A Gentleman’s view.

15 Major Differences Between Occupy Wall Street And The Tea Party Protests

I read an article recently, which compared the origins of the Occupy Wall Street movement to the origins of the Tea Party movement. As someone who has paid attention to both movements,  I believe nothing could be further from the truth. Below are just 15 differences between the Occupy Wall Street protests, and the Tea Party movement.

1. Occupy Wall Street is a grassroots movement, funded by people around the world, without corporate sponsorship.
The Tea Party is an AstroTurf  movement, receiving most of its funding from corporate sponsorship, and Fox News and its supporters.

2. Occupy Wall Street wants less corporate influence over our Government.
The Tea Party wants less Governmental influence over corporations.

3. Occupy Wall Street didn’t receive mainstream media coverage until several weeks after it began.
The Tea Party held rallies across the country sponsored by Fox News, and even small rallies with minimal turnout received attention from other media outlets.

4. Occupy Wall Street protesters are unarmed.
The Tea Party protesters openly carried a large variety of guns, including assault rifles.

5. Over 1,000 Occupy Wall Street Protesters have been arrested.
Zero Tea Party Protesters have been arrested.

6. Occupy Wall Street doesn’t endorse either political party.
The Tea Party actively endorsed the Republican Party.

7. Occupy Wall Street protests have sparked similar protests around the world.
The Tea Party protests were ridiculed around the world.

8. Occupy Wall Street protests have more than 50% approval from the general public.

The Tea Party protests peaked at 18% approval from the general public.

9. Occupy Wall Street protesters represent the poor, the disenfranchised, and the people who don’t feel like they have a voice in our Government.
The Tea Party protesters represented the wealthy, the elite, and the corporations who already have too much influence in our Government.

10. Occupy Wall Street doesn’t want politicians to co-opt their movement.
The Tea Party protests regularly featured speeches from conservative political figures like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck.

11. Occupy Wall Street protesters signs are spelled correctly.
Many Tea Party protest signs featured glaring spelling and grammatical errors.

12. Occupy Wall Street is supported by the youth in this country.
A majority of the Tea Party’s support came from middle-age citizens and people 65 and up.

13. Occupy Wall Street represents the 99% of Americans who aren’t millionaires and billionaires, and who don’t have a voice in our Government.
The Tea Party represents the wealthiest Americans, and wants the Government to stop trying to tax them.

14. Occupy Wall Street protesters are setting up camps across the country, to get attention from the media and to show that they’re serious.
The Tea Party went home as soon as their corporately sponsored rallies were over.

15. Occupy Wall Street has received endless criticism from the right-wing.
The Tea Party received endless and unconditional praise from the right-wing.

Hopefully this has been an informative list, of some of the more obvious differences between the Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements.

The Campaign Against Women

Despite the persistent gender gap in opinion polls and mounting criticism of their hostility to women’s rights, Republicans are not backing off their assault on women’s equality and well-being. New laws in some states could mean a death sentence for a pregnant woman who suffers a life-threatening condition. But the attack goes well beyond abortion, into birth control, access to health care, equal pay and domestic violence.

Hedges: How Our Demented Capitalist System Made America Insane

When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the ice sheets in the Arctic melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil and water be poisoned. Let the forests die.

When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the ice sheets in the Arctic melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil and water be poisoned. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism, accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft. Reality, at the end, gets unplugged. We live in an age when news consists of Snooki’s pregnancy, Hulk Hogan’s sex tape and Kim Kardashian’s denial that she is the naked woman cooking eggs in a photo circulating on the Internet. Politicians, including presidents, appear on late night comedy shows to do gags and they campaign on issues such as creating a moon colony. “At times when the page is turning,” Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote in “Castle to Castle,” “when History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! Panties overboard!”

The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern society’s version of primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less and less to exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the self-deluded, those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those who entertain and inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as exemplars of intelligence, success and progress. The World Health Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression—which seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide. Welcome to the asylum.

When the most basic elements that sustain life are reduced to a cash product, life has no intrinsic value. The extinguishing of “primitive” societies, those that were defined by animism and mysticism, those that celebrated ambiguity and mystery, those that respected the centrality of the human imagination, removed the only ideological counterweight to a self-devouring capitalist ideology. Those who held on to pre-modern beliefs, such as Native Americans, who structured themselves around a communal life and self-sacrifice rather than hoarding and wage exploitation, could not be accommodated within the ethic of capitalist exploitation, the cult of the self and the lust for imperial expansion. The prosaic was pitted against the allegorical. And as we race toward the collapse of the planet’s ecosystem we must restore this older vision of life if we are to survive.

The war on the Native Americans, like the wars waged by colonialists around the globe, was waged to eradicate not only a people but a competing ethic. The older form of human community was antithetical and hostile to capitalism, the primacy of the technological state and the demands of empire. This struggle between belief systems was not lost on Marx. “The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx” is a series of observations derived from Marx’s reading of works by historians and anthropologists. He took notes about the traditions, practices, social structure, economic systems and beliefs of numerous indigenous cultures targeted for destruction. Marx noted arcane details about the formation of Native American society, but also that “lands [were] owned by the tribes in common, while tenement-houses [were] owned jointly by their occupants.” He wrote of the Aztecs, “Commune tenure of lands; Life in large households composed of a number of related families.” He went on, “… reasons for believing they practiced communism in living in the household.” Native Americans, especially the Iroquois, provided the governing model for the union of the American colonies, and also proved vital to Marx and Engel’s vision of communism.

Marx, though he placed a naive faith in the power of the state to create his workers’ utopia and discounted important social and cultural forces outside of economics, was acutely aware that something essential to human dignity and independence had been lost with the destruction of pre-modern societies. The Iroquois Council of the Gens, where Indians came together to be heard as ancient Athenians did, was, Marx noted, a “democratic assembly where every adult male and female member had a voice upon all questions brought before it.” Marx lauded the active participation of women in tribal affairs, writing, “The women [were] allowed to express their wishes and opinions through an orator of their own election. Decision given by the Council. Unanimity was a fundamental law of its action among the Iroquois.” European women on the Continent and in the colonies had no equivalent power.

