Raw Story posted the Racel Maddow show from last night with clips from Cheney’s speech and critique from General Eaton. First, there was an award for Scooter Libby – Service Before Self Award [Cheney got the Keeper of the Flame Award. Then came Mr. Contempt, Dick Cheney himself. He is unbelievably hostile. Rachel makes clear all of the inconsistencies. Then Cheney jumps on the torture bandwagon – on and on – to hold on to our “moral bearings.”

Gen. Eaton: Dick Cheney Was “Incompetent War Fighter”
National Security Network
PRESS RELEASE
October 22, 2009

Today, National Security Network Senior Adviser Gen. Paul Eaton (Ret.), who served more than 30 years in the United States Army and from 2003-2004 oversaw the training of the Iraqi military, responded to Dick Cheney’s accusations on Afghanistan from last night:

“The record is clear: Dick Cheney and the Bush administration were incompetent war fighters. They ignored Afghanistan for 7 years with a crude approach to counter-insurgency warfare best illustrated by: 1. Deny it. 2. Ignore it. 3. Bomb it. While our intelligence agencies called the region the greatest threat to America, the Bush White House under-resourced our military efforts, shifted attention to Iraq, and failed to bring to justice the masterminds of September 11.

“The only time Cheney and his cabal of foreign policy ‘experts’ have anything to say is when they feel compelled to protect this failed legacy. While President Obama is tasked with cleaning up the considerable mess they left behind, they continue to defend torture or rewrite a legacy of indifference on Afghanistan. Simply put, Mr. Cheney sees history throughout extremely myopic and partisan eyes.

“As one deeply invested in the Armed Forces of this country, I am grateful for the senior military commanders assigned to leading this fight and the men and women fighting on the ground. But I dismiss men like Cheney who inject partisan politics into the profound deliberations our Commander-in-Chief and commanders on the ground are having to develop a cohesive and comprehensive strategy, bringing to bear the economic and diplomatic as well as the military power, for Afghanistan — something Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld never did.

“No human endeavor can be as profound as sending a nation’s youth to war. I am very happy to see serious men and women working hard to get it right.”

Atlas Hugged
Ayn Rand has drifted in and out of favor,

but she may be more relevant today than ever before.
NEWSWEEK

By Mark Sanford

November 2, 2009

In my experience, people who’ve read Ayn Rand’s books either love them or hate them. I’m one of the few who fall somewhere in between. When I first read The Fountainhead  and Atlas Shrugged  in the 1980s, I was blown away. Those books portray the power of the free individual in ways I had never thought about before. Since then, I’ve grown more critical of Rand’s outlook because it doesn’t include the human needs we have for grace, love, faith, or any form of social compact. Yet I still believe firmly that her books deserve attention…

The Fountainhead   is a stunning evocation of the individual and what he can achieve when unhindered by government or society. Howard Roark is an architect who cares nothing about the world’s approval; his only concerns are his integrity and the perfection of his designs. What strikes me as still relevant is its central insight—that it isn’t "collective action" that makes this nation prosperous and secure; it’s the initiative and creativity of the individual. The novel’s "second-handers," as Rand called them—the opportunistic Peter Keating, who appropriates Roark’s architectural talent for his own purposes, and Ellsworth Toohey, the journalist who doesn’t know what to write until he knows what people want to hear—symbolize a mindset that’s sadly familiar today.

The Fountainhead   makes that parasitic existence look contemptible. Near the end of the book, Roark is on trial for demolishing a building he had designed—he had insisted it be built exactly as drawn, but when some bureaucrats alter the structure, Roark feels he has no choice but to dynamite it. Representing himself, Roark pleads, in characteristically Randian terms: "I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need … I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society."

Cold though they sound, these words contain two basic truths. First, an individual can achieve great things without governmental benevolence, and second, one man has no right to another’s achievement. These are lessons we should all remember today, when each week is seemingly marked by another government program designed to fix society.

After finishing The Fountainhead, Rand spent 14 years building a movement around what she called "objectivism" and composing the massive novel that would become Atlas Shrugged  (1957). "Who is John Galt?" is the first line of Rand’s 1,000-page book, and by the end it’s clear she wants everyone to think, and act, as if they were him. Galt had been, as we discover only as the plot unfolds, head engineer at the Twentieth Century Motor Company, which had produced a motor powered by static electricity. His superiors, however, had decided to restructure the company along Marxist or "collectivist" lines, and Galt had left the company. He leads an effort to get the nation’s greatest business leaders to go on a kind of strike. One by one, they disappear, making their way to a hidden valley in Colorado and leaving the now increasingly collectivist U.S. government to try and preserve the country on its own, with no help from these giants of industry. What happens, of course, is that the government collapses, and Galt emerges to reorder society along strictly free-market lines…

Why? I think at a fundamental level many people recognize Rand’s essential truth—government doesn’t know best. Those in power in Washington—or indeed in Columbia, S.C.—often lead themselves to believe that our prosperity depends on their wisdom. It doesn’t. The prosperity and opportunity we enjoy comes ultimately from the creative energies of the country’s businessmen, entrepreneurs, investors, marketers, and inventors. The longer it takes this country to reawaken to this reality, the worse we—and in turn, our children’s standard of living—will be.

