP’s Bonuses of Wall Street Banks 2008 forward and immediate freezing of all said assets.

All CEO’s at existing investment banks in place during 2008 immediate resignation to include 10-year suspension of required certifications and licenses from investment/trading/advising practices.

Immediate extension of unemployment benefits for one year or any part thereof.

In some circles, there is a price for spewing the kind of hatred Patrick J. Buchanan spews out daily!

What kind of political pundit would you expect to hear on a radio talk-show sponsored by neo-Nazis? What kind of author, wants to sell his latest book to an audience composed of white supremacists, Holocaust deniers and Christian militiamen?  Would you expect such a pundit and author to be a “regular” on  MSNBC, PBS and have a column that appears in mainstream newspapers across the country?

Last night (11/22), Pat Buchanan appeared on The Political Cesspool to hawk his latest book.

A word or two about the The Political Cesspool:  It is talk radio show founded and hosted by white supremacist, James Edwards.  The Cesspool is broadcast by Liberty Radio Network and Accent Radio Network. It is also frequently carried and promoted by Stormfront Radio, a service of the neo-Nazis Stormfront website.  Sponsors of The Political Cesspool  include the white separatist Council of Conservative Citizens and the Institute for Historical Review, a Holocaust denial group.

Writing for MediaMatters , Eric Hanonoki reports that:

“During the nearly twenty-five minute interview, Buchanan attacked the country’s increasing diversity and warned that America would face numerous problems when whites become a minority.”

One can’t help but wonder what proverbial line Pat Buchanan must cross before media outlets like NBC and PBS, declare him persona non grata.  Would David Duke be welcomed to the round-table discussion of the The McLaughlin Group? Would CNN or MSNBC put out the welcome-mat for Reverend Jeremiah Wright?

Considering Buchanan’s  long history of racial and ethnic incitement, how is it that he is still viewed as a legitimate, authentic, mainstream voice for the political right?  Is it because America has drifted so far to the right? Or is Buchanan is just slimy enough and chummy enough with the powers that be, that he will forever be welcomed to march on to the mainstream media stage wearing nothing more than his ethereal Nazi jack-boots and Klan hood?

By Robert Barnes, Published: August 23

Texas Gov. Rick Perry brings to the presidential race a law-and-order credential that none of his competitors can match — even if they wanted to.
In his nearly 11 years as the state’s chief executive, Perry, now running for the Republican presidential nomination, has overseen more executions than any governor in modern history: 234 and counting. That’s more than the combined total in the next two states — Oklahoma and Virginia — since the death penalty was restored 35 years ago. Texas governor announced his candidacy for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, shaking up the Republican field.

The number is partly explained by sheer longevity at the helm of a huge state that has mastered the complicated legal maze of carrying out capital punishment. But Perry has hardly shrunk from the task. As the 2012 presidential race unfolds, Perry’s record will inevitably become part of the debate in a country where the number of death sentences handed down continues to fall and some states are renouncing executions. Polls show that capital punishment remains both popular and controversial. And although all of Perry’s main competitors, including President Obama, support the death penalty, Perry’s role stands out.

He vetoed a bill that would have spared the mentally retarded, and sharply criticized a Supreme Court ruling that juveniles were not eligible for the death penalty. He has found during his tenure only one inmate on Texas’s crowded death row he thought should receive the lesser sentence of life in prison. And Perry’s role in the 2004 execution of Cameron Todd Wil­lingham — who supporters said should have been at least temporarily spared when experts warned that faulty forensic science led to his conviction — is still the subject of investigation in Texas.

Perry has been unapologetic. “If you don’t support the death penalty and citizens packing a pistol, don’t come to Texas,” he wrote in his book lauding states’ rights, “Fed Up!” It is a bipartisan tradition. The annual rate of executions was actually higher when George W. Bush was the state’s governor, and Democratic Gov. Ann Richards oversaw 50 executions during her four-year term without ever granting clemency.

“In the big picture, it is hard to see how Perry is much different from Bush or Richards,” said Jordan Steiker, co-director of the University of Texas Law School’s Capital Punishment Center. That’s partly because Texans and their representatives give governors little room to slow down the process. Decisions to seek the death penalty are made by local prosecutors. Unlike in some states, the governor does not sign death warrants or set execution dates. The state constitution prohibits the governor from calling a moratorium on executions and allows clemency only when the Board of Pardons and Paroles recommends it, which is rarely.