Rebuilding this older vision of community, one based on cooperation rather than exploitation, will be as important to our survival as changing our patterns of consumption, growing food locally and ending our dependence on fossil fuels. The pre-modern societies of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse—although they were not always idyllic and performed acts of cruelty including the mutilation, torture and execution of captives—did not subordinate the sacred to the technical. The deities they worshipped were not outside of or separate from nature.

Seventeenth century European philosophy and the Enlightenment, meanwhile, exalted the separation of human beings from the natural world, a belief also embraced by the Bible. The natural world, along with those pre-modern cultures that lived in harmony with it, was seen by the industrial society of the Enlightenment as worthy only of exploitation.Descartes argued, for example, that the fullest exploitation of matter toany use was the duty of humankind. The wilderness became, in the religious language of the Puritans, satanic. It had to be Christianized and subdued. The implantation of the technical order resulted, as Richard Slotkin writes in “Regeneration Through Violence,” in the primacy of “the western man-on-the-make, the speculator, and the wildcat banker.” Davy Crockett and, later, George Armstrong Custer, Slotkin notes, became “national heroes by defining national aspiration in terms of so many bears destroyed, so much land preempted, so many trees hacked down, so many Indians and Mexicans dead in the dust.”

The demented project of endless capitalist expansion, profligate consumption, senseless exploitation and industrial growth is now imploding. Corporate hustlers are as blind to the ramifications of their self-destructive fury as were Custer, the gold speculators and the railroad magnates. They seized Indian land, killed off its inhabitants, slaughtered the buffalo herds and cut down the forests. Their heirs wage war throughout the Middle East, pollute the seas and water systems, foul the air and soil and gamble with commodities as half the globe sinks into abject poverty and misery. The Book of Revelation defines this single-minded drive for profit as handing over authority to the “beast.”

The conflation of technological advancement with human progress leads to self-worship. Reason makes possible the calculations, science and technological advances of industrial civilization, but reason does not connect us with the forces of life. A society that loses the capacity for the sacred, that lacks the power of human imagination, that cannot practice empathy, ultimately ensures its own destruction. The Native Americans understood there are powers and forces we can never control and must honor. They knew, as did the ancient Greeks, that hubris is the deadliest curse of the human race. This is a lesson that we will probably have to learn for ourselves at the cost of tremendous suffering.

In William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” Prospero is stranded on an island where he becomes the undisputed lord and master. He enslaves the primitive “monster” Caliban. He employs the magical sources of power embodied in the spirit Ariel, who is of fire and air. The forces unleashed in the island’s wilderness, Shakespeare knew, could prompt us to good if we had the capacity for self-control and reverence. But it also could push us toward monstrous evil since there are few constraints to thwart plunder, rape, murder, greed and power. Later, Joseph Conrad, in his portraits of the outposts of empire, also would expose the same intoxication with barbarity.

The anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, who in 1846 was “adopted” by the Seneca, one of the tribes belonging to the Iroquois confederation, wrote in “Ancient Society” about social evolution among American Indians. Marx noted approvingly, in his “Ethnological Notebooks,” Morgan’s insistence on the historical and social importance of “imagination, that great faculty so largely contributing to the elevation of mankind.” Imagination, as the Shakespearean scholar Harold C. Goddard pointed out, “is neither the language of nature nor the language of man, but both at once, the medium of communion between the two. … Imagination is the elemental speech in all senses, the first and the last, of primitive man and of the poets.”

All that concerns itself with beauty and truth, with those forces that have the power to transform us, is being steadily extinguished by our corporate state. Art. Education. Literature. Music. Theater. Dance. Poetry. Philosophy. Religion. Journalism. None of these disciplines are worthy in the corporate state of support or compensation. These are pursuits that, even in our universities, are condemned as impractical. But it is only through the impractical, through that which can empower our imagination, that we will be rescued as a species. The prosaic world of news events, the collection of scientific and factual data, stock market statistics and the sterile recording of deeds as history do not permit us to understand the elemental speech of imagination. We will never penetrate the mystery of creation, or the meaning of existence, if we do not recover this older language. Poetry shows a man his soul, Goddard wrote, “as a looking glass does his face.” And it is our souls that the culture of imperialism, business and technology seeks to crush.

Walter Benjamin argued that capitalism is not only a formation “conditioned by religion,” but is an “essentially religious phenomenon,” albeit one that no longer seeks to connect humans with the mysterious forces of life. Capitalism, as Benjamin observed, called on human societies to embark on a ceaseless and futile quest for money and goods. This quest, he warned, perpetuates a culture dominated by guilt, a sense of inadequacy and self-loathing. It enslaves nearly all its adherents through wages, subservience to the commodity culture and debt peonage. The suffering visited on Native Americans, once Western expansion was complete, was soon endured by others, in Cuba, the Philippines, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The final chapter of this sad experiment in human history will see us sacrificed as those on the outer reaches of empire were sacrificed. There is a kind of justice to this. We profited as a nation from this demented vision, we remained passive and silent when we should have denounced the crimes committed in our name, and now that the game is up we all go down together.

Why Do Conservatives Hate Freedom? By Michael Lind

Since World War II, mainstream conservatives have opposed every expansion of personal liberty in the United States.

Why do conservatives hate freedom? The question may be startling. After all, don’t conservatives claim they are protecting liberty in America against liberal statism, which they compare to communism or fascism? But the conservative idea of “freedom” is a very peculiar one, which excludes virtually every kind of liberty that ordinary Americans take for granted.