When the economy took a nosedive a year ago—a series of events that arguably began when the government-sponsored corporations Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac went broke—many Americans, myself included, watched in disbelief as members of Congress placed blame on everyone and everything but government. This wasn’t new in 2008. It’s an act we’ve seen over and over since the beginning of the New Deal in 1933. For that reason, I think, those passages in Atlas Shrugged  foreshadow what might happen to our country if there is no change in direction. As Rand shows in her book, when the government is deprived of the free market’s best minds, it staggers toward collapse.

Ironically, as Heller’s biography makes clear, while Rand’s philosophy was based on the individual’s absolute freedom, Rand herself exercised a dictatorial control over her followers. She would denounce anyone who expressed opinions even slightly diverging from her own. Her chief acolyte (and lover), Nathaniel Branden, once circulated a list of rules for Rand’s inner circle to follow; one of them read, "Atlas Shrugged  is the greatest human achievement in the history of the world"; another said, "Ayn Rand, by virtue of her philosophical genius, is the supreme arbiter in any issue pertaining to what is rational, moral, or appropriate to man’s life on earth." For the leader of a group dedicated to human freedom, Rand didn’t allow much of it around her.

There is one more major flaw in Rand’s thinking. She believed that man is perfectible—a view she shared with the Soviet collectivists she hated. The geniuses and industrial titans who retire to Galt’s hidden valley create a perfect society based on reason and pure individualism; and Galt himself, in the 57-page speech near the book’s end, explicitly denies the existence of original sin. The idea that man is perfectible has been disproved by 10,000 years of history. Men and women are imperfect, or "fallen," which is why I believe there is a role for limited government in making sure that my rights end where yours begin. There is a role for a limited government in thwarting man’s more selfish instincts that might limit the freedoms or opportunities of others. But we need to remember the primacy of the individual, of his or her ability to make the world a better place.

Over the past year, we’ve seen Washington try to solve all our problems—chiefly by borrowing billions from future generations—to little effect. In that sense, this is a very good time for a Rand resurgence. She’s more relevant than ever.

Mark Sanford obviously sees himself as a member of The Family‘s chosen people or as one of Ayn Rand‘s brilliant, creative, rugged individualists. It’s a bit hard to fathom what he bases that assessment on. His accomplishments aren’t too impressive [unless you count getting elected to the government that he doesn’t believe in]. And if this piece is an example of his thinking, he’s not a rocket scientist either. It’s an amazing example of an ideology driven argument that’s based in fantasy and misinterpretation. While one might question why Newsweek published it, an even more interesting question is why he wrote it. Does he think he has a standing as a pundit?

Ayn Rand wrote heroic fiction. She was good at it, though somewhat monotonous. One should leave a period of reading Ayn Rand like the rest of us did – deluded for a bit, then realizing that her ideas only work if you are, in fact, one of those talented, brilliant, chosen people. She works best as a catalyst for an encounter with one’s own Narcissism, so as to realize the folly of such thinking, and to rejoin the rest of us a little wiser. To get stuck with Ayn Rand into adulthood is to live the life Howard Roark should have lived. Instead of riding off into the sunset of brilliance, Roark should have been sent to prison for  unlawful use of explosives and willful destruction of property. And Mark Sanford? His illusions of grandeur and specialness have gotten him a failed marriage, public humiliation, and an opportunity to be thrown out of government on his ear. That’s Objectivist Epistomology for ya’…

More Insane Rantings from the Crazy Man in the Attic
By: emptywheel
October 22, 2009

Someone let Dick “PapaDick” Cheney out of his undisclosed location last night–they even gave him an award for being a “keeper of the flame.” In spite of the fact that the press is covering it as another serious attack from Cheney, I find it pretty laughable.

How else to treat a speech, for example, in which PapaDick boasts that Rummy got this “flame-keeper” award before him?

^{I’m told that among those you’ve recognized before me was my friend Don Rumsfeld. I don’t mind that a bit. It fits something of a pattern. In a career that includes being chief of staff, congressman, and secretary of defense, I haven’t had much that Don didn’t get first. But truth be told, any award once conferred on Donald Rumsfeld carries extra luster, and I am very proud to see my name added to such a distinguished list.}

From that auspicious start, Cheney launches into a screed against Obama for shutting down missile defense in Czech Republic and Poland–he complains that Obama did not stand by the agreements that Cheney and Bush made.

^{Most anyone who is given responsibility in matters of national security quickly comes to appreciate the commitments and structures put in place by others who came before. You deploy a military force that was planned and funded by your predecessors. You inherit relationships with partners and obligations to allies that were first undertaken years and even generations earlier. With the authority you hold for a little while, you have great freedom of action. And whatever course you follow, the essential thing is always to keep commitments, and to leave no doubts about the credibility of your country’s word.So among my other concerns about the drift of events under the present administration, I consider the abandonment of missile defense in Eastern Europe to be a strategic blunder and a breach of good faith…}

But he moves directly from that complaint to complaining that Obama is honoring the commitment Bush made to withdraw our troops from Iraq.