Texas’s relatively streamlined process for death penalty appeals is overseen by an elected court not known for reversals. Federal lawsuits go to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans, which has the same reputation. “In many states, executions are blocked because the state courts, the federal courts or both are intensely hostile to capital punishment and look for any excuse to overturn convictions,” said Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the pro-death-penalty Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in California. “So the short answer to why Texas has the most executions is (1) size, and (2) not being obstructed by hostile courts.”

Still, Perry has been an aggressive advocate. He battled the Bush administration in the Supreme Court when the president tried to force state courts to review the death sentences of 51 Mexican nationals who had not been allowed to consult Mexican authorities. The court ruled in Perry’s favor, 6 to 3.

Last month, the Obama administration and governments around the world asked Perry to delay the execution of Humberto Leal Jr., a Mexican national who faced execution for raping and killing a 16-year-old in San Antonio.
Perry declined and Leal was executed July 7.
Although Leal’s innocence was not at issue, death penalty opponents say 12 men on Texas’s death row have been exonerated. Anthony Graves is the latest, spending 18 years in prison before a Texas Monthly investigation showed his innocence.

Perry signed a bill awarding Graves $1.45 million in compensation but denied his imprisonment was an indictment of the Texas system.
“He’s a good example of, you continue to find errors that were made and clear them up,” Perry told the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. “So I think our system works well, it goes through many layers of observation and appeal, et cetera.” Such statements do not endear him to opponents of capital punishment. “We’d like to get rid of him,” said Scott Cobb of the Texas Moratorium Network, “but not by giving him to the rest of the country.”
Despite the limits on power, law professor Steiker said that “it is fair to say a Texas governor is responsible for every execution.”

If he is particularly concerned about a case, the governor may halt the process for 30 days and use the “bully pulpit” to express those doubts, Steiker said. Although a majority of the pardon board must recommend clemency, its members are appointed by Perry and beholden to him. Perry’s lone clemency decision — aside from halting executions of the mentally retarded and juveniles dictated by the Supreme Court — came in the case of a man who drove the getaway car and was not the triggerman in a murder. Perry called for the legislature to reexamine the law, but it has not been changed.
After Perry signed a law offering life without the possibility of parole as an alternative to the death penalty, the total number of death sentences in Texas dropped, as it has in other states, from 23 in 2004 to eight in 2010, according to the anti-capital-punishment Death Penalty Information Center.

But what is likely to draw the most attention as Perry campaigns is the case of Willingham, who was convicted in 1991 of setting fire to his home and killing his three young daughters. Shortly before his 2004 execution, defense attorneys gave Perry and the pardon board a report from an arson expert saying the forensic evidence used to convict Willingham was severely flawed.
Perry went ahead with the execution, and has refused to release information from his advisers about the evidence.
The state forensic science commission began to review the case and the state’s arson unit after investigative journalists cast increasing doubt on Willingham’s guilt. But just before the commission was to hear from an investigator it had hired, Perry dismissed the chairman and replaced three members of the commission.

Perry’s newly installed chairman, a prosecutor who had called Willingham a “guilty monster,” delayed the commission’s hearings and asked the attorney general for an opinion about whether the commission could actively investigate the Willingham case. Attorney General Greg Abbott (R) said last month that it could not.
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, who unsuccessfully challenged Perry in the 2010 Republican primary, tried to make an issue of the Willingham case, accusing Perry of “trying to ramrod a covering-up.”
Perry fired back through a spokeswoman that critics “should just say so” if they oppose the death penalty for a man who killed his children and beat his wife and whose conviction had been upheld by numerous courts.
On the campaign trail last week, Perry was asked how he defended the cost and inefficiency of the death penalty.

He said it was a decision to be made by states, and “in the state of Texas, our citizens have clearly said that they support by overwhelming majority capital punishment.” If others disagree, he said, they should try to pass a constitutional amendment to halt the death penalty. “I just lay it out there as an issue for Americans,” he said. “I will suggest to you that I’m going to work a whole lot harder on a balanced budget amendment to the United States constitution than I am for an amendment that will ban capital punishment.”