I distinguish conservatives from libertarians, who, on issues of personal liberty, tend to side with liberals. Since World War II, mainstream conservatives have opposed every expansion of personal liberty in the United States.

During the civil rights era, the leading conservative politician, Barry Goldwater, and the leading conservative intellectual, William F. Buckley Jr., along with most of their followers opposed federal laws banning racial discrimination. To their credit, they later admitted they had been mistaken; indeed, both Buckley and Goldwater supported gay rights late in their careers. But at the time that conservative support for a color-blind society might have made a difference, the leaders of American conservatism sided with the Southern segregationists. They claimed they did so, not because of racial prejudice, but because they feared federal tyranny — a weaselly stance that, in practice, made them side with white supremacist tyranny at the state level. If they had truly believed in their own propaganda about federalism, conservatives could have opposed federal civil rights legislation while campaigning for civil rights laws at the state level. They didn’t.

The civil rights revolution was followed by the sexual revolution. Here again, conservatives, as distinct from libertarians, were on the side of government repression. The mainstream conservative movement opposed the legalization of contraceptives and abortion. In this case, unlike in the case of civil rights, the American right did not even pretend to have constitutional reasons for opposing Supreme Court decisions like Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 (which struck down state bans on the use of contraception, including by married couples) or Roe v. Wade  in 1973 (which struck down state bans on most abortion). The mainstream right simply argued that conservative Christian beliefs about sexual morality should be incorporated into law. In other words, the very conservatives warning us about the dangers of “mobocracy” when it came to the welfare state had no objection to using the power of government to force their fellow citizens to live their private lives according to the teachings of Thomas Aquinas or the Book of Leviticus, as interpreted by semi-literate Southern Protestant preachers.

The conservative campaign against gay rights is equally impossible to justify, in terms of America’s Founding philosophy of natural rights. Unable to come up with any Lockean liberal reason why citizens of a democratic republic should be discriminated against, on the basis of their sexual orientations, conservatives are forced to cite the Bible or thousands of years of tradition. The whole point of the American Founding, however, was to establish a regime that was not based, like the pre-modern monarchies of  Europe, on revealed religion or ancient custom. In the words of Gen. George Washington in his circular to the states, shortly after victory in the American war of independence:

The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epocha when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period, the researches of the human mind, after social happiness, have been carried to a great extent, the Treasures of knowledge, acquired by the labours of Philosophers, Sages and Legislatures, through a long succession of years, are laid open for our use, and their collected wisdom may be happily applied in the Establishment of our forms of Government…” A theocratic or tribalist Right that argues for public policies by invoking divine revelation to some ancient prophet or immemorial custom dating back to “the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition,” is profoundly, radically un-American.

In the cases of freedom from racial discrimination and freedom from sexual repression, American conservatives have been solidly on the side of government repression of the powerless and unprivileged. The same is true with respect to workers’ rights, debtors’ rights and criminal rights.

To listen to their Jacksonian rhetoric, American conservatives are the champions of the little guy against the “elites.” But not, it appears, in the workplace or the bank. The American right is opposed to anything — minimum wage laws, unions, workplace regulations — that would increase the bargaining power of workers relative to their bosses.

And what about debtors? Genuine Jeffersonians and Jacksonians have usually sided with working-class debtors against upper-class creditors.  Not American conservatives.  They supported laws making it harder for families crippled by medical bills to declare bankruptcy. The Tea Party was mobilized in part by opposition to proposals to restructure the debt of homeowners who are “underwater” with their mortgages. And — best of all — the very same American right that wants to impose Catholic or  Old Testament sexual morals in the bedroom opposes Catholic and  Old Testament teachings about the need to limit usury.

Last but not least is the appallingly authoritarian conservative record in the realm of criminal rights. If American conservatives really believed their talk about the threat of government tyranny and government incompetence, they would unanimously oppose the death penalty. Nothing could illustrate arbitrary, despotic government power more than the possibility that execution might depend on the vagaries of jury selection or the incompetence of state-appointed legal counsel. And yet when it comes to the death penalty, American conservatives abruptly forget their qualms about state power in its most lethal form. The same conservative movement that claims that government cannot be trusted to run the postal system or administer Social Security insists that wise and flawless government never applies the death penalty to the guilty inconsistently and never executes an innocent person by mistake.

What would America look like, if conservatives had won their battles against American liberty in the last half-century?  Formal racial segregation might still exist at the state and local level in the South. In some states, it would be illegal to obtain abortions or even for married couples to use contraception. In much of the United States, gays and lesbians would still be treated as criminals. Government would dictate to Americans with whom and how they can have sex. Unions would have been completely annihilated in the public as well as the private sector. Wages and hours laws would be abolished, so that employers could pay third-world wages to Americans working seven days a week, 12 hours a day, as many did before the New Deal. There would be far more executions and far fewer procedural safeguards to ensure that the lives of innocent Americans are not ended mistakenly by the state.

That is the America that the American right for the last few generations has fought for. Freedom has nothing to do with it.

Former Mormon Explains Why Mitt Romney Should Never Be President by Sarah Wood

Written by: James Martin

Romney:

The first thing you need to know about Mitt Romney is that he is a Mormon, aka a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. They call themselves Christians, but they have so thoroughly brainwashed their members that anything the church says…goes. No matter how much Mitt Romney says he would keep his church separate from Government, and how he would never let the church come in and run Government, commands of the church come first and foremost in Mormon minds.

If the church wanted Mitt to let them come in (AND THEY WOULD) and help or direct the Government, that is how it would be. Why? Because the church leaders would supposedly have a “vision” that it is God’s will. The church is all about trying to prop up the image of its founder, Joseph Smith. Joseph Smith had a supposed vision (prophecy) that one day a Mormon would become President of the United States, FOR THE EXPRESS PURPOSE, of letting the Mormon Church take over the U.S. Government. You can take it to the bank, that if Romney were President, the church leaders would have another “vision,” that a church takeover must happen. By the way, that prophecy was simple revenge for perceived wrongs done to Joseph Smith by the government. Nevertheless they treat all his prophecies seriously, no matter how ridiculous they are.