^{Next door in Iraq, it is vitally important that President Obama, in his rush to withdraw troops, not undermine the progress we’ve made in recent years. Prime Minister Maliki met yesterday with President Obama, who began his press availability with an extended comment about Afghanistan. When he finally got around to talking bout Iraq, he told the media that he reiterated to Maliki his intention to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq. Former President Bush’s bold decision to change strategy in Iraq and surge U.S. forces there set the stage for success in that country. Iraq has the potential to be a strong, democratic ally in the war on terrorism, and an example of economic and democratic reform in the heart of the Middle East. The Obama Administration has an obligation to protect this young democracy and build on the strategic success we have achieved in Iraq.}

Don’t worry. I wasn’t really expecting any intellectual consistency from Dick Cheney. Cheney’s complaints about Obama’s Afghanistan policy in this speech are getting a lot of press. What no one else wants to mention, though, is Cheney’s refutation of Obama’s complaint that the Bush Administration never really had a real Afghan strategy. Cheney refutes that, you see, by noting that they conducted a strategic assessment of Afghanistan in Fall 2008, seven years after committing troops to Afghanistan.

^{Recently, President Obama’s advisors have decided that it’s easier to blame the Bush Administration than support our troops. This weekend they leveled a charge that cannot go unanswered. The President’s chief of staff claimed that the Bush Administration hadn’t asked any tough questions about Afghanistan, and he complained that the Obama Administration had to start from scratch to put together a strategy. In the fall of 2008, fully aware of the need to meet new challenges being posed by the Taliban, we dug into every aspect of Afghanistan policy, assembling a team that repeatedly went into the country, reviewing options and recommendations, and briefing President-elect Obama’s team.}

Hahahaha!! Cheney believes that developing an Afghan strategy in an attempt to force Obama’s hand can make up for the seven years during which he oversaw the complete neglect of the war against the people who actually hit us on 9/11.

I also note that Cheney neglected to mention–not even once, not even in a speech talking about “new challenges” from the Taliban–Pakistan. Perhaps that’s because Cheney was personally in charge of our Pakistan policy for the last three years of the Bush Administration, during which period that country became the source of the real instability in the region…

There’s the conflation of the information collected from KSM using torture (which KSM has said included a number of lies) with the information collected using rapport-based intelligence.

^{In the case of Khalid Sheik Muhammed, by the time it was over he was not was not only talking, he was practically conducting a seminar, complete with chalkboards and charts. It turned out he had a professorial side, and our guys didn’t mind at all if classes ran long. At some point, the mastermind of 9/11 became an expansive briefer on the operations and plans of al-Qaeda. It happened in the course of enhanced interrogations. All the evidence, and common sense as well, tells us why he started to talk.}

There’s the insistence that Cheney kept us safe–ignoring, of course, all the attacks on our allies.

^{Eight years into the effort, one thing we know is that the enemy has spent most of this time on the defensive – and every attempt to strike inside the United States has failed. So you would think that our successors would be going to the intelligence community saying, “How did you did you do it? What were the keys to preventing another attack over that period of time?”}

^{Instead, they’ve chosen a different path entirely – giving in to the angry left, slandering people who did a hard job well, and demagoguing an issue more serious than any other they’ll face in these four years. No one knows just where that path will lead, but I can promise you this: There will always be plenty of us willing to stand up for the policies and the people that have kept this country safe…}

I’m most fascinated, though, by the desperation of this passage: the appeal to the “legal underpinnings and safeguards” and the claim to “moral bearings.”

^{In short, to call enhanced interrogation a program of torture is not only to disregard the program’s legal underpinnings and safeguards. Such accusations are a libel against dedicated professionals who acted honorably and well, in our country’s name and in our country’s cause. What’s more, to completely rule out enhanced interrogation in the future, in favor of half-measures, is unwise in the extreme. In the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half exposed. For all that we’ve lost in this conflict, the United States has never lost its moral bearings – and least of all can that be said of our armed forces and intelligence personnel.}

Is it possible the crazy man in the attic realizes his attempts to convince others that he is anything but a torture-hungry monster just sound crazier and crazier as he babbles on?

emptywheel‘s comments stand on their own [and I love "crazy man in the attic" as a name]. But I find Cheney’s comments beyond disquieting. Three years ago, David Corn and Michael Isikoff published Hubris. At the time, it was a real eye opener. We’d had books from Richard Clarke and Paul O’Niell that alerted us to the truth about the Administration and Iraq, and we would have a book in early 2007 that told pieces of the story better [Anatomy of Deceit – emptywheel], but Hubris stood out as the first book with a full complement of facts that sealed the deal. We were lied to, systematically lied to. The book is still worth reading [less than a dollar on Amazon]. The title was perfect. It’s still perfect:

hu⋅bris /hyoo-bris, hoo/

–noun
excessive pride or self-confidence; arrogance.

se⋅di⋅tion   /sɪˈdɪʃən/

–noun
1. incitement of discontent or rebellion against a government.
2. any action, esp. in speech or writing, promoting such discontent or rebellion.
Synonyms: insurrection, mutiny. See treason.

To psychotherapists, excessive pride or arrogance turning into contempt is an all too familiar pattern. All you have to do to make it happen with such cases is to cross them, or to simply decline to mirror their wonderfulness. Dick Cheney’s failures are there for everyone to see. I think he’s banking on another terrorist attack [a possibility no matter what we do] so he can say "See! I kept you safe!" He tried banking on something once before [Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq]. That paranoid "hunch" didn’t pan out as well as he planned. Frankly, when or if we are attacked again, I doubt that the world will rally to Dick Cheney. He’s too publicly sick at this point to gather much of a following.