Staff writer Krissah Thompson contributed to this report.

You sometimes wonder just exactly what planet are some people on.

To whom the Deficit may concern;

If I purchase a house and obtain a mortgage thru my local Dollar Bank and make payments as required, I am being a responsible person and paying my bills. I get to keep living on that particular property as long as I keep paying my mortgage payments on time. If Dollar Bank for business interest having nothing to do with the fact that I save and loaned with them, decides to sell that mortgage to another bank, say Wells Fargo with whom I don’t save, loan or bank with at all, I still have to pay my mortgage payments when they are due and not one day later without penalty, just as the original contract required me to do. My point to the Tea Party membership, just because you don’t like who is in the White House presently, doesn’t give us as a country the right to fuck over the rest of the world financially speaking and not pay bills and agreements in place long before the Black man took office. I’m just saying, it is just that simple, we must meet our obligations in spite of who runs our politics.

The End of Awe By MAUREEN DOWD Published: July 23, 2011

WEDNESDAY found both the British prime minister and the Irish taoiseach passionately addressing their parliaments about the demystified lords of their universes. Frantically distancing himself from the pope of Fleet Street, David Cameron sardonically assured riled-up lawmakers that he had never seen Rebekah Brooks in her PJs because he had not attended Gordon Brown’s wife’s slumber party at Chequers with Wendi Deng and Elisabeth Murdoch in 2008.

He conceded that he should not have ignored warnings from the palace and elsewhere against bringing a capo from the sulfurous Murdoch gang into his inner circle.
Across the Irish Sea in Dublin, Enda Kenny took on the actual pope, making a blazing speech about the Vatican’s unconscionable behavior in the pedophilia scandal.

After 17 years of revolting revelations, Kenny said the latest report on the Cloyne diocese in County Cork exposed “an attempt by the Holy See to frustrate an inquiry in a sovereign, democratic republic as little as three years ago, not three decades ago.” The report, he said, “excavates the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism, the narcissism that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day. The rape and torture of children were downplayed or ‘managed’ to uphold, instead, the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and ‘reputation.’
“Far from listening to evidence of humiliation and betrayal with St. Benedict’s ‘ear of the heart,’ the Vatican’s reaction was to parse and analyze it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer. This calculated, withering position being the polar opposite of the radicalism, humility and compassion upon which the Roman church was founded.”
Pulling back the curtain to expose the profane amid the sacred would have been remarkable coming from any leader in one of the many countries scarred by pedophile priests, but from the devoutly Catholic prime minister of a nation whose constitution once enshrined the special position of the church, it was breathtaking.

The Irish were taken aback by the ire of the ordinarily amiable, soft-spoken Kenny, the longest-serving parliamentarian in the land. In his first few months as Taoiseach, the 60-year-old had not given any sign that he could throw such Zeus-style thunderbolts.
But bankrupt and battered Eire, which needed a shot of muscular national pride, was thrilled with his emphatic articulation of their revulsion at the tragedy, and his assertion of Ireland as a sovereign republic not under the thumb of Rome.

“If you look at some of his predecessors, going right back 50 years, they would have been very much of the view that they were Catholics first and politicians second,” said Diarmaid Ferriter, a professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin.Sounding like he could have been talking about Rupert Murdoch’s fief as well, Ferriter observed: “There has been this very obvious and planned and hugely arrogant policy of obfuscation and deliberate delaying tactics and complete avoidance of responsibility on the part of the Vatican. They were actually treating the sovereign government of Ireland with complete contempt.”
He added: “We’re fed up with hearing about canon law. This is a Republic, it’s about civil law.”

Garry O’Sullivan, the editor of The Irish Catholic, compared the resonance of the speech to the French revolution, without the violence. “The French Republic didn’t kick out the Catholic Church, but they set up a French Catholic Church and kicked out Rome,” he said. “Kenny has tapped into a vein in the Irish psyche, people saying, ‘Well done for standing up to those bloody bishops and the pope.’ It was lancing a boil.”

Like other elites in shaken Ireland, like the multimillionaire bankers and real estate developers, the church elite is rapidly losing clout. “The mighty have fallen from their thrones,” O’Sullivan said.
Diarmuid Martin, the archbishop of Dublin, who has been frozen out by the Vatican and his fellow Irish bishops for his tender solicitude toward abuse victims, teared up on Irish TV talking about Kenny’s cri de coeur.