The only other church I know of that elicits such obedience was The People’s Temple, and we all know what happened there, they drank the Kool-Aid. In other words, the Mormon religion is a cult of brainwashed souls.

Mormons duck out the back door of the church as quickly as they come in the front door. The number of people on the church rolls rises all the time, but that’s because even if you join and then decide the church really isn’t for you, they still continue to count you as a member. Unfortunately this trend doesn’t apply to the “old school” Mormons like Romney. They’re totally entrenched into the religion/cult.

Some of the freaky Mormon beliefs are:

Mormons have a member “stand in” for a dead person and they’re baptized as a member of the church.

Mormons have a couple “stand in” for a dead man and woman and marry them into the church, and those count as a “twofer” in church membership rolls. Supposedly they’re “sealed for time and eternity” as husband and wife. Mormons are also supposedly the only ones who will be allowed to have sexual intercourse in Heaven.

Mormons believe that God was once a man here on earth and that he attained God-hood due to his “good works” here on earth. He was then elevated to live on the planet Kolob. This is why the Mormons stress “good works” as part of their membership. But here’s the rub! How could God create the earth according to the book of Genesis (which their other teachings do NOT dispute) unless he was ALREADY a God, and then attained God-hood through “good works?” If you truly are a Christian, does this all sound a bit weird to you? And no I’m not kidding you, these things are core beliefs of the Mormon Church. They all are from the false prophecies of Joseph Smith. You see, it’s easy, if you know all the facts, to tell why Mitt wants the White House so badly.

One of the tenants of the Mormon Church is to have as many babies as possible. So this goes hand in hand with Romney’s stand against abortion AND birth control. If you’re not popping out a new “Mormon Unit” every 12-18 months, you’re not having enough unprotected sex.

It also explains why they stress getting a good education, so they can make enough money to support all those kids with the mother being a “stay at home mom” like his wife Ann. Yet he wants to cut and privatize education. This is one of the Republican strategies to keep the voting public too dumb to see the truth.

Back when I was a youth in the church, we were taught that black people were descendants of Cain, and that the dark skin was the curse God put on him for killing Abel. Black people were to be shunned at all cost. We weren’t to be rude about it, but we weren’t to associate with them. This racist “teaching” is no longer part of Sunday School, because a few black people threatened to sue the church for racism and discrimination because they were not allowed to join. Suddenly the church elders had another supposed “vision” that blacks had paid their penance (still indicating they’d done something wrong) and they’re now allowed to join. But they were not allowed to hold church offices, so the threat to sue was renewed and lo and behold another “vision” comes down the pike and blacks are now allowed full membership. I used to go to church with people like Donny & Marie Osmond and their family. I KNOW they were raised to be racist. In my opinion, to be raised racist and suddenly have your church tell you that you must do a full 180 and love and embrace black people is a total mind-fuck. (Excuse the one word, but nothing else seems to convey the gravity of the situation)

Christians don’t believe that God changes his mind to fit the times, yet this is what the Mormon Church is saying he does. A further example of this is that Joseph Smith said polygamy was an “everlasting covenant” from God, but the government said that if Mormons continued to practice polygamy, Utah would not become a state. If you look up the words everlasting, and covenant, you can see once again that God SUPPOSEDLY changed his mind just to fit the times.

Mormons wear “special” undergarments. For reasons too long to go into, suffice it to say that they believe this underwear protects them from evil and gives them mystical powers, as well as making their bodies more visible to the spirits when the rapture occurs. There are symbolic cuts in the underwear that are the same as symbols of being a member of the Masons. Also many of the secret ceremonies, hand signals and handshakes are derived from Masonic rituals.

• Romney wants to be President to fulfill a cult prophecy. When Mitt Romney received his patriarchal blessing as a Michigan teenager, he was told that the Lord expected great things from him. All young Mormon men — the “worthy males” of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as it is officially known — receive such a blessing as they embark on their requisite journeys as religious missionaries. But at 19 years of age, the youngest son of the most prominent Mormon in American politics — a seventh-generation direct descendant of one of the faith’s founding 12 apostles—Mitt Romney had been singled out as a destined leader. The Cougar Club — the all male, all white social club at Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City (blacks were excluded from full membership in the Mormon church until 1978) — was humming with talk that its president, Mitt Romney, would become the first Mormon President of the United States. “If not Mitt, then who?” was the ubiquitous slogan within the elite organization. The pious world of BYU was expected to spawn the man who would lead the Mormons into the White House and fulfill the prophecies of the church’s founder, Joseph Smith Jr., which Romney has avidly sought to realize.

Economic goals according to Romney’s own book, “Believe in America” Mitt Romney’s Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth © 2011

• Wants to provoke China into war by labeling the Chinese government as criminals in the world court. Never mind that they own most of our money, they have nuclear capabilities and over a million soldiers. I’m sorry, but we wouldn’t stand a chance.
• Wants to privatize Social Security and Medicare. They say Obamacare would create death panels, but that’s nothing compared to what it would be if Wall Street controlled medical benefits. And with how well Wall Street has proven that they can screw up even a wet dream, do you really want them deciding how much your Social Security checks should be? I don’t think so. Romney would privatize his next meal if he could.

General plans (from stuff he has said lately)

• Wants to cut education funding and oversight.
• As a vulture capitalist, Mitt Romney cost thousands of employees their jobs and their retirement pensions, while he made out like a bandit. If elected president, Romney will kill Medicare and Social Security and further subjugate women’s rights, while destroying the EPA and other government services.

OBAMA is looking pretty good now, isn’t he? Read on, don’t just shut your mind and stop here.