And fortunately, nobody much is listening [except, of course, Rush Limbaugh – Dick Cheney Takes It to Obama].  There’s lots of right wing venom coming Obama’s way, and plenty of people  are  involved in "incitement of discontent or rebellion against a government," but they’re not doing it by screaming "Cheney [or Bush] was right." In fact, they mostly speak as if the last eight years never happened [and I don’t blame them]. Actually, no one but Cheney is even talking about the Bush Administration at all except those of us who are still angry about it – not even Bush himself. And nobody is very interested in spending money on missiles in Eastern Europe or listening to any more hype about thats "bold" surge. Cheney talks as if we aren’t still in the middle of an economic crisis, a crisis that he and his partner in crime ignored as it built while they wiled away the hours with their foreign wars and surges.

Not very long ago, we were being told that history would be kind to Bush and Cheney, proving them right. We argued that history would reveal how terrible they really were. We might have both been wrong. If what’s happening these days is any indication, their reign may end up being a blank spot – and that might well be the hardest thing of all for Dick Cheney to bear…

[to recall a recently used quote]

… a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Volcker’s Voice Fails to Sell a Bank Strategy
New York Times
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
October 20, 2009

Listen to a top economist in the Obama administration describe Paul A. Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman who endorsed Mr. Obama early in his election campaign and who stood by his side during the financial crisis. “The guy’s a giant, he’s a genius, he is a great human being,” said Austan D. Goolsbee, counselor to Mr. Obama since their Chicago days. “Whenever he has advice, the administration is very interested.” Well, not lately. The aging Mr. Volcker has some advice, deeply felt. He has been offering it in speeches and Congressional testimony, and repeating it to those around the president, most of them young enough to be his children.

He wants the nation’s banks to be prohibited from owning and trading risky securities, the very practice that got the biggest ones into deep trouble in 2008. And the administration is saying no, it will not separate commercial banking from investment operations. “I am not pounding the desk all the time, but I am making my point,” Mr. Volcker said in one of his infrequent on-the-record interviews. “I have talked to some senators who asked me to talk to them, and if people want to talk to me, I talk to them. But I am not going around knocking on doors.”

Still, he does head the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, which makes him the administration’s most prominent outside economic adviser. As Fed chairman from 1979 to 1987, he helped the country weather more than one crisis. And in the campaign last year, he appeared occasionally with Mr. Obama, including a town hall meeting in Florida last fall. His towering presence [he is 6-foot-8] offered reassurance that the candidate’s economic policies, in the midst of a crisis, were trustworthy.

More subtly, Mr. Obama has in Mr. Volcker an adviser perceived as standing apart from Wall Street, and critical of its ways, some administration officials say, while Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary, and Lawrence H. Summers, chief of the National Economic Council, are seen, rightly or wrongly, as more sympathetic to the concerns of investment bankers. For all these reasons, Mr. Volcker’s approach to financial regulation cannot be just brushed off — and Mr. Goolsbee, speaking for the administration, is careful not to do so. “We have discussed these issues with Paul Volcker extensively,” he said. Mr. Volcker’s proposal would roll back the nation’s commercial banks to an earlier era, when they were restricted to commercial banking and prohibited from engaging in risky Wall Street activities…

The Obama team, in contrast, would let the giants survive, but would regulate them extensively, so they could not get themselves and the nation into trouble again. While the administration’s proposal languishes, giants like Goldman Sachs have re-engaged in old trading practices, once again earning big profits and planning big bonuses. Mr. Volcker argues that regulation by itself will not work. Sooner or later, the giants, in pursuit of profits, will get into trouble. The administration should accept this and shield commercial banking from Wall Street’s wild ways…

Over the period between the Crash and the 1932 election, there had been recurrent runs on various Banks around the country, and a number of Banks had gone under. In the "lame duck" period between F.D.R.’s election and his inauguration, there was a big run on the Bank in Detroit in anticipation of his inauguration. Bank Runs were the target of his famous inaugural quote, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." On the day after his Inauguration, he declared a Bank Holiday, shutting down the runs on Banks in their tracks and putting some teeth into his inspiring words.

Banking Regulations: Within three months, Congress passed the Glass-Stegall Act [which became known as The Banking Act of 1933]. This reform legislation had two parts:

• The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation [FDIC]: In order to put a stop to the destructive runs on Banks, the Federal Government got into the Insurance business, insuring Savings Accounts for up to $100,000 in case of Bank failure.
• The Separation and Regulation of Commercial and Investment Banks: This is the part known as regulation. Hearings disclosed obvious conflicts of interest when Banks invest money from their vast holdings in Savings Accounts. So, the Bill imposed strong restrictions on investing by these banks [Commercial Banks]. Likewise, the behavior of Banks that were involved in investing were also heavily regulated. The design here was clear, In the boom before the Crash, Banks had loaned money to people to put in the Market and had invested their assets as well. Glass-Stegall imposed restrictions to stop speculators from using other people’s money. Bank size [merger] was also regulated.