What church “cabal” is this in the Vatican or Ireland, he asked, “who try to undermine what is being done, or simply refuse to understand what is being done?”
In Britain and in Ireland, two dictatorial institutions that once dominated with fearsome power are crumbling, brought low by highhanded cultures inured even to crimes against children.

A large part of the strategy of the Vatican and Rupert Murdoch in acquiring power was to create an aura of invincibility, a hallowed mystique. But those mythologies are cracking, and people are no longer afraid to confront these empires’ corrupt practices and vast cover-ups.
It is stirring to watch people who have long been cowed finally speaking up, shedding their fear of the authoritarian men at the top who owed their power to the awe of the people.

1) ACORN: Breibart’s Web site was the central agency for disseminating videos that were later shown to have been heavily edited in order to convey a fictional scenario smearing a social service organization that had for years been assisting low-income citizens with financial advice and voter registration. Every investigation of the affair exonerated ACORN and affirmed the videos’ deception. Breitbart’s henchman, James O’Keefe, is being sued by former ACORN employee Juan Carlos Vera.

2) Shirley Sherrod: In this episode, Breitbart was responsible for slandering a USDA employee by calling her a racist. Lately he has been defending himself by saying that he had included the “redemptive arc” of her story revealing her innocence. But let’s not forget how he originally portrayed the situation:

“In her meandering speech to what appears to be an all-black audience, this federally appointed executive bureaucrat lays out in stark detail, that her federal duties are managed through the prism of race and class distinctions. [...] In the first video, Sherrod describes how she racially discriminates against a white farmer.”

That is a pretty clear accusation of discriminatory behavior on the part of a federal employee. It is also a lie. Sherrod did not discriminate against the farmer, as Breitbart later acknowledged, and the story she told was about an incident that occurred 20 years before she held a federal post. Nevertheless, Breitbart’s reaction at the time was another demonstration of his paranoid narcissism, as he whined, “As difficult as it probably was for her, it’s been difficult for me as well.” Poor guy. Sherrod is suing Breitbart.

3) Clinton Plotting a Tea Party Attack: Breitbart published a story with no evidence, about an alleged conspiracy that never came to pass:

“Big Government has learned that Clintonistas are plotting a ‘push/pull’ strategy. They plan to identify 7-8 national figures active in the tea party movement and engage in deep opposition research on them. If possible, they will identify one or two they can perhaps ‘turn’, either with money or threats, to create a mole in the movement. The others will be subjected to a full-on smear campaign.”

Also never coming to pass…a retraction. This story bubbled up through the media like much of Breitbart’s fiction, eventually getting coverage from Fox Nation.

4) Jason Mattera’s Punking of Grayson and Franken: Jason Mattera, who later became editor of Human Events, was employed to run a couple of “ambush” interviews that were posted on Breitbart’s Web site. One interview targeted Rep. Alan Grayson and castigated him for his support of a bill that funded a program to prevent child abuse. The other interview was directed at Sen. Al Franken, who was attacked for supporting student health and school safety. In both cases Mattera twisted the purpose of the legislation into something unrecognizable and patently false. Expect more of this, because as Breitbart says in his book, Righteous Indignation, “Ambush journalism is the most valuable kind of journalism.”

5) University of Missouri Labor Class: In another phony video sting, Breitbart published a video of the proceedings of a class on the history of labor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. As usual, the video was a deceitful mashup that misrepresented the professors and students as supporting violent labor activity. The twist here is that it was Breitbart’s one-time friend Glenn Beck who published an accounting of the video deception and vindicated the professors. As a bonus intrigue, the party who gave Breitbart the UM video is identified only as Insurgent Visuals. That, however, may be a ruse to disguise Breitbart’s long-time partner in crime, James O’Keefe.

6) Beck’s Back Alley Snitch: Speaking of Glenn Beck, in happier times when the two weren’t feuding, Breibart was the source for numerous Beck offensives. He provided Beck with scandalous material on Van Jones who, at the time, was a White House adviser on environmental initiatives. Beck lauded Breitbart, saying…

“You know where the great journalists of our time are? Andrew Breitbart. [...] You were the only one, besides watchdogs, that were really aggressively working behind the scenes with us on Van Jones.”