Romney avoids mentioning it, but Joseph Smith ran for president in 1844 as an independent Commander in Chief of an “army of God” advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government in favor of a Mormon-ruled theocracy. Challenging Democrat, James Polk and Whig, Henry Clay – Smith prophesied that if the U.S. Congress did not accede to his demands that “they shall be broken up as a government and God shall damn them.” Smith viewed capturing the presidency as part of the mission of the church. Smith’s insertion of religion into politics and his call for a “theodemocracy where God and people hold the power to conduct the affairs of men in righteous matters” created a sensation and drew hostility from the outside world. But his candidacy was cut short when he was shot to death by an anti-Mormon vigilante mob. Out of Smith’s national political ambitions grew what would become known in Mormon circles as the “White Horse Prophecy” — a belief ingrained in Mormon culture and passed down through generations by church leaders that the day would come when the U.S. Constitution would “hang like a thread as fine as a silk fiber” and the Mormon priesthood would save it. Mitt Romney views the American presidency as a theological office.

150 Achievements Of Liberalism That Conservatives Seek To Destroy

1. The 40-hour work week.

2. Weekends

3. Vacations

4. Women’s Voting Rights

5. The Civil Rights Act of 1964

6. The right of people of all colors to use schools and facilities.

7. Public schools.

8. Child-labor laws.

9. The right to unionize

10. Health care benefits

11. National Parks

12. National Forests

13. Interstate Highway System

14. GI Bill

15. Labor Laws/Worker’s Rights

16. Marshall Plan

17. FDA

18. Direct election of Senators by the people.

19. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Workplace safety laws

20. Social Security

21. NASA

22. The Office of Congressional Ethics. Created in 2008.

23. The Internet

24. National Weather Service

25. Product Labeling/Truth in Advertising Laws

26. Rural Electrification/Tennessee Valley Authority

27. Morrill Land Grant Act

28. Public Universities

29. Bank Deposit Insurance

30. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

31. Consumer Product Safety Commission

32. Public Broadcasting/Educational Television

33. Americans With Disabilities Act

34. Family and Medical Leave Act

35. Environmental Protection Agency

36. Clean Air Act

37. Clean Water Act

38. USDA

39. Public Libraries

40. Transcontinental Railroad and the rail system in general

41. Civilian Conservation Corps

42. Panama Canal

43. Hoover Dam

44. The Federal Reserve

45. Medicare

46. The United States Military

47. FBI

48. CIA

49. Local and state police departments

50. Fire Departments

51. Veterans Medical Care

52. Food Stamps

53. Federal Housing Administration

54. Extending Voting Rights to 18 year olds

55. Freedom of Speech

56. Freedom of Religion/Separation of Church and State

57. Right to Due Process

58. Freedom of The Press

59. Right to Organize and Protest

60. Pell Grants and other financial aid to students

61. Federal Aviation Administration/Airline safety regulations

62. The 13th Amendment

63. The 14th Amendment

64. The 15th Amendment

65. Unemployment benefits

66. Women’s Health Services

67. Smithsonian Institute

68. Head Start

69. Americorps

70. Mine Safety And Health Administration (This has been weakened by conservatives, resulting in recent mining disasters.)

71. Food Labeling

72. WIC

73. Peace Corps

74. United Nations

75. World Health Organization

76. Nuclear Treaties

77. Lincoln Tunnel

78. Sulfur emissions cap and trade to eliminate acid rain

79. Earned Income Tax Credit

80. The banning of lead in consumer products

81. National Institute of Health

82. Garbage pickup/clean streets

83. Banning of CFCs.

84. Erie Canal

85. Medicaid

86. TARP

87. Bail Out of the American Auto Industry

88. Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act

89. Wildlife Protection

90. End of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell

91. Established the basis for Universal Human Rights by writing the Declaration of Independence

92. Miranda Rights

93. Banning of torture

94. The right to a proper defense in court

95. An independent judiciary

96. The right to vote

97. Fair, open, and honest elections

98. The right to bear arms (Do you really think extreme right wingers would allow anybody besides themselves to have firearms if in power?)

99. Health care for children and pregnant women

100. A stable and strong government established by a Constitution

101. The founding of The United States of America

102. The defeat of the Nazis and victory in World War II

103. Paramedics

104. The Brady Handgun Act

105. The Glass-Steagall Act (It has since been repealed and we’ve been paying the price for it.)

106. Oil industry regulations (The Gulf paid the price after conservatives tore many of these regulations down.)

107. The Affordable Care Act which makes insurance companies more honest and fair.

108. Woman’s Right to Choose

109. Title IX

110. Affirmative Action

111. A National Currency

112. National Science Foundation

113. Weights and measures standards

114. Vehicle Safety Standards

115. NATO

116. The income tax and power to tax in general, which have been used to pay for much of this list.

117. 911 Emergency system

118. Tsunami, hurricane, tornado, and earthquake warning systems

119. Public Transportation

120. The Freedom of Information Act

121. Emancipation Proclamation, which ended slavery

122. Antitrust legislation which prevents corporate monopolies (These laws have been savaged by conservatives, which is why corporations are getting huger and competition is disappearing leading to less jobs and high prices.)

123. Water Treatment Centers and sewage systems

124. The Meat Inspection Act

125. The Pure Food And Drug Act

126. The Bretton Woods system

127. International Monetary Fund

128. SEC, which regulates Wall Street. (Conservatives have weakened this regulatory body, resulting in the current recession.)