F.D.R.’s early measures marked a radical intrusion of the government into the country’s financial system and stemmed the panic and chaos of the three years since the Crash. The Stock Market came up and the Banking Indistry was stabilized.

In 1994, the Republicans won a majority in the House and Senate called "the contract with America." Except for short periods after World War II, this hadn’t happened since the Depression. The Democratic President, Bill Clinton, was under attack throughout [Whitewater, Monica, etc.]. He was finally impeached towards the end of his term for lying about his affair with a White House Intern, but not convicted in the Senate. Towards the end of his term, two Bills from the Congress finally ended the Roosevelt post-Depression regulations on Banks, and provided an end run around SEC Oversight. Both Bills were initiated by Senator Phil Gramm from Texas, who then retired from the government.

Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999:

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act … is an Act of the United States Congress which repealed part of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, opening up competition among banks, securities companies and insurance companies. The Glass-Steagall Act prohibited a bank from offering investment, commercial banking, and insurance services.
The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) allowed commercial and investment banks to consolidate. For example, Citibank merged with Travelers Group, an insurance company, and in 1998 formed the conglomerate Citigroup, a corporation combining banking and insurance underwriting services under brands including Smith-Barney, Shearson, Primerica and Travelers Insurance Corporation. This combination, announced in 1993 and finalized in 1994, would have violated the Glass-Steagall Act and the Bank Holding Company Act by combining insurance and securities companies, if not for a temporary waiver process. The law was passed to legalize these mergers on a permanent basis. Historically, the combined industry has been known as the financial services industry.

This Bill essentially repealed the Glass-Stegall Act. Things were back to pre-1929-Crash conditions. Again, there was a blurring of Bank/Broker distinctions and megaBanks proliferated…

Paul Volcker "argues that regulation by itself will not work. Sooner or later, the giants, in pursuit of profits, will get into trouble. The administration should accept this and shield commercial banking from Wall Street’s wild ways."

He is, of course, correct. The only reason not to reinstate the distinction betweem Commercial and Investment Banks is to allow Wall Street access to our money to play with, essentially without our consent. Barack Obama has done a lot of correct things, but this is a mistake waiting to happen. Listen to this old man!

Are Condoms the Ultimate Green Technology?
New York Times
by Andrew C. Revkin
September 15, 2009

More children equal more carbon dioxide emissions. And recent research has resulted in  renewed coverage of the notion that one of the cheapest ways to curb emissions in coming decades would be to provide access to birth control for tens of millions of women around the world who say they desire it. A study by researchers at the London School of Economics and commissioned by the Optimum Population Trust came to the following conclusion:

Contraception is ‘Greenest’ Technology
U.N. data suggest that meeting unmet need for family planning would reduce unintended births by 72 per cent, reducing projected world population in 2050 by half a billion to 8.64 billion. Between 2010 and 2050 12 billion fewer “people-years” would be lived – 326 billion against 338 billion under current projections. The 34 gigatons of CO2 saved in this way would cost $220 billion – roughly $7 a ton [metric tons]. However, the same CO2 saving would cost over $1trillion if low-carbon technologies were used [Here’s a link to a pdf of the report].

I recently raised the question of whether this means we’ll soon see a market in baby-avoidance carbon credits similar to efforts to sell  CO2 credits for avoiding deforestation. This is purely a thought experiment, not a proposal. But the issue is one that is rarely discussed in climate treaty talks or in debates over United States climate legislation. If anything, the population-climate question is more pressing in the United States than in developing countries, given the high per-capita carbon dioxide emissions here and the  rate of population growth. If giving women a way to limit family size is such a cheap win for emissions, why isn’t it in the mix?

from FDL Late Night

SC gov impeachment resolution to be introduced
The State
By JIM DAVENPORT
Oct. 20, 2009

COLUMBIA, S.C. — A South Carolina legislator says he will introduce a resolution to impeach Gov. Mark Sanford when lawmakers return next week for a special session on unemployment benefits. Republican Rep. Greg Delleney said Tuesday he expects the measure will be sent to a committee and will get impeachment proceedings started. There are no plans for now for the full Legislature to take up impeachment before the regular session resumes in January. Leaders of the South Carolina Republican Party and 61 of 72 GOP House members who will deal with impeachment have called on their fellow Republican to resign. Delleney’s resolution says Sanford ignored his responsibilities to pursue an affair with an Argentine woman, tried to cover it up and embarrassed the state

It seems to me that the reason doesn’t really matter. When a Governor of a State, has 61/72 [85%] of the Congressmen from his own Party asking him to resign, it’s probably time to go. The only force against impeachment that I know of is Sanford’s personal wish to finish out his term – like King David did. That’s not a very powerful force right now. There was a point along the way when he sounded suicidal to me, during one of his confused interviews. But lately he has sounded entitled and kind of mean – like trying to seal the ongoing ethics probe from the legislators.