The same thing occurred with Yosi Sergant, communications director for the National Endowment for the Arts. Breitbart went after him and provided the data to Beck, who said…

“This is again another Breitbart story, where the NEA communications director reached out and said, hey, listen, we have to be very careful with our language here.”

In both cases the information provided by Breitbart was vague and/or untrue, but both Jones and Sergant were jettisoned — just as Sherrod was — by a nervous White House for violations that were either false or greatly exaggerated.

7) Democrats Plotted to Blame Tea Party for Slaughter: Breitbart’s site featured an article making the sensationalist claim that Democrats devised a plan to blame the Tea Party for the tragic shooting in Tucson, AZ. The allegation consisted of a single, unidentified source who merely offered his own opinion that the massacre could be pinned on Tea Partiers. There was no allegation of a conspiracy or even of any discussions of such a plan by anyone connected to the Democratic Party. But that didn’t stop Breitbart from posting the story with an irresponsibly provocative headline.

The Abbie Boudreau Affair: In one of the most bizarre adventures by the James O’Keefe gang, they set out to lure CNN reporter Abbie Boudreau into a floating love nest to embarrass her in some manner that was never really explained. While Breitbart did not act as the agent for this prank, he did provide a platform for O’Keefe to publish his defense after having been outed by an accomplice. O’Keefe managed to take a situation in which he appeared to be a revolting pervert and make it worse by saying about Boudreau…

“She would have had to consent before being filmed and she was not going to be faux ‘seduced’ unless she wanted to be.”

Considering the fact that he never sought the consent of his previous video victims, why should we accept his assertion that he was going to start seeking consent now? Even more troubling is his implication that his intended victim “wanted” it. O’Keefe is resorting to the disgusting defense that rapists offer about their victims. And Breitbart permitted this to be published on his site.

9) GEICO Gecko – Tea Party Crasher? Breitbart’s Big Government blog posted a mind-numbingly stupid article that accused Ricky Gervais, the actor/comedian and voice of the GEICO gecko, of disparaging the Tea Party in a profanity-laced voice-mail. The only problem is that Gervais had nothing to do with it. It was an actor (D.C. Douglas) who worked for GEICO a couple of years prior. But it wasn’t enough to smear Gervais with insinuations, Breitbart also posted a picture of the gecko atop a table adorned with a poster of President Obama sporting a Hitler mustache. What that had to do with the story is anyone’s guess. It just appeared to be a gratuitous slap at the president while falsely slandering Gervais.

10) Racism: Breitbart is obsessed with the theme of racism. He is convinced the charge is thrown around cavalierly, and mostly to insult Tea Partiers and himself. He embarked on a campaign to prove that congressman and civil rights hero John Lewis was lying when he said he had been the victim of racial epithets when attending a congressional rally.  Breitbart regards the Shirley Sherrod incident as an example of the racism demonstrated by the NAACP. But when discussing allegations of his own prejudice, Breitbart said this to radio host Adam Carolla:

“Can I prove that I’m not a racist toward Hispanics? Did you ever see Moscow on the Hudson? Remember Maria Conchita Alonso in that? The things I did to myself as a teenager prove that I’m not a racist.”

So Breitbart’s proof that he is not a racist is that he used to masturbate to pictures of a Latino actress. Breitbart’s repulsive pride in his perverse view of racial open-mindedness tells us much about him. And he is certainly in no position to assess the veracity of people like John Lewis.

This should be a good starting point for the press in case they ever get the chance again to respond to Breitbart’s call for evidence of his dishonesty and low character. Here’s hoping the press is listening and that no one presumes to use the Weiner affair to rehabilitate Breitbart’s reputation. Just because Breitbart lucked into being correct (the way a broken clock is right at least once a day) doesn’t mean that his long-established pattern of deception should be dismissed. Just because Charles Manson didn’t kill Marilyn Monroe doesn’t mean that he’s innocent of every other crime attributed to him.

Breitbart deserves no accolades over this, and he still owes the many people he deliberately harmed an apology. Weiner, at least, was man enough to own up to his mistakes, eventually.

Mark Howard is an artist, author and the publisher of News Corpse. His political and socially disruptive artwork has been displayed internationally.