129. National Endowment for the Arts

130. Campaign finance laws (Conservatives have gutted these laws, leading to corporate takeovers of elections.)

131. Federal Crop Insurance

132. United States Housing Authority

133. Soil Conservation

134. School Lunch Act

135. Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act

136. Vaccination Assistance Act

137. Over the course of nearly 50 years, liberals contributed greatly to the eventual end of the Cold War.

138. The creation of counterinsurgency forces such as the Navy Seals and Green Berets.

139. Voting Rights Act, which ended poll taxes, literacy tests, and other voter qualification tests.

140. Civil Rights Act of 1968

141. Job Corps

142. Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965

143. Teacher Corps

144. National Endowment for the Humanities

145. Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966

146. National Trails System Act of 1968

147. U.S. Postal Service

148. Title X

149. Kept the Union together through Civil War and rebuilt the South afterwards.

150. Modern Civilization

It’s in Their Culture by Nicholas Farrell 

We are endlessly told that white people are racist and that white men are sexist. But in my experience people of a different color are much more racist and men of a different color much more sexist. It is just that we do not hear about this racism because no one is allowed to speak about it for fear of being branded…a racist.

Now from Britain comes the latest horrific example of nonwhite racism and sexism. And try as they might, the British media were unable this time to avoid telling us at least part of the truth.

Here it is: Nine British Muslims, eight of Pakistani and one of Afghani origin, gang-raped dozens of underage white girls in the northern England town of Rochdale between 2008 and 2010. One of the nine just happens to be a father of five and a religious-studies teacher in his local mosque.

There were 47 known victims, mostly aged 12-16 and living in local government children’s homes. But there were probably many more victims and many more rapists.

“If nine non-Muslim white men did the same thing to dozens of Muslim teenage girls, British Muslims would blow up the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace.”

Last Tuesday in Liverpool those nine men were convicted and sentenced to a total of 77 years in prison. In separate recent trials, 56 men (50 of them Muslims) were convicted of similar crimes in other northern England towns.

In the coverage of this latest child-rape-industry trial, the British media avoided the fact that racism motivated the nine and that they are all Muslims. The police and social workers failed to investigate for the same reason. The nine are usually referred to as “Asian” or “Pakistani” and not “Muslim.” But at the root of their racism is their religion. Asian or Pakistani Christians or Hindus, for example, treat women of whatever age and color differently.

The Pakistani/Muslim attitude to women in general is very bad; the Pakistani/Muslim attitude to non-Muslim white women is even worse.

To such men, white women who go out without a male chaperone, dressed in miniskirts and high-heeled shoes, plastered in make-up, and who drink and take drugs, are sluts plain and simple. Infidel sluts.

In short: They are not merely asking to be raped. They do not just want to be raped. They deserve to be raped. That they are underage and in the care of the social services only reinforces this point of view.

All men, me included, have issues regarding how women dress and behave, don’t we? But most of us deal with them as best we can.

And most Muslims in non-Muslim countries, even of Pakistani origin, do not do what the Rochdale Nine did to all those non-Muslim, white, teenage girls. Nor are most Muslims in non-Muslim countries, even if of Pakistani origin, Islamic terrorists.

But let’s face it: Many, many Muslims do think that non-Muslim white women are sluts and the perfect symbols of Western decadence and that this is a core reason why they do not (how shall I put this?) approve of Western civilization and therefore why they would like it to be run along Islamic lines, just as the Islamic terrorists do, even if personally they do not actively support al-Qaeda, et al. Not in public, at least.

The crimes committed by those nine Muslim sexist racists in Rochdale, a former mill town and once the pride of Britain’s textile industry, included multiple counts of rape and sex trafficking. The gang members, many of whom were taxi drivers, enticed the teenage girls to go out on the town with them by plying them with free alcohol and drugs. They would then pass the girls around to have sex with several men a day, several times a week, in taxis, flats, and kebab shops. One 13-year-old was forced to have sex with 20 men in one night.

In 2008, the police and the social workers had evidence of these terrible crimes. But they did little mainly because to do something would have meant criticizing the British Muslim community of Pakistani origin. Terrified of being accused of racism—an accusation that could easily have destroyed their careers and led to criminal charges against them as well as civil unrest—they turned a blind eye.

Even now, the metropolitan chattering classes and the multicultural freak-show crowd that control the media still insist that the Rochdale case has nothing to do with race.

Let’s not forget the sexism. This racism and sexism were rooted in the religion of the nine men, Islam. To do the same thing to Muslim girls, on the other hand, would have been for them unthinkable.

They all pleaded not guilty on the grounds that they had done nothing wrong in their eyes and were thus were brought to trial only because of their race and religion. One was banned from court after he called the judge “a racist bastard.”

At least Nazir Afzal, the Chief Crown Prosecutor in the northwest who eventually brought the case and who is of Pakistani origin and a Muslim, had the balls to say after the trial that “imported cultural baggage” had played a role, although he carefully avoided the word “religious.” Regardless of how you define it, that baggage involves among other things forced marriage, honor killings, and genital mutilation.

But still the metropolitan chatterers and the multicultural freaks refuse to concede defeat. They chant their tired old mantra: Sexual exploitation of teenage girls happens in every racial and ethnic group. Oh no, it doesn’t! Not on this scale against girls chosen precisely because they came from a different racial and religious group. And if nine non-Muslim white men did the same thing to dozens of Muslim teenage girls, British Muslims would blow up the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace. And that would only be the first course.

It is time that the left abandoned its multicultural diktat of turning a blind eye to such disgusting racism and sexism by nonwhite men simply because “it’s in their culture.” And it is time for the rest of us to look after vulnerable white non-Muslim teenage girls a little better than this.

20 Historical Facts That Republicans Distort Or Just Get Plain Wrong

By Stephen D. Foster Jr.

We all know at least one person that doesn’t know much about history. And we all know that there have been people who have tried to distort history. The Republican Party, however, does both. Over these last two years, Republicans have a made a real effort to distort history as much as possible, to the point where they are now seeking to rewrite school textbooks. The Republican Party has bent over backwards to present their own twisted version of history and it’s starting to look like that one requirement to be a Republican is to be ignorant of historical facts and events. Below is a list of the many historical facts that Republicans have either distorted or have just gotten plain wrong along with corrections of their errors.