Bogus! Glenn Beck truncates Anita Dunn’s ‘Mao’ remarks

to wildly distort what she actually said
Crooks and Liars
By David Neiwert
Oct 20, 2009

Glenn Beck continued his jihad against White House Communications Director Anita Dunn yesterday on his Fox News program, focusing his rage on remarks she made earlier this year at a D.C. – area high-school graduation ceremony. Here’s what he played of her remarks:

"[T]wo of my favorite political philosophers, Mao Tse-Tung and Mother Teresa, not often coupled with each other, but the two people that I turn to most …"

Not content to do it once, he ran the same snippet again, exactly like that. Twice he described Dunn as saying that Mao was one of the philosophers "she turns to most". Except, of course, that wasn’t what she said. You have to hear the rest of the sentence after Beck clips it off. Here’s the full original quote, which you can see at the original full video:

"The third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers: Mao Tse-tung and Mother Theresa – not often coupled with each other, but the two people I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point which is ‘you’re going to make choices; you’re going to challenge; you’re going to say why not; you’re going to figure out how to do things that have never been done before."

In other words, she found their words handy to make a universal and fairly banal point about being true to one’s self. That’s all. No Mao-worship. You also can hear laughter from the audience when Dunn couples Mao and Mother Teresa, so at least it’s clear that some in the audience got the joke. Glenn Beck didn’t…

… the most important political philosopher for her is Mao Zedong — oh, and Mother Teresa. The guy responsible for more deaths than any other 20th-century leader is her favorite philosopher? How can that man be your favorite anything? He killed 70 million people. That would be like me saying to you, "Oh, you know who my favorite political philosopher is? Adolf Hitler. Have you read Mein Kampf? Just fight your fight, like Hitler did." It’s insanity! This is her hero’s work! Seventy million dead!

She thinks of this man’s work all the time? That was a quote. Could you please put the gulags back up here? Could you please put the images back up here of China, please, while I remind you the gulags – not that picture. Give me the picture of the Chinese and the brutality, the gulags, the re-education camps. And he’s your favorite?

America, how many radicals is it going to take? How many radicals surrounding our president will it take before you understand that when the president says he wants to transform the country, well, he wants to transform it, all right. Progressives don’t care what you think. They will drag you to reform if they have to. But we’re not just talking about progressives now, we’re talking about revolutionaries that idolize Mao.

 

I was mentioning Patrick Buchanan‘s 1990 Culture Wars speech [Elephant? Fox? symptoms…]. Well he’s still at it – Traditional Americans are losing their nation. It goes along with the theme of my posts Elephant? Fox? symptoms…, Obama’s existence…, Jesus loves the little children…, we all worry…, and anything that come out of Glenn Beck‘s mouth. It’s all the same stuff. Some person or group [Obama, the Democrats, the Liberals, the Progressives, the Secular Saboteurs, the Homosexuals, 1boringoldman] is specifically and deviously motivated to destroy us [America, American Culture, Christianity, White America, moral people] using a variety of doctrines [Communism, Secularism, Atheism, Fascism, Socialism, Racism, Islam].

Traditional Americans are losing their nation
WorldNetDaily Commentary
by Patrick J. Buchanan
October 20, 2009

… the alienation and radicalization of white America began long before Obama arrived. He acknowledged as much when he explained Middle Pennsylvanians to puzzled progressives in that closed-door meeting in San Francisco. Referring to the white working-class voters in the industrial towns decimated by job losses, Obama said: "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Yet, we had seen these folks before. They were Perotistas in 1992, opposed NAFTA in 1993 and blocked the Bush-Kennedy McCain amnesty in 2007. In their lifetimes, they have seen their Christian faith purged from schools their taxes paid for, and mocked in movies and on TV. They have seen their factories shuttered in the thousands and their jobs outsourced in the millions to Mexico and China. They have seen trillions of tax dollars go for Great Society programs, but have seen no Great Society, only rising crime, illegitimacy, drug use and dropout rates.

They watch on cable TV as illegal aliens walk into their country, are rewarded with free educations and health care and take jobs at lower pay than American families can live on – then carry Mexican flags in American cities and demand U.S. citizenship. They see Wall Street banks bailed out as they sweat their next paycheck, then read that bank profits are soaring, and the big bonuses for the brilliant bankers are back. Neither they nor their kids ever benefited from affirmative action, unlike Barack and Michelle Obama.

They see a government in Washington that cannot balance its books, win our wars or protect our borders. The government shovels out trillions to Fortune 500 corporations and banks to rescue the country from a crisis created by the government and Fortune 500 corporations and banks.

America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.

While he’s riding the current Republican Talking Point ["it’s not racism"], he’s speaking from the point of view of white working class Americans without hurling accusations of motive at the opponents. That’s laudable, at least relatively laudable in a climate where wild paranoid blaming is rampant. But he doesn’t go back far enough. He doesn’t mention driving the American Indians from their lands. He doesn’t include these folks fighting and dying in the Civil War to preserve slavery of African Americans. He doesn’t mention the 100 years of forced Segregation in the South. He doesn’t acknowledge the prejudice against european immigrants in the industrial north that left some deep scars on my own family.

The problems he lists are certainly problems, but they don’t have much to do with his topic. Immigrants don’t run the Banks or Wall Street. Christianity is not the State Religion of America [and in case he hasn’t noticed, the Mexican Immigrants he’s talking about are among the most uniformly Christian people in the world]. And he might check on the "only rising crime, illegitimacy, drug use and dropout rates." He’d be surprised at how those statistics actually play out. He might take a peek at the faces of Wall Street that just did us in. They are lily white.