1. Did Paul Revere Ride To Warn The British?) Sarah Palin made the dubious claim that Paul Revere actually warned the British instead of the American colonists. Her supporters even made attempts to edit the Paul Revere Wikipedia entry to make her claims sound correct. If she had taken the time to read Longfellow’s poem, Paul Revere’s Ride, she would not have made this error, as the great majority of school children know that Revere made his midnight ride to warn Americans, not the enemy.

2. Was The Shot Heard ‘Round The World Fired In New Hampshire?) Did you know that Lexington and Concord are located in New Hampshire? I didn’t. And the people in New Hampshire and Massachusetts didn’t either. When Michele Bachmann exclaimed to a New Hampshire crowd that “the shot heard ’round the world” occurred in their state, I’m sure that Massachusetts let out a roar of laughter. The sad but hilarious thing is that most American children know that the first shot of the American Revolution occurred in the state of Massachusetts.

3. Was John Quincy Adams A Founding Father?) Michele Bachmann must have failed American History in school. Because she has absolutely no knowledge of early American history. She once claimed that John Quincy Adams is a Founding Father of America when in fact, JQA was just a child when the Revolution began. He was born in 1767 and was just 14 when the war ended. And like Palin’s supporters, Bachmann fans proceeded to edit the Wikipedia page of John Quincy Adams in an attempt to make her claim viable.

4. Did The Founding Fathers End Slavery?) Michelle Bachmann isn’t through yet. During a speaking event she once claimed that the Founding Fathers were the ones who ended slavery. That’s a surprise to me since George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe all owned slaves. In fact, 12 of the first 16 American Presidents owned slaves. But Bachmann’s attempt to paint the Founding Fathers as saints is also a denial of past Republican Party history since early Republicans rose to prominence by fighting against slavery and the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, ended slavery altogether.

5. Was America Founded As A Christian State?) Ever heard of David Barton? He’s the guy that Glenn Beck goes to when he wants to distort history. David Barton claims that the Founding Fathers intended the United States to be a Christian state. Many Republicans have since picked up on this claim and have been shamelessly using it to court the Christian right-wing, and as a reason to end the separation of church and state that has been part of this country since its founding. His claim can be trounced with one question. If the Founding Fathers wanted America to be a Christian state why did they not say so in the Constitution? Instead, the Founders placed this in the document.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
~First Amendment, Bill of Rights of the Constitution

In other words, there is to be absolutely NO state religion.

6. Did Benjamin Franklin Reject Evolution?) We continue with the lack of knowledge of the Founding Fathers among the right-wing. Many Republicans have been making the claim that Benjamin Franklin rejected evolution. There are two problems with this claim. First, the theory of evolution wasn’t around until Charles Darwin published the theory in 1859, nearly 70 years AFTER Franklin died in 1790. And secondly, Franklin was a man of science above all else. It is unlikely that he would have rejected a scientific theory in favor of creationism. Franklin in fact, rejected the dogma and divinity of Christianity.

7. Was The American Revolution Fought To End Slavery?) Yet another claim that David Barton makes in an attempt to present the founding generation as perfect, is that the American Revolution was waged to end slavery. Once again, Barton makes a claim that is completely false. The American Revolution was fought to win American independence from Great Britain. And as I recall, the slaves were certainly not freed before, during, or after the war. They remained as slaves and would be slaves until the Civil War.

8. Was The Civil War Fought Over State’s Rights?) Republicans claim that it was all about state’s rights and not about slavery. The truth is, state’s rights only played a small role. The South feared that President Lincoln would end slavery, so they took preemptive measures by seceding from the Union and attacked Fort Sumter without any provocation. Slavery was, without a doubt, the main cause of the war between the states. Without slavery, white plantation owners would have to pick their own cotton, or, pay people to do it for them. They also believed Africans to be inferior and would not tolerate their freedom. We should all keep that in mind as the South/Republican home base continues to make claims that they aren’t racist.

9. Do States Have The Right To Secede?) After President Obama took office, many Republican legislators and governors, particularly in the South, began threatening secession. They say secession is a right but is it really? The answer is absolutely not. Not only did the Civil War settle this dispute, James Madison and Andrew Jackson (both Southerners) also rejected this claim. Nowhere in the Constitution will you find the right to secede. The Constitution was created by the people “in order to form a more perfect union” and by seceding, a state breaks up the nation, thus breaking a legally binding contract. And Andrew Jackson once threatened to march an army to South Carolina after that state threatened to secede. In fact, Jackson felt that secession was treason. The Supreme Court has also weighed in on this issue. In Texas v White, the court held that the Constitution did not permit states to secede from the United States, and that the ordinances of secession, and all the acts of the legislatures within seceding states intended to give effect to such ordinances, were “absolutely null”.

10. Was D-Day All About Health Care?) Republicans have been very vocal about the Affordable Care Act and Rick Santorum is no exception. He has made the claim that Americans stormed the beaches at Normandy on D-Day because they opposed Obamacare. He said, “Almost 60,000 average Americans had the courage to go out and charge those beaches on Normandy, to drop out of airplanes who knows where, and take on the battle for freedom … Those Americans risked everything so they could make [their own] decision on their health care plan.”

This is absurd. The men that stormed the Omaha and Utah beaches were fighting to liberate Europe from Nazi rule. They weren’t thinking about health care 67 years into the future. They were thinking of their families and whether they’d ever see them again. Santorum also fails to realize that military personnel and their dependents have government-run health care. And the soldiers aren’t complaining about it either. And as a matter of fact, many World War II veterans and their families also have Medicare which is also run by the federal government. That blows Santorum’s claim out of the water.

11. Did Ronald Reagan Only Lower Taxes?) Worshiping Ronald Reagan means you also have to believe that Reagan never raised taxes during his Presidency, but this constant right-wing claim is false. While he did cut taxes in 1981 and again in 1988, Reagan actually raised taxes every year from 1981 to 1987 including The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 which, at the time, had been the largest peacetime tax increase in U.S. history, the Deficit Reduction Act of 1984, a higher gasoline levy, a higher payroll tax, and a 1986 tax reform deal that included the largest corporate tax increase in American history.