America’s secular saboteurs
Washington Post
By Bill Donohue
President, Catholic League
10/20/2009

^{There are many ways cultural nihilists are busy trying to sabotage America these days: multiculturalism is used as a club to beat down Western civilization in the classroom; sexual libertines seek to upend the cultural order by attacking religion; artists use their artistic freedoms to mock Christianity; Hollywood relentlessly insults people of faith; activist left-wing legal groups try to scrub society free of the public expression of religion; elements in the Democratic party demonstrate an animus against Catholicism; and secular-minded malcontents within Catholicism and Protestantism seek to sabotage their religion from the inside.}

^{Yesterday’s radicals wanted to tear down the economic structure of capitalism and replace it with socialism, and eventually communism. Today’s radicals are intellectually spent: they want to annihilate American culture, having absolutely nothing to put in its place. In that regard, these moral anarchists are an even bigger menace than the Marxists who came before them.}

^{If societal destruction is the goal, then it makes no sense to waste time by attacking the political or economic structure: the key to any society is its culture, and the heart of any culture is religion. In this society, that means Christianity, the big prize being Catholicism. Which explains why secular saboteurs are waging war against it. When Jesse Jackson led students at Stanford University in the late 1980s screaming, "Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Culture’s Got to Go," it was a way of undermining this nation’s Judeo-Christian heritage. When Yale University returned $20 million to Lee Bass in the 1990s because the faculty objected to its being used to expand its Western civilization curriculum – they wanted multiculturalism – it showed the power of radical secularists.}

^{Sexual libertines, from the Marquis de Sade to radical gay activists, have sought to pervert society by acting out on their own perversions. What motivates them most of all is a pathological hatred of Christianity. They know, deep down, that what they are doing is wrong, and they shudder at the dreaded words, "Thou Shalt Not." But they continue with their death-style anyway. Secular saboteurs have often seized the arts to make a statement. That’s why the blasphemous often tracks the obscene: if the goal is to put an artistic dagger into the heart of culture, then it makes sense to use all the ammo available by attacking the sacred. And they are certainly masters of that art. From scatological artistic exhibitions to the latest obscene installation, the charlatans have succeeded in politicizing the arts and denigrating Christianity.}

^{There was a time when Hollywood made reverential movies about Christianity. But those days are long gone. Now they just insult. And when someone finally makes a film that makes Christians proud, he is run out of town. Were it not for Mel Gibson, there would have been no "Passion of the Christ." But for every Harvey Weinstein who likes to bash Catholics, there is always someone else waiting in the wings to do the same. The ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State harbor an agenda to smash the last vestiges of Christianity in America. Lying about their real motives, they say their fidelity is to the Constitution. But there is nothing in the Constitution that sanctions the censorship of religious speech. From banning nativity scenes to punishing little kids for painting a picture of Jesus, the zealots give Fidel a good run for his money.}

^{Catholics were once the mainstay of the Democratic Party; now the gay activists are in charge. Indeed, practicing Catholics are no longer welcome in leadership roles in the Party: the contempt that pro-life Catholics experience is palpable. The fact that Catholics for Choice, a notoriously anti-Catholic front group funded by the Ford Foundation, has a close relationship with the Democrats says it all. Secularists within Catholicism and Protestantism are so out of control that it makes one wonder how any serious-minded person would ever accuse these religions of being oppressive. Insubordination of the most flagrant kind is routinely tolerated in a way that would never be countenanced at the New York Times, yet the bad rap always goes to Christians. We’re not talking about those pushing for moderate reforms: we’re talking about termites eating away from within.}

^{The only way secular saboteurs can be stopped is by an alliance of religious conservatives across faith lines. The good news is that this is already happening. In the fight over gay marriage, the scorecard is 30-0: traditional Catholics, evangelical Protestants, Orthodox Jews, Orthodox Christians, Muslims, and Mormons, along with a big contribution from the Latino and African American communities, have succeeded in throwing a roadblock at this crazy idea. The culture war is up for grabs. The good news is that religious conservatives continue to breed like rabbits, while secular saboteurs have shut down: they’re too busy walking their dogs, going to bathhouses and aborting their kids. Time, it seems, is on the side of the angels.}

^{Bill Donohue is President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. He is author of the new book "Secular Sabotage: How Liberals Are Destroying Religion and Culture in America," published by FaithWords.}

Except for the cuteness at the end about Christians out-screwing the secularists and therefore winning in the end, this piece is grounds for a good dose of antipsychotic medication. But it’s not. It’s a guest editorial in a National newspaper. I can only hope is was put there to be fair to the ill among us, rather than to be taken seriously.

It puts a window into the power of the feelings evoked in a particular segment of Americans. My daughter went to Integrated Public Schools in the South until college. Somewhere along the way, she discovered  that that was seen in her northern universities as an unusual thing. Instead of being a graduate student teacher in her own field, she taught "Multiculturalism," in part because of her background. So when I read, "multiculturalism is used as a club to beat down Western civilization in the classroom," I feel defensive. I don’t think she was there to do anything remotely like that and I wonder where Bill Donahue gets that idea. It’s hard for me to see my daughter as a "secular saboteur." She seems like a nice person who enjoys helping people in her professional role as a Child Psychologist. My point is Donahue’s attribution of motive.

But this one really got me, "Sexual libertines, from the Marquis de Sade to radical gay activists, have sought to pervert society by acting out on their own perversions. What motivates them most of all is a pathological hatred of Christianity." I don’t know if he’s talking about gay sex here, or sexual perverse sex, but I expect he would make no distinction between the two. He actually states that the sexual motivation is something that has something to do with him. Gay people are having gay sex because they hate Donahue Christianity. Gay sex bothers Bill Donahue’s Christianity, therefore Gay people are motivated by a "pathological hatred of Christianity," rather than the usual  sexual drive, the same drive that has religious conservatives breeding "like rabbits." Remarkable thinking.

But I think there’s a point here beyond the fact that whoever Bill Donanhue is, he is a self-righteous, hate filled, lunatic who uses his own pathological feelings to assess the motives of others = is paranoid and dangerous. The point is that the central premise of this kind of Christian is that the phenomena in the world they don’t approve of are there specifically to attack them – to destroy Christianity. That is a piece of the history of Christianity, even if it has nothing to do with its Gospel ["Good News"]. The Jews in Jesus’ time were under the domination of their own clergy and the Roman conquerors. The early Christians in Rome were persecuted and operated underground – literally underground if you visit the extensive Catacombs outside of the city. Martyrdom is a major piece of Christian history and particularly the Catholic cosmology. And Hollywood has made much of the persecution of the early Christians by the "Libertine" Romans and others along the way.

^{Yesterday’s radicals wanted to tear down the economic structure of capitalism and replace it with socialism, and eventually communism. Today’s radicals are intellectually spent: they want to annihilate American culture, having absolutely nothing to put in its place. In that regard, these moral anarchists are an even bigger menace than the Marxists who came before them. If societal destruction is the goal, then it makes no sense to waste time by attacking the political or economic structure: the key to any society is its culture, and the heart of any culture is religion. In this society, that means Christianity, the big prize being Catholicism. Which explains why secular saboteurs are waging war against it.}

I actually think that, in a way, Bill Donahue is right. We are at war with him. We’re not fighting against Western Culture, or Catholicism, or even Christianity. Nor are we fighting for sin. We’re fighting allowing his insanity, paranoid insanity, to rule our lives. We’re fighting the place of the Church as the arbiter of morality. They lost that fight a very long time ago, in Western Culture and in the founding of our country. They had their centuries in the sun after the Romans, but those days are over for all time. Part of the reason they lost their place was that the only thing they could come up with was to persecute or kill people – burn them at the stake, slaughter them in holy wars, assassinate them at their church or clinic, becoming the persecutors themselves. Bill is preaching craziness. And his hated Multiculturalism is little more than the lesson taught to me in a church as a small child:

Jesus loves the little children,
All the children of the world.
Red  and yellow, Black and White,
They are precious in His sight.
Jesus loves the little children of the world.

^{Communism is a socioeconomic structure and political ideology that promotes the establishment of an egalitarian, classless, stateless society based on common ownership and control of the means of production and property in general. Karl Marx posited that communism would be the final stage in human society, which would be achieved through a proletarian revolution. "Pure communism" in the Marxian sense refers to a classless, stateless and oppression-free society where decisions on what to produce and what policies to pursue are made democratically, allowing every member of society to participate in the decision-making process in both the political and economic spheres of life.}

^{As a political ideology, communism is usually considered to be a branch of socialism; a broad group of economic and political philosophies that draw on the various political and intellectual movements with origins in the work of theorists of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution. Communism attempts to offer an alternative to the problems with the capitalist market economy and the legacy of imperialism and nationalism. Marx states that the only way to solve these problems is for the working class [proletariat], who according to Marx are the main producers of wealth in society and are exploited by the Capitalist-class [bourgeoisie], to replace the bourgeoisie as the ruling class in order to establish a free society, without class or racial divisions. The dominant forms of communism, such as Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism and Trotskyism are based on Marxism, but non-Marxist versions of communism [such as Christian communism and anarcho-communism] also exist.}

^{Karl Marx never provided a detailed description as to how communism would function as an economic system, but it is understood that a communist economy would consist of common ownership of the means of production, culminating in the negation of the concept of private ownership of capital, which referred to the means of production in Marxian terminology. In modern usage, communism is often used to refer to Bolshevism or Marxism-Leninism. As a political movement, communist regimes have historically been authoritarian and coercive governments concerned primarily with preserving their own power, with no substantive concern for the welfare of the proletariat.}

"Communism attempts to offer an alternative to the problems with the capitalist market economy and the legacy of imperialism and nationalism. Marx states that the only way to solve these problems is for the working class [proletariat], who according to Marx are the main producers of wealth in society and are exploited by the Capitalist-class [bourgeoisie], to replace the bourgeoisie as the ruling class in order to establish a free society, without class or racial divisions."

Obama’s approach is to support the Financial Institutions that made the mess, use government stimulus to jumpstart a recovering economy, and solve the problems of the capitalist market economy by re-establishing restraints to stop and prevent it being abused. The guy is a Capitalist, trying to make it work in the non-Communist way. And as for Healthcare, he’s advocating keeping it private for the most part, including private insurance for most. If he’s a Socialist or a Communist, he sure isn’t showing his colors with these policies.