12. Was Joseph McCarthy A Hero?) Another idol of the Republican Party is Joseph McCarthy. Republicans are now rewriting school books to present McCarthy as a hero who did no wrong. In reality, where the rest of us live, Joseph McCarthy was nothing more than a witch hunter who accused innocent Americans of being communists. He had no real evidence that people were communists and he should have recognized that people have the right to be part of any political party they choose. He violated the Constitution and ignored the values of freedom that we hold dear.
Just like Republicans today.

13. Was Martin Luther King Jr. A Republican?) Republicans claim that Martin Luther King was a Republican. So they can explain this part of a speech by King, right? In one speech, he stated that “something is wrong with capitalism” and claimed, “There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.” So, by claiming King as one of their own, I’m assuming Republicans are also adopting his philosophy.

14. Who Signed The Smoot-Hawley Act?) Many Republicans still have anti–New Deal views. Michele Bachmann blamed FDR for turning a recession into a depression by passing the “Hoot-Smalley Tariff”. Except that FDR didn’t pass it. Hoover did, three years before FDR took the oath of office. Oh, and it’s Smoot-Hawley, NOT “Hoot-Smalley”.

15. Did 9/11 Happen On George Bush’s Watch?) How many times have we heard a Republican or right-wing talking head on Fox say that no terrorist attacks happened when George W. Bush was President? In July, Fox News host Eric Bolling said “we were certainly safe between 2000 and 2008 — I don’t remember any terrorist attacks on American soil during that period of time.” Other Republicans such as Rudy Guiliani and Dana Perino also “misremember” that period of time. I seem to recall sitting in a 20th Century History course at my high school on September 11, 2001 when terrorists struck the World Trade Center in New York City. And as I also recall, George W. Bush was President at the time.

16. What Did The Founding Fathers Think About Corporations?) Corporations are people according to Republicans. They even believe the Founding Fathers loved corporations. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth. The truth is that the Founding generations distrusted corporations with a passion. That’s why corporations were regulated rather harshly compared to the pampering Republicans give them today. Corporations were limited to an existence of 20-30 years and could only deal in one commodity, could not hold stock in other companies, and their property holdings were limited to what they needed to accomplish their business goals. And perhaps the most important facet of all this is that most states in the early days of the nation had laws on the books that made any political contribution by corporations a criminal offense. If the Founding Fathers were still alive and reinstated these regulations, Republicans would be accusing George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the rest of the founders of being evil, un-American socialists.

17. What Is The Constitutionality Of Federally Mandated Health Care?) Is federally mandated health care unconstitutional? According to Republicans it is. But that’s not what the Founding Fathers thought. Congress passed and John Adams signed, a mandatory health care insurance law back in 1791. The mandate required sailors to pay a tax and in the event they needed care, they could get medical care from the government. If it was unconstitutional as Republicans claim, why didn’t Thomas Jefferson or James Madison repeal it? The fact is, they didn’t, and I’d say James Madison knew more about the Constitution than any Republican does, considering he’s the primary author of that sacred document.

18. Is Social Security A ‘Ponzi Scheme’?) When Rick Perry called Social Security a “ponzi scheme” in the first GOP Debate, he not only made a political mistake of epic proportions, he was also dead wrong. Social Security was created to keep senior citizens out of poverty and it has done a wonderful job of doing just that. When people put money into a ponzi scheme, they don’t get it back. Social Security, however, gives the money back plus more to every person who puts money into the system. It’s far from being a ponzi scheme. The real ponzi scheme is the private health insurance business which takes money from you and then drops you when you need medical care.

19. Did The Founding Fathers Support A Strong Federal Government Or A Weak One?) This is an easy one. Republicans are dead wrong when they claim that the Founding Fathers wanted a weak federal government. And that is simple to prove. Before we had the Constitution, America was a loose alliance of states under the Articles of Confederation. Under the Articles of Confederation, the federal government was weak. So weak in fact that it didn’t have the power to levy taxes, could not regulate commerce, and relied on the states to provide money for defense. The states had all the power and the federal government had virtually none. This was a chaotic system that threatened to tear apart the new nation. So the Founders wrote the Constitution which created a strong central government capable of levying taxes, regulating commerce, printing money, and forming a military. Most importantly, under the Constitution, the federal government was given the power to provide for the general welfare and the states were given far less power. Republicans will often cite the Tenth Amendment as proof of state supremacy but they’re wrong about that too. After the Constitution was ratified, some wanted to add an amendment limiting the federal government to powers “expressly” delegated, which would have denied implied powers. However, the word “expressly” ultimately did not appear in the Tenth Amendment as ratified, and therefore the Tenth Amendment did not reject the powers implied by the Necessary and Proper Clause. In other words, the federal government has the power to make laws about things that are not found in the Constitution such as health care.

20. Were The Founding Fathers A Group Of Right Wingers?) Republicans have been crisscrossing the country trying to convince Americans that the Founding Fathers were conservatives. But were they really? The answer to this question is absolutely not. If the Founding Fathers were conservatives they would never have revolted against England. One can hardly call breaking away from the most powerful nation on Earth at the time a conservative act. Plus, the Founding Fathers supported a strong federal government, believed in civil rights, supported separation of church and state, despised corporations, and believed the government had the power to provide health care and levy taxes. This is why the Supreme Court throughout American history has rarely ruled laws unconstitutional using the Tenth Amendment.

Republicans and Americans in general need to get a firm grasp of history. The Republicans understand that the lack of education is the key to controlling the electorate. All they need to do is distort and re-write history in their favor to win the votes of the ignorant. We must learn our past history so that we do not go down the backwards road that Republicans are leading us down.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
~George Santayana